Category: Politics

This has to do with the bloodletting that’s going on right now.  I think that it’s important that we remember that Docudharma is not a “more and better Democrats” community.  Some of us used to post at a place like that.  Some of us have chosen not to post there any longer.  I’m sure each of us who’ve chosen that route have different reasons, and I’m sure that some of the reasons are the same.  For the moment, those reasons don’t matter (at least in the context of this posting).

I recently watched a documentary on HBO about an at risk school struggling to meet the demands of No Child Left Behind.

Hard Times at Douglas High and I noted on the boards at HBO there was a lot of “this is depressing” commentary or some general lashing out against poor people. A few teachers weighed in to echo similar experiences.

One of the dominant themes of addressing poverty in this country is to focus in on “what is wrong” with poor Americans rather than what it is structurally, culturally, and economically wrong with our country that consistently produces an under class. Now I am not arguing that we can climate poverty by tinkering with social programs although I think we can reduce it. First we have to examine our attitudes toward poverty, our disdain and fear.

A common meme is that the poor make “bad decisions” and that can account for their status but what is missing from that approach is the admission that the middle class and wealthy make bad decisions as well. When middle class and wealthy people make bad decisions they frequently have a broad safety net that cushions the impact composed of either access to funds or family and friends who are willing to “invest” in their problem to correct it. When a middle class kid gets involved in drugs or violence we are also far more likely to forgive them or ascribe it to some outside “bad influence” but when a kid from a bad section of Memphis gets involved in the same activity we dismiss them as “gang bangers” who can’t be helped or we assume they are already “bad kids”. We expect poor kids to behave badly and it simply emphasizes our already ingrained opinions and we still have some capacity to be vaguely shocked or disturbed when a middle class or wealthy kids act out in anti-social behavior. We assume poor people in general already have a capacity for inappropriate behavior because we have already decided “what is wrong with them”. It never occurs to us that poor people have jobs, raise their kids with some wisdom or decency and have the same dreams for them as the middle class do for their kids. We assume they want or aspire to less and feel perfectly comfortable seeing them assigned less as a result.

Indeed in the current political campaign there is much discussion about what can be done to help the middle class primarily as an impulse to prevent them from becoming poor or rebellious but little about how to create structures to help poor people either join the middle class or have a decent manageable life as poor people because of course being poor itself is something to be ashamed of.

Sometimes, it behooves us to take a moment unto ourselves for quiet reflection and contemplation, where we can behold once again the beauty and wonder of a world teeming with brilliant life in the cold, empty void of space.  Individually and collectively, it is easy to lose oneself in the day-to-day chaos that envelops us as social beings: the demands of one’s life, complicated by the demands of living and participating in a community of social beings who each have their own individual desires and who, together, form organizational structures that run the gamut from basic family, friends and neighborhoods to cities, states and nations — all competing for a varied, yet limited set of resources.

We develop patterns and follow them; if they were set to music, the beat and harmony would shift and change to reflect the ups and downs, ins and outs of life, and we would be the dancers — our lives set to the music, trying to move in sync with it. Sometimes, those harmonies skip and stutter. Other times, they become harsh and repetitive, playing the tune over and over and faster and faster until the dancer, exhausted, can do nothing more than run in place or die, unable to break free.

This essay speaks of the political scientist and philosopher Hannah Arendt.

All quotes are from Elisabeth Young-Bruel’s wonderful biography of Arendt, For Love of the World.

And my method in writing on this difficult (at least to me!) subject are taken from Arendt’s own hard won sensibility about philosophy — that after two World Wars, so much of the theories and philosophies that were given such respect showed their own inability to reach the people, to prevent war, and so the question arose, what use were they?

For a Jew who was brought up in Germany and studied philosophy at the finest universities in Marburg and Heidelburg, and who after Hitler’s rise to power in 1933 spent years as a stateless person in Paris and the United States, her “ivory tower” learning left her with a far different view of the value of the learning of the past.

She stopped looking for either categories of thinkers or historical influences, thought genealogies, and she developed a method as informal as the title she gave it, “Perlenfischerei,” pearl fishing.  The pearls that were full fathom five beneath the historical surface were the sea-changed, rich and strange jewels she sought.

I think we are at a similar time in history now, and I find Arendt’s words resonate with me.

Gareth Porter: There is no leader yet in site who can lead a movement for basic change

In the second part of his interview to Pepe Escobar, investigative historian and military policy analyst Gareth Porter expands on what awaits Senator Barack Obama when he deals with the power of the national security state. Porter also examines what kind of movement and leader would it take to really try to change a very rigid system, and the proposition of Obama as a new Bobby Kennedy.

Is our favorite little cowboy growing up?

In perhaps the weasliest fashion possible and using a newly coined weasel word….Horizon….Lil George has agreed to set a timeline for getting out of Iraq.

AND Flip-flopped on appeasing the terrurists in Iran!

Two total 180 degree turns on your cowboy foreign policy in the same week, George?

Well gol-leee, George! What happened to bring it on??? With us or against us? Dead or alive? They brought it, you killed a million people in Iraq and sank our nation and our troops into the quagmire for SIX YEARS, but NOW you agree to set a timeline? Wassup wit dat?

There are two models of the acquisition of political power discussed here:

1) the Republican model, in which an “aestheticized” politics is promoted (in this case, it’s the “aesthetics” of the War on Terror and of insecurity in general) in order to capture power for an elite (the Bush administration and its neoconservative cronies, and its financial backers in the oil and defense industries)

2) the model proposed by the Italian thinker Antonio Gramsci, in which a coalition comes to power in order to support the claims of working people.

Here I will try to suggest that the former is “bad pragmatism” and the latter is real pragmatism, and suggest that the Democratic Party stop imitating 1) and find a way to subscribe wholeheartedly to 2).

(crossposted at Big Orange)

Objective observation of the current politics and populace tells us that here in 21st century America, there are two ideas that take precedence above all else. Both are myths. Both are ideas apparently more important than any facts, logic, proof, evidence, or demonstrable reality.

The first is that America, no matter what it does, how many crimes are committed in its name, by its duly elected officials, is the good guy, the cowboy in the White Hat.

America lied its way into a illegal and immoral war of aggression for no reason other than the greed and lust for power of its political and economic leaders. The majority of the American populace went along for the ride. America tortures. America exploits migrant workers while condemning them and punishing them for our reliance on them. The list goes on and on.

And the whole of the list of American wrongs that are not wrong because they are our wrongs, exists for one purpose above all others, to bolster and enable the second myth. (Which of course makes them ultimately the same myth.)

The myth that the Christian God created America to serve ‘his’ purpose, and selected white Christian males to work ‘his’ will on earth. Thus can they do no wrong. Thus are their wrongs….not wrong.

This myth is so woven into the fabric of American culture and belief that it is invisible to most. It is not spoken of, except in rare slips of the tongue such as this exchange between O’Rielly and McCain from last year:

O’REILLY: But do you understand what the New York Times wants, and the far-left want? They want to break down the white, Christian, male power structure, which you’re a part, and so am I, and they want to bring in millions of foreign nationals to basically break down the structure that we have.

The most destructive consequence of this myth is America’s surety that they are entitled to this God-given American lifestyle. This is what ensures than even in the face of facts, logic, proof, evidence, and demonstrable reality that the ‘American lifestyle’ is destroying the planets atmosphere and, ultimately, the “lifestyle” of every living thing on earth, their violent denial will continue.

When it comes right down to it, that is the myth that prevents any REAL change in America. How on God’s Green Earth do we fight that?