(Okay Kidz! I am in better shape and sat down to write again, yay! This is what happens when my brain is halfway between politics and spirituality, lol, and I just let it flow!)
The political Left that is. Us Dirty Fucking Hippies are still alive…and are or soon will be heading back into insurgent mode. Sniping from the hills, taking what prisoners we can, if we are lucky we may even be able to shoot down a chopper or two.
But from jbou, (haha) to kos and Keith, to Nancy Pelosi and Hollow Reid, and everyone in between, everyone on the political left has just been dismissed from the conversation.
The Macro Worst Godammed Thing about this pivotal moment in political history….is that Obama did not even talk to Pelosi and Reid before making a deal with the Devil Republicans.
He bypassed, and gave nary a thought to not doing it, the entire Left Wing of American Politics in his froth mouthed screaming headlong rush into the arms of the Daddy Party.
It was not just YOU who he emphatically and (breaking The Angry Black Man Rule) angrily called a Sanctimonious Purist, it was, by not even consulting the Establishment Dems, everyone even marginally on The Left. We do not matter. Our positions and policies do not matter. Our opinions, the opinions of the only group of people who have been proven to be continually correct about fucking everything, do not matter.
All that matters is “getting things done.” Which, since the Republicans have at least a tiny scintilla of negotiating chops, means that the only people who matter are those keeping him from “getting things done. It does not matter what those things are, so all the Repubs have to do is say no and he will do whatever things they want him to.
If the Left says no, it does not matter. He will just deal directly with the Right, cutting the Left out of the power loop completely. Just watch, the few good Dems left in Congress will try to block this deal from going through. And McConnell and Boehner will twist enough arms to get the Repubs to vote for it and it will pass.
If the Dems DO mount a filibuster, he will not deal with them, he will twist their arms. While patting the Repubs on the back as “reasonable actors.”
The point being, after taking this position he cannot go back.
He has no choice now but to make the Congressional Dems his enemy, since they will be screwing up his brilliant deal.
And if the Dems are his enemy, those to the Left of the Dem Establishment….are now the equivalent of terrorists.
And he will NOT be negotiating with us, as he just has with the Hostage Takers, because we have nothing he wants. Not our votes, not our money, not our GOTV. He is now counting on Citizens United to get reelected. And of course the stupidity and gullibility of the American Voter.
Before this pivotal moment, The Left still had the illusion that they had power, at least the power to influence. That illusion has now been stripped.
The Left will NOT be listened to.
Unless of course The Dems and The Left unite, put aside past differences and recriminations and rise up in a coordinated effort to stage mass Tea Party like protests while at the same time the Establishment Dems stage a protest of their own, using all of their power.
This will not happen.
Maybe someday, but not before 2012. The Dems will once again eat shit, The Left will once again fracture over tactics and there will be no unified front.
I may be prejudiced, having already decided to withdraw from politics, I may be having a confirmation bias moment….that politics is now useless. That The Left will now, finally, start flexing its power.
But I don’t think so, and really after the hundreds of times I have said it in the last 40 years….getting to say I Told You So again gives me a mere nanosecond of ego based frisson.
The Left needs to reform, regroup, reload and, in its coming years back in the Wilderness…..find something to fight for.
There was a time when Republicans and the Ruling Class could be morally shamed into acting human. They have (thanks in part to being able to get away with stealing elections, starting illegal wars and torturing, all while growing obscenely richer) stopped pretending they have morals. And if they have no morals they cannot be shamed. And since they have ALL the power (even the power to make Democratic Presidents enact their policies for them) there is no longer any leverage that can be used to even rein them in.
Until The Left rises up and REALLY fights back, which will not happen before 2012, as they search frantically but vainly for some way to proceed other than rising up and taking to the streets…The Left has been stripped of any power it might have had.
By a Democrat.
Again.
If the Democratic President says straight up to The Left, STFU….as both Clinton did and Obama now has, no one else is going to listen to The Left. They are now, as the folks who call him the “only adult in the room” wished for….relegated to the role of pesky children. And their policies such as “not killing and torturing,” “Not allowing poor people and seniors to starve and freeze to death,” and “saving the planet from destruction as a human habitat,” will be treated as amusing suggestions from children.
.
.
There was A Moment.
George Bush was not an accident. And it was certainly not an accident that Dick Cheney chose himself to be Vice President. If you believe that the universe makes some kind of sense and is not just a series of random chaotic events, you must ask yourself: what was the purpose of George Bush and Dick Cheney?
And if looked at in a certain light, with a certain perspective, one could say that their purpose was to show the world the true face of evil in government. And how easily that “banality of evil” is accepted.
We encourage people in our society not to use the word “evil” in political discourse. But if killing innocent men, women and children, and systematic, planned programs of torture are no longer considered evil, then what is evil? And if there is no evil, then what have we become?
George Bush and Dick Cheney were no accident. The face of evil was exposed to the world and to the American people so that we could make a choice. And for many of us who voted for Obama in the 2008 election, we believed we were making a choice, a choice for change away from evil, away from corruption, away from greed trumping all in American politics.
There was a moment. That Moment has passed.
A moment where America, and by extension the world had a choice to turn away from evil.
There was a moment where we could have changed. There was a moment to be seized that could have changed the entire path of human history. There was a moment to be seized where we could literally save the planet. That moment has been missed.
And now we see not the face of blatant evil that was so grimly and expensively revealed to us, but the face of the lesser, long-term, pervasive, corrupting evil that comes from not seizing such a moment. A slow decline, as we slouch towards the paroxysms of a dying empire. We’re nearing the bottom of the slippery slope, where nothing is immoral, where nothing is unjust, where nothing is outrageous, where any act can be justified and rationalized if the cloud of moral uncertainty and denial and moral rationalization has only been thickened enough.
We are no longer in a malaise. We are now in a malaria infested swamp. Where even our elected heroes who come with the promise of change and hope are swallowed by the corruption of a dying way of life that does, in its death throes, threaten to destroy the planet itself. That moment has passed. Now the world awaits the next moment, the next moment that we might seize to turn around the spiral of death and destruction of greed and moral hazard, the slow slide that ends in the acceptance of assassination, the toleration of torture, the approval of aggressive war and the making of the middle class into prey for the powerful.
The voices of the powerless, once held up as the beacon of a responsive democracy, of a government that even cared about its people, let alone was of, by and for them … those days are gone. And as we wait for a new possibility, a possibility that was not taken when the specter of evil was so blatant, it is a possibility that will now be harder to seize, as the confusion of a rudderless society rationalizes its moral degradation with helpless cynicism borne of lost chances.
A moment of decision, a tipping point, a fork in the road, will come again to the human race. An opportunity for us to rise to our potential rather than sink to our lowest common denominators will again appear.
When that moment comes….WE must be prepared to seize it, to amplify it, to assist it.
The Good News (heh) is that the world is so rudderless, so confused, in such a moral (and political) fog……….that that Moment and whatever form it has taken will be able to cut through all of this bullshit like a fucking knife.
In my opinion, and according to my inner guidance, that Moment will appear not in a political form…as politics moves ever further from any sense of morality due to worsening conditions for the People of the Planet, it will arise in a Spiritual Form, a Moral Form.
As an across the board rejection of what the Human Race, under the guidance of the Ruling (and immoral) Class has become.
In my opinion, our job now is to prepare for that Moment.
Which includes caring for each other and as many others as possible as we go through the NEXT iteration of bald faced evil that will be necessary (unfortunately) to shake the Human Race out of its lethargic journey to the absolute bottom of the slippery slope of Human Nature. Caring for each other, nurturing Love, and a pretty damn exciting journey into finding, exploring, and as much as possible, spreading a NEW WAY for Humans to relate to each other. Morally and politically.
Because all politics really is is the argument over how to relate to each other morally.
And that simply cannot be done in a culture, a country, a world….that has no moral center.
We passed up one moment of destruction that was also our Moment of opportunity to change. Now we will have to wait through more destruction for the next one….as The Universe counts down our time to destruction as a species as we know it.
We only get so many Moments, before we make the planet uninhabitable. Let’s TRY to be ready for the next one.
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Hopefully with a better name, haha!
his presidency, I guess…
I’ve seen all this coming from way way off. By 1992 I viewed this as the inevitable path, as it became clear that the Democratic party, in choosing Clinton, was choosing Reaganite hegemony. It’s part of the reason I’ve been so mentally blocked, the deep pervasive hopelessness that comes with actually understanding the extent and capabilities of a modern hegemony equipped with the many powers from the cultural to the military and everything in between that are in the hands of the contemporary globo-imperial-American ruling class.
It’s not just their massive and overwhelming powers of surveillance and suppression that can be deployed on any scale, however mighty that makes them. Even more so, it is their advanced and ever-advancing techniques of of distraction, distortion, diversion and division, which make it well-nigh impossible to build any sort of unified or even confederated oppositional current. The sheer brilliance and capacity for social micromanagement currently on display, that has managed to take the anger stemming from the bailout of the financial elite, and channel that anger into a rightist movement howling for the blood of socialists is disturbing to destruction to every remaining rationalist grasp of social affairs. How do we fight a power capable of such massive manipulation? Because for all my despair, for all my sense of the hopelessness of the cause, my self, my soul, my inner being still recoils and rebels, still cries out to fight back.
America has been dying before our eyes these last 30 years, with the cause being Conservative Rule.
Today the America created in 1776 is in its death-throes.
The coming new incarnation of Amerika is the offspring of Hitleresque “super race of the rich”, Reaganesque “trickle-down economics”, Ayn Randian “unrepentant greed” , Bush/Cheney “stupidity & evil” & Obamaian “capitulation to the corporate overlords”.
In this coming nightmare of the new born again Amerika – Sister Sarah waits in the wings with her cross & gun, to speak for the corporations, to speak for perpetual wars, to speak for the supremacy of the rich, to speak for the will of the Lord – Telling us all – God bless Amerika!
God help us all!
… the way to look is globally. And I’m not speaking of politics, either.
Morality and ideology are exhausted in the face of the power you so aptly describe.
I know a lot of people think the words “spirituality” and “morality” are weak weapons against this kind of power.
But it always begins in the mind. From democracy to communism and socialism, always these things began as ideas.
When we can clean the muck of “official reality” out of our minds we will be receptive to new ways of looking at old problems.
How can we be ready for something when nobody can agree on what the problem is.
is needed.
Im tired of these terms… “The Left.” “Progressive”. “Liberal”. Theyve lost meaning, or, enough consistency in meaning that they actually mean the same thing to most people any more. Gobble-dee-gook.
The world’s just bigger and bigger and more and more and more people have only the common language of Dancing With The Stars, or iSpeak, or whatever…. again…. to the extent that there is no commonality, no cohesive core of a shared morality that embraces honor and dignity, truth and justice.
There are entirely too many charlatans who know how to use those words to manipulate and con well-intended people into accepting, or at least tolerating, Evil Action or manner.
We have to get ourselves back to The Garden. The divinity that is already yours. Mine. Everybody’s who is willing to embrace it. “The Kingdom is at hand.”
In the past, the whole political tactic of attacking character rather than what was said affected me very much emotionally. It hurt my feelings.
Now … the only hurt is to my ego. Doesn’t last near as long.
Before the pain (and I’m a vain enough person that calling names does hurt me in one way or another, lol) can go any deeper, I just kind of … shrug. It’s so obviously the raw conditioning that has become so evident that anyone who’s reasonably aware can see it for the fear mongering it really is.
I do not, however, underestimate the power just of that social conditioning, aside from the other more brutal use of power we are seeing (insofar as any kind of representation of the actual citizens of this country). I highly respect the primal herd instinct that’s hard wired in us just as much as the lizard brain.
A few years ago I read a hilarious and terrifying Taiwanese SF trilogy, The City Trilogy by Chang Hsi-kuo.
Not sure I remember it correctly, but there was one scene that was really hilarious and I’ll try to describe it.
There was a community of people, probably from the same village, and some monster had them all enslaved to it.
The people “strategized” during this time. They saw the monster horribly kill and eat someone from the left of the line. The people from the right side of the line voted to always keep the left side of the line closer to the monster.
But then the monster killed and ate someone from the middle.
Each time someone was offed, the “rules” changed … to protect the place in the herd, is my theory.
But still — the insults now don’t affect me the way they once did, even with a healthy respect for the herd instinct.
Maybe I am turning into a lizard!
Mwooo ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.
noah how long can u tread water……
The left/right spectrum is bullshit. See past it, work with people in fighting the establishment if you agree with them – alliances with conservatives, tea partiers, libertarians, anarchists, progressives, socialists, communists, whoever…political divisions are many times just another way the ruling class divides us.
Organize, organize, organize!
Our culture teaches and preaches the hierarchy of these “things”, whether physical or conceptual. We live our lives within this hierarchy. This is foundational to our history, politics and government. And I agree with Lady Libertine that we need a new language; a linguistic, intonational and gestural affirmation of our common gift.
Our politics, government and laws cannot dictate our vocabulary nor can the purveyors of “material speak” and “social regulation”. The industrial revolution is the only revolution that really “won out”. Its time is over, and the next revolution will be the human one. It will develop its own language, and I am looking forward to it.
but you didn’t have the guts to allow it to be front-paged, lest it upset Daily Kos.
Well, it’s cooking and we are not dead. We will hurt them, and then they will notice us. It’s that simple.
…. if some amoral a$$whipe wants to attempt to portray me as some sort of “Enemy of the People” they are not going to succeed.
Bernie Sanders is saying this afternoon on Keith Olberman’s show he wants people in the streets protesting these proposed tax cuts.
I don’t care who is President, or what they do to get their deals.
I only care about how I react to what I find as my surroundings.
I see a lot of these sh*theads who were deliberately sabotaging part of the first term’s Democratic platform mandate/agenda are now trying to pretend that they weren’t. They are going to be sorry that they did that. Because they are going to try to come after people like me, and they are going to find out that we don’t roll over, nor forget.
The Republicans and their old ‘blue dog Dem’ friends are walking down your street right now, looking at what you have, and saying “me want, gimme, gimme.” You’d better hope that your camouflage holds up if you aren’t going to defend yourself.
What a hilarious bunch of fvckups they are. You should have seen the look on my spouse’s face when watching the video of the President doing that riff on “this is just like the public option debate” , “sanctimonious ” and ” if you strive for perfection you never get things done.”
What was that Lame Duck session Deal again ?
Extend the Bush era tax cuts for everybody, in return for another year of unemployment benefits. Republicans : gimme gimme gimme or nothing else gets done during the Lame Duck. Not even the DOD appropriations. Democrats: uh, we think The Prez is demanding we take the blame for this crap again. We hate the voters ! Let’s do it ! Remaining Dem Caucus After January. Wait a sec. Why should we ? Is the new DCCC guy on crack or something, with the “7 polls say the American people want tax cuts for the rich, no estate tax, and a huger deficit AND the war going on past 2014 ?”
Worst case scenario. Bush era tax cuts expire, taxes then go up for everybody, and the unemployment benefits expire without a renewal, creating a few more million very unhappy poorer people. But Social Security would not be pilfered as much by the payroll tax cut, and the deficit wouldn’t be as big. The DOD appropriations bill doesn’t even get passed. Holy Moley. And who would take the brunt of that ? A Republican Congress Led By John de l’orange Boehner. Because he would then have to fix this sh*t.
Yet here is the alleged Democratic President trying to prevent that very scenario. Why is he covering their goddamned ar$$ses ?
Because he is afraid. He actually has the delusion they aren’t going to turn on him once they are offered “the hostages” and the snotty little DFH’s on the left. And once they turn on him, he has no power any more.
We still do. That’s rather sad he has made this choice to disassociate himself from the ones who “brung him to the dance,” but, hey, that’s how it goes. Buh – bye. We are now released from the obligation of having to support his co – dependency problem with the people who are predators.
Here comes Larry effing Summers now today as the concern troll, saying we’re going into a double dip recession if these tax cuts don’t get extended.
Except Larry effing Summers is going to be taking another private sector job very soon. Larry Summers is totally full of **** at this point. Why, oh, why, is anyone listening to this moron ?
This is horseh*t. Not the part about the models. Everybody runs models. The part about the GDP and the million jobs. Larry wants your Social Security money and will create an even bigger deficit to do it. If Larry Summers is for something, then it’s to benefit the Oligarchy, the Corporations, the Dictatorships, The MIC/Defense Mercenaries, The Crooks (like ENRON and the Republicans) and himself. Larry Summers was against Glass Steagall. Bye Larry. We can’t afford you.
Now, I am not certain what I can say at this point to the rest of you to get you to wake up a bit and stop falling for the gloom and doom scenario. But I do know what to say to certain other groups of people.
But part of my being surprised I am still alive at this point, means that I don’t roll over meekly onto my back and beg for more abuse at the hands of these idiots.
I think we can carefully and thoughtfully map out just what the left is and what it can stand for. I think this is easier than I thought originally. I think there can be a broad coalition of people who can agree that the left seeks a cooperative and more socially oriented society–basically a neo-socialist society with, major industries essentially run as public non-profits, i.e., utilities, medical care, transportation (roads, bridges, rail even air) with plenty of room for small to medium sized corporations to provide innovation etc. For example, in energy, you can have a public utility grid that allows, at the same time, a way for entrepeneurs to sell energy back to the grid at a reasonable price.
But none of this sort of thing, which I believe a broad swath of the public would support, cannot get a hearing unless we de-mystefy the propaganda narrative put out by the MSM and the PR and advertising industries and this may take courage that 99% of people who identify as leftists lack, sadly. That would start by a real examination of just what our history has been since WWII including a careful examination of “deep politics.” I include a close analysis of the political assassinations of the 60’s and many smaller events orchestrated by the covert ops community from the overthrow of governments to the strange case of 9/11. I have said before and I’m saying it again–if you don’t at least look at the events that have actually determined much of our political course since WWII more deeply there is no way and I mean no way to reconstitute the left.
To put it another way. We need a revitalization of learning on the left, i.e., a willingness to read history a little closer than it is presented in high school texts. In fact, “conspiracy” is a central part of most historical events and without understanding how humans obsessed with power and/or ideals actually get done what they set out to do there is no point in even talking or writing about politics.
If the left is dead it is only because it has committed suicide.
Don’t think the answers are in the life of the mind, as the screen play as written is way too ambiguous. The ending is up to us, we the people, globally. It’s outside of the inevitable script projected on any screen were watching.