Thursday, June 12, 2008
A Light at the End of the Trouble
It’s been a while since I’ve had a good rant, at least here in blogville, so I’m going to see if I can lay one down. I’m feeling pretty ranty, what with the, um, “news” and everything, and a significant uptick in child tantrums these days. It’s rant weather, folks, and I’m ready for it.
I think the spirit arose within me when I realized that Bobby Kennedy had been shot just about 40 years to the day before Barak Obama got the democratic nomination for the U.S. presidency. That seemed portentous, somehow, as if maybe we’d moved forward because the alternative, god forbid, was that we’ve just been treading water, in which case, something terrible was just going to happen again. I couldn’t bear to imagine living in that world. It feels live we’ve moved forward, doesn’t it?
But then I look at what’s really been going on, a nation at (undeclared) war with an ideology, still trying trickledown voodoo economics by preserving tax breaks for huge corporations and the wealthiest individuals, in a nation where wealth is concentrated in the fewest hands in its history and the economy is leaving more of us behind on a daily basis, where members of congress and famous TV stars are facing home foreclosures and oil companies are recording record profits even as working families are being forced to relocate because they can’t afford to commute to work, and I begin to wonder if we’ve made any progress at all. We’ve had so many years now of intentional ignorance, of fantasy instead of policy, of a government that actively misleads us into circumstances in which it is patently incompetent, and still there are so many of us who just believe what we are told and passively subscribe to executive, legislative, and judicial acts that seem to me no less than treason - a renunciation of the ethics and principles that underlay this nation and rendered it, for a while, a bulwark of relative liberty and justice. No, we’ve never been truly free or just, but we’ve gotten progressively closer for a long time - till recently.
But then we found ourselves confronted with a reality in which big money was actually able to buy public opinion again, despite advances in true democracy, equality of opportunity, and critical thinking. That was the problem, I think - freedom is all well and good if no one is smart enough to exercise it, but now we’ve got immigrants and womenfolk and low wage workers and so many who had been traditionally disenfranchised, actually in a position to exercise their franchise in a meaningful way for the first time, and that was a threat that the Dick Cheneys and Rupert Murdochs of the world just couldn’t abide. Their strategy was transparent, and I was sure it would fail - but it never did: dissimulation and mendacity. Confuse the issues, and lie about them. Accuse your opponents of chimerical wrongdoings; render them toothless against you by forcing them to fight meaningless battles. Why did Bill Clinton spend most of his second term arguing about marital infidelity, and why didn’t GWB spend his second term answering questions about his energy advisors and military failures? Even his erstwhile allies are throwing him under the bus now, McClellan and Bremer, finally making a clean breast of the virtually criminal evasions in which they willingly participated. These matters have, it is fair to say, troubled me - but I think I see a light at the end, as it were, of the trouble.
Mendacity has served them well - lies about science, about the war, about their “enemies.” Even now, they’re actively, blatantly lying about Obama’s tax plans, saying he’ll raise capital gains taxes on people earning “five figures” when he’s proposed starting such efforts at $250,000. And this is not some tangential hack who’s spouting this garbage, it’s Ben Stein, a former Nixon speechwriter who’s had a successful career as an actor and pundit ever since. They’re dissimulating, casting aspersions on Obama as a possible terrorist because of how he and his wife “bumped” fists - a stance (*widely* disseminated) that serves no purpose but to associate the candidate with an inchoate threat that leaves us exhausted and anxious. And they’ve continued with their hypocrisies, promising the moon while delivering prisoners to torture chambers where they have their genitals slashed with scalpels (and I wish I were making that up). Executive privilege has been abused to such an extent that it’s meaningless anymore, but we are blinded entirely to what has been done in our name though not in our interest. I could easily recite a list of individual counts under each of these three primary political vices committed against us - dissimulations, mendacities, and hypocrisies - but it would do nothing but make me angry and keep me from falling asleep tonight - and in fact, I think it might be growing just the tiniest bit irrelevant. I think a corner may have just been turned.
We did not turn this corner, and by “we” I mean “me and those who think as I do that this country has been steered down the crapper since Reagan smirked his way into the Oval Office.” For all that time evil has been perpetrated in the name of conservatism - a movement that has been co-opted by avaricious men (and a few women too) from a desire to protect what has been vouchsafed to us and to restrain governmental excess, to a melange of reactionary ideologies welded together by a variety of inherently incompatible self-interests. Modern fiscal and social “conservatism” have nothing to do with each other, and even fiscal conservatism has mutated into freewheeling government welfare to the most privileged echelons of society. These bedfellows were not just strange, they were ideologically opposed to each other. Yet they recognized their mutual interest in protecting each other’s stake in a government that would in turn protect their respective (not mutual) hegemonies, so they swallowed their bile and each pretended to endorse the others despite their nagging knowledge, deep where their hearts used to be, that those other guys just were not making any sense anymore - if they ever had.
Abstinence education and No Child Left Behind were both failures but could not be so identified. Global warming evidence was covered up. Military intelligence was re-shaped. Civil liberties were subverted. Programs to help the least among us were slashed, leaving them more reliant on others than ever before - even as those “others” lost the ability to help them. Enemies were excoriated to preclude our hearing their truths. And through it all, “conservatives” held their alliance together like a parliamentary coalition that used hate and greed to bind components that under other circumstances would have had nothing to do with each other.
But now, this week, I think we may have seen the first real crack go right through that facade. Living in earthquake country, I know that when the first crack makes it all the way through, structural integrity is fatally compromised and the collapse is, if not imminent, at least predictable in the not-too-distant future. And I know a crack when I see one.
Alex Kozinsky is a very big deal in conservative jurisprudence. He’s a full-on libertarian, which is still an actual ideology and not just a diluted sham of political chauvinism. I am not going to hunt down his many opinions with which I disagree; suffice it to say he was the youngest chief judge of the 9th circuit court of appeals (federal), appointed by Nixon and, while not personally a hardass, he has espoused and advocated for some very strict positions on constitutional law which I believe dishonor the spirit of that document. That’s a lawyer’s debate and not one to have here. The point I wish to make is that he’s been a favorite of the far and middle right for quite a long time. He’s “one of theirs,” even when he advocated strongly in favor of privacy rights in the workplace.
Why was he such a fan of the “right” to keep the contents of the hard drive in his chambers to himself? It’s all over the news now: he’s been found to have maintained a web site that featured images ranging from the offensive to the virtually pornographic. Half naked men cavorting with aroused farm animals, naked women painted to resemble cows on all fours facing away from the camera, “Bush for President” crotch shots, and many other items of highly questionable social value. He was illegally sharing, or facilitating the illegal sharing of, MP3 files. He was wallowing in prurience of the sort that Reverend Haggerty publicly disavowed (he of the amphetamines and male hookers). I’m not saying that the Kozinski website lacked first amendment protection - Edwin Chemerinsky has opined that it’s not even porn. And that’s fine with me. Justice Kozinski can watch what he wants, even as he presides (as he was doing) over an obscenity trial featuring bestiality and excretory gratifications. His impartiality has not been shown to be in question, and he had sworn a jury to address the actual factual questions of redeeming social value.
Alex has had the decency not to deny or minimize the significance of the items that have come to light. He has claimed that they’re part of a “ton of stuff” he’s posted, that he didn’t know everything that was on his site, that he didn’t realize it was available to the public, and he’s agreed to cooperate with a probe (!) of the matter. But “conservatives” are now in a quandry. This guy was a true champion, and now he’s shown himself to be as silly or ribald or curious or - heaven forbid - human as any of the “liberals” who want to teach sex ed in junior high or think our foreign aid shouldn’t be conditioned on the abortion policies of third world nations. It’s not like some talk show host or preacher who “had a lapse.” It’s not a congressman who got caught with his pants down. This is a man who’s sat on the second most important court in this nation for thirty years, enunciating opinions that the right has trumpeted for decades. The right to bear arms, the government’s inability to restrain “free trade,” and others I’ll let you assess for yourself. The internet has brought that power of directed inquiry to each of us, just as it has given each of us the ability to learn and decide for ourselves.
I don’t think that progressives - those seeking currently to reform the political climate now predominant in this nation - will find anything in these researches that will change our minds about anything, except perhaps to look on this hard-right jurist with perhaps a bit more humanity and sympathy on a personal level. However, I do think the nature of these matters will incite a lot of laptop research, so to speak, among many who had suppressed for a long, long time their nagging doubts about their political partners. Maybe some will decide they can’t remain in that partnership, and others might decide that partnership means something other than what they previously understood it to mean. In either case, the conglomerate is deconglomerizing. The solid face of right wing jurisprudence, one of the core fundamentals of the “conservative” movement, is breaking down, with Judge Moore’s 10 commandments in the courtroom in one corner and Judge Kozinski’s dirty priest jokes in the other.
Meanwhile, Obama is preaching a message of progressive change and inclusion, and Keith Olberman is beating Fox news in ratings for the first time in eight years. The U.S. Supremes have just decided that inmates in Gitmo have the right to contest their incarceration in a civil courtroom. Bobby Kennedy was shot 40 years ago, but I am not sure he’s still buried. There is a train coming through that dark tunnel, and we can fight it or ride it. I think - I believe - that every day, more of us are getting off the tracks and on the coaches. It’s been a long time coming, but troubles, eventually, end. We may just live to see it. I intend to, anyway.
Thanks. I do feel better now.
