Americans Too Wussified to Fight a Real Rebellion
Mort Zuckerman
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Subject: Americans Too Wussified to Fight a Real Rebellion
Date: Sep 17, 2009 7:07 AM
Dear Coop,
My sentiments exactly.
We're having this shipwreck of a nation
because the commoners won't fight until
it is too late, and at that, we'll be fighting
*each other* over what's left from the last
Walmart break-in or train derailment. It
will be sort of WWII and the Underground
Resistance in the reverse. 'Disorganized
attacks against our fellow Americans for
the last scraps...
Americans no longer have the *character*
to fight the right fight.
Kathleen M. Dickson
http://www.actionlyme.org
=====================================
http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/09/17
Published on Thursday, September 17, 2009 by CommonDreams.org
Once Again The Animals Were Conscious of A Vague Uneasiness
by Christopher Cooper
People tell me how wrong I am in my opinions concerning important
public issues. Some of this instruction I receive by reading essays
and interviews, and a good deal is delivered to me personally by
acquaintances or co-workers, much of it rendered in an exasperated or
condescending voice. That I remain recalcitrant may simply be evidence
of my perverse nature and the inability of even good pedagogy to reach
and save every soul. I may be crazy. Or I may be right.
Let me tell you that I voted for George McGovern. And I have more than
once voted for Ralph Nader. And I have "thrown away" my vote once or
twice on Green Party candidates. On the spectrum of American political
thought and alliance I was for some years a liberal, believing or
hoping that good ideas and good intentions could, through activism and
education and the application of law and franchise, improve the lot of
persons of modest means, reduce conflict between societies and
inequalities within them, and reduce or reverse our abuses of the
natural world. That was, to be sure, the person I was many years
ago.
I have not abandoned these principles; I probably hold them more
firmly now at sixty than I did even at twenty. But I no longer imagine
any candidate or party allowed to function in this society will
promote legislation, regulation or taxation to materially effect these
goals. This is the vein into which so many wish to inject the
corrective elixirs of hope and faith.
Conservatives, reactionaries, corporatists and warmongers don't argue
with me. They laugh at me and my peaceable vegetarian life, but do not
imagine I am correctable; I amuse but do not irritate them. They have
their beliefs in the rightness of power and money and the God-given
right of the white man to take and to use. I do not read their sacred
texts and attend their services, so they do not much think about me.
I seem, rather, to be at odds with liberals because we start from a
very similar station but climb aboard far different trains when we
take our feelings out into the world.
George W. Bush, President G. W. Bush, was and is an idiot. A shallow,
stupid man of crude appetites when younger, his life would have been
of no consequence had not the Republican party chosen him as the
public face of the Cheney government. I doubt he has to this day any
coherent idea of how he found himself in the White House or who made
the decisions while he lived there. He was, in the words of Mr. Bob
Dylan, "only a pawn in their game." You know it and I know it as we
say here in the woods of Maine. And liberals and Democrats know it.
Members of the print and broadcast press know it. Bloggers are well
aware of this. Hell, Republicans even have an obvious degree of
contempt for the sad little creature who was the putative president
for two terms recently ended. They do still love and fear Dick Cheney
though. And war. And greed.
Because Al Gore rolled over and played dead and did not misbehave or
act out or fight for himself and his country, the Supreme Court short-
circuited the system and gave us George Bush, his stupidity, his wars,
his coddling of the rich and his courting of crazies in the far
fringes of Christian American Medieval backwardness.
Then, because John Kerry was an inept fool who ran a campaign that
largely ran away from everything honorable he had once done and
believed in, we were blessed with a second term of Richard B. Cheney
and his wooden-headed puppet.
Throughout those eight long, dark years, whenever I complained about
what our poor nation had become and was doing, I was advised to vote
Democratic, early and often, and to contribute money to that party and
its candidates. Only a Democratic Congress and a Democratic president,
I was told, could reverse the terrible damage.
It came then to pass that we received those tools. The Democratic
president and Congress, and after some finagling even the sixty-seat
majority in the Senate. I was advised to watch for the great change to
come rolling over us like a flood; we would soon be awash in
progressivism. Our boys would come home from foreign wars, we would
close our illegal prison camps, abandon torture and rendition. The
rich would again be taxed, environmental abuses rolled back, people
put ahead of corporations. We would get universal health care. Some of
this would happen immediately upon Barack Obama taking office. Much
would be in place in a magical, marvelous "first hundred days." What
great changes a year would bring.
I don't have to tell you there is great and crushing disappointment
among those who most fervently supported candidate Obama and his
campaign for Change We Can Believe In. "I don't want any more
Clintons," one man told me often last year. (He did not need to tell
me he wanted no more Reagans, no Romneys, no Giulianis.)
We are still wasting money and lives in Iraq. We are wasting money and
lives in Afghanistan at the highest rate since we blundered into that
misunderstood (and, yes, "misunderestimated) country eight years ago.
We keep in wire cages and steel and stone cells persons we picked up
years ago; we do not try them nor do we release them. Some we send
still to places where men do to other men those things both Bush and
Obama have said we do not do. Our wars are not ended, they are
escalated.
This new government is generous to bankers. The worst sort of bankers.
Crooks. Thieves. You've read the tales, each more lurid than the
other, of the wild ride Wall Street has enjoyed at your expense. Your
taxes go to clean up their mess. They continue to reward themselves
with bonuses. Nobody goes to jail.
Where is our new energy policy? Foundered on the fantasy of "clean
coal", I fear, with mountaintop removal accelerating the devastation
in Appalachia and the mile-long coal trains still snaking out of
Wyoming daily, hourly.
And here we are about to receive a piece of crap that will be called
health care reform but will instead be a gift to the very insurance
companies, their managers and their investors, who have given us the
worst system in the modern world. You may well be required to buy
their bad product (as Republican Mitt Romney required of
Massachusetts) and fined or taxed for failure to do so. Perhaps you'll
be allowed to join with your neighbors and form a happy group to buy a
bad plan together. What you will not get is anything even vaguely
similar to a progressive, fair, publicly-financed system such as the
rest of the civilized nations enjoy.
What you can be sure you'll get is the assurance that we have "passed
a plan" because that's all that this president formerly known as the
candidate of change is now promising-we will get a plan this year. It
will be satisfactory to the insurance companies. It will further
enrich them. Thousands will continue to suffer and die because this
Congress and this Democratic president have made deals with and taken
millions of dollars from the corporations that have brought us to our
wretched present sickness.
And so it goes. And every so often the triangulation and dealing and
selling-out is concealed by the cloak of hope and promise and we are
treated to another allegedly inspiring speech, often using the same
inane chant we heard so often last fall: "I'm fired up! I'm ready to
go! Fired up! Ready to go!" (Great and sustained applause follows.) We
were desperate for a leader; we got a motivational speaker.
There is disappointment and there is disgust and there is anger. You
can read well-reasoned, articulate essays every day that detail the
hooks the war industry and the investment bankers and the coal and
nuclear industries have so firmly set in the body of this
administration, this Democratic majority administration. You can have,
and I have certainly had, long conversations with intelligent, honest,
decent persons who are as disturbed by the policy similarities between
Bush and Obama as you are
But don't say it out loud. Don't predict that what we see is what we
get. Don't look from man to pig and pig to man and pronounce them much
the same. Or do it if you like, and think it if you do, but don't be
bold and say that the Democrats are not much better for us than the
Republicans.
Your betters will remind you that Dick Cheney was a worse human being
than Joe Biden. They will tell you that Obama is smart. He is playing
a careful game. He is more progressive than his actions. He's only
able to get what the Senate will allow him. He means well. He would
like to do the right thing. He's fired up and he's ready to go. He's
inspiring. He's not George Bush.
When we elect a selectman who proves himself inadequate, unsuitable or
ill-intentioned, we say so. We complain. We tell him he misled us. We
make his year in office unpleasant. We do not make excuses for him.
But in that case we see only the individual, the man or the woman. We
are not bound into any notions that this or that party will take us in
a different direction than another. We seem to hear and see and
understand better when we are not encumbered by faith, by the religion
of party.
So I am neither amused nor amazed that the candidate of hope and
change is doing the same dirty deals with the same merchants of death
and greed as his predecessor. They are both creations of the two-party
system. Whether they are ignorant dupes or are happily complicit,
Republican or Democrat, white or black, may not, when the bolts are
tightened and the valves adjusted and the contributions tallied and
the collusion concluded, make a great deal of difference in how
thoroughly you and I and the uninsured and the unadvantaged and the
troops in Taliban territory and the villagers in the several countries
where our taxes are turned into terror from above are screwed.
And you tell me, over and over and over again....
Mr. Cooper works hard and gets by. But he does not have health
insurance. He cannot afford it. Therefore he does not often seek
doctoring. Mandating his purchase of the deficient, dishonest products
of the industry will not induce him to do so; it will likely just
further piss him off and cause him to generate more unwholesome,
unhelpful essays such as this. Persons wishing to contact him for
whatever reason (no insurance agents, please) may write to
co...@tidewater.net. Before he leaves this author wishes to tell you
that he is one resident of the state of Maine who is not impressed
with the work of Senator Olympia Snowe, political bed-partner of
Senator Max Baucus. Just s
"[Real] scientists are *fiercely* independent. That's the good
news."-- NIH's Top Fool, Anthony Fauci
m
On Sep 17, 7:09 am, Mort Zuckerman <morph...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> To: c...@tidewater.net, fr...@nytimes.com, dpr...@stmartin.edu,
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> michael.c...@po.state.ct.us, conn...@po.state.ct.us, executive-
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>
> Subject: Americans Too Wussified to Fight a Real Rebellion
>
> Date: Sep 17, 2009 7:07 AM
>
> Dear Coop,
> My sentiments exactly.
> We're having this shipwreck of a nation
> because the commoners won't fight until
> it is too late, and at that, we'll be fighting
> *each other* over what's left from the last
> Walmart break-in or train derailment. It
> will be sort of WWII and the Underground
> Resistance in the reverse. 'Disorganized
> attacks against our fellow Americans for
> the last scraps...
> Americans no longer have the *character*
> to fight the right fight.
>
> Kathleen M. Dicksonhttp://www.actionlyme.org
> =====================================http://www.commondreams.org/view/2009/09/17
> c...@tidewater.net. Before he leaves this author wishes to tell you
m
>
> read more »- Hide quoted text -
>
> - Show quoted text -
That was a compliment, Kathleen.