Voices
The forums created by modern technology allowing for the expressions of pain that some of us feel so often to be heard by those willing to listen provide for sort of an inexpensive therapy, and there is always the chance somebody will read what is posted and be motivated to do something good for us all. We are reaching the point, though, where those voices better start getting louder and louder because we are in real danger of destroying whatever it is that has connected us as a nation.
Nothing less than our very system of government is at stake. We are watching the spectacle of a Congress beholden to the contributors who make possible their continued hold on office unable to respond to the call of a vast majority to reform health care, to protect our posterity from the doomsday path on which we have placed our nation and to regulate wizards of finance whose obsession with their self-interest have put the financial security and well being of the rest of us in permanent jeopardy. This is a recipe for disaster all by itself and placed side by side with the fact that we are no longer able to have civilized discourse over opposing views, the future looks bleak indeed.
I saw Regina Spektor at Radio City this week and will discourse in full on that spectacular event on my own blog sometime this weekend but without placing to much significance on it, the sight of so many young people sitting in rapt attention while a classically trained musician, sitting in front of string quartet, with a rock and roll drummer, all but cried in pain at "all the holocaust deniers" and the evil of hate and hatred gives some reason to hope for better future. But Regina also sings about "using your headphones to drown out your mind" and, as noted here before,this:
and so, as Regina knows better than most, we are on the precipice and it remains unclear which way we will go.
There are other voices which are out there, of course. Many of them are expressed in the printed word on Daily Kos, TPM and other places where the devoted can tell one another that they are not alone. Others are on television. Bill Moyers and Rachel Maddow are out there teaching and cajoling and Keith Olbermann bared his soul a week or so back and repeated the whole thing last night to demand that our nation rise to the time at hand. If you haven't seen this, stop wasting time here and go watch it.
But I remain forlorn and dubious about the capacity of the system at hand to respond to any crisis or, indeed, the problems which beset us. It is what President Carter was trying to express in what has come to be known as his "malaise speech." But his point, which might have been better expressed, but perhaps not, was well taken. My own inadequately expressed fears have been posted, among other places, here and here, but the point is that if we do not wake up and take responsibility for how poorly our government functions, we invite anarchy or worse.
Yes, the failure to enact campaign finance reform is the primary villain, but as the Star Trek movies explained, once you have been assimilated you lose the ability to fight back, so it is hardly surprising that the forces who control would not allow the process which permits it to allow us to change it and to most people in this country, including the press, and bloggers even on progressive sites, find the subject to boring to even consider. That's how the Borg assimilates you on Star Trek whereupon resistance becomes futile.
Here is the latest polling on the health care reform proposals, this one conducted for CBS News. Let's look at one specific question:
John Chancellor once explained that the word "landslide" should only be applied where one side gets 60% of the vote. This polling, which reflects sort of a low point in public support of what some idiot decided we should call "the public option" establishes by that definition landslide support for it.
Yet, Tim Phillips tells Rachel Maddow with a straight face, and backed by much of the press and broadcasters, that most of the public is against "Obamacare" and it is widely reported and said that "the public option is dead."
This is playing with fire, folks. An unresponsive government acting on behalf of its benefactors instead of the people who vote cannot last long. It can last while people are sleeping---which they are---or while they are obsessed by cable driven foolishness about a helium balloon)---which they are, but then something happens and people wake up, though sometimes not for very long. (For the cable nets to rise up against a guy for fooling them, instead of asking themselves how they got so easily fooled is simply amazing.) I wonder if any other president will be reading books to schoolchildren while our nation is being attacked but I am not convinced it is impossible.
Yes, there are voices. I heard Vin Scully a couple of times this week as the Dodgers march on. He is 81 years old now but sounds almost exactly as he did when he was 41, when I first heard him, or when he he was in his sixties, when he broke my heart by describing the "tying run and now the winning run" in 1986. And most importantly, he broadcasts alone and describes baseball in a prose poetry that is worth hearing even if one does not care what he is describing.
That tells us again about the power of words. I heard a judge the other day, a man I have respected, blurble out some nonsensical explanation about why he could not find a politician guilty of a crime that nobody could reasonably believe he did not commit and I was deeply disappointed. It was not just that we have not advanced as far as I had thought, where a man could not attack a woman, even a person too timid to testify against him, and not face meaningful sanction simply because there is no witness to the event who can specifically recount the crime----as if murder could never be prosecuted because, after all, the victim is dead. More than that sad fact was that the language was mangled and reason set on its rear in order for the judge to explain his verdict. If the judge was some old unreconstructed fool, I could understand and hope for better days to come. That is not the case with this judge: a good man who just whiffed when he could have done something important.
But Regina Spektor, once a little 9 1/2 year old girl leaving the land of her birth, the Mother Russia, to flee with her parents from the antisemitism which would have doomed her, to a country that spends as much time trying to rid itself of immigrants as it once welcomed them to our shores, but fortunately found room for Regina, tells us that things change. Take, for instance, "The Man of a Thousand Faces" who
Nothing less than our very system of government is at stake. We are watching the spectacle of a Congress beholden to the contributors who make possible their continued hold on office unable to respond to the call of a vast majority to reform health care, to protect our posterity from the doomsday path on which we have placed our nation and to regulate wizards of finance whose obsession with their self-interest have put the financial security and well being of the rest of us in permanent jeopardy. This is a recipe for disaster all by itself and placed side by side with the fact that we are no longer able to have civilized discourse over opposing views, the future looks bleak indeed.
I saw Regina Spektor at Radio City this week and will discourse in full on that spectacular event on my own blog sometime this weekend but without placing to much significance on it, the sight of so many young people sitting in rapt attention while a classically trained musician, sitting in front of string quartet, with a rock and roll drummer, all but cried in pain at "all the holocaust deniers" and the evil of hate and hatred gives some reason to hope for better future. But Regina also sings about "using your headphones to drown out your mind" and, as noted here before,this:
Power to the people
We don't want it
We want pleasure
And the T.V.s try to rape us
And I guess that they're succeeding
Now we're going to these meetings
But we're not doin' any meetin'
And we're trying to be faithful but we're cheatin', cheatin', cheatin'
and so, as Regina knows better than most, we are on the precipice and it remains unclear which way we will go.
There are other voices which are out there, of course. Many of them are expressed in the printed word on Daily Kos, TPM and other places where the devoted can tell one another that they are not alone. Others are on television. Bill Moyers and Rachel Maddow are out there teaching and cajoling and Keith Olbermann bared his soul a week or so back and repeated the whole thing last night to demand that our nation rise to the time at hand. If you haven't seen this, stop wasting time here and go watch it.
But I remain forlorn and dubious about the capacity of the system at hand to respond to any crisis or, indeed, the problems which beset us. It is what President Carter was trying to express in what has come to be known as his "malaise speech." But his point, which might have been better expressed, but perhaps not, was well taken. My own inadequately expressed fears have been posted, among other places, here and here, but the point is that if we do not wake up and take responsibility for how poorly our government functions, we invite anarchy or worse.
Yes, the failure to enact campaign finance reform is the primary villain, but as the Star Trek movies explained, once you have been assimilated you lose the ability to fight back, so it is hardly surprising that the forces who control would not allow the process which permits it to allow us to change it and to most people in this country, including the press, and bloggers even on progressive sites, find the subject to boring to even consider. That's how the Borg assimilates you on Star Trek whereupon resistance becomes futile.
Here is the latest polling on the health care reform proposals, this one conducted for CBS News. Let's look at one specific question:
Would you favor or oppose the government offering everyone a government-administered health insurance plan -- something like the Medicare coverage that people 65 and older get -- that would compete with private health insurance plans?"
Favor 62 %
Oppose 31 %
Unsure 7 %
John Chancellor once explained that the word "landslide" should only be applied where one side gets 60% of the vote. This polling, which reflects sort of a low point in public support of what some idiot decided we should call "the public option" establishes by that definition landslide support for it.
Yet, Tim Phillips tells Rachel Maddow with a straight face, and backed by much of the press and broadcasters, that most of the public is against "Obamacare" and it is widely reported and said that "the public option is dead."
This is playing with fire, folks. An unresponsive government acting on behalf of its benefactors instead of the people who vote cannot last long. It can last while people are sleeping---which they are---or while they are obsessed by cable driven foolishness about a helium balloon)---which they are, but then something happens and people wake up, though sometimes not for very long. (For the cable nets to rise up against a guy for fooling them, instead of asking themselves how they got so easily fooled is simply amazing.) I wonder if any other president will be reading books to schoolchildren while our nation is being attacked but I am not convinced it is impossible.
Yes, there are voices. I heard Vin Scully a couple of times this week as the Dodgers march on. He is 81 years old now but sounds almost exactly as he did when he was 41, when I first heard him, or when he he was in his sixties, when he broke my heart by describing the "tying run and now the winning run" in 1986. And most importantly, he broadcasts alone and describes baseball in a prose poetry that is worth hearing even if one does not care what he is describing.
That tells us again about the power of words. I heard a judge the other day, a man I have respected, blurble out some nonsensical explanation about why he could not find a politician guilty of a crime that nobody could reasonably believe he did not commit and I was deeply disappointed. It was not just that we have not advanced as far as I had thought, where a man could not attack a woman, even a person too timid to testify against him, and not face meaningful sanction simply because there is no witness to the event who can specifically recount the crime----as if murder could never be prosecuted because, after all, the victim is dead. More than that sad fact was that the language was mangled and reason set on its rear in order for the judge to explain his verdict. If the judge was some old unreconstructed fool, I could understand and hope for better days to come. That is not the case with this judge: a good man who just whiffed when he could have done something important.
But Regina Spektor, once a little 9 1/2 year old girl leaving the land of her birth, the Mother Russia, to flee with her parents from the antisemitism which would have doomed her, to a country that spends as much time trying to rid itself of immigrants as it once welcomed them to our shores, but fortunately found room for Regina, tells us that things change. Take, for instance, "The Man of a Thousand Faces" who
used to go to his favorite bookstoresSo, we keep going, with hope that we are slowly entering a new age of enlightenment where we, too, can smile at the moon like we know her.
And rip out his favorite pages
And stuff them into his breast pockets
And the moon to him was a stranger
Now he sits down at the table
Right next to the window
And begins his quiet ascension
Without anyone's sturdy instruction
To a place where no religion
Has found a path to our alikeness
And eats a small lump of sugar
And smiles at the moon like he knows her
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I like your voice, Barth. It's beautiful.
October 17, 2009 4:39 PM | Reply | Permalink
Thanks.
October 17, 2009 4:44 PM | Reply | Permalink
I hereby render unto you the Knightly Blog of the Day Award for this here TPMCafe Site given to all of you from all of me. So much here and me and LisB came to the party.
First off:
I listened to that speech. We must all sacrifice, we must be responsible or....
It was a grown up speech and the American people took the word of a b movie actor who said, give the oligarchy the keys to the kingdom and we will straighten it all out in time. You poor people, you have enough to worry about it. The moneyed class will trickle down to you all that you need.
And the antisemitism comment. Yes, we per fathead dobbs and others can blame those Catholic Norte Americanos whose papers lack endorsements for all of our problems. I mean we cannot clean toilets because they came here to clean toilets.
Malaise. I think the message just has to be tweaked a bit. Make it a challenge. This land is your land this land is my land if WE take some responsibility, if we make some sacrifices.
October 18, 2009 1:40 AM | Reply | Permalink
To be complimented by LisB and dickday, exactly the writers that make this site invaluable, absolutely makes my day.
Your last paragraph makes a great point: one that should be developed. Churchill's famous exhortation was not for Britons to show and go about their daily business (something they did not have to be told to do anyway) but for the "blood, sweat, toil and tears" that they would have to endure if the war would be seen as their "finest hour."
And, of course, the most inspirational president of my youth told Americans that they should "ask not what their country can do for you, but what you can do for your country." He did not suggest that whining about those damn politicians fell in the latter category.
WE have failed to take control of our government. We slept while the expenses of running a political campaign took over the process itself and perverted our politics. The result is the state we are in today, where a beltway mentality, ruled by the need to have the money to buy the tv ads that keep one in office, is so divorced from the rest of the country that it is becoming almost frightening.
The President made the right point yesterday:
" In fact, the insurance industry is rolling out the big guns and breaking open their massive war chest – to marshal their forces for one last fight to save the status quo. They’re filling the airwaves with deceptive and dishonest ads. They’re flooding Capitol Hill with lobbyists and campaign contributions. And they’re funding studies designed to mislead the American people.
Of course, like clockwork, we’ve seen folks on cable television who know better, waving these industry-funded studies in the air. We’ve seen industry insiders – and their apologists – citing these studies as proof of claims that just aren’t true....
It’s smoke and mirrors. It’s bogus. And it’s all too familiar. Every time we get close to passing reform, the insurance companies produce these phony studies as a prescription and say, "Take one of these, and call us in a decade."
But his point will doubtless be lost on the talk shows this morning with their on the one hand, on the other hand stuff, all sponsored by exactly who we would expect to sponsor these programs.
But there has to be a way back. Yes, here is a new post in a formative stage. Probably won't get to it until next weekend, but thanks for the encouragement.
October 18, 2009 7:42 AM | Reply | Permalink
After billions of years you cannot help but wonder at the inexplicable and universal randomness we are subject to. One mans conviction is anothers folly has been with us forever and doesn't show any sign of abating. And in spite of our concerted efforts to make sense of it we are no further along to gaining that insight than we were at the beginning. We note the endless march of time but remain forever still in our minds.
October 18, 2009 11:15 AM | Reply | Permalink
I hear you and much of what you say is true, but there have been a few advances as time has marched on: there are very few people who still believe that the world is flat (not the Tom Friedman usage) or that earth is the center of the solar system or universe. Most of us have accepted that slavery is ans was a terrible scourge on the earth and that it is the intent of the game that the Red Sox should generally win. (OK, maybe that last one is not as universally accepted as it should be, but you get my point.)
I think that the past ten years have seen a backward slide, particularly in this country. There are people openly advocating against getting vaccinated to protect against the spread of the HV-NV flu---y'know.
October 18, 2009 5:32 PM | Reply | Permalink
I saw that about the flu. I was surprised to see it with the number of children who already died. I even saw where some healthcare staff persons were objecting to the requirement of the getting immunized.
You're right that for some things we have gained knowledge but many people are distrustful of it. It gets silly though where we still make some huge blunders that are widely harmful when we had the means and knowledge to make a different choice. A good case in point is Katrina. Emergency Management is something we know and have examined and practiced time and again. Yet we still had absolutely the wrong people with the wrong knowledge and wrong skill sets at the top management of a most crucial agency. How can people not know these most fundamental things. As a society we cannot continue to make fuckups of that caliber about things we already know.
Much of the stuff going on is totally crazy because we really do know the right answers and which are the necessary steps that must be taken. Yet we have a congress that gives the appearance of knowing absolutely not a thing. They make decisions based upon a political calculus even though that decision is contradicted by the facts and is absolutely certain to produce an undesirable result. That is ridiculous and it has to stop.
October 18, 2009 7:09 PM | Reply | Permalink
It is not the political calculus that is wrong. They have that right.
It is the moraliy of the calculus that is wrong, because what is at stake are millions of dollars in campaign contributions against the health and welfare of those of us on the sidelines.
October 18, 2009 8:47 PM | Reply | Permalink
I think it might be both. They can't make a decision where they adhere to a political calculus because it isn't a moral one. Which in the end comes down to the same struggle congress has faced for as long as I can remember. That being the influence of money in politics most assuredly skewing the decisions of government in ways which are decidely harmful to the country.
This discussion always comes back to that same basic thing every time anyone examines it. The consistency with which the discussion always logically leads to this crucial point has yet to be accepted by our lawmakers and then truly and objectively rectified so it produces a moral outcome. And then I always follow up with charges of congressional corruption etc. This time what jumps into my mind is, "We hold these truths to be self evident...". Although contextually different, this would seem to be one of those.
This is where congress and more particularly the SC get it wrong. They always frame the argument in terms of freedom. However, they conveniently ignore the fact that the morality of it is the greater indicator of the efficacy of the decision.
October 19, 2009 3:32 AM | Reply | Permalink
It strikes me that they have fallen into a trap where they are concluding that freedom is the be all end all and can stand alone. As we have found this isn't true. Freedom only works where there is a moral and legal framework to give it definition. Freedom that produces an immoral or otherwise decidedly harmful outcome is freedom where the moral and legal framework have been stripped away. In our case the illogical notion of corporate personhood has provided the foundation for the removal of that moral and legal framework.
October 19, 2009 4:14 AM | Reply | Permalink