Tom Ridge came clean this week. Woo-hoo.
What a brave and selfless act. Reminds me of Colin Powell completely and totally kinda sorta dissing the Iraq invasion. Great to hear that everything we knew and said and got clobbered for saying at the time was in fact true. Thanks a lot, General. That's really helpful. Not so great about the whole timing thing though.
Colin Powell was probably the only human on the planet who could have stopped the Iraq holocaust, but he waited instead. He seems to think that loyalty to the president is more important than loyalty to the country, loyalty to principle, or loyalty to the idea of preserving lives. Or so he claims. Given what he has said since he sold the war to Americans with his unconscionably despicable Security Council dog-and-pony show, I'm hard-pressed to see how he's been loyal even to Bush. Seems kinda like he's only loyal to Colin, trying to save a place for himself in the history books.
All of this has me thinking " as I'm afraid I've found myself doing pretty much every day for at least the last decade " "What the hell happened to America? This country seems to have deteriorated mightily over the course of my lifetime, and I know from the email that I get that I'm hardly alone in believing that.
I'll confess right off the bat that I am more than a little suspicious of the question itself. Doesn't every generation think that life was better back in the day? Could it be that I'm just part of the latest cast of regular, vanilla-flavored narcissists now busy transforming themselves into full-blown, old and bitter narcissists?
There's some pretty good reason to think so. Iraq is a disgusting piece of savagery that was sold on lies and never should have happened in a remotely moral universe. But Vietnam was worse. The Caligula Kid " George W. Bush " and his growly pally, Dick "Dick Cheney, are about the last persons out of the whole 300 million of us who should have been selected to reside in the White House. But so was Nixon and, in some ways, Johnson too. Karl Rove was a monster who cheapened American politics and the practice of government in every fashion he could possibly imagine. But so did his mentor, Lee Atwater. And so did Atwater's spiritual antecedent, Joe McCarthy. It many ways, the present disaster often looks like just more of the same, history's proverbial one damn thing after another.
But my gut tells me that the feelings rumbling around in there are not just the bitter ruminations of some geezer who isn't even old enough yet to qualify as an old man. I do think something profound and fundamental has changed.
It's hard to put your finger on it, though. For one thing, it's not just one thing. It's not just the politicians. It's not just the media. It's not just the institutions of government or the political parties. It's not just the public. It's all of that, and a lot more.
And for another thing, it's not just this or that deadly sin, but all of them, plus a few that weren't even on the original manufacturer's list. Is it that we've become more deceitful, or more fearful that is the problem? More corrupt, or more vicious? More slothful, or more greedy? And so on, and so on. So many ways to destroy a culture, so little time...
At the risk of sounding a bit too much like the very people I most loathe in the American political and cultural discourse, I think what's happened is that the society has fundamentally lost its moral bearings. No, I'm not talking about some hyped-up, jerked-off, compulsive obsession with all things sexual. That regressive fixation, complete with enough hypocrisy to sink a small continent, is of course so much a part of the problem, not the solution. What I'm referring to is an unmooring from basic, just, unselfish " and one might even say, patriotic, in the true sense of the term " dignity, generosity, humanity.
Look, let's not kid ourselves. There's always been a dark side to the human spirit, and you'll never go broke betting on the proposition that politics draws more needy and black souls to its practice than do most other professions. As already noted, before Rove there was the shameful scourge of McCarthy, and he was hardly the first political practitioner of the dark arts, in America or elsewhere. But it's different today.
To begin with, this country has unquestionably drifted to the right over the last thirty years. This is not an entirely simple equation, and indeed, in the domain of social issues such as gay rights or the integration of women and minorities into the economic and political institutions of society, I would even argue that we've witnessed a progressive turn during these last decades. Moreover, it's even possible that we are in the early stages of a leftward turn in other domains as well, given the current crises of American capitalism and foreign policy. Nevertheless, even with all those caveats, who would have imagined in 1970 that America would be far more regressive four decades later, rather than far less?
It's a libertarian sort of regressivism, to be sure, hence the aforementioned drift to the left on social issues, and perhaps even a new isolationist cast on foreign-policy questions, rejecting the worst excesses of imperialist predation. That's hard to say. The Iraq experience provides evidence for both a more optimistic or a more pessimistic interpretation of public opinion when it comes to foreign adventures.
But where you really see the rightward turn is in the economic domain. Once, thirty or forty years ago, it was literally a national project to worry about the poor. So much so, in fact, that we decided to fight a war on poverty. By the 1990s, however, that war was lost through an abandonment of the battlefield equating to unconditional surrender. One of the most profoundly significant, and yet simultaneously most subtle developments of the Clinton years was the new and near total emphasis on the lot of the middle class. Not only had America's poor fallen off the radar screen, but in fact, if they got in the way of the middle class achieving all its bourgeois aspirations and acquiring all its requisite trinkets, then not only would the poor cease to receive additional aid and attention, they would also be cut off from their pathetically minuscule existing forms of relief. This is the true meaning of the welfare reform bill, signed by Clinton in order to guarantee an election he already had in his pocket. The middle class was saying that it wanted tax breaks and a balanced budget, which meant something had to give. There went welfare, and with it the war on poverty.
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