The War on Poverty was another flash. Lyndon Johnson's speeches about lifting "our brothers and sisters" out of the endemic suffering of poverty sound today not only like oratory from another age but also from another planet. His rhetoric assumed a moral imperative of compassion toward our fellow human beings, a value to be placed at the very heart of our collective life and our instruments of governance. But Johnson, not only a product but the very quintessence of a deeply corrupt system of bribes, backroom deals and bullshit, never genuinely challenged the forces that engendered the suffering of poverty in the first place. And his total capitulation to the War Machine meant that even his weak and compromised stabs at building a "Great Society" were starved of funds, left to malfunction and deteriorate, tainting the ideals behind them in the minds of the public. He too ended his days isolated and death-haunted, with the blood of hundreds of thousands of people killed in an imperial war -- which he himself admitted to intimates was pointless and unwinnable -- hounding him like furies to his grave.
There were other moments -- such as the Church Committee, hearing which for a time held out the possibility of reining in the murderous, liberty-devouring "national security" apparatus. But this too was swiftly quashed, and that same apparatus has metastasized into a monstrous cancer that has completely devoured the state, which now serves merely as its withered appendage and dogsbody. The impeachment of Richard Nixon -- for petty partisan sneakery, not the high war crimes of which he was manifestly, even proudly guilty -- seemed like another potential break in the gloom, but came to nothing; in just a few years time, he was a wealthy, respected elder statesman. And so it has gone with every such moment, although each has left some worthy fragments.
Now, I am no idealist. I don't long for cleansing fires to scour all evil from society, or for the imposition of grand schemes of human perfection or divine order. Like Andrà © Chà ©nier, the poet-journalist who went down in the flood of the French Revolution, I aspire to be one of those "men upright and unvarying in their principles, who want to neither lead nor follow parties, and who abhor all intrigue." I would much rather not concern myself with politics at all. A well-turned phrase -- or a well-turned ankle -- holds immensely more meaning for me than the machinations of third-rate wretches splashing in the fetid pool of office-seeking. By "slivers of light" I mean only potential opportunities to arrest the pace of our degeneration, and get us to a place where the ordinary corruption endemic to human nature and every single political system devised by human nature operates on its usual vast scale.
But for now, all I know to do is to fall back on the bedrock need to bear witness, to speak for the human and the humane in the midst of what seems to be implacable and unbreakable horror all around. To refuse cooperation with evil, in whatever partisan garb it wears. To shore one fragment after another against the ruins, and wait for a glint of broken light to appear.
UPDATE: A Saturday rally in Washington by
unions and other groups did turn out several thousand people, calling
for more jobs, tax hikes on the rich, immigration reform and defending
public services. This, as they say, is better than a poke in the eye
with a sharp stick, although it falls far short of the angry,
obstreperous crowds in Europe, who are not wanly supplicating their
leaders for a few crumbs but demanding action to preserve their quality
of life.
However, one's heart sinks to see the event's organizers, and some
of the participants, describing it as a get-out-the-vote effort for the
Democrats, and a show of support for Obama. Given the horrendous record
of the president and his party in prosecuting savage and wasteful wars,
overt and covert, all over the world; setting up unaccountable,
"extrajudicial" death squads and hit lists; continuing and expanding
Bush's assault on civil liberties; aiding and abetting the ever-widening
disparity in wealth and opportunity between the sliverous elite and the
collapsing middle class and the already poor -- not to mention the
president's clear intent, with his stacked-deck "Catfood Commission," to
gut Social Security, one of the last remaining shreds of America's
never-robust or extensive "safety net," just as soon as the election is
over -- what in God's name do they think the Democrats will actually do
to advance the organizers' stated "core principles" of "jobs, justice
and education," should the party manage to cling to Congressional
power in November? There will be no money to support these principles,
for one thing; it will all go to the wars, to the burgeoning security
apparatus, and to the sacred goal of "deficit reduction." And Obama and
the Democrats have already demonstrated, amply, that they have no will
or desire to advance these principles or put them into action in any
event.
I don't want to belittle the efforts and hopes of thousands of poor
and working people who showed up at the rally to fight for a better
life. In that, I wish them every success. And I'm glad to see some
counterblast in the public square to the violent fantasies of the
proto-fascists. But I believe that if your ultimate goal is simply to
perpetuate the status quo of rule by two scarcely indistinguishable
political factions, both deeply dedicated to militarist empire and the
crushing dominance of financial elites, then you will not stop the
accelerating degradation of American society or light a path to a
genuinely new direction. Instead, the war, murder, chaos and decay will
go on, breeding more blowback from abroad and instability at home, and
thus giving more fuel to the proto-fascists and their paymasters.
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