Peeking at Washington

Since being part of an online community, I know more Americans than I ever have before. So I'm even more conscious of just how much people are still feeling the effects of the recession--the difficulty finding jobs and so forth.

The past few weeks Fernando and I watched the Doc Zone series Meltdown, and though there were countries that suffered even worse than the US from the recession (oh my days Iceland, life savings wiped out overnight) there were times I felt like I was reading The Grapes of Wrath again.  In 2008 the recession's first impact on my life was that I took a full-time job I wasn't passionate about because it seemed foolish not to when the opportunity arose. The next few years were taken up with the dramas of my own life, so I feel like it's really in the past months that I've been contemplating the enormity of the crimes of the people who gambled with our economies for their own trivial trivial pleasure. And were given bonuses and allowed to slip away.

"I want to put a tag of shame on the greedy bastards who are responsible for this." - Steinbeck on why he wrote The Grapes of Wrath 

And this week, as my concentration's been momentary broken from my novel, I've taken in the breathtaking awfulness that the Republican Party has become. I was listening to some Tea Party guy on my radio station saying that the idea that the US would have had to default on its debts was a lie, a conspiracy. And I thought, oh my God, the Tea Party's rank and file is made up of radio talk show conspiracy devotees. Nothing wrong with them, I love many including my grandmother (who thinks he town was poisoned by CF lightbulbs, though I think she stops short of calling radio shows).

But unlike the set Stephen Colbert makes fun of, I do believe in being advised by experts and "cleaning up Washington" shouldn't mean draining it of intelligence. (Case in point: No one consulted experts when they invaded Iraq. Which is why they did things like dismissing the army without first collecting the guns.)

And in any case, there's no Cleaning Up of Washington going on here. If the real drivers behind the TP movement actually succeeded, I suspect the lower case tp's would one day wake up and regard the results with misgiving. ...If they weren't all jobless and homeless by then. My friend K posted this article on her facebook (and most of the rest of the quotes below) about the billionaire origins of the Tea Party movement:

The originators of the Tea Party movement "mobilised the anger of people who found their conditions of life declining, and channelled it into a campaign to make them worse. Tea Party campaigners take to the streets to demand less tax for billionaires and worse health, education and social insurance for themselves. ... A handful of billionaires ... are now breaking and reshaping the system to serve their interests. We knew this once, but now we've forgotten. What hope do we have of resisting a force we won't even see?" (The Guardian)

It reminds me of the idea that the hippie movie was coopted by being commercialized. This is like, rich extremist conversatives protecting their interests and discovering they magically segued with their angry conservative counterparts among the working class, and mobilizing them. "Ya, we want to clean up Washington too! Ya... that's... that's what it's about!"

Lawks a mercy.

"As I write this, I am hearing White House factotums and leading Democratic shills talking about all the “protections” they won in this agreement... This talk obscures the crushing reality of the deal they are about to vote through: the complete exemption of high-net-worth individuals from any kind of sacrifice, now or in the future, while the sick, the poor, the elderly, and school kids will pay the whole tab for America’s return to fiscal discipline." (Religion Dispatches)

My only hope now is that the Tea Party has so far revealed its extremism as to have lost the more moderate edges of its support. I hope, like an Ebola virus, it has overheated and will soon burn out its host. But though I think the Democratic Party will win the Presidential Election, I'm not too confident about Obama, or sure he should win it.

"If I hear one more person try to tell me the deal cut between Congress and the White House was as good as we can expect, that it isn't all bad, I might vomit on them. This whole thing has been a disaster, and no amount of spin can alter the fact. Mr. Obama has taken to the habit of abject retreat with such gusto that he should be outfitted with one of those beeping devices they put on trucks to alert people when they go in reverse." (truthout)

But I don't follow American politics close enough to have a really educated opinion. I'm just feeling sickened.

Hartzell backed a Budget rental truck up to a no-frills apartment building that is on a strip of motels and pawnshops in Tampa, Florida. He had been laid off by a packaging plant during the financial crisis of 2008, had run through his unemployment benefits, and had then taken a part-time job stocking shelves at Target in the middle of the night, for $8.50 an hour. His daughter had developed bone cancer, and he was desperate to make money, but his hours soon dwindled to four or five a week. In April, Hartzell was terminated. His last biweekly paycheck was for a hundred and forty dollars, after taxes.... Representative Paul Ryan’s ten-year budget plan, which remains his party’s blueprint for the future, would impose a fifty-per-cent cut on programs like food stamps and Supplemental Security Income, which, as long as Danny Hartzell remains jobless, represent the Hartzells’ only income. By the last day of June, the Hartzells had twenty-nine dollars to their name. The Republicans in Congress won’t be satisfied until the family is out on the street. (The New Yorker)

And now in Canada we've got the kind of conservative party, and conservative-trash-media, capable of leading us down this particular garden path. As my friend Banane said after our elections, it's all a little too Yeatsian.

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in the sands of the desert.

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

___________

Second Coming designs by Cassie Dee