©2008, UrbisMedia
Listening to the heads of the major American automobile companies whine before Congress today was enough to make me puke. Can you believe this—they each flew to Washington to beg for a handout in their corporate jets. It confirmed to me that there will be no justice, no reckoning, no pay-up for the screw-ups who have taken this country to the brink. To have General Motors, the company that once bragged that is was America, play a hostage game by insisting that if we don’t cough up the money to save them from losing the “market economy, capitalistic competition” game they worshipped, then we will no longer be the America we once knew, the America that built cars. Haven’t these jerks seen people driving around in Toyotas? Somebody tell Phil Graham that we have found the real American whiners. These guys need to go bankrupt; they will only squander whatever handout we give them on Escalades, Hummers, and trucks for guys with penis problems.
A little sidebar here. NPR ran an interview with a recently retired carpenter for GM that said he lived in a nice house by a lake “buyout” of $62,000. This is on top of his pension and medical benefits. When he retired he was making over $100,000 (with overtime). He’s worried that GM won’t get bailed out. So, this guy who had a job you barely have to go to high school for, but made six figures, wants to get bailed out by people who go to universities for years to prepare for professional occupations, have student loans to pay off, and often don’t make as much money as he did. I also got the impression that the guy was (is) a Republican, an irony given the fact that it’s the congressional Republicans who are opposing the auto company bailout. Good for them; I think they might have this one right (though likely for ideological reasons.) But the weepy carpenter also emphasizes that there are many in the country who are plainly in some delusional zone of denial about where we are and how we got here. They have swallowed uncritically so much Republican BS and lies all the way back to Reagan’s mythical “morning in America” that they just don’t have much of a grip on reality. They like the myth too much. When they started being foreclosed on their homes and losing their jobs and pensions, they realized they needed to make a change. Many may have voted for Obama, but I am not sure they get the reality if their circumstances if they expect the substitution of one political subterfuge for the one they were living on. That’s what the Republicans are counting on, because they are talking about “getting back to their core values.”
The delusional American mind also confirms that there will probably be nothing done about the crimes—and I mean the word literally—of the Bush administration. Obama has a lot on his plate and there is a good argument for not dealing (at least by way of justice) with the past, although I think he is going to have days when he would like to see Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and others rotting in a gibbet from the White House gate. No, we are, as they say, “a Christian nation,” and that means forgiveness (or at least forgetfulness), well selective forgiveness. Jesus, they already forgave Judas Joe Lieberman! At least in the Bible Judas has to hang himself. Jerry Ford forgave Nixon for lying about Watergate and a few years later Reagan is violating the Constitution with the Iran-Contra deal. Americans just want to forget and get on with making the same mistake again. So Bush, a guy who could run a lemonade stand into the red on a hot day, will probably walk away from it all convinced that history will eventually recognize him as a great leader and orator, and Cheney will go out clutching his chest at some Halliburton stockholders meeting wearing that signature sneer on his face.
There will be no justice in my Christmas stocking. There will be none for some poor bastard that was scoped up in Bush’s rendition programs and chained like a dog to the floor in Guantanamo for months without cause; nor justice for some dead Iraqi family in Haditha that were taken out and gunned down by “a few good men” American Marines who have walked away from it; or for some poor sap of an American soldier, who, maybe on his third deployment, was sent back to his family with a lot of missing parts. Much of the world breathes a big sigh of relief at the election of Barack Obama, but we must not forget that there have been years of the building of hatred for Americans thanks to the policies of the Bush administration. There are still dozens of American military bases in the Middle East and Americans will become even more desirable targets for those whose grievances transcend the Obama presidency. If we are seen to exact no justice for those in the administration who have acted as war criminals, others will feel justified to take retribution into their own hands, abroad or in America itself.
There has been one tough-sounding refrain from our president-elect, one that he sounded with rather consistent specificity throughout his campaign—that he would do his best to find and kill Osama bin Laden. This might have had something to do with needing to sound bellicose and with countering the negative of his own Muslim-sounding middle name. But, whether it is, or was, cant or not, it should not distract is from the fact that much of the problem of America is of its own making. Killing bin Laden might have some minor effect upon Al Qaeda, but probably no more real effect than hanging Saddam Hussein. We have made thousands of bin Ladins in the years since 911. It has been astonishing to observe the revision in world opinion about America over the election of Mr. Obama, an almost miraculous reaffirmation of our democratic system in the ability of it to affect a political “revolution” in the period of one revolution of the earth.
I don’t believe any of the Christmas mythology—the manger, the star, the wise men, the gold, frankincense and myrrh, Santa—the whole baby Jesus’s birthday thing. But, the fundamental Christian idea—the part that I subscribe to, wherever it might have come from, but gets expressed for the “first” time in the West in the words and acts of Yeshua bar Yusef, rebellious rabbi of Judea in the First Century, is that individuality matters, and people are created equal and that avaricious bastards aren’t ordained to be rich by God. I rather like Jesus for that, but that certainly wasn’t any idea either the Romans or the Jewish religious hierarchy were going to countenance.
So I really don’t give a rat’s ass about Christmas as we know it now, but I don’t want to throw baby Jesus out with the gift-wrappings either, because of what he symbolizes. This has nothing at all, of course to do with the whole subsequent apparatus of hypocritical bullshit that was built by St. Paul, the Roman Catholic Church, the Prods, and all the rest if it. It’s all about power, lording it over people, keeping them scared and coughing up the cash and voting for politicians who hanker for alliance with religious power. Nothing in the essential original true Christian message has anything to do with that. So all this crap from religious types that there is some conspiracy to “get rid of Christmas” is just that—crap. Their idea of Christmas already got rid of Christmas. Christmas is about peace on earth and good will to one another, but they’re worried we won’t go out and buy those Escalades and Hummers.
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© 2008, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 11.21.2008)