Thanksgiving will never be quite the same after watching that now famous video of Sarah Palin rambling nonsense in front of the guy jamming turkeys into some sort of gruesome beheading device while smiling at the camera like at extra from Deliverance. This year she is back, hawking her book for $4.97 a copy at bookstores in red states (maybe they are just Potemkin bookstores that only sell Going Rogue and the Bible, the library of delusion). Palin is a canary in the national mine; an indication that a nation, like a person, should never believe its own PR. In America that PR came early, first with the notion that we were founded on religious tolerance and, second, the Thanksgiving myth that native peoples were really welcome at our national table. No thanks, I prefer a little reality with my stuffing and cranberry sauce.
Last Thanksgiving Day we were still in the glow of the election of Barack Obama and the incipient Democrat-controlled Congress. The scent of change was mixed with that of turkey gravy and pumpkin pie. Sure the economic meltdown was in full decent and Bush and his Wall Street cronies still had a chance of dumping $700 billion of our money into greedy pockets because they were “too big to fail” while millions of Americans were just the right size to fail. Amazingly the people who had prosecuted two wars for seven years, fiscally “off the books” were blaming American workers for running up personal debt. Regrettably, many of us thought that Obama was speaking to the blamed victims. We had hope, Obama hope, which, sadly, has turned out to be hollow rhetoric, campaign chatter, and the eloquent speeches now rankle in their repetition, and have the tenor of the carnie barker and the huckster. But that deserves some elaboration, doesn’t it?
What I am driving at is that, in spite of our annual Thanksgiving Day interlude where we pat ourselves on the back for our genocide against native peoples, complete with football, lots of flags and Air Force flyovers, we are a corrupted society without much of a clue how to reverse the course to the end of the American empire. We seized on Obama—and he seized on our desperation—and we made ourselves believe that say, in spite of Bush trebling the number of lobbyists on K Street, he might be a man who could lead us to the reformation by the force of his eloquence. I think, for a moment in Grant Park, he might have believed his own PR. Then it was gone like a politician’s promise.
In Tom Stoppard’s play, Jumpers, a joke is made of the philosophical paradox that when an arrow is fired at a target it halves the distance mathematical to the target according to a mathematical formulation—first half the distance, then half of the half, and so on—so that theoretically it never really arrives at the target, just keeps halving the distance. (Tell that to St. Sebastian, eh?) I’m not sure I am getting this quite right because I saw the play in London decades ago. But somehow this conundrum stuck, and I think of it every time I hear the word compromise, or more accurately, that “politics is the art of the compromise,” because maybe this is what we means when we say that politicians never get anything done—they just keep halving the distance to their targets.
When Barack Obama spoke of “change” in so many of his campaign addresses it struck a chord among many of us who had come to believe that the time had come not just for a change from George W. Bush to someone else (anyone else), or from the hegemony of one party to another, but “change” that took recognition of the fact that our country has been in desperate need offundamental change for many years. By fundamental change I mean not a change in image or rhetoric, not finding new PR to call ourselves the historically exceptions “greatest country in the world,” or coping to the sloganeering like “morning in America,” or other self-deluding and problem-deflecting behaviors. We don’t need Thanksgiving Day change; we need cold-turkey change.
• Like changing the military-industrial complex has come to full flower since Ike warned us about it. Clemenceau said that “war is too important to be left to the generals,” but that’s what we have done. Congress abdicated its Constitutional responsibility after 9-11. Never mind that our military is amassing a won-lost record that is rivaling that of the French after Waterloo, has developed a nuclear arsenal (and let the formula out of the bag) that it can’t use without killing itself, and whose “pointy end” is composed of tractable kids from ghettos and outbacks. It must spend more on PR these days as it does on body amour—don’t say anything that might be interpreted as lack of support for the troops—and the rest goes to the expensive, unregulated private army of mercenaries. In any case, it clearly cannot win in asymmetrical against guys in flip-flops and suicide vests. With leadership that comes from military academies that have been turned into Christian seminaries I don’t even feel safe with Jesus on our side.
• Like changing the rhetoric about so-called Free Market Capitalism If it ever existed, it has long transmogrified into Manipulated Market Corporatism. The Market, as unfettered by any regulation as possible, is still worshipped as our secular religion with Wall Street Gods Too Big To Fail. Never mind that American corporations have no allegiance to the nation; they will move out or sell out at the drop of a profit ledger or at the urging of their shareholders. They have shown that the spirit of Madoff lives in too many of them and they will screw you with sub prime mortgages, turn your pension and IRA in to dog poop, and raise your credit card interest rates and penalty fees while you sleep—then, when the whole bubble pops they get you—yes, you, you dumbass right-winger who falls for the whole ruse—to pay for it by bailing them out. Remember the Monty Python bit about the dead parrot? We are the guy with the dead parrot!
• Congress is bought. What is called lobbying is nothing but blatant bribery, a corruption of the processes of government that is no different than the corruption of Afghanistan, China or Argentina. K Street is a corporate whorehouse that has something on nearly everybody in Congress. Its process, if you watch the ridiculous manner in which the health care issue is being conducted, a mirror of the arrow conundrum of Jumpers, when creeps like Olympia Snow, Joe Lieberman or Tom Coburn can play politics with the health of tens of millions of Americans. Congress is mortally ill. Health is just another part of the corporate system in America. It is perhaps the most fundamental change that Obama could bring about—though he seems rather lazy about it—because it is a true challenge to American corporatism. But alas, our political process has a pre-existing condition.
• One of the reasons the political process is ill is that the wall between church and Church and State had been breached. Religion is delusion and a nation that allows itself to be ruled, directly or indirectly, by religious thought, is deluded and destined for ruin.
• Then there is going to be very little honest assessment and examination and exposure of these corruptions because he media have become consolidated into a few huge infotainment conglomerates are primarily interested, like the rest of corporate America, in profits. Profits come from ratings, ratings come from the baser values of the media-consuming public and you just have to turn on your TV to see what that is.
It must now be recognized that there is, for all intents and purposes, basically one political party in America—a Center-Right party. It must be recognized that President Obama offers no real alternative, not even an effort to fix the corrupted elements of American society. Only the streets are left, if fundamental change is to take place. There was a time when Americans would take to the streets. The “Teabaggers” still do (they sure need the exercise), but they are certainly not about change—if anything they are against any change—but are about airing their ignorance, confusion and bigotry.
Obama’s ascendency has only had the function of scraping the soil and exposing our nation’s ugly enduring secret—good ole American racism. Indeed, those sublimated feelings of bigotry and intolerance are all the more virulent for the fact that, since Brown V. Board of Education and the Voting Rights Act of 1964, the demographic changes in America have us on the verge of not longer being a “white nation.” By mid century we will be a nation of half-breeds, quarter-breeds and sixteenth-breeds. There will be pockets of putatively “all-whites” in rural Red states, recognizable by their obesity, ignorance, and faded copies of Going Rogue. By then the only thing likely to bind us together will be the annual Thanksgiving Day, where we delude ourselves into thinking that we actually really want to sit down together at some faux nationalagape and play “who’s the real turkey at this table.” Thanks . . . but no thanks.
____________________________________________________________
© 2009, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 11.26.2009)