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STRUGGLING FOR THE SOUL OF AMERICA
This entry was posted on 1/27/2011 2:37 PM and is filed under uncategorized.
"The Tea Partiers say, 'I want to take my country back.'
I don't want to take my country back.
I want to take it forward."
Bill Maher
As an old classic rock song goes, There's somethin' happenin' here. What it is, ain't exactly clear.
You don't have to be a history buff to realize that there has been a subtle shift in the sensibilities of the American people since the terrible assassination attempt of a sitting U.S. congresswoman, Gabby Giffords, that resulted in the deaths of six innocents--including a nine-year old child--and serious injuries of 13 others, as well as the congresswoman, who was shot through the brain.
The reason I refer to history is that I believe it is the kind of shift in national consciousness that historians refer to as a "transformational moment," as Matt Bai explained so beautifully in his January 15 piece for the New York Times, "After Tuscon, Is the Anger Gone?"
Historians consulted by Bai mentioned, for example, the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, which took the lives of four little black girls who were attending Sunday School at the time, as one such transformational moment: in changing the attitudes of the American people toward Civil Rights for African Americans:
"The South had endured its share of martyrdom before then, but the
killing of four young girls in a church basement was more than even
casually engaged Americans could stomach. “That actually became a moment
when everyone took a step back and asked if there was something wrong
in the country that was causing this.”
Another example presented was the towering moment during the infamous McCarthy Communist-under-every-rock hearings when an Army lawyer, Joe Welsh, cried, "Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last?"
As another historian told Bai, "McCarthy was politically dead at that moment and physically dead in three years."
Bai says that such transformational "moments" simply can't occur anymore the way they did in the past because our method of absorbing information has changed so dramatically. Rather than a newsflash seen on one of three television networks, followed by in-depth newspaper coverage--which gave people time to absorb the shock and then think about it--we now get bombarded by insta-news that isn't always reliable, and inundated by an industry of opinion-peddlers on the Internet and cable TV that enables us to custom-order our news to fit our preconceived notions.
This does not mean that our attitudes, overall, are incapable of shifting--cable news coverage to the contrary--but that the shift is more subtle and takes a bit more time to come about.
Over the past few weeks, we have witnessed just such a subtle shift. Most people may not even be aware of it; others, keenly so. But it is there.
I give our president, with his equanimity, eloquence, and stillpoint-calm in the face of one staggering national crises after another, a great deal of credit for this, but it is not all his doing.
Former President Bill Clinton once said that the American people are far more sensible and smart than most pundits and pontificators give them credit for; although Winston Churchill might have hit it closer to the mark when he once reportedly said, "You can always count on Americans to do the right thing--after they've tried everything else."
And, in the case of political discourse and matters of public policy, we have, indeed, tried everything--including carrying loaded automatic firearms as close to events featuring President Obama as the Secret Service will permit, while wearing T-shirts like the one worn by Timothy McVeigh on the day he was arrested in 1995 for bombing the federal Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma--killing 168 innocents--a shirt that quotes Thomas Jefferson:
"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants."
(Yeah, Americans are not exactly known for our sense of irony.)
Americans on either side of the political spectrum have been raging in one form or another since September 11, 2001--raging against so-called "Islamofascists," raging against the Bush cabal, raging against "illegal immigrants," raging against two ongoing and seemingly endless wars, raging against Wall Street, raging against this country's first black president.
The country's post-9/11 case of post-traumatic stress was manipulated and enhanced for political purposes by the evil genius of men like Karl Rove and Dick Cheney and put to good use by George W. Bush and his supporters. Our collective shock and grief and anxiety was whipped into a fever-frenzy in order to garner votes and war-support for Bush, his private contractor-cronies, and his power-hungry administration, and it worked for a good many years.
Then Obama came along and my oh my, the national hysteria of those same supporters reached almost maniacal proportions, as Jennifer Senior pointed out in a New York Times Magazine piece just before the 2010 elections called, "The Benjamen Button Election."
Senior compares the political mind-set leading to the November elections as that of a small child throwing a temper tantrum and indulging in magical thinking:
"Anger in politics is not always infantile. But whenever political rage has an overtly fantastical quality—i.e., Obama is a Kenyan socialist whose sinister regime must be destroyed—and whenever adults’ laments are not entirely rational—i.e., I
would like to win two wars on terror and collect every nickel of my
Social Security and Medicare … all while balancing the budget and
preserving my tax cuts—it’s worth at least considering these responses in a context. Often, it’s happening for a reason."
Senior analyzes how, in times of crises or great uncertainty, many people react with the same sense of powerlessness, narcissism, and a "destructive, deceptive sense of might" that a toddler will when denied something he or she wants.
Intense technological changes, taking place with the speed of light, combined with the cultural upheavals brought about by such things as the women's movement and Civil Rights--not to mention an economic catastrophe--have thrown a certain segment of our society into that precarious position of feeling as if their lives are spinning out of control.
“And when people become more powerless...they become more
distrustful of those who have power or authority, so they want systems
that protect them against someone else—and that, in turn, paradoxically,
disempowers them more.”
Set those same emotions on hyper-drive through the Internet and social networking sites, (which may or may not have their own agendas), and that anger and paranoia can be validated in cyberspace and exaggerated into hysterical proportions by the end of the day.
The result, politically, as Senior puts it, is not reality-based thinking. "It's reality-television-based thinking."
Which, she points out, lets an ill-informed, unqualified gadfly like Christine O'Donnell become a serious contender for the United States Senate.
When O'Donnell claimed that all one needed to run for public office was "passion and principles," Senior wryly stated, "Passion and a few principles: That’s all you need to run for public
office. Not experience, intellect, sound judgment, humility, or
leadership skills."
I could interject at this point that when the electorate is, indeed, behaving like children pitching temper tantrums, then their arguments are going to be emotional ones, not logical ones--which makes it that much easier for them to be manipulated by candidates who are not only not qualified to serve, but who either secretly know it and don't care, or are possessed of such towering hubris that they don't believe they NEED qualifications.
What's worse is when a news media, desperate for ratings in an age of electronically-distracted viewers, pursues those candidates as if they ARE serious, which then validates even more the deranged delusions of their followers.
When rumor becomes fact overnight in the Wild West frontier of the Internet and breaking-news- ballbusters feverish to get it out there FIRST fail to vet it for accuracy beforehand, it gets even easier to fan the flames and get your face in front of the cameras or on YouTube as the Everyman or Everywoman Avatar of the chronically enraged.
And the more outrageous the pronouncements of these Avatars, the more likely they were to be Big Stars in the political-celebrity firmament.
So that, eventually, pretty much all of it had been turned into one big reality-TV show which--as everyone surely knows--isn't really real.
I'll tell you what IS real, though.
Bullets.
Bullets are real.
Bullets rip through the flesh of little girls and bring their nine-year-old lives to an end before their brains have a chance to register what has happened to them.
And bullets can send a young, vigorous, hardworking and bright congresswoman to the hospital where surgeons remove half of her skull so that she won't be left a vegetable when her brain swells up.
Bullets can tear through the national consciousness of a society and can make them stop and think, Who are we? Who do we want to be? What kind of country do we want to bequeath to our children who yet live?
Suddenly, it's not a TV show anymore. It's real life.
And when you are suddenly brought up short and forced to face the truth of your life, you do some thinking--at least, those of us who ARE adults and who don't usually behave like children--do.
It's a reckoning.
Back in August of 2009, someone brought a gun to Congresswoman Giffords' town hall meeting where the contentious issue of health care reform was under discussion. At that time, shadowy corporate sponsors who had a great deal to lose if insurance companies lost their death-grip on this country, gathered up thousands of those angry people, loaded them onto buses, and sent them around to these meetings to whip up the crowd into an outraged frenzy. Not all who attended had been bused in, of course, but there were plenty of good souls who were deeply distraught because of what they'd been told, and their attitudes toward congresspeople such as Giffords--who supported health care reform--was hostile.
Two days before that meeting, in fact, someone had thrown bricks through the glass doors of her offices. She'd had numerous death threats. And when she tried to visit her Arizona offices as part of her duties, she had to push through throngs of angry activists who'd staked out the place in order to harrass and harrangue.
So the congresswoman was answering questions at that meeting when a man leaned over and his gun fell out of his pocket.
You can carry firearms in Arizona--on your hip, if you want to--so it was not that unusual that a constituent would be armed. The local police, however, were not impressed that he'd brought that firearm into the meeting, and he was arrested.
Giffords said at the time that such events, plus stunts like Sarah Palin's putting of gunsights over districts such as hers, contributed toward an environment that condoned violence. Privately, she told friends that she did worry about being shot.
I'm not going to get into whether this atmosphere of rage and paranoia contributed to the Tuscon shooting--I've already addressed that in previous posts. I'm going into this detail here in order to draw a mental picture of the FACE of that collective rage and fear in this country.
In other words, people didn't just write angry letters to their congresswoman, or leave hostile messages on her voice mail or deliver long petitions to her office or write scathing letters to the editor of their local papers--all of which has been done since the founding of this nation. (Well, all but the voice mail part...)
Instead:
They threw bricks through her office windows. They threatened her life. They confronted her in large crowds--hundreds, it was estimated--outside her office when she tried to go to work. And they brought loaded firearms to her town hall meeting.
Multiply this all over the country and you get a pretty good idea of the national mood over the past few years.
And then, someone DID shoot Congresswoman Giffords. Her and 19 other people, killing six, including a child.
And people of sanity began to wonder...Is the YAY or NAY vote of a senator or congressperson WORTH such terrifying destructiveness as death threats, bricks through doors, threatening crowds, and loaded guns?
We cherish our freedom of speech in this country, but does that mean we also cherish freedom to terrorize?
At a time of such national soul-searching, we look to our leaders for answers, for wisdom, for comfort., and, as I pointed out in my last (unspam-related) post, "THE IMPORTANCE OF GRACE," the contrasting styles of the leader of the free world and the leader of the Ragers (for lack of a better term), could not have been more illustrative or clear-cut.
Sarah Palin, arguably the brightest star in the Right-wing celebrity-politician celestial firmament, put up a video on her Facebook page in which she complained about the media bias she imagines is directed against her, and used inflammatory language to accuse those critical of her incendiary rhetoric and symbolic gunsights of waging some sort of political persecution of her.
The self-absorbed nature of her actions caused a terrific backlash that, to this day, surprises and mystifies her. Much like a pouting child who reacts defensively when they know they are wrong--or an adult narcissist--she retrenched her position even deeper
and retreated into the comforting arms of Fox-friendly commentators who
she knows have been crushing on her from the beginning and who could be
counted on to agree with her completely, validate her position, and thus
absolve her of any need to take responsibility for her own actions.
But what Palin and other echo-chamber extremists like her fail to realize is that the country's attitude is shifting. None of her old tricks seem to be working anymore with anyone other than her most passionate supporters. In fact, America is beginning to get pretty sick of her and her excuses. The more they see of her, the less they like her, as her poll numbers have hit an all-time low .
Since he first declared himself a serious candidate for the president, the Right wing, aided and abetted by Fox news, and a slavering Internet and punditocracy, has tried to paint Barack Obama as a socialist/Marxist/communist (as if they are interchangeable terms), America-hating, Kenyan-born, Left-wing extremist and Chicago street thug bent on the destruction of this country.
Meanwhile, Left-wing extremists, swept along on wave after wave of Internet outrage, used different colors from their paintboxes, insisting he was a corporate sell-out beholden to Wall Street, a Vulcan cold fish who didn't care about the plight of America's jobless and homeless, a secret warmonger who embraced George W. Bush's policies without a backward glance once he took office, and a rich, effete phony interested only in hero-worship from his adoring fans.
The Great American Center, left to their own devices, didn't know WHAT to believe. All they knew was that they did not see themselves much anymore in the tapestry of American politics. Their muted, neutral tones had been overwhelmed with the bright reds and blues of the loudmouths.
Governing, however--the Bush administration to the contrary--must be about something other than campaigning for the next election. It must be about solving problems. The best presidents have always known that half of the country, give or take, did not vote for them and do not support their policies. They know that, while holding to certain core values is important, it is also important to find some sort of middle ground that most of the people can live with most of the time.
It involves pissing off the extremists on both sides, looking for solutions, working compromises, making sacrifices for the greater good--without selling one's soul in the process. Not all of them can do it, but the ones who can go down in history and are revered more and more as the years pass and their accomplishments last.
When a country is brought to its knees by an event such as the Tuscon shooting, it falls to the president to lift us up. When President Obama went to Tuscon to address the gathered mourners and the nation at large, his remarks were so full of grace, humility, comfort, and inspiration that virtually no one mocked him or otherwise slammed him.
For that moment, the country was united.
But don't take my word for it.
Read some of the news coverage of the talk: Here , here , here , here , here , here, here , here , here, here , and here.
It is said that Obama was particularly distraught at the death of little Christina Taylor-Green, who was born only three months after his own youngest daughter, Sasha, and the moment in the memorial service when he choked up talking about her put the lie once and for all to the canard that he is a cold and unfeeling man unable to empathize with most Americans.
Americans saw a kindred soul, and they were comforted. Even conservatives were hard-pressed to complain.
So moving was his speech, in fact, that even Congress was inspired to behave with more civility--at least for the time-being--and arranged for mixed seating at the State of the Union address, which gave it a far more respectful, somber tone than previous pep-rally performances, with one side leaping to their feet at something they agree with from their leader and one side sitting on their hands, pointedly fiddling with their Blackberrys, or even rudely shouting out, on national television, no less.
The State of the Union address crystallized and clarified the national mindset like nothing else; by that I mean, the tone in which the president presented it, and the manner in which the American people, by and large, took it.
For one thing, he reframed the debate , emphasizing not the past old argument of Big Government versus Small Government, but the future, competitive government that is sleeker, more efficient, and manages to care for its people without taking over their lives while, at the same time, remaining a force to be reckoned with on the world stage.
Wrote the New York Times editorial board: "Mr. Obama’s speech offered a welcome contrast to all of the posturing
that passes for business in the new Republican-controlled House."
And the American people are listening to the president's vision. Since the speech in Tuscon, his poll numers are the polar opposite of Sarah Palin's. While 8 out of 10 approved of his remarks that sad day, 7 out of 10 vehemently disapproved of Palin's. Overall, his numbers are now higher than they've been in months.
While they may be listening to the president, more and more, the American people are tuning out the lunatic fringe of the far Right.
For one thing, the scary image put forth by Fox news and others of the president simply does not jive with the calm, intelligent, thoughtful man who presents himself to the American people repeatedly in times of crises and in moments of stress, as well as everyday governing and family life.
For another, the demographics are simply not there for a sustained movement of Ragers.
And this brings me to the Bill Maher quote I put at the top of this piece. Tea Partiers--the somewhat-organized embodiment of rage and paranoia that took over those town hall meetings in 2009--do not represent the United States as it exists today, which is probably why they claim to want to "take the country back."
What they want to "take back" is an idealized image of America popular in John Wayne movies and black-and-white TV shows of the '50s, where almost everybody was white (except the servants); all the moms stayed home and cleaned house in a dress and heels; and father always, always knew best.
This idealized image is burned into their memories because they grew up on those flickering-screen images and internalized them as memories. In truth, there was every bit as much family violence, sexual molestation, drug use, and pornography then as there is now--it was just hidden away and covered up.
Yeah. The Tea Partiers, by and large, are OLDER.
Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone magazine spent several months shadowing Tea Partiers at rallies and meetings, and here is what he described :
"Scanning the thousands of hopped-up faces in the crowd," [at a Sarah Palin rally] "I am immediately
struck by two things. One is that there isn't a single black person
here. The other is the truly awesome quantity of medical hardware:
Seemingly every third person in the place is sucking oxygen from a tank
or propping their giant atrophied glutes on motorized
wheelchair-scooters."
And he captures the exquisite reality of magical thinking in the following paragraph:
"[T]he person sitting next to me leans over and explains. "The scooters are because of Medicare," he whispers helpfully. "They
have these commercials down here: 'You won't even have to pay for your
scooter! Medicare will pay!' Practically everyone in Kentucky has one."
Yeah. That's right. GOVERNMENT-RUN Medicare.
"A hall full of elderly white people in Medicare-paid scooters, railing
against government spending and imagining themselves revolutionaries as
they cheer on the vice-presidential puppet hand-picked by the GOP establishment. If there exists a better snapshot of everything the Tea
Party represents, I can't imagine it," he adds.
On the other hand, attend virtually any Obama rally or meeting where he is scheduled to speak, and you will spot every color in the rainbow in his audiences, all ages, even numbers of both genders, and people of just about every political persuasion--including more than a few disgruntled moderate Republicans who have been booted out of their own Party. Young people are particularly enthusiastic about the president, which contrasts starkly with old folks on their free Medicare scooters.
Whereas the Tea Party appealed, for its moment in the sun, to the general angry mood that had taken hold in this country, that mood is shifting--but the Right-wing extremists are not. And what that is doing is marginalizing them more and more--and diminishing their numbers.
As Michael Weiss points out in the U.K. Guardian, such movements have cycled in--and out--of American politics since its beginning...And the Tea Party is on its way out.
The American people just aren't in the mood for it anymore.
But like most children--or narcissistic adults--the titular heads of the Tea Party, the darlings most likely to run for president on the GOP ticket, are not aware that the country--and their time--has passed them by.
Positioning themselves as to the Right of the Republican Party--rebels against The Establishment--they have not only backed more than a few lunatics like Christine O'Donnell for office, but have set a course to run for themselves. And the Tea Party is eating it up--so much so that I would not be surprised if they didn't place themselves as a Third Party alternative on the ballot in 2012.
In that vein, they asked Minnesota congresswoman Michele Bachmann to give THEIR rebuttal to the president's State of the Union address--a rebuttal which was not sanctioned or approved in advance by the Republican Party.
Bachmann managed to not only look idiotic (by facing the "internal" Tea Party television camera rather than the ACTUAL CAMERA THAT WAS BROADCASTING HER TALK), but she sounded, well, loony.
As Dana Milbank characterized it in the Washington Post, she flat-out occupied some sort of "alternate universe" of her own making.
And she's not the only one. According to Richard Cohen , also of the Washington Post, the GOP seems to be attracting a whole slew of nutcases and extremists. He refers to it as a "political lobotomy":
"The consequence of such views has to be crushing. It is simply
impossible for a centrist to capture the Republican presidential
nomination - maybe even to be a Republican. (I challenge any of the
above to wholeheartedly endorse evolution or global warming.) The party
continues on a course that has already driven out the political
moderates and pro-choicers that once comprised its intellectual and
financial core and, in the staffing of administrations, still somewhat
does - Colin Powell, for instance. To call this a brain drain
understates the calamity. It's a political lobotomy."
Perhaps even more importantly, says the New York Times editorial board, the contrast between the president's State of the Union address and the meandering, out-there rebuttals presented by the opposing Party, spells out plainly to the American people what constitutes a true leader at a time when, frankly, we really need one:
"What really distinguished Mr. Obama from the three Republican leaders on
display in a single night was not the specifics in the speech. It was
the cheerful assertion that if the United States is to regain its
footing in the world, it will be government that stands it upright. In
surprisingly sunny terms considering the struggle about to begin, he
said it was government that had unleashed the engineering of the Space
Age and the Internet era. It will be government, he said, that prepares
good teachers, makes college affordable, and provides incentives for
businesses to hire.
"The three Republicans portrayed government as a grim juggernaut that
kills jobs and dreams and even, in Ms. Bachmann’s nightmarish vision,
enforces light-bulb standards. The only dream they presented was to cut
and cut again. Mr. Obama cannot avoid the path toward eventual deficit
reduction, but he is more likely than the doomsayers to persuade the
nation to join him on the journey."
And it is THAT JOURNEY that is outlined beautifully by Matt Bai in the New York Times in his piece, "After Detour, a Map of America's Journey" :
"For all the speculation leading up to President Obama’s second State of
the Union address, the most profound shift in the speech turned out not
to be a move from left to center, as some had predicted, but rather a
move away from legislative priorities in favor of telling a broader
American story.
"After two years of getting dragged down into the arcane details of
lawmaking, the man who rocked two Democratic conventions with his
soaring language signaled that he was ready to reach for grand themes
once again." Bai explains why this speech represented, not just a shift in tone for this president, but a corresponding shift in the nation altogether, in what they are looking for from him now:
"In describing his State of the Union approach to reporters before Mr.
Obama’s speech last night, senior White House aides used the terms
“story” and “painting a picture,” but they declined to discuss the
specific proposals that might be coming in the weeks ahead, or even
whether those proposals would be included in Mr. Obama’s budget
or in separate bills...
"No doubt the details will come soon enough, and no doubt they will prove
divisive. (“We will argue about everything,” Mr. Obama said on
Tuesday.) But the argument this time seems more likely to resonate
outside the halls of Congress, in a far grander debate." But I submit that this debate is already over. I don't mean on the details of this legislation of that, or whether to cut spending or raise taxes to slash the deficit, or even whether our government is too big or too small.I mean the struggle for the soul of America. For a while there, we were filled with rage toward most anything and everything--depending upon which side of the political aisle we resided--and hatred toward our opponents, who seemed to be our enemies. But the president has pulled our focus away from each other and out toward the Big Picture of where we want our country to be in terms of competitiveness with other countries, and in terms of who we are and what image we want to project on the world stage. The petty, small-minded Professional Haters who've made millions off the restless anger of a disenfranchised culture that is on its way out in the 21st century do not represent the American people as a whole, and nothing made that more plain than the events of the past few weeks. Their attempts at reaching out to anyone other than their own little echo chamber of like-minded paranoids fell to the earth like Icarus with his wings on fire. The picture they've painted of an evil totalitarian bent on the destruction of his own country is looking more and more clownish and cartoonish to the majority of Americans who can see the falsity of it with their own eyes. America is moving on. We're being swept along on a high-speed rail of interlocking technology, and the Wired World depends more and more on cooperation between nations--not idolationism, xenophobia, and extremism.
Our demographics are changing. Within this generation, whites will no longer be the majority of our population. People's views on such things as gays are loosening up, becoming more all-encompassing. Right-wing hysteria about a "gay agenda" and such claptrap seems tin-eared and outdated.
There will always be conservatives in America, and that is as it should be. A thriving, energetic opposition--Yin to Yang--is necessary in a strong democracy. Their ideas are as important as those of progressives, and as always, those in the center seek a working balance between the two.
There will also always be heated rhetoric, particularly during campaign seasons--this, too, is important to a free society.
But the long, national temper tantrum is coming to an end.
Most Americans no longer want to feed off rage, hatred, and paranoia in their political leaders. Those days are past.
For a while there, the two sides struggled to lay claim on the soul of America. What was it?
Was it hidebound, aggressive, suspicious of the world, fearful of the future, intolerant of anyone not passing some sort of religious and political purity test?
Was it angry, defensive, accusatory, unwilling to fight even when provoked, intolerant of anyone not considered tolerant in the right ways?
Yes.
And no.
The soul of America contains both extremes, to be sure, but for the most part--just like most any human being--the soul of America lies somewhere in the middle: Tolerant of most, unwilling to start fights but willing to defend itself when attacked, willing to embrace the world stage without sacrificing its own unique and rich personal heritage.
Most people are an amalgram of various political views--maybe they're not racist, but they believe in free enterprise. Maybe they're strong environmentalists, but staunchly pro-life. Or perhaps they're fiscally conservative on some things but believe in a strong safety net.
President Obama, perhaps more than any other leader we've had in a while, perfectly symbolizes that middle ground, which is why he is attacked equally by those on the far Right and those on the far Left.
And, more than most, he seems to understand the make-up of the American soul, which is why he can remain patient in the face of that constant barrage.
He understands that rage is simply the flip-side of fear and powerlessness, and he refuses to play into that fear.
I think, at long last, the American people are starting to wake up from their post traumatic stress; they are moving past their rage and childish fears. They are ready to look toward the future, and I think they're going to want this man to lead them to it when the next election rolls around--because, more than anything, he represents the hope and optimism and creativity and independence that IS the American soul.
It's not about who has the cleverist soundbites, after all. It's about whoever has the smartest solutions. The fact that those solutions will wind up displeasing both sides of the extremes usually means they're pretty much in line with what most Americans expect.
The din and noise will continue, no doubt.
The difference is that fewer and fewer people will be listening to it.
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