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Commentary: The End of Hope?
For many, this is a time of desperation and
depression. For one, this is a time of
hopelessness.
By Regis T. Sabol
Even if John Kerry wins this wretched election,
which becomes less and less likely with each
passing day (even more than Gore, has there ever
been a Democratic candidate with so much
opportunity to defeat a ghastly
president--actually, the ghastliest president in
the history of the Republic--who squandered that
opportunity so foolishly?), we will remain
trapped in Iraq until we finally throw in the
towel, as we inevitably will, and go home in
shame and defeat at the cost of who knows how
many thousands of lives and how many billions of
dollars, not to mention extinguishing our status
as a beacon of democracy in the world.
A Republican Congress (Forget any pipe dream of
the Democrats regaining that institution.) will
make sure the Bush tax cuts for the rich stick,
widening the gap between the rich and the rest of
us and ending any hope for economic equality and
justice. Corporate plutocrats will continue to
suck all life out of the environment and all hope
for a brighter future for working class
Americans. As for the poor, they will remain just
as fucked as they were when Reagan came to power.
As Bob Dylan once said, �It's all over now, Baby
Blue.� I will continue the futile struggle to
save democracy in this country, but I might as
well be standing on the walls of the Alamo or in
the ghetto at Warsaw. We are all doomed.
The Day Hope Died
In retrospect, hope died on the morning of June
6, 1968, when Robert F. Kennedy died of a mortal
gunshot wound at the hands of an assassin, an
obscure Palestinian busboy at the Ambassador
Hotel who wanted to strike a blow against
America�s support for Israel. Ironically, more
than either Hubert Humphrey or Richard Nixon,
Kennedy would have been most likely to find a
solution of sorts to that labyrinthine problem.
It is also ironic that Bobby Kennedy could have
and would have made America �the shining city on
a hill,� a claim Ronald Reagan usurped and
demeaned in a kind of Orwellian double-speak.
Kennedy would have ended the war in Vietnam,
rather than dragging it one for four more years
to ensure his re-election, as Nixon did. Having
been struck like Saul on the way to Damascus by
his brother�s assassination, Kennedy would have
fulfilled the promise of the Great Society that
Lyndon Johnson created and then destroyed to
pursue that tragic, foolish, misbegotten war in
Vietnam.
When Nixon fell, I cheered. (In yet another twist
of irony, Nixon would be considered too
progressive by the right wing that now controls
the Republican Party to even be considered as the
Party�s nominee. The same could be said of
Eisenhower.)
Carter�s election gave us false hope. Although a
fundamentally decent man and widely considered
the most intelligent president of our time,
Carter was the most conservative Democratic
president since Grover Cleveland. And he was
incompetent, incapable of dealing with the mighty
problems he faced and unable to weather the
tsunami known as Ronald Reagan.
The ascendancy of Bill Clinton again gave us
false hope and shattered dreams. Because he could
not deliver the universal health care he promised
and because he could not keep his pants zipped,
the savviest politician, perhaps, since FDR,
squandered his presidency and set the stage for
the incomprehensible rise of George W. Bush.
Al Gore didn�t help matters by running a hapless
campaign even though he carried the cache of a
booming economy and eight years of relative
peace. Still, he managed to win more popular
votes than any candidate besides Ronald Reagan
and won the popular vote by more than 500,000.
That went all for naught when Jeb Bush and the
Republican ideologues on the Supreme Court handed
the presidency to Bush.
Country-Mouse Red States vs. City-Mouse Blue
States
It�s been downhill ever since. And I see no hope
in sight that America will come to its senses. We
have become a nation divided by the successful
application of fear by Bush, his mentor, Dick
Cheney, and his political guru, Karl Rove, into
Red States and Blue States. The Republican Red
states outnumber the Democratic Blue states and
starkly reflect the enormous cultural divide in
America.
The Red States include the South, much of the
Midwest, and the west up to the California,
Oregon, and Washington borders. Even here, the
Republicans have made inroads, California is now
governed by a third bad actor (following in the
footsteps of George Murphy and Ronald Reagan),
this time one who cannot even properly pronounce
the name of the state he governs without
betraying his Austrian native tongue and
testosterone-driven mindset.
The Red states eschew what they call big
government, believe in that old time religion,
and sneer at pointy-headed intellectuals,
city-slickers, and bleeding-heart liberals, and
admire macho-militaristic solutions to
international problems. In many ways, Bush is
their poster boy. He is proud of being a C
student and a party-loving frat boy. He views his
many failed business ventures as proof of his
faith in unfettered capitalism. He claims to be a
born-again Christian and has embraced the
homophobic, misogynistic agenda of the
evangelical religious right. He also embraces the
literal-minded Biblical concept of creation and
dismisses evolution in the face of all scientific
evidence to the contrary. He views the world in
Manichean terms of black and white, good and
evil; his social views are distinctly Hobbesian.
The Blue states, on the other hand, are often
everything the Red states are not and everything
the Red states despise. They are, for the most
part, dominated by urban metropolises; they are
multi-ethnic and push to be multi-cultural. Their
number includes the wealthiest old-rich families
with names like Roosevelt and Rockefeller.
Paradoxically, they contain large populations of
African-Americans, Latino, and the newly
immigrated from Eastern Europe, the Middle East,
the Asian subcontinent, and East Asia. With the
demise of the Industrial Revolution, they largely
consist of the displaced working class and the
poor. At the same time, they have rich artistic,
cultural, intellectual, cosmopolitan, and
politically progressive traditions. One could
argue that they are the seedbeds of these
traditions. And, while they are fewer in number,
collectively, they have a larger population than
the Red states. Red states see them as the
smart-alecky city mouse that lacks the down-home
common sense of the country mouse.
With the unconstitutional takeover of the
presidency, the Red states now control all three
branches of government. They have delivered the
nation over to an autocratic, theocratic,
plutocracy. Neo-conservative militaristic
imperialists now dominate foreign policy and have
finagled us into a foolish war under false
pretenses. And, should Bush legitimately win the
election in November, the robber barons of power
and greed will complete their stranglehold on the
Supreme Court, ensuring a repressive, retrograde
perversion of the Constitution that is far
different from what the founders of this country
envisioned.
Country Mouse vs. City Mouse Rooted in Nation�s
History
This country mouse-city mouse tension is not a
recent phenomenon. It is rooted in the founding
and history of America. Most conspicuously, it
manifested itself in the divide between North and
South over the issue of maintaining the odious
institution of slavery. Even though this conflict
was ostensibly resolved in a bloody civil war,
the divide remained with segregation replacing
slavery as the law of the South. And the sins of
racism and xenophobia have always infected the
entire land.
It further manifested itself in the rise of the
labor movement, which took hold in the Blue
states but never succeeded in the Red states.
That is why manufacturers in the unionized North
fled to the non-unionized South. The suffragette
movement was rooted in Blue country. Even today,
the conflict over separation of church and state
is divided along the Red-state-Blue-state fault
line. The Scopes trial took place in Tennessee
and this year an Alabama judge defied the Federal
Courts in exhibiting a stone exhibit of the Ten
Commandments in his courthouse; he is now a hero
to Red-state true believers. The primary
distinction the two cultures is that the Blue
states are generally more tolerant of diverse
ideas, more likely to be skeptical of accepted
truth and have, to a greater or lesser extent,
more successfully overcome blind faith and
aberrations of the human spirit that deny human
rights and equality..
That is what drove the Progressive movements of
the late nineteenth and much of the twentieth
century, as marked by the presidencies of Teddy
Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Harry Truman,
JFK, and Lyndon Johnson. Without question, all of
these men had their shortcomings and, in ways
large and small, betrayed the progressive ideals
for which they stood. Over the long haul,
however, they advanced and oversaw political,
social, cultural, intellectual, and artistic
progress.
That era is now over and it is not likely to rise
again. The country mouse, with his cowboy boots,
Texas twang, taste for country music and love of
gas-guzzling fast trucks, NASCAR, blood-sport
wrestling, fundamentalist Protestant
Christianity, and macho-militarism, has
outwitted, outfoxed, and marginalized the city
mouse. Reality TV shows and Fox News have trumped
reality and real news.
Simplicity now trumps complexity. The stern
father has regained domination over the nurturing
mother. From now on, it�s my way or the highway.
And the bumper stickers--Power of Pride, God
Bless America, and America: Love It or Leave
It--say it all.
And so,
Bye, bye, Miss American Pie.
Saw our hopes turn to ashes,
Nothin� to do now but cry.
And the good old boys
Have taken over, my, my.
And this will be the day that we die,
This will be the day that America dies.
Regis T. Sabol is a contributing editor to
Intervention Magazine. He is also editor of A New
Deal: an online magazine of political, social,
and cultural thought. You can email him at
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Posted Sunday, September 19, 2004
http://www.interventionmag.com/cms/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=article&sid=884&POSTNUKESID=aeedec990fa9e964bdb99e1dcc61ea96
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