-Caveat Lector- -------- Original Message -------- Subject: [Activist_List] Mr. I-Feel-Your-Pain Was Better At Inflicting It Date: Sat, 20 Jan 2001 16:48:28 -0800 (PST) From: Rick Rozoff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Reply-To: "Activist Mailing List" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Activist Mailing List - http://activist.cjb.net --------------------------- ListBot Sponsor -------------------------- Get fast, easy info by phone: Call 800-555-TELL. News, weather, restaurants... & much more! http://www.tellme.com/signin/register.gsp?src=engage&i=12 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- The Globe And Mail (Toronto) Mr. I-feel-your-pain was better at inflicting it JOHN R. MacARTHUR Saturday, January 20, 2001 In the spring of 1969 my incautious father took me to a big antiwar demonstration, by then a common occurrence in downtown Chicago but by no means one taken lightly by the security apparatus of Mayor Richard J. Daley. Less than a year earlier, Chicago's "finest" had clubbed, bloodied and arrested hundreds of protesters at the 1968 Democratic convention, so the atmosphere was taut. Vietnam had radicalized a previously contented class of upwardly mobile youth, as well as many of their perfectly respectable suburban parents, and I will never forget the rage pulsing through that huge, menacing crowd as it pushed down State Street. Fights broke out along the periphery as counterdemonstrators tried to provoke the marchers, and at one point my dad yanked me away from the street when we found ourselves too close to a vicious fist fight. Even nice, polite college boys get mad if they're pushed too far. And by 1969 they'd been pushed so far that few people with the education, money or connections to avoid it were willing to get killed for Lyndon Johnson's, Richard Nixon's and Henry Kissinger's grand game of realpolitik. Around the same time I was on State Street, a polite, upwardly mobile young Bill Clinton was engaged in some modest antiwar agitation of his own -- though far from the home front at Oxford, where besides a résumé-building Rhodes scholarship, he could rejoice in his continuing exemption from a military draft that sent so many poor southern boys like himself to their deaths. I mock Mr. Clinton with some hesitation -- nevertheless, the most notable aspect of his administration is that the radicalism of the late 1960s didn't stick. This spirit encompassed a good deal more than opposing Vietnam; when Americans realized the depths of Mr. Johnson's and Mr. Nixon's corrupt commitment to a pointless war it freed them to see the myriad other ways in which politicians could subvert democracy. This realization called into question the basic assumptions of the Cold War, the terrible treatment of blacks, the existence of a military-industrial complex, the routine violations by the government of basic civil liberties, the Third World poverty that prevailed in discreet pockets all over America and the degradation of the natural environment by business and government alike. At the time Mr. Clinton took office, the impetus for progressive reform had been largely destroyed by Ronald Reagan, so it's understandable why our first "peacenik" President moved cautiously at first. But very quickly it became apparent that Mr. Clinton was less committed to reform than to the gospel of dead-centrism, which argued that no Democrat could ever attain the White House without embracing economic laissez faire and rigid social control. In keeping with Reaganism, the free market had to be further freed to work its magic -- hence deregulation of banking, electric utilities and airlines, hence the blind eye cast on the merger frenzy that reversed a century's worth of antitrust tradition. Meanwhile, unruly black people needed to learn manners (in jail or in the electric chair if necessary), have their welfare guarantees removed and their penchant for selling illegal drugs cracked down on hard. All of this started under Ronald Reagan and George Bush, but Mr. Clinton codified their policies with the "tough-on-crime" bills he signed in 1994 and 1996. Thus, today, we have banks that tout uninsured stocks instead of government insured savings accounts, rolling power blackouts in California, and bigger, richer oil companies with less competition than ever. Thus, the prison population, disproportionately black, is approaching 1.4 million (up from 300,000 in 1977), and the Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure lays in tatters, victim of the "war on drugs." Famous for "feeling your pain," Mr. Clinton was always better at inflicting it. Nothing better illustrates the President's abandonment of liberal activism than his decision in 1993 to push passage of NAFTA ahead of a national health-insurance plan. Historians will surely dwell on Mr. Clinton's betrayal of his wife through his devotion to free love, but the greater faithlessness toward the first lady came on "free trade." Mr. Clinton was bent on proving he was a Democrat capable of raising money from a Fortune 500 excited by the cheap Mexican labour NAFTA would guarantee. Hillary Clinton complained that the NAFTA campaign was sucking up too much political capital. She was right; NAFTA passed handily and health care died. The unprincipled Mr. Clinton nevertheless possesses an admirable sense of survival. Overcoming impeachment was no small accomplishment, given the collective screams of Kenneth Starr, the Rev. Jerry Falwell and the editorial page editors of The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal, who promoted the Whitewater real estate "scandal" that led directly to Monica and the Senate trial. In the end, though, the talented Mr. Clinton is a profoundly selfish cynic who sold out the best instincts of my generation. Last November, on his way to Vietnam -- a small country despoiled by the extraordinary U.S. bombing campaign, by napalm, by defoliation and by the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians -- Mr. Clinton uttered some typically fatuous words in the guise of conciliation. Recalling president Johnson's Vietnam escalation and forgetting 1969 (in England and Chicago), he said: "I believe that he did what he thought was right . . . No one has a right to say that those lives were wasted. I think that would be a travesty." This libel against the dead provides a fitting end to the waste and travesty of Mr. Clinton's presidency. John R. MacArthur is the publisher of Harper's Magazine. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Yahoo! Auctions - Buy the things you want at great prices. http://auctions.yahoo.com/ ______________________________________________________________________ To unsubscribe, write to [EMAIL PROTECTED] <A HREF="http://www.ctrl.org/">www.ctrl.org</A> DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion & informational exchange list. Proselytizing propagandic screeds are unwelcomed. Substance—not soap-boxing—please! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory'—with its many half-truths, mis- directions and outright frauds—is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. 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