- Like a hall of mirrors, our political debate is, in every
way, designed to perpetuate the status quo. But no hall of mirrors can
withstand the impact of a big enough tidal wave, which is why those inside
the hall are freaking out.
-
- There are times every now and again where you just have
to step back and behold the absurdity of it all. You have to step back
from the day-to-day trench wars and just marvel at how entrenched the power
really is in this, the country where we still cling to Horatio Alger fables
or "anyone can grow up to be president" myths.
-
- What I find particularly fascinating is the intricacy
and careful calibration of the propaganda system that holds this whole
structure up. Like a hall of mirrors, our political debate is, in every
way, designed to perpetuate the status quo. But no hall of mirrors can
withstand the impact of a big enough tidal wave, which is why those inside
the hall are freaking out.
-
- Consider, for a moment, the frothing, fulminating bile
now being spit from the highest reaches of Washington, D.C.'s media establishment.
A few months ago, we saw one major columnist at the largest newspaper in
the world say voters should not have the right to decide elections in America
anymore. Not only was he not shunned for his screed, he continues to appear
regularly on television as an objective, god-fearing patriotic American.
Soon after that, in the face of polls showing the vast majority of Americans
oppose the Iraq War, a top Washington blowhard from one of the largest
television networks in the country appeared on TV to label every Democrat
who has questioned the war "as weak, Jane Fonda-type Democrats."
-
- But really, that was only the beginning. Since then,
as voter discontent with the war, stagnating wages, job outsourcing and
the general direction of the country has escalated, Washington has battened
the hatches, and gone from spitting bile to firing tank ordnance at the
oncoming battalions of ordinary people who, goddamned them, dare to think
they should be able to have some say in their own country.
-
-
- Washington Post columnist David Broder - the so-called
dean of the Washington press corps - called voters who want change "elitist
insurgents" - a not-so-subtle attempt to conflate American voters
with terrorists.
-
- Then there was my personal favorite - David Brooks sitting
there in his pink shirt with a smarmy half-grin in Northwest Washington
telling the country "Don't Worry, Be Happy." Brooks breathed
a sigh of relief that "the Clintonite centrists are reasserting their
intellectual, financial and political supremacy" and that Hillary
Clinton gave a speech that scholars at the fringe-right-wing American Enterprise
institute "called remarkably centrist." Thank god, said Brooks,
that the "renegades who rail against the establishment are being eclipsed
by the canny establishmentarians" because, according to him, "They're
the ones who know how to use the levers of government to get things done."
Ah yes, with war raging in the Mideast, poverty rising in America, people
struggling to pay their bills, Clinton-backed free trade deals shipping
jobs overseas - thank the lord that the same old crew was supposedly reasserting
itself because that record shows "they know how to get things done."
-
- He's not 100 percent wrong, of course - these people
do know "how to get things done" - but only exclusively for the
fat cats who pay to get a seat at the table - the fat cats that people
like David Brooks feel most comfortable with; the fat cats that way too
many Democratic officials are more than happy to go brag to reporters about
shaking down even as they deride the GOP's culture of corruption.
-
- Incredibly, however, none of the establishment's old
tricks seem to be working anymore. All of the Jedi mind tricks, all of
the false storylines, all of the Clockwork Orange-style indoctrination
efforts just don't seem to be sticking. And that's why it's gotten so ugly
of late.
-
- Today, we see David Broder quite literally losing control
of his faculties on the pages of the Washington Post. You can almost see
the veins popping out of that shiny white forehead you've gotten so used
to seeing on Meet the Press. Like the bad, overdone stereotype of the crotchety
senior who is angry that the world around him is changing, Broder declares
that there needs to be "a new movement in this country" to "resist
"the extremist elements in American society." Who are these extremists?
Why, people who use the Internet to politically organize and engage. Yes,
according to Broder, "bloggers" are the moral equivalent of "doctrinaire
religious extremists" - yet again, another not-so-subtle effort to
portray anyone who dares to excercize their democratic rights as an Osama
bin Laden supporter. He then fires off a screed about various politicians
such as Rep. Sherrod Brown. He calls him "a loud advocate of protectionist
policies that offer a false hope of solving our trade and job problems."
Right, becaue in David Broder's cloistered world, the "free"
trade deals Brown has opposed have done such wonders for places like Ohio.
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- In David Broder's world, those hundreds of thousands
of blue collar workers who have been thrown out onto the street thanks
to NAFTA and China PNTR are the filth of the earth that high and mighty
elite Washington journalists like him cannot be bothered with. In David
Broder's world, any request for our trade pacts to include restrictions
on child slavery, environmental degradation, and pharmaceutical industry
profiteering off desperately poor people, positively un-American. Why?
Because David Broder lives in a place where all of these critical issues
are merely just more fodder and gossip for a newspaper column - not real
challenges in his life, nor in the life of the people he spends his time
with in the Washington Beltway.
-
- At the very least, Broder realizes that the American
public is outraged at the twisted moral compass that govern him and his
buddies. That's why he is freaking out. But there are still some who are
prancing around, spewing happy talk, making a fast buck, totally unaware
of what's really going on out here in the real world, and perhaps even
more insulting, totally unconcerned about their own naked hypocrisy. For
instance, just this week, we see former Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin,
now the head of Citigroup, standing on a stage with a straight face and
holding a seminar about the best ways to alleviate international poverty.
That this man was the top architect of the international trade policies
that have exacerbated both domestic and international poverty is an afterthought.
That this same man holding this seminar still refuses to acknowledge the
culpability of the trade policies he has jammed down the world's throat
is not to be mentioned. All that matters to the fawning media and political
establishment is that this much-worshipped moneyman is on stage saying
we need to help poor people. It makes you wonder if at some point soon,
we'll be seeing Jack Abramoff holding a seminar on ethics and morals in
the political arena.
-
- Simultaneously, courageous reformers like Sen. Byron
Dorgan (D) who has written a serious, bestselling book about how to really
fix our economic policies are shoved to the side, barely getting mentioned
in the press, while financial-industry-hack-turned-congressmen Rahm Emanuel
and his buddy Bruce Reed who heads a corporate front group are given oodles
of press attention for publishing a barely-selling pamphlet of warmed-over
hollow talking points perpetuating the status quo and reinforcing negative
stereotypes about those who want real change.
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- At this same conference, we see images of New York Times
columnist Thomas Friedman laughing it up with Pakistani dictator Pervez
Musharraf. That's right, the columnist who piously champions his supposed
commitment to spreading democracy is happily, publicly hamming it up with
a brutal central Asian dictator. Ah yes, because it's all just so goddamned
hilarious to a New York Times columnist who can sit back in his 12,000
square foot Bethesda mansion, count his $2 billion family fortune, tell
the world how much he really truly cares about freedom, push American soldiers
into the Baghdad shooting gallery, advocate destructive trade policies
that he brags about not having even read, and blaming Americans whose economic
lives have been decimated by those trade policies for not better educating
themselves. It's all just so goddamned funny for Tom Friedman, because
he gets to do all that, yet still also gets to ham it up every few weeks
on national television with Tim Russert, and gets to be on stage with his
good friend Bill Clinton and pretend to be serious.
-
- Of course, Clinton, who convened the conference that
featured Rubin and Friedman, was recently the recipient of a 20,000 word
New Yorker article that was the journalistic equivalent of what Monica
Lewinsky did to him in those steamy Oval Office days. In the article, New
Yorker editor David Remnick proclaims from the mountaintop Clinton's supposed
devotion to solving the African AIDS crisis, but never once - not once
- bothers to take a moment in between lavish banquets and starfucking exchanges
to actually ask Clinton why, if he was so committed to stopping this awful
plague, he insisted on passing trade deals that included provisions specifically
designed to allow pharmaceutical companies to inflate AIDS drug prices
in the developing world? But then, if you are David Remnick and all that
really gives you a professional hard-on is getting to eat barbeque in Bill
Clinton's private apartment in his palatial presidential library, why would
you ask such a question? Because really, the only ones who care about the
answer to such a question are the millions of impoverished peasants who
were never able to afford AIDS medications thanks to those trade provisions
- and those aren't the people David Remnick hangs out with or is writing
for.
-
- The same disconnection from reality is prevalent among
many politicians - which might explain why some of them now are reacting
so angrily to the fact that yes, they do have to face voters for reelection.
Take Joe Lieberman. When confronted with the fact that he skipped more
than half of all U.S. Senate votes on the Iraq War and most of the votes
on the destructive Medicare bill so as to attend fundraisers for himself,
he angrily claimed there is a moral equivalence between him as a full-time,
$160,000-a-year U.S. Senator skipping decisions on the most pressing national
security and health care questions in American history, and his opponent
missing 6 votes on a part-time town council 15 years ago. He also says
with a straight face that the reason he worked so hard to stop health care
reform in the 1990s was because he cared about small business - but then
he conveniently forgets to mention that he authored legislation to raise
taxes on small business health benefits.
-
- Then there is Rep. Nancy Johnson (R) who is now airing
television ads saying that asking President Bush to obtain search warrants
after he's wiretapped phones as the law requires would dangerously slow
down the original wiretapping. Put another way, she's actually asking audiences
to quite literally believe that the basic laws of space and time do not
exist. Meanwhile, chickenhawks who refused to serve in the military when
they had the chance continue to sit comfortably in their Washington think
tank offices and transform their sick insecurities of personal weakness
and frailty into screams for more American soldiers to be sent to die in
Iraq.
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- What you see here, folks, is that all of it - the elections,
the public policies, the future of the country - is one big joke to the
people in power, and they are willing to lie, cheat and distort anything
to protect the integrity of that joke they are so happily enjoying. They
don't want anyone asking questions of them. They don't want anyone thinking
they have a right to use democracy to change things. They are fat and happy
and putting the pedal to the metal in their sleek sports car on the great
American highway overpass - and anyone who tries to slow them down, run
them off the road or make them just glance at the blight below gets the
big, road-raged middle finger.
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- When I get up everyday at 5:30am to start working, it
is still dark out. I read through the clips and digest the daily does of
ever-more raw hatred coming from our nation's capital and directed at the
majority of Americans. Then I try to have some breakfast without feeling
totally demoralized. But as I look out on the darkness outside, I always
remind myself of the famous parable: "It is always darkest before
the dawn." Win or lose, November 7th isn't going to change everything.
But win or lose, it's clear that things are already changing. The rising
anger coming from the halls of power are a reflection of the establishment's
deep understanding that change is coming. The screams from the angry pundits
and the desperate politicians and the paying-to-play lobbyists are like
the early warning sirens at a beach. And just over the horizon, they see
that tidal wave coming.
-
- David Sirota is the author of "Hostile Takeover"
(Crown, 2006). He is the co-chair of the Progressive States Network (www.progressivestates.org).
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- © 2006 WorkingforChange.com
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