I'm sick of tea and fake grass. I drink espresso. I wanna be astro billbug.
Here's the problem.
We're talking about it. We're laughing at the fringe right. We're quoting Glenn Beck. Maybe they got no ideas, but they must have some good material 'cause we're watching the circus.
Meanwhile, a solid national policy agenda established during an awesome Democratic primary got hijacked by a financial crisis, the final F you from Bush & Co. OK, some of it was just Bush-league policy that happened between the Bushes when Bill Clinton sided with the right and sowed the seeds of this financial crisis.
I find it a little scary to read some of the quotes from the right, but it looks like there's been a real sea change. It's possible that we're looking at Permanent Democractic Majorities.
I remember hearing the Republicans talk like that before they completely blew it.
Maybe it's time to ask a different question.
Quo vadis?
I don't speak Latin, but I know what it means. For me, quo vadis is a reference to Sports Night. In the last episode, Dana is hanging out at a bar wondering what rich and powerful entity would buy the network, and then she meets this guy in a bar and he turns out to be the new owner and he asks her the question, quo vadis? In real life, the writers and some of the actors went to West Wing instead, and Sports Night died. For awhile, I was hoping for more episodes of Sports Night, then I tuned into reality.
Then came Firefly. Cancelled after making 14 episodes and showing 11. I felt so bad, I wrote a letter to HBO asking them to pick it up. Sure I loved Serenity, and the comic books, but it wasn't enough. It was such a nice cast, universe, story. It was going someplace. The show had chemistry.
It's awful to see a good show canceled.
I felt worse in '94, and all fired shitty in '00 and '04. Call me Captain Concern Troll, but I can't imagine how bad I'd feel if these permanent Democratic majorities got canceled. Again.
I want to see the next 30 years of a real Democratic Majority, and I want to help forge a very serious political agenda with a soul. I want to see it transform America so completely that the radical right just fades away. I wouldn't mind having some of the old conservatives back. I'm glad we've got President Obama, but I see a country with some serious problems. Massive structural problems in state/federal duty rosters, public universities and schools that get hammered by the financial crisis, a serious loss of capability in the civil service.
I see a Democratic party that's got some good policies, but they look a lot like the policies we had in the 80s and 90s. We're winning, but I fear that it's only because we're playing against the '08 Detroit Lions. I don't know about the rest of you, but I think we can do better.
I think it would be great to make some part of the DKos conversation about the tides, not the surf, so I'd like to ask some questions.
If our agenda today is the right one, and if it's more or less unchanged from the one we've had for the past 30 years, how did we get our butts kicked so badly? More importantly, how do we keep from getting our butts kicked again?
I think it's worth having a conversation about where we've been and where we're going, because I don't just want permanent Democratic Majorities, I want effective government with a clear vision of what America can become. I want healthcare reform, good public education, a strong economy. I want the USA to remain one of the major funders of global health and medical research. I want the human rights agenda that the USA fought for after WWII to be respected and even truly valued by Americans. I want an end to poverty, an end to disease. I want peace on earth.
Maybe it starts with a discussion of who we are. Milton Friedman and Ayn Rand and others promoted a message that won the souls of too many people. They said that being selfish was the moral thing to do. The message became a cancer and people felt moral about making money, even when they did things like short selling. I think that was part of the conservative message killed us and seriously damaged America's soul.
Selfish=moral is an addictive message. The antidote isn't just a critique of that argument, it's forging a new mythical character for America. What does it mean to be rich? The first two definitions of rich in the online dictionary are:
- Possessing great material wealth
- Having great worth or value
The critique is that material wealth became an end to itself, but we need something more compelling to replace the 80's mythology.
What I'm proposing is a new story and a new soul for America about what makes us rich in the second way, so that in 20 years, if I look up rich again, the definitions come up in the other order. What has great worth and value? Why healthcare? Why education? The answers seem self-evident to me, but I think I'm fooling myself that it's enough to just ask those questions so everyone sees the obvious answers.
I hope someone out there understands what I'm saying and I hope this conversation spreads beyond the analysis of current events and into the corny corn fields of America.