"The truth is--this is how we were warned it would be."
Doubtlessly, those words held a more ominous tone in Michigan and Oregon twenty-five years ago. Now they're just depressing. I wasn't yet born then, anyway. Cuomo's indictment of Ronald Reagan came to pass and now it calls out our festering, gangrenous body politic.
[note: the title is the name of a song by The Ascent of Everest. It is a post-rock threnody, with sampling of Mario Cuomo's speech. November Second was Bush's re-election.]
In 1984, at the end of the first Reagan Administration, New York Governor Mario Cuomo gave a supportive Democratic convention speech that, well, prompted many to think they'd nominated the wrong guy. But was he describing 1984 or 2008, after Reagan and his lesser successors had run with every Nixonian idea to its extreme conclusion?
Ten days ago, President Reagan admitted that although some people in this country seemed to be doing well nowadays, others were unhappy, even worried, about themselves, their families, and their futures. The President said that he didn't understand that fear. He said, "Why, this country is a shining city on a hill." And the President is right. In many ways we are a shining city on a hill.
But the hard truth is that not everyone is sharing in this city's splendor and glory. A shining city is perhaps all the President sees from the portico of the White House and the veranda of his ranch, where everyone seems to be doing well. But there's another city; there's another part to the shining the city; the part where some people can't pay their mortgages, and most young people can't afford one; where students can't afford the education they need, and middle-class parents watch the dreams they hold for their children evaporate.
In this part of the city there are more poor than ever, more families in trouble, more and more people who need help but can't find it. Even worse: There are elderly people who tremble in the basements of the houses there. And there are people who sleep in the city streets, in the gutter, where the glitter doesn't show. There are ghettos where thousands of young people, without a job or an education, give their lives away to drug dealers every day. There is despair, Mr. President, in the faces that you don't see, in the places that you don't visit in your shining city.
In fact, Mr. President, this is a nation -- Mr. President you ought to know that this nation is more a "Tale of Two Cities" than it is just a "Shining City on a Hill."
Maybe, maybe, Mr. President, if you visited some more places; maybe if you went to Appalachia where some people still live in sheds; maybe if you went to Lackawanna where thousands of unemployed steel workers wonder why we subsidized foreign steel. Maybe -- Maybe, Mr. President, if you stopped in at a shelter in Chicago and spoke to the homeless there; maybe, Mr. President, if you asked a woman who had been denied the help she needed to feed her children because you said you needed the money for a tax break for a millionaire or for a missile we couldn't afford to use!
Doesn't need much tailoring, does it? Mario Cuomo's speech was a moment of clarity and hope in a decade of deep division within the Democratic Party. He called for America to join together, for the wagon train to help the disabled and elderly and minorities to reach the destination together.
We hoped for that much last year. At the least, we didn't get "50 dollars an hour" plutocrat John McCain for chief executive.
But it's come 25 years too late. Cuomo's electrifying call stood singular at a lousy convention, going unnoticed and unheeded by most of the country. Indeed, the party was very much dominated by corporate and machine Democrats, corrupted to the bone.
We're a nation rotting at its core. And there we were, thinking all our limbs were going to be with us for Thanksgiving. The only citizens I see on cable talking about what the poor need are millionaires, and not the kind who deal with us little people. The infallible "Gang of Six" have millions of dollars from their criminal friends on Wall Street and K Street. At least a fifth of our eligible voters will stand by Republicans no matter how much Republicans contradict the scarce principles hidden amidst their massive wealth redistribution to the rich ideology. No matter how increasingly ignorant their leaders show themselves to be each cycle.
The presumably progressive Congressman David Wu refused to come out in favor of single payer or a public option. He was re-elected, last year, by over 70% with no opposition. Some of our best allies on health care, like Senator Jay Rockefeller, gave away our civil liberties to the Bush Administration like it was leftover lemonade from the sidewalk sale. With friends like these, who needs enemies?
The truth is, these people need to go. We need better advocates for advocates. We deserve principled opposition--that excludes Chuck Grassley.
But the reality is this is how we were warned it would be. We've never been more petty, impatient, snide and short-sighted as a nation. [edited] The string-pullers will sanitize war and censor "fuck you" on television, but they won't censor thinly-veiled racism, calls for assassination, Glenn Beck, or other uses of the first amendment that lack the responsibility with which they should be exercised. They censor out the poor from their discussions about what the poor need. Barbara Bush can have her little mind shielded from poverty and failed government, but we can't be protected from her perverted thoughts.
You can't erase decades of war-mongering and plutocracy's cancerous effects on this nation. John McCain, (see: election results) Chuck Grassley (see: death panels) and Dianne Feinstein (see: the window your civil rights went out) still strut around, as if they had any credibility on anything. They are from another generation and could provide insight and wisdom only if they brought it to the table. Didn't happen. They exemplify the difference between "older" and a true "elder".
Giving to progressives is one thing, but it's not going to stop the Kent Conrads of the world. The point is to defeat the corrupt bastards where they can be vanquished. Throw out David Wu and Jane Harmon. Don't let a dime of your donations go to Mary Landrieu or Blanche Lincoln or Harry Reid, the ex-lobbyist.
But undoing a culture of obscenity. Well. That'll take a while. We don't even have to look across the street. Often enough we can look at ourselves.