Sure. It's bad, but you've got to have a plan, right? Everybody does, and everyone's plan is a scheme for how they are going to beat the system.
A week after the disastrous mid-term election I was still walking around mumbling to myself, letting out little Tourette's-like squawks and yelling back at the television. I raised my fist and shook it at no one in particular, just to let the outrage flow a little and keep it from bottling up and blowing a gasket in my hypertensive vascular system. Screw this! This sucks! Today, I decided that enough was enough and I went back to normal living. The guitar playing group at the senior center was low-key and calming. Life goes on, even if the Visigoths will take over one house of our national legislature in the next congress and are already threatening to do unspeakable things to just about everyone.
Calm down now. It's only an election. A few Republicans are in the catbird seat and will be swaggering around for a couple of years, acting as if destroying the economy and crushing the hopes and aspirations of working people were a perfectly normal course of action for civilized people. Of course it isn't, and we all know that. Even the benefactors of this shameful shift of power, the Republican corporate elite, must know deep down that the policies they advance are structured solely to benefit the already super-rich, and to impoverish and exploit the rest of us.
Their hope is that wage slavery and perpetual misery will be visited only upon "other people", not them, and not even anyone they know socially. They are convinced that their own affluence and well-being, even if it is secured at the expense of many more people below them on the economic ladder, is morally justified.
There's the nub of it. It's all right in this country to screw over other people as long as you're doing it in the name of capitalism and free enterprise. We have a god, his name is Mammon, and we worship him by enriching ourselves at the expense of others. The object is always to get more, and the more you get, the better a person you are. It's a simple idea: The more money you have, the smarter you must be and also the more morally fit you are to be a political leader. What? You don't think so? Name one other value that's ever seriously put forth by Republicans (including tea-baggers) that isn't just a catch-phrase full of empty platitudes. Want some examples? No problem.
- We're for the right to life! (Oh? I take it that's just for fetuses, right? What about people who are already alive or not brain dead? How does that square with the death penalty or dying for oil in a desert hell-hole?)
- We're taxed too much! (Oh? 39% too much for you? It's less than half that for capital gains, you know. The top rate was over 90% under Eisenhower. It's been going down ever since. Just how little should rich people pay?)
- Balance the budget! (Oh? As Clinton did? What about rich people paying a little more in taxes?)
- We're for strong defense! (Oh? What about balancing the budget? What about getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan? Wouldn't that save a few bucks?)
- We're for democracy! (Oh? As in "all the free speech you can afford"?)
- We're for keeping bureaucrats from getting between you and your doctor! (Oh? As in "all the health care you can afford"? What about that insurance company bureaucrat skimming 30% of premiums and doing his best to keep me away from my doctor?)
Oh, boy. What a crock. But, somehow, they sold this bill of goods to the lumpen proletariat. How in hell do you convince dirt-poor hillbillies that free public health care will kill you? That's what you have to do to elect a Republican in Kentucky, but -- Hey! Lookie here! -- Senator-elect Rand Paul, a bona-fide pot-smoking devoté of Aqua-Buddha (that's a bong, you know) is readying himself to take his seat in the 112th Congress.
Yes, they are stupid. Sure, they are gullible. Indeed, they have been horn-swoggled. But, that's not the question. How in blazes to you get a nation with a preponderance of ignorant yahoos to do anything at all in their best interest?
Is it too much to ask that they don't go running, giving out a Rebel yell, directly into the fire of machine gun bullets? (Yee-haaa!) OK. They don't do that as much any more, but they line up at the high school gym to talk to the recruiters, don't they? And they've already seen their buddies come home with fewer limbs, seizure disorder from IED explosions, or just plain dead in an aluminum casket. They went to Iraq to defend democracy, and see that Iraqis get free, government-supplied socialized medicine, paid for by our tax dollars (not the Iraqis'), and still think that "Obama care" means worse medical care than they're getting now. Will they still think that we have, as Speaker-to-be Boehner says, "the greatest health care system in the world" when they get old and sick? Will they still think that when the VA tries to weasel out of treating and compensating them for service-related injuries? When will they figure out that raising taxes on those making $250,000 a year or more doesn't apply to them? When will they figure out that giving bailout money to Wall Street brokers doesn't trickle down to them, ever?
This seeming contradiction between observable facts and the sentiments of Republican rhetoric is not a contradiction at all. The ignoramuses see that the most people get screwed over by Republican policies. They know that a few people at the top skim off the lion's share of the wealth an benefits of a society structured to extract wealth from the masses and serve it up to the elite. They have been schooled in the doctrine that sharing the wealth, healing the sick, feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, housing the homeless and generally doing things for the common good is evil! That's socialism and we don't allow that here.
We can close the loop and connect the dots on greed and the American dream if you are willing to be objective. The American dream is greed, aggrandizing one's self and accumulating material goods, not helping others. When you are obsessed with doing better than everyone else, all you can see is the pinnacle. With your eyes on the prize in your quest to be #1, you don't give a damn about anyone else. You'll climb right over their backs, stepping on their shoulders and heads, to get to your objective. You know that everyone you use to get a leg up is pushed further down, and you don't care. Get it? You don't care about people who aren't rich because -- by gum! -- you're going to be one of them there rich folks some day.
Do you see why it doesn't matter if most people are hurt by a policy and only a tiny minority benefit from it? The idiots who vote that way don't care! Even if they are the poorest of the poor, the totally hopeless underclass without a prayer, they aspire to being rich! When they vote to keep taxes down for the super-rich, they are hoping that that lottery ticket will propel them into that economic stratosphere where that top tax rate means something. Every schoolyard athlete thinks he has a shot at one of the few thousand jobs in professional sports, so he doesn't want to blow his chance to keep most of it. Even when they know that the odds are prohibitive of their ever making that kind of money, the kind of money where you need an accountant to file your tax return and you can pay a doctor in cash for any medical care you need, they still act as if they were going to be that rich someday. They think, "Screw everyone else," and vote as if they were already rich, because they have a dream, everything's possible, yadda yadda yadda.
There it is folks. We've got a branch of government controlled by greedy, insensitive bastards who don't give a damn about anyone but themselves. In other words, we elect people exactly like ourselves who share our common aspirations. We vote that way solely because greed is our central, dominant ethic. Greed is our problem, and it goes all the way down to the poorest of the poor. To get the downtrodden masses to vote sensibly and shape society in their own best interest, we've got to get them to stop thinking like millionaires.
Any suggestions on how to do that? And, please don't dare suggest to me that we reason with them and try to get them to follow a logical line of reasoning. We've been trying that for over a century and it hasn't worked yet. We've got to get a new angle.