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This time of year in my twelfth grade English class, we study excerpts from Sir Thomas More's classic work Utopia. I enjoy teaching this and for a description of how I do it, you can read my earlier diary Subversive Teaching.
But we'll keep it short tonight and get straight to the meat. I think the following passage, written in the early 1500's, has much to say to us today. More, A Man for All Seasons, has a comment for all seasons--especially ours. His description of government of, by and for the 1% could come from today's headlines.
Bailout Wall St. bankers? Cut Social Security and Medicare benefits? Defend a tax code that favors the wealthy? More's response to these current controversies centers on justice:
What brand of justice is it that any nobleman whatsoever or goldsmith-banker or moneylender or, in fact, anyone else from among those who either do no work at all or whose work is of a kind not very essential to the commonwealth, should attain a life of luxury and grandeur on the basis of his idleness, or his nonessential work? In the meantime, the common laborer, the carter, the carpenter, and the farmer perform work so hard and continuous that beasts of burden could scarcely endure it and work so essential that no commonwealth could last even one year without it. ...Their daily wage is too scanty to suffice even for the day: much less is there an excess and surplus that daily can be laid by for their needs in old age.
...After [the commonwealth] has misused the labor of [the workers'] prime and after they are weighed down with age and disease and are in utter want, it forgets all their sleepless nights and all the great benefits received at their hands and most ungratefully requites them with a most miserable death.
What is worse, the rich every day extort a part of their daily allowance from the poor not only by private fraud but by public law. Even before they did so it seemed unjust that persons deserving the best of the commonwealth should have the worst return. Now they have further distorted and debased the right and, finally, by making laws, have palmed it off as justice. ...[S]o help me God, I can see nothing else than a kind of conspiracy of the rich, who are aiming at their own interests under the name and title of the commonwealth. They invent and devise all ways and means by which, first, they may keep without fear of loss all that they have amassed by evil practices and, secondly, they may then purchase as cheaply as possible and abuse the toil and labor of all the poor. These devices become law as soon as the rich have once decreed their observance in the name of the public--that is, of the poor also!
Yet when these evil men with insatiable greed have divided up among themselves all the goods which would have been enough for all the people, how far they are from the happiness of the Utopian commonwealth!
From Utopia by Sir Thomas More, translated by G. C. Richards
I was so pleased when President Obama said much the same thing on Wednesday. I hope he will continue to fight back. And we really need to hear Democrats answer the charge that they are engaging in class warfare by saying, "Damn right we are! The rich have been waging class war on working people for thirty years and winning! We're just defending ourselves!"
Sir Thomas More offered a different vision of what the Sixteenth Century world could be in Utopia, offering equality rather than feudalism. While I do not believe a socialist utopia is the answer, he certainly tried to move the world in a better direction.
In 1932, we adopted FDR's vision that government by and for the people is the way to tackle the fundamental needs of the people that cannot be met by the private sector. As a result, the middle class grew and wealth inequality was reduced. Wages rose with productivity.
Then, in 1980, we traded that optimistic view of America for Ronald Reagan's cynical notion that the government of a democratic republic was somehow oppressive and not to be trusted. At that time, he was the head of that very government! (Of course, he was right about himself: He was not to be trusted; he defied the law of the land in the Iran-Contra affair, an impeachable offense if there ever was one.) His plan to destroy the federal government undermined both the spirit and the letter of the Constitution he had sworn to preserve, protect, and defend:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
Reagan spread the lie that government (and by extension the Constitution) was the problem, not the solution, and set us on a course to dismantle the only thing standing between ourselves and a fascist plutocracy. The United States government is a problem only if one is greedy, selfish, and unpatriotic.
We need to reassert faith in the Constitution and in our government, which, after all, is composed of ourselves--not a bunch of thugs belonging to some dictator or to some cabal of oligarchs or to some foreign occupier. We need to change course. We need to recapture FDR's vision and abandon the self-destructive, unAmerican path that Reagan set us on. I think Obama's speech was a step toward that goal.
Sir Thomas More's words still ring true. Whether it's feudalism or neofeudalism, we need to offer a strong alternative.
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Thanks to tonight's Top Comments contributors. Let us hear from you when you find that rock among the pebbles.
TOP COMMENTS
From Samer:
After seeing this comment by ukit in Rasmussen Reports: Dems Have "Realistic Chance" of Retaking House, I may never look at Mitt Romney the same way again. . . .
From Indycam:
In FOYI's diary TEPCO's New Cooling Plan, Rich in PA offers this brilliant snarky but tasty idea.
From Free Jazz at High Noon:
RJDixon74135 offers an alternative in a very nice rant in Into the Woods' rescued-to-recommended diary Either Leave Social Insurance Alone Or Pay Us Back Our $1 Trillion.
From your humble diarist:
Also from Into the Woods' outstanding dairy, whoknu starts a great thread about how and when we should get our $1 trillion.
If you aren't reading ericlewis0's Animal Nuz diaries every Saturday, you are missing the best cartoon on DK (with apologies to Tom Tomorrow). GentleReader throws in this funny comment about Obama's animal avatar.
In webranding's wonderful diary, A Happy Story: Cool Teachers, Ms. Citizen has a great story of a cool teacher, while potatohead tells what's needed to be one.