I watched Bill Maher's HBO standup special last night. I've never been a big fan of his; I've found him a litte too self-aggrandizing, and he's not really that FUNNY. On his HBO show, the only consistently funny part is the scripted bit at the end, and he doesn't write that, he just delivers it. At any rate, the special didn't make me laugh out loud once, only a few chuckles. And I observed that athe live auidence wasn't so bowled over wither. There were more "hell yeah" applause lines over one or another political points than big laughs at his jokes...
...but the most memorable thing he said, I think was at the end of a rant about the administration's failings on and around 9/11 that "the only person held accountable and fired after 9/11 was ME!" Failure of accountability is a common background thread here, I know, but I really started to ponder the implications of this in the light of the upcoming 4th anniversary of 9/11.
On the day after last years' election I was talking with a distraught friend who wanted to know how people could re-elect Bush. My instinct about it, at a deeper fundamental level was this: people in general don't want to be accountable for the consequences of their actions. It's a simple as this: how many people plead guilty to crimes, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. They think "I'm not admitting guilt -- I don't think I'm guilty, you prove it." People won't generate accountability, they only will be held to account by an outside agency. That's a kind of background notion on this culture, I think.
And I think when people see Bush and his crew get away with what they do, and consistently spin and weasel and lie and lawyer to get out of things, that there's an appeal to people for that. "If THEY can get away with it, there's hope for me."
In the real world, in our current one-party state, there is no hope for accountability in the political vein we are all accustomed to. The Congress and the Justice Department are all gleefully in synch with the administration, marching us into an ever-widening debacle across military, economic, and moral fronts. I lay in bed in the middle of the night pondering this fact, and wondering what's an answer or solution to the increasingly perilous situation it seems we face as a result of this collective irresponsibility. And I realize that this -- our blogosphere and the tools of distributed reaction and dissent that we have are the antidote to this culture of unaccountability. But to be effective, we need to be sure that we are willing to be accountable for our own actions -- that we don't devolve into the slovenly irresponsibility that our "leaders" portray.