What August 28th is Really All About

This is what August 28th means to me. I have no idea what the people gathered at this place on August 28, 2010, think this country is all about, but I don't recognize their vision and version of America.

See what it was like on August 28, 1963.

Style Over Substance

http://wimp.com/fareedzakaria/

If I may offer my own opinion (and even if I may not), I would begin by saying that our society is rooted in a culture that values style over substance. (There's a bold statement, eh?!?!) We only have ourselves to blame.

Some like me would say that style-over-substance is the only explanation for how Ronny Ray-Gun, Slick Willy, Dumb-ya and even Obama got elected. Yes, even Obama. He was the right guy with the right message and right delivery at the right time. It's refreshing to have a president who speaks in complete sentences and doesn't come off like some dumb ass cowboy who fell out of his saddle one too many times....or in W's case, who has all the right power-base genes but the intellect of a toaster oven.

Frankly, 2 turds could have beaten any GOP ticket considering how bad W screwed things up. That and the fact that the best the party of Lincoln could come up with was a near-senile ex-maverick and a brainless windbag ex-beauty queen who doesn't read a single newspaper and seems pretty proud of her ignorance. The GOP deserved to lose. Some, including me, would cast them - McCain, mostly - in the role of sacrificial lamb. Hell, let's face it. After W's 8-year debacle a GOP ticket of Jesus Christ and Ayn Rand still would have lost.

One thing I think we might all agree on is that "style" has taken over substance. "Style" when it comes to leaders and especially presidents is overrated. I'll bet "style" isn't exactly the first adjective that comes to mind when we think about Nixon, Carter, or George Herbert. Not that any of them were particularly great leaders. Damn, now that I started on this path I have to admit that they all sucked, too. They sucked *AND* had no style. What a trio of losers, eh? Carter, of course, is my favorite among the three but that's only because of what I've learned about GHWB and Jimmy since they left office.

I wonder if any of us will live long enough to see the voting public mature as a society to a point where we focus on facts, the issues, and policies and forget the rhetoric and hyperbole. Sadly, I suspect not. My hope still rests with my children's generation. Ironically, it seems simultaneously easier and harder to fool the digital generation. Clearly, we have done nothing but screw things up royally.

Speaking of screw ups, what a freak show 2012 promises to be if you real Republicans finally and completely surrender your party to the lunatic fringe nut-jobs and Palin is your candidate. If that happens, I can only hope Inhofe or maybe her fellow Faux News celeb, Huckabee, is her running mate. Wwooooooooo-doggies!!!! We're gonna' have us one big ol' Meet the Kardashian-type media circus campaign, you betcha!!! Break out the grizzly jerky and the Good Book, and let's have us some drilling in the ANWR, deportation of anyone who even resembles a Latino, and teaching Creationism in public schools! Hell, let's just have us one big ol' full blown Christian Taliban White House!! If you ain't a white, heterosexual, god-fearing, conservative, lifetime member of the NRA, and deeeee-vout Christian, well then, you're a commie pinko tree-huggin' fagot socialist and we're gonna' show you the door!

You know us middle-class whites - any chance we get to piss on someone below us on the socio-economic ladder and we'll whip it out just to prove that our lord god and savior, Ronny-boy, was right about trickle down!

Enough of that. It's hyperbole, and I'm sure it pisses some of you off. Sorry, but it serves to make the point. We have ourselves to blame.

The media is about eyeballs and advertisers. You've heard it from me before. The media focuses on the president's emotions or lack thereof because that's what we care about and will watch. We don't care about real leadership. Hell, most Americans wouldn't know what that was if it slapped us squarely in the face. When we think of leadership we think of Ben Rothlisberger or Kobe Bryant or John Wayne. We don't think about intelligence and intellect. We don't think about careful contemplation, consequences, inclusion, or long-term consideration for the common good and the general welfare. We certainly don't seem to think about the truth or facts about anything unless, of course, they appear to fit our preconceived notions, beliefs, and desires for what we want and wish the world to be.

What other explanation is there for the ridicule from some quarters of sources like PolitiFact, FactCheck, Snopes, and other unbiased resources?

What other reason can there for Obama's handlers and his political opponents alike to make so much about his "kicking some ass" comments? One side claims it demonstrates his toughness while the other sees it as an indictment of him and his leadership while ogres like Cheney telling legislators to go f*** themselves and that chimp W's stupid flip of the middle finger to a camera like some delinquent ninth grader gets a pass. Oh, then there's that whole inconvenient torture thing, but, hey, we're Americans! We can do whatever the hell we want, whenever the hell we want, and to whomever the hell we want because............well, that's the bully's prerogative.

So, coming from a self-proclaimed flaming liberal, the real crime is that we citizens don't stop and take the time to ask real questions or do our own homework. There simply is, IMHO, no other rational explanation for why things are as they are. We are complicit in the dumbing-down of America, the media, and American politics. Only we can change that. Nothing could have convinced me more of that than seeing a tea party rally with my own eyes.

I don't care that they hate Obama, I really don't. Like most hate, it's out of ignorance. What I care about is that the media pays any attention at all to this lunatic fringe and their lunatic demigod, Queen Sarah. Sharron Angle? Are you effing kidding? How does someone like that rise to any more prominence than with a bunch of local snake handlers without the media and our moth-like reaction to follow the light?

Every second of attention paid by the media to the tea party movement confers a mistaken and misguided sense of credibility they do not deserve and can only win with an uneducated, uniformed portion of the populace who thinks their values are being echoed when all they really are is more fodder for the movement. Moths to the flame; eyeballs to the advertisers.

I get the frustration, I really do. We all have some. But what I saw on July 3rd in my proverbial backyard was the basest elements of what I thought was a democratic society. These people don't care about democracy. They pay it lip service. They don't care about facts or the truth. Listen to their speakers. What they want is a segregationist's America, complete with discrimination against anyone who isn't a god-fearing white face like themselves. What they want is a white man back in the White House; preferably a good Episcopalian, Presbyterian, or Methodist, and in a pinch, a Baptist. No matter what, anyone with a name like Barak Hussein Obama is obviously a Muslim, probably isn't a citizen, and is for sure just a little too tanned for the liking of good ol' fashioned baseball, apple pie, and Chevrolet Americans, goddammit.

And we have ourselves and our feeding of the media-beast to blame for all of this. Why else would the president's emotions - real or staged - seem to get more attention than what caused the disaster in the Gulf and what we're going to do as a nation and as a people to make sure this never, ever, ever happens again anywhere, not just in the USA?

Must be because what we value most is style over substance.

American Pie....That You Shouldn't Want

Don't get me wrong. I think the American religion of capitalism has some merit. I've done ok by it, I guess. But it also seems to me to be fraught with failure; failure that is rigged into it for most of us no matter what we want to believe about unfettered and free capitalist markets that create opportunities for any of us to be rich.

Believe in tinkle-down economics and corporate benevolence if you like, but the reality is that the vast majority of us are only so much chattel in the execution of an economic model that sees people as expendable resources. That's not rain splashing on top of your head. More on that in a minute.

How else can our indifference and downright hatred and contempt from some segments of our population be explained? I'm no theologian, but I don't think it can be explained as part of any mainstream religion.

No, IMHO, it comes from what I consider to be a terribly misguided resurgence of Randian capitalism and what seems to be a built-in contempt in conservatism for anyone not meeting their litmus tests and the definition of "success" in a capitalist sense. It all seems to me to breed an ugly culture of greed and amorality that spawns idiots like Beck, Limbaugh, and Palin who preach their sermons of lies and hatred. They make tons of money and grow their personal wealth by duping certain people in this country into thinking that things like universal health care and financial market regulations are bad ideas. In simple terms, their religion of capitalism puts greater value on money and individual wealth than it does on human life or protecting the rest of us from undue investment risks taken on by people who get all the reward and bear none of that risk.

(BTW and before anyone takes offense at my penchant for using the word 'dupe', it means to deceive. It has nothing to do with intelligence. Even the brightest people in the world can be deceived.)

Unfettered capitalism also dupes Americans into believing that we can buy our way into wealth and happiness. Who was it, after all, that made credit cheap and told us the only way to be happy was to stuff our lives with more and more stuff!?! Probably wasn't the liberal left.

Unfettered capitalism also seems to create a sense of entitlement among American consumers. Strange use of that term, entitlement, I know. What I mean is that we have allowed ourselves to be deceived - duped - into believing that we are entitled to cheaper and cheaper consumer goods so we can stuff our lives with more and more stuff without one wit of consideration for how, where, and by whom those goods are produced, distributed, and delivered to market. It was this video that got me thinking about that today.

The high priests of this capitalist religion - the "captains of industry", "Wall Streeters", and, yes, neo-Randians, so-called fiscal conservatives, even Libertarians - are more than happy to supposedly "serve the market demands", right? I mean, why not? If that's what Americans want then, dammit, we're Americans and that's what we're going to have. All that's being done is the servicing of the demands of the marketplace, right? If that's what people want, that's what we'll give them. What's wrong with that?

Fair enough. I'm ok with that....to a point.

If cheaper and cheaper is the siren song to wealth and happiness, how's that going to be possible in a country that produces fewer and fewer consumer goods? How's that possible where the middle class *is* the primary consumer marketplace and where that part of our society is under the most stress and may even be shrinking?

If everything has to get cheaper - and in the case of food, nothing could be worse, really, since the cheapest food products tend to be the least healthy for us - what's a good capitalist to do? Well, there's the always-popular answer of lowering labor costs. Turning people into chattel. It's either continue to ship middle class jobs overseas so you can pay slave wages to workers, or risk pricing your goods and services out of the market. Now that's good capitalism at work!

The very class of people capitalists need in order to have at least a domestic market - the middle class - are the very people getting hurt the most right now. Who's doing that? It's precisely and unequivocally the fault of unfettered and unregulated capitalism and capitalists.

I mean, you're not going to blame the poor are you?

And certainly you can't blame the government for over-regulation because the RRs - Randian Republicans - successfully deregulated financial markets when they passed GLB.

I suggest you think about this the next time you hear the ultra-whack-wing-right mouthpieces like Beck and O'Reilly and Limbaugh and Palin - or elected officials with "Waterloo" agendas - criticize an administration for not yet having fixed a broken economy. Are we that eff-ing stupid to think that 8 disastrous years can be remedied in one?

Think about this the next time.....
....a jobs number comes out
....someone complains that America doesn't manufacture enough and our trade balance is all out of whack
....someone claims that what's needed is less government regulation and not more
....someone points out that the middle class is shrinking and we're headed toward some banana republic state where you have only a small percentage of wealthy people living off the backs of an impoverished population.

Exactly where are jobs supposed to come from in an economy that long ago - and in the name of corporate profits and shareholder returns - shipped most of its manufacturing overseas where there's nothing close to our definition of a middle class?

And exactly how many "services" jobs can we reasonably expect companies to create and sustain in our economy? Oh wait, many of them now exist overseas, too. Why? Because labor is cheaper there. Remember that the next time you make a "language skills" complaint about the customer service agent who answers your call. It wasn't the liberal left who outsourced that job from Minneapolis to Mumbai. Thank your friendly neighborhood capitalist.

So what's the answer to our current economic mess? Is it more government bail outs to free market capitalists who want nothing to do with government involvement in their lives and their businesses? F***ing hypocrites.

Is it protectionism? Is it isolationism? Can't keep lowering operating expenses and outsourcing jobs to Asia-Pac countries and then close off our borders to the importation of those foreign-made goods. What would happen to the income statements of our benevolent corporations then?

Is it more regulation or less? History can teach us a lot if we just take the time to study it. The first Great Depression seems to have taught us very little.

I don't profess to know the answer.

What I do feel pretty confident that I know unequivocally is this.....
....it wasn't the so-called universal health care socialists who think it's time to rein in insurance companies who put money and profits ahead of humanity and humane treatment of others
....it wasn't the advocates for social equality and gay marriage rights who keep wondering why anyone else gives a f*** about them and their desire to get hitched
....it wasn't the "nut-job" environmentalists and tree-huggers who wonder why we can't see the reality that oil barons are simply protecting the last few drops of a disappearing resource from which they will wring every last penny at our expense
....it wasn't all those worrisome waves of illegal immigrants taking all those prized lawn-care and domestic housekeeping jobs from true middle class Americans
....it wasn't the inner-city poor luxuriating in lives of crime-free-front-stoop Doritos-munching and drug dealing
....it wasn't the peaceniks and war protesters who want the government officials brought to justice who dragged this once great country as low as it could go by admittedly torturing people
....and it sure as f*** wasn't the the middle class that put us into this mess.

No, no, no. It was..................................................................................nah, I don't need to say it. You know who it was. Whether or not you'll ever admit it out loud....now that's a different question. ;-)