Dear Arthur,
Years ago, brother-in-law, Rob, bought me a subscription to "In These Times," a level-headed left-wing journal published in Milwaukee since 1976. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_These_Times
In the following ITT article, author Theo Anderson describes the nation's obsession-with-terrorism as a distraction from financial responsibility - a distraction fostered by "The 1%" laughing their way to the bank.
Then, in late 2008, we experienced whiplash re-focusing of economic concerns at the very moment meltdown occurred.
In a twinkling, our neo-imperial impulse was replaced by financial fixation.
And so the nation's clamorous "War on Terror" was reduced to a whimper; a re-prioritization of "concern" particularly noticeable in Uncle Sam's "soft shoe" withdrawal from Iraq (where, notably, Iran won the war).
Ho-hum.
Mencken, Goering and Marine Commandant Major General Smedley Butler speak with one voice:
"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/h/hlmencke101109.html#ixzz1girp4GEw
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"Why of course the people don't want war... Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece? Naturally the common people don't want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But after all it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship.... Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought along to do the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country." Hermann Goering, Adolf Hitler's Deputy Chief and Luftwaffe Commander, at the Nuremberg trials, 1946.
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War is a Racket
Excerpt from 1933 speech.
For all five chapters of Butler's "War is a Racket," please see:
In retirement, General Butler, a life-long Republican, ran for a Pennsylvania senate seat.
Admittedly, Mencken overstates the case.
Some hobgoblins exist.
And so, terrorism is a real issue - but an issue of modest proportion, requiring proportionate response.
However, since 9/11 -- when The National Lunacy began -- "conservative" craziness contends that a roadside terrorist or nuclear bombardier lurks behind every bush.
The sort of "conservative" extremism that contemplates America's "Broken Bank" - while refusing to "deposit" sufficient revenue to "pay the nation's bills" - recalls Dwight Eisenhower: "The problem in defense is how far you can go [in military spending] without destroying from within what you are trying to defend from without."
With each passing week, I am increasingly surprised by Niall Ferguson's "firm grip."
Although Mr. Ferguson would behave more "conservatively" in "normal times," he is keenly aware that these are NOT "normal times" and attributes our economic-and-financial peril to rank-and-file conservatives whose simple-minded nostrums are "inadequate to the task" and provocative of Depression and Wreckage. http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/12/04/the-fed-s-critics-are-wrong-we-need-to-avert-depression.html /// http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2011/07/24/gop-antitax-dogma-endangers-the-country.html
Wherever that "center" lies, The Republican Party -- with the exception of Romney and Huntsman -- has fielded a cast of presidential candidates who, broadly sketched, are theocratic panderers or anti-scientific clowns.
I have been studying The Dark Ages - a near millennium characterized by Central Authority Collapse - and note how readily the GOP "Base" would undertake an encore.
For those who believe "The Past" embodied "A Golden Age" -- despite the fact that as recently as 1750/1850 half of humankind died by age 8 and "all" humans lived half their lives with toothache -- the Collapse of Central Government (and consequent retrenchment in an earlier century) "looks like" the benign Will of God.
Who knows?
Perhaps it is.
But if it is, enactment of that "Will" will feel like Wrath.
J. K. Galbraith got it right: "People of privilege will always risk their complete destruction rather than surrender any material part of their advantage."
Pax on both houses
Alan
Excerpt: "Saying crazy things in public is apparently a prerequisite for winning right-wing voters. They expect candidates to tell them with a straight face that taxes can never be raised, that defense spending can never be too high, that climate change isn’t happening, and that a nine percent flat tax is a fair tax. They want, in short, to live in Steve Forbes’s fantasy. It’s not because they want the rich to get richer. It’s because, in that world, you can believe whatever you want to believe with no accountability to actual evidence."
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December 13, 2011
Steve Forbes: The GOP’s Man in 2012
The Republican Party’s awkward flat-taxing farce has the last laugh.
History supposedly repeats itself—first as tragedy, then as farce. But the modern GOP has reversed that truism.
Terrorism’s disappearance as a political issue has been nearly as striking as George W. Bush’s erasure from conservatism’s consciousness. It’s hard to imagine a conservative blogger now describing Bush as “a man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius” and a man “ahead of his time.” Yet one did describe Bush with just those words, and without irony, in an infamous post in 2005. (A.A. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_H._Hinderaker)
With the vanishing of Bush 43 and the humiliation of McCain in 2008, it’s left to Ronald Reagan to rally the GOP. The advantage of relying on a leader who died nearly a decade ago is that dead men don’t talk, and memories are short. He can be whatever you want him to be. So the Reagan of Republican mythology has become a tax-cutting, budget balancing, government-slashing warrior, though Reagan was nothing of the sort. He signed into law the largest corporate income tax increase in U.S. history in 1986, the largest peacetime tax increase to that point in 1982, and a raise in payroll tax rates in 1983, all while expanding the federal government and ballooning the national debt. It was Reagan, as Dick Cheney once helpfully pointed out, who taught that GOP that deficits don’t matter. Cheney and Bush learned the lesson well. (A.A. "What Would Reagan Really Do?" - http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2010/07/09/what-would-reagan-really-do.html)
What’s interesting about the GOP’s obsession with the Reagan myth is that a man who is far closer to the Party’s current policy positions – and who is very much alive and globe-trotting – is mostly forgotten.
That man is Steve Forbes – a man who, in his primary campaigns in 1996 and 2000, pioneered all the distinctive traits of the current candidates. He displayed the inarticulateness of Rick Perry, the grand theorizing of Newt Gingrich, the corporate phoniness of Mitt Romney, the general weirdness of Michele Bachmann, the governing inexperience of Herman Cain, and the out-of-left field policy positions of Ron Paul and Rick Santorum.
Forbes is remembered mainly for popularizing the flat-tax idea still the rage Republicans (although Herman Cain’s 9-9-9 tax plan has died with his candidacy), but the flat tax is just one manifestation of a mindset that now dominates the GOP. It’s summed up in the slogan of Forbes magazine: Capitalist Tool.
Forbes’s campaigns were to the GOP what Ralph Nader’s and Dennis Kucinich’s campaigns were to the Democrats: a prod, pushing the parties toward places that the mainstream candidates couldn’t go. Those campaigns by Forbes were always dark jokes, and Forbes was something of a comedic genius. You could imagine him in the plush recesses of his private jet, snickering as he plotted his policy platform: cutting taxes for the wealthy, hiking taxes on everyone else, privatizing Social Security, abolishing the “death tax,” and bringing back the gold standard. It was the capitalist tool’s ultimate fantasy.
The fact that he seemed to be in on the joke made the dark comedy all the more delicious. Forbes was Stephen Colbert without the irony, never bothering to pretend that he was anything more than a servant of the wealthy. Because, why bother when everyone knew that you had no chance of winning? “Yes, I am talking crazy up here,” Forbes’s smile suggested. “Yes, I am a tool and a total goof. And yes, it’s hard to believe that anyone takes me seriously. But having bought my way into the thick of this thing, I’ll say whatever I damn well please.”
Meantime, the GOP’s legitimate candidates had to act as if the Party had plans other than making the rich richer and the poor poorer. George W. Bush was especially deft at that game, promising tax cuts for everyone and making compassionate conservatism a central theme of his campaign. And then, in the wake of 9/11, economic issues receded and the threat of terrorism dominated the presidential election of 2004 and much of the 2008 cycle, until the bank emergency in the fall of that year put the focus back on the economy.
We’re still dealing with reverberations from that meltdown, of course, and because the economy is Barack Obama’s greatest vulnerability and foreign policy is his greatest strength, the GOP’s attention in the current campaign has been devoted largely to economic policy. And what a revelation that has been.
The current crop of GOP candidates don’t quite get the Forbes joke. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say that the joke’s premise – which is that serious candidates for the presidency can’t run on crazy ideas and hope to be elected – is no longer valid. It was Steve Forbes, not George W. Bush, who was ahead of his time.
Because saying crazy things in public is apparently now a prerequisite for winning right-wing voters. They expect candidates to tell them with a straight face that taxes can never be raised, that defense spending can never be too high, that climate change isn’t happening, and that a nine percent flat tax is a fair tax.
They want, in short, to live in Steve Forbes’s fantasy. It’s not because they want the rich to get richer. It’s because, in that world, you can believe whatever you want to believe with no accountability to actual evidence. If allowing corporate tools to rig the game for the wealthy is the price one pays to live in that fantasy, so be it.
History supposedly repeats itself–first as tragedy, then as farce. But the modern GOP has reversed that truism. Forbes was the farce. Forbes’s heirs in the 2012 campaign are the tragedy.
Yet one of them will be the GOP’s nominee and possibly our next president.
The dark joke, it turns out, is on us.
ABOUT THIS AUTHOR
Theo Anderson, a former In These Times editorial intern, has a Ph.D. in American history from Yale University and teaches seminars at Chicago's Newberry Library.
1.) “The American Dream” by foul-mouthed (but brilliant) George Carlin - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acLW1vFO-2Q
Political and Economic Reading List:
1.) “The American Dream” by foul-mouthed (but brilliant) George Carlin - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=acLW1vFO-2Q
10.) Benjamin Franklin “on Property and Taxes” - http://press-pubs.uchicago.edu/founders/documents/v1ch16s12.html
"The terrible thing about our time is precisely the ease with which theories can be put into practice. The more perfect, the more idealistic the theories, the more dreadful is their realization. We are at last beginning to rediscover what perhaps men knew better in very ancient times, in primitive times before utopias were thought of: that liberty is bound up with imperfection, and that limitations, imperfections, errors are not only unavoidable but also salutary. The best is not the ideal. Where what is theoretically best is imposed on everyone as the norm, then there is no longer any room even to be good. The best, imposed as a norm, becomes evil.” ”Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander” - http://alanarchibald.homestead.com/ThomasMerton.html
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