Although I wonder if he’s kidding, “Berwick Realist” (BR) repeats himself often enough that—although only anonymously—(s)he apparently wants to be taken seriously. The upshot of BR’s remarks is that, whatever the critic’s nay-saying, we’ve suffered no loss of civil liberty under the Bush administration, and that those who think so stand among the deluded “liberals,” “socialists,” and “America-haters.”
It’s easy to show that this is drivel. As writer Naomi Wolf documents in painful detail in The End of America, our Constitutional liberties have never in our history seen so systematic and brutal an assault as they have under the authoritarian “security-industrial complex” of the Bush regime. For those unconvinced, I recommend her discussions of the suspension of Habeas Corpus, the harassment of journalists, the control of the media through monopolizing conglomerates like FOX, unwarranted spying on private citizens, the explicit flouting of the Geneva Conventions, not-so-secret foreign prisons—and torture (p. 52-68).
The erosion of our first amendment rights is clear: the actual torture of anyone is the threat to torture—anyone, and if we think we’re safe because we’re good citizens, we’re simply being naïve. As Wolf shows, “enemy combatant” knows no national boundaries; freedom of speech critical of the government died with the Patriot Act.
But perhaps BR is a victim of the spin to which our language has been subjected in recent years in the interest of concealing the truth, creating an inhuman enemy, or diluting the facts so thoroughly that we just don’t get, for example, that phrases like “axis of evil,” “Islamofascism,”and “war on terror” are intended to keep us paralyzed by the fear of some coming Armageddon.
Don’t we get it that the spin-masters who create bigger-than-life-evil-super-power nemeses for us are making whopping big bucks off the manufacture of a culture of war-mongering—all at our expense? Are we so occupied with American Idol that we just don’t care that our kids are dying in Iraq and Afghanistan for nothing but the profits spun out of “Rumfeld-stiltskin” hype? THINK: is the reporting of facts unfavorable to the government treason? Rupert Murdock thinks so. Are critics “enemies of the people”? Ask Sean Hannity. Does “war-footing” justify the complete suspension of the rights of people deemed “enemy combatants”? Ask Bill O’Reilly. Are professors who challenge their students to critically evaluate their government’s actions a danger to civil order? Ask David Horowitz.
This isn’t to say, of course, that we don’t have enemies or that there aren’t real issues to confront. Indeed, I can think of nothing more threatening to global stability than religious extremism. The theocrats within our borders who’d dictate what our children can read, what counts as science, whom we can love, what women ought to aspire to, and who can represent God are the ideological soul mates of the Jihadists.
Wouldn’t it be ironic—and tragic—were we to forfeit our democracy in the very course of defending it from those enemies? This is what we’re doing, whether BR gets it or not. While we reel between the “Renew America” evangelicals and the corporate pirates of the Bush administration, our infrastructure erodes, millions go without health care, our environment deteriorates, and our civil liberties languish; yet we dump trillions into a war for a fuel that’s literally going the way of the dinosaur. We can’t afford BR’s blinders. If we give up the liberty for which our country stands, we will have nothing left at the end of this misbegotten war but spin—and it can’t possibly pay the debt on the lives lost to it.
Showing posts with label Renew America. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Renew America. Show all posts
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
Sunday, December 16, 2007
New Years Resolutions, Property Taxes, and Corporate Greed
In the spirit of the coming new year, and inspired by Joe Bageant’s riotous Deer Hunting with Jesus, I’d like to suggest a holiday resolution: Let’s disabuse ourselves of one big myth that’s bedeviled us for too long, one whopper that divides our communities and threatens our children’s educations.
The myth I have in mind is that property taxes are the primary culprit for home foreclosures. This is false, and accomplishes nothing more than playing the foil for those who’d put an end to that bulwark of democracy, publicly funded education. Proposals like the School Property Tax Elimination Act of 2007 are designed to under-fund public education, the consequences of which would be felt most painfully by those who can least afford them. Districts like Benton whose teachers offer high quality education at bargain basement prices would be among the first to feel the fallout of such ill-advised and unnecessary measures—ill-advised because a boon for big business is hardly relief for the working poor; unnecessary because the more responsible culprits are not hard to find. They’re just not folks we can point to—like our neighbors.
It doesn’t take the rocket scientist to see that corporations like Exxon, Walmart, the HMOs, and the big pharmaceuticals have an open hand in our wallets. We blame the unions for demanding the expensive stuff we all want—livable wages, decent working conditions, health insurance—because the costs encourage the outsourcing of labor to places like Mexico and India. But then we resent what’s in fact the direct consequence of our failure to organize for better, namely, the very wages that insure we’ll never be more than a paycheck away from foreclosure—God forbid we get sick. We’re walking contradictions looking for someone to blame—and who better than teachers? Those unionized state employees who get to enjoy the suspicion meted out against the “book smart”? To the rejoinder that Exxon is just how free enterprise works, no it isn’t. They and others enjoy substantial government subsidies and tax breaks—all at our expense.
It’s not surprising that nationalist hate groups gain a foothold on our frazzled nerves; when your among the 47 million Americans without access to healthcare, living on the minimum wage, driving a “POS,” and working night shift for the pay differential, it’s got to be a comfort to think it’s someone else’s fault. And in some important ways, it is. The trick is to see that the fault is not your neighbor’s (unless your neighbor’s Exxon/Monsanto/Blue Cross), and that the enemies those fear-mongering “patriots” make up for you—“leftists,” liberals,” “feminists,” “gays,” “democrats,” “atheists,”—are intended to convert you from being your neighbor’s neighbor into being the neighbor whose righteous anger needs a target. Still, the property tax myth only works when it’s all stirred up by an equally mythical nostalgia, you know, the chicken-in-every-pot story. Never mind that this America never existed for many citizens. It’s still the story that makes the “haves” cling ever more tightly onto what they know they could lose to credit card debt. The “have-nots” are the ones who unionized, agitated for civil rights, and demanded equal pay for equal work. They’re the ones that nationalists like the Renew America folk vilify for taking away “our” America.
Make a New Year’s resolution: Don’t buy simple-minded hype that makes your neighbor into your enemy. Ask yourself the harder question: Where do the nickels and dimes really go? If the answer is gasoline, medicine, doctor appointments, it’s not your neighbor who’s your enemy; it’s the institutionalized greed concealed by slick propaganda like “Falling prices,” “We’re here to help,” and “Beyond Petroleum.”
Wendy Lynne Lee
wlee@bloomu.edu
600 words
The myth I have in mind is that property taxes are the primary culprit for home foreclosures. This is false, and accomplishes nothing more than playing the foil for those who’d put an end to that bulwark of democracy, publicly funded education. Proposals like the School Property Tax Elimination Act of 2007 are designed to under-fund public education, the consequences of which would be felt most painfully by those who can least afford them. Districts like Benton whose teachers offer high quality education at bargain basement prices would be among the first to feel the fallout of such ill-advised and unnecessary measures—ill-advised because a boon for big business is hardly relief for the working poor; unnecessary because the more responsible culprits are not hard to find. They’re just not folks we can point to—like our neighbors.
It doesn’t take the rocket scientist to see that corporations like Exxon, Walmart, the HMOs, and the big pharmaceuticals have an open hand in our wallets. We blame the unions for demanding the expensive stuff we all want—livable wages, decent working conditions, health insurance—because the costs encourage the outsourcing of labor to places like Mexico and India. But then we resent what’s in fact the direct consequence of our failure to organize for better, namely, the very wages that insure we’ll never be more than a paycheck away from foreclosure—God forbid we get sick. We’re walking contradictions looking for someone to blame—and who better than teachers? Those unionized state employees who get to enjoy the suspicion meted out against the “book smart”? To the rejoinder that Exxon is just how free enterprise works, no it isn’t. They and others enjoy substantial government subsidies and tax breaks—all at our expense.
It’s not surprising that nationalist hate groups gain a foothold on our frazzled nerves; when your among the 47 million Americans without access to healthcare, living on the minimum wage, driving a “POS,” and working night shift for the pay differential, it’s got to be a comfort to think it’s someone else’s fault. And in some important ways, it is. The trick is to see that the fault is not your neighbor’s (unless your neighbor’s Exxon/Monsanto/Blue Cross), and that the enemies those fear-mongering “patriots” make up for you—“leftists,” liberals,” “feminists,” “gays,” “democrats,” “atheists,”—are intended to convert you from being your neighbor’s neighbor into being the neighbor whose righteous anger needs a target. Still, the property tax myth only works when it’s all stirred up by an equally mythical nostalgia, you know, the chicken-in-every-pot story. Never mind that this America never existed for many citizens. It’s still the story that makes the “haves” cling ever more tightly onto what they know they could lose to credit card debt. The “have-nots” are the ones who unionized, agitated for civil rights, and demanded equal pay for equal work. They’re the ones that nationalists like the Renew America folk vilify for taking away “our” America.
Make a New Year’s resolution: Don’t buy simple-minded hype that makes your neighbor into your enemy. Ask yourself the harder question: Where do the nickels and dimes really go? If the answer is gasoline, medicine, doctor appointments, it’s not your neighbor who’s your enemy; it’s the institutionalized greed concealed by slick propaganda like “Falling prices,” “We’re here to help,” and “Beyond Petroleum.”
Wendy Lynne Lee
wlee@bloomu.edu
600 words
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