Compassion For Cretins
If you are looking for a concrete example of what I have been calling the crisis of American democracy you need look no further than the Montana house of representatives. In most small towns in Montana, if you are known as the guy who stands up at all and any public meetings and goes off on a twenty minute rant about the United Nations and the Federal Reserve you WILL eventually be elected to office. If you are the guy who sends in letters-to-the -editor of the Winifred Gazette weekly about prayer in schools and the Gay agenda you will soon be writing and voting on laws, giving lectures on theHouse Floor about the Constitution, and truly representing the people of your district because they are virtually all as white and proudly ignorant as you. And Republican.
Balancing this provincial tendency are the representatives,almost all Democrats, from the urban areas, Billings ,Butte, Helena and especially Missoula. All House votes thus far have been strict party line, with the "patriot" from the Constitution Party voting with Repubs and giving them a 51-49 edge every time. The only original bill thus far has been the one outlawing the United Nations flag and disavowing Montanas allegiance to One World Government, the rest is the usual banal hodgepodge of pro-Ten Commandments Intelligent Design anti-sodomy and grizzly bear stuff. Any fourth grader can recite the issues and positions, they are so mind-numbingly scripted and cliched, in fact, the debates and their outcomes are so predictable it is a total waste of time and money to carry on the charade.
So if I think "the people" are so ignorant, how can I have any hope for change? Because I believe ignorance is a form of oppression, one to be struggled against and eventually emancipated from. It is not a passive condition but an elaborate construct and strategy employed by the forces of exploitation and as such combated not through antagonism but through patient organizing and compassion.Thats not to say they won't piss you off sometimes, well, OK, all the time (see title to this post). The same confusion over cause and effect exists in relation to the overall alienation of the "masses", the veritable enervation of praxis that is so prevelant not just among the youth but certainy concentrated there. People in general cannot understand what has happened since WWII, (the Good War), they don't understand monopoly capitalism or the new technologies or global struggles for wealth and power, the art or the music, and what they don't understand , they fear.Of course the young people seem committed to violence, cynicism, vacuous spectacle! It terrifies their parents! The parents who aren't themselves medicated un-conscious to fight the lonliness, the aloneness. Whether it's the latest video game or faith in God and Guns, people need some meaning that school, work and sports isn't providing but a radical social movement can. Check out Che Bobs recent posts on some of this cultural angst and weltschmartz. (world-hurt)
Labels: pedestrian politics
posted by troutsky @ 9:06 PM
6 comments
6 Comments:
Ditto for Idaho, but if you want to experience some of the most extreme forms of this social-think I would have to recommend Eastern Colorado. Colorado Springs in the south that is the headquarter for both Fundamentalists Christians & the US Air Force. To the north Boulder former headquarter of free thought and radicalism, now the center for Upscale-trendyism, and lip service to radical ideas. And just to make it really interesting Freemen and the Colorado Militia in the south east.
As frustrating as living in states like Montana and Idaho can be. It is alot easier than living in a state that is having a severe identity crisis.
Now the Democrats are going to hold their convention in Denver. That should be interesting, kind of.
We have the same shit here in ND. Our house recently passed a "shoot first" intruder law. One of the reps went off on a tirade about filling people with lead and making them full of holes in they step on his property. The newspaper in Fargo used a full editorial making fun of him. These people are nuts.
Interesting mix of Wild West mythos and prairie populism.A Dangerous concoction and then you mix in the Mormonism and the Corporate land Barons, the Champions, Plum Creeks,Asarco and Weyerhauser etc, a little Cattlemens Association and the old Jimmy Stewart and John Wayne movies.
We are getting some of that "identity crisis" in our western valleys with gated communities and celebrity part-time residents. What Che Bob and I have been discussing is countering this ascendency of the radical right with some radical left. Montana has a proud labor history and an ethos of tolerance for individualism that this religious right and the Nazi right offend.You can only tolerate so much!
As for the Taft-Hartley theory, I think you are on to something, that was a profound moment.As were the Rosenberg trials and the nativist reaction to European "socialist" immigrants, KuKlux Klan etc.
I want to mention an anomaly of the English language that seems to have
caused a responsibility problem. The word, "ignore," is a totally active verb; something one does for and to oneself. But the word, "ignorance," is shifted to the passive state; something foisted upon oneself to no fault of ones own. To blame people's ignorance on their conditions, situation, government, education, nurturing, faith is to miss the entire responsibility of the individual and is tatamount to pushing a car with a chain. Doesn't and has never worked.
A Buddhist precept is that one's actions are the very ground upon which one stands. This kind of personal accountability is the idea to which I believe Gregrandgar to be referring. We cannot escape the consequences of our actions and expecting personal accountability is important. However, when and where does one learn personal accountability in the socialization process?
We have to learn it, right? Learning to be personally accountable is an increasingly difficult prospect in a world that models and teaches our youth to "ignore" our actions that cause devastating consequences. Individuals are not raised in a vacuum, they are exposed to all variety of hypocrisy and contradiction. I am all for teaching the youth to be ultimately responsible for their actions, and believe it can be done, but I feel it is unfair/short-sighted to expect them (or the rest of our society) to be more responsible and to somehow wake up tomorrow with more personal accountability without looking seriously at the society in which they are raised. In other words, we learn to be responsible as much as we learn to be irresponsible.
I come from the Keith Ellison district.
Minneapolis rarely has GOP candidates even running.
Still no labor party.
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