Yes, those were the days Archie and Edith Bunker sang about and the man who led us from market crash and credit crunch into full blown depression by blaming the workers instead of the actual causes. Somehow we've forgotten that Archie the lovable, small minded bigot and ignoramus was supposed to be a joke.
I admit it, I went and hid my head in Caribbean sand for a week so I wouldn't have to watch the madness, the hysteria and the lies, or endure the Fox News fits and fables -- or most of all, witness the continuing spectacle of my country eating itself alive out of a desperation to keep doing what always produces everything we're trying to fix. Sooner or later however, and Hurricane Tomas argued for sooner, one has to come back and face the discord.
It isn't easy. It isn't easy to accept that Americans will support politicians that truly are nowhere near as smart as a fifth grader and that Americans will elect politicians who don't think the government has any business interfering with our "right" to abuse and exploit and segregate other Americans or to accept that Americans will just childishly stay home and let some 20% of the voters put a plutocrat affiliated with a billion dollar medicare scam in the Florida Governor's mansion out of contempt for "elitism" and because Obaaaaaaama and the 'Librils' haven't restored the Bush bubble, the Bush soaring debt, the Bush job loss, the Bush expansion of Federal size and power, the Bush redistribution of wealth, the Bush disenfranchisement of voters and infringements upon civil rights soon enough to please them. Yes, that's a hell of a long sentence, but how we sank this low is an even longer story and when it comes to telling it, it's not me whose head is buried in the sand.
No, after 8 years of job stagnation, job loss and declining earnings, all we'll be hearing about is about that 9.6% unemployment Obama created without any help from Bush's tax cuts and wars -- and we won't be remembering the 9.5% unemployment in Reagan's first term. ( nor his tax increases nor the effect they produced) We'll hear the gloating and bragging about the president's low popularity although Reagan's was lower at the same point in his career. We'll hear about profligate spending, but not a word about the payback with interest that tells a different story. We'll keep hearing about the debt, but not the policies that produced it and how it can only be solved by a policy that has produced the largest government sponsored redistribution of wealth in our history without creating a single new private sector job -- a policy that must be maintained for fear of Communism. Like Archie, we'll keep longing for that romanticized version of a Hobbesian hell with every white man for himself, minorities in the minority, stragglers will be shot and no prisoners taken. We'll keep ignoring reality and we'll keep repeating the slogans as we count our beads, fabricating facts and citing false history when we pay attention to history at all.
Meanwhile the sand is warm and the hurricane is moving out to sea. . .
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2 comments:
Many thanks for the post, it summed up what is so wrong with where we are at as a country.
There is another, maybe more disturbing, side to the tale though. That is the shortsightedness of those who could stand against this ugly tide if only they would put aside their own righteousness long enough to see the big picture. The gnashing of teeth over what Obama has not done is deafening. And every cry for punishing the democrats brings reward to the republicans. We can not fight the machine because the human protagonist has lopped off his own nose and can not tell when he should stop cutting. As I point this out to my liberal friends their own ability to ignore reality deepens. They seem to have a false future, like the false history of the conservatives only forward looking. If they keep holding their breath or behaving the same way long enough somehow things will turn out differently, for the better. I feel really alone sometimes. Last of the Mohicans, watching my nation disperse and fade away. Helpless with no ally to reach for.
Sure wish I could hit the open seas. Leave the chum to the sharks. I always hated Archie because he was all too real.
I agree with you, sad to say. When All in the Family hit the screen, there were many wearing "Archie Bunker for President" buttons. The cynicism and sarcasm went right over their heads and it still does.
The seas are too rough this time of year. I feel like Gilligan only this is a much bigger island.
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