BroadSnark

People have, apparently, lost their minds.  There seems to be a panic that we have lost the fabric of our society and I’m having trouble getting a handle on what has happened that is so drastic that people would think its tyranny or fascism or hitleresque or stalinesque (Jon Stewart)

That quote is from Stewart’s interview with Lou Dobbs (video below).  Dobbs never really answered Jon’s question, so I’m going to try.

There is a certain segment of the American population that really believes in the American foundational myths.  They identify with them.  They believe that America was built by a handful of white, Christian, men with exceptional morals.  Their America is the country that showed the world democracy, saved the Jews in World War II, and tore down the Berlin wall.

These people have always fought changes to their mythology.  They have always resented those of us who pushed to complicate those myths with the realities of slavery, Native American genocide, imperial war in the Philippines, invasions of Latin American countries, and secret arms deals.

And we have been so busy fighting them to have our stories and histories included in the American story that we sometimes forget why the myths were invented in the first place.

No myth illustrates the slight of hand behind our national mythology quite like the myth of the cowboy.  In the mythology, the cowboy is a white man.  He is a crusty frontiersman taming the west and paving the way for civilization.   He is the good guy fighting the dangerous Indian.  He is free and independent.  He is in charge of his own destiny.

Read Richard Slatta’s Cowboys of the Americas and you will get a very different picture.  In reality, the first American cowboys were indigenous people trained by the Spanish missionaries.  In reality, more than 30% of the cowboys on Texas trail drives were African American, Mexican, or Mexican-American.

And cowboys were not so free.

Cowboys were itinerant workers who, while paid fairly well when they had work, spent much of the year begging for odd jobs.  Many did not even own the horse they rode.  Frequently, they worked for large cattle companies owned by stockholders from the Northeast and Europe, not for small family operations (a la Bonanza).  The few times cowboys tried to organize, they were brutally oppressed by ranchers.

So what does all this have to do with Lou Dobbs, Glenn Beck, teabaggers and white panic?

Marginalization and myths have always been about economic exploitation.  White supremacy is not simply personal bigotry.  It is the systematic exclusion, dehumanization, and erasure of the majority in order to preserve economic dominance for the wealthy minority.  And while white men may be in most positions of wealth and power to this day, only a very few of them really benefit from our current economic system.  White supremacy helped distract poor and working class whites from targeting their economic exploiters.  White supremacy helped mask the lie of equal opportunity.

When you know the real history of the cowboy, it makes the selling of Reagan and Bush as cowboys seem like an inside joke.   The mythological cowboy is the heroic figure that many Americans wish they were.  The fact that the cowboy was actually an exploited worker is virtually unknown.

When Americans vote for a president, they want to see that heroic version of themselves looking back at them.  They want to see that free cowboy of the mythology.  No matter how poor or exploited white people were, they could always take subconscious comfort in the fact that, when they looked at the highest power in the land, they saw an idealized version of themselves.

And then came Barack Obama.

Pop.

It’s a powerful thing to be able to identify with the people who are your leaders, to feel like they are one of you.  It’s a feeling that many people in the United States felt for the first time when Barack Obama was elected.  It’s equally powerful when your elected leaders are clearly not like you, when the fact that they do not represent you is glaringly obvious.

I had my whole life to get used to the idea that the government was never made to really represent my interests.  Many of these angry people are the very white, Christian, men that this country was supposedly built by and for.  And this is the first time the myth of America has been unmasked for them.

Undoubtedly, there are some bigots out there who are just angry that they have a black president.  Clearly, even for those who don’t feel motivated by personal bigotry, there is a healthy dose of racism underlying the fact that it took a black president for them to realize that their government is as dysfunctional as it is.  But I doubt the people we are talking about have an understanding of the difference between bigotry and racism.

And I don’t believe it is just blackness that makes Barack Obama different and symbolic.  It is also his intellectual cosmopolitanism.  He is a symbol of the privilege that is replacing whiteness – the educated professional/managerial class.  And there is a significant amount of animosity directed towards those people who justify their privilege by virtue of their intellect.

And so these people who have lost their foundational myths are out in the streets.  They are using all the synonyms for “bad” that our pathetic school system and media have taught them – communist, fascist, totalitarian, socialist, nazi.  All the words are interchangeable.  They all mean not American.  They all mean not them.

The Heritage Foundation put out a morning bell yesterday.  The gist of the message is that Obama slighted Reagan by not showing up for the Berlin wall ceremonies and for not mentioning Reagan in his speech.  Reagan is, of course, the savior who freed the world from the communists.

My personal favorite bit is the quote from Nile Gardiner:

Barack Obama simply does not view the world as Reagan did, in terms of good versus evil, as a world divided between the forces of freedom on one side and totalitarianism on the other. For the Obama administration the advancement of human rights and individual liberty on the world stage is a distinctly low priority, as we have seen with its engagement strategy towards the likes of Iran, Burma, Sudan, Venezuela and Russia.

Oh the irony of inferring that Ronald Reagan was a great defender of human rights.  The Reagan administration supported the most oppressive Central American governments in El Salvador and Guatemala.  They illegally sold arms to Iran to raise money for brutal counter-revolutionaries in Nicaragua.  They closed their eyes to the massive illegal drug operations of their Contra buddies while incarcerating obscene numbers of American citizens for using the drugs.  And they invaded the tiny island nation of Grenada in flagrant violation of international law.

But I’m not writing this to rag on Reagan.  Too easy.  I want to write about the first part of the quote, the part about Barack Obama not seeing the world in terms of good vs. evil.  I want to write about the damage done by people who insist on dividing the world up like that.

What happens when you try to divide the world into good and evil is that the “good” people can do no wrong and the “bad” people can do no right.  How convenient to be on the hero’s side and never have to face an ethical dilemma.  The hero is good, therefore everything they do is good.  If they lie, cheat, murder, or torture it doesn’t matter.  They are the good guy, so their actions must be good.

And that victim of the lying, cheating, murdering, and torturing?  Well they are the villain.  Everything they do is bad.  If the villain saves a baby from a burning building, that inconvenient information is left out of the narrative or explained away as part of a sinister plot.  And how easy it is to dehumanize the bad guy.  Their guilt is pre-determined.  When someone from a vilified group acts in the way we expect, it confirms all our suspicions.  How easy it is to just throw them away, even a child.

Life is not a cowboy film or a fairy tale.  And we can’t afford to listen to people who have the worldview of a toddler.  Time to grow up.

It is time for me to enter the 912 commentary fray.  It seems like most of the posts I’ve seen have either ridiculed all the protesters as ignorant racists or completely ignored the obvious racism and ignorance.

Below is a series of photos taken by Chris (that’s the boyfriend), who describes his undercover adventure into the 912 protests:

I would ask each protester in my Oklahoma accent if I could get a picture of their great sign. They would ask me suspiciously, one eyebrow up, who I was with. I told them I was an independent blogger. Not MSNBC, okay. They would ask me where I was from and I would tell them Oklahoma. Geographically okay. I just hoped they didn’t have any lefty sniffing dogs.

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Is it wise, or even fair, to just dismiss the 912 protesters as a hoard of pitchfork carrying, white-hood-wearing, racists?  Some of the signs were appallingly racist.  But most of the signs Chris shot were not indicative of the kind of personal hatred and bigotry that we most associate racism with.

Even the boyfriend, who grew up around people very much like those at the protest, “expected to see screaming lunatics like at the town hall or secessionist meetings I see on the television.”  But as Chris spent more time wandering around and talking to people, he got the impression that:

The vast majority of the people at this event were more government-out-of-my-life Libertarian types as opposed to right wing spittle spewing racists. That doesn’t mean there were not racist messages or people out there, because there were. It seemed, however, that there were more class issues and anti-government issues.

Now it is impossible to separate class and anti-government issues from racism in this country. It is impossible to separate anything from racism in this country, including healthcare. We are saturated in racism. But that is exactly why it is so ludicrous to dismiss people as racist and therefore unnecessary to be listened to.  If only non-racists are allowed to participate in our democracy, then we better anoint a king now.  The only problem is, where do we find the one non-racist to be king?

Dismissing all the protesters isn’t just undemocratic, it also avoids confronting issues that we need to confront.  As Stephen Maynard and Charlton McIlwain point out in their must read post, using racist as a noun only obscures the fact that we are fighting structural racism and not just personal bigotry.

And remember, as you look at some of the more appalling photos and images from that protest, what the media does to us.  There could be a million everyday-looking people at an anti-war march, but the media will film the three naked hippies or the two kids throwing rocks through windows.  We don’t get reporting anymore.  We get Jerry Springer with a veneer of newsiness.

That’s if the media bothers to show up at all.  Note that most of the footage and photos floating around the internet don’t seem to be from major news stations.  Chris said, ” I saw one other person wading through the crowd as I was covering the event. I didn’t see any news trucks.”

The media doesn’t need to stick around because they have no plans to talk about anything substantive.  Darren at Dissenting Justice observes that:

The issue of race has become the latest nonpolicy distraction for the media. Earlier, the media covered violence and mayhem at healthcare town hall discussions — rather than the substance of reform. It then covered the conflicts between moderate and liberal Democrats (rather than the substance of reform). Now, it is exploring whether the opposition to Obama is racist (rather than the substance of reform).

Nobody knows what the hell is in those healthcare bills.  Matt Taibbi says you would have to read 9,000 or 10,000 pages of documents in order to figure out what they are trying to do.  And then the myriad of bills will just go into committee, where who knows what will happen.

It isn’t surprising that people are confused and enraged and feeling as though our government is constantly confusing, deceiving and taking advantage of us.  And since we don’t communicate with each other, it’s easy for the Glenn Beck’s of this world to rake in the cash insinuating that the money of “hard working Americans” is going to be given to less hard-working, less American (less white ) people.

The anger and confusion is legitimate.  It is the target that is too often confused.  Glenn Greenwald (the Glenn that people should be listening to) says:

It is true that the federal government embraces redistributive policies and that middle-class income is seized in order that “someone else benefits.” But so obviously, that “someone else” who is benefiting is not the poor and lower classes — who continue to get poorer as the numbers living below the poverty line expand and the rich-poor gap grows in the U.S. to unprecedented proportions. The “someone else” that is benefiting from Washington policies are — as usual — the super-rich, the tiny number of huge corporations which literally own and control the Government.

In the first link of this post, there is a video of some anti-czar protestors. The interviewer points out that Ronald Reagan appointed the first czar and that Bush increased them. The protestors had no idea. It’s easy to ridicule them for being ignorant, but by doing so you might miss something important. One of the women says she has been a republican all her life, but is rethinking that now. That’s what we really need, a whole lot of Americans rethinking their knee jerk support of the republican and democratic parties. That’s what we could get if we actually spoke to one another.

I’m not saying it will be a piece of cake or that everyone is equally open to new information. Too many people, right and left, are closed minded as hell. Chris didn’t talk to everyone, but he talked to enough people to give him an impression that he wouldn’t have gotten from sitting in front of the televison

Once people realized my t-shirt was Bob Marley and not Go Army (same green color), they stopped giving such candid proud photos. They would still talk to me though, guarded perhaps. But they would still have an ideological political discussion with me. I believe, to save our democracy, we need to find a way to have those conversations in the midst of all the crazies.

***P.S. Still on the Hunger Challenge this week.  Yesterday went a bit better.  I managed to stay in my $4 budget and get to the gym.  I was still sadly lacking in veggies though.

Here in the United States, we like to pretend that we are all middle class.  We all want to believe in that myth of equal opportunity.  Despite the fact that every day we see people with no scruples who work less and earn more, we still seem to buy into the idea that those who work hard will be rewarded for it.

This mythology, this willingness to admire the rich and revile the poor, is very convenient for the people that have been bleeding us dry.  And while we are busy blaming the poor for their misfortune, the richest 1% keep taking bigger slices of the pie.

Since Ronald Reagan, every president has run on a platform of fiscal responsibility.   And since Ronald Reagan, social programs spending (except for health care costs) has been decreasing.

The republicans managed to win elections by labeling poor, black women as “welfare queens.”  Their tactics were so successful that the democratic party fell all over itself to become “new democrats” who “reformed” the welfare system.

Now the welfare queen myth is back in new form.  Once again, that greedy 1% is manipulating people into thinking that their increasingly difficult and indebted lives are the result of poor freeloaders, rather than the rich corporate welfare recipients who really benefit from government largess.

The 1% is really ratcheting up their war now.  The war is no longer just against the poor or against liberal government.  They now set their sites on civil society.  This morning’s Heritage Foundation email attacks, not just acorn, but “poverty advocacy” as a whole

That “web of relationships” between poverty advocacy groups like ACORN is the real story here that impacts the American people. ACORN is by far not the only suspect community organizer group. Just last summer federal investigators raided a city-chartered nonprofit agency accused of abusing a federally financed program that was created to clean up houses damaged by Hurricane Katrina. Teachers unions have contributed over $1.3 million to ACORN and its affiliates, since 2005. And the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has chipped in another $7.4 million. ACORN founder Wade Rathke even has a book out titled “Citizen Wealth” which “shows how to cut through government indifference and bureaucratic obstacles” to achieve “maximum eligible participation” in the “anti-poverty programs still out there.”

So here we are.  The 1% is using their considerable arsenal to make sure they keep their lifestyles of the rich and famous.  Republican politicians and media pundits will happily help them blame the poor, brown people for all our troubles.  Democrats will, maybe, throw a little government money our way to look like they are for the people.

The real question is, what are we going do?  Are we going to let politicians attack the poor and those advocating on their behalf? Are we going to watch as democrats fall all over themselves, once again, trying to show how fiscally responsible and anti-welfare they are? Are we going to let race and culture and mistrust get in our way again?

Or are we finally going to acknowledge that the 1% has gone too far and it’s time the other 99% of us stand up for some justice?

I work with many Europeans and Canadians who follow U.S. politics, particularly this election, and are positively flummoxed by the kind of anti-government rhetoric that we hear from conservatives.

Case in point – one of my co-workers from the the United Kingdom came into my office, flabbergasted by a quote he read by Ronald Reagan. The quote was “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.” From his perspective, this is an insane statement. He is thinking of government in terms of what it does. He is thinking of education, health care, roads, laws and protection for the most vulnerable. He is thinking of governance.

But that, oft cited, Reagan quote is only the beginning of what he said. The rest of that quote from his 1981 inaugural address is:

From time to time we’ve been tempted to believe that society has become too complex to be managed by self-rule, that government by an elite group is superior to government for, by, and of the people. Well, if no one among us is capable of governing himself,then who among us has the capacity to govern someone else?

Far be it for me to agree with Ronald Reagan on anything, but the man had a point. And it is a point that resonates with many, perhaps most, Americans. The majority of us are escapees from bad governments. Quakers and Puritans came escaping religious prosecution by their governments. Mexicans came fleeing from the Mexican Revolution and the parade of bad governments that came with it. German Jews fled the Third Reich and Soviet Jews fled Stalin. Nicaraguans, Guatemalans, Salvadorans, Argentinians, and Chileans fled the dirty wars. Haitians fled Papa Doc and Baby Doc.

More than a few of these people fled as disillusioned former supporters. Some Cuban refugees had been supporters of Castro and the Communist party, but were disillusioned by the poverty and political persecution that came later. Jews fleeing Russia were often former supporters of the revolution who came to find out that a dictatorship of the proletariat was worse than the aristocracy had been.

And then there are the people who found themselves under the rule of the United States government against their will. For Native Americans and African Americans, the United States government has historically been the mechanism by which they were oppressed, not an institution that protected them from harm. All of which is to say that we Americans come by our suspicion of government, and government power, honestly.

The problem with conservative rhetoric isn’t that it creates suspicion where there is no cause for it. There is plenty of cause for suspicion. If the conservatives truly wanted to limit the power of government representatives, I might actually support them. The problem with conservatives (and with anyone else who obtains power) is that they never limit their own power, once they have it. What we have ended up with is the worst possible outcome – a group of “representatives” abusing their enormous power and privilege, without even a modicum of the governance we need.

Americans don’t want their lives to be dictated to them. Conservatives have laid out the choice as being between a powerful government that takes your money and tells you what do, and a (theoretically) small government that tells you to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. Those are false choices, and not just because conservatives have consistently enlarged government.

The other choice is a real democracy, a direct democracy, one in which we all decide for ourselves how our money is spent, and one which understands that it is possible to have governance without relinquishing our power to people who will only abuse it. It requires us to actually invest ourselves in learning about and trying to solve the problems we face. It requires a commitment to work with and try to understand people who think differently. It requires people to do more than (maybe) vote once a year in an election between Tweedledum and Tweedledee.