Nothing lasts forever, and protest movements against the power structure are particularly hard to sustain. Movements of any substance are incredibly difficult to even begin, at least at a level that will have any important impact. If such a movement does gather the critical mass and solidarity to make actual ripples in the mainstream media, then challenges are quickly mounted, both by the power structure and of course the media itself. The opposition to “Occupy Wall Street” is emerging in full force.

The “Occupy” movement is huge, and right now it’s only getting bigger. But it’s unclear to me whether it could really lead to systemic change, or whether it might only be “the thing that leads to the thing” that brings change. Even that latter possibility is a glass half full. Such a movement, in threatening the ensconced positions of the class that controls the wealth, the government and the media, requires immense inertia as well as long-term endurance. All too often, legitimate unrest is attenuated by lip-service and false engagement, or astroturfing, then quietly bled from the public consciousness via the normal pathways of distraction. Isn’t there a World Series coming up? Shouldn’t Dancing with the Stars be approaching yet another thrilling climax soon?

Well, watch out, because their opulence has been threatened, and the financiers and their congressional lackeys need to find their Death Star. Their weapon of choice when fighting against the people is the people themselves, and this case will be no exception. For a long time, mainstream news sites avoided highly-visible coverage of the movement. Even today, unbelievably, I encounter people who haven’t heard about it. When they did start devoting a bit more time to it, it was mostly just to wonder if the people involved had any specific “demands” or “plans” of their own, thus questioning the legitimacy of the protests. The unspoken implications were: #1 the movement was capricious and immature, and #2 if it were to be taken seriously in its desire to upend the current system, it should probably have its own fully-fleshed-out plan in place, maybe in the form of a 1500-page Senate Bill or something. When coverage lit upon specific individuals involved, preference was given to those who had misguided or extreme quotes, or were very unconventional in appearance. Official sources, when quoted, usually said something about how they “understood the concerns” of the protesters, but didn’t think they were organized or informed enough to go about affecting change through the proper channels. So casual perusal of the news might lead to the impression that “Occupy” was small, “fringe-y,” not well-organized, and not being taken very seriously. When that seemed to be ineffective, they turned to pitting elements of the population against one another, more actively trying to portray the protesters as people who were unlucky and bitter about it, and simply wanted to alleviate their own misfortunes by misappropriating the fortunes of others. Oh, and in addition to just being unlucky, they might also be lazy and use drugs. Some of them might not even be unlucky, but only joined in because said drugs were free at protests (WTF??) and there was probably sex, too.

“Most people view it as a ragtag group looking for sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll,” said one top hedge fund manager. (NYT)

Erick Erickson, soft, pasty white guy and officious suckler on the hemorrhoids of the rich and powerful, has taken on astroturfing duties with his disgusting and disingenuous blog, exploiting the fears of the intellectually retarded. Throughout history, the wealthy have always set the poor against the poor and the poor against the middle-class, because…well, because it keeps them (the wealthy) mostly out of the conversation. I won’t spend time elaborating on this, because I couldn’t possibly do it any better than Doug Muder does in his post Suck it Up: Using Our Pride Against Us. You really ought to read that piece. In fact, if you aren’t currently reading all of Doug’s posts, then any time you spend reading mine could be put to better use. For me, here’s the quote that best sums it up:

We can all decide not to identify with the people who work more and more for less and less, but we can’t decide not to resemble them.

Don’t let those in power divide and separate our hope for a decent future. If you really believe that “Occupy” protesters are just lazy, dirty hippies looking for drugs and sex, you are truly drinking the Kool-Aid. And I am not talking about the run-of-the-mill kill-your-friends-and-family Guyana Grape served in a small styrofoam cup, either. This is the new and improved hardcore Planetary Rape juice, brewed by IMF half-orcs in Rupert Murdoch’s bathtub, personally pissed in by Herman Cain, and shot down your gullet through a massive Halliburton-engineered Fear-Bong.

I really hope you’ll read Doug’s piece, and also the one which preceded it and is the best summation of what “Occupy Wall Street” is all about: Turn the Shame Around. But in case you don’t here’s one more great quote from it, which provides the “human nature” reason that makes it easier for the elite to pit us against one another:

The closer you are to the abyss, the stronger the temptation to deny that you bear any resemblance to the people who have already fallen in.

Muder also links to the incredibly awesome Open Letter to that 53% Guy. Great collection of thoughts from a guy named Max Udargo. I guess between the Udargo letter and Doug’s site, I’m sort of wondering why I should even be writing about this, because those are so much better. But I suppose there are those few who might be swayed by my tendency toward colorful metaphor. Whatever it takes!

OK, so that’s one ominous force which threatens the “occupy” movement. The other is something I’ve only recently become aware of: media fatigue. When something this big happens, everybody has to have an opinion, and a lot of you are probably sick and fucking tired of hearing and reading about it. Of course I’ve seen media fatigue a lot during the past decade or so in which I’ve actually been paying attention. But only recently, while listening to a radio interview with a shrimp boat captain whose livelihood was wrecked by the BP oil spill, and who has yet to receive any of the promised restitution, have I grasped that such fatigue plays a natural supporting role keeping the minds of the people from where they should be. I was like “Oh, yeah, the oil spill….” And then it hit me. Haiti. The Japan tsunami. The Indian Ocean tsunami. Oil Spill. Etc. Not only do these stories serve to distract everyone from other really important things that are happening under their noses, they also serve to make people refractory to any new information on the topic, because they are saturated. Election coverage, too, I suppose. The media lifespan of a story is less of a media-directed thing than an overload thing for media consumers. We can handle a certain amount of stuff on one topic. Doesn’t matter whether it’s true, false, new interesting, rehashed, whatever. We get to a point, and we’re done. The only time an old story is trotted out again is if there’s a propaganda purpose. Think 9/11. I think it’s a good possibility that “Occupy” overload might be the thing that kills the movement, in auto-immune fashion. I hope not. If everyone turned off their goddamned TVs for a while, we might have a chance, you know?

Or, as I might say if I subtitled posts: “How the Tea Party is Like an Awesome but Confused – or Possibly Brain-Injured – Running Back.”

My intent for this site is to have mainly original commentary, written by me alone, and when I link to other articles, I hope to be able to enhance it with additional personal insight or synthesis. I don’t necessarily think there’s anything wrong with being, to some extent, an aggregator of interesting and important content; it’s just not what I want to do, as enough people are doing it well already. I put a lot of thought into writing and editing of my posts, which is why there are so few of them, and why I don’t expect them to ever come with great frequency.

But today a friend tipped me off to The Weekly Sift, the site of a guy called Doug Muder.  I was thoroughly impressed with the pieces I’ve read so far, and I just had to highlight THIS one, comparing the Tea Party to the infamous Wrong Way Marshall. Great piece of work, Doug!

I hope if you’re reading this you’ll click over to Doug’s site, but here’s a teaser:

a lot of [libertarians] are low-to-middle-class folks who have figured a few things out:

• Honest, hard-working Americans are seeing their opportunities dry up.
• The country is dominated by a small self-serving elite.
• Our democracy is threatened.
• The public is told a lot of lies.
• People need to stand up and make their voices heard.
• If we stand together, we’re not as helpless as we seem.

I could go on, but you get the idea. They’re on to something. The country needs people like this carrying the ball, if only they weren’t running the wrong way.

What’s funny is that I was thinking along analogous lines just this morning, before I even knew about this site: I was thinking how disheartening it is to hear all of the criticism of the current administration, especially the more shrill and broad criticisms, coming from the right-wing talking heads. First, it’s disheartening because a good bit of it is true. But what’s even more demoralizing is that most of the people don’t even know why it’s true, or more accurately how deeply true it is.

They’re just regurgitating losing-side talking points that change hands every four years or so. Most of them actually believe that things would have been different with McCain/Palin, or could be different with Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, Mitt Romney, etc. The arguments stay silly and superficial, never diving into the truly unpleasant truths, thus playing right into the hands of the corporate elite. As long as we think it’s D vs. R, middle-class vs. poor, us vs. them, we will keep getting abused.

We don’t need to elect different politicians. That will never lead to progress. We need a different economic model entirely, and that won’t come until we have redefined the electoral system.

OK, that last statement begs the deeper explanation I’d love to write right now, but this is all I have time for today. Go read Doug. Here’s another excellent post, called Why I Am Not a Libertarian.

Ron Paul is an old coot with outmoded ideas about abortions, guns, and probably some other stuff. He reads Ayn Rand and there is at least some past evidence he might be a racist. He speaks of the “Free Market” as if it’s an actual thing (Ha!). And as a few of my Facebook friends pointed out, he’s got two first names, which is another pretty big strike against him.

But he is strongly anti-war, and I believe that issue supersedes the other ones. The biggest contributor to world unrest is U.S. interference abroad. It’s always cast as promoting Democracy, which if you’re paying attention at all, you know is complete bullshit. Whenever the U.S. becomes involved in a foreign conflict, there is always a ridiculous amount of money to be made by multinational energy and infrastructure corporations. Every time. We like to think we are helping people under oppression, or performing world “police” duties, but again, I stress: bullshit. In the past 60 years, at least, we have never exerted serious military force on foreign soil just to help someone.

If you have starving people, or a genocidal maniac running your country into the ground, and want us to help, you’d damn sure better be sitting on some pimp oil deposits, or have some excuse for a massive Halliburton-level infrastructure project, or U.S. involvement won’t be anything more than symbolic. Another requirement: a brutal dictator waiting in the wings to take over. Someone to whom we can give a plausible “Democratic Makeover,” who will do what we want them to do for the next decade or so, and of course, someone whom we can trust with generous weapons shipments, poison gas technology, etc. Basically, we want someone who will allow us to milk your country’s resources for all they’re worth, even if we know your people will eventually wake up and see our involvement for what it is, and decide to react to U.S. oppression (channeled through the aforementioned fake-democratic leader/puppet) through the only means they have available (since, you know, the elections are totally rigged): violence.

The CIA invented a term for this: ‘Blowback.’ It’s something most of our leaders know will come eventually, even as they sow the seeds. But it’s all figured into the cost-benefit analysis. If there’s money to be made, somebody’s gonna get bombed, and if there’s a price to be paid down the road, it’s rarely going to be paid by the individuals who set the bombing in motion. The term was first used in relation to the 1953 coup in Iran, where the U.S. and Britain overthrew the government because the Iranians got all uppity and thought they should be able to maintain control of their own natural resources (Stephen Kinzer has a good book on the subject). That event has pretty much defined the relationship between oil-producing countries and the West ever since, though internal CIA documents describing it didn’t surface publicly until nearly 50 years later. So in 1979, perhaps ordinary Americans can be at least partially forgiven for thinking that the uprising against Mohammad Rezā Shāh Pahlavi, the taking of American hostages, etc. was the wholly unprecedented result of a bunch of evil and crazy Muslims randomly deciding to be evil and crazy. Of course today, anyone who has bothered to read up a little on 20th century Middle East history knows better. That wouldn’t include Rick Santorum, who in addition to being just generally a colossal dumbass, doesn’t even bother to familiarize himself with the issues that might be important for a Senator or a Presidential candidate to have a grip on. For an in-depth look at blowback and how it’s related to U.S. foreign policy throughout history, see the Chalmers Johnson book by that title.

So. Why, if this post is supposed to be about Ron Paul, am I prattling on about “ancient” history….about blowback and the 1953 Iranian coup? Because Ron Paul actually talks about this stuff. He sees U.S. interventionist foreign policy for what it is, and he’s not afraid to say it. The page linked above under Santorum’s name recounts the recent Iowa debate, where Paul made Santorum look like a naive child, and includes a video of the exchange. Initially, I watched the video just to amuse myself by seeing Ricky-boy get schooled. But my jaw literally dropped when I heard Ron Paul use the word ‘blowback’ and start talking about the 1953 coup. I’ve never heard this talked about before by any candidate, despite its obvious relevance to our Middle-Eastern predicament. I just assumed it was sort of tacitly agreed, as it generally is in the mainstream media, that such open criticism of U.S. foreign intervention, no matter how long ago, was inappropriate. Thus, I decided this Ron Paul guy definitely deserved a closer look. Turns out he’s been talking about this for a long time. In particular, about halfway down the page, watch the video of his 2007 appearance on Bill Maher’s show. From that interview:

“Well, I think it’s been known for quite a few decades that our foreign policy has what the CIA calls “blowback”. It has unintended consequences. You can go back to 1953, when we put the Shah into power, us supporting Osama bin Laden and radicalizing Islamics to go after the Soviets, and that comes back as blowback, our support for Saddam Hussein in the 1980′s, and this comes back to haunt us, and that’s why I have been very [...] supportive of what I call a non-interventionist foreign policy—mind our own business, stay out of the internal affairs of other nations.”

And from Ron Paul’s book The Revolution: A Manifesto:

“Blowback should not be a difficult or surprising concept for conservatives and libertarians, since they often emphasize the unintended consequences that even the most well-intentioned domestic program can have. We can only imagine how much greater and unpredictable the consequences of intervention abroad might be.”

And on intervention generally:

“There is always some militant-violent-jihadist looking to rally that faction, but they have to have incentives. The incentive is when we impose our will on them and we get involved in their internal politics. Besides, it contradicts everything the Founders theorized, and there’s no constitutional authority for us to march around the world undermining different governments.”

To my mind, this is huge. Our foreign policy, particularly with regard to intervention in other sovereign governments, is responsible for a major subset of our economic problems today. The United States has nearly 1000 overseas military bases in at least 120 countries, and there are now covert operations underway in more countries than that. Special Forces alone are now operating in at least 75 countries, according to the Washington Post. Seventy. Five. Fucking. Countries. WTF, American People??

The biggest concerns for our economy and our national security arise from imposing our presence where it isn’t wanted. The web of U.S. interference is so complex and tangled that it’s probably not even possible to calculate how much this is costing us monetarily. Estimating the future cost to our country in dollars and lives, arising strictly from ill-will toward America for our meddling, is another question altogether. An impossible task. Figuring out who benefits from our massive “defense” budget, on the other hand, is pretty easy. This is a vast problem, and it’s almost never addressed in honest terms by our leaders. Ron Paul is addressing it, and he seems to have his head screwed on right about it.

What about the other issues? Well, this piece is long enough already, and I don’t have time or energy to cover them at length. But I’ll make two simple points: first, most of these other issues pale by comparison to our dangerous and costly military interference abroad, and second, Ron Paul is happy, in most cases, to let the states handle this stuff, as our founding fathers intended. And besides, what if he is a serious racist (for example)? Let’s say he gets into office and decides he wants some legislation crafted that would take us back 50 years in the civil rights department? You think that could happen? That’s a rhetorical question. Finally, we’re not going to get a candidate who’s ideal on all fronts, and look where trying to do that has gotten us. Barack Obama, is tepid, malleable, ineffectual. Better than Shrubbo? Yeah? So what. It’s time we figure out what’s most important for the future of the United States, and the world, and let the small chips fall where they fall.

NOTE: Iran has a rich history of propagandizing through its postage stamps. Bonus points for reading up on the story behind the stamp that appears with this post.

A lot of my conversations, if they turn toward politics, result in me trying to outline for someone the ways in which our media culture indoctrinates us and prevents us from getting accurate information. If they become convinced I am right — and they usually do, because they probably know it deep down to begin with — their response, inevitably is:

But how do we fix it?

Obviously, it’s a deeply rooted problem, and I don’t like to seem flippant, but the reality is that we have to spend a little time educating ourselves, and then educating each other. I responded to one such query yesterday with a link to an article, What Can We Do About the Great American Lie, by Michael Lewis. The piece briefly lays out some of the sources and reasons for the lies, and then in one swift paragraph identifies the solution: simply tell the truth and the revolution will begin. Yes, perhaps a bit of flippancy here. But he has the basic idea: whenever we encounter such a lie, why not point it out? Generally, we have no problem calling out co-workers, friends and acquaintances if we think they’re being dishonest about something, and many of us punish our children when they lie. So why is it, when the real whoppers come up in conversation, such as “The media have a liberal agenda,” or “We invaded Iraq because Saddam had WMD,” or “Allowing gay people to get married will lead to polygamy, and eventually bestiality,” why do we just clam up? It only takes a minute to point out that something might not be entirely accurate, or might indeed be a malicious lie to serve the greedy.

But when it comes to such a fundamentally dishonest government and media, how can we possibly distinguish the truth from lies??

Honestly, it isn’t that difficult. Most of the time, the truth is almost exactly the opposite of what the mainstream sources are telling us. I compared distinguishing truth from lies in American politics to doing one of those puzzles for 2-year-olds, where you have to insert the triangle shape into the triangle hole, etc. The hard part is getting people to turn off their TVs and video games long enough to even see what the fucking hole looks like.

But I personally don’t have the time to investigate every politician and issue and read the public record and read all the political blogs and figure out what it all means. I’m too busy earning a living and trying to keep the house clean and raise children. It’s a lot more complicated than a toddler’s puzzle, unless you want to make it a full-time job.

But it isn’t more complicated. OK, maybe a little bit more complicated, but not nearly as hard as the people in control want us to believe. Think about it: the liars can only benefit from our hopeless attitude that their lies are too hard to expose, and that we are impotent to change things.

Do you spend ten minutes per day, ever, or even ten minutes per week, reading a news story? Something about the state of our country, or the world? If not, then this won’t be much help. But if you do occasionally engage in the actual consumption of news, try this: read about it from a source that isn’t funded by huge corporate media, or backed by a “think tank.” That’s all anyone has to do to be mildly informed about how the world works. Alternatively, take 10 minutes a day and read Understanding Power. You’ll be done with it in two to three months, and you’ll be smarter than most people you know when it comes to picking out the bullshit. I personally guarantee that. Ten minutes per day. You can do it sitting on your ass, and you won’t even have to shower afterward, although you might feel like it.

I understand the quandary as well as anyone. Everyone is busier than ever these days, trying to survive, trying to make money, trying to do the right things for their kids, and, if they’re overachievers, for their communities. When they get a little leisure time, they don’t want to spend it figuring out how they’re getting fucked by the rich and powerful. We have to take time to unwind, or we will go nuts. We need TV, video games, recreation, relaxing time with friends, etc. I do all of those things, though somewhat less than I used to. But too many people are now doing them to the exclusion of a fundamental awareness of the political and economic forces which root the decisions that are, in fact, making it so hard to find the time to understand those forces. That’s what drives it all. That’s why things are the way they are. It’s a vicious circle: if we don’t have time to figure out how, where and why we’re being screwed, how are we ever going to stop the screwing? And if we aren’t doing anything about it, we can only expect it to continue, and, obviously, get worse.

‘Politics’ has had its meaning twisted by these same inexorable forces. Politics is now a separate thing, in which some people choose to be interested, and others choose to avoid. It’s something that isn’t deeply discussed in “polite company.” But that’s bullshit. Politics should not be the bailiwick of white guys in suits with fancy law degrees. Politics is life. Everyone’s life. The means by which we assure ourselves and our children of clean air, safe food, hospitals, education, etc. No one has time to worry about all of that and still lead fulfilling lives and make valuable contributions to their communities. That’s why we have a system of government. But too many people have lost sight of the fact that government is supposed to be representative. Sure, most people understand the word, but they have abandoned the requirement in favor of party “platforms” and trite checklists of where candidates stand on a few mainstream issues. And these issues become more and more trivial (or, if not trivial, more removed from important forces which shape our lives, our communites and the future), while the the things which will actually have a dramatic lasting impact on the world (energy policy and foreign wars, net neutrality and intellectual property/patent law, media conglomeration, regulation of financial markets) are either not discussed at all, or are presented in comic book terms which intentionally obscure the overarching truths from us.

If everyone took that ten minutes per day and devoted it to legitimate self-education, the world would be a different place, and the tide would begin to turn, slowly, toward a government composed of individuals who actually felt a sense of responsibility to the voters instead of the campaign funders, and toward a media which actually felt free to report the truth in plain terms. That is it. That is ALL we need to make this country as great as what it once was, and as great as its founders intended. Two simple things: a representative government and a free media. Right now, we don’t have anything that even vaguely resembles either one of those things. And the deepest irony of the symbiotic systems of campaign finance and corporate media indoctrination is that many people will think I’m crazy for asserting that. But it’s a fact: our democracy has largely evaporated. The only way we can ever hope to get it back is to inform ourselves. Without true representation in our legislative bodies, and without a real and verified watchdog in the media, we can no longer expect to go about our lives and assume that evil and corruption will eventually be exposed. We’ve come to a point where we have to shine the light ourselves. “We the People” have to do at least a modest amount of truth-seeking on our own, and just as importantly, when we see the truth being abused, we need to speak up. The few people who are still looking after the best interests of all humans, and the future of the planet, are no longer occupying the halls of power or the halls of truth. We must take it upon ourselves now, to be informed. Even if it’s only ten minutes at a time.

While Drew Westen’s recent opinion piece published by the New York Times – What Happened to Obama’s Passion? – makes some good points, I found it to be naive overall. My decision to post about this today is not to be critical of Dr. Westen; he does in fact seem to have a good grasp on what’s wrong with our country from a constituent’s point of view, as well as an awareness of the decaying cultural underpinnings which have allowed our problems to perpetuate. Rather, I wanted to highlight his piece because it’s a perfect example of the deep denial in which the Left has taken to cloaking itself lately.

The first three of four pages are spent making some pretty straightforward assertions which are easy to accept, and easy to argue. Things are pretty shitty right now, and it would help a lot if people really understood why they were so shitty, and in theory a great leader would tell us in plain terms why things are generally shitty. Our brains are adapted to narrative: stories matter, stories are how our culture has always transmitted ‘knowledge and values,’ and great leaders (FDR, MLK, etc.) have historically leveraged their achievements through strong narrative.

Westen laments that Obama, so clearly a charismatic and passionate speaker, chose not to exploit his own true strength by offering Americans a compelling narrative to explain how we had fallen into this deep economic trough, and the difficulties we would encounter as we climbed back out of it. He accurately assigns this negligence as a root cause of why Obama’s own stock has dipped, and shows us how failure to shine the simple light of truth on the economic disaster of the last three years has not only left Obama open to attacks from the right, but has also made his espoused agenda (re: healthcare, entitlements and taxes) nearly impossible to advance.

Thus, Barack Obama, a man who has repeatedly demonstrated impressive intelligence, knowledge and verbal acuity, as well as a deep, eloquent charisma which allows him to commune with the general public concern at a near-Churchillian capacity, suddenly and inexplicably dropped the ball when it came to laying the real groundwork for the Hope and Change he’d so convincingly prognosticated. Not likely.

Generally, the American Left these past three years has fallen into the trap of casting Obama’s apparent failures within a framework of “well, just look what he started with,” or “the Right has relentlessly controlled the media narrative.” In other words, the political machine that so consistently failed to dent the shiny armor of Obama’s rhetoric, and a Republican ideology that suffered a humiliating loss in 2008, has discovered a new recipe. Blink your eyes and hey, guess what? These career dumbasses are now exhibiting a masterful control of the public dialogue. Again, not likely. Sorry, but the ebb and flow of the political tides in our country do not mimic the turn-on-a-dime dynamics of a high school basketball game. Decades upon decades of corporate financing and profoundly lobbied fiscal policy have built a very stable, attenuated political environment (which happens to be at ironic odds with the economic environment, but that’s another story).

When people so readily subscribe to an idea that is ridiculous, there’s a very common explanation for this: that the actual reality is difficult to accept. No one likes to think they are wrong, even about small things. But it’s especially hard to admit that you were taken for a fool. Completely bamboozled. I’ll admit it, even though I don’t enjoy admitting it. I was completely wrong about Barack Obama. I thought he was legitimately different, and would be a real force toward change in American politics. In the context of everything I know now (and, to be frank, everything I knew then), that was pretty silly of me. This was a case of me wanting to believe in something so badly that I was willing to block out the obvious evidence to the contrary. Again, not something that feels good to concede. But it’s pretty hard for a reasonable mind to deny at this point. Barack Obama hasn’t made an accidental fumble at every one of the 3,487 opportunities he’s had to be honest with us in an important way. He simply doesn’t want to be honest. He is a supreme bullshitter, and a master of the political game.

I’m not going to bloat this article with a point-by-point analyses of how his corporate backers stand to benefit from his health care plan, the stimulus package, the debt-ceiling negotiations, etc. Suffice it to say that, broadly speaking, all of the results he’s obtained while in office have been very close to what he intended, and what he expected. In essence, the results he was paid to deliver. We simply cannot build, from the facts, a convincing narrative that such a competent and successful politician as been suddenly rendered impotent by the incisive cunning of the same inept band of morons who nearly burned the house down before he got there.

OK, I might have gotten a little off track here. While I’ve just described the fall-back position of a large sector of today’s Democrats, it isn’t precisely this position that Westen takes in his piece. His own special brand of naivete manifests itself in places like this:

“The real conundrum is why the president seems so compelled to take both sides of every issue, encouraging voters to project whatever they want on him, and hoping they won’t realize which hand is holding the rabbit.”

I’d have a hard time finding a better example than that of answering your own question as you ask it. I involuntarily snort-laughed as I read it.

Westen offers some explanations for this “conundrum.” The charitable ones include political simple-mindedness, lack of experience, and “character defect.” The less charitable ones are that Obama doesn’t even know himself, or that is concerned only with his re-election. Then, near the very end of the article, he decides to allow for a bit of reality:

“…perhaps, like so many politicians who come to Washington, he has already been consciously or unconsciously corrupted by a system that tests the souls even of people of tremendous integrity, by forcing them to dial for dollars — in the case of the modern presidency, for hundreds of millions of dollars.”

Even here, by inserting the possibility of ‘unconscious’ corruption, he is hedging a bit for Obama by blaming our campaign finance system. In that bit, I would largely agree, though conscious vs. unconscious corruption by the system are not effectively different. I’m pretty sure most victims of sexual abuse (yes, perhaps I resort too often to sexual abuse, particularly of the anal variety, as a metaphor for what’s happening to the American people) make no allowance for whether their assailant may have had a bad childhood, etc. It can’t be said often enough or loudly enough, apparently: our entire political system is broken. The two parties are one party, and they fake-argue over mostly irrelevant garbage in the public eye, then retire quietly to chambers and collaborate in something they can all get equally on-board with: bending us over our high-def TVs and fucking us hard to the sweet, oblivious sounds of Jersey Shore, or whatever equally insipid shit we happen to find ourselves watching.

We shouldn’t be asking ourselves what happened to Obama’s passion. We need, rather, to figure out what happened to our own ability to spot patronizing bullshit.

Westen’s last paragraph starts with a sort of grand quote, an homage to MLK:

“But the arc of history does not bend toward justice through capitulation cast as compromise.”

I liked that quote as soon as I read it, but quickly became uncomfortable with it, and here’s why: the arc of history is cast as its own entity here. But that’s dumb, at least as far as we imagine such an arc as existing in some vaguely sentient form. It’s an abstraction. There’s no cosmic moral force that’s debating whether it throws its support behind this or that President, depending on how he or she might live up to words and expectations. I suppose whether you believe that depends on how spiritual you are, and I am not very spiritual. The so-called “arc of history” is our own to describe, a priori, rather than a pre-existing thing upon which we exert our ever-evolving supplication. Yes, there is an “arc of history.” We have built it entirely on our own, and it seems lately we’ve bent it into something like a Salvador Dali painting of a pretzel reflected in a funhouse mirror. Time to find a new arc.

Yes. We. Did. But what exactly did we do? We elected another “leader” who has put the best interests of the American people, and the economic and ecological future of the world, at the bottom of his priority list.

Glenn Greenwald has an Op-Ed piece in The Guardian today which is worth reading. He offers some specifics about how Obama’s actions since taking office amount to a betrayal of the American voters. But more broadly and importantly, he provides surgical insight into the underlying reasons our system of politics, combined with a corporate-supported media and campaign finance mayhem, is failing us so miserably. He doesn’t mention those last two things specifically, but they are ever-present specters haunting the foundation of almost every serious problem we face. Here’s the money quote:

The nature of American politics is that once a policy is removed from the partisan wars – once it is adopted by the leadership of both parties – it is removed from mainstream debate and fortified as bipartisan consensus.

This seemingly casual observation, buried deep in the article, is the fundamental and critical truth which has been so effectively hidden from all of us. Even though he doesn’t hammer explicitly enough on the media on this particular occasion (he does mention the lack of “mainstream journalistic scrutiny” in the follow-up sentence), the statement might as well have come straight out of Herman and Chomsky’s seminal Manufacturing Consent.

The lack of outrage from the mainstream left at everything Obama has done, and is trying to do, is silent proof that we’ve become anemic, pacified, and largely mind-controlled. His healthcare bill was a gift to insurance companies, and his financial policy an invitation for Wall Street to keep hacking away at world economic stability. I have to laugh even harder now at all of the mindless conservatives who claimed Obama was a socialist, and would squander our wealth on giving free rides to the welfare population. Utterly ridiculous. I knew even then, of course (because I am not a moron), that this wasn’t even a remote possibility, for a whole host of reasons. But I had no idea how easily he would fall into step with the banks and other powerful interests, and am beyond shocked that he is now beating the drum for massive entitlement cuts, and that he has happily propagated the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld doctrine of terror and torture.

Honestly, I can’t see how any self-respecting media-addled conservative mind could not love this guy. Donald Trump and all of these other assholes should have been lining up to help get him a forged birth certificate for the one that supposedly doesn’t exist. Hello, young idealistic-but-Republican finance intern? Barack Obama is your freakin’ wet dream. At least based on the short-sighted beliefs with which you’ve been indoctrinated, and think are your own.

I find this all very ironic in the context of the piece I posted yesterday about Michele Bachmann, which outlined a possible scenario under which she could be an unwitting heroine by selling her advocates on the reality of the impending ecosystem catastrophe. Barack Obama, in much the same way, has essentially become an anti-hero and a tool of the elite right, by couching the systematic destruction of everything that made America great in warm fuzzy rhetoric. So few people who have associated themselves with the left are willing, apparently, to actually stand up for what they claim they believe in. If they were, the Democratic Party could not hope to run this joker in 2012 without a massive revolt.

But, as Greenwald laments, “The silence from progressive partisans is deafening.” I agree, and have noted this for a long time. My Facebook friends are a fairly diverse bunch when it comes to political views, but are generally weighted toward liberal viewpoints. When I post a rant against John Boehner or Mitch McConnell, they jump right on board in agreement. But when I disparage Obama, I get blind approval from conservatives, maybe some marginal, hesitant, conditional agreement from a few lefties, and mostly silence. Maybe they too spent $90 on a moveon.org poster*, and aren’t ready yet to feel publicly stupid about how misled they were. I don’t know, but it’s frustrating.

When I posted an earlier, diluted version of this rant on Facebook today, a conservative friend actually assumed that my disapproval implied I was ready to embrace the Republicans, and had finally found my way over to “the good side.” You can be confident a snorting laugh ensued. My opinion of our president is that almost everything he says is good, but that it’s all completely at odds with his actions. Any power he’s able to wield is a danger to us all, and worse because he is clearly intelligent and charismatic. So yeah, I’d venture to say he is “bad” for the country, and the world.

But to draw from that the conclusion that Michele Bachmann, or Newt Gingrich, etc. are “good,” is to stand completely outside of reality, and to remain in the fictional black and white world which our corporate-built government has manufactured to keep us out of their way. The current crop of Republicans are self-interested tools of the system, and they are reckless and irresponsible with our future. In other words, precisely the opposite of what we would hope for. But unlike Obama, they don’t even bother to pay lip-service to the concepts that could advance humanity to a better place. They openly wield their dumbassery for all to see. Their mental incompetence is often shocking. They are like small dogs with head injuries, wagging their tails boisterously as they piss all over the floor and grovel to their corporate masters.

Obama, also, is self-interested, and reckless, and a tool. But he is smart. Charismatic. Insidious. He is more like a plotting feline, who purrs softly, looks good, and doesn’t trouble us much, but then takes a dump in our oatmeal when we turn our backs for a few seconds to change the channel to a different reality show.

Just because we have two very different types here doesn’t mean one is “good” and one is “bad.” I’m pretty sure both of those “sides” are really fucking bad. And that’s just the problem, isn’t it? Why are we setting up “sides,” anyway?? Aren’t we all in this together? Almost our entire world of experience right now is simplistically framed for us, so we don’t have to do the work. Do we internalize Soundbite A, or Soundbite B? Hmm….tough decisi– Oh, Hey! Look! That fun Housewives show is on. SHhhh!

We are made dumber by mainstream content of all sorts, and then our dullness is used to pit us against each other over stupid shit that doesn’t really matter, while the powerful and rich elite make themselves even richer at our expense, and the expense of the future of the entire population. Everything is framed up for us to make it easy to listen to a few soundbites and then choose one “side” or the other. Too complicated to forge out in our own directions. We’re too busy and distracted and ignorant most of the time to realize that there are a whole bunch of letters between A and Z. We are like lazy students who want multiple choice tests, or better yet, true/false ones. We dread the essay question, and the media framework reinforces that at every turn.

I used to spend a lot of time ranting about Shrubbo on internet forums. Consistently, conservatives accused me of being a one-sided W-hater, and said I would fawn ceaselessly over Barack Obama. This is me proving you wrong, dumbfucks. Just like I routinely proved you wrong about almost everything else, even though you rarely realized it. I may never understand this human attraction to the binary…..the comfort we seem to find in the reduction of everything to black or white. I suspect that evolutionary psychologists are making progress into genetic underpinnings of this propensity, but I won’t be happy until they produce a drug which can alleviate that. Preferably without side-effects, unbranded, and covered by a global health insurance plan. To anyone who thinks that between Republicans and Democrats we are offered a viable range of social and political hope, I’ve got two words for you, from the late John Belushi:

“Cheeseburger. Pepsi.”

Or in more contemporary terms, for the young readers: “You will eat this shit sandwich, and you will like it. Bitch.”

A note about the image I’ve chosen to go along with this post, before anyone goes all Ayatollah ape-shit over some unintended symbolism: this is the limited edition Shepard Fairey poster that was offered by moveon.org in the wake of Barack Obama’s historic election. I added the blood in Photoshop, to symbolize the blood that is and will be on Obama’s hands for his extreme mismanagement of nearly everything. I’m referring both to actual blood from his new clandestine wars, and from his failure to do what he claimed he would do about the leftover Shrubbo war crimes, and am referring also to the metaphorical blood gushing from the sucking chest wound that American Democracy has suffered over the past few decades, which Barack Obama has done nothing to staunch, but rather, into which he seems to be grinding his bootheel.

*I have one of these posters. I paid $90 for it after the election. I was thrilled with the result, and while I never believed Obama would turn all of our problems around, I truly did have hope that he was an honest and decent man, who intended to work for the people. So much for that. I also thought that one day the poster might be worth a lot of money, since only 5000 were printed originally. Now I am fairly chagrined to even own it, and I’m not sure what will eventually become of it. But if you should one day see me ranting loudly in public, and setting fire to a large piece of paper, you can pretty much guess what’s on that paper.

Michele Bachmann is a bigot and a hypocrite. She’s culturally inept and politically unsophisticated: Her thinking on many social issues (abortion and gay marriage, for starters) fall well outside the mainstream of Western Civilization, and she is demonstrably lacking in a fundamental understanding of the legal and historical framework underpinning the nation she was somehow elected to serve. She’s what I like to call a dumbass, or, in other parlance, a Republican. But it may well be that Bachmann, or some Republican like her, holds the key to the survival of our existence as we know it. Or, at least somewhat as we know it, because it’s pretty clear to anyone watching closely that “as we know it” is careening toward its expiration date.

Ask yourself: what are the truly critical issues facing humanity today? Abortion; the Sanctity of Marriage; gun ownership; the War on Drugs? Haha. No. The Debt Ceiling? Terrorism (or, more equitably, religious extremism)? Nope. Global Climate Change? OK, now we’re getting somewhere. But even terminology so broad as Global Climate Change tends to oversimplify what’s happened, and make it seem like a separate “thing.” But it’s not just an item on a checklist, something to which we may allow ourselves to attach fluctuating priority depending on how the day is shaping up. Rather, it’s a tangible, leering Grim Reaper, staring us all in the face.

Boiled down to very simple terms, the earth is a substrate for life, just like a laboratory Petri dish is a substrate for the growth of bacteria, fungus, etc. There is a fixed amount of substrate in both cases. When all of the nutrients have been sucked out of the agar in a Petri dish, the bacteria stop growing. Of course, they keep metabolizing for awhile….keep generating waste which contains substances toxic to further growth. And eventually start dying off, being broken down into more toxic by-products, etc. But basically, a Petri dish is a very limited closed system, which, left unchecked, will very quickly overproduce and then crash, and eventually become a mass of smelly goo. And so it is with the earth.

Our planet is obviously much larger, and our ecosystem much more complicated, than a Petri dish. But the bottom line is that the earth is, for all practical purposes of human life, a closed system. There is a fixed amount of land, water, and nutrients. When biologists look at ecosystems and populations, one of the parameters to which they frequently refer is “carrying capacity.” Simply put, this is the load (number of organisms) a system can handle indefinitely, given the amount of resources available and the rate of turnover of nutrients. So, you ask, what is the earth’s carrying capacity, and how soon will we reach it? Bad news, guys. We strolled casually past that shit decades ago, as we might pass a bum on the street begging for quarters, not really even noticing. The ecosystem is now in decline, and heading for an inevitable crash. Sure, our continued advances in technology and agriculture have made us more efficient every day at harvesting the earth’s resources. But these advances are not a hopeful path toward a solution; the incredible efficiency with which humans have learned to extract food and other resources is, in fact, the problem. Our own cleverness is what has allowed us to march beyond the point of no return with almost no one even noticing.

(Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten about Michele Bachmann; back to that crazy bitch in a few. Hang in there, this is important.)

If the earth’s resources were a bank account, we could say we’ve been dipping into the savings side for a long time now, and it is not being replenished. We aren’t accruing interest, and it’s going to be empty a lot sooner than most people are willing to accept. Colloquially speaking, we are fucked. No, I’m not saying we are fucked “if we don’t do x or y.” I’m saying we are fucked, period. As Paul Gilding tells us in his book The Great Disruption, it’s too late to reverse the damage we’ve done to our planet. All we can hope to do at this point is manage the decline. Pump the brakes and look for the safest spot to crash. Gilding, whose message is somewhat more optimistic than it might sound so far, talks about heroic human action in past times of grave crisis, and believes that in the end, we’ll come round to seeing the truth of things, and that our response as a species will be massive and effective. But if course it will be too late to save everyone, and too late to salvage many of the paradigms of “life as we know it.”

I’m not going to try to anticipate or conjecture about the specific manifestations of the impending crash. Gilding and many others have been doing this for a long time. We’ll see soon enough which predictions were more or less accurate, and it’s not going to make anyone happy to be able to say “I told you so.” What’s not in dispute by anyone who examines earth and climate science, is that fundamental changes are coming soon. Like, in our lifetimes. Most of us can stop thinking about “our children, and our childrens’ children” and start thinking about ourselves. As soon as we do that for real, and abolish the easily-shunted abstraction of “the future,” we’ll get to work. But that hasn’t happened yet. It will, inevitably, and the point at which that moment of clarity nucleates within the minds of enough people is what will ultimately decide how manageable the coming crash will be. Obviously, the longer we wait, the worse off we’ll be when the new equilibrium is reached.

You see where I’m going with this yet? One of the increasingly active dialogs in our political milieu is what many refer to as the “global warming debate.” Those three words amount to one of the most grievous crimes ever committed against humanity by the mainstream media. “Debate??” There isn’t one. Not a real one, not among intelligent people who are able to assemble collections of data and draw critical conclusions. There’s no real debate among climate scientists, and no real debate among people who pay attention. There’s only a fake debate, perpetrated by the media and funded by Exxon-Mobil, the Koch Brothers, and other powerful lobbies. Sure there is some “quibbling” among peer-reviewed scientists about the details, but overwhelmingly the scientific community tells us, again and again, that human activity is now having a deep and lasting impact on the earth, and that our ecosystem’s carrying capacity was exceeded long ago. It is an irrefutable fact, when you look at the numbers, that we are depleting our resources even as our own population continues to grow unchecked. No fair and balanced media source would honestly pit two experts against one another, one advocating for “global warming” and one against. First off, it isn’t even possible to find an “expert” who claims that global climate change isn’t happening, unless that “expert” is on the payroll of one of the aforementioned lobbies. What if we assume that someone on the payroll of Exxon-Mobil is capable of producing unbiased science, and admit them into a legitimate debate? Even then, if we wanted to be fair and balanced, and present an accurate picture of current scientific thought on the matter, we’d have to offset each such corporate funded “expert” with roughly 472 published climate scientists who hold the broadly opposing view. That’s not even an exaggeration. That’s how deep the consensus runs.

And the word “warming” is itself an unfortunate term here, as it allows naïve people  who don’t understand the difference between strongly-supported hypotheses and anecdotal information to reject the reality out of hand. As in “Global warming, my ass! Twenty degrees below zero in early November? Ha! Bullshit!”

But I’m not writing this to convince you of a truth that you almost certainly accept if you’ve read this far. If you are easily bamboozled by junk science, and are one of those people who finds it easy to just accept any dumbass thing that flies from the delusional pea-sized brain of Michele “Carbon dioxide is a natural byproduct of nature!” Bachmann, then you stopped reading this somewhere short of the second sentence, and anyway you probably aren’t all that fired up about reading in general.

Now, this is a generalization, and I am well-aware there are numerous exceptions, but the issue of Global Climate Change is broadly split down party lines. You won’t find many liberals who question it, and an insane number of conservatives still follow the words “global warming” with the word “hoax” more often than not. It’s too bad that Al Gore had to be the one to produce one of the more important treatises on GCC, because I think that really pushed things hard in the direction of a partisan split. There’s also the fact that Congressional Republicans of the last 20 years or so are more likely than Democrats to shamelessly work against the interests of their constituents for money. Campaign finance reform is desperately needed, but that’s another story. At any rate, the R’s try to feed you bullshit about GCC being a hoax, while the D’s generally stick to a different brand of bullshit.

Now, you begin to see the great potential of a truly moronic politician, with a truly simple-minded and moronic following, to shift the balance, don’t you? Ultimately, this is not a political post. Not in the small, Western, partisan sense. It’s meant to encourage an examination of what’s really important. And it isn’t difficult to see that a major planetary crash might well supersede all of the garbage that tends to get media attention. You might even begin to conceive of the odd compromise that may one day make it possible for humanity to persist far into the future without going full-on Road Warrior: maybe, just maybe, if a bat-shit crazy person like Michele Bachmann (or Sarah Palin, or Mitt Romney, etc.) were to wake up one day and smell the rotting Petri dish of our certain doom, all of the bat-shit crazy people who voted for her would be willing to accept the gravity of our situation, and get on board with some things like sustainable food, steady-state economies, and renewable energy. Maybe. So long as the rest of us were maybe willing to have our abortions and gay married sex in secret.

It’s honestly not such a stretch. Everyone’s got a tipping point. We know all too well that for someone like Bachmann, that tipping point is unlikely to be confronting a roomful of lucid experts on climate change. Who cares? Maybe it’s one of those dumbass anecdotal things, like a couple of hot days in November where her bra sticks to her stupid saggy boobs and makes her itchy and annoyed while waiting for her turn to speak at an NRA rally. Maybe she visits a lake in Texas where her uncle used to take her bass fishing when she was six, and finds out it’s all dried up forever. Doesn’t matter. If something, anything, causes a moment of crystallization in her mind (or the mind of Mitt Romney, or any one of those nutjobs seeking the Republican nomination), and this happens when they are in a position to influence policy, then maybe we all get an ironic gift from someone who’s otherwise horribly unqualified to represent actual people on a grand scale.

Maybe I’m just deeply afraid of the next election, and seeking silver linings here. Nah, I don’t think so. For the most part, I don’t believe the person in the Oval Office is going to have a huge impact on my daily life. Barack Obama has already soured me on believing that there is any real hope for change being channeled through a lip-service paying, corporate-funded, status quo politician. The political center of gravity will have to shift on a much more fundamental level (like, in my Facebook Newsfeed) before it shifts at the level of national elections.

But I stand by Gilding’s assertion that facing GCC is inevitable, and that the crystallization of national (and international) sentiment will happen eventually, though it’s difficult to say when or how. And someone as nutty as Michele Bachmann, or perhaps any Republican with an overzealous, undereducated following, could, under the right set of circumstances, catalyze that crystallization, even as they do their best to take us backwards in other areas. I, for one, could tolerate a lot of backwards-ass social policy shifts in exchange for, you know, still being around and having a society at which to be pissed. Hmm. I might even consider voting for Newt Gingrich, now that I think about it.

UPDATE: I just read through this again, and despite the wall of unrefined text (damn, that’s a lot of words, eh?), I still feel like I wasn’t explicit enough in separating the concept of Global Climate Change as its own thing from the actual deeply-integrated ecosystem clusterfuck that’s approaching. It’s deeper than ‘climate,’ much deeper than simply ‘warming.’ It is a profound over-exploitation of the entire planetary ecosystem. In fact, I hereby propose that we abolish the phrases “Global Warming” and “Global Climate Change” in favor of GEC: Global Ecosystem Collapse. Or Catastrophe. Or, Clusterfuck.