Dear Ed,
I am delighted that you have given your website the Lazarus treatment. Welcome back.
To follow up on your March 5 posting, I’d like to say that I’ve had the good fortune to read Michael Scheuer’s Imperial Hubris. I highly recommend it both to you and your readers.
It’s quite interesting that Scheuer describes himself as a conservative Republican, one out of the Reagan mold. It’s interesting because it suggests the degree of divergence between reality and the pabulum regularly spoon-fed to us by incumbent national politicians and their sycophantic minions in the national media. Without a doubt, Scheuer’s and my political views have very little in common. But with regard to his analysis of sentiment within the Islamic world, I think he’s exactly correct.
Scheuer has recently made clear that it’s a question of ‘when’ and not ‘whether’ Islamic zealots aggrieved of American foreign policy will detonate nuclear weapons on our soil. That someone as well-placed as Scheuer should be sounding such an urgent alarm while the political and media establishment largely ignore him is indicative of our political malaise.
But the reality deficit exhibited by the establishment carries much farther beyond such extreme circumstances. It extends into its portrayal of everyday American life. For example, within our memory a family of two parents and five kids could prosper on one income. For such a family little more than a high school diploma was necessary to maintain a standard of living whereby a house, a car, paid vacations, worry-free healthcare, and a college education for the kids were available without having to go into hock, let alone into bankruptcy.
Presently, that standard of living is unattainable for households even with two incomes and two college degrees.
Thus across the span of a generation we have experienced a decline in living standards of proportions probably not seen since the Great Depression, while the clarion call from the political and media establishment is that everything is just wonderful.
Which brings me to the point of the upcoming presidential beauty pageant. I see a whole lot of form and hardly a lick of substance, particularly as the contest pertains to Sens. Clinton and Obama. I’ve seen and heard hundreds of news reports about these two, but not once have I heard a peep about policy.
And perhaps this is for good reason. Because if matters of policy were to be discussed openly, it would become painfully clear that both mainstream political parties have acted as simply the left and right wings of a larger Corporatist Party, where the summum bonum is the concentration of wealth, capital and power into the hands of an ever-smaller elite, where such notions as “free trade” and “globalization” have attained the mantle of religious doctrine, and those who would be so unwise as to call those concepts into question are easily dismissed as heretics.
To me, the meaningful debate is not about which candidate should be chosen, as those who have any chance at being elected are essentially the same: each must subscribe to the status quo or stand aside in favor of someone who will. Each must tacitly agree that there is to be no substantial debate about economic policy, trade policy, military policy, or foreign policy, except at the margins – where that debate will, of course, have no substantial effect on underlying policy.
I truly doubt that the engineers of the Central Committee of the Soviet Communist Party could have wished for better: power concentrated in the hands of a small elite where all it needed to do to keep the populace placated was to give the rascals plenty of lottery tickets, reality programs, and to perpetuate the Big Lie that everything is just dandy.
My view is that a truly meaningful debate for our time would be along the lines of a post-mortem critique of democratic structures in our country. That way, we could identify what happened, and map out a path toward renewed hope.
Brian
