The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age
    Barth's picture

    Governing

    By Barth on Sat, 02/12/2011 - 11:24am |

    Aren't you just a little bit jealous? Revolution is sweeping the middle east as those whose interests take a back seat to the oligarchs who have longed ruled the country got fed up. They collected together and forced change. What kind of change they have brought on remains to be seen, of course, and their road forward, with the secret prisons and beatings of those who oppose the ruling class---seen by the New York Times only a week ago----offer just a hint of how steep is the road ahead, but they are on it and have set a course for their country that recognizes the need to do something.

    Not here, though. No Tunisian shopkeeper will wake us up from our stupor, it seems. We remain quite in the free fall described here over a year ago. As Bob Herbert eloquently explained this morning and argued here over and over, unless we find a better way to finance our elections, our government will grow increasingly unresponsive to its citizens and that, as we have seen this week, is a recipe for the unpredictable to happen. As we know from having studied the Beatles, revolution always sounds like a better idea than it necessarily is. Just think of how the Constitution would read if it were drafted today and you will understand that point immediately.

    The Herbert column points to the obscene tax relief to those who should instead be helping their fellow citizens recover from the ditch to which we have been thrown, and the rants of your faithful blogger were directed at health care, but the disconnect between the public interest and what passes for political thought is not remotely issue specific. Gov Cuomo the First famously spoke about campaigning in poetry, but governing in prose, but this imagines that those who campaign can "govern" or participate in governing, or that they have any interest in doing so. It is hard to believe that they do.

    The best current example comes from the daily drumbeat, as our official unemployment rate is said to be 9.0% but known to be much, much higher, that the main issue facing the economy---the thing that government most urgently has to address, is the federal budget deficit. The Speaker of the House tells us that only "liberal economists" disagree and that it is time to follow the oracle John Ashbrook---he of the 9% vote when he challenged President Nixon's relection in the New Hampshire Republican primary in 1972. In fact, the Wall Street Journal and Washington Times insist, and Mourning Joe whines every morning, the success of government should be measured by how well they reduce the federal budget deficit.

    The Speaker knows the truth, though. It is not just liberal economists who tell us how absurd it is to reduce government spending during a recession. Even the financially illiterate, such as your blogger, know that if people will not spend money, the government has to or we all descend into a trough.

    There is no division of thought among those who consider the issue and not the politics. From the Economist magazine to Jamie Galbraith and everywhere in between the obvious is plain, based as much as on common sense as the Great Depression and the New Deal's embrace of John Maynard Keynes: that this is not the time for government to "tighten its belt".

    The disconnect between reality and our politics is huge. Watch the Sunday shows this week as they ruminate over the big, bad deficit with their knowing looks. You know what they are really saying as they run on as if they know something that nobody else does: here is our cover to cut "entitlements": the safety net erected by President Roosevelt to protect us all against the depredations of a cruel marketplace.

    With few of the advantages we have, the children of Egypt found a way to fight back. We can, too, but there is no sign that we will.

    Comments

    Consider the reason that you might not see Americans or Europeans rise up and revolt in the same manner is because the Egyptian and Tunisian revolutions were mainly about fear of the state, police state abuse of broad swaths of the population, reacting against totalitarianism, and not so much about economics or unemployment. Yes, the abuse affected the least powerful the most, but  they had the support of other classes because they also had fear of the state. There is a reason you see Neo-Cons quite happy in their support of both revolutions and that you do not see many anti-government types thinking those revolutions were a bad thing. If you were to see police in the U.S. regularly killing people for refusing to pay a bribe or for handing out political leaflets and not just getting away with it but continuing to enjoy enormous powers, or authorities continually fining and physically abusing small business persons and taking their tools away, doing everything they could to discourage them from trying to support themselves, then I have no doubt Americans would also rise up.

    Actually, if they do manage to set up democracies of some type, it's from this point forward that Egypt and Tunisia will be dealing with the type of problems that we have. They weren't before--then, the problems could all be blamed on the totalitarian state.


    by artappraiser on Sat, 02/12/2011 - 1:37pm

    I understand that, and, indeed, it is hard to compare our situation to theirs.  We have had enromus advantages, in natural resources, oceans separating us from the rest of the "western" world, and in the ability to sort of start our history over again when we became a republic after separating rom Britain. The basic stability we have enjoyed since then, even with a civil war, makes the need for radical change seem less essential.

    But what they accomplished is more than what we need to do, too.  I certainly do not advocate the overthrow of our government or repudiation of its constituional frameworks (plural because of the federal-state system of government we have).  But we need change---big change----on the level of the New Deal and we need it to happen soon, because the"tea party" represents just a sliver of the discontent in the failure of the political system to deal with what is out there.

    I have no answer, really.  FDR was able to do what was done because of the extreme nature of what had happened and the support from the general public for "action and action now."  I surely hope we can avoid those circumstances again, but the way the "stimulus" was whittled down to near uselessness in the early part of 2009 shows how far we have to go.


    by Barth on Sat, 02/12/2011 - 1:57pm

    Ok and did not mean to disparage all your points.

    It's just that I think the false equivalence I'm seeing all over offers not just zero answers but might lead to nihilism,  that the democracy they fought for is useless, that people with democracies don't own their own countries any more than in totalitarian countries. And actually, I am seeing this in some editorials coming from former SSR's with their own recent "revolutions," saying basically: you'll see, it's not as easy as you think it is. And of course it's in all the "what's the use, the international corporations own us all" arguments.

    The high expectations problem is always with us. Personally, I'd rather see people in the west learn something from the Egyptian's joy in simply getting rid of Mubarak. At this point, they don't know that his replacements will be any better, but they still see what they accomplished as a huge win.


    by artappraiser on Sat, 02/12/2011 - 2:23pm

    Yes, yes, yes.  I agree with every word.  What the Egyptians did was heroic, in every sense of the word and to deny that, with nihilism or what's the use, the ineterantional corporations own us all stuff is nothing more than a justification for laziness, or an expression of love for slogans over thought.  I have had quite a few arguments even in these supposed lefty pages ovet this issue.

    Nobody who watched what took over Europe in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and certainly nobody who was part of it would want a return to what was there, but yes, the alternative has its difficulties, too.  Nihilism is not the answer.  Quite the opposite is required.

    The musician whose poetry, songs and general being most moves me these days, Regina Spektor, is an emigre from the Soviet Union, who came here with her mother, father and brother when she was nine years old.  Some months ago, she was interviewed by Michael Specter (coincidence) of The New Yorker at its festival. Though she was so very young when she left, her insight into what Russia was and became really gets to the heart of all of this in observing that however important it was to overthrow the government that was there, doing so did not make eveything great, all by itself. There is just so much more that has to be done, but the Egyptians have started their process.  We can all hope they will do well by it, as, for instance, the Poles, the Czechs and the Hungarians surely have.

    Here's Regina at The New Yorker Festival, anyway, not singing, but describing Russia and the Soviet Union in a really interesting way:

     


    by Barth on Sat, 02/12/2011 - 5:23pm