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

    Voices

    By Barth on Sat, 10/17/2009 - 4:38pm |
    The forums created by modern technology allowing for the expressions of pain that some of us feel so often to be heard by those willing to listen provide for sort of an inexpensive therapy, and there is always the chance somebody will read what is posted and be motivated to do something good for us all. We are reaching the point, though, where those voices better start getting louder and louder because we are in real danger of destroying whatever it is that has connected us as a nation.

    Nothing less than our very system of government is at stake. We are watching the spectacle of a Congress beholden to the contributors who make possible their continued hold on office unable to respond to the call of a vast majority to reform health care, to protect our posterity from the doomsday path on which we have placed our nation and to regulate wizards of finance whose obsession with their self-interest have put the financial security and well being of the rest of us in permanent jeopardy. This is a recipe for disaster all by itself and placed side by side with the fact that we are no longer able to have civilized discourse over opposing views, the future looks bleak indeed. 



    I saw Regina Spektor at Radio City this week and will discourse in full on that spectacular event on my own blog sometime this weekend but without placing to much significance on it, the sight of so many young people sitting in rapt attention while a classically trained musician, sitting in front of string quartet, with a rock and roll drummer, all but cried in pain at "all the holocaust deniers" and the evil of hate and hatred gives some reason to hope for better future. But Regina also sings about "using your headphones to drown out your mind" and, as noted here before,this:

    Power to the people
    We don't want it
    We want pleasure
    And the T.V.s try to rape us
    And I guess that they're succeeding
    Now we're going to these meetings
    But we're not doin' any meetin'
    And we're trying to be faithful but we're cheatin', cheatin', cheatin'


    and so, as Regina knows better than most, we are on the precipice and it remains unclear which way we will go.

    There are other voices which are out there, of course. Many of them are expressed in the printed word on Daily Kos, TPM and other places where the devoted can tell one another that they are not alone. Others are on television. Bill Moyers and Rachel Maddow are out there teaching and cajoling and Keith Olbermann bared his soul a week or so back and repeated the whole thing last night to demand that our nation rise to the time at hand. If you haven't seen this, stop wasting time here and go watch it.

    But I remain forlorn and dubious about the capacity of the system at hand to respond to any crisis or, indeed, the problems which beset us. It is what President Carter was trying to express in what has come to be known as his "malaise speech." But his point, which might have been better expressed, but perhaps not, was well taken. My own inadequately expressed fears have been posted, among other places, here and here, but the point is that if we do not wake up and take responsibility for how poorly our government functions, we invite anarchy or worse.

    Yes, the failure to enact campaign finance reform is the primary villain, but as the Star Trek movies explained, once you have been assimilated you lose the ability to fight back, so it is hardly surprising that the forces who control would not allow the process which permits it to allow us to change it and to most people in this country, including the press, and bloggers even on progressive sites, find the subject to boring to even consider. That's how the Borg assimilates you on Star Trek whereupon resistance becomes futile.

    Here is the latest polling on the health care reform proposals, this one conducted for CBS News. Let's look at one specific question:

    Would you favor or oppose the government offering everyone a government-administered health insurance plan -- something like the Medicare coverage that people 65 and older get -- that would compete with private health insurance plans?"


    Favor 62 % 

    Oppose 31 % 

    Unsure 7 %



    John Chancellor once explained that the word "landslide" should only be applied where one side gets 60% of the vote. This polling, which reflects sort of a low point in public support of what some idiot decided we should call "the public option" establishes by that definition landslide support for it.

    Yet, Tim Phillips tells Rachel Maddow with a straight face, and backed by much of the press and broadcasters, that most of the public is against "Obamacare" and it is widely reported and said that "the public option is dead."

    This is playing with fire, folks. An unresponsive government acting on behalf of its benefactors instead of the people who vote cannot last long. It can last while people are sleeping---which they are---or while they are obsessed by cable driven foolishness about a helium balloon)---which they are, but then something happens and people wake up, though sometimes not for very long. (For the cable nets to rise up against a guy for fooling them, instead of asking themselves how they got so easily fooled is simply amazing.) I wonder if any other president will be reading books to schoolchildren while our nation is being attacked but I am not convinced it is impossible.

    Yes, there are voices. I heard Vin Scully a couple of times this week as the Dodgers march on. He is 81 years old now but sounds almost exactly as he did when he was 41, when I first heard him, or when he he was in his sixties, when he broke my heart by describing the "tying run and now the winning run" in 1986. And most importantly, he broadcasts alone and describes baseball in a prose poetry that is worth hearing even if one does not care what he is describing.

    That tells us again about the power of words. I heard a judge the other day, a man I have respected, blurble out some nonsensical explanation about why he could not find a politician guilty of a crime that nobody could reasonably believe he did not commit and I was deeply disappointed. It was not just that we have not advanced as far as I had thought, where a man could not attack a woman, even a person too timid to testify against him, and not face meaningful sanction simply because there is no witness to the event who can specifically recount the crime----as if murder could never be prosecuted because, after all, the victim is dead. More than that sad fact was that the language was mangled and reason set on its rear in order for the judge to explain his verdict. If the judge was some old unreconstructed fool, I could understand and hope for better days to come. That is not the case with this judge: a good man who just whiffed when he could have done something important.

    But Regina Spektor, once a little 9 1/2 year old girl leaving the land of her birth, the Mother Russia, to flee with her parents from the antisemitism which would have doomed her, to a country that spends as much time trying to rid itself of immigrants as it once welcomed them to our shores, but fortunately found room for Regina, tells us that things change. Take, for instance, "The Man of a Thousand Faces" who 

    used to go to his favorite bookstores
    And rip out his favorite pages
    And stuff them into his breast pockets
    And the moon to him was a stranger
    Now he sits down at the table
    Right next to the window
    And begins his quiet ascension
    Without anyone's sturdy instruction
    To a place where no religion
    Has found a path to our alikeness
    And eats a small lump of sugar
    And smiles at the moon like he knows her
    So, we keep going, with hope that we are slowly entering a new age of enlightenment where we, too, can smile at the moon like we know her.