On With The Absurd
One can understand why Republicanism was not afraid to make for itself a tenet of total revolt, complete insubordination, of sabotage according to rule, and why it still expects nothing save from violence. The simplest Republican act consists of dashing down the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd.
Andre Breton was not talking about Republicanism, he was, in yet another of those manifestos he liked to write, describing Surrealism. But he had a point. We have arrived at a supremely absurd moment. One at which those who prefer the comforts of a practical life are about to be decidedly set upon by those who deal in idealist fantasy. Which means to say that most of us will be royally disgusted at what is about to transpire in Washington.
This is a moment of inflection. It is not a moment of reflection.
This is a moment when the radical violence of the right wing vision will either be resisted and turned back, or it will persist with its remaking of America. The plutocratic drive to concentrate wealth and to dismantle our social system will score another victory, or the majority will prevail and begin the long path back to a more equal society.
It is disheartening that this moment results from a prolonged campaign to convince us that we are in crisis. A fiscal crisis that is.
This is not true.
It is disturbing to hear so many people argue we are facing an insurmountable budget problem. We are not. Our debt is entirely manageable. Our deficits will melt away once we establish growth at a reasonable pace. Future generations will not somehow be swamped by a legacy of unpaid bills. Were such things likely then the debt created by the Second World war would have crushed the baby boom generation before it had a chance to indulge in its current complacency.
No. Our most pressing budgetary issue is health care. We suffer under the burden of the world’s least efficient health care system. It is indescribably riddled through with duplicative bureaucracies, ineffective incentives, misdirected spending, and really poor management. This problem looms in the middle distance. It is not a cause of our current discomfort.
That has a different cause. We suffer from a decline in democracy due to the overpowering of our politics by moneyed interests. The usurpation of our politics by the combination of corporate and individual plutocratic lobbying interests has undermined our ability to protect ourselves from the concentration of power and wealth within an elite whose goals are not ours. So policies are developed to cater to the narrow interests of the elite and not to the broader common good.
The American political system is built around compromise. It’s primary goal is to prevent the development of pure democracy. It is designed to stop the voice of the mass from drowning out that of a minority. Perversely this means we easily succumb to the will of an organized minority. It leads all too easily to fractured government in which a committed radical group can dictate policies that do enormous harm to the majority. In recent years this ability to hold the majority hostage has been enhanced by the exploitation of procedural tools such as the filibuster in the Senate.
For forty years the country has been driven ever further toward a right wing vision. When that vision failed to produce the desired results, its designers simply doubled down on their determination. So it is that we have seen more filibusters in the last few years than all the prior post-war decades combined. The goal was to create a dysfunction that could only be broken down by our capitulation to the agenda of the right.
The culmination of that dysfunction is the negotiation over the so-called ‘fiscal cliff’.
The cliff is an absurdity. It is absurd we are discussing hugely important policy matters within the shadow of an artificial timeframe. It is absurd we are discussing cutting social spending when it is not the cause of our woes. It is absurd that we imagine this to be anything other than a well contrived subversion of democracy. It is absurd we deign to converse with a group whose only goal is to destroy the social fabric that supports us all. So much is absurd in our current circumstances that the absurdity is itself absurd.
Most absurd of all is that the immediate fate of our economy hangs in the balance because our leadership could not reach agreement last year and so put a gun to its own head. Their ineptitude and callow action has put us all in the firing line when, and if, they pull the trigger.
And we thought the election produced a winner. We thought we had expressed our desires. We imagined that the 47% had overcome the plutocracy. No. That would be a democratic outcome. Not in America.
How absurd.
