That Quarter

Madame M:

First, let me wish you and all mothers a great Mother’s Day!

Second, let me thank you for covering for me while overload was upon me.

There is as usual, entirely SO much that needs to be talked about in just the American landscape, let alone elsewhere, and that doesn’t even take into consideration all the points I need to address while you’ve had the soapbox solo the last three postings!  I will try mightily to restrain and focus in order that some faint measure of brevity can be attained!

To cover a bit of previous before addressing your recent post:  1) I was not aware we had been “struggling,” but maybe that’s the surest sign, lol, 2) if we had been, your “Digging For Answers” post came through and bulls-eyed it superbly (prime exhibit #1: “We ask people to live under impoverished conditions while pressing their faces up against the glass of wealth and privilege. Then we just can't imagine what all the anger is about”), 3) The “Digging For Answers” post needs to be taught nearly verbatim as part of a lesson in a university social science class, 4) Plan B, the book, listed some correctives to the disconnection that design of our American cities brings, 5) answer to your question:  Community Policing.  It has worked and does work better than anything when it is implemented earnestly (including when police and citizens sit down in relaxed and informal settings), and can work (and has worked in specific instances) in this large country precisely because law enforcement in America still retains large measures of de-centralization,  6) all efforts at law enforcement reform are made harder inside a plutocratic political-economy and widespread poverty, 7) how interesting that the worker bees you illustrate in your Rethink Community post, the cooperative engines of bee society, are female.

As to your post, I see we have swung the pendulum to full agreement, and I am sparked to add some things.

We the undiscerning, mindless robots of tragic failure, in order to perpetuate a more dysfunctional disunion, foment injustice, ensure domestic discontent, feed the devouring military-surveillance-fear-repression consortium, ignore the general Welfare, eviscerate the environment, and undermine the foundations of Liberty to ourselves and our descendants, do hereby disestablish preservation, protection, and defense of the Constitution of 1787 in favor of a vague and misty imaginary one we cannot articulate but still“know“ is being “threatened” by those we choose as ideological enemies.

I came up with that after reading your quite on-target “rant.”

Thomas Frank,  born in the heart of America in Kansas City, has chronicled very well the infuriating and frustrating phenomenon you/we relate.  In his books, The Wrecking Crew: How Conservatives Rule; Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right; and his most famous one, What’s The Matter With Kansas? How Conservatives Won the Heart of America, he details what has happened.  For those who have not yet read his books, just going to the Wikipedia entry on him will give you some quotes from them that can be instructive.

Kansas has, in the 10+ years since he wrote the book, become even a deeper example.  It has a governor and legislature so in tune with ideological extreme (and demonstrated failure) policy that Kansas has gone into economic and governmental dire straits.  And what was once an educational system that ranked in the top third in the nation has been shredded.

A plutocratic political-economy takes three broad groups, and that’s precisely what we have:  1) The enormously wealthy individuals and corporations.  These are the true rulers.  They are the plutocrats.  2) Their mouthpieces/shills/politicians and other paid or sponsored henchmen.  These are the otherwise “powerful” that have been purchased or forced through money and influence to make the system work for the plutocrats—and to gum it up so that it can’t work against them.  3) the emotionally manipulated (emotions—often false ones—of fear, disgruntlement, resentment, anxiety, greed, distrust, racial “preference,” religious “persecution,” etc.).  The unkind call these low-information voters “suckers” for voting against their economic and democratic interests, but there is no doubt they are vocal, demanding, organized—and they vote in droves.  In so doing they perpetuate the plutocracy.  And in the process do all—and more—of the insensible things you list. 

Including campaigning for Mike Huckabee, a man who, while he doesn’t believe in a minimum wage, believes in a MAXIMUM wage, a limit for those who are EARNING a living.  He, of course, being a shill for plutocrats, says nothing of maximum income.  No, no, no.  That would step on the strings of his puppeteers who thrive on carried interest, dividends, capital gains, and other unearned income.

But there is another catalyst in this plutocratic setup.  The apathetic, the distracted, the ill-informed, the uncritically thinking, the diversion-fanatics, the shallow, the willfully ignorant, the uncaring, the selfish, the overly apolitical, the self-indulgent, and even the despairing and the disgusted share a common trait.

They rarely show up to vote, and even then not consistently.  Or even to register.  And getting them to be engaged and retain focus on an issue is usually beyond their capacity.

Thereby giving excessive, destructive influence to the vocal, demanding, organized quarter of the population who arm and armor themselves to fight cultural wars while the real problems slowly devour all of us.

Hey three-quarters, are you listening?