Party Like It’s 1853
Today I read (h/t tpmmuckraker.com) that the whole, quite successful, smear campaign about “Mirandizing” the firecrotch bomber, a fake kerfuffle which didn’t surprise me at the time because it was so ordinary: unanimous, hypocritical, and of course, petulantly dredging up an old far-right grievance from the ’60′s; but it was actually a little unique, in that it was dreamed up and promulgated by none other than Tom Ridge and ol’ Dick Cheney in their clearly too-ample spare time. A substantial portion of the Republican old guard, you see, have dedicated the rest of their luxurious but unhappy lives to relitigating Watergate, and have had astonishing success at it. Why quit when you’re ahead?
But as so often happens with Republicans, as with dogs, is that everything you feed them they consider an appetizer. If you give them the 60′s, pretty soon they’ll be wanting the 50′s, back when Joe McCarthy came up with that neat name, “The Democrat Party,” and women and darkies were much more often reminded of their place. But now that we’ve given them that, too, and open racism, sexism, and homophobia have morphed into some beleaguered and fervently protected form of “free speech,” they want to go back to before that commie Theodore Roosevelt came up with the pernicious idea of taxing rich people at all, and worse, bossily not allowing, say, one large corporation to buy the whole planet, if it wanted to and the price was right, which it of course by then would be.
All this talk of the founders, then, is little more than a smokescreen to reach back as far as necessary for the least democratic and most elite-favoring policies one can find, and declare them Holy Writ. The Founders, after all, had no idea about income taxes, and indeed when they were finally enacted, they applied only to the rich; because at that time the rich alone could finance the whole government and a war, too, and most everyone else could only afford groceries. (Kind of like now…) The difference is that in the years since, and particularly over the last 40 years, the burden of financing the government has been steadily and relentlessly shifted downward, and the richest one percent were left with so much money they could go ahead and buy the government to keep such a providential arrangement going. Also, since they weren’t paying for it anymore, the rich could pick out a lot of fancy goals for the government to pursue for them, too. Unfortunately, such a gross misallocation of resources, over time, always ends up requiring a military dictatorship to maintain because, unlike a democratic government, they don’t have to put up with a lot of impertinent backtalk from the lower 99%. The new and improved policing, imprisonment, and torture regimes we’ve handily established will, at this rate, undoubtedly come in handy later, so you have to admire the bipartisan prescience behind that little idea. You see, the Founders would have obviously rejected that Magna Carta as kind of commie, too. Also.
A few years ago I was reading about the financial desperation of antebellum and gilded age “house museums” across the country, but especially in the South and the East; not enough tourists could support their enormous upkeep, and since the establishment of income taxes and the servant problem that accompanied it, Americans, until recently anyway, didn’t live in mansions with dozens, if not hundreds, of rooms and employ armies of servants to fuss over it all. As luck would have it, these mansions turned out to be pretty easy to sell to the Randian Rich in the mid-2000′s, and many desperate foundations were able to dump these places for many times their debt with nice checks from the new plutocrats, but some of them felt a little bit sad about it. One golden-parachuted curator told the NYT, “We’d just completed the rebuilding of the historic slave quarters.” I’m betting that feature ended up in the real estate ad, and probably helped sell the place more than the putting green did.
From here on out, the rich have found that the only big thing left to fix is the servant problem, and you have to admit they’ve got a surprisingly good start on that, too. I bet those historic slave quarters have filled up nicely.
so how do we get into the 1% group?
Can’t beat them, so try to join them….
Well, there’s an awful lot of wingnut welfare out there, Heel, even for white guys like yourself. Although it’s too late to write a book comparing liberals to fascists, smearing Anita Hill, or defending racism, I’m sure the folks at Regnery of HarperCollins could give you a few ideas, and set you up with a copywriter that’s a native English speaker….) You’re probably too smart to turn up on anyone’s short list of Presidential candidates, but that works, too, usually. (Maybe a couple more blows to the head from tipping over would put you on the yellow brick road to the top…. worth a try, anyway….)
The simple truth. It doesn’t take many pages to tell it. It takes even fewer to see what’s coming next, unless you’re as dumb as Sarah Palin, or as compromised as Barack Obama.
Inequality as Policy: The United States Since 1979
Ah, the “free market” at work. I think I wrote a post, “That Volcano Could Use Some More Virgins,” back in the early days of the Hag, talking about just the subject of that essay. Thanks, WT.
“Goodness me, Miss Betsy, do you reckon those rich boys that bought the plantation could fit three whole Mexican families in the old slave quarters that used to house a single man?”
“No harm in tryin’!”
Why wouldn’t ya? Especially now that they have LEED gold ratings?
Less jibber jabber, more guillotines! — something stinks.
Except, as we know, the Masses are utterly passive.
Well, all but the Palinite Multitudes who can afford the freight in Naish-vul to listen to their Little Bird chirp.
Of course, that passivity is conditioned into them, from thirty years — at least — of Reaganite “Freedom.” It’s a wonderful thing when you think about it.
Everybody knows they’re being used and abused and pillaged at will, but nobody at all has any idea what to do about it — except dismantle what remains of what used to stand in the way of the pillagers.
Yeah, that’s the ticket!
That’s what happens when public education is destroyed in the interests of preventing another revolt among the Educated Classes.
I often wonder whether people will one day wake up and realize that FOX and all the radio blowhards are a combination of Pravda and Big Brother. Probably never.
Any time I wonder similar things, I just watch this video, and it begins to make perverse sense again.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mKKKgua7wQk
Imagine the exploding head syndrome (EHS, or, “eh” as it’s popularly termed) this might generate:
Can it be? FoxNews “the most trusted foreign financed name in America”?
Yeah!!! Bumfight! I just love it when the righties have spats, and one of them actually tells the truth in their anger. I just read a story about FOX where one of their bimbos said, “We’re big on America here at FOX.” She must have been referring to her cup size.
Ah, yes. Leonard Cohen. One of my favorite Canadians.
so how do we get into the 1% group?
Can’t beat them, so try to join them….
“Behind evey great fortune, lies a great crime.”
– Honore de Balzac (supposedly)
Just have to think big enough , Heel .