Tuesday, October 07, 2008

commuting

Been spending a lot my time at Saur's lately. We dont agree on much (definitely arent right now), but there's generally a good variety of opinions there, and everyone is fairly polite. Mixing it up is so much more fun than just preaching to the ether on my blog, so that's where you can find my latest writing. I'm better at reaction, anyway.

2 comments:

United We Lay said...

I like her blog, and we've been buddies a long time, but I'm fininding myself haveing an extremely difficult time dealing with people who are voting republ;ican these days. I listen to their opinions, I read what they write, but there are some really important things on which we will not agree, and when I believe that those things are fundamental human rights and they believe it's okay to make fun of me for that publically... I don't know. I just can't take them serously anymore, not matter how "good" of a person I thought they were. Can you be a good person if you deny someone a basic civil right? Can you be a good person if you don't believe that everyone should have equal access to health care? Can you be a good person if you really believe that we're doing the right thing in Iraq? Can you be a good person if you think automatic weapons are fine in the hands of criminals? These are the reasons why our country is so divided. The republicans think I'm a bad person for the things that I believe, and I think they are just the worst hypocrites on the face of the planet, right after Born Again Christians.

daveawayfromhome said...

Okay, this is a bit long, so long that I may turn it into an actual post. In the meantime...

I think that what's really going with the Republicans of this country is that they are starting to panic. They've been so sure that they were right about everything, and have been on the winning side for so long that to see everything they've fought for blowing up in their faces is making them kind of crazy, as everything they thought they knew is turning out to not perhaps be correct after all, and they dont know what to do as things spin out of their control. Did you follow the link I left at Saur's blog about how people can react when faced with a loss of "control". One way is a turning to superstitition (the religious revival of the 70's that led to the Moral Majority et al can be attributed to this), the other is a tendancy to see patterns where they are not (i.e., conspiracies, like Obama the Muslim Terrorist sleeper). The study found that when faced with a loss of the feeling of control, people would seek patterns in an effort to regain some power over their lives. Sometimes, this leads to seeing patterns where none exist. This is not exclusive to conservatives, and I think it goes a long way towards explaining the many 9-11 consipiracy nuts, also.

For me, the problem with conservatives in America today is not their opinions. Much of the time I can see their point, even if I dont agree with it, and can concede some validity to it. This goes for things like your gun issue, or things like abortion and the death penalty. And even when I dont agree with their positions, I recognize the need for conservatives; they provide the brakes on "progress", they are the voice that says "is this really a good idea?", kind of like the conscience of our society.
Or at least they did. Lately, they've moved from being our conscience to thinking they're our Masters, that somehow what they do is always right and those who disagree with them are always wrong. They have lost the ability, seemingly as a group, to see things in any terms other than black or white. This is not an exclussively Right-wing attitude, there are always people in any group that have this high-contrast perception, but the Republican Party has made a Virtue of their inflexibility. Much of the party has taken this intransigence as Creed, and now this inability to compromise is bearing the kind of fruit that such single-mindedness generally leads to.
And do not think that Republicans cannot see that their policies, built on their unshakeable, unbendable beliefs, are what have led to a collapse of our nation that can, so far, only be compared to the Great Depression. They are reacting now in a manner which is perfectly predictable for people who feel that they are unable to be mistaken about their policies, only their implimentation: They blame everyone and anyone but themselves. Some will never come out of it, they will deny, deny, deny, and become more and more intractable. The good ones, like Saur, will get over their shock, review their beliefs, and figure out what went wrong, both with their beliefs and with their leadership. Their core values will stay the same, but they will change a few things that just didnt work, and hopefully expand their grey areas.

Of course, all the above is in reference to the people who do the voting in the Republican Party. I give no such sympathy to their leadership. Republican leadership has been marked by a particularly cynical meanness, which I believe is to a large part to blame for the unbending attitudes of the party faithful. It's leaders have operated under the principle that their ideas and policies are not only absolutely correct, but that compromise is unthinkable, demonizing those who oppose them, often using religious beliefs to reinforce their authority and to paint those who disagree as potentially Evil. They have done this with a winner-take-all certainty which I can only compare to despots or Inquisitors, and they have done it all in a self-centered bid for power, power which they hold onto like small children who refuse to share their cookies.
In a dDemocracy, politics has always been about compromise, absolute rule is the stuff of tyrannies. Both sides want different things, neither one can have everything that they want, and so they horse-trade, giving up one thing to the other side in order to have their way on another, more important thing. But Republicans decided that they do not have to compromise, and have acted accordingly, making everything they "believe" in set in stone, unchangable as far they are concerned, and they've taken any loss as a personal affront. So instead of the give and take that politics in a free and honorable society ought to consist of, they've resorted to propaganda, political smears and pyhrric nuclear options. And after a decade of dominating the process almost totally, we now see what happens when one side of an arguement gets its way every time: wrack and ruin, and a concentric series of blunders unalloyed by any alternative viewpoints.
What's more, they have achieved these ends in a very deliberate manner, using their various bully pulpits, operatives in the media, political "advisors", and especially conservative think-tanks, where policies, strategies, and detailed plans for political battle are worked out, right down to key phrases whose repetition "make" them into "truth". It is a coordinated effort that I would describe as being far less like a bunch of wonks playing war-games than I would like a roomful of revolutionaries plotting a coup. I would be unsurprised to learn from a visiting time-traveller that organizations such as GOPAC were less think-tanks considering policy than they were conspiracies coordinating players in an effort to establish a permanent "majority" (like some sort of philisophical aparthied).

A healthy democratic society needs both Conservatives and Liberals, one to ensure that the society moves forward and makes changes, the other to make sure that the changes dont get out of control. Somehow, the Republican party became both of those things, making some fairly radical changes, in a massive program that treated their economic experiments as proven fact. Now we can all see where that has led. Some of us are panicking, some of us are stunned, and some of us are really pissed off.

Hopefully, we'll come out of this wiser, with a minimum of upheaval.
But I doubt it.
In fact, I'd question whether such an outcome would even be a good thing for America. Twenty years ago we had a small financial meltdown (not that it seemed small at the time), and came out of it with relatively little pain (that we were aware of, anyway - what could we have done with the money that we spent clearing up the S&L mess, without apparently learning one goddamn thing). Maybe we need a period of strife, poverty and, maybe, even bloodshed. As it is sometimes said, a burned hand teaches best, and in an age when money is just an abstract stuff that comes and goes through a piece of plastic, maybe we need a hard lesson on just what that magnetic-striped rectangle represents.