The second step is to trump up reasons why the imaginary problem requires weakening the government's domestic capabilities, as with private school vouchers, or exerting unilateral force abroad, as with the Iraq invasion.
The third step is to make up stories explaining why the failure isn't really a failure.
The fourth and final step is to leave it to the Democrats to solve both the original problem and the new one created by the conservative policy.
How can any American believe in policies that, if followed, will leave the majority of their fellow citizens worse off than they started? Do they not, as author Naomi Klein reports being asked by a Swedish grad student visiting the United States, "have a belief that they are building a better world?"
That would depend upon what the definition of "better" is. As Klein writes as a part of her response to this pointed question, "The ideology in question holds that self-interest is the engine that drives society to its greatest heights."
She quotes Alan Greenspan's autobiography concerning the effect of Ayn Rand on Greenspan's views: "What she did...was to make me think why capitalism is not only efficient and practical, but also moral..." and to hell with those who don't benefit - like that poor slob in Florida who found Australian coins in his vending machines. It's extremely bad to affect the profitability of the large corporation, but I guess it's OK to rip off the working class entrepreneur, isn't it?
So what is one to think about those whose beliefs parallel Rand's and Greenspan's? Maybe BuzzFlash has the right description: "Right wingers aren't really conservative; they are radical wrecking crews." It's OK to pull down the pillars of the temple as long as those who are harmed are The Other, as in The Conservative Culture War. Author Paul Waldman describes this culture war as "a worldview that divides Us and Them." That makes it much easier to stifle moralistic qualms about "defending our way of life" which then allow those mindless amoral minions of the conservative side of The Conservative Culture War to ask the outrageous question, “Don’t you agree that several GIs killed each week is a small price to pay for the oil we need?”
One might direct this fool tool to have to ask this question directly of those who were wounded by members of the 57% of Iraqis (93% of Sunnis and 50% of Shia) who recently told BBC/ABC News pollsters that attacks on coalition forces are acceptable. These casualties might not take that question well, as they aren't yet being properly cared for at Walter Reed despite the disclosures of "systemic problems" at US military hospitals many months ago and the subsequent empty political promises to fix things. It's obviously more important by far for the American military to pay large bonuses to attract new recruits than it is to care for "he who has borne the battle" for domination and control of the world's petroleum supply.
Article comments
— go to most recent comments1 - Baritone
Realist,
You had a lot to say and said it pretty well. As a kind of reflection of your descriptions of what this country has become, what follows is a recounting of something my older brother told me just yesterday.
He is nearing 65 but unable to retire. In fact, he had been out of work for nearly 5 months when a job kind of popped up out of the blue.
He is now doing office scut work for a small insurance company. He is amazed at how regimented the work place is. The company has a small campus-like facility which includes its own parking lot, and 2 modest sized office buildings all enclosed with an iron fence taking up about a square block on the near north side of Indy.
My brother has to use a coded swipe card to enter the lot which is monitored by both a uniformed security guard and a number of cameras each having a corresponding view screen in one of the buildings, he's not sure which.
He also must present a personal photo ID to another guard to enter his building. He must also use it to enter a stairwell or an elevator and to enter certain areas in the building. There are a number of areas his pass will not allow him to enter. He has no access to the other building on the campus.
He has a cubicle in a large, open room amongst an additional 30 to 40 other such cubicles. The entire room is also constantly monitored via cameras. Each cubicle has a computer station - part of the company network. They are forbidden to even attempt to access the internet. All phone calls are monitored and recorded.
There is a company cafeteria on the ground level of his building, and employees are not required, but are encouraged to take their lunches there. They may purchase food provided by the contracted caterer, or they may brown bag their lunches, placing them in one of a couple of refrigerators provided adjacent to the cafeteria.
Any employees who choose to lunch off campus are required to sign out and back in reporting where they ate and any other stops they may have made.
This is not a large company. Their main product is short term health insurance to individuals making short or longer trips abroad - from week-end romps in Cancun to multi-year work assignments abroad for missionaries or people on assignments for corporate employers. As far as my brother knows, this company has no particular connection with any government entity or involvement with military or diplomatic affairs. Employees are informed that all of the security is a result of HIPAA regulations.
He says that everyone has been quite pleasant to him. He likes his immediate supervisor. But he says that the atmosphere in the place is rather like it is peopled by zombies or "Stepford" workers. There seems to be little tension in the place, but the few conversations he's had with his co-workers have informed him that they are all happy as clams to be working and at the core, deeply fearful of losing their jobs. About the only thing anyone there has asked of him is how he intends to "decorate" his cubicle.
Oddly, every morning his first task so far has been and remains sorting and stuffing into envelopes literally hundreds of letters printed overnight informing policy holders of their claims having been denied.
My brother says he has never worked anywhere where he felt so exposed and so constantly monitored. All things considered, I'd say that "Big Brother" is with us in spades.
Baritone
2 - Dave Nalle
You had a lot to say and said it pretty well.
You left out the fact that most of it was arrant idiocy.
But I did like your anecdote. Reminded me of the movie Office Space. Point being that the conditions you describe were already old enough to be a joke when that movie was made (the animated version)) 16 years ago. For that matter, you see offices like that depicted in early silent films where row after row of accountants work at their desks side by side like extensions of their adding machines.
This isn't something new. The highly regimented workplace has been around since the industrial revolution. It's not uncommon, but it's also not by any means any more common than it was a hundred years ago. It's just the way certain sorts of business like to operate. Technology has been put in service of the regimentation of the workplace, but before video cameras it would have been supervisors looking over your shoulder. Nothing new.
Dave
3 - Baritone
Dave,
Obviously, I don't agree with your characterization of Realist's piece. I think he pretty well nailed it. Perhaps he could be accused of being a bit shrill here and there, but that often goes with being really pissed off and a little frightened.
My brother has worked in a number of office environments over the years in a variety of capacities - from scut to manager. He chose the scut level now as he is at a point where he just needs an income to supplement his retirement and doesn't want a job that follows him home at night.
But he has never seen this level of employee control. It's not just the regimentation, but, as I noted, the level of surveilance. Have you ever had to account for your time during your lunch break? That and the rather strange demeanor of his fellow employees - the word lemming came up in his description.
The fact that this is not "new" doesn't make it good. It is symptomatic of the creeping erosion of our rights, mostly in the name of security.
B-tone
4 - Ruvy in Jerusalem
I've worked in such environments as Baritone describes - they were extant in 1989-90 when I worked for CDC in Bloomington. They weren't a joke for us. In fact there were a lot of unemployed P.H.D. types working there, Dr. Nalle. Comparatively, I was one of the ill educated ones, with only a bachelor's degree. And the tension was a lot higher there than for Baritone's brother - we were on projects, and each project involved kissing someone else's ass. And we never knew if after completing one project, we would be assigned to another.
I still have an ID card from the place that I kiped.
That is what is coming our way in all of our lives. Hell, don't believe me! Go watch the movie Zeitgeist. A lot of it is what I already knew, but it gets its point rather convincingly. And unfortunately, there is a great deal of truth in that movie.
BTW, Baritone, it is hits exactly the notes you'd view as on the money in its first third.... I never saw anyone take apart Christianity so thoroughly and effectively.
5 - Clavos
Since employment is at the pleasure of the employer, what your brother described to you, Baritone, is not only, as Dave pointed out not new (Lucille Ball's "Job Switching" [1952} and Charlie Chaplin's "Modern Times" [1936] both come to mind), it is also not in violation of anyone's rights. An employee who is not happy with the working conditions can always seek employment elsewhere.
Had you (or your brother) ever worked at a high level defense contractor, you would have seen even more stringent security measures; e.g., to the point of NOT being allowed off campus at lunch time.
One final point: "As ye sow, so shall ye reap."
Liberals created and pushed for the HIPAA legislation, certainly without realizing that one aspect of the fallout could result in what your brother describes.
As we pass more and more laws that "protect" the people, we give the government (and industry) ever more power to micro-manage our lives.
6 - troll
...I can understand why a KBR stockholder might call this 'arrant idiocy' - nothing like profiting from the construction of the infrastructure for our oppression...way to go
7 - Baritone
Clavos,
In a way, you missed my point. Many of the employees where my brother is working appear to be quite happy, but in that "Stepford" sort of way. Automatonish.
Problems in the work place go at least as far back as Dickens' accounts and the recounting of the horrors in turn of the century sweatshops, etc.
You share the black and white view of most conservatives that anyone can just quit and find another job. That might be a viable option for some, but not for most. Decently paying jobs, even in a good economy, are usually hard to come by. It is a highly condescending attitude to discount the difficulty most people face in day to day survival. Your view apparently is that such monitoring, regimentation and general erosion of personal privacy is the price one must pay, "and if they don't like it, get the hell out." That is precisely the attitude held by many of the early industrialists which ultimately gave rise to unions. Regardless of economic station, most people take umbrage at being used and abused. That's why Louis and Marie became, well, lite headed.
It has been shown in a variety of studies that such work conditions do not foster productivity. Look at the success of many of the Silicon Valley type companies which largely eschew regimentation. More often than not highly structured, constantly monitored work environments foster resentment and tension to a point that production becomes secondary and the quality of the work shoddy. Or, as in the case of my brother's work place, a kind of weird zombielike atmosphere prevails which may be in its way productive, but is, nonetheless, frightening in its possible consequences. It's not only USPS employees who go "postal."
B-tone
8 - Dave Nalle
...I can understand why a KBR stockholder might call this 'arrant idiocy' - nothing like profiting from the construction of the infrastructure for our oppression...way to go
Money doesn't have politics. They offered me about $6 a share to take KBR stock. How could I pass that up? To sacrifice my family's economic welfare for your tender political sensibilities seems like a non-starter.
Dave
9 - Clavos
You're right, B-Tone, I DID miss your point about the Stepford employees. I have virtually zero discomfort with them; if they're content, I see no problem, the problem lies with those who aren't content.
However, I think you got too hung up on my minor point about seeking other employment and didn't address my major one about creeping government (and industrial) intrusion into our lives, driven by our culture's insatiable (and unrealistic, IMO) desire to be "safe" by means of government regulation.
Your brother's company blames their security measures on HIPAA. I'm sure that's a convenient excuse for many of their practices, but I equally believe that at least some of their draconian rules ARE due to the equally draconian HIPAA legislation.
In any case, my point is the HIPAA laws enable (and even encourage) your brother's company to impose their work rules.
The ongoing (and accelerating) government intrusion into all our lives at all levels is, to me, the greater problem.
And we have brought it on ourselves and even clamor for it, as we incessantly demand that the government regulate danger in life out of existence.
By doing so, we open the door for, and even enable, a "Big Brother" (or in the popular term, Nanny) state.
10 - Doug Hunter
I understand now. Democracy only exists when the majority agrees with me, otherwise everyone else is a zombie or lemming or paid off by big oil.
11 - Cindy D
Ruvy,
I saw Zeitgeist. It is best described by an obsolete French word: phantasmagorie: art of creating supernatural illusions.
If you look at the filmmaker's Sources page, you will find:
A publisher that specializes in books on subjects like Atlantis, alien abductions, a special dragon bloodline--descendants of magical beings, etc. Ironically, they even have a separate section called "fiction."
I think the above references were for the astrology/religion part of the film.
So, I looked up a few of the authors cited on the other material. I looked at three and found:
1) A guy who thinks putting a news article on his web site (which actually exposes his obsessive mental illness) proves that the woman he became obsessed with was involved in "illegal covert operations".
2) A Lyndon LaRouche crackpot.
3) A proponent of a one-world government.
Then I stopped.
12 - Irene Wagner
Watch out, Realist. It's unpatriotic to criticize your government during war time.
Realist, you seem to be, rather than curling up and dying of despair JUST YET, casting about for some sort of inspiration. You've wisely eliminated as appropriate sources for that inspiration political Democrats AND the Conservative Right.
You are also appropriately suspicious of the American Church as a source of political truth.
For the last century, totalitarian-governments-in-the-making, recognizing in the church their single most powerful idealogical rival, will do one of two things:
1) Court the unsuspecting church as an ally early on using false assurances such as the ones Nazis gave to Niemoller. (This is the socialist totalitarian--e.g. Nazi and Neoconservative--approach.)
2)Eliminate the Church. This is the Communist totalitarian approach.
Religion is a way of going along to get along for some, Realist, but that wasn't what it meant for Martin Niemoller, once he understood that the Nazis had lied to him. He paid dearly for being fooled, but he paid even more dearly for protesting. (The article you linked to was actually written by a Jew who was acknowledging Niemoller's sacrifice, rather than condemning his accomodation.) Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a Lutheran pastor who was imprisoned, and eventually hanged, for his participation in the German Resistance, also refused to go along to get along. Christian belief also informed the political philosophy of the White Rose, an organization of German students actively resisting Nazism. They too lost their lives doing this.
Many a bully American pulpit has been paid for with faith based initiatives by neoconservatives. That's true. But the people accepting that money, in the main, were not people working for evil in the world. They were running homeless shelters and soup kitchens, and making significant lifestyle sacrifices to do so. As more people of that quality discover that the Neoconservatives are just another flavor of the evil they'd been working against, many of them will become the Bonhoeffers and Niemollers of the twenty-first century.
They may end up in the "Haliburton Hilton" before you do.
13 - Ruvy in Jerusalem
Cindy,
"That is what is coming our way in all of our lives. Hell, don't believe me! Go watch the movie Zeitgeist. A lot of it is what I already knew, but it gets its point rather convincingly. And unfortunately, there is a great deal of truth in that movie."
I didn't give the movie applause, except for the way it took apart Christianity. For the most part, I had been there, done that and bought the T-shirt...
Another point that I learned from that fat pig of a Jew-hater who did the hatchet job on Bush, Fahrenheit 9/11
When a skunk tells you about a river dam bursting upstream, get downwind if you don't like the stink of the skunk. Then grab your things and get moving! It doesn't matter how bad the skunk stinks. The river still will flood your house.
Your serve, madame....
14 - Ruvy in Jerusalem
Or should it be upwind of a skunk to avoid the stink? It's been a long time since I drove on an American highway....
15 - Clavos
You don't need an American highway to know which way the wind blows....
(apologies to Bobby Zimmerman)
16 - Christopher Rose
If a skunk tells you anything, go to the hospital or your doctor - you've overdosed!
17 - Irene Wagner
You wouldn't be able to RESIST inviting a Talking Skunk in for a tete-a-tete if he were a Talking Skunk "taking apart Christianity," Chrisopher Rose. C'mon. Prediction: The House that published "The God Delusion" will be coming out with a comic-book style "Junior" version featuring Skippy the Skeptical Skunk.
18 - Baritone
Skunks are people, too. If they have the intelligence to be skeptical, especially concerning the myth of god, then, hooray for them. They could provide good lessons for wide eyed impressionable kids who are all too often pushed into a "faith based" life without the advantage of the ability to understand what the hell is happening to them. It's tantamount to child abuse.
B-tone
19 - Irene Wagner
Baritone: "Skunks are people, too." Good one.
But you had to spoil the fun and levy a charge of CHILD ABUSE, didn't you?
A few weeks ago in BC, I tried to point out that that Richard Dawkins was suggesting that parents who passed on their faith to their children should have the right to parent those children taken away, as they were engaged in child abuse. People accused me of suggesting that Richard Dawkins had more influence on people than he had actually did.
So did you come up with that plan yourself, Baritone, or WAS it Richard Dawkins who helped you see the light?
20 - Irene Wagner
Getting back to Realist's scenario though, a dystopia where the government monitors and proscribes nearly every human activity...oh wait a minute, we're back on topic already. The criminalization of the practice of teaching one's children about God sounds fairly totalitarian to me.
21 - Baritone
Irene,
While I have read Dawkins, I have long felt that inuring the young into the church is wrong. They are shuttled down one path without the opportunity of knowing that there are, in fact, others they could follow, if given a choice.
Being a non-believer, I do find it troubling that children are blugeoned with religion, god and faith before they can think for themselves. Those who do eventually wake up and leave faith behind for a more rational life, often do so at a high emotional cost - often causing unrepairable rifts with family and friends.
It we taught children to fall down and pray to a Papa Smurf Pez dispenser, that would be considered perhaps emotional, and certainly intellectual abuse. Teaching the myth of ANY god as truth is no less ludicrous. We live in a nation of christian zombies.
B-tone
22 - Irene Wagner
Baritone: I hear you saying that passing on one's views to a child (understanding that a child under the age of eleven will take the parent's word as truth) on the origin of the universe, the meaning of life, the validity of ideas like Love and Discerning Right from Wrong, teaching them the traditions that may have been in the family for centuries, or were discovered by the parent in a positive life-changing way--all of these come under the rubric of child abuse.
Now how could we rephrase that idea of yours in kiddy language? In other words, how would Skippy the Skeptical Skunk have said the same thing?
***
I notice you haven't SPECIFICALLY said the practice of teaching children about God should be legally CODIFIED as child abuse. Is that because you actually believe it shouldn't be? Or because you do, but you can't actually bring yourself to come out and SAY IT?
23 - moonraven
I repeat:
It's about fucking time some of you started to wake up!
24 - Baritone
I'm awake, I'm awake, goddamn it! Leave me alone.
25 - moonraven
Yeah?
What are you DOING about your new-found awareness?!