Abortion
I don’t really believe that most people who vote Republican in this country support their awful policies. At least they don’t support most of their awful policies. I have friends and family members who will tell you that they believe in little regulation for business and low taxes for the rich so they can give us jobs, but I don’t think they’re married to those points of view. I think the things that make them tolerate economic policies that come from elite rich people are social issues. Things like gay marriage and abortion are the glue that hold working class religious conservatives in place in this conservative coalition.
If that glue were somehow removed, then I think we’ll see people moving toward third parties. Which would be good on two fronts:
1. It would create a more diverse environment in our legislatures.
2. It would also make our Presidential elections a lot more interesting.
More importantly it would expose the super rich for the disgusting, self-centered, dishonest, entitled assholes that they are. anything that gets the people of this country closer to supporting policies that solve problem regardless of ideology is probably something good. As it stands though, there are millions of people who are suckered into believing that it really matters what a candidate for office thinks about gay marriage, gays openly serving in the military, legalization of drugs or any other issue that politicians create to make things seem scarier than they really are. To be fair though, abortion is not an issue that can so easily be written off as the other issues that pulls conservative in line by inflaming their prejudices against things that other people are doing.
At its core the pro-life movement centers its understanding of the issue around the idea that life begins at conception, and that terminating a pregnancy is tantamount to murder. I don’t know that I would use the same language now that I did when I was still firmly planted in the conservative movement, but I have to say that I personally have issues with abortion. But I don’t think that making a medical procedure illegal is wise, either morally or with regard to its enforceability. It doesn’t make sense to tell women whose pregnancies may kill them that must carry a baby to term.
In fact this does not mesh well with the small government ideology that Republicans typically espouse, nor does it directly effect the economic policies of their party. The only reason that abortion has influenced public debate is because the pro-life voting bloc is large enough to merit the Republicans attention to make up for the fact that their policies are antithetical to the needs of poor, working and middle class people.
But who has time to think about economics when there are babies being murdered?
Another thing that needs to be taken into consideration is that criminalizing abortion doesn’t eliminate abortions or even fundamentally undercut the secondary issues that lead to abortions, like poverty and sexual assault. The carrot that is being dangled in front of the pro-life demographic in this country is keeping them from realizing that there are solutions to the secondary issues that lead to unwanted or unstable pregnancies. The problem is that right now they’re being encouraged to seek ideological responses to problems that are, in fact, solvable. And considering how well pro-lifers organize, these problems seem that much more solvable.
I think that taking the moral concerns of anyone with a legitimate case is of the utmost importance in a democratic society. And right now millions of our neighbors are being held hostage by people for whom they should not have to knock on doors. I would like to see my pro-life brothers and sister come to see that choice isn’t the antithesis to life.
Grace and Peace,
Jared
First time in nearly four months…
I haven’t taken any time to post here in a while, too much going on. Also, I didn’t take my computer with me to Vegas. So the one time in the last few months I would have been able to post something, I couldn’t. At any rate, I wanted to take some time to quickly review some books I’ve read recently and say a few things about the election and whatever else pops into my brain as I type. So here goes.
The Eliminationists by David Neiwert:
The history and explanation of what fascism is and has been is worth the price of the book. The author, David Neiwert, is a journalist with a background in home-grown fascists right here in the US of A. He covered the Patriot movement in the 1990s and is in this book to chronicle the transition from radicals to mainstream status that has taken place on the American Right. His chronicling of this is vague and gives the appearance that the case is merely anecdotal, rather than the systemic transformation of the way this country functions. Neiwert will reference something that Rush Limbaugh, Michelle Malkin or anyone in that crowd might say and then make point to how racist, ignorant or inflammatory it is. What he doesn’t do is really establish, in detail, the background of the extreme Right. If what we’re talking about is a fat guy saying ignorant racist nonsense, that could just be someone’s uncle. I think Neiwert assumes that everyone knows that many on the Right are either lying or just don’t know anything, but that isn’t the case. Understanding that Sean Hannity is a blow-hard and Glenn Beck is, at best, mentally challenged or, at worst, aware of what he’s saying, doesn’t keep their words out of people’s heads. In fact, what they do is capitalize on the anger, frustration and fear that are already out there to get better ratings. A winning strategy if what you’re aiming at is a better position for bargaining with sponsors, but a losing strategy for civility and the edification of the public. Listen to any of the big names in talk radio on nearly any issue of substance and you will hear war
While there are some dissatisfied elements to this book, Neiwert’s solution is right on the money. He encourages us, moderates and the Left, to engage the Right and not mock them. Knowing that there are good people with whom you disagree and tempering your beliefs to make room for them works to insulate everyone from the crisis in democracy that fascism needs to thrive.
American Gods by Neil Gaiman:
This is the Second of Gainman’s novels (third, if you count the one he co-wrote with Terry Pratchett) and I’m starting to get impressed. I really don’t want to give too much away, so this will be more of a synopsis than a review. Gaiman’s novel is set in a world where people carry their gods with them in their heads. That means that when they immigrate some place else, say the Americas, a new incarnation of that god will soon be with them. The difficulty is that this land is not particularly suited for gods. There must be something about this continent that causes men to periodically overthrow the sacred. Repeal and replace, if you will. So, now the old gods are going to have to fight against the new gods for their lives and there’s a man named Shadow caught in the middle of their fight.
It did occur to me, not long in to this novel that there wasn’t any reason that the old gods couldn’t just fade away, and no reason that the new gods couldn’t let that happen. Then I realized that these gods are our creation. So they’re petty, spiteful and constantly fearful; even and especially when that means they have to create that fear for themselves. In the end these deities are really just an image from which we should be able to learn. Because even if they’re not perfect, they can teach us something.
Blowback: The Cost and Consequences of American Empire by Chalmers Johnson:
The late Chalmers Johnson was one of the first to make a post 9/11 argument, before 9/11. I enjoy reading the people we should have listened to, ten years too late. Whether it’s Benjamin Barber or Chalmers Johnson, they mean that we may have hope because there are people who didn’t wait until everyone knew that bad policy was a bad idea.
Johnson’s book mainly serves as a primer in Cold War Policy roughly ten years after the end of the Cold War. What he wants people to know is that we should have been doing things differently, and now (the year 2000) we have a chance to create a lasting peace. Unfortunately, it didn’t take long after the publication of this book for all of that to come undone. Our Cold War policies did little more than to create an environment in which we could go from an expensive long-term excuse to spend money preparing to go to war in a “conventional” theater, to fighting an “unconvetntional” war. One name that came up in connection with the Kwangju massacre that was also in the news at roughly the same time I was reading this book, that of Richard Holbrook. I knew the name when I first read it, but to hear the man eulogized while I also learn that he was partially responsible for helping to sweep a dirty little secret under the rug of history left a bitter taste in my mouth. The warm sendoff that Holbrook received from the American news media is a sign to me that they are unwilling to work very hard to shed light on anything or anyone that won’t come across as sensational.
At any rate, Johnson chronicles the decades long accumulation of policies that have yielded the unintended consequences that the CIA dubbed “blowback”. Blowback is what happens when we put puppet leaders in place in countries we want to wield some influence over and then a violent coup or revolution puts our interests in jeopardy. Or when we fight a war for years because we can’t let a region of the world be “lost” to us. The actions of powerful nations has always yielded much more return than they intended, and certainly more than they wanted. Japan’s treatment of the Chinese people resulted in the Communist Party in China gaining legitimacy and eventually taking over the country. Now it must be our turn to seek to promote our interests at any cost, which is why Johnson refers to what the US does in the world as an empire.
You’ll have to read the book yourself to get the specific picture that Johnson paints, which is mostly of our involvement in East Asia. But, suffice it to say, 9/11 was the result of people in power (citizens and their elected representation) ignoring people like Chalmers Johnson.
Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War by Andrew Bacevich:
If Chalmers Johnson told us the “what” ten years ago, Andrew Bacevich tells us the “why”. From the Cold War to today, Bacevich argues, we have been told that we are dispensable to the freedom and peace of the world. The policies that have resulted from our catechesis at the hands of National Security “experts” has left us broke financially and overextended militarily. Overextended, that is, in spite of the fact that no single nation (or very possibly group of nations) is capable of posing a real threat to the existence of the United States. Nor have any been, even while the Soviet Union attempted to mirror our power projection throughout the world.
Americans were told that Cuba was a threat, when it wasn’t. That Communist regimes in Korea and Vietnam would have threatened us. And now we’re told that barely literate religious extremists in Afghanistan will be the end of this country if they aren’t dealt with. None of this is true and yet we are caught in the cycle of thinking that makes us a nation defined, in large part, by its wars. It almost wasn’t that way though. There was a time after Americans had accepted failure in Vietnam that the orthodox approach to foreign policy was being called into question. Even today it’s not uncommon to hear people of all stripes ask why it is deemed necessary that we even have such a large presence throughout the world. In fact I remember hearing some Ron Paul supporters and Tea Party folks saying just that at several different rallies over the last couple of years. But unfortunately mature foreign policy, or at least the ability to question conventional wisdom, are not the desired ends of furor being whipped up around conservatives. If anything right now their insistence on undermining good government means that they want to take the most draconian steps that they can conceive of to undermine any attempts the current administration may take to govern sanely.
Not that President Obama escapes Colonel Bacevich’s or my ire. His insistence that a group of barley literate insurgents in one of the poorest places in the world is staving off threats to the existence of this country is ludicrous, a campaign strategy come back to bite him in the ass. In stead of hastening the end of our military involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan, then Senator Obama decided that he would call the war no one was paying attention to, “a war of necessity.” Whether or not the President believes this is irrelevant, it’s his now. It’s possible that he can make it past all of this relatively unscathed. Maybe, like George W Bush he’ll lose popularity and then regain street cred with the partisans who will write his mythology. But if history is any indication, Democrats don’t do that as well as do Republicans. President Obama may very end up a long-haired malcontent roaming around his property for the rest of his life, trying to make amends for the things he didn’t believe in but did any way.
All of this is fun to think about, and yet it seems nothing can free the President, or anyone else in Washington, from the ideas that have permeated American foreign policy for the better part of a century now. Nothing, that is, but the American people. If we change the way we vote, change the way we think. Insist on a reinstatement of the Draft. Left us be neighbors together and not just people simultaneously ignoring one another. The real responsibility and blame, no matter how much we were lied to. The fact remains that we did not learn our lesson from Vietnam, we put ourselves through physical therapy and got back in the car drunk. No one wanted to believe we’d lost Vietnam anymore than the Germans wanted to believe that they’d lost in 1918. Actually that parallel is more apt than many think, as the alternative to losing for the Germans was betrayal by the Jews, et al and here it was liberals who betrayed our troops. But I digress.
We are the solution, and our prospects look grim.
Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Friend by Christopher Moore:
This is a fantastic novel. It’s funny, it’s human and it’s well written. Moore doesn’t seem to want to belittle or undermine Christianity or establish some new conception of the institution so much as he seems to want to peak a little Jesus’ humanity, in the hopes ( I think) of revealing something about our humanity. So in that regard his treatment shouldn’t be taken too seriously, as Jesus is merely the vehicle through which Moore is trying to teach us that love and compassion are dangerous. And in the end isn’t that what Jesus was doing all along?
Tear Down this Myth: How the Reagan Legacy Has Distorted Our Politics and Haunts Our Future by Will Bunch
A balanced budget, smaller federal government, honesty and transparency in government, strong military policies, a strong aversion to immigrants and overall fiscal responsibility. These are the things I grew up hearing were the things left behind by the fortieth President of the United States. Unfortunately, as I grew up I learned that they were all bullshit. To be fair, they make for good rhetoric, and it is nice to remember the people we like as being like us. Liberals do it with JFK, a President who accomplished nowhere near what people ascribe to him.
Conservatives wanted their chance to make a myth. Lincoln screwed everything up by exerting too much federal power over the all-important states. And who else were they going to look to Hoover, Nixon, Bush 43; losers. Everyone already liked Eisenhower, and you can’t get energized over someone who only governed responsible and then left. All that was left was Reagan. So in the early 90s a campaign began to recreate Reagan in the image of Grover Norquist, or whoever else it took to get a Republican elected. And that’s what Will Bunch’s book is all about, the distortion of history for political gain.
In all honesty Will Bunch is not too critical of Ronald Reagan, at least not in the way that liberals are “supposed” to these days. In fact, I think that this book is intended to take away one of the tools that Reagan’s myth makers rely on as a sign of success for the false narrative that they have crafted for a man silent in the public sphere almost as soon as he left office. The tool I’m referring to is the anger of liberals that fuels pro-Reagan rhetoric because it makes conservatives feel validated to hear liberals malign them and someone they believe to share their values. Bunch sees that the architects of Reagan’s legacy are attempting to take advantage of the fact that ideology can sometimes rewrite history from two sides. For instance, on the issue of tax cuts, conservatives believe that Ronald Reagan only cut taxes and the response that comes from liberals has been to say that this devotion to tax cuts is what made him a bad President. The same thing happens when conservatives are told that Reagan shrank the federal government, which is untrue. But still the fight rages over these artificial facts. Bunch is bringing to light a Reagan who compromised and didn’t get everything he said he wanted. A man who spoke rhetorically in a way that was vastly different from the way he governed. I think this book puts the lie to the idea floating around out there right now that people are more conservative or more liberal than they have been in the past. It’s easy to look back and see that people were more reasonable in the past, but only when the standard against which they are judged is your ideology.
Now, in closing, I’d like to throw my $.02 into the fray over the recent election. The Tea Party movement is a ruse. I don’t think that there have been any significant shifts in ideology in this country in the two years and I think that the current strategy being used by the Republicans, if properly rebutted, will serve as more of a liability in 2012 than it will anything else. The shelf-life on astroturf movements is quite short and conservatives really should wake up to the possibility that they will not be able to sustain the level of nonsense they have been since 2008. Also, reports of the President’s demise have been greatly exaggerated. And I do mean greatly. Not only is he getting some version of nearly everything he wants, but I think his opponents are misjudging the fight that they’re in.
In 2008 it was clear to Republicans that the country was done with them. So, in early 2009 Republican operatives, their organizations and their wealthy backers began to design a way for Republicans to win some power back in Washington. So in comes the Tea Party in February of 2009. Now, I’m not sure if there was initially some grass-roots legitimacy to the Tea Party movement, that was soon squashed by the interests of wealthy individuals and corporate backers or if it was always bullshit. In fact it really doesn’t matter, the movement is illegitimate and its numbers are, in my opinion, greatly overestimated. The term populist comes up again and again in reference to these people, but that term is inappropriate on nearly every level. The last real iteration of the populist movement in this country came in the Populist Party, a movement based in the anger and frustration of agricultural communities caused by the low prices that they were forced to sell their crops at and the high costs of transporting them by rails. Ultimately this specific movement failed and was folded into the Democratic Party. But then again, the prophet Zinn said, “…where a threatening mass movement developed, the two-party system stood ready to send out one of its columns to surround that movement and drain it of vitality.” The interesting this about a group like the Tea Party is that stand ready-made to be gobbled up by these interests and shit out the other end to just be another source of stinking talking points to fill the public’s nostrils, what with its desire to see weaker government regulations, lower taxes and more reliance on “private solutions” to problems.
Most of the talk of the Tea Party comes from people who don’t understand the public, and want desperately to do so, or by people who are ideologically driven to propagate their message. The problem with this is that when one group of people is talking really loudly in favor of something and another group is looking for something to say about anything, it’s easy to see how the second group could be overpowered by the first. So what we’re seeing now is the aftermath of a concerted effort to make a small, corporate backed movement seem bigger and more popularly driven than it is. And in that aftermath everyone is acting like a movement of questionable origins is a testament to the power of democracy triumphing over special interests. In many ways it’s like a sitcom plot where someone creates a person, has to kill them off and then has to watch everyone else act like they knew that person. They did it on M*A*S*H* and Seinfeld, now they’re doing it on Fox News.
When the Republicans took back the majority in the House of Representatives, they talked about it as though they were back on America’s good side, but they’re not. They’ve merely benefitted from an apathetic public and a bullshit populist movement that acted as a smokescreen for more than a decade of corruption and criminal malfeasance coupled with a strict regime of deregulation and lower regulation resulting in record deficits, a recession and armies of lobbyists in our nation’s capital, undermining our very ability act as a public.
Grace and Peace,
Jared
