BattleStar Democrita seeking Mythical Core Values
01/26/08
The notion of "America's Core Values" haunts our society in a manner not unlike the frantic crew of Battlestar
Galactica hunting for the rumored Edenesque "Planet Earth. "
Some of us voice the yearning but most do not register feelings until someone in prominence - this cycle it's
Obama - touches that tender nerve of idealism. Obama seems to be the only candidate who has offered anything that looks like
a return to that mythical blend of tough self-sustained idealism combined with Nightingale compassion and Lincoln equality
that supposedly composes "America's core values."
Yes yes ... baseball, Mom and apple pie are internally reinforced images, but they constitute merely the gate
to the family homestead. The homestead itself is where the house, the property and the family members sustain themselves by
mutual trusting dependence on a value system based on love, tolerance, economic equality, industry and opportunity.
That homestead has never existed in this country.
However, as an internal visualization, it has driven the grandest, most successful and most popular events,
changes, adjustments, creations and repentances that we've seen in our history.
That idealized homestead never included a unanimous endorsement of supposed free-market economics. It never
included subordination of individual rights and freedoms to the priorities of corporate dominance and certainly did not include
evolution of the government into a source of camouflaged corporate welfare.
In that regard, a pure and successful free-market society has never existed, has never proven itself a successful
nor universally beneficial system for public well-being.
When pondered and considered honestly; when valued for what they truly represent, our mythical core values
reflect the undeniable rebuttal to politicians who declare that government should be run as a business.
At best, that notion reflects a very narrow view of economic reality in this country and is perhaps best exemplified
by the candidacy of Mitt Romney.
Romney typifies most politicians who have come to equate their personal financial success as a blend of entrepreneurial
wisdom fortified by civic understanding of the laws of economics which somehow generate a natural entrepreneurial compassion
for the less successful.
Most of these prominent megaphones want you to believe that justice for all is found on the back of a dollar
bill more so than in any Constitution.
We seem to hear this nonsense more from conservatives and/or the Republican Party who have for the last 50
years portrayed themselves as economically wise fiscal conservatives.
In reality, once unleashed by their political successes beginning in the 1990's, with great fanfare they put
on the Mitre of reform and picked up the Scepter of change to affect a "fiscally responsible makeover " that in reality represents
today's most powerful contemporary economic embarrassments.
For example we saw a welfare reform in the 1990's that has only marginally resolved even half the problems
of poverty in this country. We also saw a rebuttal of the Clinton presidency's attempt to address national health care inadequacies.
Resistance to the Clinton efforts was foolish, ideological, partisan and primarily greed-based. These were un-American refusals
to reform or change health coverage in this country.
We saw how the "fiscally responsible" party of change actually changed many American core value freedoms into
unprotected vulnerabilities subject to the whims and greed of corporate capitalism.
These same fiscal hypocrites continue to campaign as if they were successful self-made representatives of
a mythical American Dream available to all voters.
In this state, we have a candidate who has already commenced his sniping at the incumbent governor, implying
that as an unverified business success, he somehow knows that the individual citizens in our state will be better off once
he pretends to run the state like a real estate agency.
Republicans have never satisfactorily explained at a national or state level how running the government as
a business specifically benefits and protects the physical and economic well-being of the majority of citizens.
One simple example is that any effective business will look at its bottom line and look for ways to refuse
to spend money as a means of generating greater profits. They HAVE to look for ways to say No.
What does a government do with "greater profits" created from denials and refusals to spend on the social
infrastructure that supports and protects all citizens?
Are refusals to expend funds to the needy or most vulnerable in the name of "fiscal responsibility wise and
good public policy?
If not the citizens, then who are the shareholders to whom government business-runners owe their highest allegiance?
What is to be done with those profits generated by an elected government run as if it were the same sociopathic
"person" based on self-interest inherent in the non-human entity in this country known as a "corporation?"
Having taken some whacks at Republicans, I'm not about to imply that even a victorious Democrat like Obama
would be able or even willing to reverse many of the legislated mistakes of the past 20 years in this country.
It is obvious to those who are not blinded by partisan advocacies that neither party's victories in the future
will guarantee any movement for genuine reform unless among those victories a specific mandate is included. It must be a mandate
that reflects the will of the people; a mandate opposed to bought-and-paid-for civic policies enacted at the behest of monied
lobbyists.
Voters must simultaneously have opportunity or means of formalizing a mandate to remove, severely restrict
or equalize the playing field when it comes to lobbying our representatives for change. We need to intervene and force
corporate lobbyists out of our elected official's waiting rooms.
In this regard, any pretend apologetics from Hilary or other candidates trying to justify accepting corporate
donations is worthless.
Read this blog and others like it and you will frequently encounter an almost mindless and tragically
immature assumption - rarely expressed but always the basis of attitudinal and tactical thinking - that pragmatism usurps
any desire or commitment to an ideal.
Partisan activists who consider themselves wise and who are intimately involved in the campaigns of their
most beloved candidates almost always belittle ideal thinking. They use the chestnut that you have to play the game in its
forever-deteriorating manner in order to win power.
Only then - once in power - can the victor look up the core values even he/she have probably forgotten and
restore America to its mythical former glory.
Such thinking neither proves nor wins anything but individual personal advocacy duels. It also demonstrates
and reveals a cynicism that fuels the ever-increasing loss of a civic appreciation for how things work in this country.
That's why too many of us - and I mean this literally - are too stupid to see through political tactics generated
by polls and political consultants.
Candidates wearing real or memorized earphone prompters so as to conceal their inability to think on their
feet and give genuinely honest answers are not the candidates who believe in America's Core Values.
We're losing our trust in whatever the Mythical American Core Values ever were. Nothing is taking the place
of that trust except perhaps cynicism and an ever deepening self-absorbed behavioral pattern; a pattern that only underlines
what historians will eventually describe as the reason for the fall.
A future mythology may be only a speculation about an American Dream once believed to exist.
