Re: OT - No Way Home

mozark wrote:
> by Chris Floyd
>
>
> "How does it feel
> To be on your own
> With no direction home.."
> -- Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone"
>
> Let's be clear about one thing. Nothing that has happened in the past
> week -- the mass destruction in the Mississippi Delta, the
> obliteration of the city of New Orleans, the murderous abandonment of
> thousands of people to death, chaos and disease -- will change the
> Bush Administration or American politics at all. Not one whit. The
> Bush Administration will not reverse its brutal policies; its
> Congressional rubber-stamps will not revolt against the White House;
> the national Democrats will not suddenly grow a spine. There will be
> no real change, and the bitter corrosion of injustice, indifference
> and inhumanity that is consuming American society will go on as
> before.
>
> One proof of this can be found in the first polls coming out after the
> disaster, which show that around 45 percent of the American people
> approve of Bush's handling of the relief effort. It seems
> inconceivable that any sentient being could witness the agonizing
> results of the Bush team's dithering, dilatory response -- an agony
> played out in the full glare of non-stop media coverage -- and not
> come away with a sense of towering anger at this criminal
> incompetence. But it's obvious that nearly half the American people
> have now left the "reality-based community" altogether; they see only
> what they want to see, a world bathed in the hazy, golden nimbus of
> the Leader. The fact -- the undeniable truth -- that behind this
> carefully-concocted mirage lies nothing more than a steaming pile of
> rancid, rotting offal means nothing to these true believers. The Lie
> is better, the Lie is more comforting, the Lie lets them keep feeding
> on the suffering of others without guilt or shame.
>
> This painful split between obvious reality and popular perception is
> nothing new, of course. Today we look at old footage of Adolf Hitler
> and wonder how on earth such a pathetic and ludicrous creature could
> ever have commanded the adoration and obedience of tens of millions
> of people. Yet he did. As Eliot said, "Human kind cannot bear very
> much reality."
>
> The fact that a few conservative commentators and politicians are
> making mild criticisms of Bush means nothing. There has been much
> trumpeting of the remarks by David Brooks of the New York Times that
> Bush's manifest failures in the Delta -- coming after the debacle of
> the Iraq occupation, the torture revelations, etc. -- could be a
> "watershed" moment when the nation loses faith in its institutions, a
> situation Brooks likened to the 1970s. But even in making these
> comments on one hand, Brooks was taking them back with the other,
> saying clearly that he might "get over" his disappointment with Bush
> soon enough. Think of it: Brooks has watched people literally dying
> before his very eyes after being abandoned to their fate for days by
> Bush's criminal negligence - and he thinks he can "get over" that at
> some point, and give his full-throated approval to the Leader once
> again.
>
> This is the general mind-set (if you want to dignify the inch-deep
> shallowness of Brooks' intellect with the word "mind") of all the
> conservative critics: gosh, Bush really dropped the ball on this one!
> He'd better turn the PR thing around, or he might lose some of the
> "political capital" he needs to "advance his second-term agenda."
> That's it. That's as far as it goes.
>
> After all, they fully support the "agenda" -- more war, more tax
> cuts for the rich, more impunity for big corporations, more welfare
> for the oil barons, the coal barons, the nuke barons, more coddling
> of elite investors, more state power for Christian extremists, more
> media consolidation, more graft, more kickbacks, more easy money for
> greasy palms. And now that Karl Rove has finally figured out his
> response -- employing brazen lies to smear state and local officials
> -- you will very quickly see the conservative critics, especially in
> Congress, fall into lockstep with the porcine counselor's program.
>
>
> By the time Congress holds hearings into the disaster, they'll be
> singing love songs to the Leader; the hearings themselves will
> doubtless turn into a pageant of heroic tableaux -- glittering
> stories of the heroic federal effort to rescue the perishing, all of
> it driven by the calm and steady hand of the Commander-in-chief. Oh,
> there might be a scapegoat or two for the Congressmen to pummel with
> puff-cheeked righteous rage for the cameras. But anyone hoping for a
> fearless, presidency-shaking probe will be disappointed.
>
> Just as the media have always overhyped Bush's popularity, they are
> now overhyping the "political crisis" he is supposedly facing. There
> is no political crisis whatsoever, if by "political crisis" you mean
> something that will cause Bush to alter his politics or his policies.
> The war in Iraq will go on. The war against the poor will go on. The
> slow destruction of middle-class security and stability will go on.
> The long and ferocious rightwing campaign against the very idea of a
> "common good" will go on, unabated - perhaps even strengthened as it
> faces a backlash from the half of the American public that actually
> accepts the reality of what they saw in New Orleans and all along the
> ravaged Gulf Coast.
>
> This is what you must understand: Bush and his faction do not care if
> they have "the consent of the governed" or not. They are not
> interested in governing at all, in responding to the needs and
> desires and will of the people. They are only interested in ruling,
> in using the power of the state to force their radical agenda of
> elitist aggrandizement and ideological crankery on the nation, and on
> the world.
>
> They have a large, hard core of true believers who will countenance -
> even applaud - any crime, any corruption, any incompetence of the
> Leader and his minions. With this base, and with all three branches
> of government already in their hands, the Faction need only procure
> the reluctant support of just a small percentage of the rest of the
> population - through fearmongering, through smears and lies, and, as
> we saw in 2000 and 2004, through the manipulation of election results
> via politically connected voting-machine corporations and politically
> partisan election officials.
>
> None of this will change because of what happened in New Orleans. If
> these people could be touched by suffering and injustice, by death and
> destruction, by corruption and incompetence, then they would not be
> where they are today. If there was a viable opposition in the American
> Establishment to Bush's policies, it would have stood up long ago.
> Like the people left behind in New Orleans, we're all on our own -
> "with no direction home."
>
> How does it feel?

Great piece!


.

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