The best thing about Republican bigotry is the ecstatic release it promises in hard times. Its technique is first to lacerate with horror, next to wallow in indignation, and last to raise its fist in triumph. That its specialty is lawful abuse, under colour of religious, patriotic scruple, gives deniability to the suicide it inflicts, the spousal abuse it shields, the substance abuse it propagates, and the infinite suppression it achieves of social progress. It's designed to keep the sharecropper class where it belongs, and it works. They exploit terror to promise dominance, and they get away with it in plain sight of their exploitation of their own constituents. Here they come again.
I think we should go out and meet it. The Party has been on a joyride of immunised hysteria since the campaign of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew in 1968. It worked, because times were hard. They lied; and led with praise of righteousness, to drive a 40-year stake through the heart of progress, called fear. Now they have destroyed the nation, and they want people to be frightened of making love? We shall see. 
I just read an editorial concerning the lack of social activism in the younger American generation. The main point was that staggering student loans and debt to the US government makes young people hesitant to speak up against the very people that have issued their loans. From what I understand, my parents generation did not graduate from college with the $25-100 K loans that my friends and I have. This made it easier to give "the man" the middle finger. Are freshly minted college grads hesitant to address governmental grievances for fear of shouldering their families with their debt should something happen? It seems that Greek, French, British, and Egyptian youth more closely resemble 20th century American collegiates, as tuition to their universities is markedly less than ours. Maybe this explains the much-televised protests in these countries?
ReplyDeleteThe editorial is without foundation. Insecurity is a classic inhibitor, and debt can give rise to insecurity; but if you'd bother to extrapolate 1970s dollars against the garbage you borrowed, you'd find your parents' generation to have been quite adequately encumbered, to the extent debt is relevant. If, however, you think your generation senses an intimidation in the paymaster class, against the exercise of your liberties, then you describe the closeting effect of any such calculation, which certainly would have applied to your parents' generation, and indeed quite loudly did, with Vice President Agnew specialising, when not accepting bribes, in inciting riot. I don't think we can impute quiescence to debt of this kind. The United States has undergone cultural change, an effect more of two solid generations of government by blatant cynicism than of personal hardship; and certainly the Right's exaltation of self-seeking has played very constructively into this transforming quality of leadership.
ReplyDeletea topic touched upon here often is privilege and its "'odd" effect. rather than seeing privilege as obligation it has been seen as entitlement. oddly the democracy we have aspired to has been obliterated by that entitlement-it has never been social entitlement to the impoverished- rather the aspiration to grasp reins of royalty we cast off. has that dream finally awakened to reality-there has to be an oppressed-in order to rule. though your assessment far surpasses my own-I can say we are on the same page. pgt
ReplyDeleteThank you for these reminders of the indispensability of a marginalised group. We are far from the only society to be stratified - and certainly are stratified much less than others, which are stratified traditionally - but we are unique, I think, in improvising a new group to despise, when we have assimilated the last one. This "immigrant" model breaks down, however, as we realise how non-conformists of ethnicity or dogma have been convenient whipping boys in all societies. What makes me very optimistic about the failure of this custom in the US, however, as regards lesbians and gay men, is their increasingly visible distribution and permeation of every sector of life, without the baggage of any ethnicity or dogma. But they will still have to lead; and I think the profession of a personal sensibility is constructive for all, for portraying their inevitable diversity.
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