Via a friend on facebook, I think this is worth a long full read. It reminds me of Sam Harris’ take on moderate religious people, who, in taking religion off the discussion table, enable the unreasonable far religious right to continue. Only, on the caricaturization of the left, maybe we lefties are actively helping it along.
I don’t begrudge the “coffee movement” or the Stewart/Colbert rally their request for less shrillality - or their satire and humor about it. However, I do have the same worries as Hedges:
The American left is a phantom. It is conjured up by the right wing to tag Barack Obama as a socialist and used by the liberal class to justify its complacency and lethargy. It diverts attention from corporate power. It perpetuates the myth of a democratic system that is influenced by the votes of citizens, political platforms and the work of legislators.
By cartooning ourselves with humor, perhaps we are helping the far right continue the charade of “lefty radicals among us” even though they have no idea what the definition really is.
The loss of a radical left in American politics has been catastrophic. The left once harbored militant anarchist and communist labor unions, an independent, alternative press, social movements and politicians not tethered to corporate benefactors. But its disappearance, the result of long witch hunts for communists, post-industrialization and the silencing of those who did not sign on for the utopian vision of globalization, means that there is no counterforce to halt our slide into corporate neofeudalism. This harsh reality, however, is not palatable. So the corporations that control mass communications conjure up the phantom of a left. They blame the phantom for our debacle. And they get us to speak in absurdities.
Reasonableness in the face of annihilation (of the middle class, of our global climate, of science) is, essentially, rolling onto our backs and letting the loud shouters on the right step on our necks heads. We already know they are capable of it. “Do not go gentle into that goodnight” wrote Thomas. “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”
If we stop raging in some sort of capitulation to the “be nice, stop fighting” crowd, then we automatically lose. All of us. As Hedges puts it,
The two comics evoked the phantom left, as the liberal class always does, in defense of moderation, which might better be described as apathy. If the right wing is crazy and if the left wing is crazy, the argument goes, then we moderates will be reasonable. We will be nice. Exxon and Goldman Sachs, along with predatory banks and the arms industry, may be ripping the guts out of the country, our rights—including habeas corpus—may have been revoked, but don’t get mad. Don’t be shrill. Don’t be like the crazies on the left.
Moderate, in this country, appears to be a definition of “between the left and the right.” But actual moderate philosophy is quite different. It’s the public option in the health care bill - a total compromise from what is truly “left.” I don’t think you’ll get a single moderate to say we should defund public schools or ignore the problems of global climate change. And yet, when we on the left call for such things, fight for them, we’re called “shrill” by the people cartooning the debate.
I will admit the debate has been cartooned by unreasonable people. However, the unreasonableness is largely one-sided. Let’s call a spade a spade and please, finally, admit this fact.
And remember this: people are not inspired by a vision of moderation and reasonableness. They don’t go out and vote for it, no matter what they say to pollsters. They want leadership, vision, and a sense that the person they are voting for has conviction. And even that this leader will fight for these things.
One final thought:
The modern spectacle, as the theorist Guy Debord pointed out, is a potent tool for pacification and depoliticization. It is a “permanent opium war” which stupefies its viewers and disconnects them from the forces that control their lives.
In the movie Gladiator, Gracchus, a Senator of Rome, says of the tyrant Commodus, “I think he knows what Rome is. Rome is the mob. Conjure magic for them and they’ll be distracted. Take away their freedom and still they’ll roar. The beating heart of Rome is not the marble of the senate, it’s the sand of the coliseum. He’ll bring them death - and they will love him for it.”
Are we still the democratic United States of America? Or are we Rome? I think the jury’s still out on that one. There is coming to our nation a crossroads, one we have experienced in the past. Do we allow the rich so large a chunk of our economy (the greatest since 1928), or do we level the playing field for those not fortunate to be born to wealth? Do we try and salvage some semblance of our world ecology, or do we let global climate change play havoc with humanity in thirty years? Do we lead, or do we blindly follow our corporate masters who gut our freedoms - indeed, coopt them for themselves - while they keep us entertained and distracted by the death and glory of gladiators on the sand?
