Neil Young: “Oh Susannah”
Spite
If there be any, as I hope there be none,
That would lese [lose] both his eyes to lese his foe one,
Then fear I there be many, as the world go’th,
That would lese one eye to lese their foes both.John Heywood’s A Dialogue Conteynyng Prouerbes and Epigrammes, “Of Spite“
I have to say that I find the survival of Wisconsin’s Governor Walker bizarre. It’s not just a low-ish voter turnout. Essentially, a big chunk of the population chose to use their/our money to pay for the financial sectors’ destruction of the economy. Even more than that, they chose both to dismantle their main tool for protecting their economic interests– the union’s collective bargaining power– and accepted a higher degree of misery for the culture at large. It’s a classic case of “cutting off your nose to spite your face.” It’s impossible to say how bad– or, rather, how much worse– things will get but these defeats are not metaphors.
State employee unions are standard bearers everywhere, helping to keep wages high and benefits more generous for everyone. In an economy flooded with people needing work, the loss of collective bargaining will drive wages down and further shrink benefits. Less money, fewer people with healthcare, more poverty, everyone looses.That’s just the start of Walker’s agenda, which also includes radical cuts in Medicaid and education and generous grants and tax incentives for businesses. There’s little evidence that this sort of corporate welfare and worker “discipline” will stimulate any sort of economic growth.
As president Clinton has said, it’s sure to expand unemployment , slow economic growth, and “explode the debt when the economy recovers so the interest rates would be so high, nobody would be able to do anything.” Why do people make this choice? My guess is that the right-wing has succeeded in making cultural politics seem more real and important than material interests. It’s not the usual “abortion” and “guns” strategy, although that’s a part of it. Instead, they seem to have tapped into a kind of class resentment that pits rural voters (mostly white) against a more cosmopolitan (in other words, not only white) urban and suburban population. This is what Walker really meant by “divide and conquer.”
The Progressive Hawk
Memorial Day seems to have sent out a series of semantic echos, little stories that bounce around after the holiday and that offer a kind of gloss for the nationalistic pomp and circumstance. It’s a little creepy, frankly, because the ones that caught my attention all involved president Obama and election year military posturing. I’m not surprised at the president’s use of militarism to fight Romney but I am a little creeped out that his reelection campaign is rooting itself so deeply in celebrations of state sponsored violence.
Obama, as a recent New York Times article suggests, is using what we might call a “progressive” imperial rhetoric rooted in tropes of technological sophistication and personal responsibility and underwritten by a reactionary understanding of the Vietnam War. This isn’t Bush’s Hobby War, run secretly by Darth Cheney, with its crude spectacles and “shock and awe” slogans and sweeping, indiscriminate murder. Obama’s War is surgical and professional, over-seen by someone who thinks carefully about what he’d doing.
This started with the killing of Osama bin Laden, and then Lybia, but the campaign for “progressive” militarism is expanding, perhaps as the economy contracts. It’s myth all the way down, if not cynical falsification. The drones are no more surgical than the Patriot missiles of a previous era of militaristic rhetoric– this isn’t large-scale violence by that standard but it is hardly discriminate– and veterans were not spit on when they returned, despite the oft-repeated story . (See, “The Legend of the Spat-Upon Veteran.”)
There was a brief moment at the end of the Cold War when we had a chance of purging American liberalism of its militaristic fetish. There would still be imperialists calling for state sponsored violence, of course, but maybe we could dismantle some of their tools. Clinton was a start (but disappointing) and then 9-11 handed the Bush gang their chance. Obama, though, had what seemed like authentic anti-war credentials… We can hope its just the election but I have a feeling the hawkish progressive is going to have a long shelf life.
Doc Watson “Deep River Blues”