Nutshell history

I’m not too worried about the Wisconsin outcome. At one time I thought there was hope there for the beginning of the “uprising,” but that’s just a fond remembrance of the 1960’s, a time when the upper classes were caught off guard and didn’t quite know how to react. As I am fond of saying, all of American history from the early 1970’s forward can be summed up as a reaction to the 60’s. It scared the crap out of them. Even the saddest current legacy of this futnucking place, kids in hock up to their eyebrows with college debt, can be traced to the refuge that college campuses had become back then. Kids could go to college and walk away with the beginnings of a way through life and without a mountain of debt. No more. It gives them too damned much freedom.

Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is a combination of arrogance and stupidity. That he thinks himself so right when he’s so wrong is what makes him what he is – an idiot. But there are so many Scott Walkers around today in every state, in every race, that we just have to weather this storm. American politics is incredibly stupid on the Republican side, and soft in the belly on the Democratic side. Since both sides feed at the teat of the 1%, there is no hope in that system for immediate reprieve. We’ll have to live for a good long time with extreme wealth inequality, unending war and mountainous private debt. We’ll have to endure another crash or two, and defeat in these wars (they lost in Iraq and are losing in Afghanistan, very nice) before there’s any division among the owning classes about what kind of society we want. Out of that might come some inspired leadership, and some strength from popular movements.

Stop and think about it: The brand of economics that got us into our financial mess is accepted by “both” parties and taught on all our campuses. The ability to go to war against anyone at any time is a fixture since 9/11, apparently an inside job. The population is dumbed down, given no news in any meaningful sense, and only allowed the freedom to vote when voting is meaningless. (Even if voting had meaning, the advent of electronic tallying allows results to be altered, elections stolen. Had Wisconsin not been in the bag, it would have been stolen.) There is no freedom of speech, as Manning and Assange demonstrate. Government agents can disappear us at a moment’s notice, and the right to kill us is now enshrined in executive order.

The amazing thing, which I surely did not see coming, was that all of the gains of the extreme right (essentially an unrelenting march of fascism) that were achieved since 9/11 by the Bushies were made permanent under Obama. His administration has brought complete encirclement by the right wing, solidification of gains, and cleaning up of a mess here and there. He is part of the permanent right-wing majority.

Does this get you down? Yeah, me too. Can’t help it. But as a Cincinnati Reds fan, I know what it is to be down and see no prospects on the horizon. You just enjoy each individual game. A small victory here and there is fun, even if there is no pennant on the horizon. Military defeat for this country is a good thing, and more and more people realize that the idea of a 19-Arab 9/11 conspiracy was a joke. That last part is subterranean, like “killing Osama”, for which physical evidence is yet to be presented – enough people know this but don’t say anything, as they’ll be ridiculed. That sort of knowledge, shared but not spoken, can create sea change over the long haul. It will manifest in many ways, and maybe in my lifetime a major “news” outlet will acknowledge that 9/11 was an inside …. nah. Won’t happen. They still think Oswald killed JFK. It’s their job to be clueless, and damned they are good at their job!

I’ve long been enthralled by the events of the 1960’s – I was too young to have any sense of the flow of events over long periods of time back then, but something was in the air. It wasn’t Vietnam – the slaughter there was merely repeat of a similar massacre on the Korea peninsula in the early 50’s that generated no protests. The slaying of JFK in public had deep impact on the public psyche. But even before that, with the arrival of the Beatles and the ensuing mass hysteria, something was up. It was the boomers, a generation that had it relatively easy, had time to enjoy pursuits outside of sweat labor, had some money and access to college education when campuses were not so intellectually clamped down as they are now …

…returning vets told horror stories of atrocities in Indochina, and with the Beatles and other countercultural music, drugs entered the mainstream. The most important events that took place on campuses were not protests, which were nice, but rather “teach-ins”, which spread the word about Vietnam. In that spate of free expression rose a feminist movement, the maturity of a long-existent civil rights march, pacifism and environmentalism. It was a threat to (what we now call) the 1% that they had never seen before. In short order, RFK and MLK were gunned down, and Hubert Humphrey was crowned the Democratic nominee without ever having won a primary. There was a police riot in Chicago. The backlash had begun.

In the ensuing decades, unknown to the modern right-wing, the campuses were purged of rebellious professors, and military indoctrination began anew. The movie Top Gun was a sign that militarism was again on the rise. Between and 1975 and 1991, the US invaded Central America and Afghanistan (mostly by proxy), but these events were hardly known in the mainstream. The US supervised a near-genocidal attack on a little island called Timor, and both aided and excoriated Pol Pot as the Cambodian massacre of the 1970’s was completed. Then came the fall of the Soviets, and the rise of the unimpeded American Empire, the first strike on Iraq in 1991 wherein the “Vietnam Syndrome” was “whipped”, according to HW. Business as usual again …

But not quite. It was hard, took massive propaganda to justify attacks on other countries. Even little Kosovo required use of NATO, as the America public would not get behind the effort. Clinton wanted to invade Iraq in the late 1990’s, but the public would not get behind him, and he had to settle for a major bombing campaign without actual troops. Something had to be done … a new permanent enemy was need to replace Communism, and that required some grand mobilizing event, a new permanent enemy and a New Pearl Harbor … or Reischtag.