Am I Bitter? You Bet I Am!

I am proud of having once found myself making the observation that "the United States without New York City is basically Australia." Now that we have the election results in for the 2o10 mid-term elections, I may have to modify that--we are basically Australia even with New York City. Why is anyone surprised? Why all the musings and head-scratching by media commentators over how to explain the Republican wave and the success of the lunatic fringe Tea Party? That, my friends, is who we are. The U.S. has two cousins, the lasting inheritance of British colonialism, namely, South Africa and Australia. We are really more alike than most anyone will acknowledge: two former slave states and a continental island nation that still subjugates what it calls its aboriginal population. Prior to his death a short time ago, during a talk at the 92nd Street Y, the writer Norman Mailer was asked to account for the behavior of the American people during the Bush era. "Fifty percent of the American people are stupid," was his knee-jerk response. Well, with all due respect for Norman, I disagree. It's not about intelligence; it's about ingrained attitudes, what some proudly point to as "American exceptionalism."

Take a whirlwind tour through U.S. history and you will find that in the 221 years since our constitution was ratified, there have really been only two critical junctures--the Civil War and the Great Depression. Two instances when the country was basically forced into change. In both cases, capitalism was just barely saved from, in the first instance, the spread of a plantation, latifundia culture that would have left the country looking more like a banana republic than a modern nation state, and, in the second instance, the prospect of the country going either fascist or communist. In Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt, the nation produced two leaders who to this very day are vilified wholesale by American reactionaries as traitors to the true American spirit, yet both men saved America for its unique brand of capitalism. And, if one reflects a bit more deeply, what will also emerge from the effort is that the period of the Civil War and the New Deal were the single, singular episodes of anything resembling radical change in the landscape of the nation. Some may believe I am overlooking the tumult of the 1960s with its anti-war, civil and women's rights rebellions, but rebellions they were, distinct from the far deeper changes that took place in the mid-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The latter were martialed by two presidents; the one attempt at a electing a spiritual leader to oversee change in the 1960s, George McGovern, resulted in an historic landslide defeat. He lost every state but Massachusetts.

The bottom line? For all but two or three decades of its history, this country has been a bastion of laissez-faire capitalism and private ownership more resembling a plutocracy than a democracy. Its permanent status as such is carefully nurtured by a homegrown aristocracy pulling strings behind closed doors, fiercely dedicated to protecting its ever-growing hoard of wealth and privilege and taking full advantage of the availability of an almost endless resource of more visible troops among Southern racists, religious fundamentalists, orthdox Catholics, orthodox Jews, strivers and social climbers as well as virulently anti-communist, anti-socialist, anti-social democrat immigrants here to finally "make it." Unfortunately, they are not stupid. On the contrary, they are intelligent adherents to their doctrine, their gospel, of wealth and of the promise of privilege.

Still by far the richest nation on Earth, with its 14 trillion dollar annual GDP, equal to the sum of the GDPs of the next three richest economies, the much feared China as well as Japan's and Germany's, (the latter two still hosting huge U.S. military bases). Moreover, its influence far exceeds what mere numbers can reveal. The U.S. economy now serves as a model for the world's economies. Over the coming months, we will be treated to speeches from an endless series of Cassandras warning us about the dangers of deficits and national debt. Now, as recent big-spender Republican administrations have clearly demonstrated, Republicans have no problem with debts and deficits, so long, that is, as those funds are not expended on social programs. They will attempt to club to death the few remaining unions, (here, too, a contradiction, they loved unions in Poland under Lech Walesa), crowbar open the treasure chests of the few remaining pension funds, and go on a Klan raid of privatization, privatizing everything in their path--from prisons, to schools and libraries, to the military, to the very air we breathe. A pay-as-you-go and a dog-eat-dog universe, since they will also attempt to dry up the funds of all regulatory agencies, particularly the SEC, recently given new power--and a new budget--by our floundering would-be savior in the White House.

We got our short-lived consolation prize in the form of the young President Obama for enduring the eight years of outrages in the previous administration. Turns out it was just an apology note, but its perfume has already dissipated, and now we stuff the note in a drawer and resume business as usual. Good night, and God bless America.