Friday, October 02, 2009

Why isn't this obvious?

Please go read If the Russians Did This to Us, We’d Kill ‘Em by David Michael Green.

Here's part of it:

If the Russians had come here and done this -- if they had come and stolen our resources, if they come and enslaved our children into inescapable soul-numbing jobs, if they had left us with environmental degradation and a wrecked economy and destroyed education system and a crumbling infrastructure and a sieve-like healthcare regime -- if the Russians had come and done any or all of this, we would've risen up in anger and hostility and patriotism and nationalism, and we'd have loaded up our weapons and killed every last one of them.

But it wasn't the Russians that did it, it was our own overclass. And worse still, it was our own government acting as though they were protecting us from the evil bogeyman du jour, while in fact they were assisting the wealthy in bleeding us dry, until our anemia left us fit only for our profit-seeking hospitals.

Earlier, Green made this point:

...and not only are we not furious at them, we don't even notice the crime. Or, if we do notice, we're furious at some ridiculously inappropriate target, like a ‘liberal' president who isn't even remotely liberal.

All this seems so ridiculously obvious to me. I really don't get why it's so hard to see.

Now here's the part that really concerns me:

And yet, because he is being made out to be some sort of outrageously decadent liberal, and because Americans are too dim to figure out the ruse, this president -- who is failing to address the concerns of ordinary Americans, most especially because he's not working for them in the least -- is bound to fail, and is looking increasingly like the proud owner of a one-term presidency. And what we can expect in reaction to that failure -- ironically and disastrously and jaw-droppingly idiotically -- is a sharp turn to the right. When Obama fails, it will be framed, as it already is being, as some sort of grand failure of liberalism. In fact, of course, just the opposite is true. It's a grand success of the overclass's looting of America.


Go read the rest of it if you have time. It's worth it. I assure you.
~~~

1 comment:

  1. Ellie,
    I really appreciate your sensitivity to the plight of our country and our world. I am with you all the way. But what I have been wondering lately is why do the right wing ideologues always win the minds of the people? Is it really just because they have all the money, media, power, etc; or are we as progressives so tied into the system that we can't make a convincing case against it? I think we may have an identity crisis which the right wing does not seem to have.

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