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When Political Ideology Morphs into Spiritual Death:
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"For a society served by partisan bickering and political spats, any disengagement from market-mediated principles and practices is consid¬ered a half-step from Communism."
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[A] broad mind [is] always in danger of becoming narrow. A nation may be ever so civilized and yet lack wisdom. Perhaps the worst havoc wrought by the George W. Bush era of unbridled neo-liberalism was dismantling all investments in the concept of a social safety net to safeguard deliberative democracy. The Bush gang established, with frightening ease and expedience, a revised order of thinking - where citizens could calculate the amount of support and sympathy a crisis and its victims deserved (the Iraq Invasion, for one), based on such spiritually dead criteria as ethnic orientation, national identity, religious affiliation, and political ideology. Thus, the count of Iraqi civilians caught in the crossfire lessened in value as time passed. But before Bush had come Herbert Hoover, Richard Nixon, and Ronald Reagan - masters of the Southern Strategy that swept clean all supplies of the Social State laid out by liberal (though far from faultless) leaders like FDR and LBJ. On domes¬tic (Fiscal Responsibility) and foreign slates (National Security), the sweeping quickened. Most memorable of Reagan's contributions to the dialogue of oppression is his 1976 triumphant fictional narrative of a "woman in Chicago" who with "80 names, 30 addresses, 12 Social Security cards ... [was] collecting veteran's benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands." [3] And in that instance, many who had once championed Welfare Assistance and Food Stamps as necessary in a society rife with economic inequality began losing touch with their humanity, effectively setting stage 20 years later for a Democrat president to celebrate "an historic opportunity to end welfare as we know it and transform our broken welfare system by promoting the fundamental values of work, responsibility, and family." [4] Reverend Jesse Jackson offered a counter-narrative in 1988 which fell largely on stuffed ears: "Most poor people are not lazy. They are not Black. They are not Brown. They are mostly White and female and young. But whether White, Black or Brown, a hungry baby's belly turned inside out is the same color - color it Pain, color it Hurt, color it Agony." [5] But Reagan and Clinton found common cause in stigmatizing poor single mothers whose sources of income had narrowed out to government handouts. One a conservative; the other a triangulator: both saw welfare-receiving citizens as unnecessary cargo burdening an already-sinking economic ship. And even President Obama seemed to find very little objection-worthy in this practice when he listed at a March 2009 Orange County town hall the prerequisites of a hard-worker: All I'm trying to do is restore some balance to our economy so that middle class families who are working hard - they're not on welfare, they're going to their jobs every day, they're doing the right things by their kids - should be able to save, buy a home, go on a vacation once in a while. [6] His 2008 presidential election rival, current Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, had gaffed her way into headlines a year earlier for suggesting Obama couldn't win support from "working, hard-working Americans - White Americans." [7] The trend is quite clear: a parallel drawn between assistance-accepting individuals and shiftlessness, with laser-like focus through a racialized prism. That White women form the largest group dependent on Welfare Assistance has hardly measured any difference to the many pundits, politicians, thinkers, and leaders - of both parties - who incessantly spew the lie that middle class Whites' hard-earned dollars mostly end up picking the tabs for Black and Brown crack-addicted single mothers. For decades now, this has been the uninterrupted chant, repeated and recycled by politicians short on policy substance. It has worked well in convincing many to go against the better angels of their nature which encourage help for the unprivileged and a hand-up to those crippled by poverty. After all, "we are, or try to be," as Gore Vidal reminds, "what our society wants us to be." [8] Suburban Whites especially have been rallied in rage against legislators uncommitted to cutting off, permanently, individuals and families dependent on government assistance - in deluded hope that this unconscionable act of Tough Love would force them out of their mobile homes into nonexistent job sectors. With the 2008 economic meltdown, however, many who once held steadfast to individualistic values of self-reliance soon realized how dispassionately and indis¬criminately the storms of homelessness can blow over even middle-class families' homes. It took a tragic event of epic magnitude, but finally the message found traction in the hearts of millions - millions described by The New York Times as "the new poor: people long accustomed to the comforts of middle-class life who are now relying on public assistance for the first time in their lives - potentially for years to come." [9] No one was safe anymore. Tent towns blew up fast as realistic alternatives to mass homelessness; thousands who never once begged for bread were found stranded in lines at soup kitchens; young college graduates scuttled back into their parents' basements to cut unnecessary costs; and every family monitoring the news knew at any moment their foreclosure bell could begin tolling. This fear-factored humility reminded many of another time, not quite a century ago, when the air was thick with want and need - The Great Depression. Thousands of men put out before daybreak, scouring the streets for jobs only a few months prior no one would insult them with offers for. Women who never before broke a sweat outside the home were, too, forced out in search of any opportunity to keep the ground still. The whole country had lost its character and self-worth, and Washington could foresee the effects which could still linger even after a potential recovery. With innovative initiatives like the Federal Writers' Project, an offshoot of the New Deal, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt sought to inspire in citizens the courage to examine the world for all its beastly and beautiful qualities: to dream beyond the visible to the imaginable: to work in establishing those dreams in the neighborhoods, cities, towns, and states within their reach. But, just as Barack Obama is starting to find out, for a society served by partisan bickering and political spats, any disengagement from market-mediated principles and practices is consid-ered a half-step from Communism. Though the Federal Writers' Project produced prodigious scribes like Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison, and Jim Thompson, doubt was raised regularly, by Democrat and Republican leaders, of the usefulness and social service of commissioning unlicensed writers to document towns down and out - more so without watchdog agencies to weed out unflattering observations or dissenting political pronouncements. FDR faced his share of Right-wing thuggery; and so did LBJ, who, for all his flaws, attempted to make more meaningful the promise of the social contract. Lyndon Johnson, three decades later, fell under similar scrutiny for suggesting greater compassion was critical if society should at all bridge the widening gap segregating the few rich from the most poor. A piece of legislation alone couldn't rectify the conditions people of color and the poor in general faced torment from; much had to be done on a structural and institutional – federal - level to protect and promote the dignity of the underclass. And thus the Great Society was proposed - a neocon's worst nightmare. *** On October 27, 1964, Reagan rejected any federal investments in the lives of every¬day folk as enabling "greater government activity in the affairs of the people" - thus, the logic leads, creating bads far outweighing goods. [10] The aim, of course, extended beyond producing good theater and sparring with the most visible political opponent; it also trivialized the notion that a citizen only legitimately became one when she took special time out to be concerned with the plights those less fortunate face daily. And, in such sense, any true citizen could never simply stay confined to one state, country, or continent, for as the poet and theologian John Donne admitted, Each man's death diminishes me, For I am involved in mankind. The implications bear out: if I take critically my responsibility as a citizen whose allegiance beats beyond national or regional borders, this should handicap all capacity for narcissism and antipathy, and any shedding of innocent blood should arouse in me burning passion to bring wrongdoers to justice and the at-risk to safety. If I took critically my responsibility as a world citizen, as a human being accountable to the suffering of those around me and far away (one who understands borders "turn whole peoples into prisoners in glorified camps" [11]), hardly can I "love oppressed people," as Cornel West writes, "and not be a fanatic for fairness." [12] "To strike a proper balance between citizenship and common purpose on the one hand, and communal autonomy and cultural variety on the other, is no simple matter," Noam Chomsky points out; "and questions of democratic control of insti¬tutions extend to other spheres of life as well." [13] Certainly many hard-Right con¬servatives and "Blue Dog" democrats disagree. They "want," instead, to "take" their "country back." And one of their intellectual icons repeatedly orders, in all but seditionist terms, that they do everything required to return to the "simpler times" [14] of the past - when the enemy wasn't hard to spot; when code-words like "Red" and "Black" and "Brown" and "Woman" self-explanatorily condemned groups as "other," "different," "outside," or "waste" [15]: times when Blacks knew, and stayed in, their place, and Whites didn't have to feel so threatened by the prospect of racial depopulation. Lyndon Johnson had eyes set on a greater front; he believed that for the Civil Rights Movement to gain ground substantively, the struggle for Black self-determination had to broaden to address moral dilemmas bearing national implications. Johnson saw the moment seasoned for blunt talk and straight speech, and on March 15, 1965, he delivered a riveting address to Congress, which shook the seats of both Democrat and Republican lawmakers. [16] In his most eloquent exhortation, Johnson, stern with purpose, betrayed his bias by adopting the anthem of the movement he was throwing great political weight behind - "We Shall Overcome." Johnson assured that even with a bill passed, the battle will not be over. What happened in Selma is part of a far larger movement which reaches into every section and State of America. It is the effort of American Negroes to secure for themselves the full blessings of American life. Their cause must be our cause, too, because it's not just Negroes, but really it's all of us, who must overcome the crippling legacy of bigotry and injustice. The election of Barack Obama, in large measure, was to pick up where Johnson left off, and render a fierce indictment of the fear-mongering plots presidential aspirants before him had successfully sold in place of policy promises. But those who toiled tirelessly to see this young, bright, charismatic figure assume the presidency now find it hard to believe he may lack the courage and candor to stand up to the thugs on the Right and their allies in his own party. The president, it is now painfully clear, once convinced himself Rush Limbaugh's brutish minions truly wished to work with him and make manifest the promises of bipartisanship. Worse than a costly conflation of enemy with adversary also appears the willingness to negotiate with some whose moral principles should stand completely conflicted with his - a rabid Right-wing, Ideology-driven opposition hell-bent on establishing an "utterly privatized and commodified society where corporations and markets define politics while matters of life and death are removed from ethical considerations, increasingly subject to cost-benefit analyses and the calculations of potential profit margins." [17] It counts as willful blindness to the suffering of the masses, prompted by Privilege-pressured guilt. Of course the sadistic irony wears a strange mask, for the Few Wealthy (top 1% controlling roughly 35% of nation's wealth) [18] have successfully convinced the Many Poor (50% of U.S. kids now dependent on food stamps) [19] of some mythical, shared struggle. And it's increasingly evident with those who would rather blather about how close (Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh tell them) the president's policies align with Socialism than discuss, and act on, the annual deaths of 45,000 lacking healthcare coverage. [20] It's just as evident with the tens of thousands more willing to rally against ill-defined terms like cap-and-trade than support meaningful legis¬lations hoping to protect the environment their kids would be forced to survive within. Wole Soyinka's reflections come to mind: Constantly immersed in the cumulative denigration of human sensibilities, only to have one's most pessimistic predilection topped again and again by new acts - or revelations - of the limitless depths to which the human mind can sink in its negative designs, one is tempted to declare simply that the world has now entered an irreversible state of global anomie. [21] These events betray a society tinkering on the brink of moral collapse, a civilization stepping into social schizophrenia. At this critical juncture, where very little anymore invokes a spirit of public or communal significance, one question raised two decades ago applies with even greater relevance: "[H]ow do we promote non-market values such as equality, justice, love, care and sacrifice in a society, culture, and world in which it is almost impossible to conceive of a non-capitalist alternative?" [22] The perpetual privatization of life - from medical needs to education fields - threatens to push humanity over an edge no amount of recovery can restore. At this rate, the value of life loses out to expendable prices subject to the laws of inflation and deflation, tumbling between the aisles of consumption and production: the rancid, Darwinistic individualism of the '90s swings back harder in a Market Society where those who can, do; and those who can't, die. And the biopoltics of corporate authori¬tarianism sweeps away from public recognition debris of wasteful lives lost in a world where wealth is worth and money is meaning. No society can survive such death-march to its grave. "What is at stake here," Henry Giroux explains, "is not just a struggle over authority and the production, distribution, and transformation of meaning, but also the equally important task of changing those forms of economic and political power that promote human suffering and exploitation." [23] "True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar," Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. taught. "It is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring." [24] Tolu Olorunda is a cultural critic and author of the newly released The Substance of Truth (Sense Publishers, September 2011). He can be reached at: Tolu.Olorunda@gmail.com.
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