[dropcap style=”font-size:100px; color:#992211;”]I[/dropcap]t appears that a great many people who self-identify as liberals have little concept of either the historical definition of the term or the history of liberalism in the U.S.
For example, tracing liberalism’s inception back to Charlemagne and up to the framers of the U.S. constitution, the liberal tradition has been to place property rights above human rights. (And I bet you believed that those landholding, powder wig-bedecked fobs known as the founding fathers felt infinity with and were devoted to bestowing freedom and political power on us rabble, now didn’t you?)
Apologists for U.S. Liberalism confuse leftist’s struggles against the predations and miseries concomitant to state capitalism with the intentions and agendas of the Liberal Class who display avidity for little else than protecting their own privilege, and who merely pose as advocates for the exploited and downtrodden, all as they act as operatives of the moneyed elite.[quote]The liberal tradition
has been to place property
rights above human rights[/quote]
A great many Teabag Party People come off sounding as if they are performing some kind of piss-take on what liberals believe rightwing nutters sound like. Only Fox News viewers could believe that corporate operative-created Obamacare was creeping socialism and only MSNBC/Daily Kos-consuming liberals would defend the corporate Trojan Horse bill as serving as a balm to the suffering.
Regarding the Republican barn burners of the U.S. Congress and their Know-Nothing Party, Teabag Party base, David Hare’s quotation of Rebecca West in his introduction to his play, The Secret Rapture, seems apropos:
“Only half of us is sane: only part of us loves . . . [desires] happiness, wants to die in peace . . . in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable . . . and wants to die in a catastrophe . . . and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.”
Because we, on a personal level, in most cases, choose the primary option, our hidden, shadow half can live out the latter on a collective basis. Empire gathers its élan vital from such bacchanals of blood. Individually, the atomized populace of empire attempts to mitigate alienation by a vicarious revelry in violence.
Collectively, in the manner of any mob, from the road rage and the carnage extant on soul-devoid US interstates to the phosphorous-poisoned flesh of the people of Fallujah and the humanitarian bombing of Libya, the mob finds its collective comfort zone in catastrophe.
Soil-salting, Republican Congressional search and destroy squadrons and their Teabagger homunculi are the empire’s human delivery system of The Second Law of Thermodynamics. Initially, appropriated as witless tools by the monied elite to preserve the status quo, but, by means of the Law of Unintended Consequences, their hidden half might well serve as the wrecking crew that reduces to rubble bankster/corporate imperium.[quote]They act as operatives
of the moneyed elite to
preserve the status quo[/quote]
The bit of dismal theatre known as the “looming” Debt Default Crises has been an exercise in the obvious, to all but the most ardent partisans.
Apropos: The zeal of Republican true believers for the peace that arrives with annihilation and of the duplicity of Democrats who have served as the more effective operatives of the neoliberal oligarchs in dismantling the U.S. social safety net and advancing the agendas of U.S. militarist empire building.
If Fox News, the Koch Brothers, the Tea Party, and congressional Republican kamikazes did not exist, the Democrats would have had to invent them. What could have been more convenient for the political class of the Democratic Party in obscuring their self-serving role in the rise of wealth inequity and the declining fortunes of the middle and labouring classes of the nation than the rancorous parade of spittle-frothing lunatics known as the modern conservative movement?
The crackbrained mindset of Teabaggers, Trucker Rally types, and Republican barn burners in general is the only thing that Democrats have going for them.
Apropos, it is a sad state of affairs when a political party’s defacto campaign slogan is: We serve the agendas of the One Percent and U.S. militarist imperium, only we give the appearance of doing so in a more sane fashion than our Republican (faux) rivals.
Illustration by Dan Booth (not to be reproduced without the illustrator’s prior permission)
Phil Rockstroh is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York City.
Yet a bio amounts to dharma for dimwits: It defines a human being in the same manner and degree of veracity as a restaurant menu describes the various slabs of meat offered … commodified things that were once living beings.
