It has been said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result. I would like to add another aspect to this which is that insanity is also doing and saying things for the absolute hell of it and expecting a good result. The United States of America seems to suffer from both of these forms of insanity all at once at the current moment in it's history. One doesn't have to look very far to see these two types of insanity at play since most everyone has access to a television or two. But it isn't enough to point out the obvious (that the country has gone mad), though it often helps to do so to people who manage to miss it or to cause it. The people who miss and cause it do so because they are swimming in it. It is all around them and they live it and breath it and eat it for breakfast without providing themselves the opportunity or the means to take the long view. Seeing as the long view is one of the main features of this blog I will take a swing at what I believe is going on.
It's hard for me to imagine someone taking an optimistic view on the present situation. Maybe I'm jaded but whenever someone declares him- or herself an optimist, I see a person in denial. One can be an optimist once one has taken a full accounting of the circumstances and sees bad outcomes as not only possible, but even likely, and then finding the best outcome from what is possible. It is only in this way that I can see myself as an optimist. But a survey of the political discourse in this country, the realm in which the two forms of insanity are made most public, shows me and many others that there is little reason to be optimistic.
Of recent events, the one most emblematic of the first form of insanity is the bail-out by the government of the banking system. Certainly, the banking system needed saving as we would be in the throes of the sequel to the Great Depression right at this moment. No elected official would have allowed that to happen if they could, though the right wing of the political spectrum talks as though they would indeed be willing to let that happen. But I digress. What this has become in practice thus far is to restore the same system that existed before the meltdown. Some reforms have been proposed but so far not much that will lead to the complete restructuring that would be in the offing if we had a responsive government. The attempt to modify the health care system falls into this catagory of insanity as well.
The second form of insanity manifests itself largely in the form of the popular media and right wing media in particular. For the sake of full disclosure, I am an ideological big government liberal, a disenchanted Democrat who is perhaps a former Democrat. I may even just be a democrat, one who believes that rule by the people is best and however that is realized is better than any alternative. The particulars are too many to go into here, but whenever a right wing screamer can call health care reform a Nazi scheme then this alone may suffice to say that any two words can be put together and made sensible to large numbers of people. But more seriously, it points to a true attempt by the right to undermine demonstrable reality for the purpose of destroying attempts at confronting a failing status quo.
The Grand Unified Cause (GUC) for the two forms of insanity spring from the same purpose. It is to keep the American power machine running for a little while longer. The stage we are in is retrenchment by the ones who benefit from the system, e.g. the bankers and the health insurance industry, to keep the system going. Necessarily, predictably, it will come at the expense of the citizenry as the pie grows smaller and the fraudulant practices by which our corporate elite generally operate are used to maintain the flawed growth model of our contemporary capitalist scheme.
I will return to this subject later. Next weeks post will be nonexistent, or will become the post of a week after that as I will be visiting my brother in Houston and drinking little amber beverages.
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