The pictures out of London this week were startling. The cityscapes with a dozen fires raging in the background reminded one of the famous pictures of the Blitz, only this time, the villains weren’t from a foreign enemy, but from people within a society which had turned against itself. The photos from World War II were inspiring, calling to mind the defiance of evil which led the British peoples to victory over a powerful foe. The pictures this week are demoralizing, symbolizing as they do a society that has collapsed in on itself.
Worse yet were the remarks of elite commentators sitting in their lush broadcasting studios or their lavish offices in academic settings. This was all caused, they said, because the wealth of London wasn’t being equally parceled out. But the wealth of society has never been equally parceled out and the implication of their remarks was to excuse such behavior, because in modern Western parlance, a moral free “explanation” amounts to a justification.
On the radio, I heard a Labor MP attack the riots with heartfelt passion. The rioters, he said, were not just burning down chain stores; they were burning down small shops owned by their neighbors. But if a public official believes it to be a greater crime to burn down a local store than it is to burn down a chain store, then society has already lost. Criminal destruction is criminal destruction and if you discriminate against the victims, you have condoned the destruction.
On the internet, you can find a clip from a British television show where the Deputy Labor Party leader is debating the Conservative Education Minister, fatuously accusing him of creating the riot because budget restraints required him to cut back on tuition assistance. Although the Education Minister handled himself well, what can you say to a public official who seriously thinks that arsonists should be placated with subsidized college education or that someone so debased as to burn his own neighborhood belongs in college in the first place?
Who defends society these days? Who puts the interest of the nation at large over the desires of the special interests? The answer is damn few.
Everyone talks about the rights of citizenship, but no one talks about the duties and responsibilities. Republicans and Democrats don’t talk duties. They dangle competing carrots: do you want to keep more of your money by paying less taxes or do you want more goodies paid for by the “millionaires and billionaires” making more than $200,000 a year.
Both of these positions are a crock. For the Republicans, tax cuts are a declining issue. You can only reduce taxes so much and since only 50% of the tax paying public pays any taxes at all, that issue has been pretty much run into the ground. And that was before the monstrously wasteful boondoggle of a “stimulus package” made all future tax cuts impossible. Not that higher taxes will make the “rich” pay more, it will only increase their use of tax dodges and loopholes.
And the sort of tax increases the Democratic Party will tolerate anyway are modest: two and three percentage increases with plenty of new tax loopholes to exploit, as the tax hikes were under Bill Clinton. Ronald Reagan’s tax cuts just made it safe for the rich to be Democrats, who now rail against the “rich” even while they dominate that demographic. Obama outspent John McCain by an enormous amount in the 2008 elections and will probably outspend the GOP in 2012 as well. He carried 19 of the 20 richest Congressional Districts in the country. And why not? Not many of the “rich” these days have payrolls to meet or regulations to comply with. Today’s rich are the trial lawyers, the quick buck artists on Wall Street, the Hollywood types. Why not be a Democrat? There are always favors the government will grant you and regulations just reduce the amount of competition you will have to cope with. “Taxes are for little people,” to quote that late, great Democrat, Leona Helmsley.
But if the Republicans are fighting the other sides’ battle for them, the Democrats are just cynical. If they were really concerned with society at large, they would want to get the maximum bang for the tax buck. If that were the case, they wouldn’t have blocked Republican attempts to combat Medicare fraud in the recent debt ceiling Kabuki dance. They would be as outraged as Republicans are that 50% of all foreign aid money never leaves Washington, D.C., getting skimmed off by a handful of corporations run by retired government officials who get rich by taking the money from starving third world children. There is not enough money in all of the portfolios of all of the “millionaires and billionaires” in the country that would get us out of the jam they have put us in.
Like those “scientists” so concerned about global warming that they’re willing to run up an enormous carbon footprint spending the taxpayers’ money to fly to Bali for a conference cum vacation, the special interests have corrupted national discourse to such a degree that they confuse their own interests with the country’s. They hide behind the image of a unified society, even as they divide it in order to gain wealth.
We have fractured as a society because no one in authority wants to stand up for society at large. There are no Americans any more, we are all hyphenated Americans because that is how politicians, academics and the media choose to define us. Society is just some monolith which we are supposed to oppose.
But many of us don’t oppose it, because, whatever its flaws, the alternative – no unity at all – is far worse. This is the reason, not some sort of homophobia, why there is so much opposition to gay marriage or to gays openly serving in the military. Gayness has little to do with it. The military and the institution of marriage were two of the last remnants of a unified society, where the concept means the same thing to everyone in society and where everyone is subject to the same rules.
If you were married, you were subject to the same rules as everyone else, rich or poor, black or white. Not anymore. And gays have always served in the military, but they have always submitted to the concept embodied in “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Now you aren’t going to be a Marine, you’ll be a “gay Marine.” What is the damage with that? Maybe not much, maybe a lot, as a large majority of front line Marines thought in the same poll President Obama used to eliminate the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy. We won’t know for quite some time. But with both gay marriage and gays openly in the military, there are two more element of unity which will disappear in the country, one more area in which an adjective will have to be added to the description of who you are.
And at some point, we will begin to look like the Austrian - Hungarian Empire, where your ethnic identity or your aristocratic heritage or some other form of distinguishing characteristic took precedence over your country.
That’s when the fracturing begins in earnest.
That’s when mobs take to the streets.
That’s when overeducated fools look for explanations and excuses.
And that’s when society is fully and finally dead.
Thomas F. Berner
www.WeThePeopleBlog.net
comments@wethepeopleblog.net
