And then there are the things we probably didn’t need to think about, but it’s America, so setting the obvious point aside, yes, there are scarier things in the world, and risk is choice, you know?
And, no, there is nothing about The Beatles that actually goes here. I just needed a title, and Macca mewling over Mother Mary happened to be the first thing to mind that didn’t involve the proverbial bleach and eyeballs.
One of the curious things about the American political discourse is that two roads running in fairly opposite directions are somehow expected to meet up again after some mysterious number of miles have passed.
Consider it in other terms. A job interview? Why would you hire the candidate who says the job he’s applying for is useless and can do no good?
A product salesman? Would you really buy the product if the salesman insisted that it didn’t work and wasn’t worth the money?
I think of Homer Simpson: “I kicked a giant mouse in the butt! Do I have to draw you a diagram?” That is to say, it shouldn’t require a cartoon to help people figure this out. Some things really are that obvious.
Sometimes a notion bears repeating.
For instance, Steve Benen, last week:
We don’t have a spending problem. We don’t have a spending problem. We don’t have a spending problem. We don’t have a spending problem.
While Mr. Benen was responding to a quote from Rep. Eric Cantor (R-VA)—”And, you know, we’ve got a spending problem. Everybody knows it.”—on Meet the Press, the sentiment that the United States suffers from a “spending problem” is not exclusive to the House Majority Leader. You can find it throughout the Republican Party, and nearly everywhere you turn Beltway media punditry. But one can just as easily argue that we have a revenue problem, as in, not enough revenue. After all, one of the questions that confounds my conservative neighbors is what they think would happen if we destroy education funding, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, regulations for labor, food, and drug safety, and other programs that arguably work to augment the quality of life in the United States.
So they say, so they say:
The restructuring of society taking place, in the direct interests of the corporate-financial elite and at the expense of the working population, is not occurring unnoticed. The American and international working class will inevitably find itself drawn into struggle against the present, untenable form of social organization.
Hiram Lee invokes a recurring fantasy of the left, and while I do not scorn the underlying sentiment, I admit to a certain cynicism. Perhaps in other places around the world, populist anger might bring down governments, but the prestige and wealth of the United States is such that Americans are wary of risking it all for an unproven thesis.
I don’t know how or why I failed to do this before, but I have finally added Tom Tomorrow’s This Modern World to the blogroll.
Apologies around for the oversight.
B.D.'s Last Refuge 