Ah, yes, Bush. The thirty-ninth run of the gladiators. What is it with those Roman numerals, anyway? XXXIX? Sounds like a less than favorable movie rating. Which reminds me, of course, of that infamous wardrobe malfunction at half-time in XXXVIII. I'm not a great football watcher, Bush, but I watched this one, if only as a not-to-be-missed update on our cultural status quo. (Boy, are we getting classical today!)
I watched in the full expectation, of course, that your morals brigade would have succeeded in wielding enough influence to clean it up for me this year; and I was shocked almost beyond words to find myself once again exposed (forgive the expression, Bush) to some pretty raunchy stuff. Not the kind of thing you'd want your children to be watching, if you were serious about wanting to protect their moral values.
I mean, did you happen to catch that commercial where they were mocking--mocking, there's no other word for it, Bush--the righteous indignation of those good people you've appointed to oversee our national moral welfare? In the course of which commercial, the sick-minded perpetrators not only engineered a purposeful wardrobe malfunction, but managed also to expose more breast--sans nipple, I'm happy to report, but more breast per naked square inch than Janet Jackson is endowed with, as we all now know. And at closer, more shameless range. A rank temptation to more lascivious minds, Bush, than yours or mine. I was just happy that my own children are now too old to have their tender minds warped by this kind of gratuitous, supposedly humorous filth.
And did you catch the lyrics to that one of Sir Paul McCartney's songs? You'd think that, what with being a Sir and all, even a former Beatle would have learned a little decency by now. Wrong! "JoJo was a man," he sang, "but thought he was a woman"(emphasis mine). Does that not evoke precisely the kind of lifestyle we've been trying so hard to protect our children from hearing about? I was frankly appalled. And then that reference to a woman of at least questionable morals: "People," the lyric went, if I have it right, "said she had it coming, But she gets it when she can" (emphasis added, again). Is this the kind of story that we want our kids to hear? I'm with you, Bush: I recoil at such a thought.
And--did my eyes deceive me?--was there not a moment in another commercial where we were invited to watch the peculiarly disgusting spectacle of a chimpanzee in the act of planting a kiss on another chimpanzee's (let's not mince words, Bush) posterior? And here we've been trying to hard to set the record straight on evolution, too. Is it funnyto be watching chimpanzees acting as human beings? Or is this another liberal assault on our dearly-held beliefs, not to mention our education system?
Well, Bush, I'm sitting here just hoping that you'll get your Margaret Spellings onto this immediately. And your new guy at the FCC, whoever that might be. I think we can agree that Michael Powell did things by half measures there, just like his Dad. Right, Bush? He let an awful lot of smut get under the wire, so to speak. But this kind of thing is not to be tolerated in a decent America, in public, in a TV show watched by millions throughout the world.
So, let's get cracking… um, well, let's get started, Bush. It's high time we invented a cleaner, more moral America!
Oh, and by the way, did anyone happen to notice that another twenty-eight people, at least, were killed in your Iraq war yesterday?
About Me
- Peter Clothier
- Born and raised in the UK, lives in Los Angeles, California. A writer about art and artists, essayist, social observer, daily meditator and student of the Buddhist dharma.. and a long-time recovering academic. Happily out of a "job" since 1986--but "works" every day. Father to three great kids (why don't we have a proper word for, um, middle-aged "children"?) and grandfather to four wonderful grandchildren. Even after all these years in America, he still speaks English.
2 comments:
Peter:
The need to keep focusing on the bad that is being done in our name is so important.
As Tolstoy said: "If bad people can work together for their own ends, then can't good people work together for better ones?" We do continually have to concentrate on what is to be done for the good.
Certainly we have to look out for Bush and his crowd, but attention has to be paid to the Democrats also. They are equally up to no good.
The Democratic party has allowed itself to be paralyzed by its' spineless and shameless kowtowing to the wealthy classes. In that aspect there really is no difference between the two major parties at all. Both are so eager to court wealth and power, and to milk all of the political money out of the system that they can, that they have entirely corrupted their ideals. How else could it be that the rich in the US are actually taxed at a lower rate than the middle class and the poor? One can point to the record of eight Clinton years of feckless foreign policy, and not one major social program enacted (simply 8 years of maintaining the status quo). Bush, of course, is retrograde. Both parties are so concerned about keeping the political game in their court that they have cooperated together in re-districting schemes that limit the free expression of the voters of the United States. In State after state there are movements afoot to change the power of the parties and incumbants to draw district lines. That is because in State after State the Democrats and Republicans have drawn party lines to favor themselves. The greatest shame of the current system is not that the Republicans have eked out an edge, it is the inability of an increasingly alienated and disaffected electorate to have any effect on the system at all - and the continued inability of Congress to deal with the pressing bis issues confronting this nation - which produces further and greater disaffection. The two parties are so corrupt that they have cooperated even with each other to lock in their existing districts. Each ignores ethical concerns, and each party responds to ethical dilemmas with legalisms designed by the corporate sector. The mutual back scratching is comparable to the United States cooperating with Osama Bin Laden to kill of third-party terrorists. The analogy being that we like things they way they are: we are the superpower, they are the bad guys, and that gives everybody a role. In the same way Dems and Elephants don't want others coming into the game and spoiling the tidy status quo. Comparably, in many urban areas the police have ceeded local control over to gangs. That's convenient. The cops get to be the cops, and there is only one set of bad guys to deal with. It's like corporations dividing up a market. The attention is to the bottom line and not to moral responsibility. Everybody, it seems, is following the example of Wall Street.
Appreciating what you say about the Bushies, my concern is for the entire nation and our collective leadership, and I do not think anyone at the tiller is looking ahead. All of the interesting initiatives are being conducted and tested at the State and local level. The national parties spend all of their energy in maintaining the status quo, so nothing fundamental - outside of foreign policy - is getting done at the national level.
You mentioned Social security. Have the Democrats announced a plan? Nope. Bankrupt. Look also at health care. This is the crisis of the century in the US. There have been three large strikes in the past 16 months in LA and they are all about health care. Look at the Sheriffs, look at the supermarket clerks; look at the school District. It's all about the inability of people to pay for health care. The Fed just came up with a statistic that showed that 1/2 of all bankruptcies (financial not idealogical) resulted from health care bills. Doesn't that indicate a crisis? So what are we doing about it? Nothing. Bush would rather push Social security because he wants to make more Republicans, and the Democrats will engage in the politics of fear to stop him. It's a game increasingly not worth the candle - and the steady decline in participation, the alienation of young voters from the system, shows that the public agrees. Government and the major parties, looking to their bottom line, are not getting anything done.
That gets me to the second part of this rant, which is that the dominance of the corporate model is near complete in the US, and that our government has abnegated its' responsibilities in favor of an imaginary self-regulating and efficient market model. Of course the real world knows different. Laws in the US requiring clarity and transparency in capital markets make our financial markets strong. Corporations are doing everything they can do to thwart the system. I mention Enron. The history of corporations shows example after example of this. Corporations, however, are the most efficient social models in the history of the planet. That's true. They get work done and organize activity very well. The problem is that it is a mistake to confuse efficiency with good government. That's the problem so many people have these days. They say "Government ought to be more like business'. What they are doing is decrying the waste in government. There is a lot of that, but the greater fact is that governmennt is not about efficiency. Government is about setting the ground rules by which we live. The Declaration, the Bill of Rights, the Constitution. No one ever made a dollar off of any of these documents, but that is what the government of the United States is celebrated for. Also, if a corporation is bad it will eventually fail. It goes out of business. Government will never, can never, go out of business. Imagine the US closing down the Interstate Highway System for the day, or the courts, or the Army. Navy, and Air Force. Never happen. A corporation would do that if it needed the money, but government can't.
Government and industry are poles apart. But, that's the problem that arises when the ability to effect events and manipulate the system, an ability at which corporations excel, takes presedence over the moral purpose of government. This is where I slam against many of the liberal classes. In spite of the excesses of the religious right they are correct about one all-important thing. Government is about the big moral issues. Government is about moral order. "Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." That's a moral statement. Don't forget why we hold those words so dear. It's what the whole shebang is all about.
Many liberals overact to the screed put out by the evangelicals and try to eliminate morality from government. This is why governments across the nation celebrate every religious holiday (at least Christmas and Channukah). This is why government officials (Republican and democrat) still pick nominees for position on the basis of their ethnicity. It's zombie democracy. It's corporate thinking. It's sad.
Increasingly however these discerned rights and basic values suffer under our corporatized system. This is so even though at heart we all are moral beings: left or right. Corporations have no morality. That's the definition of a corporation. But, we have ceeded to corporation the rights of individuals: freedom of speech, right to lobby, etc. Could you imagine a corporation paying a judge for a decision? Well, they do try but in general we have it right there. The systems are inimacable. But, corporations pay off politicians in broad daylight all the time. Tell me how we are so sensitive to a confliuct on one hand and so blind to the obvious conflict on the other. This is the problem with the dominance of the corporate philosophy.
It is the adherence of the Democratic party to that corporate outlook that has been the greatest contributor to its' downfall. People are wary of Bush, but at least he stands for something and the Democrats - as far as I can see - stand for almost nothing. The right wing will also stand against the corporations when they cross moral boundaries. Please ignore for the moment their excesses. Don't throw out the learning because of the current leadership. The point I'm making is that the domination of corporate interests - and the restitution of government to the democratic principles and freedoms which we espouse - can only be accomplished by firmly keeping our eyes set on the supremacy of some moral order, as enforced by government. We have to take responsibility. That's the key. The Democrats seem to have forgotten that, and so the Republicans make hay because at least they stand for something, and as the Dems sleep at the switches of government (and the Republicans happily acquiesce) the corporations run amok.
The debate about what Bush is doing wrong is akin to a debate about the arrangement of deck chairs on the Titanic. Nothing will make things right because the ship we are riding on is going to hit a berg and sink. It does not matter who is at the controls. Read your history. That's what the debate needs to be about.
Carey
Carey, Great to hear from you. Thanks for writing. I'm pretty much in agreement with everything you say, especially what you have to say about health care as the predominant crisis of the current social-political situation; and about corporate dominance of the political dialogue in this country. These are both points I've brought up at various times elsewhere in my blog. I'm not qite so ready as you to include all Democrats in my list of villains, but by and large what you have to say is very true, and needs saying. Over and over, just so we don't forget it. Thanks again for writing. I hope you'll find the blog worth revisiting, and worth mentioning to your friends. All good things to you, Peter
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