PRIMAL SCREED
ROADKILL ON THE HIGHWAY OF HISTORY
by James McCarty Yeager

Feb. 7, 2001 -- Washington, D.C. (Progressive Populist via APJP) -- 
You’ve always got to remember that it takes less to bring
down a Democratic government than a Republican one. In all the
recrimination over how Gore didn’t become President and the Democrats
didn’t carry the House and Senate, the inertial predisposition of the
media, economic elites, and cultural leaders to favor the party of the
supine, indolent, but propertied rich has been sinfully overlooked by
the very people who are so predisposed. 

"When good is defeated it is not because it was good, but because it was
weak," Bertolt Brecht remarked in his 1932 essay on the five
difficulties of telling the truth under conditions of oppression. So
let’s lose all notion of inevitability about our present sorry state.
The ordinary folks of America didn’t vote in sufficient numbers to
overwhelm the institutional bias against them. Even as it was, Gore won
more votes than any Democrat ever. Ran as well in the suburbs as Bill
ever did. What killed him was (gasp) the white southern male vote. Shave
a point off that and Gore would be president today, instead of merely
the deprived victor.

This is not an argument that progressives should tailor their message to
the redneck vote. Democrats do not need to act more like the Republicans
to win, no matter what Al From and the Democratic Leadership Council
proclaim. Democrats do not need to scare corporate America less.
Democrats do not need to stuff the aspirations of their allies in order
to soothe the hackles of their adversaries. 

Take a lesson from the Republicans, boys and girls. You get kudos for
principle if you stand up for your actual beliefs, instead of trying to
compromise. Democrats believe in people rather than property,
neighborhoods rather than real estate, unions rather than
multinationals, genuine living children instead of the unborn, and
actual economic justice rather than theoretical economic opportunity. 

So don’t put up with policies that merely preserve the status quo when
they do not roll back the clock. A letter a month keeps your
Congresscritter alert, you know. You might remind your Senators and
Representative that "There is no peace and no rest in the development of
material interests. They have their law, and their justice. But it is
founded on expediency, and is inhuman; it is without rectitude, without
the continuity and the force that can be found only in a moral
principle. …[T]he time approaches when all that [commercialism] stands
for shall weigh as heavily upon the people as the barbarism, cruelty,
and misrule of a few [generations] back." -- Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo (1904).

How will we know when the Bush2 administration (a/k/a Ford2
administration) is officially as rightwing as Reagan1, Reagan2, and
Bush1? Let’s count the ways. Believes in the tax cut, the whole tax cut,
and nothing but the tax cut as a substitute for actual public choices.
Appoints a zany, feral Vice-President. Appoints an absolutely
professionally unfit Attorney-General. Appoints a virulent
anti-environmentalist to Interior. Appoints a caretaker to ride herd on
EPA. Wants to waste even more money on lethal, destabilizing military
gew-gaws. Plans to cripple, if not destroy, public education. Only wants
cosmetic campaign finance reform. Does not want even cosmetic health
insurance reform. Exalts Christian right policies on abortion (against)
and the death penalty (for.) "Birth ‘em, test ‘em, then kill ‘em," is
how I believe they pronounce it in Texas.

Just as Bush1 was wholly insignificant except for delaying necessary
economic reforms in the US, Bush2 seems committed to fighting rearguard
actions thinly disguised as policy enhancements. The governmental use of
religious institution charitable impulses is loudly proclaimed as
progress, whereas it in fact retreats to French imperial policy of 1625.
When Cardinal Richlieu (a mentor, or regent, for Louis XIII) would spend
public money, he would ensure the church got its share. That the
churches of America are mainly Protestant, founded in opposition to this
kind of practice, is merely the kind of cheap irony the detection of
which is unimaginable by Falwell, Robertson, and even the old men in
dresses of my Catholic Cardinalate. 

Our job as citizens-in-resistance is to laugh loudly every time these
solemn bozos set themselves up for another pratfall, no matter how they
spin the policy that leads to the fall. The self-importance of these
jokers so far exceeds the earnestness of the early Clintonites that only
a newsman or media talking head couldn’t notice its pervasive and
inescapeable stench. I quote the words a Houston millionaire recently
sent me, more in sorrow than in anger: "[Shrub’s] mendacity and
mean-mindedness [are] of no consequence. I can tell you from knowing
Papa for many years and having been exposed to W quite enough to make a
judgment, that the latter is even dumber than the former. But the one I
especially loathe at the moment is James Baker. I had once considered
him a statesman. He is now no more than a drunken old liar." I never for
a moment mistook any Bush for a statesman, not even old Prescott. But it
is nice to see that even their social acquaintances are already sick of
them. The media won’t be far behind. 

OK, THE JOKE’S OVER: GIVE US BACK OUR CONSTITUTION NOW
A random sampling of Bush nicknames befouled this column some time ago
(public duty, you know, up to my elbows in the filth of naming Snippy’s
true nature). I now see some public spirited soul has put up the top 100
names on the web (forgot the URL though). Their winner? Resident Bush.
Simply dropping one letter confirms his real status: he’s not all there,
he’s just there.

James McCarty Yeager is Washington correspondent for the Progressive Populist and can be reached via email at jamie.yeager@iname.com.

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