Last week’s Newsweek magazine contained a truly amazing piece, (“Rich America, Poor America,” Niall Ferguson, 1/23/12). Billed as a “conservative historian’s solution” to the issue of growing inequality in our nation, this piece stands out not because of any true “solution” that is offered here, but for the real peek at how the wealthy actually look at us and the world they live in.

The issue of inequality isn’t seen as a great mystery, most might point to the capitalist class structure of our nation and the ongoing class struggle. There, according to Ferguson, is where you’d be wrong. Not so, he says! The rising inequality has its source in the fact that the “upper class has gotten rich because of the financial returns on brain-power,” and they “produce a disproportionate number of the smartest children.”

If that formulation just slapped you in the face with its open arrogance, Ferguson is just getting started.

Traditional conservative and Midwest moderate Republicans are finally standing up to the reactionary Buckeye State GOP’ers whose anthem is “Gimme that ol’ time repression.” On January 25, 2012, Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted addressed the Ohio Association of Election Officials and recommended that the state’s legislators should repeal the draconian House Bill 194. In this November’s presidential election, voters in Ohio will literally get to vote on who should vote in the state.

Husted urged lawmakers and election officials to start over after the 2012 election with a new bill on voting reform. HB 194 has been denounced by voting rights and civil rights organizations as it, among other things, eliminates some opportunities for early voting and doesn’t allow pollworkers to guide voters to the correct precinct.

One would think that if condemned to lose sanity it would be preferable not to be aware of what was happening. On the contrary, as in lucid dreaming, there is something empowering and even comforting in lucid derangement, particularly national as opposed to personal derangement.

We may be in the advanced stages of going loony as a society and a polity, and yet expanding one's awareness of how this process is proceeding is a form of enlightenment, even if the enlightenment is offered with some defeatist shading.

"The United States of Fear" is a collection of Tom Engelhardt's writings from his TomDispatch blog. It turns our world inside out any number of times, allowing us to glimpse with startling clarity the horrifying world outside our cave without ever quite persuading us that the real world can be real if it isn't on television, and not infrequently building into the presentation the understanding that there is no cure for what ails us.

Here's an example. According to Engelhardt we dwell in a "Postlegal America":

One of the four Democrats vying for the new U.S. House seat created by Republican redistricting, Kilroy last week joined a gathering of about 70 people as they marked in protest the second anniversary of the US Supreme Court's Citizens United ruling. As she spoke, several activists with Occupy Columbus used the ‘People’s Mic’ to question her populist bonafides.

Cruz Bonlarron read from a crumpled piece of paper and several others with him repeated what he said, one phrase after the other. This was the total message of their repeat-backs; some parts of it were hard to discern even for someone standing nearby, so later Banlarron read it again for me :

Editors:
The Dispatch recently highlighted, in its main front page article, the heartbreaking growth of eligibility for Ohio’s school lunch program. Due to the loss of jobs, continued economic pressure on Ohio’s working and poor families, the Dispatch article points out, a majority of Ohio’s public school students are now receiving government aid just to be able to have a decent, healthy lunch while going to school.

I would certainly think that this information would spur our legislators to immediately go into crisis mode, and begin to do everything possible to reverse this growing misery, despair and poverty. I guess that would be the case if the present legislature had, as its goal, to actually perform their jobs in a way that would help our citizens. However, that hardly appears to be so.