Op-Ed
That link between age and wisdom — is it just a joke?
Suddenly I’m curious in a real way. I just turned . . . 75. There’s a significance to that number that isn’t abstract, and I’m having a hard time ignoring it. Perhaps it has more to do with cataracts and hearing aids, not to mention wobbly knees, lost thoughts and techno-cluelessness, than it does with diamonds. But I find myself wondering, more than ever, what I have learned over the past three quarters of a century — and what, if anything, I understand.
I think about the chaos in Afghanistan, the insane war on terror, refugees massed and caged at the southern border, a child murdered on the streets of Chicago. When I was in my 20s, I felt certain the world from which such cruelty and stupidity emerged was being transformed. Our generation was changing it. Now, as I limp to the bathroom, I feel the throb of an aching heart. Things have changed in some ways, both for better and for worse, but mostly they have stayed the same. What I have come to understand is how little I know.
Back when Paul Weyrich partied like it was 1999, he made a monumental admission that explains the ferocity of today’s evangelical right.
In an open letter to his extreme conservative cohorts, he acknowledged that they “probably had lost the culture war.”
Yippie!!!
He was right. And today that reality means that American democracy – and the human race – may actually survive.
Weyrich was mourning …
… a cultural collapse of historic proportions, a collapse so great that it simply overwhelms politics … the United States is very close to becoming a state totally dominated by an alien ideology, an ideology bitterly hostile to Western culture.
The counter-cultural heathens against whom Weyrich ranted were shaped by the Vietnam war, rock music, LSD, and so much more … a ‘60s Boomer generation (76-million-strong) that utterly shattered the established mores on which the right wing depended.
The “alien ideology” Weyrich feared was feminist, LGBTQA+, post-White Supremacist, and at war with Trump misogyny, sexual Puritanism, imperial arrogance, fascist autocracy, and ecological insanity.
MEK is a curious hybrid creature that pretends to be an alternative government option for Iran even though it is despised by nearly all Iranians.
One might ask if Washington’s obsession with terrorism includes supporting radical armed groups as long as they are politically useful in attacking countries that the US regards as enemies? It is widely known that the American CIA worked with Saudi Arabia to create al-Qaeda to attack the Russians in Afghanistan and the same my-enemy’s-enemy thinking appears to drive the current relationships with radical groups in Syria.
What if . . . ?
I get lost — tangled in doubt and cynicism — when I try to pose the question in a more specific way. What if . . . a collective human voice could be heard, crying out across the borders as the pandemic surges, as the fires rage, as the planet’s life-sustaining climate collapses: “We are one”?
What if nationalism’s time has come and gone?
Open Democracy put the matter thus: “As the COVID-19 pandemic intensifies around the world, we are witnessing countries making unprecedented decisions to close borders to non-citizens. And as days pass, national borders have become more visible and less permeable than ever.”
As restrictive anti-abortion state laws head to the six anti-choice fanatics on the Court, the Trump Cult’s simultaneous attack on anti-virus vaccination grows ever-more stunning in its hypocrisy.
In short: they claim official mandates for masks and vaccinations in places where they could spread the virus violate their personal freedoms. As “anti-government” activists, they claim such mandates invade their sacred bodies.
And at the same time, they also demand that women who want to control their own reproductive lives must be denied.
So let’s try to get this straight:
These “pro-liberty” anti-government fanatics portray masks meant to stop the spread of the coronavirus pandemic as a dictatorial plot to curtail their freedoms. One lunatic congresswoman says masks are the equivalent of the yellow star forced on Jews by the Nazis. Others proudly resist demands by local governments that likely spreaders take steps to weaken the pandemic. This, they say, is an invasion of their civil liberties.
For Derek Chauvin, nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds have turned into twenty-two and a half years — the prison sentence he recently received for the murder of George Floyd.
Chauvin famously knelt on George Floyd’s neck last year, as he lay handcuffed and helpless, for those nine-plus minutes, while three colleagues stood by, indifferent to the murder so obviously underway . . . police administering the death sentence to a man accused of trying to use a counterfeit $20 bill at a nearby convenience store. Unfortunately for the smirking Chauvin, his crime was caught on cellphone video and shocked much of the nation and the world. And a year later, something almost unprecedented happened: A police officer was held accountable for killing a black man.
But is this “justice” or is it simply bureaucracy? George Floyd is still dead. His young daughter remains robbed of her father; his loved ones, his family, still have a terrifying void in their lives. And the racist social structure in which Chauvin acted, though now under intense scrutiny, remains intact. People continue to needlessly suffer and die at the hands of our militarized police.
When former US President Barack Obama used an old cliché to denigrate his political opponent, the late US Senator, John McCain, he triggered a political controversy lasting several days.
“You can put lipstick on a pig, but it’s still a pig,” Obama said at a campaign event in 2008. The maxim indicates that superficial changes have no bearings on outcomes and that modifying our facade does not alter who we really are.
American politicians are an authority on the subject. They are experts on artificial, rhetorical and, ultimately, shallow change. Once again, Washington’s political make-up artists are busy at work.
On May 25, famous American actor, Mark Ruffalo, tweeted an apology for suggesting that Israel is committing ‘genocide’ in Gaza.
“I have reflected and wanted to apologize for posts during the recent Israel/Hamas fighting that suggested Israel is committing ‘genocide’,” Ruffalo wrote, adding, “It’s not accurate, it’s inflammatory, disrespectful and is being used to justify anti-Semitism, here and abroad. Now is the time to avoid hyperbole.”
But were Ruffalo’s earlier assessments, indeed, “not accurate, inflammatory and disrespectful”? And does equating Israel’s war on besieged, impoverished Gaza with genocide fit into the classification of ‘hyperbole’?
Ballots to restructure along professional/democratic lines from the New Day Pacifica movement began being distributed June 7, 2021.
If the Pacifica Network does not remake itself into something workable, its relevance and survival are doubtful.
With its treasured history and powerful broadcast signals in America’s biggest media markets, the Pacifica Network should be a core electronic flagship for America’s vital pro-democracy movements.
Instead:
* FOE Pacifica has chased away all but a tiny, tenuous audience;
* It’s in a deep financial abyss;
* Its management, and many of its most crucial meetings, are profoundly dysfunctional;
* Its recent KPFK-Los Angeles fundraiser was a major disaster, portending even deeper disarray;
* For years FOE Pacifica has failed to produce a passable audit, costing the network millions;