In the milieu of bailouts ("Would you like some pork fries to go with that pork-burger?" "Super-size it!") and ballyhoo on the political circuit, an echo calls from the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression, to remind us that we have been this way before:
Shine, Perishing RepublicCorruption is never compulsory. But refusing to be corrupted--if only to a threshold percentage--carries a price tag. I'm not especially convinced that all recognize that. Maybe only the folks who have been corrupted, or those who spent childhood/adolescence on the proverbial outside looking in truly do. And that, ultimately, may be what's truly wrong with Joe and Jane Sixpack.
While this America settles in the mold of its vulgarity,
heavily thickening to Empire,
And protest, only a bubble in the molten mass, pops and
sighs out, and the mass hardens,
I sadly smiling remember that the flower fades to make
fruit, the fruit rots to make earth.
Out of the mother, and through the spring exultances,
ripeness and decadence; and home to the mother.
You, making haste, haste on decay; not blameworthy; life
is good, be it stubbornly long or suddenly
A mortal splendor: Meteors are not needed less than
mountains: Shine, perishing Republic.
But for my children, I would have them keep their
distance from the thickening center; corruption
Is never compulsory, when the cities lie at the
monster's feet there are left the mountains.
And boys, be in nothing so moderate as in love of man,
a clever servant, insufferable master.
There is the trap that catches noblest spirits, that caught--
they say--God, when he walked on earth.
Again, the ghost speaks:
Ave CaesarThe Danegeld that Washington just pledged to the Wall Street jarls is no different from shooting an adrenaline-morphine cocktail into the vein of a terminally ill person. Even without card-houses tumbling and the spike in unemployment, the fundamentals of our economy are most emphatically not strong. We're borrowing money to pay for the things we should be making ourselves. It's Company Store Capitalism--period, full stop. Anyone who claims that this is healthy has no business being President.
No bitterness; our ancestors did it,
They were only ignorant and hopeful, they wanted freedom but wealth, too.
Their children will learn to hope for a Caesar.
Or, rather--for we are not aquiline Romans but soft mixed colonists--
Some kindly Sicilian tyrant who'll keep
Poverty and Carthage off until the Romans arrive.
We are easy to manage, a gregarious people,
Full of sentiment, clever at mechanics, and we love our luxuries.
Maybe it's just my mood today, but Jeffers almost seems too optimistic. Are there actually mountain refuges in this day of illegal surveillance? And how can any tyrant--kindly or not--save us from our own excesses when they will not curb their own? FDR was considered a dictator by some, and there's no question that he crossed Constitutional boundaries by packing the Supreme Court. But he had brains and a sense of noblesse oblige and a tenacious, two-handed grip on capital-R reality. (And, of course, he had Eleanor to lean on.) Things that our latter-day Caesar lacks in superabundance. And, unlike the maverick-y reformer pretensions of a certain Republican candidate, FDR went toe-to-toe against Tammany Hall and won--Eleanor carrying the banner and helping to deliver the coup de grace a few decades later.
But such Caesars are far, far too rare to be relied upon. While the Boss Tweeds are not--and they are back in spades. (Funny how Karl Rove is fat, too.) Percentage-spreads and interactive maps on the internet are all well and good, but there are October Surprises and Diebold and good, old-fashioned voter suppression to reckon with. When the GOP's concern-trolling stoops to obsessing over tee-shirts and singing hats (I am NOT making this up), worry. Cornered people are dangerous. People at risk of facing their own guilt are far more so. Today' GOP is both.
Take a little time next week--over your lunch break or what-have-you--to call your registrar and make sure that you're on the rolls. If you're not, dot the 'i's and cross the 't's to get that way. This month. If possible, vote absentee (with your political tee-shirt on, just to stick it to the fascist fashionistas). Me, I'm packing my utility bill, my driver's license, and my friggin' passport for good measure on November 4th. The cheeseburger-poisoned b@@rds who run this show have already robbed you of your birthright of habeus corpus. Pilfering your vote is completely in character.
Update, 11:50 p.m.
By sheer coincidence, Dearest forwarded this Andrew Bacevich op-ed to me: He told us to go shopping. Now the bill is due.
Shine, perishing republic.
