Follow the Money

The Left has a serious focus problem. Which cause is the nearest and dearest to us? Global warming? War profiteering? Social injustice? Education? Health care? Glushawn Limbeckity? Seriously. We're like chickens with our heads cut off. Not only are there bogey men in every direction, but we're shooting at phantoms--we don't really know who to blame for these problems, and though there are identifiable benefits to solving them, the payoff is always deferred, and difficult to measure--like eating your spinach or lowering your cholesterol count. Statistics abound (the Left loves them) but how do you define "a better world?" Furthermore, since just about every Liberal cause depends upon money for a solution, (and money is the Right's department) you have to go through the Right to get there, and the Right gets very annoyed when you raid its coffers trying to pay for stuff it cares little or nothing about.

The Right, on the other hand, has a clear focus--making America a hospitable environment for making boatloads of money. Yes, there are the social agendas, but even those are clear as vodka--get rid of abortion, period...bring (Christian) religion into the schools, and get everybody to conform to a strict set of behavioral guidlelines that are easy to define (even though the Right has as much trouble behaving as anyone...lately it seems like they have more). Get rid of rampant crime, etc.

Now, the last of these isn't easy--crime is a moving target, but the Right isn't concerned with eliminating the root causes. The Right would simply remove offenders from the street--isolate, capture, quarantine. Fairness isn't a concern--the Right just wants "undesirables" eliminated, taken out of sight, buried. That's not hard, really. The only thing standing in the way of the Right achieving THAT goal is the Constitution of the United States. The "evil government." It galls the Right that criminals have rights--as far as the Right is concerned, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to identify, apprehend, and incarcerate the troublemakers. It's just those pesky "technicalities," like the 4th and 5th amendment, the right to counsel, etc, that keep what should be, in their eyes, a fairly straightforward task from being swiftly and thoroughly "taken care of." And as far as most of the Right is concerned, if you get rid of anybody of non-Caucasian, non-European descent, the problem is solved. It's easy to identify the "others," and isolate, apprehend, incarcerate. Or simply send them to Australia (it's still a prison colony, isn't it? Or maybe we can develop the Moon as a place to dump the people we don't want around).

The goals of the Right are easy to identify, and, in their eyes, easy to accomplish. In order to stimulate economic growth, you cut taxes to the bone and get the government out of everything. Simple, easy-breezy. Since they're all about money, and the best of them are very good at accumulating it, they've got the resources on their side. Can any of the same be said for the left?

How do you stop Global warming? We've identified some causes of it, but it's a goal that requires cooperation among all the peoples of the world, many of whom aren't even speaking to one another, much less agreed as to the best direction for the world to take. How do you define "social justice?" Who gets to decide what's fair, and how does it get paid for? Sure, there's a vast wealth disparity in our country, but there's something to be said for the idea that if you have to suck away the gains made by people who are successful in order to fund the lives of people who aren't, the end result will be unsustainable--without an engine, it's kind of irrelevant how well you take care of your tires. So that's a balance, and how does one achieve a balance where the engine keeps running, when its incentive for doing so isn't in its own self-interest? We could go on and on with the analogies, but the point is that the Left is, for all intents and purposes, swimming upstream.

Therein lies the rub--human nature is to take care of ourselves and our own. Altruism is a part of human nature, but it's pretty low on Maslow's hierachy--and once you've taken care of the food, clothing and shelter (which are so expensive in the United States that for most people it requires more than one job to make ends meet) people are exhausted--that 52" plasma screen TV seems a hell of a lot more important than feeding some orphan in a 3rd world country that you'd never even see if her face wasn't plastered all over your screen while you're trying to watch "Lethal Weapon 16."

Are the causes of the Left worth working for? Yes. Are they achievable? Not by organizing demonstrations, no. The Right simply classifies that sort of thing as a nuisance, "civil unrest," and calls out the militia to squash it.

Nope. You'll never get the Right to care about anyone other than itself. So in order to pursue the Progressive agenda, there's really only one solution: follow the money.

That's not easy. The Right makes it as difficult as possible, by obscuring the pathways through which money travels, and hiding ownership (read: control and power) of the more obvious targets. Is your local bank a free-standing entity? No. It's dependent on larger and larger fish in the food chain, leading up to the giants in lower Manhattan. Without the approval of the big fish, your local bank can't do diddley to assist YOU. You can't get a loan if your local bank doesn't have capital to lend, and the savings accounts of a few middle-class yokels isn't going to cut it. They need big infusions, and they get them from people farther up the food chain.

Still, if the Left hopes to accomplish any of its objectives, that's what's going to have to happen. You fight fire with fire--research like hell, find the money pathways, and (and here's the hard part) organize the masses to make choices (often at the expense of their own hard-won comforts) which hurt the big fish in the only place they truly give a damn about--their own wallets.

In the end, even the biggest fish need customers, and though a few of them are able to cater only to wealthy clientele, where do these wealthy clients get their fat bankrolls to spend? Big businesses depend on economies of scale. Wal-Mart makes its billions by selling trillions of trinkets at $12.34. We could bankrupt them in 6 months if we simply stopped shopping there.

The problem is we, most of us, can't do that. We are dependent on discount retailers simply for survival, because we don't have the resources to wait them out. We can't survive the winter without heat, and I wouldn't be typing this without electricity to run my computer (and an internet connection to spew this forth to the world) so utilities pretty much have us by the short and curlies.

So we implore the government to help. Is it any wonder that the Right sees the government as the enemy? It may not actually BE an enemy, but it represents the collective will of the enemy, which is US. The Right doesn't want to share. And it's pretty easy to buy off politicians, since we are all, at our cores, creatures who crave comfort (and comfort is bought with money, big piles of it).

The bottom line is that as long as the Left continues to resort to organizing verbal protests, the Right wins. We can shout all we want--the Right can just close the windows, call the SWAT team, deploy the sound cannons and the tear gas, and get back to its business of dismantling the U.S. economy (at least that part of it which provides an income for the middle class), opening up overseas markets, and providing goods and services using cheap labor from countries where the population is huge (like China) and poverty is widespread.

The only language the Right understands consists of five words: Franklin, Grant, Jackson, Lincoln, and Washington. Those are the only words we can use to bend its collective will toward solutions to the myriad, unfocused, ill-defined problems we face. Any collective action must be VERY focused on making those words a problem for the Right if the Right doesn't pay attention to the goals of the Left.

Don't be distracted by the Bible, or Gay rights, or the Gun lobby. Those are red herrings. The more we shout about those things, the easier it is for the Right to keep our eyes off the ball. The Right uses those things to energize its base, which it uses for one and only one purpose--to provide enough of a base vote that, with a little arm-twisting, it can recruit enough swing voters to achieve its agenda. As heinous as those concepts may be to us (and who doesn't want to see Gay people happy and prosperous, or the shooting war on our streets brought to a minimum?) they are distractions, if there's really any will on the Left to achieve lasting change.

The attack needs to be two-pronged, and both prongs are extremely difficult to realize, which makes it all the more important to focus. One, the Left needs to become more economically empowered in its own right. Two, the agenda of the Right (making the most money possible) must be used against it. Both goals have to pass through the Right in order to be achieved, unfortunately. As Willie Sutton famously said, "that's where the money is."

Wanna talk about a "Long War?" This makes "The War on Terror" (our struggle against a verb) look like a 10-second sound bite. We've been fighting The Long War for centuries, with little success--little victories here and there (America was supposed to be one of those, before democracy became a tabloid joke).

If there's a hope for the Progressive movement, it lies along the money pathways.

I'm no expert (far from it), but I can see that much. No amount of energy expended on shouting at the rain will stop it from falling. I don't know how, (wiser heads than mine will have to provide the research and the ammunition) but I do know that it will only be possible to affect lasting change by focusing collective action in the one place where it will have any effect--follow the money.

"Spelling Counts," and other quaint lies from childhood

DILLIGAF? OMG, ROTFLMAO!

When I was growing up, we had spelling tests--every week or so, you'd be given a new list of words to memorize and regurgitate. Most kids found this a complete waste of time, and railed against it. For the most part, none of us actually studied this list--everybody "winged-it" on the quizzes. I liked to read, so most of the words weren't a big problem for me--I'd seen them often enough in print that I could picture them mentally, so I did fairly well at spitting them back out on command.

Spelling, and its rhetorical cousin, grammar, were considered essential to success in the world of work--in fact, the ability to remember correct sentence construction (and, at the sub-folder level, word construction) served as an indicator of class, a tool for discriminating between those whose parents valued "correctness" in communication, and those who weren't so lucky. We were constantly admonished to make sure the spelling was accurate in term papers, on resumes, on job applications, etc. Fluency in English was considered important to a person's ability to secure higher-income employment, and also as a means of survival in an increasingly divided social environment--who you were, and by extension who you were allowed to associate with, were in part determined by whether or not you could remember certain rules, such as "don't end a sentence with a preposition."

At least that's the line we were fed. As I got older, owing to the fact that I'd been primed by my father to be extra-sensitive to errors in grammar and usage, I began to notice that not only did my contemporaries pretty much abandon any pretense of caring about spelling or construction, so did famous people from "high" walks of life. Senators, Representatives, corporate CEOs...you name it, they make all sorts of elementary grammar errors in their public discourse. I started to notice embarrassingly weak construction in newspaper articles, advertising copy, even business letters sent by companies whose employees represented the supposed "cream of the crop" of the expensively educated. Lately I've begun noticing dozens of spelling errors in published books (not the online kind, I mean the ones that are printed and bound, that you hold in your hand). It drove me to distraction--weren't those people paying attention in third grade? How did they manage to graduate from places like Harvard and Yale, and go on to hold responsible, high-paying jobs, without applying the rules we'd been taught in the elementary grades?

It turns out, in practice (especially since television has become so pervasive in our lives, and the number of networks long ago exceeded the supply of fluent English-speakers) that none of it matters. We don't value language. I've begun to wonder if we ever did.

What IS our language, anyway, but a mish-mash of colloqialisms that found their way into our dictionaries and our rhetoric through endless repetition? English is constantly evolving, and it's like the body of law in the United States--constantly being amended, new rules being written to account for variations (as opposed to the variations being reined in to fit the existing rules), and new standards of acceptability being formed in order to accomodate common practices that, despite the frustration of grammarians, have achieved critical mass through sheer gravity--"everybody says so," so the rules are changed to coincide with the mass consciousness.

Now, you could follow all this if you cared to (and some people DO make a study of language in that level of detail), but the number of rules and exceptions, just like the number of federal laws and regulations, has become so large and unwieldy that no single person could ever really hope to assimilate it. In truth, that threshold was reached long before I was born, and our language has become exponentially more complicated since. So why was it forced down our throats in school? Nobody follows the rules, and precious few but the most erudite and eloquent ever did. Even Senator Edward M. Kennedy, child of American royalty, Harvard Law graduate, and recent subject of dozens of television retrospectives (one of which contained the error that caught my attention) couldn't quite muddle through without screwing up every so often.

The conclusion? It was a scam. A well-meant one, to be sure. Our parents and teachers attempted to give us rules to enhance our chances of survival and achievement in society, and at the time we were taught those rules, we had no way of knowing that, like the tenets of the "Pirate Code" in the movie Pirates of the Caribbean, "they be more like guidlelines, really."

And it's not just spelling or grammar. All sorts of rules fall under the umbrella of the time-honored phrase, "do as I say, not as I do." As we are constantly reminded, the most exhalted among us are often those whose adherence to time-honored codes of morality, ethics, law (and yes, grammar) is the LEAST exemplary. Those who pontificate most loudly about biblical principles are as likely as not to be the ones publicly caught with their pants down, having blatantly disregarded three fifths of the commandments they battle so fiercely to have chiseled into the granite of our public buildings.

They blather on about the ills of our society, blaming all on the "loose morality" of our times, yet when publicly disgraced for having set the worst possible example for America's youth, they stick to their guns, refuse to resign, refuse to apologize, and in so doing expose, for all to see, their utter contempt for the rules they expect everyone ELSE to follow.

The difference, of course, is that these hypocrites are rich and powerful (which, in their eyes, exempts them from polite codes of behavior). But that's an all-too-familiar tangent, one I'll avoid for the moment so that I can pursue my admittedly long-winded, circuitous route to the point: The kids are LTAO (laughing their asses off) at us right now.

When we (and I'm referring to the pre-internet, pre-IM, pre-text-message generation) were growing up, our elders were the source of most of our information. We didn't watch Huntley and Brinkley (nor did we care to), we didn't know a tenth of what was actually going on in the world, and we actually believed that the rules our elders drummed into our heads were "carved in stone," that bad behavior would result in negative consequences, and that, in essence, spelling counted.

Then we grew up.

Our parents, before us, had grown up, too. They'd discovered that the Ten Commandments were "more like guidelines," and that the Eleventh Commandment, the really important one, the one we were never taught but which everyone eventually learned through bitter experience, was "Don't Get Caught."

But our parents (and the instinct persists in our generation, as likely it will in generations to follow) feared for us--for our safety, our cognitive development, our world views, and our ability to survive. So they sheltered us from the harsher truths, and did their best to provide a firm ethical, verbal, and educational foundation for us to stand on, in the desparate hope that they wouldn't wake up one morning to find our pictures in the paper--lifeless, tongue hanging out, lying on the floor of a flophouse with a needle still protruding from one arm. They wanted to protect us from the predators of the world, and clung fast to the illusion that by sheltering us from the worst of human behavior, we would grow up to live in places where that kind of horror didn't affect us.

Now our kids are able to circumnavigate all that--they are able to find out for themselves, in every gory detail, what actually happens in the world--or at least what appears to happen, according to their myriad electronic information sources. They may not be interested in politics (and who could blame them, given the spittle-laced vitriol that passes for "news" today), but they're very aware that the highest-ranking politicians are among the most profligate adulters, liars, theives, and murders in the human race. They're well-"schooled" in the idea that honesty is for suckers, that treating people fairly and with good will gets you nowhere (but that perpetrating the worst kind of evil can make you famous, rich, and powerful). They see 20-year-old millionaires in sports, film, music, and even in online business, and as far as they can tell, the best fortunes are made quickly--that there's a "secret," and if they can just google it, they'll be able to bypass all the work, the study, and the tedium their parents tell them is necessary, and live the high life, consuming as if there were no tomorrow.

The examples we provide them don't point to virtue, or even to competence. They point to sly, underhanded dealings, to manipulating and changing the rules to fit their own agendas, and to taking advantage of the ignorance of others to make a better life for themselves. Our media add mega-gallons of fuel to the fire, by exhalting those who've achieved the three virtues of American life--wealth, fame, & power.

So--why are we suprised when we hear about "The Family," the secret society associated with "C Street," and their contention that certain people are above reproach, that "gawd's work" is best left in the hands of a chosen few whose wealth and power is pre-ordained by a "higher power," and whose shit doesn't stink? Every bit of available information tells us that it doesn't matter HOW you do it, what's important is that you "get yours NOW," and leave the consequences to somebody else. Do we punish those who are caught cheating? No. We give them millions in free publicity, buy their "tell all" books, and make them even richer (and by extension more powerful) all by virtue of their notoriety, no matter how it was achieved. If the story is REALLY juicy, we turn it into a TV mini-series (and pay them millions for the rights). By the time their cases get to court, they've already drunk all the Chivas, driven all the Lamborghinis, snorted all the blow, and diddled all the pussy their bodies can stand. So it's "worth it."

And if they "don't get caught," the Chamber of Commerce will build a statue in their honor.

So no, Virgina, spelling doesn't count. Grammar doesn't count. Honesty is for suckers. Go to the right church, say the right things, stick to the Right wing, kiss the right asses, learn the right tricks, and you can "succeed" in America, the land of opportunity.

The current generation is wiser to the ways of the world than we are--we may not "get it," but they do, and they're moving so fast that we long ago lost any hope of following their thought patterns. I don't know where that will lead us, but it's out of our hands now. The home-schoolers may think they can wrench the barn doors shut, but the horses are long gone, never to return.

It's time we dealt with reality as it exists, and quit trying to pretend it doesn't. In so doing, we only hurt ourselves--our kids will take care of themselves, it seems. Who's going to take care of US?