Interesting article from The Village Voice

[Archangel M]

Why I am no longer a brain dead liberal.

...
I took the liberal view for many decades, but I believe I have changed my mind.
As a child of the '60s, I accepted as an article of faith that government is corrupt, that business is exploitative, and that people are generally good at heart.

These cherished precepts had, over the years, become ingrained as increasingly impracticable prejudices. Why do I say impracticable? Because although I still held these beliefs, I no longer applied them in my life. How do I know? My wife informed me. We were riding along and listening to NPR. I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the **** up. "?" she prompted. And her terse, elegant summation, as always, awakened me to a deeper truth: I had been listening to NPR and reading various organs of national opinion for years, wonder and rage contending for pride of place. Further: I found I had been—rather charmingly, I thought—referring to myself for years as "a brain-dead liberal," and to NPR as "National Palestinian Radio."

This is, to me, the synthesis of this worldview with which I now found myself disenchanted: that everything is always wrong.
But in my life, a brief review revealed, everything was not always wrong, and neither was nor is always wrong in the community in which I live, or in my country. Further, it was not always wrong in previous communities in which I lived, and among the various and mobile classes of which I was at various times a part.

And, I wondered, how could I have spent decades thinking that I thought everything was always wrong at the same time that I thought I thought that people were basically good at heart? Which was it? I began to question what I actually thought and found that I do not think that people are basically good at heart; indeed, that view of human nature has both prompted and informed my writing for the last 40 years. I think that people, in circumstances of stress, can behave like swine, and that this, indeed, is not only a fit subject, but the only subject, of drama.
I'd observed that lust, greed, envy, sloth, and their pals are giving the world a good run for its money, but that nonetheless, people in general seem to get from day to day; and that we in the United States get from day to day under rather wonderful and privileged circumstances—that we are not and never have been the villains that some of the world and some of our citizens make us out to be, but that we are a confection of normal (greedy, lustful, duplicitous, corrupt, inspired—in short, human) individuals living under a spectacularly effective compact called the Constitution, and lucky to get it.

For the Constitution, rather than suggesting that all behave in a godlike manner, recognizes that, to the contrary, people are swine and will take any opportunity to subvert any agreement in order to pursue what they consider to be their proper interests.
To that end, the Constitution separates the power of the state into those three branches which are for most of us (I include myself) the only thing we remember from 12 years of schooling.

The Constitution, written by men with some experience of actual government, assumes that the chief executive will work to be king, the Parliament will scheme to sell off the silverware, and the judiciary will consider itself Olympian and do everything it can to much improve (destroy) the work of the other two branches. So the Constitution pits them against each other, in the attempt not to achieve stasis, but rather to allow for the constant corrections necessary to prevent one branch from getting too much power for too long.
Rather brilliant. For, in the abstract, we may envision an Olympian perfection of perfect beings in Washington doing the business of their employers, the people, but any of us who has ever been at a zoning meeting with our property at stake is aware of the urge to cut through all the pernicious ******** and go straight to firearms.

I found not only that I didn't trust the current government (that, to me, was no surprise), but that an impartial review revealed that the faults of this president—whom I, a good liberal, considered a monster—were little different from those of a president whom I revered.
Bush got us into Iraq, JFK into Vietnam. Bush stole the election in Florida; Kennedy stole his in Chicago. Bush outed a CIA agent; Kennedy left hundreds of them to die in the surf at the Bay of Pigs. Bush lied about his military service; Kennedy accepted a Pulitzer Prize for a book written by Ted Sorenson. Bush was in bed with the Saudis, Kennedy with the Mafia. Oh.

And I began to question my hatred for "the Corporations"—the hatred of which, I found, was but the flip side of my hunger for those goods and services they provide and without which we could not live.

And I began to question my distrust of the "Bad, Bad Military" of my youth, which, I saw, was then and is now made up of those men and women who actually risk their lives to protect the rest of us from a very hostile world. Is the military always right? No. Neither is government, nor are the corporations—they are just different signposts for the particular amalgamation of our country into separate working groups, if you will. Are these groups infallible, free from the possibility of mismanagement, corruption, or crime? No, and neither are you or I. So, taking the tragic view, the question was not "Is everything perfect?" but "How could it be better, at what cost, and according to whose definition?" Put into which form, things appeared to me to be unfolding pretty well....

 

[tellner]

Ah, good. It would be better if he'd stopped being a brain-dead neocon as well and become a thinking rational human being. He's traded one set of comforting hateful lies for another and would really benefit from waking up and thinking.

It's not about buying Brand X or Brand Y.

It's about not buying anything at all.

 

[shesulsa]

Wow. What a said day. One of the best playwrights and best thinking men on the planet has been inoculated in his sleep with the idea that "everything is oooookaaay" and that what we have now ain't so bad because we're not suffering now - we're still here - folks get by day to day ....

*sigh*

Man.

I think someone should check him for early Alzheimer's ... or gulf war syndrome or something.

 

[Empty Hands]

Wow, someone decides they don't fit a caricature of a political position. How shocking and completely revealing.

 

[CoryKS]

It was clear several paragraphs in that he had read Thomas Sowell's work, so I was pleased to see him named further down. Good article, M! Thanks!

 

[navyvetcv60]

It was clear several paragraphs in that he had read Thomas Sowell's work, so I was pleased to see him named further down. Good article, M! Thanks!

Thomas Sowell, Smartest Man in the United States!!
I urge people to check this mans writings out.

 

[Archangel M]

You Mean this Thomas Sowell?

'Supporting the Troops'
by Thomas Sowell

Posted: 03/13/2007

The front cover of Newsweek's March 5th issue featured a woman with amputated legs and a sweatshirt that said "ARMY" across the front. Inside, there were pages and pages of other pictures of badly wounded and disfigured military veterans, in a long article that began under the big headline: "Forgotten Heroes."

The utter hypocrisy of all this can be seen in the word "heroes." There have been many acts of heroism among our troops in Iraq -- but those heroes didn't make the front cover of Newsweek.

One man fell on a grenade to protect his buddies, smothering the fatal blast with his body, so that those around him might live when he died. But that never made the front cover of Newsweek. It was barely mentioned anywhere in the liberal media

They are not interested in heroes. They are interested in depicting victims -- in the military as in civilian society.

The Newsweek hypocrisy is not unique. It has been the rule, not the exception, as much of the mainstream media has devoted itself to filtering and spinning the news out of Iraq.

Parading casualties is called "honoring our troops." But what does it mean to honor someone? When we gather at a memorial service to honor someone in death or at a ceremony to award prizes to them while they are alive, what do we do?

We talk about the good things they have done, their endeavors and their achievements. We don't call simply pointing out that someone is dead "honoring" them. Nor is simply pointing out that someone is dismembered or disfigured "honoring" them.

Talk about "supporting the troops" or "honoring the dead" is part of the general corruption of language for political purposes. It is like saying "I take full responsibility," when all that this phrase really means is: "You have caught me red-handed and there is no way to deny it, so I will just use these words to try to dissipate your anger and escape punishment."

After generations of dumbed-down education in our schools, perhaps it is inevitable that there would be large numbers of people who have no way of separating rhetoric from reality.

The reality is that many of those in the media and in politics who are constantly talking about "supporting our troops" or "honoring our troops" have for years been in the forefront of those criticizing or undermining the military, long before the Iraq war.

During the early stages of that war, men fighting for their lives were criticized for not protecting the contents of an Iraqi museum.

Unsubstantiated charges against American military personnel create instant front-page news stories in the New York Times. But innumerable things that our troops have done that would make us proud are not likely to be reported at all.

It was front-page news in the March 4th New York Times when a young soldier said goodbye to her father before heading off to Iraq.

It was front-page news in the New York Times when some reservists had financial problems when they had to leave their civilian jobs after being called to active duty in Iraq.

Anything negative, no matter how commonplace, can make the front page of the New York Times, while even remarkable acts of bravery or compassion are passed over in silence.

Activists are creating displays in which a small American flag is planted for every death in Iraq. For some of these activists, it may be the first time they have ever touched an American flag, unless they were burning it.

Perhaps the most irresponsible act of all has been Congress's promotion of a non-binding resolution against the recent increase in American troop strength in Iraq.

People's opinions can differ on troop deployment, even if -- like House Speaker Nancy Pelosi -- they have never deployed troops in their lives and have no military experience whatsoever.

But if anyone in Congress is serious about stopping the war, they can simply cut off the money -- and take responsibility for the consequences that follow.

Instead, they want to have it both ways, passing a non-binding resolution whose only effect is to embolden our enemies and undermine the morale of our troops that they keep saying they are "supporting."

 

[CoryKS]

You Mean this Thomas Sowell?

That's the man. If you want to read some of his best work, try "The Vision of the Anointed: Self-Congratulation As a Basis For Social Policy", "A Conflict of Visions", or "Basic Economics" and "Applied Economics".

 

[navyvetcv60]

You Mean this Thomas Sowell?

Yes, absolutely I Mean that Thomas Sowell.

 

[CoryKS]

Here's an interesting article from The Australian about reactions to the Mamet Apostasy.