Our Culture of Misplaced, Warped Values

Back in the sixties growing up there were writers and commentators saying that we lived in a sick, twisted society with misplaced priorities.  Let’s return to our favorite example topic, Star Trek episodes.  There was this one episode where Captain Piccard was trying to beam these survivors off this planet where they would otherwise all be doomed.  So you can imagine how flabberghasted the crew was when the first thing that got beamed up was this big old chest filled with “felicium” this drug everybody on the planet was addicted to.   Clearly a cultural anthropologist would say “This is a society that places an extrordenary value on monetary value and profit over human life”.  And yet today we see it.  This loser owner of the LA Clippers now says he doesn’t want to sell the team because “The amount of capital gains tax I’d have to pay would be horrific”.  Well, this line is one I’d expect Rush Limbaugh to pick up on.  Of course the rate would be fifteen percent, when during most of my time growing up the rate was 25 percent.  And of course that’s only on the Profit he made- - from now selling a Clippers team that got to the second round of the play-offs, and of enhanced value.  The guy should be grateful because those “black boys” on the court were putting money in his pocket.  It’s funny how people’s values have a way of leaking out.  Thom Hartman today was relating one time he was at some shooting gallery and was told he’d only be able to buy two boxes of ammunition and when Thom Hartman asked him why, the store owner said “It’s because of that Nigger in the White house come to take all our guns”.   And they say attacks on President Obama are not racial.  Do you remember when Trayvon Martin was killed and the President said “If I had a son he’d look just like Trayvon” and the conservatives on the radio almost had a cow.  But if it had been a black man killing a white teenager and it was President Clinton in the White House if he had said “That victim could be my son, if I had a son”, I would not expect Ralph Abernathy and Andrew Young and the SCLC to be crying “Oh look at that- - he’s injecting race into the case saying he’d identify with him because he’s White”.   That wouldn’t happen. 

People wonder what is so peculiarly sick about our culture in the United States, as opposed to other countries.  Canada has more per capita gun ownership – at least per household than the United States does, but they don’t have our culture of random violence as we do.  You can’t blame TV or movies of video games, because they have these all over the world and these other countries don’t have our culture of violence.  In Austrailia in 1995 they were having their own gun violence problem but they decided to do something about it and slapped strict regulations on firearms and the problem went away.  People in this country point to Chicago as a negative example, but if you’ve ever seen a map of the area, the state line with Indiana cuts right across the metropolitan area and it’s only a twenty minute drive to get firearms.  The plain fact is that the National Rifle Association and FOX news controls the debate in this country feeding their poison of paranoid and fear into the mix.  The NRA lives on fear.  They don’t care how many people are killed.  Arming all the residents of Isla Vista would not have cut down on violence but increased it.  And then the NRA could use that fear to sell even more guns.  That’s how they operate.   If the crime rate drops in Florida, it just might be because things which before were a crime, like shooting someone in cold blood, are legal now under the “Stand your ground law”.   But there is an ugly, racial aspect to the second amendment I was not aware of till just today listening to Thom Hartman.  It seems that in the south that state militias were used as runaway slave petrols, to capture runaway slaves and give them twenty lashes.  This was state law.   So called “civil libertarians” like Patrick Henry were staunchly advocating for a way to empower these state militias - - and not to be hampered by congress.  So they passed the law that said that the right of these well regulated state militias would not be tampered with.  It should also be noted that these militias are created to PUT DOWN rebellions against the government, and not to foment then as Bundy and his crowd maintains.  We know that people like Shawn Hannity defend Cliven Bundy at every opportunity.  They speak of using guns for self defense and hunting and sports shooting.  Yet of the twenty speakers at the constitutional convention who rose to speak on the second amendment, not one of them spoke about these aspects.

We then turn to this current topic of income inequity.  Rush Limbaugh will tell you two big lies  “spawned from the pit of hell” to use an Evangalical phrase.  The first one is that the poor want to “punish the rich” regardless as to whether their own lots are improved in life one bit.  Rush said the very same thing just over twenty years ago when President Clinton raised income taxes to 39%   He said it would amount to ruination of the economy.   Of course just the opposite happened and the economy took off, but of course Rush Limbaugh never said he was wrong.   The other lie of course is that equality of income is bad and even capitalism itself is bad because Karl Marx taught about it, and it’s “right out of the handbook of people like Sol Allinsky and Bill Ayres”.  Of course these are two people many if not most of progressives today have never heard of.  The only place you’ll hear these names is on broadcasts like Limbaugh and Hannity.  But Hartman reminds us that unless there is some rule maker or referee in capitalism, the natural evolution of capitalism is to have a very small elite rich class and almost as tiny of a merchant class such as shop owners and artists and such.  The rest of the people are the working poor, who are pretty much doomed their whole lives with little possibility of upward mobility.  So when Shawn or Rush talk about “unfettering capitalism” this is JUST the sort of world they are dreaming about.  Progressives are proven right throughout history time and time again, and people like Rush and Shawn are proven wrong time and time again.  But these people never look at the facts.  Waiting for “trickle down” to work is about as pointless as standing on a grassy hill waiting for Jesus to come from the sky.  So the funny thing is you need something like a disaster like war or the black death, or a mass exodus of people going to the new world or something - - to increase the wages of the average working man.  For once Neil Savedra is right.  Good can come out from this kind of tragedy.   And in an unequal state as bad as ours- and it’s getting worse all the time,  things like mental illness and crime and drug addiction invariably rise not just among the poor, but also among the rich.  Among the world’s nations- - the position rating of the United States has slidden drastically in the past ten years. 

There is another prong of the right wing attack by people such as the Koch Brothers and Dow and Monsanto however.  I’m not talking about genetically modified foods right now, but this is a whole disaster waiting to happen in and of itself.  I’m speaking more generally about how the tea party has moved into its “Next Phase”.   Now they are going after state Attorney Generals.  People like Sheldon Adelson and the Koch Brothers have realized that here is where so much of the power they fear comes from.  The attorney generals determine who will be gone after- - investigated and charged and probably convicted.  So clearly the rich consider it important to have the state Attorney General someone in their back pocket, whom they can trust.  That way polluters, and wall street crooks, and the gun and tobacco and drug lobbies- - can all get away with whatever they want.  Mike Papentonio had a big thing on Pfizer drugs today- - and they are the epitomy of greed in America today.  They are the ones who make such best selling drugs such as Lipitor and Viagra.  Lipitor will of course kill you, as any staten drug will.  Viagra is for rich people hanging on to their youths- - who leave their wives and go and date a girl young enough to be their granddaughter or something.  These companies want to relocate off shore but continue to sell their products here and have our military protect their foreign offices, and they want to have their sweet heart deals with Medicare and the VA and such.  And according to Mike, they make up to ten thousand - - percent on each pill they sell, as opposed to what it cost them to produce it.  Mike calls them “Un American”, which is a word I think we liberals ought to reclaim as our own- - because it’s a concept the tea party seems to have forgotten all about.   Some would note that (I heard this on one program) that “Well, some people used to be tea party people when they were elected but now they aren’t any more”.   Little could be further from the truth.  Actually, the rightward shift is so pervasive that- - even by 2010 standards, the party has slidden father too the political right.  I’ve heard Rush Limbaugh’s complaint that “John Boehner and this republican congress is just too soft of progressives, and too willing to compromise with the President on core issues”.  I don’t know what kind of Kool Aid they’ve been drinking- - but these people are “devowering their own” constantly trying to flank the next guy on the right on an issue.  Clearly when you see the Cliven Bundy group they live in an imaginary bubble world of their own fantasy.  In Shawn Hannity’s world, new kids out of high school can have a starting salary of 75 to a hundred thousand dollars per year working in the oil fields of North Dakota and Texas.  And they can be in the field their whole lives, which are bright with economic hope and advancement and all that.  Don’t mention global warming to them.   You don’t have to be “political” to observe all these things.  I’m just letting you know what priorities those on the far right, who have been running the country for four years, actually believe.  As for my personal beliefs, I deal in moral values.  But the other side has this laundry list of issues they check off- - to make sure they get the highest score on some conservitism purity survey.

I would now like to cite an example from a Soap Opera and tie it back into President Obama.  As you may know on Days of our Lives, Will Horton confessed to shooting Nick Fallon with a gun that his lover got from Victor Kiriacus.  Hope (Salem PD) traced the gun back to Victor because it's a rare make and model.  Victor knew that Sonny had stolen the gun and used it and saw three bullets were missing.  So he altered the gun in some way to warp out the barrel so the bullistics wouldn't quite match up, but even Victor admitted "The police won't be fooled for long".  But I think Hope must be a little mystified as to why Will Horton was suddenly confessing.  Of course with his doing so, there is already a shadow of suspicion on both Sonny and Victor.  Does Hope know that Will was tipped off by EJ that the cops had already traced the gun?  But what must perplex Hope more is "How is it that this little weasly nerd like Nick- - had such enormous Power over all of your lives?  How could he dictate the terms of something, like a custody agreement, and the three of you, Will, Sonny and Gabriel, just fall in line and never question it or right it?   Now we move to President Obama.  It's like Obama has had one of the "weakest" presidencies- - since Harding or Cleveland or something.  He has grossly diminished the prestige of the office.  But the question is "Who is President Obama's - Nick Fallon?"  Who is pulling the strings in his administration and HOW did they ever GET that sort of power over you to begin with.  We know Obama is powerless over Wall Street - - and the National Security Administration has run rampant and Eric Holder never even tried to go after the "Bush Crime Family"- - and strangely - - the President has had few defenders in high places the way other Presidents like Bush have had.  They would get up and make speeches and pound the table and say things like "stay the course' and "We need to rally behind our President.  It's the American thing to do".   But this President seems almost completely alone.   So back to Hope and the Soap - - she has to be wondering "I have the feeling there are a whole lot of other aspects to this story that we don't know about and will be astounded and shocked once we learn them".   This is ditto for President Obama.