This professor has it right....make that CORRECT in his clear seeing op ed piece today
Connect the Dots for a Disturbing Picture
By TODD GITLIN, Todd Gitlin is a professor of journalism and sociology
at Columbia University and the author, most recently, of "Media
Unlimited: How the Torrent of Images and Sounds Overwhelms Our
Lives."
NEW YORK -- There's been a lot of talk recently
about connecting dots--at least when the enemy is
terrorism. Connecting the dots: That's what the
FBI, CIA, NSA and the rest of the so-called
intelligence agencies failed to do before Sept. 11.
Important facts got to somebody's files, but the
crucial work of interpreting them, of connecting
them to other important facts, never happened, and
so the full picture remained hidden. Thanks to
whistle-blowers and belatedly mobilized members
of Congress, the difference between dots and
pictures is now well understood.
But let's look at our other current troubles. There are plenty of other dots going
unconnected, seemingly isolated facts about current and future hazards of every
variety--corporate corruption, economic fragility, ecological damage, alliance
ruptures, foreign policy calamities. But these many vexations are not, in fact,
disconnected. At the heart there is a pattern. The big, unacknowledged picture
is this: The people in power represent an economic clique whose interests are
only superficially tied to the well-being of the country as a whole. In collusion
with their delighted big-money supporters, President Bush, Vice President Dick
Cheney and their Cabinet-level entourage spent years lining their pockets with
sweetheart loans, option deals and golden parachutes from oil companies and
other related industries. They built political careers thundering against
regulation, fueled by a cozy camaraderie with Enron and like companies that
grew fat on--surprise!--deregulation. In office, these men make energy policy
in cahoots with their ultra-wealthy sponsors, a club of very special Americans
whose membership list they still keep secret. They consistently fight to secure
America's energy dependency on oil and related fuels. Toward that end,
defying the understanding of virtually everyone else in the world, they have
denied the existence of global warming, willfully distorting the scientific
evidence. When its own government scientists sounded alarms, the Bush posse
dismissed them as ''the bureaucracy" and kept galloping down the oily path
toward even more catastrophic global climate changes associated with
petroleum dependency.
These bullheaded good old boys prate about patriotism but see no problem
with moving corporate headquarters offshore to avoid taxes. They prate about
fiscal responsibility yet guarantee vast deficits by protecting billionaires from
inheritance and other taxes. They declare war on terrorism yet arrange
buddy-buddy deals with the same Saudi ruling caste that turned a calculated
blind eye to Al Qaeda and America-hating madrasas. They talk ''under God"
but they walk under oil. Is the pattern not obvious? These are the leaders who
are going to lead America out of grave trouble?
Democrats have a golden opportunity now to pound the podium and make a
case to the nation that the interests in power--the interests who won a minority
of the ballots cast but a majority of the Supreme Court during the 2000
presidential election--cannot be relied on to solve problems that their entire
careers were devoted to creating. These interests are in revolt against plain
American value and virtue. Even the honest men and women among them
cannot muster the resolve to reform--their thinking is too deeply molded by the
lives they've led.
Lifelong defenders of subsidized laissez faire for the wealthy who can afford the
price of the ticket (remember the savings and loan rip-offs?), averse to the
enforcement of public justice for everyone else (remember Ronald Reagan's
''government is not the solution; government is the problem"?), they are true
believers in the superior rights of people like themselves. Now, late in the
game, they dress up and pretend to be sheriffs, but they are more in the mold
of trickle-downer Herbert Hoover than of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who
understood that capitalism had to be saved from capitalists.
We might properly ask, where were the Democrats when the clique was
mobilizing to win back the White House in order to push for yet more
deregulation? The man who, more than anyone else, drew the necessary
diagram to connect the dots was not Al Gore but the underappreciated political
theorist (and Hollywood filmmaker) Rob Reiner. After the Republican
convention of 2000, where African Americans trotted out on stage far
outnumbered African American delegates, and self-congratulation about
''diversity" was the order of the day, it was left to Reiner to make the elegant
point that the Republicans truly did believe in diversity: After all, they nominated
executives from two different oil companies.
Was it not obvious once you heard it?
But Democrats were timid about pressing the point. It wouldn't sound nice. It
would sound like, well, too anti-business, too liberal, too 1960s or otherwise
retro. The hard-charging Dow, they thought, would undercut their point.
Anyway, the Democrats were too compromised. They had made too many of
their own deals with the oil-deregulation-and-book-cooking complex. After
President Clinton and Gore tried to tamper with their entitlements and
prerogatives early in their first administration, only to get slapped down, the top
Democrats convinced themselves that corporate growth (never mind who kept
the books) was the emolument not only for America but for global inequality
across the board. Feeling middle-class complacency, under pressure from
hate-mongering Republicans and an unrelenting press, Clinton and his party
decided they could not do better than believe in Wall Street.
The approach worked--for as long as it worked. But they spent far more time
catering to the tycoons than doing right by the teachers and cops and
firefighters, who, we now understand, are the real heroes.
Now, the Democrats need to do more than win the votes for this or that new
corporate regulation. They need to move beyond merely feeling smug about
how the Republicans have sabotaged themselves. They need to confess their
own sins--as Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has done. But even more, they need
to back the Republicans into their chosen corner. They need to connect with
the healthy side of American skepticism. They need to be thunderous and clear
on the essentials.
If the Democrats forfeit the opportunity now handed them to connect all the
flaming dots, they are truly as flabby, corrupt and venal as Ralph Nader says.
CC |
