US liberals have lost their thunder

[CHIMO]

There is an astonishing lack of anger among liberals, progressives and radicals who have abandoned emotion to the right. Our role model continues to be not FDR, still less Malcolm X, but our "bipartisan" and apparently tone-deaf President Obama. In this second or third year of a devastating depression, not just recession, that has inflicted an epidemic of suffering on the lower half of the American nation, Obama is very busy being fluent and civil while being essentially untouched by the rage felt by so many of us. Our world, as we have known it, is being annihilated, and nobody in power shows signs of giving a damn.

The real anger is all on the right, kidnapped – or authentically voiced – by the all-white Tea Partiers, Palinites, Oath Keepers and "armed and dangerous" patriot groups, some but not all of whom are native-fascistic but also include pissed-off libertarians and the disappointed and dispossessed at the bottom of the pile.

Look at the mess. Evictions – I'm a child of Great Depression furniture-thrown-on-the-street – are skyrocketing. Mortgage holders are in a feeding frenzy on their hapless fellow citizens. Michelle Obama lectures us on obesity while one in eight Americans (and one in four children) are on federal food stamps. The human toll of long term, more-or-less permanent unemployment is yet to be counted as millions of Americans are pushed out of the middle class and become the "new poor" queueing up at food banks for the first time in their lives.

Those who do vent and get angry are put down as crackpots, which they sometimes are. But the so-called left seems to have joined the mainstream (and even the radical) media in under- or mis- or never-reporting what's actually happening in the lives of so many of us. Like Obama, Pelosi and the rest of the Democratic party establishment we've forfeited real gut language in favour of policy abstractions, the "issues" syndrome, that so easily hide an open wound. Joe Stack, who rammed his Piper Cherokee into the IRS building in Austin, Texas, murdering an IRS worker and injuring many, was one maladjusted injustice collector. But his online 3000-word suicide note, a long-repressed scream of protest, has the virtue of unminced words we are never likely to hear from anyone in Washington or a state capitol. "When the wealthy fuck up, the poor get to die."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2010/feb/24/tea-party-protests-liberals

[Tutankhamun]

1. K&R

[emilyg]

2. k/r

[yurbud]

3. the author is mistaking what's going on in the media and inside the beltway with the rest of us

[midnight]

4. The wealthy don't consider this bank bailout a f#ck up. It was deliberately

planned.

[winyanstaz]

5. There are many pissed off Democrats in that pile too......

I think it has gone beyond parties for many Americans now. It has gone beyond race, sex, religion and even politics..and is down to basic survival now.

[Zoeisright]

6. Lack of anger???

I'm so mad blood is spurting out of my ears.

[Doctor_J]

7. Bullshit

we just don't have any media on which to display it. And, has been repeated thoughout history, when an angry group gets no redress through the ballot box or soapbox, ...

[Vidar]

8. Weiner, Grayson & Kucinich have plenty of thunder, but not much press coverage.

That seems to require corporate funding these days.

[MisterP]

9. dunno, there's a LOT of angry grumbling,

and it won't all go into the cartridge-box-and-canned-food Teabaggers

ironically, Britain has the same political problems, New Labour shrilling that "we saved the party" and "do you want the Thatcherites to come back?" but sounding increasingly inane. capitalism and environmental damage

Britain's non-leftist liberals are also renowned for their insistence on "calm reason" and not doing anything really ontologically radical: the late H.G. Wells and J.B.S. Haldane (who were mocked in C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy and by Huxley), Arthur C. Clarke, and what Terry Eagleton described as Dawkins' "North Oxford" "brisk, bloodless rationality," a philistine "very English brand of common sense." all of this equates science with all that is good, and tells us not to fret about mobilization or conscientization because technology will Progress (so no worries about limited resources or restraining the Great Human Success Story of "more of us, more for us" out of concern for the other 4 million species, since technology will bail us out), the future will always be better than the past (if government keeps the funding grants rolling), and the most rational thing to do is to turn over absolute power to the most rational among us, the technocrats (note that neoliberalism is basically the apex of technocracy). it's entirely unemotional, very British, and stifles any move to the left. I say "very British" since there's not many Americans that are vocally for it (though some say that conservatism is doomed because future generations will have "greater respect for science": somebody tell Kevin B. MacDonald or Robert Ardrey). even Soviet ortho-Marxist "scientific Leninism" is quite a distance from this materialistic British techno-utopian dream.