"Our Exhausting Illusions": Open Left ...

[KoKo]

Our Exhausting Illusions
by: glendenb
Sun Dec 12, 2010 at 17:00

(Exhaustion is the perfect word. I'm feeling it myself.... - promoted by Paul Rosenberg)

I've written before about the notion that an era is over when it's basic illusions are exhausted and exhausting. It's a deceptively simply statement. The basic illusions are exhausted - they don't work in the real world any more. And they are exhausting - just trying to maintain them wears us out. It's been obvious for a long time that the American political system is at the end of a natural cycle of its life - and it's time to abandon the illusions that have informed it.

Nothing better exemplifies that reality than the utterly insane budget busting tax deal that the White House is trying to shove down our throats. It's bad policy at almost every level. It adds hundreds of billions to the national debt, it buys into every false notion about tax policy that has dominated the last 30 years of politics, it doesn't do nearly enough to help the people who need help and it does way too much to help people who don't need help. When a Democratic president is praising the people who have spent two years telling anyone and everyone he is a Kenyan born muslim socialist nazi intent on destroying America and attacking his base, you know something has gone terribly, horribly awry.

-snip-

Defending these basic illusions has become exhausting for Americans. At Tom Dispatch, I read an analysis of the collapse of empires that said wars like Iraq and Afghanistan characterize collapsing empires; they're the kinds of wars that empires wage to compensate for their very real decline in power. The resources expended in these wars are completely out of proportion to any possible victories we could win and all they've done is bleed us dry. There are people who have built entire careers out of "defending" the family yet recent polling suggests that they have long since lost the battle; Americans have accepted a multiplicity of family arrangements as valid - in practice as well as attitude; yet these virtuecrats keep their endless battles raging.

Theistic religion in general is in deep trouble; as the religious left in the US grows increasingly non-theistic in its view of the world, as people abandon the institutional church because it is irrelevant to their lives, the Christianists are fighting ever harder to hold onto the redoubts they still hold. Even the once vaunted Southern Baptist Convention is seeing its numbers decline and its influence weaken; the Catholic church may be irreparably damaged by its decades long conspiracy to protect pedophiles. Increasingly large numbers of Americans identity as nonbelievers, as agnostics, as atheists or "spiritual but not religious." The great crash of 2008 and the Great Recession occurred at a time when government regulation was the most lax its been in decades and while profits have returned for the financial sector the rest of the economy continues to suffer; China with its vast regulatory and protectionist economy is growing by leaps and bounds while America struggles; government run health care uses fewer resources for administrative tasks and more for patient care than does private health care. The economic illusions of neoliberalism have been disproved by the real world.

MORE at........

http://www.openleft.com/diary/21097/our-exhausting-illusions

[Laelth]

1. Excellent essay. Highly recommended. k&r n/t

-Laelth