Blue Lips and Red Behinds: America’s True Colors

At long last, the article A Nation of Masochists by Juan Cole (Informed Comment)[1] proposes a realistic alternate theory that explains America’s voting habits. This one is no less subtle that the current theory that Americans suffer from sheer, blinding ignorance mixed with heaping helpings of stupidity.

Juan Cole reports almost exclusively on the Middle East, but clearly something ruffled his feathers and he is pissed.[2] His recounting of the last eight years under the Republicans is mostly accurate, not completely fair, but 100% amusing. If you’ll pardon the excessive citation in advance, the compact history includes:

• …they came to power when there was a budget surplus…
• They immediately ran up a big deficit every year since, doubling the national debt from $5 trillion to $10 trillion. You don’t run big deficits of $300 and $400 billion a year in good times according to Keynes.[3]
• …many […] came to Washington with a crooked plan to use fraudulent methods to ensure that campaign financing went almost exclusively to them. […] Thus, laws governing pharmaceuticals were written by the pharmaceutical industry lobbyists and [were] just signed off on by the Republicans.
• They were about fixing the whole American system permanently to kow-tow to the super-rich […] and to positively punish the middle classes.
• They took us to war against a country that had not attacked [us]; they killed or maimed 33,000 Americans, and turned a whole Arab Muslim country into a burned-out hulk, displacing millions and continuously bombing the very cities that they had conquered and occupied…
• They imposed on us this so-called PATRIOT act that gutted the Constitution. The peaceful protesters in St. Paul at the RNC were actually charged with being terrorists…
• Not to mention that levies and bridges are breaking and falling down all around us because Cheney did not want to tax his billionaire friends to pay for the country’s infrastructural upkeep.
• And then they so radically deregulated and removed any oversight from the banking system that they came within hours of presiding over a 1929-style absolute meltdown of the entire financial and securities system. To cover the criminal activities of their cronies, they are now proposing to impose a fine of one trillion dollars on the middle class, to ensure that their partners in crime will receive their $25 million Christmas bonuses and be held harmless for their misdeeds.

Whew. The emphases were added, but the anger still rings through loud and clear, and it’s hard to argue that it’s unjustified anger. That’s quite a laundry list of misdeeds; did anything good happen? It’s hard to remember. He’s not quite finished, though, because here comes the punchline:

“And in the wake of the greatest and most sustained act of systematic plunder since the Mongol hordes appropriated to themselves the riches of everyplace in Asia from Beijing to Isfahan[4], the reaction of the supine and slave-like American voting public is to scratch their heads and have a hard time deciding if they would like more of the same.”

And, in this, he is correct. As a McCain voter, try to see past the angry tone and the intimation of stupidity[5] and just look at what happened and realize that it cannot continue in this vein. Sure, Obama’s got his own basket full of problems and he’s part of the party machine as well and likely part of the problem in American politics, but at least he’s not outright uniformed or stupid or insane or senile or demented. He at least has the werewithal to realize that America is not “doing just fine” and that, basically, none of its “fundamentals are sound”. He has, at least, not outright promised more of the same as the Bush administration has given us. It’s not a matter of loving Obama or loving everything about him, it’s just a matter of recognizing the difference between potential competence and proven incompetence.

In that light, it’s just amazing that its not a blowout for Obama yet, it really is. Obama’s got brown skin and McCain has white skin (cancerous as it is); we get it. But, for once, don’t worry about it. For once, try to pretend that skin color’s not the most important thing because, if you don’t, we’re about to find out what the rollercoaster’s like without rails[6].

Perhaps the masochism explanation has merit, after all. Perhaps it’s a vestige of the nation’s Puritan roots, wherein many people just don’t think they deserve better and secretly scuttle all their own efforts at success by voting against their interests. Maybe that’s it; perhaps Americans are possessed of a self-loathing that the rest of the world could never even begin to match and are determined to throw themselves into the fire to burn out the demons. If so, the Republicans are standing gleefully by with a can of kerosene and a book of matches.