December 16, 2008
"All that is necessay for evil to suceed is that good men do nothing." Edmund Burke
On Dennis Miller's show last night, a Chicago Tribune columnist noted that ignorance of the character of Gov. Blagojevich would be impossible for any Illinois or Federal pol. He acknowledged that he liked the president elect from Illinois, but that the only way he stayed clean all those years was by looking the other way.
[The Tribune writer noted that in 2002, state senator Barack Obama and Rahm Emmanuel closely advised and guided Blagojevich's successful run for governor of Illinois.]
It takes a studied and agile cool to step over the steaming corruption of Springfield's and Chicago's civic culture as Senator Obama demonstrated like the Astaire of politics he is becoming.
Few would be enlightened by the observation that the fanatic contempt -- a Progressive contempt -- for middle-classism that the president-elect imbibed at church and law for nearly two decades is for the middle class fastidiousness. Cut and raked lawns, painted houses, washed cars, Sunday mass, regular attendance at the polls every two years. Anxiety about the health and future of their children, about money, about the quality of the local schools, about even a hint of crime. An earnestness separated from cool by a social chasm.
Which is why preachers and activists and community organizers rarely attack the upper and upper middle classes. They depend upon and emulate their economic security; their certain solidarity with unending civil rightism and cultural evolution; their contempt for restraints of any kind; and their social ease that knockoffs from the Claymore Shop cannot costume.
Now, as in the sixties, radicals in casual dress -- or when required by cameras, Brooks Brothers suits -- accessorized by firey rhetoric, climb the social rock face with a supple cool that has more in common with Kingswood and Cranbrook than the Little Red School House in the Village.
[To ambitious progressives, the working class and working poor are beneath contempt, that is, fit only for ridicule. As they are somewhere almost nightly on MY NAME IS EARL, THE SIMPSONS, THE BLUE COLLAR COMEDY HOUR, THE DAVE CHAPPELLE SHOW (in reruns).]
As a state legislature and then Senator from Illinois, President-elect Obama understood that "to do something big" (as Michelle Obama announced "we" would do at a gathering of senatorial spouses) you have to step around the collateral damage of someone elses abuse of power. Great things require great sacrifices -- by others.
Burke's words were apparently a favorite of the late Dr. Martin Luther King, who quoted them often. All that is required for evil to prevail is for a good man to do nothing. Until they can do everthing -- the Obama codicil. Institutional failure in New Orleans did not become a progressive issue until Hurrican Katrina could be used to make it a Federal case. A famously corrupt and ineptly run city finally found its fall guy -- and it only cost the loss of half the city and one thousand lives.
If Christmas brings the meanness out of you, here's a new way to make a progressive co-worker or friend feel bad. As them if "competence" is the word that they would use to describe Detroit, Pontiac, Baltimore, the Bronx, the southside of Chicago, Roxbury, Compton, CA, Oakland, CA, South Central LA, Philadelphia... In the enlightened universe of "world changers," this would be a cruel and unfair and rude confrontation with facts.
In New York and Detroit where I have spent nearly three quarters of my life, looking the other way was the only way to keep a straight face when yet another politician promised to "change the world." Correlating the urban misery index with the latest in slapstick idealism was bigotry on its face. Here in Detroit, the city is broke, the children untaught and unsafe, the city council has their judas goat in yet another dismissed school superintendant, while the preachers sing and dance around SUV's supplanting altars and crosses.
A reporter asked President Elect Obama if, after spending hundreds of billions of mass printed dollars on bailouts, stimulus packages, and infrastructure, he could promise that unemployment would decrease in two years. Obama couldn't promise that and so didn't answer the question. Those gravity-defying dance moves again. President Astaire...
There is no accountability for cool, especially when cool "loses it" as it did in the California streets after the election. Blacks and hispanics discovered that racial epithets aren't merely euphemisms on the Los Angeles Times op-ed page (which now encompasses everything from the funny pages to above the fold headlines.
The other day, at a bookstore, a cashier asked a lesbian couple (they were buying, as they announced to anyone who could hear, gay "erotica") if they would like to contribute a children's book to a local charity. "No. Absolutely not," one of the women said. "Why do they need to learn to read." She smiled. Cool is, of course, a subsidiary of American Narcissicism. A leisure service of the babyboomers. The woman looked around in hopes of getting a response. (Not cool. Not because she wanted to be noticed, but because she showed that she wanted to be noticed.) The marketing slogan for the new Sean Penn movied about Harvey Milk, a gay activist shot down in cold blood by a deranged ex cop, is NEVER BLEND IN. That is now the kulturekampf cry of any and every social justice crusade in the West.
If the whole world isn't watching, no one is. Conscience requires a sense of the private. But progressives live by the assumption that their thoughts, sex acts, prejudices, opinions, diet, and politics are of interest to all. Privacy is only a concern when the government acts or tries to protect citizens from crime or terrorism.
Your desire not to be compelled, Clockwork Orange-like, to view their private lives deserves no consideration. And that is usually when cool is lost. No one paid attention to the couple and the disappointment was noticeable. Reminding me again of a night at the Lone Star in Manhattan when Abby Hoffman came in and no one took note. His suicide months later may well have been, in part, the desperate act of a former celebrity. In a roomful of media narcissicists, Mr. Hoffman blended in.
Sam Macomb
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