The Wasteland

T.S. Eliot, a mild-mannered bank employee and American expatriate in England, wrote some of the 20th century's greatest epic poetry. He was a conservative, a royalist, and had a better public school accent than Winston Churchill. He was also a pessimist. Anyone who's taken an English lit class or two has probably read Eliot's magnum opus, The Wasteland. In navigating the flourishes in German, Latin, French and even Cockney, one quickly gains the sense that Eliot is talking down to us.

That's because he is.

Scholars have argued that the point being made in The Wasteland was that so many people are talking, but no one understands language anymore. Whether this is what Eliot intended or not, the premise is a correct one. Even as English has come to be the dominant language spoken throughout the world, our ability to understand one another has diminished. Educated people once were fluent in multiple languages and almost always were fluent in Greek and Latin. This was because understanding doesn't come from reading a translation. To explain this another way, if you want to understand trigonometry, you'll first have to have a firm grasp of the concepts, methods and mechanisms of algebra. Likewise, if you want to understand class nuances in Lyermontov's Caucasus stories, the English translations will miss the point entirely; you simply can't capture the deference and condescension inherent in the Cossack/Russian dialectic in the same way that ты and вы express so elegantly.

I've thought a lot about The Wasteland of late. It seemed that after the election we were no longer working toward a dialogue. But it's more than that. We no longer understand each other and no longer care to. And it's not just everyone's favorite dichotomy--Democrats and Republicans--the "right" and "left" if you will. The Republican party is besieged from within as the radio entertainers, the religious right, business conservatives and civil libertarians battle among each other and the moderate forces of the party--including those in the press--for the soul of the GOP. The Republican party going the way of the Whigs, perhaps?

Not likely.

Talk on the left is equally tone deaf. Democrats no longer speak to labor or progressives--if they ever did; they certainly don't speak for them. The "liberal" media" (i.e. MSNBC) has a script they're following, not unlike the one followed by the rightist media (i.e. Fox News). Both are looking for knee-jerk reactionists. Both follow the talking points remarkably well.

Will Obama's health care plan make us healthier? Will Republican promises to cut government spending make us more prosperous? In other words, what's the observable difference from up here in the cheap seats?

Abortion? Republican majorities in both houses never tried to pass legislation outlawing it during the 12 years they were in power. Assessment: no one in the GOP cares about abortion. It's simply a wedge issue to help them get elected by people with a genuine ambivalence to the practice. It's worked brilliantly ever since Reagan. Why would they kill their golden goose?

Health care? It's become to liberal rhetoric what 9-11 was for Guiliani's: a verb, a noun and National Health Care. Like most social programs, it has one of two means to be accomplished: levy higher taxes on the middle class or place criminal consequences upon those who can't afford it. Again, it's a Holy Graille; deliberately vague and unachievable, countervailing the Republican promise (with crossed fingers) to outlaw abortion.

The assassination of Dr. Tiller in a Wichita church has been a watershed moment in American politics. Roe v. Wade, though it remains firmly the law of the land, has been virtually nullified through a violent war of attrition that has included the assassination of abortion providers, the bombing of clinics, and any number of other acts that should at once draw howls of laughter at the mere mention of the euphemistically named "pro-life" movement. Those who quickly spoke out to justify his murder as, the victim simply "reap[ing] what he sowed," can no more be labeled as supporting the human right to life than an Antebellum planter could have called himself "anti-slavery."

At the same time, the need for some on the left to have this murder defined as an act of terrorism is disturbing. While it can be argued that demagogues have shown a depraved indifference to human life by lighting the fuses of people that they know to be emotionally unbalanced, this is not the same thing as shouting "fire" in a crowded theater. For my part, O'Reilly's constant repetition of "Tiller the baby killer," in concert with his characterization of him as an unprincipled capitalist (see video below; click on the title if you're reading this on facebook) elicited eye rolls the few times I happened to catch it out of the corner of my eye at the gym. There can be no question that O'Reilly and others, who played on the visceral reaction that people naturally have when someone tells them that some maniac is out there slaughtering infants, are responsible for Tiller's murder. Whether or not these reckless demagogues will be held financially responsible is for the civil courts to decide. But as much as I loathe them, I find the idea that they could be legally defined as terrorists horrifying.



At issue isn't what's being said in the media, but why. Why does Bill O'Reilly repeat over and over "Tiller the Baby Killer" like a broken record? Why does Rachel Maddow want the leftist pundits on her show to back up her assertion that the assassination of Dr. Tiller amounts to terrorism (which none of them would)?

Allow me to return to our original discussion about T.S. Eliot's Wasteland. We've lost the ability to communicate. Not just in the languages of the educated; we've lost the ability to accept dissenting opinion from our own. Television and internet has built up an industry that talks at us. And we talk back, even if we know no one is listening. Who reads the comments at the bottom of op-ed pieces on the web, besides the armies of the duopoly, fresh from their latest pep talk by Keith Olbermann or Bill O'Reilly or Rachel Maddow or Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh?

I am convinced that the blogosphere is that Wasteland where there are too many voices and no one can understand one another. Don't like the liberal bent someone is taking? Call him a socialist baby killer. Is she criticizing Obama? The racist bitch!

Our fifteen minutes of fame is coming to an end. The current economy doesn't give a rat's ass which side you're on or what you have to say about it. It might care who's listening.

That is, if everyone else weren't so busy trying to get you to listen to them.

The Next Leader of the GOP

Being an independent, I don't usually get bogged down in the success or failure of a given party. But I admit that I'm not wild on the idea of one hand clapping, either.

Several factions have appeared on the Republican landscape, but it was only this year, with McCain's nomination as the Republican Presidential candidate, that those factions first seemed to represent real division within the Grand Old Party. Presently, this seems to have resulted in finger pointing. Some of it has been aimed at Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and, clearly, George W. Bush no longer en vogue (Jonah Goldberg even pretended to have never liked him yesterday: "Bush's brand of conservatism was always a controversial innovation on the right") . On the other hand, a full 65% of Republicans like Sarah Palin for President in 2012. Newt Gingrich has re-emerged as a hopeful. Mitt Romney's name has also come up. And let's not forget about Mike Huckabee, Michael Steele and Chip Saltsman.

For those of you who think your political position on the left means that the next leader of the GOP doesn't concern you, think again. The odds of Obama succeeding at turning the economy around in his first, or even his second term, aren't very good. According to economist and Nobel Lauriat, Paul Krugman, "[w]hat saved the economy [from the Great Depression], and [Roosevelt's] New Deal, was the enormous public works project known as World War II, which finally provided a fiscal stimulus adequate to the economy’s needs." While another World War would rescue the economy, the fact that so many of the players involved, at present, wield a nuclear arsenal makes this Orwellian notion a non-starter. Even with a Democratically controlled Congress, the type of stimulus needed to correct the economy might not occur within a four, or even an eight year period. Hence, public opinion is likely to swing back to favor the right. More importantly, particularly if Obama is successful, a return of conservatism is inevitable.

Who do you think should lead the GOP and why?

The Day After: What this Means

The Op-Ed columns won't shut up about race and the "historic" nature of this election. On the flipside, there are others who also think this is about race: white liberal guilt. Both groups are missing the point. We elected the guy who taught Constitutional Law at Harvard for four years, who happens to have an ethnically mixed geneology. Ultimately, it means that the incumbent party has been defeated, ending eight years of corruption, torture, cronyism, and constitutional usurpations. Those things are not inherent in the Republican Party, only in how it came to define itself under a Bush Presidency--and thanks, in no small part, to the elusive Dick Cheney.

Nowhere was this more apparent than in the candidacy of Senator John McCain. The primary candidate who won nomination by exciting the middle became convinced that he could not win without securing the base; the Bush base. We kept seeing the real maverick peering out over the arcane machinery installed by Karl Rove, which has, unfortunately, come to define the Republican Party. The galant concession of our noble warrior was eclipsed by the bitterness of his "supporters," who offered their candidate only muted applause, heckled him and booed every mention of the Democratic contender, while cheering McCain's running mate as though she had won. It was evidence of a bitter divide--not between white and black, but between two sides of a social construct: left and right, liberal and conservative, Democrat and Republican.

Remembering Senator McCain's RNC acceptance speech, he admonished his party toward their better instincts, saying, "I fight to restore the pride and principles of our party: we were elected to change Washington and we let Washington change us. . . . We lost the trust of the American people when some Republicans gave into the temptation of corruption. . . . We lost their trust when we valued our party over our principles. We're going to change that." This was the maverick we'd heard about. We saw him again at a rally, battling the the lies propagated by his own campaign, correcting a woman who blurted out, "He's [Obama] a Arab." Sadly, it was those rare glimpses when we saw McCain, the reformer, that we also saw his attempts at reform summarily rejected by the Republican base, a base whose identity has them locked in to the ideological struggles of the past, which occurs in the social construct of dichotomy, where every issue can somehow be categorized as liberal or conservative.

Are Newton's Laws of Motion liberal or conservative laws? It's a silly question, since laws of physics aren't filtered through a paradigm, they simply are. So why should existing solutions be any different? If we break a steel rod in half, do we reconnect it with a conservative or a liberal weld? So how do we fix our broken economy? What if "conservative" ideas won't work right now? If a liberal idea does work, does it mean that all conservative ideas are wrong forever?

Sound off.