President Obama today called for an end to the mentality of boom and bust. Shades of Herbert Hoover here. The Depression is psychological so just be happy and it will end. This was perhaps good politics and certainly good theatre (Obama’s forte) but as economics it is nonsense. He cannot go on to say he supports capitalism but wants to avoid boom and bust because boom and bust are necessary to a capitalistic system.
Wouldn’t it be nice if politicians actually talked to us like we were adults. It is an insult to our intelligence that our leaders should deflect our concerns with scripted gobble-de-goop. But what really boggles the mind is that we (in the royal sense of society as a whole) accept it, jump in our snugly jammies, nestle in our nice warm beds to dream the sweet dreams of the innocent. Safe in the knowledge that Daddy president or prime minister will chase away all the monsters and bad men that want to hurt us. This might be funny if it wasn’t so sad and we could just turn our faces and ignore the sadness if it wasn’t so dangerous. This complacency is what horror is madeof. It led to the deaths of more than 60 million people (total death toll of World War 2) in the middle of the last century.
Politics has followed numbers into becoming a way to turn off the human mind. It is well established that most modern people shut down as soon as someone starts rattling off statistics or columns of figures. Most of us are functionally innumerate. Politics now seems to have the same effect. I am just not sure when this happened. Politics really rose as a mass interest as we moved toward a more inclusive understanding of society. The English Civil War, the American and French Revolutions, the First World War and the Socialist and Communist revolutions that followed propelled the kiss of politics to every lip. The rights of man, democracy, Liberté Egalité Fraternité, dictatorship of the proletariat, the International Working Man’s Association, the Industrial Workers of the World, and in my own era Students for a Democratic Society, The July 26th Movement, the Southern Christian Leadership Committee and more were founts of information not just for radicals and political specialists but for all. Politics was the stuff of dinner table conversations (and the cause of my ulcers but I bear them proudly as a battle injury in the war to create the good society). Politics was not just important, it was exciting. It offered the possibility of a better society not just a richer one. The ideal taken from the Christian Bible of ‘What gaineth a man if he should inherit the whole world but lose his own soul’ meant something. I am by no means a religious person although I do consider myself a spiritual man. But what that verse stands for is not about religion it is about integrity. The opposite sentiment is expressed as everyone has a price.
Today’s world seems to function on the latter sentiment. When did gluttony replace honour and expediency replace justice? When did we stop caring about what is right and start closing our minds at the first tones of political thought? We have surrendered our freedom not to foreign terrorists but to the seductress in our midst. The syrupy placations of our own political succubi rape our soul and leave us unable to stand for our own beliefs. Unable to challenge their actions lest the narcotic poison be withheld, we become our own murderers.
