Trostkyzation
In ancient Rome, when the emperor or an especially
distasteful elite died, his image on stone and in bronze was removed. And by
decree there arose a damnatio memoriae, a holistic effort to erase
away his entire prior existence. When Tiberius got through with the dead
Sejanus, few knew that he had ever existed, such were the powers of the Roman
state to create alternate realities. Orwell’s Animal Farm [1] and 1984 [2] explored
the communist state’s efforts to airbrush away history. Orwell perhaps was most
notably influenced by the removal of Leon Trotsky from the collective Russian
memory to the point that he never existed. That force was used in these
instances does not mean that something like them could not happen [3] through
collective volition; indeed, I think we are starting to see dangerous signs
that a sort of groupthink is already beginning.
In our own time there are certain growing trends, most
of them media-induced, that conspire to rework our collective memory, in
pursuit of a supposedly noble and just cause. In the fashion of no other recent
figure, President Barack Obama has brought those forces of establishing an
official truth to the fore. Last week he lectured the media [4] that
things are not just equal with two sides to a story. Instead, they have a
responsibility not to fall into the trap of equivalence — the subtext being
that he is not subject to the same laws of inquiry as are his earthly
opponents.
Suddenly, the Supreme Court is a suspicious
organization run by unelected politicos that uses capricious judicial fiat to
overturn widely popular laws. The president denigrated it in a State of the
Union address and now suggests that such “unelected” jurists (as opposed to electing
them?) should act responsibly and thus “must” not find a popularly enacted law
unconstitutional.
I am confused: I thought we were supposed to welcome
such judicial audit. Was not that the charm of the Warren Court? Did not the
Obama administration go to federal court to ask justices to set aside the
Defense of Marriage Act that it was entrusted to enforce — seeking judicial
help not to follow a law that it chose not to seek to overturn in Congress?
I also thought that a younger Barack Obama once had
regretted that the Supreme Court had never addressed “redistributive change” [5] and,
per the U.S. Constitution, had confined itself only to defining negative
liberties rather than demanding positive “rights” that legislatures were
supposed to ensure — or else. And did ObamaCare really pass with broad
majorities? I thought that it received no Republican votes in the House and only
squeaked by. And it would have been filibustered in the Senate without the Ted
Stevens pseudo-scandal and various sweetheart deals to swing senators. Or is
that now inaccurate?
Good Little Citizens?
Is public campaign financing good or bad? I thought
Obama in 2008 was the first presidential nominee since the law’s inception to
have ignored it. But did anyone so note that? What happened to this once
hallowed liberal reform? Was it not aimed at stopping the BPs and Goldman
Sachses of the world from warping the election process with huge infusions of
cash — as in the $1 billion range?
Are the one-percenters suspect and avoiding their fair
share, or are they the most generous donors to the Obama campaign? Sometimes
one feels bewildered in this now alternative universe: in the evil Bush year
2007, I remember that recess appointments were always to be seen as illegitimate [6], while
filibusters were critical checks on abusive Republican legislative majorities.
But then by 2011, the former was now a principled mechanism to sidestep
reactionary obstructionism and the latter nihilistic ways of halting needed
liberal progress. What happened, or have we lost all ability to remember?
The World Made Anew in 2009
I need to go to a re-education, or perhaps a re-memorization,
camp. What happened to “unpatriotic” presidents [7] running
up $4 trillion in debt in eight years, or is trumping that in three then
patriotic? Was the presidentially appointed Simpson-Bowles commission the
proper bipartisan way to address deficits, or were its findings coopted by the
one-percenters? In December 2010, I thought suddenly raising taxes was
supposedly the wrong thing to do in tough times. Was it not by March 2011?
When did the Catholic Church declare war on women, and
at what point in history did condoms or birth control pills became oppressive
expenses in need of federal subsidies in a way that, say, iPhones were not?
Does the crude smear “slut” by media figures threaten the world of our children or help to raise money [8] to
donate to presidential campaigns? What words, what images, what references are
taboo, and what are tolerable — and why? Did the president deprecate the
working classes of Pennsylvania and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, and did
he make vague promises to the Russians off mic — or were those just products of
our imagination?
At what point did borrowing against our children’s
futures become needed “stimulus” and “investments”? Is keeping the federal
budget far larger than it was during the Bush years “social Darwinism,” a term
that is acceptable political invective in a way “socialism” is not? Where did
the adverb “unexpectedly” [9] come
from, as in almost all economic news now is “unexpectedly” something:
“unexpectedly” high unemployment figures or “unexpectedly” sluggish home sales?
Did unemployment ever really go over 8 percent? I
thought that it had and is so now. I remember being told that high gas prices
analogous to Europe’s, skyrocketing energy costs, and putting federal oil
leases off limits (up to the point of risking $10 a gallon gas) were all our common
aspirations [10] to
cool the planet, to cut fossil fuel use, and to transition energy management
from the oil companies to the more caring government. But now I am told all
that was never so: the private sector is to be praised for producing more gas
and oil on private lands than ever before; high gas prices are bad; and we
certainly don’t want energy costs to skyrocket. But will the 2012 truth soon
revert to that of 2000-2011?
Try Harder . . .
Sometimes we try hard, but cannot quite get straight
the party communiqués. Supply and demand are irrelevant to gas pricing, we are
told, in this age of energy speculation and rising Middle East tensions that
warp the market. But why then do we ask the Saudis to put more oil into the
global pot and ponder doing the same from our strategic reserve? Is there
something called supply and demand at work, as in increasing global supply to
lower prices, or at least to suggest there is more supply coming on line? Is
Saudi oil and previously pumped oil of better quality than newly pumped oil?
Wind and solar will create “millions of new green
jobs.” But when and how so? Government subsidies to insider green companies
like Solyndra are to be deemed good, even if they produce little energy; but
normal tax breaks for the oil companies are bad when they fuel the entire
country. Are there solar panels on Air Force One? Is there a rule that says
Solyndra cannot make what Exxon rakes in?
We are supposed to believe that Republicans in the
House have done terrible things in stopping the president’s agenda. But I
thought that after 2008 there were Democratic majorities in Congress that could do [11] whatever
the Democratic president wished? What was not done in 2009 is understandable,
but not understandable in 2011?
The masses are told that they will like the new
federal takeover of health care. But those who like it the most are to be
rewarded for their fealty by being granted exemptions from it? If we write
favorably on its behalf, can we too then become exempt from it?
Constitutional Crimes
I still don’t know what Guantanamo, renditions,
tribunals, preventative detention, and the Patriot Act are. One day I heard
that they were all both unnecessary and unconstitutional, and then I woke up a
bit later and discovered that all were both critical and lawful. When did that
happen? At the time when Iraq went from the “worst” (fill in the blanks) to the
administration’s “greatest” achievement? When did assassinating Predators go
from airborne terror to jokes about some day shooing away suitors from the
presidential daughters?
I am still trying to figure out what the
one-percenters are. I think they are wealthy people — but not the very wealthy
people. Or are they the very wealthy people who accept that higher taxes can
either be avoided or won’t substantively affect their sizable portfolios, or
feel that they provide necessary psychological inoculation for their mostly
segregated and elite lifestyles?
Those who run Apple, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, or
those who manage Goldman Sachs, or those who make $20 million a year in
Hollywood, or those who administer Harvard and Yale or the Ford and Rockefeller
Foundations have always paid their fair share, and thus are not to be fairly
dubbed corporate jet owners? Or is it that these very rich, but not to be
demonized one-percenters, accept that the 50%-plus of their income given in
state and federal taxes was not previously enough, and so they now feel that
they must up that amount and thus must pay 50% of the nation’s aggregate
federal income tax revenue rather than just the paltry present 37%? Is that the
truth? In other words, the good one-percenters de facto agree that they have
previously in the Bush years cheated the Treasury under the present income tax
code, and really did feel guilty that they had not voluntarily contributed
more, but now they agree with Obama that they should be forced to
pay more taxes?
I am further confused: did Bill Gates’ extravagant
mansion rob the rest of us (how many of us paid too much for Microsoft Word to
pay for his indulgent investment?). Does Warren Buffett’s jet mean that the
rest of us have less jet fuel as we sit cramped back in the tail section? Why
does James Cameron get his own submarine to explore the ocean; could he not
instead have cut the ticket price [12] to
his movies? Can we all go to Costa del Sol or Martha’s Vineyard; how many
cruise missiles paid for that? What are the criteria that suggest some of the
above is corporate jet-setting and some is not, when do pigs walk on four and
when on two legs?
But this alternate reality is not just political, but
also social. This week I read in local papers of a supposed flight from the San
Joaquin Valley by the more affluent, either out of state or to the other
California that is the coastal corridor from San Francisco to San Diego. The
interior we are told is emptying out, keeping unemployment high and housing
prices low. But the wire services also assured us that our net population did
not dip, given the role of “international arrivals.” So was there an influx from
Switzerland or Kenya into California that I was not aware of? Are we back to
“overseas contingency operations” and “man-caused disasters”?’ Did Major Hasan
lose it in a workplace rage?
In the tragic Trayvon Martin case almost everything
that I saw or read for nearly two weeks seemed to me not quite true. As the
days wore on, why did the narrative keep changing? Trayvon was not any longer
the slight, preteen in a football uniform as his most widely disseminated photo
suggested; that information matters as much or as little as information that
George Zimmerman had a prior run-in or two with the authorities. Martin was not
outweighed by his shooter by 100 pounds. He was not a model student; and George
Zimmerman probably did not run him down in efforts to execute him. Zimmerman
probably did not utter a racial epithet. To the extent that he sounded
insensitive, it was largely due to a doctored NBC tape (NBC said that it was an inadvertent error [13] but
why did it err to bolster rather than weaken the media narrative? [fake but
accurate?]). Zimmerman really did suffer a head injury. The latter was
half-Hispanic; but the original white-on-black crime narrative was nevertheless
somewhat salvaged with the new rubric “white Hispanic.” I used to think that
the idea of re-arresting someone when probable cause is still in doubt was not
a compromise solution to finding out the facts.
Putting a bounty on someone’s head is not a crime?
Posting a private address to followers for the intent to foment violence
against the residents is not either? Nor is doctoring a tape to inflame racial
tensions in a period of unrest a terrible thing to do. For congressional
representatives to label someone not charged with a crime an assassin or
executioner is not considered bad taste and draws little rebuke.
These are the narratives that for purposes of social
justice now become reality, but tomorrow, next week, next month, next year?
Who knows? “Truth,” after all, is not the Socratic
absolute, but a socially constructed commodity, defined by power and predicated
on race, class, and gender, concerns that can be made to serve the greater
good, if adjudicated by — well, again, fill in the blanks.
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