Untitled Document

“Politics is the shadow cast on society by big business... the
attenuation of the shadow will not change the substance...”
John Dewey, 1859-1952

The bad moon of another campaign season rises. The depoliticized,
disinformed, and disengaged American electorate twitch in their
culture-coffins. Soon they will be urged to arise and plod across the
dim landscape. Robotically they will stand in line to perform their
ritual; attempting to hungrily suck meaning from the wizened and
bloodless corpse of a rumored democracy. Then, still famished, they
will return to their vaults. But the moon will rise again, and so will
they --- on and on.

It’s that time again in Obamanation, where two corporate-approved
candidates and their running-mates cluster on the right side of the
arena. The Anointed signal over the heads of their fans to the funders
in the posh VIP suites above the faux-fray. McCain is Able, his
sponsors assure the audience. He has the proven character to bomb
civilian power plants and irrigation projects. Though he admits to not
knowing much about economic issues, he clings tenaciously to Laffer-
ism, the totally discredited notion that cutting taxes on rich folks
and their corporations increases Treasury revenue.

In a grotesque and Rove-ian move he passed over his ally, apologist,
and prompter, Jihad Joe Lieberman for the VP spot in favor of proven
breeder, exploiter, and weapon wielder Sarah Palin. As governor of
Alaska, Palin consistently sided with oil, mining, and “safari”
interests, including those who enjoy shooting fleeing wolves from the
comfort of airplanes. Now that she’s officially tapped, some
questions are arising about the “vetting” process behind her cynical
nomination.

But as John Dolan noted to AlterNet readers (9/2/08), “Perhaps the
saddest aspect of Palin’s disgusting record on environmental issues is
the fact that it’s hardly even being mentioned in the debate about her
nomination. Most of the focus, for an audience of suckers weaned on
celebrity gossip, seems to be about her mothering skills, her
daughter’s pregnancy and whether she was Miss Congeniality or just a
runner-up in some beauty pageant. The fact that she makes her living
helping to wipe out whole species, poison productive watersheds and
play to the ... great-white-hunter fantasies of her constituency
hardly seems worth a mention.”

Obama, and his hair-plugged hack of a VP contestant are long on empty
oratory and eager to partition Iraq while escalating the carnage in
Afghanistan. But as Michael Yates has written recently, “Obama has
failed to say anything meaningful” about issues of importance to
working people: “Will he make the Occupational Safety and Health Act a
real law and not the dead letter it is now. Will he engineer a public
works program that rebuilds the infrastructure of ... forgotten [mill]
towns and puts their people back to work?... Will he do something
about public education and get rid of the corporate-inspired No Child
Left Behind legislation? ...Stop wasting billions of dollars on ...
criminal wars? Demand that unions be made legal in Iraq?”

Yates notes that Obama’s labeling corporate shill and gaffe-meister
Joe Biden as “working class ... tells us just how lame U.S. politics
are.” Still, “Obama might have won over the voters Hillary Clinton got
by pretending she was still a working class woman from Scranton, while
she slugged down shots and beers in [Pennsylvania] bars. He could have
intertwined his hand with the hand of the white worker, like the
emblem of the old Packinghouse Workers Union, and gone out on the
stump and told the truth about class struggle. A lot of white workers
would have eaten this up.”

Such solidarity-based electoral politics is a practical impossibility
at present of course. As professor Paul Street, wrote in his Brave
New America piece recently, “The popular majority of the citizens ---
the People --- in whose name U.S. ‘democracy’ purports to function is
politically disinterested, infantilized, obedient, distracted, and
divided. An increasingly spectator-ized and subordinate public is
shepherded by the professional political class across a painfully
narrow business and Empire-friendly field of political, policy, and
ideological ‘choices.’”

He quotes from Sheldon Wolin’s new book Democracy Inc. : Managed
Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism : “The
citizenry, supposedly the source of government power and authority as
well as participant, has been replaced by the ‘electorate,’ that is,
by voters who acquire a political life at election time. During the
intervals between elections the political existence of the citizenry
is relegated to a shadow-citizenship of virtual participation. Instead
of participating in power, the virtual citizen is invited to have
‘opinions’ : measurable responses to questions to questions
predesigned to elicit them....”

“...In elections parties set out to mobilize the citizen-as-voter, to
define political obligation as fulfilled by the casting of a vote.
Afterwards, post-election politics of lobbying, repaying donors, and
promoting corporate interests --- the real players --- takes over. The
effect is to demobilize the citizenry, to teach them not to be
involved or to ponder matters that are either settled or beyond their
efficacy.”

Street notes that this evolving new totalitarian system “requires no
great sacrifice or strength on the part of its subject populace. It
creates a ‘soft,’ childish, and fearful citizenry that is asked mainly
to buy things, to watch their telescreens, and perhaps to occasionally
vote...”

And so another tawdry and demeaning campaign season begins in arenas
named by and for corporations. Outside these “secure” sites,
journalists and dissenters to empire/ “managed democracy” are
bloodied, roughed up and arrested by latter-day Praetorian Guards. The
debased, diversionary jibes and twaddle spewing out of these
coliseums, feverishly reported by the corporate press would sicken and
shame a truly sovereign people.

But here, as the sun sets on what’s left of America the Dutiful, we
stir ever so slightly. November night will soon descend.