HERE'S THE FUNNIEST PART...:

Amid All Our Disasters, Why Are the Only Revolutionaries on the Right? (Rochelle Gurstein, September 16, 2011, New Republic)

When I think about our current crises, it doesn't seem far-fetched to notice that there has been at least the potential for a "revolutionary situation" in America beginning six summers ago with Hurricane Katrina--those dismal images that poured out of New Orleans of miserable men, women, and children abandoned to the full force of the hurricane without sufficient food and water, without sanitary living conditions, and most telling, without the protection of the police or the National Guard. I still feel our nation's shame when I recall the interviews I saw with people who did not have the means to leave the city, typically African-American, all too often morbidly obese, who said they were suffering from diabetes and/or high blood pressure and had run out of the medications that they needed.

I was dumbfounded by the utter failure of President Bush and his administration to respond to this emergency--the paralysis of the "ruling class" being one of the conditions of a "revolutionary situation"--and felt there was a kind of perverse justice in the spectacle of Cuba offering aid to America. Naively, I believed we were at a turning point in our history. I was convinced that our representatives in Congress would have to drop everything and make the fight against poverty our one and only mission; that, as the saying goes, the whole world was watching and we could not simply blunder on in the old way. [...]

Who would have thought that the revolutionary change in popular consciousness would be the belief that the root of all our social and economic troubles and the enemy of ordinary people is our hobbled welfare state?

Stuck in old habits of thought, I realized that I had relegated the Sarah Palins of our impoverished political world to the outer region of the not-to-be-taken-seriously bible-thumpers, that in my complacency I had failed to see that Tea Party militants were far better organized and more willing to stand up for what they believe than any Leftist these days. And who knows? Even though they speak for only a small minority, they might very well pull off their revolution. The Left has never succeeded in getting one of their own to run for president under the banner of the Democratic party--Ralph Nader had to run as a third-party candidate--but this time around the Republican establishment is fielding such bona fide right-wing radicals as Michele Bachmann and Rick Perry.

...when kids had to be evacuated from the city that Democrats maintained below sea-level in a hurricane zone many were sent to Houston schools, in the Bible-thumping state governed by Bush/Perry, where they were absorbed without lowering test scores to Louisiana levels. Maybe that's why Rick Perry stands a decent chance of being our third consecutive Republican president from Texas, whereas no Democrat from Louisiana could ever be elected. Americans have seen the two models in action and decided between them.

Posted by oj at September 18, 2011 8:09 PM
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