Global Eye - Client State

[CHIMO]

The years of George W. Bush's sour misrule have been disastrous for many of his staunchest supporters. The Heartland folk have seen their jobs taken, liberties curtailed, communities withered, states bankrupted, prices hiked, schools neglected, pensions gutted, air poisoned, water tainted, and their children killed and maimed in an unjust war for profit that's made the world more dangerous. Yet still they swear allegiance to a leader whose every action -- as opposed to the honeyed hokum of his speeches -- expresses nothing but vicious contempt for those he governs.

It is, by any measure, an extraordinary situation. How can we account for it? One answer -- offered up ad nauseam by Bush's cadre of media toadies -- is that the rock-ribbed American yeomanry placed their dedication to "moral values" above crass economic interests. This display of transcendent idealism has excited admiration even among the defeated Democrats, whose "centrist" apparatchiks and commentators openly long for some of that red-state moral mojo.

There's just one thing wrong with this ubiquitous piece of conventional wisdom: It's a steaming crock of Crawford cowflop. The truth is that the number of voters in 2004 citing "moral values" as their priority in selecting a candidate -- 22 percent -- actually declined by more than 13 percent from 2000, as Frank Rich, among others, reports. In fact, the "values" vote was down almost 20 percent from the 1996 campaign, which returned the notoriously amoral Bill Clinton to office with a bigger winning margin than the tiny mandate Bush managed to muster, by hook and crook, this year.

No wonder they prefer voluntary servitude -- and manufactured outrage, and Idiotspeak, and witless diversion -- to the true moral values of responsibility and dissent. It would cost too much -- in money, comfort and self-righteousness -- to stand against the system. And so the machine keeps grinding on, fed by slaughter, greed and guilt.


http://context.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2004/12/03/120.html

[glitch]

1. Another excellent article from Chris Floyd - thanks for posting. nt

[Vitruvius]

2. Most importantly, Floyd describes the suck-up system that props up Bu$h:

...in 16th-century France, Etienne de la Boetie -- best-known as the bosom friend of the great essayist Montaigne -- explained how an entire society can be dragooned into "voluntary servitude" by a ruthless elite through an iron chain of clientage: big cheeses dispensing patronage to favored minions, who in turn act as patrons for their own proteges, and so on down the line.

La Boetie's ideas are nimbly explicated by Shakespearean scholar Stephen Greenblatt <SNIP>: "It may at first seem difficult to understand why so many people would willingly abandon their innate freedoms, but in fact the process is simple. A tiny group chooses, for strategic purposes, to declare allegiance to a single person. That person may be a dolt or a scoundrel (but) what matters is his symbolic position at the apex of the system. Nor does it greatly matter if the members of the inner circle have any serious regard for the person to whom they declare their allegiance; what matters is that their immediate dependents feel similarly bound to them, and through them, bound to the person at the pinnacle. Each of those dependents in turn has his dependents, and before long tens of thousands of people are locked into a system that is exploiting rather than protecting or serving them."

This type of clientage machine has now overspread American society like kudzu, choking off the natural growth of civic life and blocking out the light of truth. There are too many powerful people making too much money off a system of corporate rapine and military aggression to allow any reality or humanity into the equation. To keep the patronage flowing -- from the White House table right down to the convenience store cleaner dependent on his boss making money from the workers at a local weapons plant -- millions must pay ritual obeisance to the dolt at the apex.

Bush has refined this system by adding blood guilt to the mix; his supporters must believe in his righteousness and wisdom, or else they would have to admit their own complicity in mass murder based on deliberate deception. They would also have to acknowledge complicity in Bush's personally sanctioned apparatus of torture, exposed yet again last week, this time by the Red Cross. No wonder they prefer voluntary servitude -- and manufactured outrage, and Idiotspeak, and witless diversion -- to the true moral values of responsibility and dissent. It would cost too much -- in money, comfort and self-righteousness -- to stand against the system. And so the machine keeps grinding on, fed by slaughter, greed and guilt.

[susu369]

3. As always, Floyd pegs it

:kick: