In The Reign Of The One-Nutted King... (Joe Bageant)

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...janked rats cried for blood as the prosthetic hand of love waved goodbye to reason

By Joe Bageant -- World News Trust

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Feast of promises

Like those “spider plants,” sometimes called air plants, that hang from the trees out my cabana window, the same ones that sprawl gracefully from little jars of tap water in the apartments of solitary librarians and the elderly, subsisting apparently on nothing but air and some miniscule bit of nutrients to be obtained from water, American liberals seem to exist on bottled water and hope. Legend has it that American liberalism once had deep traceable roots in farm populism, the struggle for dignity of immigrants, fair wages and good working conditions for laborers, and other such noble principles. So noble in fact that even high-minded sons of the owning class, people like John Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt, were drawn to them as a way to kill time between games of touch football at Hyannisport, the search for the perfect Cuban cigar and accompanying highball, not to mention the prerequisite sexual dalliances with other birds following the flock of the famous (Judth Campbell Exner once told me JFK always had to be on the bottom due to his bad back, and that he cackled like a frat boy when they screwed on the desk of the oval office, as if thinking, she said, “Oh, if Bobby could see me now!”

At any rate, noble causes and party politics are antithetical these days. Beyond that, you must be the rich, or at least very useful to the rich -- like the Bush family was to the oil companies during its rise -- to be a player in either party, both of which are faces of the only real party in this country, the party of business. Without a class base made up of real people, there can be no genuine political party. Without people from different classes defending their class interests, there can be no politics. Americans have been sold the idea that they are all somehow “middle class” -- whether they be shoveling chicken shit for Tysons, at seven bucks-an-hour, “dietary technician” at the local hospital, or hawking credit card applications out of a telemarketing center in Nebraska -- they are all now supposedly in the great middle class. Consequently, there are no politics to our political system, just business transactions taking place behind the curtain of a fraudulent democracy.

After 40 years of having their natural base absorbed by the amorphous middle class that isn’t, the meat of politics has been removed from the table, leaving Spider plant liberals left to find sustenance in the most minuscule nourishment. There are just enough tiny differences in the two parties to sustain ever-hopeful liberal voters, who have long accepted the thin gruel served by the Democratic political elite as the prelude to a promised feast. Of course the feast never comes because no Democrat is ever going to do more than “address” a problem, rather than solve it. In fact, for one of the Democratic elites to even acknowledge the existence of the most glaring sort of inequity sends good liberals into political insulin shock, so accustomed have their systems become to calorie-free ideas and “reality lite.” Al Gore makes a film about global warming, but dares not name the corporations that not only refuse to seek remedy, but insist on escalating the problem, and who just happen to fund both parties. Instead he tells the audience that they are personally to blame and must start sacrificing, hanging their clothes on lines and so forth. Movies being reality in this country, liberal America hails the documentary as a turning point in our ravenous energy consumption, drives the six blocks home from the Cineplex wondering where the hell one buys wooden clothespins, having never seen one in the entirety of suburbia in their lives. Al Gore gets an Academy Award at the annual swarming of very rich swans living in a paradise wherein they never even see their own laundry from the moment it drops from their gilded bodies.

Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton makes familiar noises about reforming health care, but flatly declares that the insurance companies that hold the entire nation for ransom “absolutely must be part of the solution.” By that logic, when it comes to stopping the war in Iraq, then Halliburton, Blackwater Security, 20,000 hired-gun mercenaries and several thousand contractors presently cutting the fattest hog in their history must be involved in ending the war.

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http://www.worldnewstrust.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1446&Itemid=10204

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1. kick

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