Class Warfare: When We Go For Our Guns, How Will We Know Who to Shoot?
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Pogo cartoonist, Walt Kelly, first used the quote "We Have Met The Enemy and He Is Us" on a poster for Earth Day in 1970
The two year retrospective of the Obama Administration, fueled by the slogan "Yes, We Can!" is summed up by the sign on television comedian/pundit Jon Stewart's desk: "Maybe We Can't."
American voters seemed more taken with the arrogant "We're from the Tea Party and we've come to take OUR government back!" articulated by Rand Paul, the libertarian/cum uber-conservative Kentucky senator-elect.
All of which begs the question: whose government is it, anyway?
A segment of political philosophy seems to want to return us to those "gone with the wind" days of yesteryear, when wealthy dashing plantation owners on white horses ruled the land, and their laboring minions of all races.
Kentuckians like Dr. Paul and Mitch McConnell, Republican leader of the Senate, personify those attitudes of bygone days a century and a half ago.
Few remember the defining class warfare statement of Kentucky Sen. Henry Clay during the pre-Civil War wrangling: "If we cannot have black slaves, then we will have white ones."
The senator was pointing to Eastern, Northern and Midwestern working men and women as he made that outrageous argument in favor of the existing system of slavery of African Americans.
It was the quintessential attitude of arrogant white males who were served by all in their purview, including and especially, women.
Clay was long dead when workers remembered what fate awaited them under the Southern system and joined the Union Army in droves -- not necessarily to uplift the blacks but to defend the working class -- and the America promised in the Declaration of Independence -- against aristocratic tyranny.
Ordinary folks like we Midwesterners need not be surprised when the tea partiers try to stop unemployment benefits, Social Security, extension of health care to the uninsured and poor and other so-called "liberal" programs.
All must bow to the super wealthy through tax cuts that sap the nation's economic foundation and shift resources from those in need to those who have much more than they need.
Doff your hat as the plantation owner rides by or risk the fate of subjects who killed the king's deer or failed to pull their forelocks in the presence of their "betters."
Why is what Senator McConnell calls the "health spending bill" so unpopular among about half the country? If we scrap the present bill, as McConnell suggests, just what are the "meaningful reforms" to replace it that he promises?
The fact that the proposed extension of health care to the unserved seems to have stirred a self-defeating strain of thought that somebody is going to get something for nothing and this must be stopped.
No matter that your son, daughter or other relatives might be helped; no matter that we might personally save money and (in hopeful theory at least) reduce the national debt, as well as providing for the more unfortunate in our society.
Make no mistake: what is incredibly happening here -- in America of all places -- is what class warfare in its insidious early stages looks like. (Read what happened in pre-Hitler Germany when in 1934 Jews were ordered to carry cards showing their family background so they could be denied benefits going to other Germans).
This week's election, and the signals we are getting from hardliners in Washington, undoubtedly presages a steadily rising wave of race and class based intolerance. And, unless the economy improves drastically, what it will continue to look like until verbal conflict flames into something more terrible.
The currently popular tea is a toxic brew that infects all who succumb to its overpowering essence, fueled by greed, false class superiority and a lingering odor of white supremacist tendencies that seems never to dissipate no matter what evidence is presented to the contrary.
Unfortunately, no one knows who is in what class, who's on what side, and whose ox will be gored when the bleeding starts. When everybody grabs their guns, how will they know who to shoot?
What is eminently clear is that the American way of life as we have known if for the last half century at least, is in grave danger.
Comic strip character Pogo's undying comment "We have met the enemy and he is us" comes poignantly to mind.
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Geraldine42 Says:
On November 09, 2010
at 09:43 AM
You are so right on , Dave. All I could do was stand around dumbfounded that Social Security and medicare receipients were demanding to take "OUR Country BAck" so they could lose or greatly reduce these benefits on which they were surviving! Go Figure.
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Dave Rogers |
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