Druid Reparations, White People World’s Pathetic Race, Czars and De-funding The Left
Lack of health insurance is a leading cause of death in America. It causes more deaths than auto accidents and murders combined. So we need universal health care. Bernie Sanders, independent Senator from Vermont, is a pretty straight shooter, not being in either party, and he is calling for a national single payer plan. He says that there will be a melding of the Baucus and one of the House plans. He was on MSNBC tonight.
The former spokesperson for CIGNA Wendell Potter says if the plan does not have a public option, if it has too many deductibles or if it gives the Insurance companies too many perks, then the plan will not be worth voting for. He says the Bill suggested by Baucus is a real bonanza for the insurance companies. The insurance companies will want the government to give subsidies to people who cannot afford private insurance to give the plan the appearance of being affordable. What it does is simply push more of the cost on the tax payer with the insurance companies getting a windfall of profits. That kind of a plan should not pass.
The Republicans were able to defund ACORN with the blessing of Obama. They seem to be a sacrifice to the right wingers. Fortunately they don’t get very much funding from the federal government.
I am going to return to Thomas Frank’s “Wrecking Crew”, in that book he notes that one of the main plans of the radical right is to defund the left. Letting Congress take funding away from ACORN an advocacy group for the poor, simply takes one more source of support for poor blacks and Hispanics and aids the rightwingers plan to weaken the left.
Today at the right wing Values conference Huckabee former presidential candidate, criticized the Czars of President Obama. But George Bush had more Czars than Obama so I don’t get this one. I guess they are trying to equate Czars with Russia with Obama with socialism. Not very logical, but these are not rational people who attend a values conference. They are believers in Jesus on a Stick. Pretty lame stuff. I guess the right wing Jesus would not have performed miracles for people who didn’t have private insurance.
Fox News blames Pelosi for suggesting people should assassinate Obama. That is pushing it pretty far. Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the House was warning people about the climate of hostility in the nation that reminded her of San Francisco just before Dan White went postal and killed Mayor Moscone and Gay supervisor Harvey Milk. This was just before I moved to San Francisco. When I arrived there in early 1980 several of the anarchists I met were facing charges for participating in the burning of police cars in the riot after Dan White was let off on a temporary insanity defense. He claimed famously that eating twinkies made him insane and that was why he shot the two men. It was patently absurd, but White a former police officer, was let off. As a result people rioted and burned many a police car that night. I wish I had been there. No wonder people were so paranoid when I showed up and wanted to get a little resistance going to the gentrification. People were all burned out from the riots the year before.
Pelosi seems to have been exaggerating a bit to me, but it is reprehensible for Fox to turn around and accuse her of stirring up violence. Glenn Beck and his ilk have been stirring up hatred towards Obama for months now. They are simply trying to shift the blame to a person who is trying to warn people to cool out and to be careful.
The political circus is incredible. The right wing has all but come out and openly threatened Obama’s life and pretend to be innocent, who me? Inciting to murder? Moi? Yes you Fox led media, Rush Limbaugh and your cronies. You are egging on a nutcase to go for it. Instead of calling people to be responcible, the right is calling the left paranoid and fear mongers. This is the sort of twisting of the facts that the Republicans love to do. Why? I guess it is out of frustration. When a bully or a thug doesn’t get his or her way, they refuse to play. They expect us all to go along with their bullying and tantrums. The theory seems to be if we throw a big enough tantrum they will give us what we want to get us to shut up. I just hope we learn to ignore them and wait for these right wing bullies to grow up.
In my day I have taken my own direct action approach. But I was representing a marginalized community of poor people being ignored by the wealthy controllers of society. I was throwing bricks at developers who were evicting poor people. The Glen Beck and Rush Limbaugh right wingers are not representing the poor. They are representing the temporarily dispossessed in the political arena. The Republicans have lost the presidency. One that they got by bullying in the first place back in 2000. They are now hunting around trying to convince white middle class people that they are now poor dispossessed people. This is empirically simply not true. They are not poor, they are simply out of office. This is a completely different order of magnitude than an anarchist working with poor street people and elderly community people who are loosing their homes. Just as ACORN helps poor people get housing and keep it. A few of their less sophisticated workers get hoodwinked by a right wing publicity seeker and all of a sudden the congress decided to cut off funding for them and all the Democrats were to scared to stand up and defend ACORN for the good work it does. This is pretty shameful behavior in the part of both Republicans and Democrats.
This is an important point because it seems that the Right is learning to take tactics developed in the civil rights movement and are turning these tactics around and using them upon the liberals who are now in a position of power. Is it an exact equivalence? Is it simply a tit for tat situation of what is good for the goose is good for the gander? Or is there a qualitative difference when as say in Russia the people who had been on top for their entire lives all of a sudden find that a bunch of peasants have moved into their mansion and they have gone from being buddies of the real czar to working as street sweepers. That is a real change. But perhaps they deserved the change in their fate. If say the Republicans had not invaded Iraq, outsourced the military and turned the CIA into a torture agency, and wrecked the economy by deregulation, perhaps they would still even be in power. The same goes for the Czar of Russia. If he had not decided to join a bloody war against Germany to defend Serbia, a war Russia was in no condition to fight, perhaps the Russian Revolution would not have happened.
Lets look at another world situation that causes confusion. Israel. It attacks the Palestinians in Gaza, kills hundreds of civilians in an attempt to stop Hamas from sending rockets into Israel. This is the only justification in their minds they need. One Israeli life is worth hundreds of Palestinians. They feel perfectly justified because, well the Palestinian leadership lets a few radicals lob rockets. They are the victims because well Jews are always the victims, look at history, look at what Hitler did.
And that worked, because in the 1940’s Hitler did kill millions of Jews and Europeans did feel guilty for letting it happen. But did the gypsies get a homeland after they lost half their population? No. The Jews did. Did the Kurds get a homeland after Sadam Hussein gassed thousands? No, they have a province now, but they have been there for centuries.
The Jews were in the right place at the right time and were able to push the right buttons after WW2 and got a homeland. Not an empty place, not a desert Island, but a land that had been theirs some 2000 years before. Unprecedented in history. It is as if the descendants of the ancient Sumerians were given Sumeria back. Or if the practitioners of the modern day Druid religion were given back Wales as reparations for having been virtually wiped out by the Romans in the exact same historical period that the Romans destroyed the temple in Jerusalem. It is exactly the same thing. An ancient national religion, with a priesthood that led resistance to Roman rule was extirpated by Roman Legions because they led resistance to Roman rule.
I would suggest to modern day Druids that they demand a nation of their own in their historical homeland. That is what the Jews got. Why not the Druids? That would be an exact historical equivalence. Could it be because unlike the Jews, Druids never gave up human sacrifice? Or is it because they didn’t have a surviving priesthood that wrote down their oral traditions and kept them alive in a diaspora for 2000 years, one that became the basis of the prevailing religion of 1/4 of the worlds population. Or perhaps it has. Modern day paganism could be a Druid survival. Perhaps all pagans should acknowledge their Druid roots. Gypsies are from India, India is pagan, Gypsies were oppressed and murdered by Hitler, gypsies as descendants of pagans perhaps even Druids should claim Wales as reparations for the destruction they suffered in world war 2. It makes about as much sense.
Israel likes to play the exceptionalist card. But why not the Persians? They have an ancient religion Zoroastrianism that is about as old as Judaism. They were once even the liberators of Jerusalem, giving the Jews back their home in Jerusalem. They also gave the Jews a refuge when they were exiled by the Romans. Persians have a long tradition of history, haveing had an empire that was able to stand up the the Romans. It could be argued that Persia was the bulwark protecting the world from the ravages of Roman rule 2000 years ago and they could be said to be defenders of the modern Muslim world from the ravages of the new Rome in Washington, DC. This is something to think about. Why are we in the USA the leaders of the free world? Perhaps Iran is the leader of the Godly world, defender of the faithful against decadent secularism. Certainly that is how they see themselves.
China, the Middle Kingdom, the Center of the world has existed with the longest continuous civilization in the world, except India. In fact China sees India as the source of religion, science and Medicine. These two ancient civilizations China and India, with between them over a third of the world and the ancient religions of Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism and Confucianism, may soon overtake the west again as the richest nations and the intellectual heartland of the world and America may again be what it was for thousands of years, a backwater on the edge of the world. And what about Africa, the home of humanity, the true heartland of the species. Africa, currently looked down upon, but it is the home of all music, culture and art. It is where we come from and will be where we return to if the rest of the planet become uninhabitable again.
Think about it. So who is the oppressed minority? Who are the poor people who deserve a helping hand. White people. It only makes sense. They are the orphan race of the world. Pathetic, smelly dirty white people. Sad huh. In another century or two Whites could again fall back into a permanent redneck status as the poor relations, the grunts hired to be killers by the sophisticated peoples of the world. That was what Vikings were, hired killers.
This is just a little historical riffing. But I think the insecurity that white people feel and the ultimate sense of confidence black, brown and yellow people feel is simply a racial memory of the natural order. This may be simply an absurdest position. But ultimately humanity needs to recognise its relatedness and instead of crying like an oppressed minority perhaps these newly out of power right wingers should consider upon who’s shoulders they stand. It is because of all the civilized living on the part of all kinds of people that a few of us are fortunate now. This is nothing that is ordained from above and it will pass just as easily as it came. If we don’t provide an exemplary example of gracious appreciation, then when it is gone, nobody will miss the time when the white man had his day in the sun.
Tags: Historical Musings., Why Are White People So Insecure? ACORN Defamed. Winger