“It’s the government that’s to blame for everything!” right-wingers cry. “We need to have less government!” But exactly which government are these people talking about? Is it the government that Americans used to have back when George Washington was president? Or has a new form of government stealthily replaced that old-school government we used to know and love — sort of like a take-over by body-snatchers, happening while our backs were turned and we were happily off watching TV.
Let’s face it, guys. The U.S. government IS to blame for everything nowadays. But it is not the same government that we used to have — as recently as 60 years ago. It’s our former government’s evil twin that is screwing everything up!
Just exactly which government is getting blamed by the right-wingers these days? Are they blaming a government that is run according to the Constitution, was elected by people who knew that their votes were being counted honestly and which is designed to work for the benefit of us American voters? Yep, that’s the very one that the wingers are blaming — even though that fantasy government has been moribund for decades.
And are the wingers blaming this new doppelganger government too — the one that was bought and paid for by lobbyists, that is owned lock, stock and barrel by corporatists and corporations, and that is turning Americans into just another source of cheap labor for the new oligarchs? Nope. THAT government is escaping Scot-free from the right wing’s wrath. That government is not being blamed for anything.
America’s current “government” right now appears to resemble one of the multiple personalities from that old movie, “The Three Faces of Eve” — in the scene where Eve Black jokes about how she used to do bad things when she was a kid and then escape her body and let poor sweet Eve White take their irate mother’s punishments.
What wingers think of as government these days — and most other Americans do the same thing too — isn’t really America’s real government at all. Our real government is more like a monster growing out of some poor schmuck’s stomach in “Alien”.
Wingers seem to be all about blaming “Government” for all of our woes — and yet they sing the praises and kiss the [bottoms] of large global corporations. But guess what guys. Global corporations and America’s government are now almost exactly the same thing.
Right now, there is almost nothing on this planet more “privatized” than the American government. All the fruits of our labor, and perhaps even our very souls, are government property now — a government taken over by oligarchs. And the government of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and the Boston Tea Party — the one that right wingers seem to hate so much — no longer exists.
And this oligarchs’ revolution has already been televised.
One of the craziest things regarding the Teabaggers and other right-wing detritus is that they constantly carp about too much government power over our lives and their fears of despotism, yet they will defend the right of unelected corporations — which are, after all, essentially run as tyrannies today — to control their lives and their futures without regulation. (Hence, they see nothing wrong with apologizing to BP for ‘inconveniencing’ them regarding minimal drilling safety standards.)
Since the days of Reagan, they’ve been so thoroughly indoctrinated with the ‘government bad, business good’ message that they can no longer perceive their own best interests — even after a corporation sends their job overseas or orders them to do the work of three employees at the same wage they were earning for doing one job. It’s amazing — even in these cases they believe in the ‘free market’ right of the corporation to run them into the ground because, as they know from Fox News, et al, government regulation always leads to socialism or communism or some other ‘ism’ they don’t understand but are nevertheless terrified of living under.
Comment by RS Janes — August 24, 2010 @ 5:59 pm