Governments should be afraid of their people

An open letter to Sens. McConnell and Cruz, and Reps. Boehner, Bachmann, Cantor, et. al:

God damn your murderous hides! For you are murderers. You're killing this country.

You have let the federal government shut down for one simple insidious reason:

You don't like President Obama. Make that: You don't like the idea of a President Obama.

So from the beginning of the Obama administration, you have done all in your power, marshaled your forces, maneuvered your money to eviscerate anything (short of bombing another country, which of course you like!) Obama has endeavored.

You have spent all your energy, not on representing your states and districts, but on making sure the president fails.

You have fertilized fear and discomfort, you have worked hate to a heat, relentlessly, expertly. Policy became irrelevant because perception has become your wholehearted pursuit, to mold it and let its moldy spores spread.

Here is your reward. Congratulations! You have reached the pinnacle (or the abyss). The fallout of the government shutdown is wide and manifold and you know about them all — foods will not be inspected for safety, diseases will not be controlled, parks will not open, etc. Let me isolate just one; one is enough: Head Start programs are shutting down.

Some 1,600 federal Head Start programs operate through the country, to serve about 1 million children of low-income families with nutrition and pre-school education and other services. As the shut or cut services (and The Washington Post reports services have already been cut for 57,000 children this year under budget battles), picture thousands of families scrambling to find alternate plans for their children as they try to continue work for meager pay, and thousands of children losing out on a good meal each day for who knows how many days.

Children and their families who lose out, powerless against the fact that you simply do not like President Obama and don't care who suffers for it.

Sure, you say this is all about the Affordable Health Care Act, which you deftly branded "Obamacare" from the start. Maybe you didn't coin the term, but you knew the perception this brand would wield, and even before the text of the legislation reached your desks you denounced it as an imposition, as government control. As socialism.

It hasn't mattered whether the law would do any good [and for all its wild imperfections — millions will still not be able to afford insurance — even you have to admit — even if you never will — that it can reduce the overall costs of health care by enabling more Americans to buy health insurance] because its utility has been irrelevant. It's the president's Big Idea, and you will not abide it.

(I thought about writing your offices, but all I'd get in return is, "Thank you for your interest on this matter, Mr. Turner. Here is what I'm doing for you as a citizen," then a recitation of votes and political positions. Better others hear my vent. Maybe it moves someone. Maybe it moves me.)

You have worked your dark magic. "Obamacare" is evil and socialist, and the Affordable Health Care Act makes common sense, and you have made sure enough Americans are so confused they don't know it's one and the same. You have even managed to make some states refuse expanded federal health care programs that will help its citizens, because of course it's socialist. It bears Obama's stain.

I blame your Republican Party almost entirely for where we are. I'm old and wise enough to know you're not alone to blame, that the Democrats bobble and blunder and obfuscate plenty. Educated in journalism, I retain a vibrant cynicism and mistrust of all. But the Republican Party seems to possess the lion's share of hypocrisy and flag-waving legerdemain and newspeak and doublespeak. The Constitution is sacrosanct until and unless it becomes inconvenient. Freedom is slavery. Down is up; night is day. Love is hate.

Will the day ever return that our representatives use their philosophical differences to build legislation made from those differences — made better by those differences — made by compromise? Why did compromise become so evil?

I just doubt things will get better. We're getting stupider, more distant, more tired. The torrents of controlling money that gets shoved up our lawmakers' butts and come out their mouths is unrelenting and undiminished, overmatching what the rest of us can do.

God damn my hide most of all.

On 9/11

Mood level: Smoldering bright orange
for a while now …

No superlatives can ever contain the horror and shock and sadness and disbelief of Sept. 11, 2001 — though we all will try in many and varied ways as the tenth anniversary approaches this weekend.

In the news media, the effort has already begun in earnest. News anchors introduce the myriad angles on the anniversary, their chins pointed slightly lower to their chests, their eyebrows arranged just so, conveying a calculated look of somber observation.

But we never truly grieved that impossible horror, never got a chance, even though the innumerable tributes under way say that we did. The Bush administration, helped by the mainstream media's lack of backbone, co-opted that day as a symbol to make us afraid of one another.

Our leaders used it to incite two protracted, misguided and ruinous wars we still wage against dubious enemies, begun on the basis of outright lies. Instead of having nothing to fear but fear itself, we have accepted the offer of fear by itself, which at first did frighten us but now has dulled and callused us, enabling the puppet masters of big oil, banking and military industry to profit mightily in our torpor.

Mission accomplished.

All the while, we still send women and men into the teeth of these wars — and will still, for years — yet barely receive them when they return damaged or dead, and the nation has fragmented.

The redemption and healing that should have followed those terrible events have been tainted by what followed instead. I can't consume any of the 9/11 remembrances and never-before-heard audiotapes, can't stop for a moment to regard that day for its own sake, without immediately linking it to the bloody horror of Iraq and Afghanistan. They are WTF? funhouse-mirror countermeasures in search of phantom WMDs. It's impossible to mourn because it's impossible not to be angry — at this absurd sequence of events, at myself for succumbing to indifference and impotence.

Those people who fell from the World Trade Center towers to their doom — such nightmarish visions! — might as well have disappeared into the desert sands around Fallujah, for all that we got to consider their horror and loss, to themselves, their families, their employers, their communities. They became fodder for what I still believe is George W. Bush's intent to salvage the legacy of his father.

Since 9/11/2001, we have become Lord of the Flies, reduced to our baser selves. Psychiatrist Justin Frank of Washington, D.C. holds a similar view, that we have become babies, viewing the world in black and white and Us versus Them.

Opposition to our nation's response — to war, to torture, to degradation, to community-endorsed hatred of Muslims, even to this strange semantic casting of ourselves as The Homeland — means being unpatriotic.

And patriots, as we know through the doublespeaky Patriot Act, willingly give up many of our freedoms in exchange for what we want to think is our comfort and safety. Air traveler with a Middle Eastern kinda name? Sure, haul him away without benefit of a doubt, just so long as I can stop feeling the fear you keep waving in front of me.

You can trace all of this to obvious outcomes, such as a divided, uncompromising Congress, and to the accepted notion now that compromise is bad (when in fact compromise is the nature of action in a representative government).

You can trace it to our economic crisis, to jobs lost at a bewildering rate, to the banks that took our money to stay in business despite being criminally bad at it, to us no longer having the money to teach our children well or keep our bridges up and pay people to do all of that.

Hand in glove, you can trace it to the artless propaganda that divides us. I'm not so naive as to believe propaganda hasn't always bedeviled us, but it used to be sophisticated. Now it's an open wound. Even before an idea rises into public view, haters of that idea create words to kill it and replace it with new ideas that make us afraid.

Propagandists repeat that simple anti-idea ad infinitum until the idea wilts in its dense shadow. So we have "Obamacare," "death panels," and the anti-ideas that President Obama is a "socialist" with designs to ruin this country, that he is Muslim (with the presumption that this is a bad thing), that he is not a citizen, that Social Security is a Ponzi scheme, and on and on. Just shouted and bellowed over and over again, without regard to merit, until the shouts and bellows become the new normal.

Tell lies often enough, and they become the truth. 

If not for the path down the rabbit hole that we took after 9/11, we wouldn't have the Tea Party, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, Fox News. Hey, you say, those are all right-leaning people and entities! Don't you like right-wingers? Love 'em, actually. We should be a people of diverse ideas working toward the pursuit of happiness. I hate that they exist solely because of the artless propaganda that the fallout from 9/11 made fashionable.

It has begotten the abysmal meanness in which our governments still deny and delay needed medical care to those who suffered from environmental toxins as they rescued the people from the World Trade Center collapse.

I trace it farther, to reality TV shows where we get to watch people re-enact Lord of the Flies in all manner of novel ways — on supposedly deserted islands, fashion runways, celebrity kitchens, New Jersey, wherever the Kardashians are.

I trace it even to last week's Fox Sports' idea of a funny bit in which a reporter interviewed only Asian students — preferably students still learning English — from USC (because that's the entire student body, right?) to have them give a "good old-fashioned, all-American" welcome to two universities that had joined the expanded Pac 12 football conference. They talk funny, get it? Some of them don't even know what the Pac 12 is — hilarious, right? Because all of us normal people do, or should. It's football, and that's American, see? Those people are different from Us, so we get to mock them.

Fox canceled that show, saying it resulted from a "breakdown in our internal processes," which I suspect is doublespeak for, "We couldn't possibly have envisioned, in the current cultural climate, this could be offensive." As is the custom in public apologies these days, Fox apologized only to those who found offense, rather than for its base cruelty.

I'm looking for signs — glimmers — that we still may truly heal from 9/11/2001. Maybe this show's cancellation is one glimmer, that time will come when all divisions cease, and our tragedy against ourselves and the world dim in memory.

When?