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Sunday, August 20, 2006

Accountability Moment

In ancient Rome, there was a pawn who followed along and watched it fall.
He cast a stone, he felt secure, he thought that his voice would never be heard.
Freedom of choice is what you've got. Freedom from choice is what you want.
-- Devo/A Perfect Circle, Freedom Of Choice


In chronicling Ehud Olmert's precipitous post-conflict freefall, and imminent collapse of his coalition government, Wolcott compares Olmert's travails with those of The Decider:

One admirable aspect of the Israeli political system is that there's a degree of accountability completely absent from American politics.



That's true, and it's directly proportional to the degree of accountability to which the respective constituents are held. Israeli citizens simply cannot afford to be as ricockulously stupid and complacent as Americans. It's literally a matter of life and death to know who their representatives are, and vote accordingly. They cannot get away with knowing more about cartoon characters than who their policymakers are and what they stand for. It's that simple.

It's appalling to even think of trying to find any sort of silver lining in the wake of 9/11, but let's be honest -- it could have at least been an opportunity to start asking questions, getting answers, and addressing real "root causes", in the hope of finding actual solutions to imminent problems. But no. The party in power decided to politicize and stonewall at every opportunity, resorting to cheap traitor-baiting at the slightest hint of even principled opposition from the craven "opposition" party. And we didn't do one single thing to change the paradigm of being recklessly overdependent on a resource concentrated in regions that violently despise us.

Consequently, everything that has changed has changed significantly for the worse. The party in power has no excuses for its manifest failures of policy and principle, and yet it is still going to be a horse race for the opposition party to be able to back into any real victory. Indeed, even with Bush languishing at or below 40% approval for almost the entire year thus far, every policy in tragic disarray, and no proferred solution besides the shopworn refrain of staying the course, there has been no real momentum generated by the Democratic Party. The one exception, Ned Lamont's primary win over doormat incumbent Joe Lieberman, was almost immediately negated by Lamont taking a week off in Maine, while Lieberman instantly seized the opportunity and hit the ground running.

So while 9/11 has been portrayed as a true paradigm shift in America's sense of security, our actions have consistently belied that theory. This has been borne out by the practical ramifications of our choices. There's just no two ways about this. We can point the finger at feckless, lying leaders, and their sniveling enablers in the corporate media, but ultimately the fault lies with the 51% of fools who refused to acknowledge that they fucked up the first time with Bush, the weirdos who worry more about gay marriage and flag burning than anything else, the morons who can't bring themselves to turn off the TV and read a goddamned book once in a while.

And the accountability moment, like it or not, will come all the same, though perhaps not in a spasm of violence amidst mindless hysteria over mascara and bottled water. It will come in the form of foreclosures and higher unemployment, in the wake of a housing bubble that burst from a glut of construction and usurious financial speculation. It will come in the form of the central banks of ascendant Asian economies selling off American T-bills to bring the record current account deficits back to a more manageable level. It will come in the form of ignorant assholes clogging up our educational and political systems, spouting false populist nonsense while they line up at the public trough with the rest of the pigs.

Maybe at such a dismal point, Americans will start holding their politicians accountable the way Israelis do to their politicians. But as long as they are willing to let themselves be convinced by some interchangeable huckster that they can have their Hummers and flat-screens for just one more day, they'll continue to let a third-rate doofus like Bush walk all over the Constitution just as much as he pleases.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hate to be the cynic here, but I don't think the acountability moment is gonna happen--not without some serious external prompting, at least. I mean, you point out yourself what it takes for politicians to become (or to be held, at least) accountable: the shadow of some serious grave threat (as in Israel), such that their actions are perceived to have momentous, palpable consequences that affect most of the citizenry.

But that's not the case in America. Its nuclear arsenal makes it invulnerable to any serious military threat, now and in the long run. Scattered bunches of crazy Muslim fanatics may always plot to do some damage to the hated colonial power, but let's face it, whatever they may be up to, it's not comparable to traditional threats from armed nation-states. A massive, long economic recession may awaken the electorate from its slumbering watching of Desperate Housewives (or whatever the hell they're watching these days). It may also put an end to America's recent slide towards an economic inequality not seen since its former Gilded Age. But a deep recession may only happen if out friends at the Central Bank of China decide buying Uncle Sam's T-bills hs become a losing deal.

As to America's other right-wing party, it's true that they've been incredibly spineless and incompetent over the last five years. But maybe their recent silence is a sign that they're, at last, sharpening their knives. At least The Economist seems to think so.

--M.

Heywood J. said...

Yeah, if there is an accountability moment here, it will be an economic one, almost certainly. As I said, even 9/11 didn't really make Americans hold anyone accountable per se, it simply made timid politicans more timid, belligerent pols more so, and citizens more or less confused by all the crazy rhetoric.

At the end of the day, there was no responsibility for, say, the photographic evidence of Bush being physically handed a briefing attesting to the type and scale of threat posed by bin Laden, only cheap cynicism of the "whatta ya gonna do" variety that we seem to specialize in.

You're right, our military invulnerability and relative lack of geographic entanglement has served our societal complacency. And I think there's a real possibility that a China sell-off of American T-bills could happen. They have been growing their economy very aggressively, which has its own economic, political, and societal ramifications. They can't keep expanding at 10% per year, with a persistent gulf between urban and rural, and keep a lid on dissent. The scale is just too enormous. Something eventually has to give, and we are simply too far on the margin to weather the repercussions.

The Economist article is interesting, and I like Emanuel's energy, but I question what exactly the Dems would "sharpen their knives" for. This is a theme I will be focusing on more as the election season develops further, but the essence of it is whether their approach will truly be one of confronting looming demographic problems which could be crippling if left unaddressed (health care, Social Security, etc.).

That's where citizens' accountability comes into play. Someone eventually has to be the adult, and step up and say, "We can either pinch a modest amount now and address the problems before they get out of control, or we can leave a larger problem for our children to scramble to patch it up.".

Hegemon is unsustainable in the long term. People need to be told they can no longer afford infinite amounts of guns and butter. Whether it's the center-right or the radical-right party that tells them this remains to be seen. Obviously, they'll both put it off until it's too late, because once bought, they're expected to stay bought.

Anonymous said...

I too was a bit pleasantly surprised by Rahm's plan. At least it's something--it can start off a political marketing campaign, which is pretty much all you can expect from statesmen these days, in an age in which none of them spends their time reading Locke and Montesquieu, like the Founding Daddies. They can be seen to look busy, as it were, and to have found at least some soundbite to oppose the "staying the course" mantra of the administration.

As to guns and butter, I hope there will come a time when the citizenry begins to ask itself what it needs so many heavy guns for. The Soviet Union is dead for good, and even Iran will never be more that a Thirld World local thug. Less than 5% of America's heavyweight weaponry is enough to turn it into a parking lot. And certainly it's a bad strategy to think you can fight wild-eyed Muslim terrorists in caves and the slums of Londonistan by adding yet another Trident D5-armed nuclear submarine to your fleet. I dunno, maybe buying more kevlar vests for America's grunts in Iraq woudl be a better idea.

But ultimately, I think Billmon was onto something when he was wishing the Dems won't win in November. They'd be left with the generalized mess the GOP has left behind it in six year of misadministration, an impatient electorate, and a big Gordian knot in the Middle East to sort out, while the fascist right will withdraw to the sidelines to yell itself blue that see, these damn libruls just aren't pursuing their War on the Abstract Noun with enough vigor (or, as a crazy journalist put it a few months ago, with enough "ferocity"), weakened as they are by political correctness. The damage has been done already, so maybe the Republicans should be given another four years in power, to make the mess complete. Then we'll be sure they'll never return to office for half-a century or so. Or do I foolishly underestimate the average American's memory span?

--M.