July 4th - 26 Years Later
Now settled into my new job as a political consultant in Washington, I intend to write this blog on a more regular basis. My return to active blogging will mean, if I’m lucky, that my site will be added to the 12.4 million blogs currently being tracked by Technorati.com.
I’m celebrating July 4th in Washington as a DC area resident for the first time in more than 26 years. A quarter of a century ago, I may have been a callow youth, but it wasn’t unreasonable to have considered myself a bit world-weary and cynical. After all, I had witnessed the assassinations of JFK, Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, the Vietnam War, and Watergate. Somehow, I remained (either foolishly or admirably) optimistic about the future of our country. I was confident that things would turn out all right in the end.
Back in the late 70s, of course I couldn’t imagine being middle-aged much less what American democracy would look like in 2005. If you had told me then that middle age wasn’t so bad, I wouldn’t have believed you. And if you had told me then what our political and economic system would look like 26 years on, I wouldn’t have believed you.
I couldn’t have imagined that the Supreme Court, by a party line vote, would block a recount of a disputed election, handing the presidency to the guy who lost the popular vote by half-a-million. I couldn’t have imagined that four years later, virtually nothing had been done to fix our electoral system or that a supporter of the ruling party made electronic voting machines that produced results at odds with exit polls that were accurate in other states, or that those voting machines were not required to produce paper records. I couldn’t have imagined that not so many years after the tragic mistakes of Vietnam, we again had a government that lied to us about why we were fighting a war and how that war was going. I would have been shocked that the United States of America operated prisons around the world in which individuals who had not been charged with a crime and were not considered prisoners of war could be tortured and held indefinitely. I would have been stunned to learn that the Clean Air Act, instead of being expanded, was actually rolled back and that tax incentives would be given to drivers of large gas-guzzling consumer trucks called sport utility vehicles. I would have been dismayed to hear that Congress routinely gives tax breaks to a new class of super wealthy Americans even as a huge deficit grew, the war drained resources and needed programs were cut. I would have been aghast to find out that 40 years after Medicare was created, nothing else significant has been done to address the problem of Americans without health insurance. I would have been alarmed to hear a congressman speaking on the House floor accuse Democrats of “denigrating and demonizing Christians…” And I would have been perplexed by the complacency of vast numbers of Americans.
Back in 1979, I would have been no less surprised by the mainstream press’s abdication of its traditional role and responsibilities in holding people accountable for the above-described problems. In ‘79, just five years after Nixon resigned, I still held the Washington Post in near awe for sticking to its guns and not being intimidated in the face of incredible pressure and full-throated attacks from the right. Today’s Post barely resembles that independent voice. It would have been hard to imagine 26 years ago that the Post would stoop to editorializing that President Bush deserved praise for doing press conferences a bit more frequently while acknowledging that the president doesn’t say much in them. The Post editorial of this past Sunday is typical of the newspaper’s lazy and intellectually dishonest “even-handedness.” It attacks both liberal and conservative interest groups for waging war over the Supreme Court. The editorial doesn’t discuss what’s at stake or consider the veracity of various claims being made by interest groups. No, from its lofty editorial perch it merely bemoans the awful rhetoric, while lumping all the groups together. No matter that these “interest groups” are in many cases the only channels through which citizens can have a say on judicial nominees. The Post editors say that “liberal interest groups will release a blast of e-mails promising a ‘rollback’ of American liberties if the person is confirmed.” As if that is an implausible and wildly irresponsible claim.
Well, on this July 4th, I say to hell with the Post editorial. We’re in a big fight to counter not only the right’s effort to control all branches of government, but also its well-orchestrated campaign to discredit all messengers of inconvenient truths. A quarter of a century on, we cannot depend on a corporatized and cowed mainstream media to deliver those truths come what may. That’s why, as messy and undisciplined as it can be, alternative media is important. It’s why grassroots organizing is critical. And yes, it’s why the Internet, something else I couldn’t have imagined in ‘79, really can - and must - empower us.