The title, Screeching Rats, comes from a comment I made this August of 2006 regarding the defeat of an ultraconservative candidate in a school board race in the state of Kansas. Not an important election, one might presume, but her tirade against the “liberals” in the Republican Party who shot her candidacy down was what prompted the remark: she was shrill and bitter, to which my reply was, “The rats always screech the loudest and most shrill as the sinking ship’s waters engulf them.”
That is my hope: for the neo-conservative, paleo-fundamentalist anti-Enlightenment antilabor movement will be sunk as deeply as the Titantic. That it will become a mere relic — a fossilized historical curiousity of which much is legend, but ultimately merely an obscure wreck.
This writer sees current U.S. administration as being held hostage to a small group of disparate individuals who have often-competing aims, yet have managed to form a grand coalition. These are the people who worship at the altar of Ayn Rand and Paul Wolfowitz; the people who think there is a reason for the United States to back stab its former ally Iraq in the back and try to foist a “democracy” upon the Iraqi people which is nothing more than a rewording of Mussolini’s fascism. These are the people who toss out phrases such as “terrorist enabler” to describe a candidate who opposes continuation of a military adventure in Iraq and claim that the bright sunny future is merely around the corner, when the Iraqi people suffer random sectarian violence that makes an Orange Day parade in Derry look like an eucumenical picnic in comparison. These are the people who want to restrict our most cherished liberties in order to keep us free. These are the people who want to make conservative fundamentalist Christianity our state religion in all but name and whose eschatology is truly frightening in its implication, the raputurists, the tribulationists, the Dominionists and the “World is six thousand years old” crowd.
Even more frightening, for their present power, per se, and not mere electoral power, are the neo-conservatives: the Trotskyites of conservatism, those for whom “Ayn Rand in one country” is not allowed, rather, permanent war in order to keep the barbarians at bay in order to form a single world of a permanent underclass of ill clothed, underfed and nonmedicated workers who are allowed no dissent under penalty of retribution, that is, the denial of their daily bread given in exchange for their long hours of labor with a permanent uberclass of corporation leaders in charge of them all. This is an Orwellian, Huxleyesque vision of the future with billions of epsilons and two minutes of daily hate for all.
While all these people are frightening in their goals, what distresses me the most is the direction the Democratic Party has turned towards becoming enablers of that lot. A party of Jackson and Jefferson become a party of Miller and Lieberman. A party in which its brightest leaders with some of the largest followings becomes a party of back benchers, silenced by the corporate media, save occasional snipes at Kucinich, Conyers, and Feingold. A party where HR Clinton has been “anointed” the leading candidate yet was hobnobbing with the minions of corporate media power and when a true alternative candidate for her Senate race is running, is unable to have his voice heard.
Our party is sick, but not terminal, unless the status quo continues. It is up to the people to read, and then analyze what they have read along with the votes that are cast and follow the debates. It often seems that the debate has little connection to the vote, as some are willing to say one thing then explain it away when voting the other, coerced by the monied powers of the corporate lobbies. It is a sad day when it takes a lone elderly man hobbling on two canes, hands trembling to denounce the destruction of the Constitution, while dozens of able-bodied men and women do not even grace his presence in the chamber. It is a sad day when claims of necessity and fear of the corporate funds drying up allow only a single senator to vote against the adventure in Iraq and the horrid Patriot Act. It is a sad day when the Senate cannot stop a thug from becoming a federal judge. It is a sad day when there has to be a blog dedicated to this topic.
But in fairness, it is always darkest and coldest before the dawn.
August 31, 2006 at 11:31 pm
Great article!
However, there is one thing that I would like to comment on in your blog. It seems that your usage of the term “corporate” might be construed as being anti-capitalist. I think I come from a similar ideology to you, and I think I know what you mean by the terms employed, but others might get a very different idea. Perhaps an enunciation of the term “Corporatism” would be in order, as most Democrats, like myself, like the idea of Corporations, but abhor the abuse that this administration allows within the Corporate world. The granting of a Corporate Charter by the States and the Federal Government is to be done in the interest of the “Greater Good”, usually implying the expanse of the tax base and the protection of civil liberties. However, when these entities become enabled to buy more representation than a citizen, the usefullness of the entity is in doubt, as that is where Fascism is able to creep in.
September 5, 2006 at 2:57 am
Oh, no, I’m not anti-capitalist, per se, rather the corporate control over both parties, and the pay to play rules that I see nearly everyone but Bernie and Dennis exemplifying — of course, luckily, some such as Edwards and Kerry have enough money of their own to have got into the game, but it is stacked against us.
I am perplexed over the use of “corporate”, myself, it having a benign meaning in the philosophy of Amatai Enzioni, for example, and meaning exactly what it says in Latin. I refer, of course to the mega-corps who have destroyed competative capitalism and its underlying principles for too many Ayn Rand novels.
Thanks for your comments, I real your latest feed today. I was out of town researching my friend’s dissertation with him in Chapel Hill and then ran to Kitty Hawk after the hurricane passed by!
I posted today on the death of Cerebus, the three headed beast that is one part Ayn Rand, one part Ariel Cohen and one part Pat Robertson. It appears that Rand’s ghost has eaten the other two… Further noise is merely death gurgles…
Thanks, this is one person, by the way, I just like to pretend it is three!