Using Technology to Deepen Democracy, Using Democracy to Ensure Technology Benefits Us All

Saturday, September 06, 2008

Nicey-Nice

There are no doubt good people affiliated with both of America's major political parties to this day, working diligently at their desks, sticking to their honest principles come what may. It does seem to me that these days one really must concede that these good people are disproportionately Democrats -- or at any rate Republicans voting for Democrats in some heartbroken self-imposed exile or semi-retirement.

It is hard to shake the reaction these days, upon hearing someone avow that they are a Republican, that they have just offered up to the world the proud declaration that they are a smug scoundrel or a dangerous fool. It's hard to know what to say in answer to such a declaration. "Oh dear," is my default.

But come what may, there are plenty of sensible modest good government types remaining between the cracks and soon enough many more freshly elected and hired newcomers from the more Democratic wing of the Democratic Party will join them. These are the folks upon whom we depend for a government that works and, hence, upon whom we all of us depend for our survival in an unfathomably complex planetary technoscientific society.

These are also the folks who have been derided relentlessly throughout the Reagan-Bush epoch as losers and meddlers and moochers and do-gooders by the lying grasping mediocrities of the Right -- throughout all the years and years of my own voting lifetime. (And among these liars and graspers one has to include the corporate-militarists on the right-wing of the Democratic Party, the ones who like to call themselves "Centrists" rather in the same way that marginal but barking-loud theocratic zealots like to style themselves a "Moral Majority.")

In any case, these good dedicated people, many of them young people drawn into government (or back into the process) by the inspiring example of the Obama campaign, may indeed manage against the odds, against the dense inertial mass of timidity, corruption, greed, and short-sightedness of the swamp of administration to right our course, re-arrange our economic priorities in the general interest, render our mode of production sustainable, de-militarize our institutions, re-secure our debauched civil liberties, mobilize the intelligence of all our people by ensuring their health, their welfare, their education as universal rights, and pay for it by demanding that those who benefit most from the commons of our inherited, shared, and collaborative resources and genius pay their fair share in maintaining these rather than capturing ever more for themselves and playing at being aristocrats while the world burns.

If it is true indeed that, "Yes, We Can," save ourselves in the midst of our present incomparable distress I can only beg, demand, hope that this time we will punish those who have benefited from the lawlessness of this era the better to protect ourselves from their inevitable return in the next relatively prosperous but too-likely amnesiac lull the Democrats manage to build for the Republicans to squander. We swept too many crimes under the rug and pardoned too many of the criminals of the Nixon and Reagan Administrations and have paid a breathtaking price for our eager amnesiac "good feelings." The inertial tendencies to catastrophic short-sightedness and corruption and tyranny that inhere in what Roosevelt taught us to understand as "Economic Royalism" and Eisenhower warned us about when he spoke of the "Military-Industrial Complex" are very well understood. Learn the lessons, teach the lessons, remember the lessons, act on the lessons.

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