Monday, January 4, 2010

Seeking Mythical Core Values

    The notion of "America's Core Values" is nothing more than that, a mythical array of benign images and buzz words that has been used for generations to suggest that this country as a global partner has never possessed anything but the most drinkable bathwater for the rest of humanity. 
     Our government has forever publicly portrayed itself as bearing only the fondest and most gentle desires for world peace, as sending only entirely noble and honorable soldiers as a last resort and whose citizens and business would NEVER think of exploiting any beyond-our-boundaries circumstance for profit. 
     These are silent assumptions for the most part, and predominant among only the most simple of our citizens who remain captured in a similar core value of a “dream” that does nothing more than drive consumerism as the patriotic duty. 
     Most do not register feelings until someone in prominence - this cycle it was Obama - touches that tender nerve of idealism. Obama seemed to be the only candidate who offered anything that looked like a return to that mythical blend of tough self-sustained idealism combined with Nightingale compassion and Lincoln equality that supposedly composes "America's core values." 
    Obama’s principle rival for the Democratic nomination ran on the idea that she was experienced, tough and quite capable of plowing around in the cesspools of D.C. politics.   
     Republicans were at the disadvantage of their own handicapped morality combined with having to run on the record of the worst president either party ever rode into office. 
     Yes yes ... baseball, Mom and apple pie are internally reinforced images, but they constitute merely the gate to the family homestead. The homestead itself is where the house, the property and the family members sustain themselves by mutual trusting dependence on a value system based on love, tolerance, economic equality, industry and opportunity. 
     That homestead has never existed in this country. 
     However, as an internal visualization, it has driven the grandest, most successful and most popular events, changes, adjustments, creations and repentances that we've seen in our history. 
     That idealized homestead never included a unanimous endorsement of supposed free-market economics. It never included subordination of individual rights and freedoms to the priorities of corporate dominance and certainly did not include evolution of the government into a source of camouflaged corporate welfare. 
    In that regard, a pure and successful free-market society has never existed, has never proven itself a successful nor universally beneficial system for public well-being.  
     When pondered and considered honestly; when valued for what they truly represent, our mythical core values ought to reflect the undeniable rebuttal to politicians who declare that government should be run as a business. 
     At best, that notion reflects a very narrow view of economic reality in this country and was perhaps best exemplified by the candidacy of Mitt Romney. Romney typified most politicians who have come to equate their personal financial success as a blend of entrepreneurial wisdom fortified by civic understanding of the laws of economics which somehow generate a natural entrepreneurial compassion for the less successful. 
     Most of these prominent megaphones wanted you to believe that justice for all is found on the back of a dollar bill more so than in any Constitution. 
     We seemed to hear this nonsense more from conservatives and/or the Republican Party who have for the last 50 years portrayed themselves as economically wise fiscal conservatives. But then Democrats are no strangers to this way of thinking and again are proving what informs and enables their political strategy. 
     In reality, Republicans, once unleashed by their political successes beginning in the 1990's, with great fanfare donned the Holy Mitre of reform and picked up the Scepter of change to accomplish a "fiscally responsible makeover " that in reality represents today's most powerful contemporary economic embarrassments. 
     For example we saw a welfare reform in the 1990's that has only marginally resolved even half the problems of poverty in this country. We also saw a rebuttal of the Clinton presidency's attempt to address national health care inadequacies. Resistance to the Clinton efforts was foolish, ideological, partisan and primarily greed-based. 
    Again this time these have been un-American refusals to reform or change health coverage in this country because the few are more important and significant than the many. We saw how the "fiscally responsible" party of change actually changed many American core value freedoms into unprotected vulnerabilities subject to the whims and greed of corporate capitalism. 
     It is obvious to those who are not blinded by partisan advocacies that neither party's victories in the future will guarantee any movement for genuine reform unless among those victories a specific mandate is included. It must be a mandate that reflects the will of the people; a mandate opposed to bought-and-paid-for civic policies enacted at the behest of monied lobbyists. 
     Voters must simultaneously have opportunity or means of formalizing a mandate to remove, severely restrict or equalize the playing field when it comes to lobbying our representatives for change.  
    We need to intervene and force corporate lobbyists out of our elected official's waiting rooms. 
    It seems that most who resist the idea of forceful change fall back an an automatic stance - that "pragmatism" usurps any desire or commitment to an ideal.  Partisan activists who consider themselves wise and who are intimately involved in the campaigns of their most beloved candidates almost always belittle ideal thinking. 
    You have to play the game in its forever-deteriorating manner in order to win power. Only then - once in power - can the victor look up the core values even he/she have probably forgotten and restore America to its mythical former glory. 
     Such thinking neither proves nor wins anything but perhaps individual arguments.  It also demonstrates and reveals a cynicism that fuels the ever-increasing loss of a civic appreciation for how things ought to work. 
    That's why too many of us - and I mean this literally - are too stupid to see through political tactics generated by polls and political consultants. We're losing our trust in whatever the Mythical American Core Values ever were. 
    Nothing is taking the place of that trust except perhaps cynicism and an ever deepening self-absorbed behavioral pattern; a pattern that only underlines what historians will eventually describe as the reason for the fall. 
     A future mythology may be only a speculation about an American Dream once believed to exist.

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