MICHAEL MOORE GIVES IT AWAY

The above-named has a piece on Alternet (“How the Democrats Can Blow It”, www.alternet.org/story/94843).

He opens with the claim that “for years now, nearly every poll has shown that the American people are right in sync with the platform of the Democratic Party”. I dunno. You can never be sure with these ‘polls’ until you’ve seen the actual questions they’ve asked and then make sure everybody is using the same definitions. Somebody, say, who turns out merely to hate everything the Republicans have been doing (and who could deny it?). Or somebody who when using the term ‘Democratic Party’ is thinking of the Party of FDR. Something like that.

But to take anybody’s word for it that most of Us are reely reely happy with the Democratic Party as it is presently construed … nah. No way. If We all were so happy with the Dems, then why are they in such anxious doubt as to the outcome of the election? They’re running against McCain who is channeling Bush-Cheney, for pete’s sake, with an economy not only down-turning but possibly over-turning, a currency that some stores in Manhattan no longer accept, a 2-front losing war and eager talk of a third, and … fill in the rest.

But then he goes further: “Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton both lost the white-male vote but won the White House”. So there it is. Back there in the ‘60s, as noted in many previous Posts, the Dems decided that given the risks run by completing the work of the Civil War in that Glorious 1965, they should forget trying to explain themselves and instead, raise up more friendly and reliable voter-blocs as fast as possible in order to literally change the composition of the voting public in a way politically advantageous to themselves.

This would require massive social change, and societal change: not only policies but the entire tectonic plate of ‘common wisdom’ and ‘common sense’ would have to be shifted so thoroughly and so quickly that their ‘new’ ‘common sense’ would suddenly be in control before the ‘old’ ‘common sense’ could hit the ground. Like a female mantis turning on her mate and suddenly sawing off its head. Thus the Democratic Party’s approach to the People and American society and culture in the years following ’68. (Nor do I hold any brief whatsoever for the neocon sleazeballs and Fundamentalist whackjobs raised up en bloc by the Republicans in response, as both vessels and cover for the Second Gilded Age and the Second Imperial Age.)

Alas, the old truth held: if you’re going to replace the king, then you’re best-advised to kill him quickly. Lenin realized that, liquidating not only the Tsar, but also vast swaths of those classes of Russians who would have least stake in the Revolution and/or the most brains to point out its lunacies, treacheries, and butcheries. Stalin did the same to the Party itself, liquidating all of those Party members who might imagine that there was any other way to carry on Lenin’s work besides Stalin’s way (and – after a while – the wise Party member didn’t even mention Lenin, except on formal occasions).

Now comes Moore and affides that ‘white males’ are not a group or class that the Democratic Party need concern itself with at all. And that the Dems should focus on “winning the black, Hispanic and female vote”.

Forget the politics of it: that it isn’t advisable to ignore a still sizable fraction of the electorate.

Forget the conceptual dangers of assuming that any non-white male voter would vote with the non-white and/or female blocs.

Forget the profound constitutional danger, the toxicity to the common weal, posed by carving such a sizable chunk of The People out of the active concern and operations of politics. And of thus declaring some citizens to be ‘sheep’ and some to be ‘goats’ and thus arbitrarily dividing The People up. In addition to stampeding The People as if It were a herd, the Dems have sought to cut up the People as if It were a roast.

Or – see my immediately previous Post – do the Dems really believe that there is any People at all? Are the Dems so cynical that they have quietly abandoned not only ‘abstractions’ such as Truth and Justice (we’ll leave ‘God’ out of it for now) but that they consider ‘The People’ to be merely a quaint abstraction? And do We frakkin’ think that the only Constitutional dangers facing Us at this moment are the very real ones posed by the Bushist Imperium? And could the Bushist Imperium have gained such traction so quickly if the Dems hadn’t been dividing and chopping up The People (the constitutionally indispensable People) for 30-plus years? Such a treachery so long sustained leaves the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in the dust.

But how can it be forgotten that Moore is merely recommending the continuation of the game-plan that the Party has been pursuing for decades. The ‘white male’ has been, with the full cooperation of the Democratic Party and all its pomps and all its works and all its resources, subjected to a sustained series of campaigns of ridicule, disparagement, and – in the domestic-violence and sex-offender manias that started in the mid-‘90s – civil and criminal persecution that is unsurpassed even in America’s chequered history by virtue of these campaigns being perpetrated deliberately and fully aforethought by the highest elements of the US government in all its Branches.

I think it has to be admitted: at some point in the past couple-three decades, the Democrats’ ‘alignment’ in conformity to its Identities shaded over into a domestic war – not ‘over’ culture but actually against ‘white males’ (as individuals and as a class and as demonized symbols, even though they were still – nominally – citizens). And in the ‘90s with the domestic violence and sex-offense campaigns, it shaded over further into a war against ‘males’ pure and simple. Was this wise? Even from a ‘mere’ political point of view? Is it ever anything but fatal when a society is generally held to be the site of a ‘war’ of one large fraction of its citizenry against another? Several ‘wars’ simultaneously? And with the perversion of constitutional praxis and criminal as well as civil law in the mid-‘90s, then this ‘war’ ceased to be quite so figurative and became rather more actual.

Nor has it helped that generations of males are now born whose idea of manhood – in consequence of either an actually or a functionally fatherless childhood – is purveyed by Hollywood portrayals of the hapless, indecisive, hug-me, ‘sensitive’ 20-or-30-something, just lookin’ for luv and a good high, trying to keep the teenage ‘high’ goin’, for lack of anything better that they can imagine. Or a rap-gangsta sort of thing. I am surely not shilling for chimpery here, but We are not going to last long as a democratic society if this keeps up.

And in the process of liberating (and pandering to) its Identities, and quite possibly to secure some level of economic feasibility for vast social changes that are part of the (Second-Wave, at least) feminist agenda, the Dems were willing to let industrial jobs and the benefits achieved through the blood and sweat of generations of American workers dissolve and ‘go away’, so that the economy could provide double the amount of jobs (at half the pay or less). And it made the Robber Baronets happy too – a twofer! What was not to like?

Yeah, come to think of it, Moore may be onto something here. Why would ‘white males’ have any reason to vote for the Democrats? Because Obama is ‘male’? It would appear that maleness has little to do with the Party these days, no matter how many affairs this or that incumbent stud may carry on. Or is it better to say ‘masculinity’ rather than ‘maleness’? I think it is. It’s not all about ‘sex’ after all.

And yet in the upcoming election what other options, realistically, do ‘white males’ have? Do We have? ... The Republicans? As presently construed they are not the party of Lincoln nor of fiscal caution but rather a hell-hot effluvium composed of the worst of Confederate militarism, the Gilded Age, the Third Reich, and the most perverted yet bloody-minded lunacies of the farthest fringes of Protestantism.

But how ‘talk’ about any of this just now? To stop the already stuttering campaign train to ‘apologize’ to ‘white males’ would require acknowledging what has been done, which would enrage the Identities who have reaped great fruit precisely by claiming that what was done was nothing but justice and (you should pardon the expression) tit-for-tat, payback for millennia of ‘oppression’.

And who isn’t oppressed by the mere but profound fact of existing on this mortal coil? They’ve been writing about the pain of living, the ‘lacrimae rerum’, for millennia, in every civilization and era. You picked a fine time to drop ‘white males’ like a hot potato, Dems.

Moore may be onto something. There’s no solution or apology possible for what the Dems have done to ‘white males’ over the past 40 years, so just move beyond it. Collateral Damage. The 'white male', a significant chunk of the population, of Our society and nation, is in Moore's view to be written off as just collateral damage.

Who would have thought Michael Moore was such a manly neocon? You’d think he be for the War Global and Long. He is, to all appearances, a white male. But after all these years, it should be crystal clear that appearances can be deceiving.

And what tangled webs the Dems do weave …