AN OLD BEATNICK MEETS GEORGE BUSH IN A TAVERN

Finally watched The Butler last night. Spent a large part of the movie in tears. All the pain that finally buried this "very sensitive" child under alcohol abuse came back last night. The interesting thing to me is how "conservative" I was as child and youth, in that I believed all the myths about America. After WWII, I really believed all the things about America's greatness, its love of freedom and justice and free speech. What the 50s and 60s taught me, finally and painfully, was that the American people were no better or worse than any other nation of people. 

Unrealistic "idealism" is what tortures modern conservatives also. They cling to the past, and they believe all the nonsense they were taught as children. They can't see modern America in a real light, and they are incapable of seeing the "injustices" created by free enterprise or capitalism. I do believe that capitalism is the best method for distributing a nation's wealth as long as the distance between those most and least rewarded does not grow too great. Which it has. 

Sadly, modern Teapublicans can't help "blaming" others for being poor because conservatives cling to the myth of "free will", thus it's easy for them to blame others and to praise themselves. They are controlled by evolutionary forces just as much as the less fortunate are controlled by genes and nurture. Those who succeed usually have a "sense of entitlement". The sense of entitlement describes a psychological or electrochemical state in the brain/body that leads to success. Their "psychological state" is a cause of success rather than an effect of success, and a grown Teapublican can no more take credit for that psychological state of being than a honeybee can take credit for being the queen of the hive. 

This film explores the difference

In my own case, I was driven by pain to try and understand who I was and what made me into the person I was. Success became secondary to that struggle. I was tortured by insecurity and shame. Until I reached the bottom of my personal struggle, trying to escape my worker bee status was next to impossible. It was like trying to climb up a hill of marbles. By the time I did understand the forces that drove me, I was in my 50s, a late start in the rush to earn fame and fortune in the free enterprise system. If only Teapublicans understood their fortunate electrochemical inheritance and quit "being proud" of themselves, we'd have quite a different nation to live in. 

Pardon my length, but simple-mindedness is not one of my strongly evolved characteristics. Complexity of thought comes with the territory of self-understanding. Thus, I am not George Bush and he is not me. Back in the day, however, I'm sure we'd have enjoyed drinking a beer together had we known each other. I enjoyed the company of many a young George Bush in the taverns where I "bought my alcoholism" one drink at a time.

ADAM CORNFORD: COULD BE TRUE

READ THIS PIECE BY ADAM CORNFORD, people. You can't go wrong. The first two paragraphs are below, but go to his blog and read it all up.

Apart from the issue of corporate money, I think there are deep historical reasons for the collapse of conservatism American-style as an ideology. They have to do with the senescence of possessive individualism in the age of global human cooperation and massive human impacts on the biosphere. Possessive individualism as a worldview originated with the hyperacquisitive English gentry class in the later seventeenth century and was codified into philosophy by thinkers like Adam Smith. It is worth remembering that the wording Madison wanted for the opening of the Declaration of Independence was “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Property.” Possessive individualism has been the ideological foundation of capitalism ever since.

Now, however, it is obsolete, for two reasons, both global in scope: the rise of the transnational corporation, and the advancing ecological crisis. Karl Marx long ago described the joint-stock corporation as “capitalist communism” and believed that its global development would unify humanity, but in a coercive and destructive way, dragging the world into deeper and deeper cyclical crises that would result in mass unemployment, hunger, and war. He therefore anticipated a point at which the working people of the world, recognizing their own transnational unity and practical interdependence, would collectively overthrow capitalism and establish what he called “the free association of the producers” in which “the full and free development of each depends on the full and free development of all.” This, not state ownership, was Marx’s vision, founded on the notion of the “social individual” for whom the freedom of others is not the limit of her own, but its expansion. In other words, socialism offers a fundamentally different vision both of freedom and of the individual. This vision was eclipsed both by authoritarian state capitalism masquerading as “socialism” in the USSR, China, and elsewhere, and by the enormous postwar boom that was actually premised on a greatly enlarged public sector. As that boom collapsed, the response of the ruling elites, especially in the US and the UK, was to promote possessive individualism with a vengeance (as “conservatism”) through a vast and well-funded network of foundations, think-tanks, media outlets—and churches.