In The New York Times last Sunday, John F. Burns wrote a lamentation for the state of his native Britain, and the recognition of the overall depressing complexity of the hacking scandal, the corruption of the three major institutions of the media, the police, and Parliament, really left one with the sinking, sickening feeling that the country was at a low ebb from which it will be hard to recover. Here Burns quotes Ed Milliband, the leader of the Labor Party in Parliament:
“Looking back over only the last three years, Mr. Miliband has said that the three great crises to hit Britain since then — the banking crash of 2008, the furor over fraudulent parliamentary expenses in 2009 and the tabloid scandal — have been rooted in a culture that engendered a “shirking of basic responsibility” from “top to bottom” in British life, that “sends the message that anything goes, that right and wrong don’t matter, that we can all be in it for ourselves as long as we can get away with it.”
“What,” he said, “is a young person, just starting out in life, trying to do the right thing, supposed to think when he sees a politician fiddling the expenses system, a banker raking off millions without deserving it, or a press baron abusing the trust of ordinary people?”
Britain is fortunate at least that it has been shaken so hard–Hacking the firm of dead girl! one can hear all of Britain asking, Joseph Welch-like, Have you no shame?–that Milliband and yes, even the Prime Minister David Cameron have asked this question. What’s terrible for the United States is that we are nowhere near that point yet. A wholesale pillaging of the economic system has taken place, with politicians and mortgage brokers and investment bankers and credit raters all complicit, and America is still not shocked and stunned enough to start dishing out punishment. And now we have this miserable spectacle of this debt ceiling crisis, in which the fundamental party seems quite willing to wait and see if the President Obama might just be wrong about the catastrophic consequences of destroying the country’s credit rating.
But ti’s even more than that. These people are de-legitimating the government, and they are de-legitimating the votes of all of us who voted for Obama and his policies. By denying a compromise, they are denying the our right to hold our views.
This cannot go on. Reform through the ballot box is unlikely when so much power and money is in the hands of the establishment. It is telling that in 1861, the North roused itself to stand up against southern secession not because the North cared about slavery, but because the South refused to accept the results of the election; after so many years of swallowing southern shit because the rules were the rules, the South’s refusal to accept the rules was the reason the North went to war. And this de-legitimation, too, could have the same kind of awful consequences. “Violence is as American as cherry pie,” Huey Newton once observed. “It was a case of the chickens coming home to roost,” Malcolm X said about the assassination of JFK. It is a terrible thing to envision, but the disrespectful, heady, almost giggling irresponsibility of the “no new revenue” fundamentalists is heading for blood.
I find myself agreeing from top to bottom, which depresses me immensely. And the similarities with pre-revolutionary France with present-day circumstances are hard to ignore: radicalism becoming mainstream, out-of-touch national authorities, the monarch being undermined by his ministers, a growing food crisis, etc.
What I’m trying to puzzle out is what is going to be America’s ‘Bastille’? I can’t see a mass march happening on Gitmo, which is the closest modern equivalent I can think of. Maybe it ultimately doesn’t matter where or how it happens, whatever the “it” is or will be.
The real question is will it be a revolution, or another civil war? And if so, who will be on which side? I’ve no answers there, and I pray to whatever god will listen those questions don’t have to get answered (even though I fear they will be).