Monday, September 6, 2010

Tony Blair and Glenn Beck

There's a nauseating combo 'eh? But this post is just about two quick separate reflections on these two assholes.

About Tony Blair, I'd like to review Heather Mallick's review of Tony Blair's latest exercise in self-pity and hypocrisy, My Journey:
Andrew Rawnsley, whose recent The End of the Party about the brief life of New Labour is one of the best political books of this decade, sums it up: Blair was “a sincere deceiver. He told the truth about what he believed; he lied about the strength of the evidence for that belief.”
...
He left office at a level of unpopularity that would shake a wiser man, but he’s as urgent in his claims of sincerity as he ever was.

It brings to mind his verbal tic as PM, “I really believe,” which made people wonder why he had to constantly remind them that he wasn’t pretending. He really, really believed, still does.

I've noticed somewhere or other on the intertubes some mentioning of the whole issue of how there are structural causes for the imperialism, theft, and cruelty that our elites indulge in and that these things can't be addressed by attacking the moral failings of individual politicians. This is true enough, but I want to say that these policies ARE imposed by human individuals and understanding how individuals can swallow these delusions and why is also important for understanding how to fix the system.

Now, about Glenn Beck: Given the fact that the stupid tea-baggers have a major cable news network promoting them 24-hours a day, seven days a week, and that there's been more ink spilled and bandwidth filled discussing these idiots over the past year than there's been on the anti-Iraq and Afghanistan wars movements for the past ten years, it's noteworthy that Beck's gathering of imbeciles in Washington only attracted 100,000 people. (The actual count was 87,000 which is well short of even 100,000.) In a country of 300 million people, with all the corporate support any group could hope to ask for, Glenn Beck was only able to scrounge together less people than the Ontario labour movement could against Mike Harris.

Isn't that more than enough evidence that we should pull the plug on the idea of continuing to waste energy covering this movement. 80 percent of the USA loathes Sarah Palin. She can do all she wants to win the Repug nomination, if she wins, she'll lose, because as debased as US American politics is under oligarchic capitalism, the people are too smart to vote for that shit-head or to fall under the sway of Beck's crazed, incoherent generalities. Sure, they represent a frightening lower bar for mainstream politics, but leave them to the full-time anti-fascist writers to keep tabs on them. They're not much more viable than Canada's "Heritage Front."

3 comments:

Inspector Clouseau said...

What's more interesting from our perspective about this Glenn Beck phenomenon is that "The Folks in Control," however one might characterize them in terms of race, status, class, wealth, geographic location or whatever, allowed our current situation to develop over arguably the last 50 - 100 years, and now there are complaints by a vocal group of concerned citizens.

Is it possible, as postulated by some, that the liberal, conservative, progressive, corporate and banking interests, and libertarian POWER FORCES in our society are laughing all the way to the bank, and that we minions with little money and power (the members of the Institute for Applied Common Sense included) are the ones complaining? And that because of new technological advances in communication and the power of the Internet, the voice of the minions is now being disseminated with greater force, essentially saying, "Stop! Enough is enough!"?

Furthermore, is this a case of the minions fighting for limited scraps at the bottom of the heap, while the real riches are controlled by a few? Have we at the bottom been pitted against one another?

Is this arguably a populist movement somewhat similar to the one led by "the Great Commoner," William Jennings Bryan at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th Centuries?

Is what we are experiencing simply the most vocal expression of the perhaps 80% of we citizens at the bottom of the heap?

thwap said...

I've heard Bryan's populism being compared to this tea-bag thing somewhere else recently.

I think Bryan's "cross of gold" speech dealt a lot more with the genuine political issues of genuinely abused social classes than does Beck's drivel about ACORN and God and honor.

That doesn't mean that I don't think that individual tea baggers have a right to be angry.

Sir Francis said...

Bryan's movement was miles away—morally, demographically and methodologically—from the Beck/Palin freak show. Its closest historical analogue is probably the Father Coughlin craze of the 1930s: next to that would be the Phillys Schlafly/Anita Bryant nonsense of the mid '70s.

But, Thwap, I'm not sure this ugly phenomenon is quite as ignorable as you would like to believe. That fact is that Palin and the Tea Party have had a considerable impact upon the results of quite a few GOP primaries. They are now the kinds of GOP power-brokers that the Jerry Falwells and the Ralph Reeds of the Christian Right used to be and, as such, are bound to influence the theory and practice of our own branch-plant neocon carpet-baggers.

We cannot be sure how long this influence will last, of course, but I think we need to hear about it and monitor it as long as it's in effect.