REFLECTIONS 2010 - Part One

“CBS Sunday Morning” is a “must watch” for me. It is a loving look at the people, places, and institutions of America. This morning it was, predictably, a look back at 2010. I got much more than I bargained for.

It is “Sunday Morning” on this first day of 2011 that triggered the urge to write all that follows. Nothing I have written is original. No concepts are new. Pretty well everything I am writing has been said. All I have done is to synthesize them into one theme: obsolescence.

The theme runs through everything from the decline of American world hegemony to the rise of China. They are all externals, but they haunt the American psyche, a psyche that is bound to primitive ideas and obsolete institutions. Primitive! Obsolete! Sometimes self-deluding because America can’t relinquish “the greatest…” of this, that, the other, and everything in-between.

The new Republicans in the House of Representatives, the “Tea Party” Congressmen prove to me that America has lost its way. They plan, at the opening of Congress to read, in its entirety, the Constitution, and I suppose the Bill of Rights. Interesting to note here that many Americans who trumpet their “Constitutional” rights are really not talking about the original document, written by Thomas Jefferson and presented to the first Continental Congress is Philadelphia. The “rights” of Americans, while originating in the rhetoric of the Constitution, are embodied, not in that document, but in the amendments to it. The Republican Congress will continue to use an obsolete system to solve today’s problem. That defines “reactionary.”


The Tea Party zealots want a return to their view of an original sense of what America is about. They want to “honour” the Constitution. If I were to be completely cynical I would say that even the most shrill, most strident of these people, probably knows that the Bill of Rights, the amendments, were changes made to the Constitution. If not changes, then adjustments. And these are the very people who want to believe that what was written by Jefferson (and the others of course) is immutable, graven in stone, and the eternal guiding light to reality. It is not. (Just a side note: without John Locke, that famous Scotsman, much of the language in America’s seminal document would not have been written. It was Locke who wrote of “inalienable” rights – although he included property as one of them.)

America, in its zeal to protect the past, is strangling its future. The Constitution was created nearly 250 years ago. It was born in an age when slavery was accepted. (Although it was vehemently argued in the Continental Congress.) It was born when physicians still “bled” patients to remove the corruption that was causing disease. It was born before electricity, before the Industrial Revolution, before steam trains and automobiles, before Relativity and before Freud. It born in an innocent age when 13 disparate colonies coalesced to create a new nation. History will remember that it was a fractious union at best. History of course will demonstrate just how fractious it was when from 1861 to 1865 hundreds of thousands of Americans died trying to kill each other in a God-forsaken fight over the Constitution.

This is the Tea Party wants. This is the America that America now says it wants, just a scant two years after believing they had voted for change. Change is inimical to America. It violates sacred principles.

On “Sunday Morning,” perhaps the most interesting discussion was that while the rest of the world idealized and often envied the American Way, and wanted most of what the American Dream embodied, there seemed to be no one who wanted to have the American style of government, the style embodied in that petrified document: the Constitution.

What emerged from the program was the reality that unless America was prepared to change its political systems, it would continue to slide irrevocably into decline. The multi trillion dollar public debt is getting larger. The country has barely survived the greatest (I believe even greater) economic collapse since the Great Depression. There is still grinding poverty among millions who are unemployed, who are displaced, who have lost their homes, and who have lost hope. Then come comparisons to China. They inevitably include the reality that there are still tens of millions living in pre-boom conditions. But China is still an “emerging” economy, so there is an excuse for the economic disparities. But there is no excuse for America. “Sunday Morning” pointed out that even before the Great Recession the median wage in the country was dropping. The crisis of 2008 made it worse for more people.

The President bravely defends the principles that have made America great and has compromised his own principles in the face of the overwhelming political “shellacking” the voters gave him. In spite of what should have been revelations for future prosperity, they voted against change. They voted to return to the comfort, the security, the predictability of the past: to Republican orthodoxy.

Nothing I say here is new. It is many years since “The New Romans” said that power was moving west and that it was crossing the expanse of the Pacific. It has devolved to China. Not the democratic notions that prevail in America and (even though they hate to admit it) in the countries of Europe,America is still the most powerful country on earth and Europeans acknowledge it. The military power of America is what helps maintain some stability and preserves a way of life that many emerging nations and jihadist fanatics want to upset. They see that power as maintaining, for all of them - their place in the world.

But the tide has turned. The American people have lost their nerve. (I’m not sure they had much of it anyway.) They voted for the comfort of the past. That political passage is still called “reactionary,” because it retreats from tomorrow in favour of the comforts of what used to be.

Consistent with the dynamic of American Society, they are fundamentalists, in more ways than one. The political strangulation of new ideas is not unlike the strangulation of new social ideas by another Fundamentalism and a powerful desire to maintain the “faith of their Fathers.” So just as policy is glued to the Constitution, social change is glued to Biblical “truths.” You hear a lot of the Tea Party people invoking the Divine. (But so does President Obama – so there you are.)

In Canada, where there is just enough difference, and in spite of government by Conservatives, we are still a “liberal democracy,” even though too many Canadians can’t define the reality of being Canada. Many Canadians, when faced with a few difficult truths, will respond to the reactionary demagogue who will make them feel better by returning to a happier time. In Toronto we voted for Rob Ford, a larger-that-life messiah who would undo the pressure put on all of us, and make us believe again. In Ontario, we will probably return to the Mike Harris model when the Conservatives win the next provincial election. Not because they are better, but because everything new is not working the way it should under present government.

My last comment is about the five cent payment for plastic bags in supermarkets. Proponents of this cancellation accuse government of taking their money. Enlightened societies believe that government is not some abstract instrument, owned by “them.” They understand that “we” are government. Even the Americans still believe in “By the people, of the people, and for the people.” The sad truth is that it has become a hollow proclamation. Mistrust of government is what gets Neanderthals back into power.

I am not through with this topic I’ll be back with a further examination of the need to recede into the dubious comforts of the past.