Pushing Back ( Why the World Can’t Wait
I was born and raised in Midland, Texas. That in and of itself may not, strictly speaking,
require an apology. But as a very young boy, I made an embarrassing mistake. I went to
Sam Houston Elementary School with George W. Bush.
What can I say? I’m sorry. I was young. Kids make mistakes. But in my own defense, I
should point out that I was not in George’s class, and he certainly wasn’t impressive
enough for me to actually remember him. I could have gone through life ignoring this
childish folly, but for one piece of evidence
The Midland Reporter-Telegram, which we always referred to as the Repeater-Smell-o-
gram, published a picture in the mid 1950’s of a group of school crossing guards from
Sam Houston Elementary. My parents still have the photo, framed on their office wall.
In it stand my older brother and George, decked out in spiffy white belts and badges.
I’ve seen that picture many times, but it only recently dawned on me that it is an historic
photograph. It documents two important milestones in George’s career. First, it marks
the closest George ever got to actual combat. (Those 6th graders can be vicious!) And
secondly, it represents the pinnacle of George’s competence and leadership ability. He
could just about handle being a crossing guard. After that, it’s all been downhill.
In fact, Bush’s incompetence is so evident that recent polls show over 60% of Americans
now disapprove of the job he’s doing. Now, that seems like a lot of disapproval, but I
wondered why it wasn’t 100%. I mean, after Iraq and torture and tax breaks for the
wealthy and Katrina and one scandal after another and the invasion of fundamentalism
into everything from science to social programs, how could anyone still support Bush?
And then it hit me: shift work.
There are lots of people doing shift work in America to make ends meet. I mean, at any
given time, a third of the country could be asleep. So, the pollsters probably got
responses from lots of sleepy people who couldn’t understand the question. That would
account for 33% of the 39% who approve of Bush. One percent represents the
destination for all of Bush’s tax cut money and no-bid contracts, so we know why they
support him. The other 5% I assume are just old soreheads.
It really is difficult for me to believe that anyone of good conscience in this country could
continue to delude himself to the point where support of Bush was still possible. It is
testimony to the vast success of decades of corporate propaganda that has filled American
heads with all kinds of goofy ideas. Here are some preposterous things that corporations
have made the general public believe:
1.
“Liberal” is a bad word. “Liberal” is like “socialist”, and that’s on
the road to”communist”. Of course, communists are still bad because
they control so many of the world’s people. I mean, there’s Cuba, and,
) well, there’s Cuba. I’m pretty sure that soon the word “liberal” will
begin to be associated with the word “terrorist”. It’s the next logical
step. Terrorists are the up-and-coming boogey men and have largely
replaced communists.
2. Labor unions are bad. They’re corrupt and they don’t care about the welfare of
the public. Not like the corporations, those nice guys in three-piece suits who do
us all a favor by providing us with jobs. That is, until they decide that labor is
cheaper somewhere else and pull the rug out from under their workers.
3. Democrats are bad. They tax and spend. Not like those good conservative
Republicans. Not like Ronald Reagan, who left us with a crushing national debt.
Okay, bad example. How about my old school mate, arch-conservative George
W.? Oh, yeah, he’s managed to fritter away a huge surplus and dig us into a vast
hole of trade and budget deficits, all the while shoveling mountains of cash to his
super-wealthy friends and paying for everything with IOU’s to the Chinese.
Hmm. Seems like the Republicans are aptly described as, “don’t tax the rich (
just spend like crazy”.
4. Social Security is broken, so we must fix it by destroying it. Huh?
5. The news media have a liberal bias. This is said all the time, but especially when
a story comes out that is unflattering to corporations or their lap dog, the U.S.
government. Now, about 2 ½ seconds into thinking about this claim, it is
apparent that it is utterly false. Corporations own the major news media.
Corporations don’t allow the news media to do things that are not in the interest
of corporations. Conversely, corporations cause the news media to over-report on
stories that purport to show them in a favorable light. Only when corporate
crimes are so egregious that they can no longer be ignored are they reported on
with any degree of honesty. Look how long the Enron fiasco went on before the
news media really dug into the story. And look how fast bad corporate P.R. fades
to the back pages of the paper, to be replaced with some hard news, like the latest
Jennifer Aniston story.
I grew up believing a lot of this crap. My parents are good people, but they couldn’t
withstand the onslaught of propaganda that has poured forth from corporate “public
relations” agencies, i.e., propaganda machines, over the years. If I hadn’t gone to college
and then the Army when I did, during Vietnam, I might have swallowed corporate
propaganda for the rest of my life. But there was a narrow opportunity there, when
people were in the streets protesting, when the Nixon presidency was coming unglued,
when underground media began to spring up. It was a period of enlightenment as well as
chaos. Sometimes it takes a breakdown in the social order to allow people to think and
see alternate perspectives.
The initial break in the corporate propaganda wall happened for me in, of all places,
Baylor University. The first semester of my freshman year, I took a required Old
Testament course from Dr. Patterson, and what could have been a boring and dogmatic
course turned out to be enlightening and liberating.
Patterson explained some facts about the Old Testament that are beyond question in the
academic community, but which are never discussed in churches. For one thing, most of
the Old Testament was written down long after the events depicted, mainly during and
after the Babylonian exile in 586 BCE, and the fact of the exile had a great effect upon
the writers. Moses obviously didn’t write the Torah, since there was no written Hebrew
in his day. (Many archaeologists even dispute the existence of Moses or the Israelite
exodus from Egypt.) It can be demonstrated, moreover, that the books making up the
Torah are composed of at least two separate traditions, Priestly and Jahwist, woven
together. In places, like the first few chapters of Genesis, there are actually two separate
and very different versions of the creation story written side by side, which makes it very
hard to believe it literally. Which story would Pat Robertson reject?
Besides which, my professor informed us, the word Adam means “mankind”, while Eve
means “life”. Knowing that simple fact throws the whole story into a different light and
reveals the tale for the allegory that it was intended to be. From there on, my entire view
of the Old Testament changed. I could never again consider it to be anything more than a
record of the religious musings of a long-dead culture. Certainly, it is not literally the
word of God.
Well, if a guy like me, the grandson and nephew of Baptist preachers, can challenge the
literal truth of the Bible, he can certainly begin to see through the thin veil of corporate
propaganda. A bumper sticker slogan current at the time became my mantra: Question
Authority.
I was told to believe in competition and the free enterprise system. However, all around
me I saw the evidence that free enterprise tends to stifle competition and create
monopolies. Business is about crushing the competition, not celebrating it. Besides,
weren’t we all members of the same society? Why should we be struggling against each
other rather than working cooperatively?
I was told that labor unions, socialists, and liberals were out to ruin America. They
wanted us all to be lazy, leaning on our shovels instead of being productive members of
society. Besides, it was through the goodness of the corporate world that we were
provided with jobs so that we could marry and support families. However, I soon
realized that capital could not function without employees to build and buy its products,
and that labor was at least as important as capital. In fact, the best way to have a
productive society seemed to me to let labor own capital. That way, there would be no
competition between the two.
The capitalists had the opposite idea, wanting instead a generous supply of cheap labor
that they could use or alternately, throw away. Time has shown me nothing different in
this regard. All these years, and many jobs later, it is painfully apparent that business
ruthlessly abuses employees. There is no job security or concern for the worker on the
part of business. Benefits are only improved when the labor market is tight. Otherwise,
businesses couldn’t care less if workers rotted on the streets, as long as they were there
when needed to build and buy products. If corporations can move operations overseas or
downsize (as the euphemism for wholesale firing goes), they’ll do it in a heartbeat,
without a care for the carnage they leave behind.
These things that have been self-evident to me since the 1970’s are still not understood
by the majority of Americans. Corporate propaganda has seen to that. Corporate
apologists will tell you that it’s more complicated than what I’ve described. It’s not.
And of the folks who do understand, many are so demoralized by the fact of corporate
hegemony that they have given up opposing it. The odds of overcoming such powerful
forces, complete with armies of so-called public relations experts, who are no more or
less than professional corporate propagandists, seem insurmountable.
Only a few factors are still on the side of the working man and woman, and one of the
greatest is our vastly superior numbers. The potential for organized, concerted action by
a large group of workers is the greatest fear of the corporate propagandists. That fear has
driven them to demonize and suppress unions, to have their government stooges pass
laws protecting them from lawsuits, and to buy careers for an endless stream of right-
wing politicians. Every potential vehicle for labor organization, from the Democratic
Party to the local church, has been bought off, co-opted, infiltrated, or tarred with the
brush of liberal/socialist/communist.
Is it possible to educate and organize folks so that they understand and act in their own
interests? It had better be. Unfortunately, I don’t think it will happen without a repeat of
the late 60’s and early 70’s. That includes not only massive actions against the outrages
of corporate greed and government folly, like Vietnam and Iraq, but also some terrible
incidents along the way as the corporations push back.
The murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. spawned widespread riots that woke up
complacent citizens. Those riots also showed the left some of its own power, projected in
a very negative way. As terrible as the riots were, a case can be made that progress
toward civil rights was pushed along because of them. The deaths of 4 students at Kent
State, at the hands of a military presence that should not have been there, undoubtedly
shook the country and caused a massive outpouring of sympathetic souls that could not
be ignored by the media and their corporate owners, whose pockets were being filled by
war spending. In the end, I’m convinced that the tragedies along the way speeded up the
end of that horrible war. It’s disgusting to think that we may have to endure something
similar in order to beat back the corporate beast in this present decade. Reluctantly, I
have to admit that I believe such sacrifices would be worth it in the end. As right-wing
apologists are fond of saying, “Freedom isn’t free”.
So, when I heard about the actions planned for November 2, I quickly contacted the local
organizing committee of the “World Can’t Wait ( Drive Out the Bush Regime”. Sure, I
vote every time. I give a little money to candidates and organizations that have the
courage to speak up against the Bush machine that is steadily grinding away at our rights
and livelihoods. And I talk about politics with friends and co-workers. But that is just
not good enough. This kid that I went to elementary school with has grown up badly, or
maybe he’s not grown up at all. He is doing things in my name that I cannot abide. I
won’t sit by and be an accessory to his crimes, foreign and domestic, like many Germans
did in a similar circumstance in the 1930’s.
Apart from spreading the word about November 2 in Hays County, where I live, my role
in organizing the actions was fairly small. In spite of that, I was asked to be master of
ceremonies for the rally at the Capitol, and I willingly accepted. I am not a public
speaker. When I’ve been required to address an audience before, I’ve always gotten the
butterflies, tight throat, and dry mouth that are typical of many in such a situation. But
standing on the Capitol steps, with 300 or more in the audience and police all around, my
nerves were calm and I felt no hesitation. I had come with a pure purpose. I was
surrounded by like-minded people. And I was angry.
As the rally began, and I weighed in with as stinging a rebuke of Bush and his cronies as
I had in me, I became more exhilarated. As each speaker followed on, my spirits rose
with the knowledge that we were speaking truth, that there was no denying to this crowd
that the present administration in Washington was utterly and unrelentingly corrupt.
For the first time in years, I felt a little of the liberation that comes when you tell the truth
and damn the consequences. We are united in a great cause. That feeling of freedom and
unity is addictive. It is the feeling of knowing that there are things more important than
my own personal comfort and safety. It can drive a soldier to heroism and a martyr to
stand calmly as death approaches. In this instance, there was no danger to ourselves, but
in the future, there may well be.
In January, this movement, which held actions in over 60 cities this time, will move
forward with the next step. The plan is to drown out Bush’s State of the Union address.
The form that action takes is still being determined in organizing groups all over the
country. One of Bush’s most blatant lies came in the 2003 State of the Union address,
where he trotted out the completely discredited fiction about Iraq attempting to buy
uranium from Niger. That lie became a cornerstone of the case to invade Iraq. Our goal
this time is to make sure that none of Bush’s lies are heard. Instead, the world will hear
this demand: Bush step down, and take your whole program with you!
Once again, I will be there, chanting, pushing back.