Back to the OK Corral?

For those anyones who haven’t been reading any blogs on this site—the answer is simple. I’ve been hit by the big A. No, not swine flu or any of its derivatives or wannabe viruses. It’s apathy with a capital A. I am beaten down, wrung out, and becoming increasingly indifferent to whatever is happening in the world.

It’s both sad and surprising that this is so. Until recently, I had a few dregs of passion left. I actually found pleasure in the self-immolating behavior of the extreme conservative wing of the Republican party. I cared whether they destroyed the world with their moral judgment on other people. I was repulsed as I watched them doing the same things they purport to condemn and, when caught, pleading the fact of their “human weakness” and begging for the understanding they deny to everyone else (think Limbaugh and his “unfortunate” addiction to painkillers—not a moral lapse of course since they were originally prescribed for him, dontcha know).

I think I lost my appetite for exposing them when I realized that it didn’t matter. Let one idol fall, another rises to take its place as long as the new voice is as shrill and venomous as the one it replaces. This country has gone mad. We are now so addicted to the frantic voice of sportscasters that we cannot recognize quiet, good public work. Everything must be magnified, brutalized, and broadcast for us to even hear it and there are all too many willing to give it to us.

Recently, Ken in Canada sent me an article from a UK newspaper in which the author bemoaned the lack of civility and respect among teenagers. I smiled grimly. Teenagers are merely the tip of the iceberg. On this side of the pond, we have a soldier killing his comrades, supposedly in the name of religion, just as the nation recognizes Veterans Day, we have a hospital worker infected with Hepatitis C stealing drugs and leaving her own used syringes to infect scores of patients, we have fraud on such massive scale that it is almost sufficient to bring down the government.

My apathy, I suspect, has something to do with how powerless I feel. Yeats was right. This is no country for old men—or women for that matter. It has become a place where self-interest rules among the powerful and greed among the lesser. It has a become a place where it is quite acceptable for leaders to become millionaires and to spend billions on war, but it is some sort of moral outrage for some poor slob to get a job if he or she was slapped with a felony for possessing a minute illegal substance or for some sick people (god forbid) to have medical coverage provided by the same government that gave out billions in corporate welfare. Hear the moral outrage in the insurers’ bleat (keep in mind they are reporting profits of around 18%) that sick people buy insurance only when they are sick. The insurers only want to insure the healthy while they are healthy—actually become sick and see how long you keep your insurance and then good luck getting any more. And yet the lobbies fight to keep things as they are.

For those who wish to tell me that I am a traitor to capitalism, I would say I think it’s time we took a long, hard look at exactly what it was like to live in a time of “rugged individualism,” little government, and unregulated commerce.

We just came back from Tombstone, Arizona—yep, the OK corral and all. Walk through the cemetery at Boot Hill and you come away with a sense of the reality of the American West. Deaths from falling down mine shafts (no OSHA), from smallpox, tuberculosis, and childbirth (no Dept of Health), from stabbing, shooting, and clubbing (only defense is your own gun), from suicide (particularly the prostitutes who were shunned if they contracted syphilis—never mind the men they got it from). Yes, sir, these were the days of good old family values. I saw only two or three graves of people who made it into their sixties or beyond. Grave after grave contained the remains of victims of crime or babies who never made it to their first birthday.

I once wrote a speech of my president about the shooting at the OK Corral. I tried to make an amusing point about how this shootout could not have occurred given today’s media. There would have been television cameras at every viewpoint. There would have been interviewers asking the principals about their strategy and their equipment. There would have been interviews with legal pundits asking about possible legal outcomes. Even the undertaker would have been pictured polishing his hearse. In other words, it couldn’t have happened without turning into a farce.

Perhaps that is why I feel such gloom these days. We have one third of this nation—one third!—who want to turn back the clock in the face of a world that has changed politically, technologically, and culturally. No wonder our politics so often appear farcical.

As I watched the re-enactment of the shootout I realized that America has not really moved on from the past. Things are just as ambiguous and subject to interpretation and violence as they were then, except that today were are infected by a sort of self-righteous hypocrisy reflected in the drivel that fills our newspapers (no wonder they’re dying). At least the Clantons never preened as paragons of family values. Ike Clanton was roaring drunk as was Doc Holliday at some point during the events leading up to the shootout.

Rather than all this palaver over trying to prevent people from getting a handout, we could surely benefit at this time for Congress to quit feathering its own nest (they’re nearly all millionaires anyway), get beyond partisan politics, start listening to the people they are supposedly representing (not the lobbyists) and let the president do the job he was elected to do.