Greater and Lesser Utopias

The world is a crazy place these days. For example, there’s Pope Benedict looking like the ghost of Tiger Woods, going around dressed as the spirit of confessions past. Then there are the Tea Partiers, who held a convention down here in Phoenix (July 2010), revealing once and for all they are the party of whites. No diversity there to distract them from their dreams of Utopia—small government, health care to the deserving, longevity to those who can afford it, and success to those who impose their economic imperatives untrammeled on the world.

Utopia’s an interesting concept. The first one I read, Sir Thomas More’s version of the same name, talked about an ideal world that had never existed and, given human nature, never could. It was a paean to a golden time when human beings might get beyond their greed (gold and precious stones were treated with contempt) and lack of care for one other. In fact, Utopia was an ideal society based on Christian principles—and, gasp, it turned out to be Christian socialism. There’s that dirty word—socialism. Self-proclaimed Christians hate to hear it yet fail to realize it is a logical extension of their own professed beliefs. In America these days, Christianity is all very well as long as it doesn’t interfere with kicking the crap out of illegals, doing away with social security so the elderly poor can starve or freeze because they failed to save enough for their old age, and leaving all social programs up to charities (as long as the half-way houses and shelters aren’t in “respectable” back yards).

The Arizona Statesman reported on the Tea Part rally in today’s paper and commented that most loose organizations of enthusiasts seldom last for very long. I’d love to believe so, but this group, if one may call it that, has revealed an American underpinning of self-delusion and unkindness that may lead to some longevity. For one thing, they have an amazing tolerance for hypocrisy.

They wish government out of people’s lives, yet want legislation to ban abortions: the government it seems should look into other people’s lives just not the Tea Partiers’. They want individual liberty yet want to give long prison sentences for relatively minor failures to conform and God help the Gays who don’t conform to their assumptions about marriage and sex. They want to believe in the perfectability of human beings, rather like the 19th Century idea of the Noble Savage who has been damaged by the polluting laws of civilization and who can rise again to his old glory if only freed of the chains that hold him back. (I wonder if any one of them has read “The Lord of the Flies.”)

They want to pick and choose what they are willing to pay taxes for without understanding that wherever the money is spent it drives the same number of jobs. John Ruskin once commented that complaining about the rich buying luxury goods was senseless because the luxury trade provided livelihoods for just as many people as if the rich had spent their money only on basic necessities. Government spending provides jobs. They don’t consider that many more people will be out of work if they shrink government. Who will pick up the slack? Will corporate America come rushing forward to provide new jobs—we know where they stand on sending jobs abroad. For this, the Partiers have no answer beyond platitudes. Sometimes I think there will be no peace until the country is either on the breadlines or involved in another Civil War.

It has always been my understanding that government’s job is not to protect our guilty bastions of self-interest but, like wiser parents, to prevent us from killing one another—plenty of which has happened in the past, and not just in the incessant wars that government involves us in. Now there’s my gripe—where you have a government, can war be far behind? This is a government of the people, not of Churches, not of corporations, and not of special interests, no matter how flattering these interests may be to who we think we are or could be.

Sir Thomas made neither the error of mistaking self-righteousness for morality nor believing that Utopias could ever be reality. A Christian life is a communal life, he said. Wow. This coming from someone who gave his life for his religion—executed because he would not put his king above his conscience. Let’s see some of these Tea Partiers give up something of theirs for their beliefs instead of just hitting the rest of us over the head with them. If this is indeed a nation under God, just where is all the other, inconvenient stuff such as loving others instead of promoting calculated self-interest as the way of the world?

The Master of the Dung Heap

I was listening the other evening to Our Lady of Wasilla screaming her message to her tea-baggers and found myself reminded of Aristophanes’ definition of a popular politician: “a horrible voice, bad breeding, and a vulgar manner.”

Aristophanes, of course, lived roughly 2500 years ago, in politically charged and fractious Greece, the cradle of our political system, so I suppose one can say that politics was ever so, or more pointedly, two thousand years hasn’t seen much change in human beings as they relate to the avenues of power. I think he would recognize us and probably satirize us as he did his contemporaries. He would have much subject matter.

One thing has changed, though, and I have to point to this to us as our unique, modern contribution. We now have the means to broadcast the voice, breeding, and manner over the country and around the world. Not only that, we have created a new form of pundit who fits the definition of popular politician just as well. That idea is both depressing and amusing (in a rather horrible way).

I can picture what Aristophanes would make of Olberman and Limbaugh. He’d probably have recognized the type and written a play about them: Orwell’s barnyard where the animals are equal but the pigs a little more equal, and a raft of other animals, such as the cock of the barnyard, the influential master of the dung heap, try to work around the pigs. The point would be to introduce some levity as well as some perspective into people who take themselves far too seriously.

When I was an instructor in the English Department at the University of Hawaii at Manoa, I remember one of my fellow instructors (we were very junior and slightly mutinous) having a cartoon pasted on her door. It showed a very large shaggy dog with a dialog balloon coming from the depths of the fur on its back. Inside the balloon were the words, “We junior fleas demand a greater voice in the running of this dog.”

Now that Ms. Palin has become a corporate juggernaut (it was reported tonight that she’s earned $12 million this year), she may be seeing herself as a rather large flea these days. I wouldn’t blame her actually. But she needs to keep in mind that a flea is still a flea. Real power is silent and secret. It operates behind the scenes. The powerbrokers are never seen, not even in the backrooms, certainly not out on the Boston commons carrying a placard.

Loud denunciations and easy slogans are not where the real power is. Such efforts are useful to someone, but not to the person using them. Ms Palin will be well rewarded for her efforts—as indeed she has been—but the real power will continue on the way it always has, in dark places where the principals are known only by accident now and then.

This is the way it was 2500 years ago and it is the way, it seems, it will always be as long as we fleas believe we are running the planet.