A significant problem I’ve been having is understanding the mindset of the people who still stand behind Obama. From no metric I can conceive of has his presidency been exceptional. On the core progressive issues, his has been a remarkably unimpressive (at best) outing. The defenses I have run into for his term boil down to a single major premise: He’s the best we’ve got, and unless you pick him, even though he’s the lesser of two evils, you will ruin this country because of your selfishness.
I was going to write that such an argument is false. But I had a brain wave last night.
The argument isn’t false. It’s wrong, but it isn’t wrong because of an intention to deceive or because the person advancing the argument is stupid. The issue simply isn’t being framed correctly. So here goes.
Everyone who has ever known a drug addict — if you ever knew someone who couldn’t put down the vicodin, the scotch bottle, the needle, or the scratch tickets — put your hand up. (No one can see you, so put your hand back down.)
Most people who have been pulled into an addict’s life know what happens. Things start to disappear. Even if you own very little, you can have a lot of things disappear before you come to the moment where you start doing an inventory and discover a whole lot of stuff has evaporated. If you’re lucky, you catch the addict in the act. You tail them to the race track, you walk in on them in the bathroom having a drink from the bottle in the toilet tank, etc. And, if you’re able to, you hand the addict an ultimatum: It stops today, right now. If you ever see them doing it again, no matter what excuse they present, you will leave, you will kick them out, you will drive to the police station and fill out a report. And then, you do it.
By all the accounts I’ve read, this is a profoundly difficult thing to do. That’s why there are so many instances of addicts conning their friends, loved ones, neighbors, etc., over and over. It is hard to amputate a significant portion of your life, just like that.
The politicians who have been getting elected are, for the most part, just like addicts. They get elected, and re-elected, by the voters having a lesser of two evils moment of weakness. Having an addict in the house or kicking him out and watching his whole life go to hell on him? Well, maybe he will change this time, and I wasn’t all that attached to grandma’s silver, anyway. I mean, sure, she handed it to me on her deathbed, but, well, my addict really means to change this time. And if I kick him out, then I’m being a bad person, I’m being unreasonable (wait for it), I’m not being bipartisan about all this. I should reach across the aisle, you know. Because it would be the height of folly to pull the rug out from under him now, when he’s so close to cleaning up and flying right.
The politicians are not, if we keep picking the lesser of two evils, going to eventually one day produce a miracle of statesmanship for us, just like most addicts don’t suddenly stop drinking, gambling, whatevering, just because someone told them they had to. After the uncontrolled binge of secret prisons, unlawful detentions, murders-by-drone, stop and frisks, etc., if some politician came forward and tried to argue that the past 20 years had all been a mistake, he’d be dismissed as a dreamer or a lunatic. Pedantic lectures would commence about how the candidate simply doesn’t understand about politics. He’s naive. And so forth.
One thing I run into in the narratives from reformed addicts is a simple enough statement: They almost always say something about how they wish they’d gotten sorted out sooner. How they wish they hadn’t had to spent three years or 30 years slowly losing everything before they finally were able to put themselves together. And that’s the point I’ve reached, because that’s the point the country has reached. Why drag out the remaining descent any longer? Because we’re super-duper hoping someone will leap in, putting right what once went wrong (and hoping each time that the next leap will be the leap home)?
We all know that each “settled for the lesser” only brings us closer to the bottom, and along the way, there has been decades of misery and hardship. Let’s finally take the handbrake off and let the maniacs ruin everything once and for all. At least we can limit the amount of time we all spend suffering.
3 Comments.
Nailed it. Best column of the year.
What makes you think that after “the maniacs ruin everything once and for all” things will suddenly turn around and get better?
Wow. That was the most narcissistic, pretentious, sociopathic piece of claptrap I’ve read in quite some time (Or am I being redundant, as socoipaths tend to be both narcicisstic and pretentious? But I digress.) I guess it’s true that if you go left far enough, you’ll find yourself agreeing with the extreme right; however, I would’ve thought EVERYONE realized the insanity of “We had to destroy the village to save it.” thinking after the Vietnam war. Maybe you weren’t around then – perception wise, your writing tends to skew extremely young.
“The politicians are not, if we keep picking the lesser of two evils, going to eventually one day produce a miracle of statesmanship for us.”
The ONLY people I’ve EVER met who thought that politicans were going to produce miracles of statesmenship were members of the extreme left. And when they did not immediately get the entirety of their miracle, the extreme left shoved themselves as fast and as far from the Democratic party as they could- and in accordance with Newton’s third law of motion, the Democratic party wen’t hard right as a result.
Now those of us in the real world, with reasonable expectations understand that the extreme left didn’t get us in this mess overnight, and it’s going to take a couple of decades of hard work and slog to fix the mess they caused. And hell, we might not live to see the better world we’re fighting for. And that’s OK.
Unless you are one of the extreme left- then it’s all “Let everything crash!” and “Revolution!”. I’ll let you in on a little secret- those are always code phrases for: “I don’t WANNA do the work necessary to fix things! I want what I want, and I don’t care who suffers, becuase what I want is all that matters.”
But they lack the moral courage and intellectual honesty to come out and admit what their real feelings are, because they know how they would be percieved if they did, and to a sociopath, perception is everything.
Instead they pretend to care, and make claims they can’t possibly back up( “At least we can limit the time we all spend suffering”) in attempt to trick the rest of us to go along with stroking their egos.
Russel is dead right. If we are suicidally stupid enough to hand the reigns over to the manaicas and they crash us into the wall, things are likely to get much, much worse, and stay worse for the forseeable future.
But if there was some way that only the extreme left would suffer for their refusal to do the work, I’d tell you to go to with my blessing. If for nothing else, for that moment, after a few years under the psycopaths you’re proposing to put in charge, when you come crawling back to apologize and admit you had no idea of how bad things could possibly both get and stay.
But there isn’t. So I guess I’ve got no choice but to keep telling you to get over yourself, and start doing the actual work towards the world you want to see instead of wishing untold suffering on everybody else to stroke your own ego.
Cause you see, I believe we’re going to save the world with or without you- but it’d be a hell of a lot easier if you’d stop stabbing us in the back every chance you get to gratify yourselves.