Being rich is fine. It's the ideal in America where we supposedly get our incentive each day from trying to be like Mitt Romney.
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| "Scrooge McDuck" |
Most of us aren't born with the kind of advantages he had. We know life isn't fair and that we don't all start even in the race. Most rich people know this themselves. That's why when many of them get involved in politics, it's almost as if they're trying to salve an underlying guilt.
They don't just go around cheerleading for the rich. If that were their outlook, why would they be interested in politics at all? Politics by its very nature is redistributionist - the term that cockeyed Republicans are trying to tar President Obama with. People are taxed so government can do things and build things we all use and benefit from. Like our library.
These days our Morris Public Library is asking patrons to fill out a survey slip on library hours. Hint hint: the library is studying where it might reduce hours. I'm tired of the "cutting" craze which has been felt through both public and private institutions. It promotes a mindset where we're all watching our back.
People who run institutions are fixated on "efficiencies." To some extent this is unavoidable because of technology. But it seems to have gone beyond that to where it's sort of a fashion. That's encouraging in a sense because fashions by definition flame out.
What? It isn't necessary to push maximum efficiency? Well, the Greatest Generation didn't seem like this, with the world it created in America after World War Two. David Brooks has written about "the redundancies in the World War Two type of organization." I recall he was writing about the Iraq war and how we could have moved in with a more overwhelming hand.
Instead it was fashionable to talk about being "lean and mean" with our resources. What a throwaway expression. It's as if anything less than total efficiency is some sort of sin. We have been guided in our thinking this way.
The Bain Capital master epitomizes all that. Mitt Romney is rich but he's not benevolent rich like the Kennedys.
We have to ask: Why would this kind of man want to be in politics? Even if he truly wanted to shape America to favor his class, wouldn't he realize the pushback could be enormous? Don't the ultra wealthy people operate in sort of a stealth world lest their crass attitudes bubble to the surface and foment revolt?
The "secret video" on Romney has come out. I won't call him "Governor Romney" because he seems to be running from his track record as governor; at least he did in the primaries.
How did you react to the secret video? I had a flashback to a summer many years ago when I was employed at a resort. It was a resort that catered to very well-off people and doted on them. I was polite but also a little revulsed at times. At first I thought these people surely had a more gentle and understanding side that would come out sometimes. It just had to be there. But the people continually grated on me.
They were shallow, self-absorbed and entitled-feeling people. They even had a sense of humor that was alien to me. I even heard a member of resort management - the highest ranking person outside of the ownership family - making a disparaging remark once. "Yeah, these slobs. . ."
I watched the Romney secret video and felt I was back there again. These were the ugly rich. They cocoon themselves. They make John McCain look like a leader of the masses. McCain is a statesman. He knew how to put on the brakes when that woman talked about Obama being an "Arab" in that defining scene of four years ago.
McCain did that because he had a basic sensitivity about people. It's the least we can expect from our politicians.
We can feel certain Romney, a.k.a. "Scrooge McDuck" would make no such gesture. He'd let it pass and then say later "people have the right of free expression."
Sarah Palin promoted the more coarse and indifferent air. The tea party bubbled up and has polluted our political discourse. Has that "fashion" run its course? Will the callousness of that movement now begin to dawn on people, what with the revelations coming with the Romney "secret video?"
Will people start saying "wait a minute?" Will they start taking a closer look at the whole Wall Street model of cutting and efficiencies? Will they begin to see that their elders who created the great American middle class after WWII had a better idea?
It has taken a while. The Romney secret video might be the catalyst. Eventually people do find the truth. We're at the catharsis point.
Why couldn't our library keep its current hours even if it costs people something?
Maybe we will all be shaken awake if the stock market shows its unstable nature a little more. October is a time when that frequently happens. That's next month! It's the month before the big election. Perhaps our political leaders will pull all strings to make sure things stay reasonably stable through then. Incumbents can get re-elected. The sky could fall after that.
Even Obama has been called a "corporatist" by Ron Paul. Obama is benevolent but he's no enemy of the cabal that runs things - the likes of Ben Bernanke, Timothy Geithner etc.
We should all assume now Romney won't be elected. Heaven help us if he is, or heaven help us if he's elected and surrounds himself with the neocons.
Obama will guide the ship of state well enough. The stock market could still collapse. We could see a dramatic devaluation of our currency due to monetary policy.
We thought the private sector had all the answers. Boomers who in their youth bled altruism and were radicals from the left, morphed into the tea party. That's my generation, the generation that thought it was just fine to ingest drugs when young. We do indeed spring from one fashion to another.
Maybe the "lean and mean" ethos of the past few years will fade. Maybe we'll start to see "the redundancies in the typical WWII type of organization" as having merit. Maybe we can indulge a little on the edges. Maybe government won't just automatically be stamped "the enemy."
Maybe working people can have a basic sense of security and be allowed to have a "slow" day now and then. Our elders would wink and say it's just fine to seek an excuse to slow down sometimes. It used to be an ideal to "knock off early" on Fridays. If you were in college and wanted to see your adviser on a Friday, good luck. People worked as hard as they had to, but looked forward to spending free time with family and friends. Today that's hard, what with websites like "rate my professor." The teachers I had couldn't have dreamt of such a thing.
Today I imagine a typical college employee stays at the grindstone until 5 p.m. Friday. And to what end? Public colleges seem to be in retrenchment. My alma mater, St. Cloud State University, certainly is.
Maybe the biggest clue that a new "fashion" is being ushered in, is the re-emergence of Rick Nolan as a politician. He's the anti-tea party. He was liberal almost to annoyance in the 1970s. He's certainly the anti-Mitt Romney.
Poor Mitt. Maybe he's running just to fulfill some sort of destiny in his mind, mindful that his father George came up short (proclaiming he was "brainwashed" about Viet Nam).
How pathetic if this is the only call "Scrooge McDuck" is heeding. But we really have to wonder, now that the secret tapes have come out. He sounds like those arrogant and unfeeling people I remember from that resort, those "slobs."
The Romney campaign is the Titanic having hit an iceberg and is now listing. Tim Pawlenty sprang into a lifeboat yesterday (Thursday). He'll be a Wall Street lobbyist, having found those environs more attractive for him than our Minnesota.
Remember the "snob" character in the TV series "Hazel?" Boy, I'm dating myself mentioning that. A character was put forth as the typical snob, who talked about "breeding." It was the most unsavory type of rich person. It was the type we'd never expect to enter politics. But it appears one has, in the person of Mitt Romney a.k.a. Scrooge McDuck.
We need to re-think our fashions. Perhaps a return to the Greatest Generation's model for living will come. We could get a leader like Hubert Humphrey again.
- Brian Williams - morris mn minnesota - bwilly73@yahoo.com
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