Where IS the outrage?

Bob Herbert’s column “Winning the Class War” in Saturday’s New York Times about the race to the top—of money, not academic excellence—hit on a popular theme these days; the relentless consolidation of our nation’s wealth at the top 1 percent of the richest Americans.

This is another area in which I’m truly conservative. I truly don't think that is an American or democratic value.

U.S. laws , unfortunately for a good 90-plus percent of the rest of us, are increasingly liberal and generous in enabling the rich to pile it up to the detriment to those not in their rarified bracket.

Herbert focuses on how that negatively impacts the nation, including even the wealthy elitists themselves.

A telling paragraph in Herbert’s column says, “Recessions are for the little people, not for the corporate chiefs and the titans of Wall Street who are at the heart of the American aristocracy. They have waged economic warfare against everybody else and are winning big time.”

But, he points out, history—including our own—is replete with the rich in such aristocratic societies ending up being the losers. (Although we haven't had a U.S. version, yet, the French Revolution comes to mind.)

More telling than anything in Herbert’s column, though, is this comment posted by Times reader JLT of Palo Alto, California, (which, for anyone who might not know, is an exclusive enclave where the wealthy can live untouched, unaffected and uncontaminated by the hoi polloi):

“What we need is even more inequality,” wrote JLT, “so that people are motivated to study hard, work hard, and be successful. Bob Herbert wants a society in nobody is rich and everyone is equally poor.”

Perhaps I didn’t read into that comment what JLT might have intended—like hidden meaning, sarcasm or irony—but I detected no tongue in cheek in it.

So, 90-plus percenters, our problem is that we just haven’t studied or worked hard enough to keep from getting laid off, losing our pensions and savings or facing foreclosure on our houses.

I can’t help but wonder, though, what JLT’s story is. Who paid for his/her college education (assuming he has one)? Mom and dad? Athletic or government-funded scholarships? State taxpayers via a state university? Legacy admission? And who gave him/her a hand up in her/his career/life?

I truly believe former First Lady, now Secretary of State Hillary Clinton was right in her book, “It Takes a Village.” No one ever does it alone.

Herbert’s column and JLT’s comment reminds me of an acquaintance who is about my (advanced) age and decries having to pay taxes, “big” government, the U.S. as “nanny” state, and so much more that echoes libertarianism, yet he, himself, has been cared for in total and benefitted from government in so many ways his entire life. (I’ll go into detail about him in a future post.)

A friend, referring to the increasingly wild gush of lucre into coffers of the already obscenely wealthy, recently asked where the outrage in this country is.

The answer is long and complex, but it wasn’t the TPers, despite all of their vitriol and recent political clout. No, if the real 90-plus percenters haven’t been completely overdosed into celebrity, shopping and other such vapid trivialities apathy, my guess is, the real outrage is yet to come.

I'm on Twitter at www.twitter.com/jerrianneh

Revolution

Recently defeated South Carolina Republican Representative Bob Inglis was interviewed a couple of days ago on National Public Radio in a piece headlined, “Republican Swamped By The GOP Wave.”

http://www.npr.org/2010/11/20/131474413/exiting-inglis-laments-conservatism-s-derailment

Contributing to Inglis’s electoral defeat was what has become the right-wing political career-ending position of daring to say he “believes in” climate change (apparently, although not said, as having some degree of human cause).

As an aside, use of the term “believe in” in this and similar contexts, sends my eyebrows skyward, as if one would “believe in” climate change as though it were some kind of religious ideology or deity.

Despite Congressman Inglis’s 93% conservative” voting record (yet not “conservative” enough for today’s South Carolina voters), I agreed with much of what he said on NPR.

He lamented the disappearance of the Republican Party of Teddy Roosevelt, whose platform as both a Republican and a Progressive of the Bull Moose Party, was conservation. I think that must have been the Republican Party of my parents, or at least my father, who thought the best light switch was one in the "off" position.

That concept of conservatism has been flipped on its head as today’s conservative archetype, instead of being frugal and thrifty, comprises the bigger-is-better, consume-and-throw-away crowd.

New York Times right-of-center columnist David Brooks snarked about the nation’s capital being awash last month with famously high-gas-mileage Priuses—Brooks’s stereotypical vehicle of Birkenstock-wearing, granola-eating, tree-hugging liberals—during The Daily Show host Jon Stewart’s Rally to Restore Sanity.

So are “conservatives’” ideal vehicles gas-guzzling, super-sized SUVs and trucks? I think driving high-gas-mileage cars, eating healthfully and caring about trees are truly conservative virtues.

Also in the NPR segment, Inglis, in discussing the Tea Party, harked back to the French Revolution in which a populist movement turned the streets of Paris and other parts of France into rivers of blood—quite literally—with the wholesale purging of the nobility and privileged classes. (Inglis didn’t mention the rest of that story, in which the insurrection split into factions, attempted counter-revolution and countless pay-back executions (better hang tight to your heads, latter-day Robespierres), followed by the Reign of Terror years, which eventually produced Napoleon.)

Inglis’s reference to the French Revolution resonated with me as that bloody era in which innocents were indiscriminately killed off along with aristocrats and royalty has and continues to come to mind amidst the Tea Party rage that has morphed into elected officials with questionable qualifications and what might turn out to be anything but populist agendas.

Another nail in Inglis’s political coffin was veering off the conservative page by decrying faux assertions about President Obama religious faith, birth certificate and being a socialist/communist/fascist and the vicious attempt to destroy reputations and institutions.

I agree with the soon-to-be former congressman on that, too.

I'm on Twitter @jerrianneh