The Shining City On The Hill

"It's a free country. Well, try to get some freedom to do. Fella says you're jus' as free as you got jack to pay for it."
-- John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath


"Say Ma, we'd better git ourselves to a teabaggin'... only those corporate-sponsored populists can save us now!"

Back in Steinbeck's day, there were no teabaggers. Working folks went 'red' the old fashioned way and the flight of the corporate victim was east-west - not coasts-in as it is now.

But Steinbeck still has things to say that are relevant to our own age of injustice. Take, for example, the conservative philosophy of 'I' over 'We' and the consequences of following the 'do as thou wilt' 'left-hand path' of capitalism. One example is the state of Colorado and the vision of a possible American future it presents. As Tom Joad might have said, it sure ain't pur'dy.

Back in the 80s and 90s, Colorado set itself up as a sanctuary for the Corporatists. Companies based in more liberally-inclined states fled there to escape taxes, unions and the dirty air their own companies created. And so Colorado became America's leading Corporatist state: Reagan's 'shining city on a hill'.

Now Colorado stands as a nightmarish vision of what happens when the Corporatist agenda merges with conservatism and is allowed free rein. Like any single-ideology system that locks competing interests out of the process, Colorado has become nearly unlivable. Unless, of course, you're part of the group whose interests the ideological monopoly represents. David Sirota at TruthDig quotes The Denver Post:

"More than a third of the streetlights in Colorado Springs will go dark; the city is dumping firefighting jobs, a vice team, burglary investigators, beat cops; water cutbacks mean most parks will be dead ... recreation centers, indoor and outdoor pools [and] museums will close for good; buses no longer run on evenings and weekends; [and] the city won’t pay for any street paving."

Yup, it sure ain't pur'dy.

But as the nation's economy struggles, the dog whistle talking points about tax and spending cuts grow ever louder and the conservative urge to 'Colorado-ize' the whole country grows. Even Obama flirts with spending freezes as part of his doomed effort to woo conservatives. Obama too..? Yup, they get to everybody it seems...

So how does this happen? How does the fallacious gospel of corporate conservatism get traction? Easy. There are millions of dumb sh*ts in this country who are just as broke as you or I. But they think their own well-being is somehow inextricably linked to that of the rich.

Just check any teabagger event, Ron paul 'love-in' or Sarah Palin rally. Their audiences listen to these shills and regurgitate the propaganda like Scientologists boosting for L. Ron Hubbard. In earlier eras, revolutionaries would have called these self-hating stooges the 'Petit Bourgeoisie'. And started executing them too once they'd run out of real rich folk to cull.

These days, the American Petit Bourgeoisie is persuaded by conservatism that the only way to stop us going broke is to make us go broker faster via tax and spending cuts. But if more of them took a look at Colorado and saw the consequences of these actions, even they might shrink from what their richers and betters tell them.

In Colorado, the Petit Bourgeoisie have not fared well. Tent cities of newly homeless residents are burgeoning in Denver. But the City, at the behest of the corporations, is slashing social services so the rich are not unfairly burdened by taxes or any sense of social responsibility. Better the working drones get to raise families in lean-tos and tents rather than the CEOs be forced to downscale from fantastically rich to just very rich. Again, according to the Post:

"As just one example, rather than initiating a tax discussion, the CEO of The Springs’ most lavish luxury hotel is pushing city leaders to cut public employee salaries to the $24,000-a-year level he pays his own workforce—a level approaching Colorado’s official poverty line for a family of four."

In The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck talks about an Okie running out of food and pulling over to the side of the road. Another Okie pulls up with a little food. Then, instead of one guy with no food and one guy with a little, there's two guys with some - a society of 'We'.

This isn't the 'big government socialism' they scare you with. This isn't 'Marxism' or some other pleb-scaring bull. This isn't 'redistribution of wealth' - the weaselish euphemism that makes conservatives look like they're not against as Christian a thing as sharing. This is basic human decency of the kind that existed until the conservatives herded and molded us into their society of 'I', as exemplified by Colorado, for the the benefit of the corporations. This was the society of 'We' that died when the very real redistribution of wealth from bottom to top went into overdrive sometime after the 50s.

So let's re-start the society of 'We', re-think the rules of the dumb game we're playing and who wrote them. And, Jeez, let's not become Colorado writ large.