The One Percent will eat the poor, and other prophecies by Hal Crowther

[Mira]

Whenever a new commentary appears from Hal Crowther my day is made.
I hope you, too, will appreciate this as a very good read.

The One Percent will eat the poor, and other prophecies 
by Hal Crowther





Photo illustration by JP Trostle; photo of Mitt Romney by Gage Skidmore/ courtesy of Creative Commons License

I've successfully immunized myself to the horse-race fever of presidential elections: the relentless polls and fundraising totals, the endorsements and lame speeches and could-be-fatal gaffes, worst of all the dim psychoanalysis and fanzine micro-dissection of candidates who always looked much alike to me. I was inoculated against most of this when I was fairly young, thanks in part to reading the convention reporting of H.L. Mencken, who took American democracy like a recreational drug and relished every hysterical high.

The political animal at his most ridiculous never amused me as much as he amused Mencken. His excesses can still reduce me to tears, even though I'm old enough to remember presidential candidates with actual convictions and commitments, instead of pollsters, bundlers and message-masseurs. It always catches me by surprise when the media resume their election coverage as if they'd learned nothing whatsoever from all the elections that came before. Are the media themselves now under such a state of siege, is the public's attention span now so brief that four years is enough to erase every scrap of residual wisdom? It looked that way to me when I read a news-service "think piece" in my local daily, an essay explaining "the stark philosophical differences" that separate Barack Obama and Mitt Romney.

I groaned so audibly that my wife asked me if I was having chest pains. This writer, I thought, is he 12 years old? First of all, no one mentions philosophy in the presence of Romney, who embraces any philosophy his ambition finds convenient and will, before his race is run, embrace as many more as his handlers recommend. And Obama, vilified on right-wing radio as a cross between Jomo Kenyatta and Malcolm X, between Rap Brown and Toussaint L'Ouverture? This is a white woman's son with a rich white man's education, a cautious, pragmatic man of the middle, like most Republicans used to be—like Mitt Romney before the White House bug bit him, like his father, George Romney, before him. Obama is a mild-mannered white attorney with a slight genetic handicap. He loves golf. In every way except that inappropriate pigmentation, he's a country-club Republican (vintage, not current) like Mitt.

In another climate, another decade, another turn of the wheel of fortune, they could have been comfortable running mates—if the fastidious Obama could have put up with an awkward fumbler like Romney. Philosophy? Romney has no philosophy, Obama only as much as he needs from week to week. The American political system seems designed to feed celebrity-addled media, which focus on the forgettable faces and generic utterances of the latest candidates, never on the forces that produce them or the deeper issues that tear this country in two.
Rep. Paul Ryan, Romney's running mate, was featured in another front-page story presenting his intellectual pedigree. His infatuation with Ayn Rand was enough to convince me that he's an arrested adolescent, but there in bold letters on Ryan's list of mentors was my old schoolmate Bill Bennett. Sometimes we literally don't know whether to laugh or cry.
I chose to laugh. We will see these faces 10,000 times before Nov. 6. (I'd never stoop to the face game myself, but is Ryan actually Eddie Munster grown up and Nautilus-hardened?) Yet the only faces that matter in this election are the faces of the founders and dead presidents printed on America's folding currency. The U.S. Supreme Court's Citizens Uniteddecision is the Rough Beast whose hour has come round at last, unleashing evil billionaires and subterranean oceans of corporate cash, tidal waves of it, under which the American democracy may vanish like lost Atlantis.

to read the rest of it go to:
http://www.indyweek.com/indyweek/the-one-percent-will-eat-the-poor-and-other-prophecies/Content?oid=3177107

This article appeared in print with the headline "Soylent Mitt."

[NRaleighLiberal]

1. Big Hal Crowther fan here.... thanks for posting!

[Mira]

2. You are welcome, and I wish you

a good and happy Carolina Morning.

[NRaleighLiberal]

3. just did a Trader Joe run - all good here! garden stuff to attend to today.

Hope you have a lovely day!

[Mira]

4. Funny! Trader Joe's has it's grand opening

in Winston-Salem TOMORROW!
Our little town is so excited.

[Dalai_1]

5. Thank you for the post, Mira

actually I went by TJ's in Winston yesterday in hopes they would
have been having a trial run before the grand opening..they
are doing that today ,one of the employees told me..

I am so excited we have them close by,have never been in one
of their stores!

[dixiegrrrrl]

6. Thats it! I am moving in with you.

I SO miss trader Joe's. None here, that I know of.

[dixiegrrrrl]

7. "Mencken, who took American democracy like a recreational drug and relished every hysterical high"

I do enjoy reading Mencken's old stuff when I find it.
Crowther sounds like a good successor.