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ACCORDING TO LIZ - Late last month the world watched as a “woke” Barbie competed at the box office with a concerned scientist outmaneuvered by political insiders.
The ex-Prez pushed this from the headlines by ongoing denials of his legal peril as he faced more charges, while the Supremes and many alt-right true-believers continued to gut citizen protections.
And that drama was swept away by the explosive positivism of Taylor Swift’s Eras tour where the sums paid to celebrate release from the pandemic lockdown are only exceeded by the joy of concert-participants’ mega-experience.
We have a government hell bent on supporting two of the most undemocratic regimes in the Middle East – Israel and Saudi Arabia.
Newspapers on both coasts and in the middle of the country have reported on how social media influencers are shaking down restaurants.
The wars over redlining and affirmative action wage on.
Book-banning and state interference in school curricula hit the headlines.
Although the years have shown that the G.I. Bill returned $7 in tax revenue and economic benefit for every $1 the government invested in college education, the pusillanimous penny-pinchers in the House want to cut all similar programs in favor of slashing taxes for the wealthy and funding more non-renewables such as weapons that go “boom” once, and leave an expensive mess to clean up.
We have bank bailouts to help the monied classes, the war in Ukraine to benefit both warmongers and armament purveyors.
Progressive economists praise the fiscal advantages of ecological investments while the fossil fuel industries lean on their political cronies to salvage their profiteering.
Gadflies for both parties in DC promote policies that, instead of saving money, persistently raise costs across the board for both individuals and the government. Policies limit wages to ensure the poor stay in their economic lanes and the rich get steadily richer while pouring money into the coffers of uber-wealthy corporations.
Republicans salivate about reduced government and then spend millions removed from the IRS that might have caught the crooks that cook the books, on expanding the military-industrial complex.
And on invading individuals’ privacy to reinstate a dinosaurish perspective that has everything – children and forests, minerals and women, the ethnically and sexually divergent – as chattels under Ye Olde White Christian Male worldview.
In other words, doubling down on the upward distribution of wealth.
And any ability for Americans to understand and speak out against the societal impact of multinational capitalism on health, education and family welfare.
The clamor over “wokeness” distracts from failings on both sides of the battle. Teaching a false history – the De Santis approach in Florida – is not so dissimilar from brainwashing by some D.E.I. trainings which often contain just as many obfuscations.
In fact, the micromanagement of language from every point of view aggressively promotes divisiveness and the narrowing of political ideologies, restricting civil discourse and limiting the development of desperately needed strong reasoning skills.
The last, in desperately short supply at all levels of American society and education would, if their expansion was prioritized, allow people to think for themselves, inspecting and articulating concerns from multiple points of view, and speaking from their own hearts instead of mindlessly parroting memes posted on social media.
Confrontations polarize factions, creating an America where the whole is less, much less, than the sum of its parts, with so much energy diverted into attack mode that there’s none left to pursue solutions. This leaves governing institutions in all jurisdictions and at all levels with a reduced ability to organize, to accomplish, and to ameliorate the quality of everyone’s lives.
Instead of holistic approaches to solving our problems, we have a bunch of testosterone-driven two-year-olds claiming to be kings of the castle and fending off all challengers. Whatever the long-term cost.
But, instead of pushy-shovey, we now have nuclear weapons and mass market manipulations.
What America needs, as the conservative activist Christofer Rufo points out, is: “a wide diversity of opinions and a shared commitment to truth.” With an emphasis on truth.
That is especially true as this election season gears up.
Contenders for President must look to the needs and desires of more Americans instead of catering to the divided fragments they erroneously perceive as a strong base.
Even if he survives his current legal challenges, Trump won’t get elected if he can’t understand that the white nationalist manifestation of his MAGA followers is increasingly scary to everyone else on the world stage, most specifically the markets, on which the American economic model depends.
Already the country’s creditworthiness has been downgraded based on all-too-legitimate concerns about America’s ability to govern itself with the reckless Republican extremists wagging the tail of Congress.
And Biden is headed for a crushing defeat if he continues to listen to the DNC’s Mega donors, turning a deaf ear to the growing progressive wing. By refusing to address a plethora of crises, from climate change to wealth inequality, from escalating war mongering to immigration, Biden has chosen to fundamentally fracture the contract with those American voters who put him into office in 2020. And will decimate their turn-out in 2024.
We need a toning down of vitriol, a reaching out, an engaging, a welcoming of collaboration across all aisles. A push towards unity and sharing.
And hope.
May the Taylor Swifts win.
(Liz Amsden is a contributor to CityWatch and an activist from Northeast Los Angeles with opinions on much of what goes on in our lives. She has written extensively on the City's budget and services as well as her many other interests and passions. In her real life she works on budgets for film and television where fiction can rarely be as strange as the truth of living in today's world.)
