Charles Dews -- World News Trust
Aug. 17, 2009 -- I normally try to not watch such unmitigated tripe, but the other day I saw on some news show or the other—they all look nowadays like Entertainment Tonight—on which there was some unknown politician bravely and patiently listening to a horde of nutty people screaming at the tops of their voices and gesticulating fiercely in his quickly fading direction. The pols face was a shade of Washington, DC, gray, and the people were distinctly red, in the face, not politically, of course. Reds are not nearly so fierce these days. Red might not be exactly the right description—it might have been more like purple in the face.
In any case, the poor politician was mumbling incoherently about how Obama had all of our best interests at heart and how he would not raise taxes to pay for "universal" health care except on the very rich—I believe the figure $250,000 was mentioned. Not that $250,000 is rich by today´s standards, but it seemed like a good round number that above which taxation would heretofore be levied. I am for taxing anyone who makes a cent more than I do from my retirement check, which barely keeps my SKY bill paid and my Internet service winging my way effortlessly and wirelessly, to say nothing of affording me a modicum of good parmesan cheese for adorning my boiled semolina pasta or a bottle of Stolichnaya now and again to share with friends who like the semblance of a good martini a pitless green olive can make.
Watching those angry and, astonishingly ugly, faces on the tube made me realize something important, I think. Many of the humans lifting those faces camera-ward were also sporting cheap white T-shirts and shiny plastic buttons emblazoned with the absurd idea that President Obama, that scion of Harvard, writer of best-selling books, husband of the impeccable, irrepressible Michelle, is a socialist. I could almost smell the stressed cheap underarm deodorant.
As a socialist myself, and not the wishy-washy liberal, bourgeois, baloney, everything-is-gonna-get-better-if-only-we-could-vote-for-a-socialist variety either. I am a dyed in the wool Bolshevik, a revolutionary leftist, a Trot, a mounter of barricades, would-be thrower of Molotov cocktails at class traitors sort of socialist. We used to be called communists back in the good old days of the Sixties, but now that there are no communists left, we are left with the softer monicker—socialist. I don´t like it, but that´s the way it is.
“Obama, a socialist?” I asked myself incredulously. “He´s fucking president of the United Snakes. No president could ever be a socialist! The ruling class would never permit it. And, as we all know, they rule.”
And then it struck me: “Those purple-faced hordes with their wagging and jabbing forefingers and their polyester T-shirts and their smug self-assuredness are giving socialism a good name. I mean, who in the world could possibly sympathize with people who scream at cowed politicians in public places. Not socialists, for goodness sake. Those people are Nazis. Out and out fascists.
I can just hear the liberals reassuring each other, “We must be socialists if they are accusing Obama of being one.” So now, everything that is good and holy and humane must be socialist. What a refreshing new take on politics in the US.
Of course, there are only a very few people left in the United States, or in the world for that matter, who really know what the heck socialism is. Most think of Big Brother as the symbol, big government fucking up everything, directing our lives, protecting us from stuff we do not want to be protected from or that we don´t need to be protected from. Most think of lowering the expectations and the drive of people as socialism; of making everyone equal, even the dimwits, even the reprobates. Equality, despite its good rap in political speeches on the Fourth of July, is not a highly desirable state in the good old United Snakes. Most people want to be better than other people, better off, more moral, more important, richer, smarter, bigger, have more stuff. Socialism is ag’in’ all that, for goodness sakes.
These are just a few of the characteristics the sound bites from the right have foisted off on socialism over the past few generations, since the Russian Revolution, the Second World War, the Sixties, Woodstock.
Writer Sara Robinson of the organization Campaign for America´s Future has this to say about our current political situation:
“We are now parked on the exact spot where our best experts tell us full-blown fascism is born. Every day that the conservatives in Congress, the right-wing talking heads, and their noisy minions are allowed to hold up our ability to govern the country is another day we're slowly creeping across the final line beyond which, history tells us, no country has ever been able to return.”
Oddly enough, I find this terribly heartening. If those are the people the far right has to throw up against left-wing barricades, we have nothing to worry about. They’ll die of coronary infarts, I mean infarcts, before they get to the top. And as for the sob sister liberals out there, they are going to find themselves moving farther and farther to the left, pushed by the right-wing loonies on the news shows, maybe one day all the way to real socialist, which involves advocating and practicing revolution that continues and that crosses all borders along class lines that places the working class at the head of the column where it belongs. After all, the vast majority of us are working class, no matter how much we might want to identify with the mythical middle class, a neologism invented by the US ruling class to bamboozle us all into thinking the working class doesn´t matter because it doesn´t exist.
Next time you see the purple-faced nitwits attacking politicians, raise a glass and give a cheer. It means that socialism is gaining ground, slowly but surely, and Marx was nothing if not right fucking on.