Left-Wing Politics, Labor, Socialism and All That

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A lot of people, many of them our friends, are baffled about politics in America.  Fear not: people across the world are just as baffled, except for truly ignorant people who know little of what went on in the past century or so.  For them, this is the first time ever that unemployment has been so high, the first time ever that Islamists are getting into their Jihads; for them this is the first time ever that Washington is going furiously at a war that we have no chance of winning, really.

Across the Atlantic, the British Labor Party is wondering what they can do to oppose the momentum of the Conservative party, which has currently got a huge majority in Parliament.  Their problem is a little different from the problems of the US Democratic Party, but in some ways, they’re the same.

Right after the Big Stock Market Crash of 1931, and the Second World War, a senator from Wisconsin started up a witch-hunt in Congress to eliminate Communism, and supporters of Communism, from the US.  This was actually just a stunt to get himself reelected, but it got everyone just as excited back then as Iran-Contra, and Watergate, and other sideshows we’ve had more recently.  (You’ve probably never heard of these, but they were pretty exciting back in the seventies and eighties.)  Soon after people got tired of this fellow (McCarthy was his name), and the President shut down the Congressional hearings, college students across US, sick and tired of the never-ending Vietnam War, began to think that Communism wasn’t such a terrible thing, and began to look seriously at Socialism, as a less-extreme alternative.

In wartime, authoritarianism does tend to flourish, and the Vietnam generation was intensely hostile to the WW2 generation, which was in charge at that time, and against all the concentrated wealth of Big Business whose misdeeds were becoming known as people began to look for pollution, poisoning, unsafe vehicles, unfair trade practices, and miserable working conditions in US factories.

This was our generation.  Inevitably, once the excitement of being young and intensely romantic faded, and once most of us got well-paying jobs, we quietly gave up being so concerned about the underdog, because most of us were not underdogs any longer.  Instead of worrying about the working conditions of the working class, we began to worry about our own lives, which should have been a lot more comfortable that they were, because after around 1980, all the money seemed to be headed towards the coffers of Big Business once again, and middle class taxes were rising, while the taxes of the really wealthy were actually falling.  In the chaos of the scramble to control the runaway Republican Party and its agenda of undoing the controls that the Democrats had put in place, and fertilizing the ground for Big Business and the super wealthy to scrape up still more of the national wealth, we forgot that the main concern of the true Socialist was the welfare of the working people, not the Middle Class, which has always been the pets of the 1%.  The Middle Class historically has sided with the Wealthy Class, not because its interests lies with the Wealthy Class, but because it is too afraid to side with the workers.

In the US, presently, we have the highly amusing situation that the working folk have been deceived into thinking that the Middle Class is its enemy, that taxes are bad (even if they pay for foodstamps, those horrible things that buy poor people nutritious, tasteless, low-grade food), and Social Security is the invention of the Devil (even if you have no other recourse if you’re unemployed).  The working class has forgotten that, even with the high taxes of the seventies, everyone was much happier, including the upper-crust.  Everything worked: the utilities, the roads, the bridges, the schools.  Now, despite lower taxes, nothing works.

In Britain, a country where Socialism of a limited sort had worked for several decades, Tony Blair, a right-winger within the Labor Party, completely sided with the US in its wrong-headed invasion of Iraq, which will be up there with some of the biggest mistakes in military history, not to mention one of the most unjust and illegal wars ever conducted by any nation.  Tony Blair was nothing but a Conservative mole within the Labor Party, and brought the Labor Party to its knees, to lose massively to the Conservatives in 2015.  In this article, a British political writer tries to anticipate what would happen if the most credible leader of the Labor Party (someone who plays a role in British politics analogous to that which Bernie Sanders plays in the US) was elected the leader of the LP.  (In the British system, the elected leader of a party becomes the Prime Minister, if the party wins a majority of the seats.)

The Brits, too, have had their Labor Party become a little too middle class, and afraid to demand the sorts of things that Labor has traditionally insisted upon, and in fact won, and which made life in Britain good for most Brits, and possible for many Scots, since Scotland and Northern England has long been the home of the poorer folks of Britain.  (It is this long tenure of Conservatives in Parliament that has driven Scotland to desperation, and to agitate for independence.  The Scottish National Party (the SNP) has won something like 15 seats in Parliament, an unprecedented thing, which signals the Scottish frustration with the Labor Party.

Who knows what will happen in 2016, if the Democrats continue to be afraid of making traditional left-wing demands, and stay home?  We must realize that the GOP is actually a minority party, even though it makes such a good showing during elections.  We must find courageous candidates for congress, and we must either convince Hillary Clinton not to be afraid of the right-wingers, and to stand for the working class, or we must elect Bernie Sanders, and support him strongly when he wins the elections.  Keeping US politics sane, and the US government working to keep the country running is not a one-time thing.  The One Percent can manage even if no government department works properly.  They're fine if the schools have no teachers, there are no policemen keeping the peace, and roads and bridges aren't maintained, and interest on college loans are through the roof.  They can go to private schools, and their private planes and SUV's can handle even the worst potholes.  (At least, so they think.)  For the poor, and the rest of us, government must work perfectly, or life is unbelievably hard.  The One Percent doesn't need government.  The rest of us do.

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Body Shaming

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This (body shaming) is a strange phenomenon, both that it happens, and that it is taken so seriously.  It does happen in other countries, but it is shaken off with a shrug; if someone was totally out of shape, he or she would be hurt, but, well, they know they're out of shape most of the time, so it is hardly news.  It is always easy to shrug off an insult that you've anticipated.

There is body shaming, and then there is some of this garbage that you read.  It is so off the scale that one must think of the perpetrator as a pathological case.  For instance, read some of the posts on Pink's page: "Shut up u uptight fat butch dyke."  This person doesn't care about Pink's shape; he or she simply dislikes her.  Is it necessary to take offense from the pointless post?  One of the things that amaze me is that people take offense at the maniacal utterings of raving madmen.
"Did you hear what he called me???"
"Yes, sweetheart, but he's crazy."
"But it makes me feel terrible!  What if some little kid heard it, and learned those naughty words?  Just because he's crazy doesn't mean he gets to insult me, does it?"
Yes, that's what it means to live in a world where crazy people are not all shut up behind soundproof walls.  Part of being civilized is to take some shit from random loonies.  Let's get over it, as a society.  Sticks and stones, people.  What happened to sticks and stones, that admirable response to verbal abuse?

I regret that we're becoming a nation of verbal abuse sissies.  Just as we don't allow our kids to start howling when a kids makes a face at them (and yes, I know: some of our kids do howl if anyone makes a face at them.  They are not cut out for middle management) we can't allow ourselves to be bothered by so-called body shaming.

Now, if someone in public office made a disparaging reference to someone's physique, and if that physique was not objectionable on public interest grounds, e.g. someone who was so thin that they fall through a storm sewer grating, or is so fat that they obstruct a squad car chasing a felon, then we have a problem.  If people are so unhealthily out of shape that it becomes necessary to remark on the fact as a matter of policy, e.g. we will have to permit a medical insurance company to refuse to give you an insurance policy, then the remark becomes reasonable.  Otherwise, public officials should not indulge in what is being called body shaming.  But if a private individual remarks that someone is overweight, it probably falls under their freedom of expression rights.  If the individual who makes the remark is manifestly unbalanced, it probably falls under the heading of Utterings of an Idiot.  In my opinion, such remarks must be ignored, not publicized.  Get over it, people.  We have very high standards of physical fitness now, and if you're out of shape, someone is going to call you out.  I'm out of shape, and every day I take a few minutes to mentally prepare myself for the possibility of being called a fat so-and-so.  If I can do it, so can you.

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