Greek Myths, Kristol balls & American DREAMers
Life imitates art or is it vice versa?
Homer certainly thought he knew when he wrote down the legends we know as the Iliad and the Odyssey – a strange amalgam of tales of men and gods; of war and peace; of hopes destroyed by conflicting ambitions; of love surviving the trials of a bitter victory.
The odd survival of Homer, when so much of ancient literature was lost, is accidental. That odd accident of history has vastly impacted on our understanding of ancient civilisation; of ancient history; and even of how we perceive our own lives through the prism of classical heritage.
The other great survival from those times is performance art. In ancient Greece and later Roman times this was expressed through speech, dance, accompanied song, mime and acting – it gave a mirror for us to hold up to our world. The Greeks saw life as interplay of Tragedy, Comedy and Farce.It turns out centuries on and millions of lives later that we’re no better informed nor any better prepared for life’s events than they. What can be more comic or tragic than that?
As we helplessly watch the undemocratic farce play out Athens today we can see how perceptive the ancients were of our human condition. Since 2008 the world economy has been on life support. Once the banks stopped circulating the credit essential to the continuance of modern capitalism the party was, as they say, truly over.
This financial and economic collapse was simply a collapse of confidence. But confidence is no more than a conceptual belief. It’s a collective act of faith. It depends wholly on irrationality. It aspires to put sense where there’s only nonsense. It has its priests in bankers; its gold is laid in marble vaults on earth rather than in treasure in heaven; its offerings are denominated in the billions.
Market capitalism relies upon an intellectual confidence trick. Financial confidence exists because collectively we choose to believe it exists. And as with religious faith once in every generation a new profit arises and faith in the old profits vanishes. Banks still have plenty of money but they’ve no faith in the circulating medium. The vital oxygen of confidence has evaporated.
Consumerism thrives by stimulating our relentless appetite to consume today with no thought for tomorrow. Evolution has programmed us to respond to plenty in this manner. Market capitalism reinforces a mechanism designed to help us survive seasonal variation in food supply. Like the children of Israel we’ve made our own golden calf and have freely chosen to worship it. The high priests of the market indoctrinated us into believing that if we buy things we don’t need but feel we need to buy we will thereby feel happy and content. Capitalism exploits our heroic appetites by making new things to meet our incessant demand for more and different.
None of this is new – these are desires and needs were known to the Homer’s Greek and Trojan heroes – it’s merely now that this has played out on a scale which is beyond their or our imagination. And like those Greeks stranded for ten years out outside the walls of Troy – events appear to have slipped beyond our ready control.
This world is man-made and often makes no sense. For example, a young man at Harvard makes the computer equivalent of a message board on which to stick pictures and comments. He calls it “Facebook”. He is now worth more than the economy of Greece. By any rational measure this is not proportionate. In losing our sense of scale and a sense of relative relationships we have lost our sense of values.
History, as Homer tells, teaches us that undiluted hubris leads inexorably to tragedy. As we watch the Greeks vote in a meaningless election set in a swamp of unemployment, hospitals empty of medicines and schools and universities empty of teachers and pupils – we all know this is the theatre of the absurd – save most sadly and absurdly real people’s lives are lived out inside this circus…their personal tragedies being fed to us by the Media as a form of entertainment.
The Rubicon between austerity and idiocy truly has been crossed. There’s no going back. And in this run from sanity the markets lemming-like lead the way while the bankers – priests of the old consumerist faith – call for yet more sacrifices to appease their financial Gods. Someone needs to take these fools to Easter Island to show them what happens when irrational beliefs overwhelm common sense.
As we wait out the weekend the world holds its collective breath. We are at the precipice. There will be a further recession the only question left is whether it will be short-lived or long-endured like the depression of the 1930s. Sadly it’s beginning to look more like the latter than the former.
This is the context for the next G20 meeting in Mexico next week….it will give the world’s leaders an opportunity to glad-hand; kiss each other’s cheeks; eat Mexican cuisine,; wear silly hats and at the end pretend to have solved the insoluble. The world watches them knowing they’re no more than marionettes.It’s those who are pulling their strings we need to call to account. These invisible men who make AAA ratings without reference to those who live with the reality of their decisions – these are the people who govern our futures but who will never have to stand for election or stand up and be counted. Power rests with Moguls like the Rupert and James Murdock – men beyond the accountability of polities; beyond the boundaries of nations and beyond the reach of the law.
And that is the unspoken anger that informs the elections underway in the world’s most powerful nation – The United States of America.
There the same forces that determined our choices now present the electorate with a choice between President Obama and Governor Romney. The campaign storm has reached its quiet eye. It waits upon the judgement of the Supreme Court Justices over Health Care and the Conventions of the two principle political parties.
As Nature abhors a vacuum so election campaigns abhor silence….and so political commentators fill the Media airwaves with their homespun predictions. Election campaigns cast most the commentariat – many of whom like to hitch the wagon of their prejudices to any passing poll – as latter days Cassandras. Like poor Cassandra their predictions aren’t believable and in that there’s little zeitgeist.
Bill Kristol – is one of these sages – has been running with a story that President Obama is about to drop Vice President Biden in favour of Hilary Clinton – the now widely well-regarded Secretary of State. And it is true that Hillary has turned into one of the few good news stories that the Obama administration can tell. And it is also true that whispers in Washington DC – a town where most whispers are stage left or right – abound that Hillary will leave the administration in November to clear her way for another run at the Presidency in 2016. It may or may not be Mrs Clinton’s ambition to be the first lady to make it to the White House in her own right but for the moment she plays the loyal card she has played ever since she lost narrowly to Obama in 2008.
It isn’t that Joe Biden doesn’t have his problems. Obama chose Biden in part because he had the experience and apparent gravitas the President lacked. As ever, fixing a hole in an old pipe often leads to another leak somewhere down the line. Biden has repeatedly shown an appetite for prolix verbiage of the sort John Prescott blessed Prime Minister Blair. Less mangled prose and more mangled policy – Biden has repeatedly led the President into policy commitments most recently apparently bouncing the administration into supporting gay marriage in an interview on TV interview.That said the days when a President might easily unburden himself of a Vice President passed with FDR who managed first to rid himself of John Nance Garner – who famously immortalised the office as being worth less than a bucket of warm spit (or piss) and later in 1944 replacing Henry Wallace with Harry Truman. Since then Spiro Agnew was elected twice but like his master Nixon, failed to serve his term for corruption charges. Nixon replaced him with Gerald Ford….the congressman whom President Lyndon Johnson once said couldn’t east gum and shit at the same time.
Gerald Ford upon becoming President after Nixon’s resignation in August 1974 – a broadcast my mother and I got up to watch a four in the morning to watch and where Nixon rambled towards the end of his presidency maudlin and full of self-pity. Ford promptly appointed pardoned President Nixon and nominated Nelson Rockefeller – a star from the liberal north-eastern wing of a Republican Party that had then not quite lost itself to Governor Regan and all his works and pomps as his new Vice President.
Rockefeller was hated b y the Goldwater right and in 1976 Vice President Rockefeller stood aside in order to allow President Ford to choose another – in this case Bob Dole from the right of the party – in his unsuccessful attempt to the elected. Even the hapless Dan Quayle, who famously corrected the spelling student from ‘potato’ to ‘potatoe’ in front of the entire nation, at the height of the 1992 campaign went on, surviving repeated PR disasters, to run for the second term with President George Herbert Bush.
So baring an intervention from the Almighty we may safely assume – despite Mr Kristol’s predictions that Biden will be Obama’s running mate this autumn. But the talk demonstrates how febrile the politics of the campaign has become.
On Friday, the president has declared a limited amnesty of illegal immigrants – a group wherein immigrants of Hispanic origins are disproportionately represented. There are forty odd million Hispanic or Latinos in the USA mainland – and around another 4 million in Puerto Rica. They are a large percentage of Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado – all essential states for the President.
As a consequence maybe 800,000 people will come forward to receive deferred action from deportation. The policy change will apply to young undocumented immigrants who entered the United States as children, along the same lines as the Dream Act, a decade-old bill that passed in the House of Representatives but failed to pass in the Senate in 2010. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told reporters that the policy change is part of a general shift by the Obama administration to focus on deporting high-priority undocumented immigrants.“This grant of deferred action is not immunity,” she said. “It is not amnesty. It is an exercise of discretion so that these young people are not in the removal system. It will help us to continue to streamline immigration enforcement and ensure that resources are not spent pursuing the removal of low-priority cases involving productive young people…..More important, I believe this action is the right thing to do,” she continued.
The policy change will effectively enable Dream Act-eligible young people, often called DREAMers, to stay in the United States without fear of deportation, and without legislation from a Congress that is unlikely to pass a such a law.
American history repeatedly demonstrates the importance of the politics of race and the politics of region. And President Obama and the Democrats see a future majority built around the rapidly growing Hispanic population and the part’s increasing dominance in the populous East and West coasts of the mainland. Since 1992 there has been a steady accretion of these voting blocs moving in favour of the Democrats – just as in the 1960s and 1970s the suburban middle classes cut loose from old urban loyalties to the party of the New Deal and FDR and turned into Republicans.
Clearly if this is going to be a close campaign then Obama is going to embrace his core vote closely to him. Gay Rights…Immigrant rights…these will play well and energise the President’s base vote and that may make all the difference.
The electoral momentum had shifted to Romney since he became the unambiguous GOP nominee. Until today’s polls in Michigan put the state back into the President’s column by between 1 and 7% the tide was running from Obama. In the course of two weeks Romney picked up half a dozen states – including plum targets like Ohio, Missouri, Florida and North Carolina, Iowa and Indiana. Romney’s problem remains that he must hold on to all he has picked up and pick up still more of the close states in order for him to reach the magic 270 electoral votes.As we’ve recently seen Obama can lose half or dozen or more of these states and still magically arrive at the 270 votes with any number of combinations of a small number of states. This doesn’t mean Romney cannot win but it means he needs a bigger lead than those he is amassing. His campaign hopes his choice of Vice President will swing it but instead it may be the voters in Greece and the politicians in Germany whose choices haphazardly determine the result of the US lection.
The world teeters once more on the precipice of Depression; politicians have limited powers and limited choices. History teaches that it is when people feel most disempowered and disengaged that they’re most likely to behave most recklessly. And if American voters feel the world’s complexities making life too difficult they may look for a simple solution.
And that rather than anything Mitt Romney does presents the real and present danger to Obama.
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