Talk about your “death panels.” The flip side of a militant refusal to solve any national problem is, in effect, an active commitment to national suicide. That seems to be our course these days.
Is global warming real, man-made and building on itself? A few noisy contrarians and dug-in deniers to the contrary notwithstanding, a broad consensus understands that the process is manifest and nothing less than an accumulating threat to life on Earth, at least life as we know life.
But the implicated industries and their spear-carriers among political conservatives are working together to make sure that the U.S. government will fail to take any actions that could inconvenience the industries or offend conservatives’ ideological free-market absolutism.
Even the red-faced folks who are shouting down health care reform know that, as a system — or more accurately, non-system — health care in this country is overpriced, underperforming and an economic calamity. Nearly half of our personal bankruptcies and a large part of home foreclosures are due to medical bills. Insurance companies refuse coverage to the sickest at every opportunity.
But the furious protesters have been suckered by a campaign of lies and distortions that depict the largely sensible changes being discussed in Congress as just about everything they are not, from socialist to murderous. The Republican Party, harkening to the din, has happily forgotten all about the loyal part of loyal opposition, public and republic alike be damned.
Economists pretty much agree that the recession seems to be bottoming out, though the improvements are tentative and uneven. With new jobs and renewed hiring usually the last step into solid recovery, a “lagging indicator” as the lingo goes, a feel-good economy still remains long months off.
But with rising ardor, the tea-party opponents of economic stimulus spending are demanding that unspent stimulus funds be withdrawn and some in Congress are paying attention to the pitch as another chance to undermine President Obama. Chocking off the stimulus is a perfect plan for killing the recovery before it is solid and for giving the recession a second wind.
Since our earliest days, the nation’s moralists have fretted that our degeneracy would have us soon going the way of the debauched Roman empire. Religious opponents said Thomas Jefferson, if elected president, would set prostitutes to dancing in the churches.
The good-souled scolds had it all wrong. It has not been sexual but political degeneracy that has menaced us — a breakdown into political self-indulgence that loses sight of the whole, of the common good. The Civil War damn near did us in.
The threat is not when we are squabbling among ourselves. That goes with the democratic territory. The threat occurs when we convince ourselves that our own government is our enemy, that none of our institutions can be trusted to solve any problem and that the plainest words are but a scrim meant to obscure nefarious meanings behind them.
Right now the wages of earnest governance are ridicule and contempt and the most dangerous move in politics is forward.
Tom Teepen writes for Cox Newspapers. E-mail address: teepencolumn@earthlink.net.
