Chris on 
Last night I was reading a book written by Abbie Hoffman, and came across a description of what the revolution of the ‘60s had sought to be. Hoffman talked extensively about political theatre, absurdity, and a revolution of JOY. It was a time when people were prone to laughter, and all the rest. I am no ‘60s enthusiast, in fact it might be my least favorite decade, but a lot of cultural change happened then, and I was reading a book.
Our local newspaper, the Wausau Daily Herald, recently made a shift from anonymous comments to Facebook-dependent commenting. You needed a Facebook account to make a comment, instead of just being a faceless hack railing against whatever and whoever, saying whatever inspired you and your particular brand of keyboard bravery. The comment section had devolved to the point of an abyss of venom. It was beyond the sort of old school flame wars and discussion board clique-like behavior; it was just simply mean. It did not matter what the paper said, or reported, or opined, invariably the comments would roam from the newspaper being stupid and liberal and one sided, to the commenters being one sided or liberal or conservative, to the people in the actual stories were one sided liberals or conservatives. It got bad.
It got so bad that one commenter took shots at a local leader, and that local leader sought him out, and it made national news. It was an amazing confluence of events, and what was cool for me was that I knew everyone involved, and I tended to think that they were all wrong.
In the last two weeks we have heard about the loss of 1000 jobs in 2012. Let us put that in perspective: If each of those 1000 jobs is worth say, 30 grand a year (and some are worth more clearly), that is roughly 30 million bucks in estimated salary lost. You start adding on the exponential things that go along with that, and you are looking at an insane amount of loss. Families just wrecked, support businesses shot, all of it.
We recently faced the closing of the Postal Service center here. It was a large meeting, with a lot of people affected, and a lot of anger.
Gov. Scott Walker is taking on some sort of reform ideas, and many of us disagree with him, and some disagree with him strongly. It has gotten to the point where our state government is seeking to defy the federal government in areas of programmatic contracts and to create all sorts of havoc. A woman in her 80s has taken up the role of plaintiff in a lawsuit filed by the ACLU about voting law changes put forth by the current administration.
I am a democrat. I have always been, except for 2nd semester of 9th grade when I was a fiscal conservative (I got my first job). I went to meetings, took part in strategic planning sessions, engaged in active leadership in my local party. Then after a while I caught onto a vibe in which the local party seemed far more interested in poking Congressman Sean Duffy for his every action, not just his mistakes. We had crossed over into finding fault with the idea that he did or did not do anything. Now mind you, Duffy is not my kind of elected official — we disagree fundamentally on just about everything. But at what point do we stop serving the republic of this great country? I know when it is — when we dissect the grammar of a press release of a sitting Congressman, and you do not disagree with anything he says, but instead are publicly critical of his use of grammar.
So, our Republican Governor sought to alter collective bargaining in this state. I would go so far as to say he attacked it. We spent a year or so standing in the capitol rotunda (it seemed like a year). Ed Schultz came, Tom Morello and Brother Wayne Kramer showed up. Hundreds of thousands of people voiced their displeasure.
What seemed like a direct result, local union bosses decided to exclude Republicans from marching in a taxpayer-supported Labor Day parade. This created quite the stir. Then, the bosses changed their mind and LET the republicans join in.
We have achieved a sort of anger in this state, and in this community that is unheard of. We no longer seem to have any desire in solving problems, and we have lots of them. We simply want the other guy to be blamed, or even better, silenced. No one is noble in this, no one is above reproach.
I am not innocent either. For a while I made fun of GOP hawk Kevin Hermening. That was not cool of me, and I had to publicly apologize for being a jerk. Do I agree with Kevin, nope. Do I think Kevin is a bad man? Nope. Do I know Kevin? Not one bit.
What happened to laughter? What happened to joy? Even in disagreement, what happened to laughter and joy and more than that absurdity? It used to be a sense of us versus them, and everyone took the piss out of THEM. Everyone felt comfortable giving raspberries to Nixon or Hoover. Now, if we do mock someone, there is some on there to stand up and defend them to the point of absurdity.
Look, I do not know Gov. Walker, or Mayor Tipple, or many of the other men and women in ties who have accepted the responsibility to leadership of our community. But, why can’t we laugh? Why is our cultural temperature running so hot that we see everything as offensive, every action as something to be demonized or supported to the death?
I state now that I believe that the institutions of our country, our state, and our local municipalities need alteration. Need some sort of change. But more than that, we need to take a collective breath, and get our shit together. We have lost our way, and we are so tightly wound with the perceived conflict and cultural strife that we argue about everything, and nothing fixes anything.
I get you want to win. But, you gotta remember that when you want to burn down the metaphorical house that those other guys are standing in, some people you like might be in that house, too. Maybe just a bit of temperance is in order. Maybe the best way to move beyond these admittedly challenging times (regardless of who is in power) is to seek solution, not victory.
Change is coming my friend… paradigm changing change
To study the history of revolution, from the French revolution to the Russian Bolshvek revolution to even our own American Revolution… there are similiarities in circumstances… there are key factors… and those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
We are at a divide, between the left and the right. The moderates, the ones who are able to listen to the ideas from both sides… they are gone. The left hates the right, the right hates the left… and the middle is abandoned… there is a fundamental disconnect between those that govern and those that are governed. When such disconnect occurs… revolution has a bad habit of following. The disconnect between residents of the colonies and the British crown was a factor in our own revolution 200+ years ago.
There is a gap between the haves and the have-nots, and that gap is growing. Again, the middle is disappearing. This differential is starting to evolve (or should I say de-volve) into class warfare – if you don’t believe me, start paying attention to the “Occupy” movements. Class warfare played a significant role in the French and Russian revolutions.
Change is coming my friends… and I really don’t want to take sides.
I am not Right.. I am not Left (though I have been accused of being both)… I am in the Middle… agreeing with different sides on different issues, but lately disagreeing with both more often than not.
I am not rich, but I am also by no means poor.
I am me… one man, feeling very alone.. feeling very left out. I am one man not represented by the Left… and I am one man not represented by the Right. I am one man who gains no benefit for all of those initiaves designed to make the rich richer… and I am one man who does not benefit from any program meant to help the poor. I am one man stuck in the middle.
The revolution is coming my friends… and when it does, would you kindly leave me out of it. When it comes.. I plan on taking my hill top bunker and declaring it neutral territory… it has worked for Switzerland, I am hoping it will work for me.
The words Democrat and Republican to me are different only in respect to each party’s views on division of wealth. Politicians of both parties have squandered a great deal of wealth, and what’s left? Anger.
They make the rules, and I play the game. I don’t care who wins, loses or gets recalled. Very few of them get it, and those who do have yet to muster the political will to break from the herd, or the money that influences them & make the hard decisions or compromises that need to be made.
I agree with John, change is in fact coming for everyone.
we need that desperatly in our leaders as well as the people no one is looking to solve anymore everyone including our leaders is looking just to win and follow party lines even when they are clearly unfunctional in the new economy cutting is not the way out of this alone.
Great piece and great comments. It seems to me that we are living in a time in Wisconsin in which some people who were elected to LEAD have mistaken it for a mandate to RULE. It is not.
Before he passed away, I used to have long conversations with from time to time with Larry Sternberg. He was one of my constituents. (Sternberg had done well in the banking business. He and his wife left $1 million for completion of the downtown loop of the River Edge Trail in Wausau.)
Larry was a conservative and I am not — at least not by today’s definitions. Still, there were many things that we agreed upon. One thing that Larry stressed constantly was the fragility of our system of self-governance and economy, along with the need for honest, thoughtful people of vision to serve and to lead. I agree with that and much of that is being expressed here, too.
I want to be optimistic, but I think that if the Republicans are successful in their continous attempts to stifle the voices of dissent with rules to vote and protest while they continue to cater to the ultra-wealthy and tear down the middle class, they will not find themselves living in their version of Utopia a decade or two now with the elections that they bought. It will look a lot more like the future that John H. Fischer worries about.
I wholeheartedly agree with John’s post.
Jim, I agree with your post for the most part, but I think it needs to be extended to the Democrats as well. Democrats, Republicans, they all want power and they have all been trying to rule instead of lead.
Otherwise to just aim it at Republicans again, it sounds like more partisan denial of the bad things both sides are doing.
But that’s just my opinion.
While both parties are certainly given to excesses, I don’t really think you can throw the Democrats into the same bag with today’s GOP. The primary difference is the ability to compromise and it is evident at the federal and the state levels. Two examples at the state level were “Healthy Wisconsin” and tort reform, where Dems backed off from far-reaching proposals in the last session of the legislature to the point of actually abandoning the efforts (even though they had partisan majorities that were sufficient to carry the efforts.) I’m not even going to get into what is happening in the U.S. House and Senate with the GOP and its leadership because we all watch the news.
No, I think a strong case can be made that what we are seeing is unprecedented — at least in our lifetimes — and the outcomes being created in terms of economic dislocation and civil unrest are something I haven’t seen before. It is as visceral as the Vietnam years and it directly impacts on far more of our population. The answers are also more comprehensive and elusive now. And waving the U.S. flag over an agenda that truly promotes inequality, intolerance, plutocracy, theocratic tones and exclusion as if it is some kind of patriotic movement is something that I find absolutely incredible. Just look at the gymnastics that candidates have to engage in to get through a GOP primary and the positions they are expected to embrace to even be considered viable. We simply can’t lay all of this equally at the feet of both parties.
You’re preaching to the choir on some of your points. I think the GOP candidates are completely useless. None of them are worth my vote. There is so very little they do or say that I agree with.
I voted for Obama. I wanted to see nationwide healthcare pass, I wanted to believe he would step in there and change things. He didn’t. He caved on everything. And he kept surrounding himself with staff that had expertise only in screwing things up like they had in the past. I lost any hope in him that I had once he went immediately to old time shifty politics as usual.
On the state level, if this recall effort against Walker wins, I want to revisit this post 11 months after they take office (same amount of time Walker has been in office before recall petitions started) and see if his successor has done anything to fix the state. Will things get better for the middle and lower classes? Will the budget be balanced? Will education be efficient and well run with high test scores and? Will property/income taxes go down or up? Will jobs return? This is what the recall people say he’s ruined, so we can only assume the person they want will fix it all. Right? This new person has all the answers to fix it. They must.
Speaking of this new person, who’s even going to run? Are they sure they won’t toss out one guy for something even worse? They don’t even have a candidate, they just want a recall because they can. Pretty poor thinking.
My feeling is that if Walker loses, the unions will make sure to elect and install their pro-union candidate and the only thing that will change is that the union bosses will get everything they demand and then some. Nothing else will improve. The state will remain all screwed up.
The rest of us will still be left out to dry. Just as we were before. Changing the name on the door won’t make a bit of difference, unless you’re rich or a union boss (usually they are the same thing).
I’m blaming both sides. I’m saying they are equally useless to the average American. I want to be proven wrong and want to see a party do what they say they are going to do and fix things. So far, neither side is even coming close. And all the partisan folks want to do is blame the other side and say “They are screwing it up worse than we are screwing it up!”
I agree with the strategy of not naming a candidate for the recall until it is established that there will be an election. There are a couple of reasons. First is that it keeps the question of whether to have a recall election and the matter of who the challenger will be as completely separate issues. The alternative is to have the petition signing be a defacto pre-vote on the matchup and that muddies the waters. It also changes the dynamic of Walker’s approach and requires the Democratic candidate to begin raising and spending money.
I do NOT expect the new governor, if elected, to be able to undo what has already happened this year in Madison — at least not until after the 2012 elections. The Assembly, at least, will still be in GOP hands. What would really happen first is legislative gridlock — and while that may not sound so good, it is a huge improvement over continuing to enact reactionary policies that take us backwards. That’s what is happening right now, so just ending the negative momentum is an accomplishment in itself. The 2012 elections will be critical to seeing any real progress — and this is true at both the state and federal levels.
I can’t argue with you about the seeming timidity of the Obama Administration in some areas. The 2010 election had some serious consequences, but it certainly does seem like the Senate and the President continue to cave on major issues and it’s difficult to find where the hard line of principle ever comes into play. That said, there is nobody in the GOP presidential field that I will be voting for and the longer they play for those hard right votes, the more unattractive they become to reasonable people in the middle of the spectrum. As for Obama, enacting health care reform, forestalling an impending economic castrophe, getting out of Iraq and taking out Bin Laden are not small accomplishments. The duplicity with which the GOP demands to have middle class tax cuts “paid for” while fiercely protecting deficit-ballooning cuts for the wealthy — tax cuts that we KNOW do NOT accomplish their ostensible goals — is truly something to behold.
Oh, one more thing in the “undoing” area. Some things will probably have to stand and they should. For years, I pointed to the public employee pension plan funding situation as a political problem and I don’t think most people would support a return to a nearly 100 percent employer-funded plan. Likewise, I’ve always felt that the funding formula for public employee health plans was a liability against the environment that most taxpayers operate in. That is far different than union-busting and a night-and-day difference from enacting a slash-and-burn budget that turns over hundreds of millions to corporate interests while short-changing public services, education, etc and actually spending more money. Governor Walker could have gotten a lot done with a bit of diplomacy and case-building, but he didn’t do that. That’s why he faces a recall that he and the GOP so richly deserve.
Seems like the daily herald facebook comment change has been positive. Those of us removed from facebook are on the outside looking in…
I can’t help but think that so much of this political inauthenticity stems from the erosion of literacy, especially historical nonfiction. The rise of the id over the superego…the preference of the superstitious above the real…
i thought this piece by Chancellor Wiley relates somewhat to our discussion:
http://www.madisonmagazine.com/Madison-Magazine/January-2012/The-Paradoxical-Scott-Walker/Listen-Up-By-John-Wiley/