Vic Socotra

12 August 2009

Pulling the Plug (On Grandma)

(Saul Alinsky, circa 1970)

Jiggs drove our of here on his 18-inch tires this morning on sexy wheels and surrounded by clear-coat deep blue metallic flake youcould drown in. If Ford is in trouble, at least it is the only major car company in the US not owned by Uncle Sugar.

Jiggs is happy- more than Arlen Specter and Claire McCaskill, who got punked in their town-hall meetings on health care reform yesterday.

I’d rather be buying a car than facing a howling mob of astro-turfers. That is the term the media are using to describe the disrupters, to connote the fact that a mysterious and vast right wing conspiracy is masquerading as a grass-roots organization.

According to that interpretation, the same bus-loads of dupes and tools are being produced at simultaneous meetings all across the country, and are the same who have been protesting at the Tea Party Meetings against taxes.

The blithe dismissal of all that rage pretty much sums up the main stream media. I listen to NPR and the BBC all day, and am accustomed to the depiction of the world we live in as a sort of terrarium for examination by more evolved beings. I heard one discourse between people who public-radio’s WAMU presumably imagined to represent diverse views on the climate, for example.

One demanded an immediate tax increase across the western democracies to be turned over to the Third World, and the opposing view was that while it would be a good thing it might not reasonably be expected to happen any time soon.

The President was Portsmouth, N.H., yesterday, and he understands what is going on. His people carefully controlled access to the bogus town hall, and he basked in civility. He seems to understand that he is on the verge of losing this discussion, and pointedly addressed one of the concerns that came from the frantic scramble to assemble legislation before the August recess.

“The rumor that’s been circulating a lot lately is this idea that somehow the House of Representatives voted for death panels that will basically pull the plug on grandma because we’ve decided that it’s too expensive to let her live anymore,” he said.

No one with a brain in their head imagines you can do anything like universal health care and contain costs without the aid of some sort of empowered advisory board like the one they have established in Britain. We have talked about that body, and the index of the quality of life they use to make decisions in a budget-based health system.

But no matter. While things were pretty civil inside the hall, it was raucous outside, where the White House could not control the attendance list.

This used to happen to President Bush all the time, which is why he seemed to pop up at military bases all the time.

There is a saying that if you have to explain in Washington, you are losing. You would think that a politician like the President, schooled in community organizing and the foul balls of a presidential campaign would be ready to squash this kind of activism, whether it is real grass or Astroturf.

Today’s politics works the way it does largely because20of the work of a noted Chicago radical named Saul Alinsky, who was a major influence on Hillary Clinton and the President.

I was going to get a lot further on him today, but a quick look at the clock suggests that is not going to happen.

I was going to talk about all kinds of cool stuff- the stratification of radicalism by poverty and then age; the Republican Southern Strategy; the adoption of the Alinsky methods by the right, and the resurgence of the left; all kinds of neat stuff.

Stay tuned. Where else can you get Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Lee Atwater and Carl Rove all reading from the same hymnal?

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