Monday, October 05, 2009

Conservative Gone Wild . . . Over Losing the Olympics Bid

Conservatives seem to be tap dancing at the edge of sanity these days, apoplectic over the minutest details of any Obama plan but ecstatic over Chicago’s failed bid to host the Olympics in 2012 (http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1009/27902.html). This celebration of failure leads me to a series of questions: Is the patriotic party really putting America first? Have they really sunk to the point where only bad news is good news these days? One wonders how low they can go in their competitive limbo to American destruction crawl before sanity prevails?

Equally interesting was there response to the news that unemployment figures were worse than expected – obviously it’s Obama’s fault (in the revisionist conservative mythology, many have pretended that Obama somehow caused the financial crisis he in fact inherited). I just want to make sure I have this right: Obama shouldn’t spend anymore money because the deficit is too high. We don’t want to regulate the economy, because that will hurt business (even as deregulation played a huge role in the current financial crisis). We want to isolate ourselves from foreigners, even as they hold a huge piece of the key to our future economic growth. And even given all of these arguments, it is somehow Obama’s fault that employment has not rebounded. This seems very similar to the arguments about global warming. Sure the most respected scientists in the world think it’s happening, but some right wing nut jobs say it isn’t and are occasionally backed by “scientists” generally sponsored by the benevolent oil companies.

Since at least Reagan, conservatives have succeeded largely based on stirring passion and resentment among working class and middle class voters. Resentment against affirmative action and Blacks in general, resentment toward gays who are “destroying the moral fiber of America,” resentment toward “illegal immigrants” who are both living off our social services and, at the same time, stealing our jobs and resentment toward feminists and their destruction of the American “nuclear family.” Facts are unimportant, or really inconvenient to these discourses. They play on deep-seated resentment at the fading of the American dream, the falling status of the U.S. in the world and the racism at the very heart of America. They play on the nostalgia that the old have for an America that never really existed. And they feed on a popular culture industry that thrives on anti-intellectualism.

At this moment, education and media become key spaces where students can become more critical about the world that surrounds them and cultivate the ability to see through the shroud of ideology and rhetoric to the truths that lie beneath. But conservatives have also effectively attacked these two spaces. They have instrumentalized knowledge in the Weberian sense to extricate real critical thinking and depoliticize knowledge, thus further solidifying the status quo. They have made K-12 about little else but rote memorization and testing, losing the radical potential that knowledge and science once promised to improve the human condition. And they are increasingly bringing their attacks to the university, attempting to institute bureaucratic and professionalist tendencies that undermine the autonomy of professors and students to critically examine social forces and phenomena. In media, they have allowed radical conservative voices to dominate the airwaves and TV screens while shouting out most progressive voices – while pushing the mainstream media away from its position as the fourth estate, holding politicians and social institutions accountable and highlighting the distance between their words and actions (outside the bedroom of course).

With Obama’s victory, a glimmer of hope emerged from the conservative miasma that has enveloped America for almost 30 years, but it seems to be fading under the brute force of a movement that is untethered by truth, rationality or any real interest in the common good.

No comments: