doesn't work well, but it still beats anything else that's been tried. Plus there is the solace of changing tides in the fortunes of political warfare: Those who were driven absolutely batty during the 1980s by the fact that the American people rather liked that harmless-seeming doofus Ronald Reagan can now console themselves with the fury of right-wingers who cannot imagine why Bill Clinton is so popular. It's possible that what goes around, comes around, and we should all just get a grip.
Yet the comfort of the Big Picture is something of which I've never been able to persuade anyone. People who genuinely care about politics (particularly those on the right, in my experience) are apt to get all red in the face, to carry on until the tendons stand out on their necks and to shake their wattles like turkey gobblers — a phenomenon so alarming it scares off many another citizen who might otherwise get involved. "Geez, if that's what politics does to you, count me out!"
Sometimes the times and the issues provide the passion — in my lifetime, race and Vietnam were the subjects most apt to alarm hostesses. "Now, let's not spoil the party by talking about Vietnam," used to be a common refrain in American social life.
The ability to disagree in an agreeable fashion is something that's never much caught on in our country. I believe it has to do with what the historian Richard Hofstadter called "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." We seem unable to rest content with the notion that those who disagree with us are simply ill-informed or dumb, but to prefer the notion they are actually wicked. This occasionally leads to such wretched excesses as the McCarthy Era.
I think a major cause of political rage in this country is that we continue to talk about politics in a phony way. I don't think politics is a spectrum that runs from right to left; I think it's a scale that runs from top to bottom. We're forever letting ourselves get divided by issues like race, abortion, family values, whatever. In fact, the only real political questions are, "Who's getting screwed?" and "Who's doing the screwing?"
The blame game is perennially popular in politics. Something wrong? Let's find someone to blame. The Austin Lounge Lizards, a wonderfully satirical band, has put its unerring finger on precisely whom we blame for everything that's wrong with our country in a brilliant plaint entitled: "Teenage Immigrant Welfare Mothers on Drugs." Damn, if weren't for teenage immigrant welfare mothers on drugs, what a great country this would be. Just one problem: Teenagers, immigrants, welfare mothers and druggies don't hold any positions of power in this society.
They don't run the S&Ls;, they're not in charge of mergers and acquisitions that cost tens of thousands of jobs, they don't move manufacturing plants to other countries where people will work for pennies an hour, they don't get the cost-plus defense contracts so they can rip off the Pentagon, they don't set the interest rates that cue the entire economy. They're not in charge. And it is our amazing reluctance to blame the people who are in charge that keeps fouling up our politics. Government in charge? Nah. Government's increasingly bought and paid for by the people who are in charge, the huge corporate special interests. Sound like another "paranoid style" to you? Maybe, but at least I've got enough sense to blame people with power. And the numbers are on my side: In the open sewer of legalized bribery we call campaign financing, two-thirds of the money comes from organized corporate special interests.
I say that's who's running things, and anyone who thinks different, show me the money.
