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| Liberty : Grafik Farm 2013 |
Darkness At The Edge of America
Is it me, or has the world just become a bit more absurd? An absurd world where well-nourished, elitist, egotistical, squabbling, overpaid US career politicians have debated the nation to a halt and thrown nearly 1 million Americans - temporarily at least - out of work.
In the magic realm of elite politics a disagreement over the present administration's healthcare legislation has triggered a sequence of events leading to closedown.
At the heart of this impasse is the Republican-led refusal to agree into law President Obama's healthcare reform as it presently stands - they want changes or its total repeal. The Democrats, for their part, have refused to alter or jettison a key piece of Barak Obama's presidency. It is a stalemate which has led to the Republican party's refusal to agree a budget.
It is the first time in 17 years that the US government has been unable to push through spending plans. The costs, financially and socially, have proved seismic.
Almost immediately, October 1, the dollar fell against other currencies, and Goldman Sachs, smoke billowing from their calculators, estimated that this very public meltdown could cost the American economy a near 1 per cent (0.9 per cent) of GDP in the present quarter.
Despite these painful consequences neither side could come to a sensible handshake, and the spat rolled on with public workers finding themselves out of work, out of pay and sent home on unpaid leave.*
Friday, October 4, more talks only resulted in one side name calling the other, and no resolution to the ongoing argument could be found.
John Boehner ( the Republican House Speaker) bitterly claimed that the Democrats 'won't negotiate', while President Obama pointedly remarked that the 'extremist wing' of a party was holding the nation to ransom.
Boehner, himself, is well aware of the damage the closedown is doing to the Republican party but, as commentators point out, he has been painted into a corner by the Tea Party wing of his party.
At the heart of the debate is Obama's Healthcare Reform Law - sometimes called 'Obamacare' - passed by the Democrats in 2010. The Republicans want the new legislation delayed or repealed and have shown themselves determined to block its passsage.
The present crisis has all the hallmarks of a runaway train heading for the edge of the cliff. In less than two weeks, October 17, the US government will find its pockets empty of cash and unable to pay its bills unless, of course the present situation can be resolved and agreement reached on legally raising the debt ceiling. While we have been here before with budget spats that have brought the governmental wing of the nation to a halt, an inability to nod the debt ceiling into a higher existence would set a very scary, global precedent.
Is America less than two weeks away from a derailment or worse, a full-on train crash?
One might imagine that the Republicans have to blink first to avoid such catastrophe but, as I write - October 5 - neither side seems willing to concede any ground.
Meanwhile, the US administration has been forced to close national parks, tourist sites, office buildings and government websites, and laid 800,000 employees off.
While elected leaders squabble like tantrum-driven children, ordinary American workers and their families ( which will take the total beyond one million American citizens) are losing sleep over where they are going to find enough money to pay impending bills. Men, women and children penalised because their elected government can't agree or compromise and protect them from hardship.
I find it hard to imagine that in the 21st century, workers are still being treated with such disdain. A highly-paid politician's bunfight has thrown them - temporarily - onto the street with no (legitimate) means to pay their bills. It is an extraordinary situation. I also find it hard to get my head around that there is no emergency provision in place for such an eventuality. So that, if highly paid, often, millionaire, politicians take umbrage and beat the living daylights out of each other with their designer handbags, ordinary government workers will nevertheless be properly looked after, their salaries and working terms and conditions protected?
Does nobody care about ordinary staff members?
Well apparently some people do, in cafe and restaurants across the US, discounts and sometimes free food is being offered to government staff no longer at work or being paid.
One restaurant owner in St Louis showed real humanity and the good sense lacking in both houses by telling reporters that his business had a good year and that he didn't mind if he lost money giving away food to government workers.
'I'm upset they're out of work just because these guys can't get along' the man told journalists.
I can't help thinking that if this had been Brazil, the Facebook generation would have been on the street by now...
*
A subsequent vote agreed that those sent home on unpaid leave will receive back pay, and since the meltdown, 400,000 defence staff have been told to report for work tomorrow. All eyes now on October 17 debt ceiling...
(excerpt from) Pop History Of The Sixties
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| Street Fighting Man (detail) : Makeshift 2013 |
I'll Take You On A Re-evolution.
But, if America's moral Mafioso thought the fifties were a time of
burgeoning sexual perversion and communist infiltration, then they were
not anticipating the sixties, swinging London (with all the connotations
that conjures up), Haight-Ashbury, San Francisco, flower power,
free-love, the summer of love, The Beatles and the British invasion.
The 1960's (especially from the mid-sixties onward) would feel, for
many, as if someone suddenly flicked a switch and a new, alternative,
psychedelic world of cultural and sexual experimentation had appeared.
A
world of great, potential and Itchycoo Park flower-power rhyming beauty edged with sinister imaginary monsters and mind-bending experiences.
It was a time when new ways of thinking, feeling and perceiving
manifested themselves in the esoteric and often hedonistic behaviour of
the young. Yes, there was, as always, moral panic, but rather than the
'revolution' many thought had arrived, it was more like shifting gears,
changing speed and trying to turn the steering wheel of life and head in
a different direction.
A re-evolution, if you like, because rather than the total overthrow of
traditional institutions or what Marx called 'superstructures', this was
a damp squibb as far as revolutions, velvet or otherwise, go. The
sixties would soon be incorporated into capitalism's big handbag and
guided tamely toward the seventies.
There were signs, however, that, as Bob Dylan later coined in his own sweet, quaint and jaggedy way, the times they 'were' a changing.
Many young people began to dress differently. They began to wear,
sometimes outrageously, flamboyant and brightly coloured clothes,
sporting strange, intricate, psychedelic patterns and designs. They
became human rainbows with fur collars and youthful spontaneous flags
marching up and down the High Street of towns across the UK and USA
wearing wide-bottomed jeans.
Did we really confuse genders as boys began
to dress in colourful, outlandish garb, much to the chagrin of their
parents, the 'morally good' - whoever they were -, the righteous (
whoever they were) and the establishment.
In an age when homosexuality was still illegal, men started to wear
their hair long in, what many considered a 'feminine style', while
girl's locked into new fashion statements as the hemline on their skirts
rose above the knee. In truth, it was a frivolous stab at being
different, at distancing themselves from austere greyness of their
parents, to being, or trying to be not like their parents. It was a time
when fashion rode the wave of a new and 'happening' scene on both sides
of the pond.
But the 'revolution', like most revolutions, was being quickly
incorporated into the commercial ways of the world, capitalism, as it
would later do with punk, was eating into the new ocean of pop music and
the fashions which were grown.
"Mary Quant" Yvonne Connickie wrote in her book Fashions Of A Decade, "Was
also closely involved with the sixties revolution in shopping habits.
From the mid-decade on, Europe and North America began to fill up with
boutiques - small clothing shops aimed at the teenage customer and
depending on a rapid turnover of stock. Shopping for clothes became
fun."
According to Connickie, Mary Quant herself said running her business
(Quant's Bazaar chain of clothes shops) was like continually organising a
cocktail party. Rampant consumerism lining Mary's pockets rather than
revolution, while she partied.
"It is given to a fortunate few" Connickie concludes, "To be born at the
right time, in the right place, with the right talents. In recent
fashion there are three : Chanel, Dior and Mary Quant."
In the sixties, the young also smoked pot, and dabbled in drugs, held
love-ins, spoke uninhibitedly about free love, protested and generally
rabbited on about peace and love and experience as well as the universe
and other places. Pop music, arguably, reach a kind of drug-induced
zenith from which it has never really recovered. It ate itself?
That's not to say that a great deal of pop music, even in this -
arguably - the most innovative and experimental era of its rampant
existence, was not manufactured and hooked onto coining money out of the
disciples of new sound and beats. But that is the capitalist way,
subsume, incorporate and entangle in money making enterprises and always
outrun the vanguard of change.
Unsuspecting moral traditionalists, who had baulked at the new wave of
music taking young people by storm in the 1950's, and who had warned
about the dangers of Presley and Haley and the light touch rock and
rollers of the time, were about to be subjected to the music of, what
they considered to be, Beelzebub.
At Her 'Satanic' Majesty's Request there was The Rolling Stones,
The Doors, The Kinks, Janis Joplin, The Animals, Jimi Hendrix and Gerry
and the Pacemakers. Gerry Marsden's backing group sounding more like a
band with heart ailments than a dangerous, out of control group of
anarchists, anti-Christs or revolutionaries.
The fifties had pushed open the door to a new sunrise, a post-war
freedom that was encapsulated in music, fashion and all the cultural
memes of the time which accidently or otherwise seemed to come together
in the sixties.
Here was a whole movement of people, albeit and apparently, quite
randomly organised and at times chaotic, who were, like naughty
children, pushing at the boundaries of what some considered to be 'good
taste' and 'morality' in society.
America's hippies and students were questioning what their nation was
doing in Vietnam, but there was also a deeper philosophy that questioned
the whole political and economic apparatus. Who says this is the way
things should be is a pretty standard slogan of youth - soon beaten out
of them by the education system and what are considered to be the
established political, social and economic 'norms' of the time.
But, as we know, and as Pierre Bourdieu has explored in his idea of habitus,
given a family and a mortgage and a football (soccer) team to follow
every week most people soon acquiesce, and as long as they can manage to
afford the odd holiday and the kids are doing okay at school they tend
to accept their lot. As the real time minutia of life, of homes, family,
television, rock concerts and favourite football (soccer) teams kick
in, people tend to move from the macro to the micro. The how to feed the
kids, how do we keep a roof over our heads, how can we afford to book a
holiday, what's on television tonight reality that most people are or
become preoccupied with.
Politics are for someone else and economics, well that's just double boring, lets crash some brain cells and watch Big Brother!
2013
