Aspiring, Sticky-Sweet Authoritarian Dictator Remains Firmly
in Power
June 6, 2012
Personal essay by Dr. Glen Barry
Wisconsin is a less free and decent place this morning. The
human right to freely and openly associate and organize with colleagues to
negotiate the best price for your labor just barely exists, and people that
form unions to do so are villainous thugs. Women are less equal. Gays and
blacks are sub-human. Teachers, intellectuals, progressives, atheists, and
other knowledgeable, free thinking peoples have less rights and prestige. A
sticky-sweet taint lingers in the air.
Largely uneducated yet belligerent rural rednecks,
out-of-state billionaires, and white suburban Milwaukee ghetto usurers are
firmly in control. They are taking names, coming for what you have, and
preparing to force their worldview upon anyone who has not yet drunk the
corporatist kool-aid. The air, water, soil and vegetation Wisconsin’s citizens
depend upon for life now lie virtually unprotected. Corporations – which we are
told are people – are firmly in control. God is in the government and regulates
our bodies and bedrooms.
Right-wing, teabagger, nutjob politicians no longer have to
campaign on the issues upon which they will actually govern, or even mention
the policies they will pursue once in office. Money is speech and anything can
be said, or even made up, and stated over and over again, until glassy eyed we
fall into line behind the great leader. Our Governor’s boorish past conduct and
patterns of election fraud since youth have never mattered, never will, and
will be erased along with fascist and illegal union busting tactics from our
history.
Neighbors begrudge neighbors their modest health insurance,
education and pension – rather than organizing and educating themselves to have
them too. People of all sorts that
better themselves by banding together into unions and/or becoming educated are
unworthy of deferred compensation they freely negotiated, earned and are owed. Teachers,
firefighters, cops, government workers, and their unions caused 911 and the
ongoing financial collapse; and they will be punished now and long into the
future, until they repent of their socialist ways.
Being smart¸ and training your mind through a process called
education, is dumb and no longer valued in Wisconsin. Funds for our formerly
world-class schools and Universities have been returned to our state’s elite
absentee billionaire slumlords, where because of their great benevolent virtue,
they rightly belong. Those who are educated are less than fully American, and
their views, especially if fact, data, knowledge, or wisdom based; are not to
be trusted. There are no experts on anything, just opinion. Truth comes from a
tightened fist.
There will be no salvation from homegrown Wisconsin fascism.
The national tea party is bent upon dumbing us down and enslaving us for god
and greed. The great black hope and assassin in chief busies himself with
nominating alleged terrorists - including American citizens - for the drone
kill list in sovereign nations. Our economy was plundered by the elites, who
are now the power behind the throne in Wisconsin, and also our
commander-in-chief’s top advisors and funders. No one has gone to jail.
Both Wisconsin’s state and national leaders routinely permanently
rollback civil liberties and ignore ecological collapse at great peril. Wisconsin’s
progressive leadership is overly focused upon preening, posing, celebrity
journalist activists – who lead the protests, report upon them, and are
followed by their own video crews. Whenever the party of Roosevelt rules it
meekly fails to stand for much of anything but re-election. The party of Reagan
– led now by a bullying uber-corporatist – overreaches and continually cheapens
America’s great democratic traditions.
Rarely are political, universal truths of justice, liberty,
fairness, peace, equity, ecology, and human rights spoken courageously any
longer – much less enacted. Sensibly caring for the well-being of others,
sharing when you have enough, nurturing children and the land are thought to be
quaint relicts of an over-taxed era. Others would consider this the price of
democracy and civilization, such as it is.
Wisconsinites – like the rest of the nation – are left in
the coming Presidential election with picking the lesser of two fascists.
Freedom from fascist and corporatist rule – and the scapegoating, sexism,
nationalism, militarism, propaganda lies; and gutting of unions, education,
environmental protection and civil liberties this implies – is a precondition
to living justly, fairly and well; and to sustaining global ecology and social
well-being long-term.
The American dream of hyper-consumption for some is over
because it couldn’t be sustained ecologically or socially. America can’t expect
to reap the ill-gotten benefits – all too often seized at the point of a gun – of
4% of Earth’s people consuming 25% of key global resources any longer. The 2.5
billion people globally living on $2 a day understandably want their fair share
too. The natural and painful consequences of downsizing America’s extreme
lifestyles and unwinding horrific disparities is sadly leading to demagoguery,
a decline in truth telling, and yes, the rise of fascism in the American
heartland.
America has lost its way. Our ecosystems and economic system
are collapsing, fascism rising, and conflict growing – do we want societal and
ecological collapse to come as we are at each other’s throats? Things are heading
that way. We are becoming the terrorists we abhor. And all the reasons are
evident in microcosm in Wisconsin. Decent, thoughtful folks in Wisconsin tried
valiantly but ultimately failed for now to combat the John Birch, KKK, Tea
Party inspired rise of hateful and destructive fascism. But the battle to retake our great state and country
from the fascists has just begun.
I hate fascism, and urge you to join together with others and myself to resist
a corporate takeover and enslavement of America. Going forward, all thinking
reasonable lovers of truth-based liberty, freedom, and the decent essence of
America, must come together to form an Anti-Fascist League. Failure means an
overtly fascist America, of the sort now destroying Wisconsin.
A profound lack of understanding exists, even amid the supposedly
radical environmental movement, of the seriousness of merging ecological
crises. If Gaia – the Earth System or biosphere – is alive, as science
has come to understand, then clearly she can die as key ecosystems are
destroyed and biogeochemical processes fail. To survive, much less
thrive, humanity must stop scraping Earth's land of life, spewing waste
into our air and water, and claiming it can all be certified as
sustainably done, while calling it "development."
