When America gets fascism it will be called anti-fascism.Ten sounded like an awful lot of steps. But – including such resonant moves as surveilling citizens (check), invoking an external threat (check), establishing a paramilitary force (check), targeting journalists (double check), and establishing secret prisons (double check) – all of Naomi Wolf's steps in The End of America raised my eyebrows ten distinct notches.
Wolf presents each step by juxtaposing recent and historic fascist government actions to reveal analogy. Quite persuasive, but it's that crafty persuasion that's hard to share with others and doesn't offer any solutions. "Regain our civic society" – but how? I see the problems, Wolf has cataloged evidence, but I don't know what to do. This happy fluffy crap is useless, because politicians don't need to listen. I emailed my senator two weeks ago via the address on his "contact" page and I have received no response. I shrug. The Daily Show shows back-to-back clips of Bush contradicting and excusing himself. We laugh. Accountability is just a buzz word.
(Transition? What?)
To her credit, Wolf rescues the Founders from the evil clutches of textbooks and wipes off the dust. She writes them as struggling revolutionaries, not fixtures of history. In their time, few people were politicians and politicians alone; it was a duty separate from one's career. The system they built was fresh, malleable, hopeful, and crafted to distribute power. Times have changed and so has the system. Career politicians are entrenched in a broken and stale corporate-government complex that I don't believe I can affect from the outside. And I can't afford (the money or the time) to be a politician, so what should I do? How can I be part of a civic society without it being a second job? Maybe it needs to be second job. Err – back to the point – it was neat to see the Founders in a humanizing light.
I found evidence to support my extant questions and even some new ones, but no answers. Hmm? What's that you say? Well, how am I suppose to know what you'll get from it? Ha!
(Tidbit: I shake with frustration at the utterance of the price of freedom. I much prefer this line by Wolf, though it trips me up without any prosody.
The price of liberty, the generation that debated and created the Constitution understood, is eternal vigilance.)
2 comments:
If you want to get more involved, let me make the following suggestions, in order of least to most time consuming:
- Vote
- Talk about politics with people
- Volunteer for a campaign (again
in least to most time consuming):
- Data entry (if you can get
the campaign to trust you
enough...)
- Phone banking
- Canvassing
- Fundraising
- Join a grassroots lobbying network.
I have done all of the above, and recommend them all, but then I'm somewhat obsessive with politics. If you're interested in getting involved with the Democrats, let me know, I have several connections I could put you in touch with. If you want to work for the dark side, I can't really help.
I participated in the caucus today. It was in a barn. Maybe everyone else's opinion of Kansas is correct after all.
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