|
A funny thing happened to me last year on my way from the left coast to the right coast: I left my bleeding heart in San Francisco. Well, I lied, not San Francisco exactly, rather Silicon Valley—that magnificent glass cathedral Global Technopolis, the glitzy world capital of High Techdom, whose e commerce wizardry greases the rails for 24/7/365 frictionless global capitalism. The home of the Silicon, PC and Internet Revolutions —as well as the disgraceful dot com dot bomb. The left coast also boasts the home of The Grateful Dead, radical feminism, pink and green hair, acres of bootleg cannabis, garish gay and lesbian parades and every other form of leftism one might imagine...all rather repugnant to the reigning Beltway mentality. Perhaps most repugnant of all is the left coast's bleeding heart for third world sweatshop laborers, the urban poor and other "sore losers" in our decidedly dog-eat-dog winner-take-all Grande Casino civilization. For the days of intervention on behalf of those who can't make it in a survival-of-the-fittest asphalt jungle have been superseded by a Washington now more concerned with intervention on behalf of corporate interests—gallantly liberating multinational commerce moguls from the outmoded demands of leftist environmentalists, labor unions, and other kindred bleeding hearts. The business press gleefully confirmed this the day after last fall's election with reports of euphoria in boardrooms across America. In an age of globalization and privatization, radicals in Washington now see even privatization of the military as a way of liberating the patriotic military-industrial complex from the cumbersome bureaucracies of the me first public domain. But in the New World Order of Bush-Clinton-Bush, a better world is assured by unleashing free enterprise and unabashed profiteering from the old fashioned constraints of the weak and their meddlesome bleeding hearts. Law, it would seem, protects the mighty and their privileges from the unjust demands of the weak and the underprivileged; and not the other way around as the Hebrew prophetic tradition had believed. Got a problem buying goods made in Chinese labor camps? “You shouldn't,” lectured Bill Clinton. “It's good for America,” echoes the current resident of the White House. And blessed be the brazen, for theirs is the Kingdom of God. Or so goes the current thinking. And so go the bleeding hearts, I thought. Why should hearts bleed when the Ownership Society of the Post Information Age promises peace and prosperity for all the faithful? You have a need, you take action, you solve your problem. The global free market, unobstructed by draconian commerce regulations and untaxed by passé New Deal socialists, administers her limitless graces and generosity upon all willing to work hard and play by the rules—so it is according to Slick Willie, Dubya, and the whole Washington crowd, as dutifully trumpeted by the servile national media. If you fail, it's all your own fault, sir. You're either lazy, immoral or just not praying hard enough. And please don't bore me with that musty Marxist "But it's the system!" rhetoric. No system has ever prospered more on God's ever green (Kyoto-notwithstanding) earth. OK? OK. Sort of ... But then, just when I finally got up enough nerve to jettison my bleeding heart and accept the New Economy, with its off-shoring of prosperous industries and its race to the bottom of third world human rights standards (and all for the greater good of the free market, I might add)—the whining and the bleeding hearts started in all over again. Only this time Washington was not bleeding for my Dad—a World War II veteran and D Day survivor whose well -being hangs by the vulnerable threads of Social Security and Medicare—or for millions like him, but rather for the hapless victims of dictatorships and fundamentalist theocracies yearning to be set free so they too might jettison their antiquated past and cheerily embrace the manifest destiny of unrestrained global capitalism, with its Nike billboards and Golden Arches in every neighborhood. All of a sudden I was once again supposed to tap into my lately-healed heart and start bleeding all over again—tax dollar by tax dollar—to pay for the freedom and enforced modernity of people I'd never met. Meanwhile, my Dad, only a day's drive away in south Florida, was still waiting for help with his outrageous medical bills and other skyrocketing living costs. One could only pray that the freedom Americans were bleeding for might receive more praise from Washington than Turkey, whose government followed the will of the ninety-five percent of its population that declined participation in the invasion of Iraq. Turkey, as it turned out, was bitterly condemned in our own national press for lacking “democratic credentials.” And don't forget the fate of Haiti's duly elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Previously backed by Bill Clinton, Aristide was betrayed by Washington last year and allowed to fall to thugs and terrorists because his governance was not considered representative of U.S. national interests. Freedom? Whose freedom? Truly remarkable it seems: within a single lifetime Washington had gone from bleeding heart New Deal types to bleeding heart Neo-types—both the Neo-liberal Clinton-type and the Neo-conservative Bush-type. (You don't believe the Neo-types are in bed together? Haven't you noticed the new Bobbsie Twins: Willie 'n Papa Bush, hand in hand, demonstrating America's political unity?) And no matter which coast I was on, my Dad and I would still have to bleed. So the deal is this, oh worker bees of America: the way to a better world is down. That's right, before the rest of the world's workers can move up, we have to go down— until all good little worker bees converge on some intersection point of subsistence dictated by the infallible, divinely ordained Invisible Hand of the Holy Free Market. The implicit assumption in all this must be that the demand for the resources (especially oil) needed to properly take care of all six and a half billion of us exceeds the remaining supply left on the planet. So, millions of American workers and WW II vets will just have to relinquish some of their cherished, hard-won entitlements and liberties in order to secure the blessings of the New World Order for everyone else. The same Washington that had urged me to accept that off-shoring my hard-earned Silicon Valley career to India was good for the American economy and that my Dad would simply have to make do with the scraps that fall from the table was now asking us all to bleed some more so that fundamentalist Shias and Kurds could rule Iraq and make alliances with other fundamentalists throughout the Middle East. They can rule Iraq, that is, until U.S. interests are crossed again, at which point their sovereignty will be pre-empted once more. Huh? The irony is stunning. Washington invokes bleeding hearts for elections across the Atlantic, but scolds us when our hearts bleed for auditable ballots boxes and verifiable elections here at home. And in neither place has Washington's own heart bled for workers' rights in a long, long time. Meanwhile, our militant foreign policy is leaving countless bleeding hearts in mothers of the fallen, both here in America and all over the Middle East. The same politicians who toiled to convince me that government can't solve all our problems, now wants me to believe that our government must solve everybody else's problems. If Washington won't let our hearts bleed for our own poor and needy—people like my own Dad—can they really expect us to bleed much more for the nameless and faceless of oil-rich countries on another continent? Sorry Washington. You wouldn't let my heart bleed from the left; now don't ask it to bleed from the right either. I left my bleeding heart in San Francisco.
Robert Argento is a former technical writer from Silicon Valley, California. He now lives and works in the Wilmington area and is working on his first nonfiction book. |
|
Globalization and U.S. Democracy I Left My Bleeding Heart in San Francisco |
|
Carolina Civic Voice Summer 2005 Vol 5, No 2 |