Naked as the Hanged Man's secrets

Wednesday morning, cold-ish and clear with stars clearly popping out from the black ceiling.  One of those perfectly illuminated sliver-crescent moons sits just above the tree tops this morning, the kind that looks exactly like the globe it is, illuminated by a single source just to the lower left and back.  It is abundantly clear why there was never a flat-moon society.

Flat, though, is how I feel this morning.  Post-election hangover, as I try to find a constructive way to parse the way things appear to have shaken out.  The low hanging fruit is the despair, cynicism, and frustration at what appears to be the foregone outcome.  The corporations have won again.  The enormous amount of money that poured into our state specifically to protect discrete corporate interests have successfully manipulated sufficient numbers of voters to jump the way they were prodded to jump.  In the midst of the worst recession since the 1930s we have been scared into hamstringing government, reducing state revenue even further, and guaranteeing polarized legislative gridlock on a greater scale.  Fun stuff.

We kept doggedly to our regressive form of state taxation, which raises most of its funds from the lower to middle class citizens and places a grossly disproportionate burden on lower incomes, but the wealthy remain safely less-taxed and corporations can continue to pool their resources.  With a population that does not critically examine media messages, money can drive (essentially, buy) election results, and does.

What are the themes we can draw from this election?  Bruce Cockburn, in his song Justice, sings that, "...everybody loves to see justice done, on somebody else."  I see quite a bit of that in this election.  Folks feel like they are paying for the sins of others and want it to stop.  Problem is, the general population has been successfully convinced the problem is other citizens and/or the folks who are in office now.  So we take it out on one another and retreat back towards the people and policies that were largely to blame for the current mess.  Or, as Paul Krugman writes in the NY Times, we've been mugged by the debt moralizers.

As I say, this is the low-hanging fruit of parsing the election results; despair, cynicism, and frustration.  It is easy to go there, and with good reason.  So what do we do with the results now that we have them? How do you constructively plan for a now-guaranteed larger state budget deficit, further program and services cuts, greater unmet citizen needs, and further redistribution of resources from poorest to wealthiest?

Well, those of us who work for colleges or other pieces of our education system need to redouble our efforts to help as many citizens as possible learn to critically examine media messages so that fewer citizens are so easily manipulated with toxic emotional messages in the future.  It's our only hope.  And we're going to have to find new ways to fund our education system in the process, cuz funding for education sure as hell isn't coming from the state or federal government, regardless of the pro-education rhetoric we still cling to in the U.S..

Maybe P.J. O'Rourke was right: "Feeling good about government is like looking on the bright side of any catastrophe.  When you quit looking on the bright side, the catastrophe is still there."  Or, as Bruce Cockburn says in the first song from this morning's random shuffle of music:

So we wait beside the desert
Nothing left to give away
Naked as the hanged Man's secrets
Praying for the break of day

That's probably closer to the truth.  We got what we, most of us as a citizenry, asked for.  Which is, for all it's warts and flaws, essentially how democracy works.  Democracy doesn't guarantee the best or even "right" results, only that the majority will get to call the shots. It may be corporate-sponsored democracy, and the media may manipulate the population, but we do still elect our own futures and live with the consequences of our choices.  In the first light of the morning after any election, we stand exposed as the society of our majority choices, naked as a hanged man's secrets for everyone to gaze at.

Bottom line: this is us.  If we don't like it, we're going to have to make different choices, one person at a time.

The full playlist:

 - Bruce Cockburn: You Don't Have to Play the Horses
 - John Mayer: Your body is a wonderland
 - Ralf Illenberger: Ballad
 - Jacob Fred Jazz Odyssey: Autumnal
 - John Mayer: Back to you

 - Posted via iPad