When I sat down to write today's post, a quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson came to mind --"By necessity, by proclivity, and by delight, we all quote." This led me to a few other quotes that seem appropriate for observing the current state of our politics.
-- "To feed the birds, you first have to feed the elephants." That political insight was given us by former Senator/Vice President/ Presidential candidate Hubert H. Humphrey, a happy political warrior of an earlier era. Over time the quotation has been used in altered form by others, terms such as supply side economics and trickle down theory. That is, feed the resources to the economic giants and the benefits will filter down to those below. That is where we are at in the current debate on what to do about the tax cuts made under President George W. Bush.
The GOP congressional leaders want to continue the tax reductions to the high income earners, defined as those filing joint returns with income over $250,000 a year, approximately 2 percent of tax filers. President Obama and the majority of congressional Democrats want to end the Bush tax cuts for the richest among us, while maintaining the reductions for the other 98 percent. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has said that no action will be taken on the issue in that chamber before the November elections. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said there could be a vote in the House before lawmakers go home to campaign for the midterm elections now just five weeks away. While the Republicans have taken a virtually unanimous partisan position on the issue, the Democratic leadership finds that conservative Democrats in both chambers are either outright opposed to raising the tax rate on the upper brackets now, or certainly don't want to have to vote on the issue before the elections.
That is about where things stand today. The point of this post is to give new life and new meaning to Humphrey's pointed, old quote. So as the political jockeying goes on, the birds await.
-- "Can we all get along?" Thus spoke Rodney King nearly 20 years ago. King, an African-American, gained national attention in l991 when a videotape was made by a nearby observer showing a group of policemen beating on King repeatedly on a sidewalk after a high speed auto chase in Los Angeles. A portion of the tape was used by the media causing a public outcry against police brutality. The police said that the force used was necessary because King, a large man, was resisting arrest. Four of the policemen were charged with use of excessive force. When the four were acquitted the following year, a riot broke out that left 53 dead, almost 2,500 injured, and about $1 billion in financial losses. To aid in quelling the riot, King was put on television where he made his famous statement, "Can we all get along?" (In a later federal trial, two of the four were found guilty and imprisoned, two were acquitted.)
The same question might be asked today to help bring calm back to our "to the barricades" political atmosphere, now characterized to a mixture of sometimes toxic rhetoric of the candidates backed by far right cheerleaders such as Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. Disagreement on policy issues and the rhetoric used is only part of the problem of political virulence, and perhaps the lesser part. The atmospherics are more heated when candidates and non-candidates like Beck wrap themselves in messianic robes and go forth as though they have been sent as God's messengers on earth. Along side of this assumption of divine guidance is a wrapped-in-the-flag patriotism.
Herein lies the heart of the problem. Many of those who have taken up the causes of the far right are also stating implicitly that those who do not see God and country the same way are thereby outside the pale of heavenly grace and are un-American.
So to answer Rodney King, "Probably not, certainly not in the near term." Regardless of who wins or loses in the coming elections, the tone of our politics has become too high decibel and too highly charged to expect any early return to political civility. To close on still another quote, this time from Pogo the comic strip possum who said in a different context in l971, "We have met the enemy and he is us."
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