By PETER S. FERRARA<br>Record Columnist
We the People are angry, there’s no two ways about it. Our anger shows up in surveys, focus groups, and interviews. We know some mighty big changes are going down on many different fronts all at the same time—and we don’t like it one darned bit! Just stop anybody on the street and they can tell you something the government is doing that’s either stupid, criminal, disrespectful, or just plain crazy. The word’s out that our Uncle Sam’s ineffective, bumbling, and incredibly wasteful. Or he’s utterly corrupt and in the pocket of big business and their agents of bribery called lobbyists—as if the maniacal capitalist Mr. Burns from The Simpsons was pulling all the strings.
What bothers most folks is this feeling that we’re still heading in the wrong direction—the one the President said he’d turn around. They’re not really sure how to fix the mess we’re in. They’re only confident the government can’t do it. I can’t fix this mess either, but I have found the word that describes what people are feeling. The word is “inchoate,” pronounced in-KO-ate. Besides meaning “only partly formed,” my Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines inchoate as having “suspicions that all is not well with the nation.”
That’s it for sure. Seems like the only people even remotely happy about America these days are our allies around the world who hated the previous administration and like the new one much better. But for many Americans, the domestic scene is bleaker than the moors in Wuthering Heights. We the People got a recent eyeful of the legislative process surrounding health care and decided that it was pretty ugly—a favorite oxymoron.
Some of us have a vague hatred of government. For others, the hatred is not so vague. We’ve had more Tea Parties than the Mad Hatter in Alice In Wonderland. We’re as angry as Howard Beale, the deranged television personality played by Peter Finch in the movie Network who said: “I’m mad as hell, and I’m not going to take it anymore!” Of course, Beale went on to kill himself on the air. I hope we don’t get that desperate.
Media play a large role in this American malaise. Tune into Glenn Beck and you’ll be told that all our problems are caused by Progressives like me. I watched Beck’s show a couple of times last week and was just about convinced to take myself outside and give me an old fashioned country butt kicking. Then I watched Rachel Maddow’s show and wanted to kick Glenn Beck’s butt instead. Those TV and radio hosts really know how to stir up a hornet’s nest—and make a very nice living doing it.
You’d be hard pressed to find anybody saying that government—big or small—is working well in the people’s interest these days. The anger is spread widely across all sections of the people. Democratic Liberals and Progressives and their counterparts within the group identified as Independents think President Obama has shifted too far to the right. In their view Washington has completely sold out to the Conservatives on health care, Afghanistan, the Wall Street and big bank bailouts, campaign finance reform, and a host of other issues.
Conservatives and their kin among the Independents are sure Obama is a Socialist bent on destroying America’s health care system and taking down capitalism by over-regulating Wall Street and the big banks. Their widely held belief is that the government is lousy at everything, and that less regulation and lower taxes are the path to progress. And they’d be right except that less regulation led to the Savings and Loan disaster a few years back and to the economic meltdown we’re in today. Lower taxes across the board always sounds good until you discover that it benefits rich folks way more than middle class or poor people. Slashing taxes today would only add to our huge debt, because we’ve never waged a war, much less two wars, without asking Americans to pay for it with higher taxes. The rich are richer than ever before and the rest of us are inchoate.
Are you tickled by the recent bonus bonanza Wall Street and big bank executives have paid themselves after we bailed them out with our money? The market’s up, the banks are rolling in dough, and for them happy days are here again. The arrogance of our corporate titans provides real insight into the mind set of those with their paws all over the nation’s financial engine.
What they’ve shown us is that they think they deserve more because by profession they are at the intersection of business and finance. Their greed has become so shameless it is dividing us dangerously into those who want to stop them versus those who want to join them.
All this anger occurs against a backdrop of seemingly endless war, humongous unemployment, a credit freeze to small businesses, and homes “underwater” with outsized mortgages. Not being able to get the economy moving, pay our bills, and create jobs is driving people nuts. As one member of the “Jets” gang in West Side Story so aptly put it: “We’re depraved (because) we’re deprived!”
I don’t think anything can be fixed in an environment as poisonous as this one. Both political parties seem to be bent on putting their own interests ahead of ours. So the people are reacting in strange ways. The “true blue” state of Massachusetts filled the Senate vacancy created by Ted Kennedy’s passing with—OMG—a Republican! Never mind that he supported universal health care in his home state and that he’s pro-choice, he ran on killing the Democrat’s health care bill and he won! Of course, a big part of his campaign was “We’ve already got a great government run health care system. Why should we pay more so the rest of the country can have one, too—and it worked. When in doubt—run against the government and you can win.
Now the right wing majority of the Supreme Court has engaged in judicial activism and contempt of a century-old precedent by lifting all restraint on campaign contributions by Big Business and Big Labor. What does that mean? It means your voice and mine will be completely drowned out by the torrents of money the rich can shower upon favorite politicians or against political foes. The bottom line is that a corrupt system will now become even more corrupt, all in the name of the huge lie that money equals free speech. It doesn’t if the only effect is to silence the voice of the underclass, which is precisely what the court has done.
So let’s add it all up. The President is an ineffective tyrant with a communist agenda.
Congress is utterly corrupt and too busy taking bribes from lobbyists to return your call. The Judiciary only applies the concept of not cannibalizing the Constitution when it benefits the rich and powerful. Which leaves us at the mercy of know-nothing’s, fat cats, and “fixer’s.” Is it any wonder that we’re inchoate. At least now we know what we’re all feeling. “IMNCO8RU?”
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Editor's note:
in·cho·ate
Pronunciation: \in-ˈkō-ət, ˈin-kə-ˌwāt\
Function: adjective
Etymology: Latin inchoatus, past participle of inchoare to start work on, perhaps from in- + cohum part of a yoke to which the beam of a plow is fitted
Date: 1534
: being only partly in existence or operation : incipient; especially : imperfectly formed or formulated : formless, incoherent
Source: Merriam-Webster Dictionary
IMNCO8RU? = "I am incohate, are you?"
