The Weekly Screed (#565)

Letting a little history flow
by David Benjamin

BROOKLYN — Last month in Wisconsin, I willfully violated the sanctity of a family holiday by bringing with me — to Thanksgiving dinner — a petition for the recall of Governor Scott Walker, an anti-government zealot who has inspired the most tumultuous protests in Wisconsin history by, among his offenses, eradicating virtually all forms of collective bargaining and waging a war of attrition on public schools.

I was up against a tough crowd. My big lovable stepbrother Tom, a born-again ex-stoner who prayed Grace, typifies my stepfamily in his fondness for Gov. Walker. Tom suspended his Christian charity (and disregarded Deuteronomy 24:15) long enough to refer to union workers as “whiners,” a term taken directly from the Fox News gospel.

Not that I was shut out. My sister Peg signed, as did brother Bill. Also sympathetic were Big Bill — my dad — and Lyla, my New Deal stepmother. Dad and Lyla, whose lives depend, literally, on Social Security and Medicare, are nakedly appreciative of a government which has — all their lives — provided for certain human needs that the currently sacrosanct “market” will always deem superfluous because unprofitable.

So, four signatures at Dad’s house. But after football, when the feast moved to Jennie’s house, my petition laid an egg bigger than Ed Schultz’s head. Preacher Tom used my own words to call me “divisive.” Gary, the family “professor,” simply snorted and left the room — compelled to silence for the first time in my memory.

Irked that nobody would sign and irritated that my loved ones wouldn’t even talk about it, I lashed out. Targeting Tom’s wife, Vicky, I pounced on her only because she mentioned harmlessly that Shane, her son, was joining the Air National Guard.

My know-it-all lecture started with General Billy Mitchell and the controversial formation of the Army Air Corps. I escalated into a polemic against the U.S. Air Force’s pet project, the vastly profligate Lockheed Martin F-35 joint strike fighter jet — a one-plane National Debt which, if the Pentagon gets its way, will cost Vicky and me and all the rest of us at least $320 billion in pissed-away taxes.

Vicky soon fled in alarm, as though I was bearing down on her in a fully-armed F-35. My wife, Hotlips, informed me that I was being a boor. Conceding her point, I gave up trying to win people over. I did announce (softly) that I had a Recall Walker petition should anyone like to sign. To that, the most telling response came from stepsister Sherry, who said “Leave him (meaning, I assume, Gov. Walker) alone.”

In three little words, Sherry had captured the intellectual essence of what might be termed the Fukuyama Syndrome. Historian Francis Fukuyama once famously described the Cold War’s conclusion as “the end of history.” In politics, a similar interpretation affects people whose side has won an election so decisively that most of their dearest policy dreams soon become actual law. They come to see their triumph as political “closure” for one and all. Therefore, they conclude, any further political activity is unnecessary. We won, they say, and that is the end of politics. “Now, leave us alone!”

Of course, Gov. Walker’s interests are largely hostile to those of my Walker-loyal family. As indicated by his corporate and financial ties — Walker represents a class known lately as “the one percent.” My whole Thanksgiving crowd, however, are the hardcore “99-percent.” We include, for example, at least 12 government employees — precisely the breed of parasite that Walker is striving to wipe from the face of the state.

Worse, I saw no one around the table who had not, at some point, been part of Eric Cantor’s contemptible 47 percent of Americans too poor to pay income tax. We had all been there, just as we’d all qualified for free school lunch, at least for a while. We all know what a food stamp looks like up-close, and many of us had gotten through the month on a boxful of food handed out by the county. I looked around and noted at least six of my loved ones currently collecting Social Security and paying Doc Welby with Medicare. I estimated that more than a dozen of us, at times, had had to sign up for unemployment. Tom? Don’t tell, but he got by for quite a while on workmen’s comp.

But never mind. Trying to get into detail with people who don’t really want information only sours the mood. I filled my plate, and sat down alongside a distant cousin, Linda and her mother, Alta. While we made small talk, I climbed down off my high horse. But I couldn’t quite get politics off my mind or the chip off my shoulder. Risking rejection, I murmured to Linda that I had a recall petition, if she wanted to sign.

Linda said oh! yes, she would, if she could. But she feared reprisals from an employer who depends on good relations with the governor’s office. I said I understood.

I glanced at Linda’ mother, my last faint hope. None of this was in my mind exactly, but I had a hunch about Alta. Her face was as still as the Sphinx; her eyes had that flintiness that one associates with a battle-hardened seventh-grade teaching nun.

But, here was a woman whose history went all the way back to the days of the bonus army and to that glorious speech by FDR in which he compared “organized money” to an “organized “mob,” and said, “Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred.”

Alta, I knew, had seen Americans take to the streets again and again, prodding a hopeless government to acts of sheer salvation — from the WPA and the GI Bill to the Civil Rights Act and Medicare. But did she care? Did she see inspiration in public servants who had acted for the public good? Or had she gone over to a dark side of democracy where there nothing “public” is any good, where the only virtue is private gain, where the only prophets are hedge-fund seers, and where a weird post-millenial Jesus curses the meek and suffers the moneychangers to come unto him.

Cautiously, I looked this inscrutable old girl in the eye and I asked.
She made me wait, not to tease, but to reflect, to let perhaps a little history flow through her head. Then, with a nod and a little steel in her gaze, she said, “Yes. I’ll sign.”

I have a new heroine.