Off topic? No apologies

My recent obsession with the US presidential campaign has overwhelmed my blogging about wine.  Wine is supposed to be the focus of this blog, and it usually is.  I love tasting, drinking, thinking, reading, writing and debating wine.  My deepest passion, as we know, is for Italian wine, and I am strongly attracted to the landscapes, culture and the people who make the wine.  I love crazy old Italy.  I feel at home there.

But we live in perilous times, as the cliche goes. I'm not speaking so much about the world's situation, which has been a hell of a lot more dire in my lifetime.  I'm talking about the perilous times we in the United States are living through.  I won't beat this one to death, we all know the litany of serious issues we are dealing with (or not dealing with, which is why things are so dangerous): declining standards of living for a large minority of Americans (those whose standard of living was never very high to begin with); the dilapidation of our physical and human infrastructures; the ruinous effects of two ill-advised (criminally so in one case) wars, financially and morally; the abridgment of civil liberty; a political culture driven more and more by the most superficial, selfish possible commercial motives; a steady erosion of American power and influence along with the willful ignorance of the concept of enlightened self-interest (remember the Marshall Plan?) -- I could go on.  But I did say I wasn't going to beat it to death, didn't I. 

We've been living through one of the periods in history characterized by the destruction of the commons.  Public services and facilities have been allowed to deteriorate, or indeed deliberately undermined, to serve short-term financial ends, not to mention ideological ones. Deregulation and starved public health services, for example, have led to a resurgence of the diseases of the poor and frail, such as tuberculosis.  A public transportation system has been starved by policy for decades to enable highway contractors, real-estate investors, etc., to flourish while again the less prosperous members of society have become more isolated and less able to participate fully in the society of work.  Public schools are denigrated for their many failures while private, "charter" and parochial options have proliferated.  And so on.  And on.

I'm old enough to remember some shreds of the mind set of the New Deal, the sense that we are all in this together.  That there must be fairness and a willingness to give the other guy a break.  That we had to help the unfortunate, and that the best way to do so -- to share the burden and assure the best level of assistance -- was through the township, the state, the federal government.  There was a real sense of a social contract, and it wasn't only or mainly the one between big employers and their employees.  The social contract was an assumed bond in, truly, American society.  Between the New Deal and the second world war, it had become internalized and solidified.  This was who we were. 

And when did this start to come apart?  I believe in the 1960s.  I believe it came apart because an idealized homogeneity of the American identity was shown to be incomplete and erroneous.  It was because black people demanded to take part in this commonality.  Quickly the very term "public" -- as in transportation, health, school, parks, etc. -- seemed to lose value in its "contamination" by these blacks.  Court-ordered enforcement of school integration was the single most destructive factor in this as white flight undermined central cities and created vast resentment and fear among whites and, I'm sure, among blacks as the gains they'd struggled for lost value through public abandonment and neglect.

The echoes of that time are heard clearly in the speeches and mantras of Republicans today as they continue to exploit the fear and anger of whites who have lost status and wealth over the past generation.  They exploit it cynically for the benefit of relatively few in order to divert public monies for their own profit under the banners of "choice" and "freedom" and "faith."  More drilling, more debt-fueled consumption, more tanks and weapon systems, etc.  Investing in our infrastructure -- why?  Where's the profit in it?  Investing in our people -- why?  We can get the guys in India to do it for less. 

This is usually framed in a false dichotomy: being for or against globalization, for or against the supremacy of the market, for or against growth.  In the meantime, we are running down this country, driving it into the ground, making it weaker and less able to compete in a more competitive world. Our political and business elites are corrupt beyond measure and utterly worthless to us.  They can only look back.  They cannot or will not see the future.

Comments

[dhonig]

Well said. Thank you.

[Doug Cook]

amen, brother.

[patrick]

Time and energy spent pointing the finger at the other party is exactly what this gaggle of clowns in Washington want. Regardless of party affiliation, they all need to be taken to task, and the whole damn system reworked. The problem is politics is now not public service but a career. To think that one party or another is going fix, or is to blame, is delusional. I visit(ed) your site oftern for great insight into wine and Italian culture.
Off Topic? Off my list of "wine" reading. I'll check back after the election.
No apologies.

[Strappo]

Gee, Patrick, sorry you're disgusted and fed up.

Tough shit.