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Ounce versus pound, the final battle
Posted by Mike Sugarbaker at 7:57 pm on 10/4/2005
Many of us have now given at least some of what we can spare to the Red Cross, and that is terrific. Their needs are ongoing. Giving blood would be good too. But if you have some more money kicking around, it might be time to consider putting some of it towards prevention.
I’m not talking about preventing hurricanes, although people are working on that. I mean preventing future disasters of leadership on the scale of the federal government’s response to the flooding of New Orleans.
You might be thinking that the Democrats now have plenty of political ammunition now to demand accountability from the party in power and wreck some shop in 2006; you’d be both right and wrong. After all, political ammunition only does you good if you know how to load, aim, and fire. (Don’t smirk, Deanies and Greenies, until you read the rest of the post. Because you aren’t as far ahead of the Dems as you imagine, and in some cases you’re behind.) We cannot just assume that media outrage about Katrina’s aftermath will win Congress back for us.
We can’t assume this because the Bush administration, and other entities, take advantage of a multi-billion-dollar infrastructure of research – “a scaffold of lies strong enough to hold under pressure,” to paraphrase Warren Ellis – that has been built up over forty years. This research has been done by organizations like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute – names you have probably seen underneath the names of conservative talking heads on the news. These organizations and others like them take large grants, mostly from large corporations, and do research – not just on language, as George Lakoff has made famous, but on policy and on morality and values themselves (as George Lakoff tried to make famous). With forty years of that kind of money, neoconservatives have invented a movement, learned precisely how to game television (and built themselves nice interview facilities for interviews via satellite), and generally developed a tendency to win arguments both in person and in the media.
It is no exaggeration, and no insult, to say that conservatives are winning in America because they have had so much thinking done for them. “By relieving the brain of all unnecessary work, a good notation sets it free to concentrate on more advanced problems, and in effect increases the mental power of the race.” – Alfred North Whitehead.
There are precious few organizations that are even trying to develop any such notation for the left. The Rockridge Institute is one. If you have any budget left for cleaning up after the massive dual tragedy of Hurricane Katrina and our government’s plan for it, please consider investing in an ounce of prevention by giving them a donation. If you’re not so much with the cash, but know a little something about the Internet, get in touch with me – I might be cooking up a cunning plan for Buy Nothing Day.