I Didn’t Really Want All That Stuff, Anyway

20score

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Tue Feb-15-11 03:34 PM
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I Didn’t Really Want All That Stuff, Anyway

Edited on Tue Feb-15-11 03:45 PM by 20score

I have been a member of the professional left for most of my adult life. Well, as of today I am officially resigning my position and joining the corporate left. The pay was terrible and the hours were lousy. Most of the time I got paid in tofu and M&M’s. My soles are worn out from marching and the seats of my pants have holes from sit-ins. I have carried more signs – spelled correctly, thank you very much – than I have hairs on my head. This may come as a surprise to those of you who have been following my scribblings since my days with Jack Kerouac, but there has been a gradual slide to the right for the past two years. It just hasn’t been public.

A little over two years ago I was an idealistic youngster that wanted certain things for the country. Health care for all, a strong and vibrant middle-class, jobs, fair-trade, an end to illegal wars and torture. I wanted criminals, both political and financial, held to account. I believed that the spirit of the Constitution – the real one that was written on paper, not the one with Jesus in it – should be respected by all three branches of government. I was so naïve. But now I see the error of my ways and realize I can have the best of both worlds. The left and the right.

My conversion to what is now called the center began in 2009 when I and others like me were pushing for a public option with no mandate. I believed, like candidate Obama did, that some people were without insurance because they could not afford it, not because they were evil and greedy. I believed at the time that giving people a choice to opt out of for-profit health care was not only a good way to keep costs from skyrocketing, but that it wasn’t really all that Nazish in nature. That was before it was explained to me by Rahm Emanuel that I was a “fucking retard.” It had never been made clearer than that. We were wrong and he was right. Now I understand.

The same type of epiphany came to me when fretting about the fact that neither Bush nor anyone in his administration, or anyone who was responsible for trillions of dollars of theft, had been held to account. I had been making the mistake that was prevalent on the left at the time by conflating normal law, where things like present and past tense are taken for granted, with Pundit/President Law where things like what tense applies is more subjective. When Obama said that he had, “a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards,” I realized then how foolish my beliefs were. Now that I understand that persons subject to Pundit/President Law were only accountable for future actions, I once again felt irrational and envied those on the television who saw this so clearly from the outset.

Being part of the “professional left” means living with blinders on. There are so many subtleties that escape attention. A big one is how to bargain from a position of strength. I used to believe, in my ignorance, that is was better for one to hold onto an “ace in the hole,” so to speak, and concede only when necessary, than to give everything up before the game actually starts. Wrong! If one gives up more than is being asked, then the element of surprise is on that person’s side. The Bush tax cut extension debate was the perfect example of this strategy. Even though the strategy was employed successfully during the health care and energy debates, no one expected this clever ruse. And it worked. After the other side was given more than they had asked for, they stopped whining for more… Okay, maybe not stopped, but there was a decrease, of sorts.

For me, and for many of my companions on the corporate left, leaving the professional left is a win-win-win situation. Money is all around for the taking, the right still hates us and we can hold on to our liberal guilt with no sense of irony. See, there is a huge canyon separating the corporate left from the corporate right. We hold many of the same beliefs, such as the most beneficial security methods for the country are the most expensive and the most intrusive, regardless of effectiveness. We believe that revenue, or lack thereof, has no effect on budget deficits, so the only way to balance a budget is cuts to the politically powerless. But here’s where the differences become apparent – the right feels good about those cuts, and the left feels remorse. No one could ever confuse the two.

My conversion to the corporate left comes with, not surprisingly, a plea for money. Now that my ideology centers on making the rich richer, I expect the money to come rolling in. I just need a few leads?