It’s the question that’s on everyone’s lips:  why would the Republicans want to bankrupt three quarters of the American population, while sending the remaining one quarter over the moon financially?

Even taking into account the degeneration of our system of checks and balances of which we are so proud, there doesn’t appear to be a rational explanation for the behavior of the Tea Party – or, for that matter, approximately half the voters who seem to supporter their current attitude toward the budget.

I think we can assume that the voters are war weary both in terms of the Beltway and the Great Beyond (our equivalent of the former Soviet Union’s Near and Far Enemies, also taken up by Al Qaeda…).  They’re ready to endorse the Republican stance simply because it looks quick and easy, instead of quick and dirty.

What’s seems illogical, however, is the attitude of the movers and shakers the world over who affirm : “We don’t have a revenue problem, we have a spending problem.”  They want the government to receive even less money from the richest individuals and the corporations, while bleeding the wage earners who built this country with one hand and taking away any benefits they may have with the other.

The key is the phrase ‘who built this country’.  We don’t need any more ‘builders’.  And we need fewer consumers.

I hate to say this, but since we cannot intelligently assume that the radical right cannot add and subtract, we have to conclude that the policies it is persistently pursuing serve a specific goal: reducing the population of manufacturing and other workers no longer needed by our post-industrial economy.

Corporate policies have the same goal: it doesn’t matter if oil spills or radioactive material pollutes the oceans; or if fracking for natural gas ruins the aquifers; or if Alaskan caribou go extinct: the shareholders will continue having the means to live in protected, gated areas of the world, consuming its last resources, as the ‘expendable’ populations die off.

Are the Democrats really part of this sordid deal? How could they not be, when they too are financed by the corporations whom the Supreme Court has anointed as ‘persons’?  The most we can say about the Democrats is that some of them may have a bad conscience.  The few who speak out cannot tip the scale in favor of humanity.

The fight over Medicare will be their last hurrah.

The expression first became a rallying cry during the First World War, with the slogan “Never Again.”  Then there came Buchenwald, and it was “never again” all over again.

Katrina was a natural disaster piled on top of Army Corps indifference, which was never to be allowed to happen again.

The more recent worldwide financial debacle really concentrated minds worldwide, so that, two years later, heads of finance from the countries that make things happen (even things that are never supposed to happen again) gathered in Toronto to make sure that this particular event should never happen again. The President returned home with an assignment from the countries that America used to tell what do do, which was to kick domestic opposition into line to create a Consumer Protection Agency (or whatever it’s called, don’t hold me to names) so that at least if this does happen again, it won’t be our fault.

The President was unwise to hold that it would never happen again.  But hardly less wise than BP that has been assuring us that thanks to its good faith and its technical know-how what we could all a “magnitude ten” oil spill would never happen again.

Never?  With more than 3000 oil rigs in the Gulf of Mexico alone, not to mention those we haven’t been told about in other oceans and on other lands.

Or, less spectacularly, the gas rigs whose numbers remain secret, on lands that used to be picture postcard perfect, throughout the country, fracking, or fracturing the soil hundreds of yards down, pumping scarce water laden with chemicals into once fertile land, sending fumes into the water pipes of nearby kitchens, causing them to burn in contact with a match.  At this point, the question becomes: “Never what?”

Never more jobs lost, never more private prisons built, never more men in search of work arrested, never more soldiers turned into invalids – never more what?

I don’t know if it was due to his famous poem “The Raven” that the early nineteenth century writer Edgar Allan Poe is seen as a forerunner  of science fiction, but surely our powerless lives today, would have been considered science-fiction in his time.

The hero of Poe’s poem hallucinates a black raven sitting unruffled over his bedroom door, repeating only one word: ‘Nevermore”.  He mourns the loss of his love Lenore, and asks the raven if there is “balm in Gilead”, to which the answer is also “Nevermore”.
Still not getting it, the poet implores:
‘Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,

It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels named Lenore     But: “Quoth the raven,`Nevermore.’”

Now, with a dramatic gesture the poet orders the beast to:

“Get back into the tempest and the Night’s Plutonian shore!”

“Take thy form from off my door!…. and leave no black plume as    a token of that lie…!”
Alas:
“The raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming

Unable to accept the finality of death, Poe wanted desperately to bring back the past.  We, very differently, imagine that we can prevent its repetition.   But like Poe’s demon, we are dreaming.