A Must Read Column From David Michael Green

Hop on over to Common Dreams to read the full column. Green offers a brutal assessment of political reality in America today. Here’s a sample from his long column:

Looking at the rhetoric the right throws in the direction of our president these days, questioning his very nationality (oh, did I mention that he’s black?), it’s easy to see that they‘ve gone completely over the line.  But what’s really out of control is what lies underneath this insanity generated for the consumption of an ignorant hoi polloi.  And what that is – what you see when you move the slime-infested rock away – is an unfathomably monstrous greed.  Watching these folks in action, you could easily get the impression that they had been impoverished their whole lives.  That they had been denied everything, right down to food and water.  That they had been deprived through poverty especially of their dignity.  You know, like the real poor people of this world, the forty or fifty percent of the Earth’s population that survives on less than two dollars per day.  Those folks. 

Instead, we are talking about people who are already fantastically rich.  And who, despite this, are absolutely hell-bent on getting richer, even if that means depriving hundreds of millions of people in the American middle class of their middle classness, and in many cases, ultimately of their lives.  How do we explain people like this?  Are they not essentially sociopathic?  Are they not made of essentially the same stuff as those who can kill without guilt or remorse?  Especially when you consider that even the greediest among us reach a limit beyond which one can effectively make use of the next dollar and the one beyond that, so that pushing others into poverty is no longer even for purposes of your own benefit, but instead for some kind of sick sport?  Aren’t these the characters whose essential sickness preachers and philosophers and shrinks have been trying to sort out for millennia? 

 

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