Anger, righteous or not!

I read with great pleasure and disgust Mark Danner’s piece in the New York Review of Books, an essay based on his commencement address to the graduating students of the Department of English of the University of California, Berkeley. The pleasure and disgust derive from exactly the same source: a perspective on the national zeitgeist. I have over the past five horrible years argued repeatedly that during the George Bush Jr. administration the wages of sin in America are obviously and remarkably plentiful. Indeed, those that have take great efforts and derive wonderful pleasures lauding their stealings over those from whom they have stolen. The number of millionaires has risen, the millionaires have become billionaires, and the power elite continue to gather their ill gotten wealth by using and abusing and disenfranchising the rest of us, laborers and workers and professional people alike. Indeed, over all those who make less than $100,000 per annum I have complained ad nauseum that the Bush Jr. administration is corrupt, impeachable, and mean. I have publicly worried that the country itself, having elected the criminals, is mean as well. I have mourned the abandonment of principle for the sake of ease and comfort by those already in power and who possess adequate pensions and health care. I am appalled at the cowardliness of the Democrats who have abandoned principle for . . . well, I guess I can’t exactly say what they intend to gain by their flight from decency and honest concern for those whom they would represent, because their present moral stances clear them of any taint of the Democratic Party. I have mourned the cowardliness of a press which refuses to ask not even the hard questions, but to leave unsaid the obvious ones as well. I have hated the public discourse which claims that I have no moral values because I didn’t support the illegal and unjust war, when I still do support universal health care, and the right to love whomever one cares to love, and to have some control over not only the nature of my family, but whether to have a family at all! I am sick at heart about not only the ethical stance of the elected officials of this country (and a few non-elected ones as well), but of the frightening direction in which we stumble in our present ethical positions And if ethics is the stance we take before the face of the Stranger—the one we do not know but for whom we must care—then I can hardly call what we practice in this country an ‘ethics.’

And so, the pleasure I had when I read Mark Danner’s piece is the confirmation that someone else felt as I did! But of course, my disgust stemmed from the pleasure. Dammit, I’m not crazy—it really is that bad!

I take no comfort in the guilty verdict today of the Klansman who murdered Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Michael Schwerner. They died in their youths; that bastard lived to a ripe old age. The ages of the four children who died in the Church bombing hardly add up to half of the age of the man who was finally convicted of planning and executing that obscene and murderous event. Justice, justice thou shalt pursue. Not here, not now!