Fantasy Island

WELCOME TO FANTASY ISLAND (FORMERLY KNOWN AS THE USA)

I am constantly being told by Bush supporters that they think he is a good man. How they have come to this conclusion is a mystery to me. Apparently it is a mystery to them because they stutter and grope for an explanation when asked to explain his goodness. All I can see of our president is a self-serving child of privilege who has sought with every public move of his career to strengthen the position of those already wealthy and connected in America. Bush struts around on a pretend ranch like Marie Antoinette in her fake farm at Versailles, as he tries to live out his fantasy that he is a regular, hard-working guy.

He showed a complete lack of magnanimity as president after an election that he didn’t win. His style of governing, which completely lacks compromise, he calls having the power of his convictions. Although he clearly lost the popular election by a half million votes, he rules as if he won a mandate from the people. In the words of Gil Scott Heron: Mandate My Ass.

He has called the fat tick of American society--our top 1%--“job creators.” Bush has given them more of an advantage to amass even greater riches at the expense of the bottom 25% of the populace. The jobs the American elite are creating for the most part are not enough to lift a lot of people out of poverty, as those ranks swelled by 1.4 million last year. The Bush plan of creating a culture of ownership points to a society where the top 1% do a whole lot of the owning. U.S. citizens in the lower 25% income have seen their wages drop by 16% over the past 25 years while working longer hours with less time off for vacation than any industrialized nation.

The biggest Republican fantasy is that most people I know who admit to being Republican also think that they got to where they are today by their own hard work and determination. They have forgotten about the public aid they received. They can’t remember the inexpensive and high quality public education they were offered. They have a collective sense of amnesia concerning their own upbringing in working class households with good, stable union jobs. My own childhood neighborhood was made up almost entirely of union workers. Every family I knew had health insurance, stay-at-home mothers, stability, and almost every family owned their own home.

The Republicans now view public entitlements as fit only for parasites, those citizens not capable of making it ow their own hard work and gumption. Welfare is only for the lazy and indigent. They have forgotten that probably the single greatest leap in the prosperity of this nation came after our soldiers returned from WWII. The government granted them the G.I. Bill to get a college education and Veterans Administration guaranteed loans to buy houses. My own father took advantage of both of these welfare programs.

So many of us today live in a fantasy world in which we believe an SUV is a necessity for the outdoorsy lifestyle we live even though most SUV owners never actually drive off-road. We live in a fantasy world in which we don’t think that driving fuel efficient automobiles is cool or necessary. We attach status symbols to horse power instead of mileage. John Kerry calls his energy plan “The great challenge of this generation,” the challenge of weaning ourselves from Middle East oil which Republicans would probably view as fantasy. Kerry’s plan will call for sacrifice, innovation, and a return to alternative energy plans scraped 20 years ago by Ronald Reagan, a president who saw things like solar power as fantasy or science fiction. The Republicans’ fantasy is to continue with an ever-increasing level of consumption with no thought to the consequences, with no thought to the future.

The most absurd Republican fantasy of all is the War on Terror or Terrorism or whatever it is they are calling it this week. They say that the war is of paramount importance to the survival of America, that it is a war of good versus evil, that it is a desperate struggle with an enemy both vast and far-reaching. This is being told to us by a group of men who never fought in battle and then swallowed hook, line, and sinker by a constituency who, for the most part, are choosing not to serve in the military or send their children to fight in the Middle East. I love the words of one 25 year old chicken hawk who claims to be a Republican who strongly supports the war but says that he doesn’t want to drop out of school to enlist. He said he might get the “bug” later. This is a war of good versus evil yet he needs to get a “bug” to actually participate?

I only hope that enough American voters will reject the Republican fantasy and help this country return to the conservative values of cooperation, sacrifice, taking care of all of our citizens, and tolerance.