Our one-sided Democracy

LEFT: Not on today's Front Page. From Life magazine 1965.

There's a certain theatrical repetition at our union meeting when our full-time officials give their "jobs" report. They invariably try to dress up mutton as lamb, as my mother used to call it. They try to portray the jobless figures in a kind of, "it could be worse" scenario by perhaps pointing to a Local union that has more jobless. Or they will say "only" 15% of our members are jobless. This is inevitably followed by some yelling from the floor or a pointed question that embarrasses the union official and then we move on. I often talk about the real human cost of unemployment: the despair, in particular, of those nearing the end of their unemployment benefits.

I just hung out with a friend, in his mid-40s, who's whole life has been shadowed by war. His father came back from Vietnam, when my buddy was just five. He had a couple of good years with him before he died. He died as a result of complications associated with the hell that was the Vietnam war.

His father left behind him a huge library of radical African American studies books. At aged 7, my friend had read Malcolm X Speaks, and by his teen years he'd read most of his father's books. This was the backbone for him in his life.

In his twenties, during the 1980s, the anti-civil rights counterrevolution in the form of the crack epidemic was in full swing. "Everyone was getting killed back then," he told me, "my goal was to reach 1990. It was that simple. I wanted to make it to the next decade. If I could do that, I'd be happy."

He survived the urban war. The war that grew out of this country's deliberate segregation of poverty and this nation's refusal to wipe out poverty. This policy of capitalism is not aimed at the poor, but at the everyone else: if you don't work hard, if you don't do what you're told, you too could fall into a pit of crime and murder. It's perhaps the most highly-developed form of the old policy of divide and rule. Its so good, its not obvious to everyone.

As a historical irony what saved my buddy, in his eyes, was joining the army in the mid-80s. He got out of the ghetto. It was during one of those few periods when America was not at war. "Every single day, I think about my dad" he told me. Every single day, forty years later the US war in Vietnam haunts him.

Perhaps next time Obama reports on Afghanistan and gets his polite questions from the corporate media he should instead be in a room filled with parents, spouses and children of departed soldiers.