Pixelated Semantics

A schizotypical inventory

The pitiless culture of winners and losers

The media continues with reinvention of political ideology - a comment peice in the New Yorker mentions "the Times" [NYT?] post-election analysis that "it is impossible to read President Bush's re-election [cut] as anything other than the clearest confirmation yet that this is a center-right country". The writer also acutely identifies the shortcomings of the evangelical approach to politics:

"In voting for Bush, as eighty per cent of [religious conservatives] did, many of these formerly nonvoting white evangelicals are remaining true to their unworldliness. In voting for a party that wants to tax work rather than wealth, that scorns thrift, that sees the natural world not as a common inheritance but as an object of exploitation, and that equates economic inequality with economic vitality, they have voted against their own material (and, some might imagine, spiritual) well-being. The moral values that stirred them seem not to encompass botched wars or economic injustices or environmental depredations; rather, moral values are about sexual behavior and its various manifestations and outcomes, about family structures, and about a particularly demonstrative brand of religious piety."

He concludes, rightly, that

"This is not a center-right country. It is a center-right country and a center-left country, but the center has not held. The winner-take-all aspects of our system have converged into a perfect storm that has given virtually all the political power to the right."

And the same, one could argue, holds true for Australia in the present-day, with a majority of left-leaning citizens being without effective representation at all, and being faced with the stance of our governments reaching out only to "everyone who shares our goals", the sense of alienation is likely to grow.

Item posted by AutoEditor at 11:38 am ::