When you want to put down an enemy, you get out your paintbrush and paint over the picture of your enemy, putting on pointy ears, horns, forked tail, and hoofs. We are conditioned how to interpret that picture: It's the devil! There are other devils we are conditioned to fear, and one of those is the name of Karl Marx.
Don May, the retired doc with too much time on his hands whose untra-conservative John Bircher blog is flogged by the Avalanche-Journal to try to rescue it's flagging circulation among its ultra-conservative, Lubbock base*, recently wrote this: "Marxists are the barbarians of modern history. Marxists purposely create class hatred and envy to attract and enlarge their political base."
Now why on earth would Don May be bashing Marxists, in an era when Russia and China have gone to the "greed is good" side of the equation and about the only communist country left is Cuba and Karl Marx is in greater decline as a prophet of history than at any other time after the publication of Das Kapital? Was May coming out of a bad dream where his retirement accounts at Merrill-Lynch were being assailed by barbarian hoardes?
Yes and no. There is method in his madness. For years now May has been painting Obama and the Democrats as socialists/Communists out to grab his pocketbook. And we, the readers, are conditioned from birth to regard Communists and communism as the ultimate baddie, after Judas and Osama.
Right now, May along with other ultra-conservatives are worried about a new popular movement. They worry that it might not fizzle out but take hold in ways that could threaten the value of their portfolios and the big spenders like the Koch Brothers who fund the Republican Party. They are worried about the Occupy Wall Street demonstrations. They are worried about populism. They are worried about the power of the people.
Don May takes a warped and selective view of history. Warped by longtime affiliation with the John Birch Society View of the Universe and by the solipsism of extreme conservatism.
Fact was, one irritant that sparked off the American Revolution was popular hostility toward rich and influential Tories. Which was used and inflamed by clever manipulators like Samuel Adams.
The Civil War began partly because of the resentment norterners felt toward rich planters who augmented their wealth by the use of slaves. Apart from matters of fairness and civil rights, slaves were seen as unfair competition to paid workmen, sort of the way we today think of our jobs exported to El Salvador, Bangladesh, and Honduras.
The driving force of American politics after 1870 or so was the conflict between big banks and big railroads on one side and farmers on the other; free silver, and so on. Which morphed into conflict between big corporations and trusts on one side and the working class on the other. Which morphed into the war between the owners of companies and the politicians they bought and the union movement.
America has been a textbook of class struggle and economic conflict.
What is happening now in these Wall Street Protests are nothing new. They are not Marxist, they are populist. They are the people versus those who feed upon the people.
That said, I don't think the demonstrations will last. Too few are hungry enough and desperate enough or innured to hardship enough. No modern American has the balls to stand up to the clubs of Pinkertons and the bullets of national guardsmen the way laborers did a hundred years ago, for example. There are so many distractions in our consumption-driven lives; we suffer from national ADHD and will soon lose focus and wander off.
*I don't visit May's blog, nor argue there, because every click on that blog and every disagreement posted is a point increase in the blog's internet ratings and a victory for May. I saw the quote because nearly every hard copy issue of the Lubbock Avalanche Journal carries a quote from May in large print on page 2. (Damn, I have to stop subscribing to that newspaper! But I ought not to complain; back when the newspaper hosted an internet forum, they selected a quote from one of my posts often enough.)
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