The best of pals 1 Kenneth Roy How the Scottish…

The best of pals 2

Walter Humes

A bar in Hamilton
exemplifies the cronyism
of Scottish public life

The Cafe

Richard Simpson MSP

The best of pals 3

Dick Mungin

We should be careful
about celebrity support
for politicians

Norman Fenton


Giving up newspapers

Life and arts

George Chalmers

Mother



Hugh Kerr

Theatre

Islay’s pics

Monifieth, Angus

West end, Glasgow

Photographs by
Islay McLeod

America

Wisconsin brings hope

Leonard Quart

Recently I was looking on You Tube at nonagenarian Pete Seeger (with only a rasp of a voice left) and Bruce Springsteen passionately singing Woody Guthrie’s moving old left’s people’s anthem, ‘This Land is Your Land’, at the Obama inaugural in 2008.

     A couple of Guthrie’s original, more radical, and even today relevant verses were left out of this version as they usually are: ‘In the squares of the city, In the shadow of a steeple; By the relief office, I’d seen my people. As they stood there hungry, I stood there asking, is this land made for you and me?’. Still, the inaugural event at the Lincoln Memorial was a rousing musical one – a multi-racial chorus backing up the two singers and a joyous, diverse crowd exulting in the moment of triumph. Even our emotionally-controlled president-elect glowed, and quietly sang along. And though I sensed what the next two years would bring, I was still moved by the combination of the song and the historic context.
     My head usually puts a check on my political emotions. I can easily get sucked in and well up whenever I listen to union songs like ‘We Shall Not Be Moved’, or ‘Country Joe’ stirring the draft-age long-haired crowd (including some of my students) at Woodstock in 1969 to join in his anti-Vietnam War I-Feel-Like-Like-I’m-Fixin’-To-Die Rag. Blasts from the past, when there was a mass base for social change.
     But before nostalgia carries me away, my awareness that those high moments rarely have much effect on the real political world stops me. In politics what may seem radiant and even sublime is usually followed by the mundane and compromised (if not outright betrayal), as events shift from protest or oratory to legislative action. One just has to hope against hope that the concessions and accommodations aren’t too great, and a relatively positive result is ultimately achieved.
     My feelings of exhilaration after Obama’s election and inaugural slowly diminished with each passing month of his time in office. I continue to admire his grace, sensitivity and complex intelligence, and I believe there have been substantial, though far from transformative, political gains in the last two years. For example: the lifting of the Bush restrictions on federally-funded embryonic stem cell research; the repealing of ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’; and, of course, the much diluted heath care bill, among others.
     But the administration has been overly cautious, been given to too many compromises; and the Republican opposition is more callously destructive and reactionary than any in my memory. So, to keep my political despair under wraps, I like remembering that luminous singing instant on You Tube when one could feel that American society and politics were on the rise.
     That’s true especially now with a genuine deficit problem, a budget battle looming, and spending cuts that are proposed – ranging between the painful and apocalyptic. The Republicans in the House are demanding tens of billions of dollars of cuts from current federal spending, including: slashing all the funding of their usual bete noires – NPR, planned parenthood, and AmeriCorps; reductions in the budget for the national endowment for the arts, and the EPA; and pitiless cuts of a whole host of programmes that are aimed at helping the poor.
     Obama’s budget, though also proposing some unacceptable cuts in discretionary funding, is somewhat better. It includes billions of new dollars to educate children, regulate financial markets, and develop cleaner fuels. In columnist Paul Krugman’s words: ‘President Obama is less bad than his opponents and he deserves much more credit for fiscal responsibility than he’s getting’.
     The Republicans may indulge in mob-like, job-killing gestures, but the Senate will never pass the cuts, and the president has said he would veto them. Unless the newly elected Tea Party wing of the Republicans pushes for a government shutdown, some distasteful compromise is in order.
     But more dramatic and significant than the national budget battles are the demonstrations we are now seeing in Wisconsin. State and local governments are required to balance their budgets, but the governor of Wisconsin has taken the inequitable policy of cutting jobs and demanding givebacks from employees – accompanied by an unwillingness to raise taxes on the wealthy and the corporations – one step further.
     Wisconsin and its governor Scott Walker are out to destroy the public employee unions (which are offering givebacks), stripping their rights to organise and bargain collectively. Walker is in the pocket of the right-wing multibillionaire Koch brothers of Wichita, Kansas, who own the second largest privately held company in the US, and through numerous PACs have financed Tea Party initiatives across the US. They also have donated $43,000 to Walker’s recent gubernatorial campaign and financed a multi-million dollar ad campaign attacking his opponent. If Walker succeeds in Wisconsin, union busting will be extended to other Republican states. And the unions – however weakened – still remain the most powerful institutional opposition to corporate interests in the country.
     The protests in Madison are our own less dangerous and ambitious version of Tahrir Square and Tunisia. As a political theorist friend wrote to me: ‘We would do better to conceive of the real history of democracy as the history of popular struggle, in which the people learn how to govern themselves. The great moments of the creative democratic process are not parliamentary sittings or elections but strikes, demonstrations, marches and occupations’.      His words strike me as a bit too sanguine, because the act of protest always has to be followed by the prose of politics. A demonstration can be heady, and an unusually wide range of demonstrators, from cab drivers to firemen, is participating in the Wisconsin protest. But however stirring, it’s never sufficient to bring about change. Still, the Wisconsin demonstrations can’t help but move one, and provide some glimmer of hope.

Leonard Quart is a professor emeritus of American studies

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