What a perfect metaphor for our America today. Bambi -- spirit of a young country. Great pristine forest -- new world of opportunities. "Man" -- word that sends Bambi and everyone in the forest into flight....!
Somehow, somewhere, things in this forest went terribly wrong. What had begun as an exciting adventure between our new people and our new world has arced over time from adventure to conquest to rape. And now we are all waking up to another of those morning-after consequences.
"Man" killed Bambi's mother in the story. Unfortunately "Man" is doing the same thing in real life. Under the glowing marquee of Free Enterprise and Yankee Capitalism, "Man" has continued to exploit not only the land and its resources, but over time all the Bambi's who dwell here. Every new climate-crisis headline, every new Wall Street and banking fraud, every new lobbyist revelation, every new fat-cat executive or Ponzi-scheme hustler, echoes like the gun that felled Bambi's mother.
Somehow, somewhere "Man" took the wrong turn in his newly discovered Eden. After years of pastoral Jeffersonian peace, he began making new Hamiltonian discoveries. How to clear the forests...squeeze the fields... empty the mine shafts... manipulate the suckers...short-change the customers.. own the politicians.... build economic empires here and wherever the Yankee dollar could reach under the flag of the-good-guys.
If this sounds like the old angry "Communist Manifesto," not quite. The Commies got some of their criticisms right, but their solutions wrong. And so, unimpeded ever since World War II, "Man" here has developed a proud, ambitious mind-set: When you're the good guys, the world -- here and abroad -- is there for you to lead. Of course, in leading you may have to be tough, strong, willing to win at all costs. But that's how the game is played. You know -- like the NFL. You know -- like the big boys with the limos and yachts do. And if some of the Bambi's get hurt or fleeced along the way, well that's just how the evolutionary spirit of unregulated Free Enterprise operates. Deal with it...!
The problem is that all we Bambi's are (once again in our history) waking up to an America that doesn't quite look like it does in all those wonderful Fourth of July celebrations. And if that shouldn't surprise us, somehow it still does. Then when a ragtag army of Pied Pipers by the names of Limbaugh and Beck and Hannity come piping along, they seem to be telling us: "Man" isn't the bad guy at all! He's just doing what Americans always do; and it's called it free, unhampered enterprise.
To say that "Man" here has built the world's greatest, most successful economic system in history is entirely true. But with every bright truth, there comes a dark back-story.
Now with the forests around us in the flames of economic failure and fraud, the Pied Pipers have decided that the real enemy in all this is the government. Whose monstrously un-American idea is that "Man" sometimes has to be watched. Otherwise he may, in his ambitions, lay waste to his forest and many of its Bambi's....
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OK, so all your GOP friends will dispute you. But then what do they know...?
ReplyDeleteCapitalism is certainly good for businessmen... but I'm not always sure about their children and especially their grandchildren. We live in a world of consequences.
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