|::| Sunday, August 04, 2002
- |::| Sitting Beside the Glory Road 12:13:56 AM
-
I've been thinking of the glory road.
It was... what, '85? '86? I remember working on it during my meal break at McAuto Systems Group, so it must have been that winter. It was the Reagan Era, and deep innit. Every turn the nation took pointed us westward toward the pyre; every step the nation took put our feet farther along that path.
We were ruled then as now by people who believed in armageddon. And their face-men believed only in money, or so it might seem. The more awesomely frightening of them, like Reagan himself (and, we now know, Dick Cheney) could revere God and Manna simultaneously. Verily, they seemed as the Antichrist of Christian sermons: Fair in form and speech, promising wealth (and who promised wealth more than the predominantly right-wing Christian supply-siders?) and speaking of peace, if even through war, and a government for the whole world, if only under the aegis of the World Bank.
I didn't fear these things when Clinton was in office. He, at least, believed in power, and the power he believed in was that of the flesh and spirit joined: The willing loyalty of the Followers of Men. Clintonites believed in the ideal of ideals; Bushites believe in the ideal of selfishness. Clinton's god was a vague being that he prayed to and exptected to offer some kind of distant guidance -- a slave-god, in a nutshell. Bush and Cheney and Ashcroft's God is the Great Manager, who leads by greed and terror. A master god, as it were.
But these aren't the master and slave gods of Nietzsche; they're something new, or perhaps something American. Class boundaries in 19th C. Europe were matters of what people believed was possible; class boundaries in 20th/21st C. America are a matter of what people believe themselves to be capable of.
