With news that 42 out of 45 Congress Senators who opposed Obama's modest gun reforms were in the pay of the gun lobby, US journalist David Simon reflects on how deeply corrupted America's democracy has become.
Never mind that the higher house of our bicameral farce is one in which 40% of the American population chooses 60% of the representation; that millions of New Yorker or Texans, say, are represented and served to the same degree as thousands of Montanans. And never mind that the lower house has now been gerrymandered to a point where a majority of American votes are guaranteed to achieve a minority of the representation – ignore, for the sake of argument, the ridiculous and antiquated structural impediments to popular will ever achieving a popular outcome. Don't worry about that mess. Just focus on the money.
Our elections – and therefore our governance – have been purchased. Instead of publicly funded elections, instead of level playing fields, instead of processes in which the power of actual ideas prevails over the size of the bankroll, we have given our democratic birthright over to capital itself. A gun manufacturer's opinion can be thousands of times louder than the voice of any grieving Connecticut parent. And the damage that might come to political careers from individual Americans who wish to have gun laws require as much responsibility of gun owners as, say, motor vehicle laws? It pales when compared to the damage that can come to political careers from a lobbying group backed to hilt by those who will profit directly from the fear and violence in our culture.
Measured against profit and political security, dead children mean nothing. Common sense is easily dispatched. Truth itself is expendable in any circumstance. Only cash still has meaning to those who claim to represent us. And the cash will always be there, more with every election cycle. Unsatisfied with the profits that can be achieved within the context of actual representative government, capital has instead succeeded in buying the remnants of democracy at wholesale prices, so that profit can always be maximized and any other societal need or priority can be ignored.
That corporations are people was not the great effrontery of the US supreme court's evisceration of democratic principle. No, for all of its ugly tenor, that statement has long been true under the law; corporations have long existed as a concept by which business interests could have the legal standing of individuals. Corporations-are-people got the righteous ink, but the venal sin at the heart of Citizens United lies in the appalling equivocation that declares money to be speech.
One man, one vote? And may the best ideas prevail in an open and discerning marketplace of ideas? Please.
When career politicians are obliged to contemplate the cash available for dishonorable votes, or the cash that will be delivered to opponents in the wake of honorable ones, how can any actual idea matter? Every day, there is less of this republic to respect, but in the United States Senate, there is little to nothing that remains. True, popular sentiment can't as easily be undone in a national contest of wide scope in which both parties are equally monied and mobilized, but it isn't the American presidency that's broken. No, it's the legislative branch; cash money has wrecked Congress, and in doing that much, it has paralyzed American governance beyond all practical hope.
Only fools play a rigged game forever, and governments that elevate money and firearms over human life, that treat their people and their will with such indifference – such governments eventually lose not only honor, but credibility. People lose the reason to believe. Eventually, a deep and abiding apathy prevails. Either that, or someone picks up a brick.
David Simon 28 April 2013
David Simon is an American author, journalist, and a writer/producer of television series. Previously, he worked for the Baltimore Sun city desk for 12 years. He is best-known as the creator of the HBO television series The Wire, for which he served as executive producer, head writer, and show runner for its five seasons
This article was first published on David Simon's website The Audacity of Despair and is reproduced here with kind permission.
For previous posts on US gun crime on this blog see here and here.
The views expressed in this post, as in all posts on Society Matters, are the views of the author, not The Open University.
Cartoon by Catherine Pain