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December 11, 2011
Tomgram: Engelhardt, The 1% Election
How to Turn Election Year Into Election Life
Their Bread, Our Circus
By Tom Engelhardt

Sometimes words outlive their usefulness.  Sometimes the gap between changing reality and the names we’ve given it grows so wide that they empty of all meaning or retain older meanings that only confuse us.  “Election,” “presidential election campaign,” and “democracy” all seem like obvious candidates for name-change.

I thought about this recently as President Obama hustled around my hometown, snarling New York traffic in the name of Campaign 2012.  He was, it turned out, “hosting” three back-to-back fundraising events: one at the tony Gotham Bar and Grill for 45 supporters at $35,800 a head ( the menu: roasted beet salad, steak and onion rings, with apple strudel, chocolate pecan pie, and cinnamon ice cream -- a meal meant to “shine a little light” on American farms); one for 30 Jewish supporters at the home of Jack Rosen, chairman of the American Jewish Congress, for at least $10,000 a pop; and one at the Sheraton Hotel, evidently for the plebes of the contribution world, that cost a mere $1,000 a head. (Maybe the menu there was rubber chicken.)

In the course of his several meals, the president pledged his support for Israel (in the face of Republican charges that he is eternally soft on the subject), talked about “taxes and the economy” to his undoubtedly under-taxed listeners, and made this stirringly meaningless but rousing comment: “No matter who we are, no matter where we come from, we're one nation.  We're one people. And that's what's at stake in this election."

Outside his final event, Occupy Wall Street protesters saw something else at stake, dubbing him the “1% president.”  The end result from a night’s heavy lifting: $2.4 million for his election campaign and the Democratic National Committee, nowhere close to 1% of what they will need for the next year.

These were the 67th, 68th, and 69th fundraisers attended by Obama so far in 2011, or the 71st, 72nd, and 73rd.  (It depended on who was counting.) In either case, we’re talking about approximately one fundraiser every five days, a total of 6% of the events in which Obama took part in this non-election year.

Think about that.  You vote for the president to spend some part of 20% of his days raising money for his own future from the incredibly wealthy.  Or put another way, the Washington Post now estimates that if you add in the non-fundraising, election-oriented events that involve him -- 63 so far in 2011 -- perhaps 12% of his time is taken up with campaign efforts of one sort or another; and this is what he’s been doing 12 to 24 months before the election is scheduled to happen.

Click here to read more of this dispatch.Published on Wednesday, August 3, 2011 by TomDispatch.com

Sacrifice-Lite: The American Way

by Tom Engelhardt    http://www.theportlandalliance.org/engelhardt
 
Post-9/11, doesn’t it seem as though all American experience is blending into a single experience
whose label is “your safety?”  Which means, in practical terms, you get poked, prodded, searched,
and surveilled wherever you go.

The other day, I went to the ballpark to see my team, the Mets, play the Florida Marlins. 
It’s always a shock these days to make your way into the team’s new stadium, Citi Field
(named, charmingly enough, after one of the financial institutions that took us down in 2008
and somehow came up smelling like roses).  No more is it just tickets at the turnstile. 
What’s involved now is that peek into your backpack or bag, followed by the full-scale
search of you, body wand and all.

I always have the urge to shout: I’m here for a ballgame, not the Global War on Terror! 
Instead, of course, I just lift my arms and let myself be wanded.  It’s like an eternal reminder that,
for Americans, 9/11 did change everything -- and for the more intrusive at that. 
Once inside, past all the restaurants and clubs, memorabilia shops and sports-clothing stores
that now add up to the baseball (basemall?) experience, it turns out you haven’t left America’s
wars behind.

In about the fourth inning of this particular humdrum game, only modestly attended on a Monday night,
the looming Jumbotron in the outfield (where I was sitting) suddenly flashed a shot of an Iraq
War veteran in the stands.  Caught in the camera’s eye, he stood up to wave, bringing the sparse
crowd to its feet cheering.  Then, former Mets great Tom Seaver came on screen making a pitch
for vets, which he concluded this way: “They’ve made their sacrifice.  Now, it’s time for us to do the same.”

And then, of course, everybody sat down, went back to hotdogs and peanuts, and the game proceeded. 
As Andrew Bacevich, author of Washington Rules: America’s Path to Permanent War, points out in a
particularly striking way in his piece “Ballpark Liturgy: America’s New Civic Religion,” it’s no mistake
that pleas like Seaver’s end in mid-air on nothing whatsoever.  Like the Bud Lite being sold all over that
stadium, sacrifice-lite is being sold all over America when it comes to wars that most of us are almost
completely detached from (until the bills start coming in).  Sacrifice-lite turns out to have less body and
isn’t filling, but nobody’s about to complain.  Not in America. 

Copyright 2011 Tom Engelhardt