For the majority of my lifetime, there have been two to three main shows running on political channels in the United States. There has been The Economy, a rarely-watched hour-long drama that occasionally grabs the public's attendion. There has been War, an on-and-off mini-series that only recently returned as a regular series with an attention-grabbing season opener in September of 2001. And there has been The Culture Wars, a gripping, sometimes ridiculous, sometimes outrageous long-running soap opera that predates my existence. All have amazing casts, and many share characters.
The third has been used by those in power, particularly of the Republican or conservative ilk, to distract us from the second to some extent and from the first at all costs. I believe this may have changed lately, and I think that can be used to advantage.
During my childhood, the Republican party's bluebloods entered into the unholy matrimony with the evangelical and religious right to assure that they would have a corps of useful idiots who could be told to scream about social issues and vote against their own economic self-interest while the upper one-half of one-percent of the income structure effectively looted the economy.
They have been wildly successful. The continuous push of the last three to four decades to reap capital rather than invest, be it in people, natural resources, infrastructure, education, or business, has now culminated in a final orgiastic bloodletting. The phlebotomists for this final massive wealth transfer have been financiers, congresspeople, the treasury secretary, our just-former president, and many others. They have done this against the backdrop of a war that was tailor-made to transfer hundreds of billions to cronies of those in power who occupy that top one-half of one-percent.
And it has all happened while America's eye has been blinded by the evangelical invasion of privacy and civil liberties. The problem is, the money-grab by one part of the party was accompanied by a power-grab by the other part. The results of both grabs have simultaneously scared the bejeezus out of a large proportion of the American public.
As a result, there is the opportunity to move forward on both fronts, or at least to begin to repair damage. The American public is very firmly fixated on that Economy show. Meanwhile, ratings for the current content of The Culture Wars are sagging badly. The advantage of this for people whose civil rights are still badly in disrepair is that, with a President whose approval ratings are sky-high and a majority in Congress in his party who will be subject to pressure from those who voted for the president as well as by a president with a lot of political capital to exert, if both economics and civil rights are part of the agenda, both can be passed. If the economics agenda is functional to effective, the overwhelming approval of the vast majority of the population will drown out the disapproval of the screaming evangelical and religious right.
This is an alternative to the occasional, even frequent argument against pushing for advancement toward full equality for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered people which goes something like the following. "How can you push for this now, when we should be focusing on the economy?!" or "There are so many more important things going on right now, like fixing the economy," and so on. As now-President Obama said in September when Senator McCain "suspended his campaign" to focus on our 'new' finance crisis, "The President should be able to focus on more than one thing at a time," -- even when the media and the public do a poor job of the same.