Alex Abella’s Blog

After a recent appearance on the radio program Coast to Coast,  a listener emailed me the following note: “We are definitely NOT a Democracy. I feel that it’s dangerous to not distinguish between a Democracy and a Constitutional Republic. This is one of the reasons our govt is in such a mess…WE THE PEOPLE do not understand our govt!”

As Jack Benny would have said, Well! (Does anybody out there remember that greedy practioner of the one liner? With just one word he would convey so much worried yet ironic contemplation of a conundrum that the audience would break up in anticipation.)

I still believe in the old adage of Lincoln–of a government of the people, for the people and by the people–if, for nothing else, because we still haven’t become a military dictatorship. Sure, there is chicanery in government–and yes, votes are sometimes erased, stolen or dismissed, but never on the scale of, say Argentina, or Venezuela. Sure, that’s  awful, when the U.S. has to compare itself to failed states to look good but that is the way of the world today.

If only the good voters of West Palm Beach had put on their reading glasses in 2000, we wouldn’t be in the mess we’re in right now. Of course, if Al Gore had had the cojones to go to Washington and denounce the Supreme Court decision, we wouldn’t be in Iraq right now either but that’s another what-if.

My point is, even a republican form of government must depend upon the consent of the governed–which is basically what democracy really means. We can still make a difference–and yes, your vote counts. Do we want another eight years of the Reagan/Bush continuum that has ruled the country since 1980, or do we dare hope and vote for a change.

I know what my choice is. What about you?

When the U.S. was sold a bill of goods by the Reagan Administration and its rational choice/free market mavens, Americans were promised that the invisible hand of the economy would cure all ills.  You take care of yourself, your neighbors take care of themselves, and society will right itself from the shoals of the Nixon/Ford/Carter years. What people didn’t catch on was how that spirit of what’s mine is mine and what’s yours is also mine if I can get it, would devolve into a financial and ethical free for all that would cut off the American way of life at the knees. How could Americans really think that as individuals they would be able to overcome the aggregate power of corporations and other vast financial interests which freed themselves from the one entity capable of controlling them, the government? But no, governmment was the problem, not the solution.

Americans failed to realize that the problem was not government but mismanagement.  Seduced by the promise of lower taxes and cheap goods, American consumers devoured the toxic cotton candy of rational choice/free markets. Now, thirty years later, we are having to cope with a metastasized financial cancer that threatens the life of the nation.

The subprime mortgage debacle, rising energy costs and spreading joblesness have finally woken up the country. (Never mind that in real terms, after inflation is taken out of the equation, the average American family has not made any financial headway in the last thirty years–and that now it requires two income earners to support a family that used to be able to make do with one salary.) Real gains have been realized almost exclusively by the top ten percent of the U.S. population, the lucky, well connected few.

Yet, more than just money and financial security has been lost. Americans have also lost the spirit of community and cooperation, the feeling of ‘we’re all in this together,’ that kept us going through the Great Depression and World War II.  America has become atomized, splintered into separate and competing worlds by a philosophy that makes egoistical satisfaction the end-all and be-all of existence. Kenneth Arrow, the Dr. Frankenstein of rational choice, called this state of being “the sovereignty of the consumer.” It should propertly be called the foolish state of the deceived.

It’s time for a change.

To all of you who have waited for my book on RAND to come out, the wait is over. Although official publication date is May 14, it’s already for sale on Amazon and all major bokstores.

Early reviews have been very encouraging, and we’ve been promised reviews in The New York Times, The Washington Post and other major media. I did a podcast for the WashPost the other day, which is supposed to be going online sometime this week or next. The editors wanted to wait until the Pa. primary was over so it wouldn’t be swallowed up by the political news. I also did another one at TheWrittenWord.com, which is available right now.

For more info, check back with my site in a couple of days, I’m updating it with all the news about SOLDIERS OF REASON. I should add that I’m going to be appearing at the ALOUD series in the Los Angeles Public Library in June with Mike Shuster of NPR. Needless to say, I am both flattered and a little nervous. I hope all of you who read this will be there to lend moral support. 

Speaking of Pa….As a Democrat, I am saddened to read how many people in that state still said they considered race to be an issue when deciding on a candidate. I had really hoped we were all beyond that, and that what counted in the U.S. was no longer the color of your skin but the content of your character.  Even the size of your bank account as a deciding factor would have been better than the subtle racism that permeated that campaign. 

Of course, it was a battle of the millionaires, but Obama’s three or four mill hardly compares to the $100+ that Clinton earned over the last decade. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t begrudge her the money, but I do think that knocking back boilermakers and claiming to be a hunter (full disclosure–I belong both to the ACLU and the NRA) as a way to reach out to the average voter was just a bit too rich for my taste. I just couldn’t believe that all the good people of Pennsylvania, in all those both beautiful  and  blighted rural counties, would fall for that pitch. 

Now that they’re both onto Indiana, I wonder just how sharp an elbow Obama will throw at her to finally get her out of the game. Will he continue to play the part of the idealistic but ultimately ineffectual Stevenson–or God forbid, George McGovern–or will he rememeber his South Side training and become the canny ward politician that JFK was?

This continues to be the most intereresting primary season since the Vietnam War.

In the beginning was the word–John 1: 1

No, this is not a religious blog–although there is certainly nothing wrong with that. I myself am a religious man, but religion is not what I want to talk about today. Since this is my first blog, I want to remind readers that narrative is at the heart of all human understanding. It is our capacity, correction, our desperate need for narrative that frames our existence.

We may be because we think but we think in narration. We are always the heroes of our own tales, and as Aristotle discovered, we always look for antagonists, if not villains. Thus the worldwide popularity of Hollywood tales and their mechanical three act structure. Thus also the need to understand the world around us in narrative arcs, to seek beginnings, middles and endings, in an echo of the way we perceive our own existence from birth to grave.

This then will be my attempt to impart some measure of narrative to the often apparently incoherent world that surrounds us. Especially here in Los Angeles, which is fast becoming the epicenter of a new kind of city and a new hybrid civilization, which takes disparate elements from myriad cultures and races, mixes them all together in unexpected ways and hurls them back out to see if they can survive in our burning alleys and polluted thoroughfares as if in some kind of mad Darwinian ordeal by fire.

Or maybe it’s all intelligent design…But that’s for another day. For now I have to get back to my book on RAND and the way the world really works…