Look out kid
You’re gonna get hit
But users, cheaters
Six-time losers
Hang around the theaters
Girl by the whirlpool
Lookin’ for a new fool
Don’t follow leaders
Watch the parkin’ meters. — Dylan

So Bobo is complaining that we just don’t worship heroes and follow leaders the way we used to. He spends about a third of the column complaining that Washington monuments are so much less heroic than they used to be. The statues of Jefferson and Lincoln are powerful but humanized, Bobo says. More recent ones, such as to World War II or FDR, are mostly duds.”That’s because they say nothing about just authority,” Bobo says.

I agree that the WWII and FDR monuments lack the visual and emotional impact of Jefferson and Lincoln, but I think that’s mostly because they are more installations than monuments. I’ll come back to this in a minute. Bobo goes on —

I don’t know if America has a leadership problem; it certainly has a followership problem. Vast majorities of Americans don’t trust their institutions. That’s not mostly because our institutions perform much worse than they did in 1925 and 1955, when they were widely trusted. It’s mostly because more people are cynical and like to pretend that they are better than everything else around them. Vanity has more to do with rising distrust than anything else.

Metrosexual Black AbeJ points out,

Bad choice of years. In 1925, the country was in a (albeit soon-to-end) boom, in 1955 it was in the middle of the greatest 25-year-period in human economic history. Now, by contrast, we are at the end of a five-year stretch during which the average American family has seen its total assets drop in value by 40%, which means there has been no growth (zero) in the wealth of the average American family over the past 20 years. And then throw in a disastrous war that elites almost uniformly supported.

Those of us at least old enough to remember Howdy Doody know that a lot changed in the 1960s and never went back to the way it was before. The Greatest Generation went through the New Deal and World War II and trusted the government to know what it was doing. The Boomer generation was raised to believe America Is the Best, Smartest, Holiest Nation That Ever Was and were betrayed by Vietnam.

The old adversary culture of the intellectuals has turned into a mass adversarial cynicism. The common assumption is that elites are always hiding something. Public servants are in it for themselves. Those people at the top are nowhere near as smart or as wonderful as pure and all-knowing Me.

You end up with movements like Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Parties that try to dispense with authority altogether. They reject hierarchies and leaders because they don’t believe in the concepts. The whole world should be like the Internet — a disbursed semianarchy in which authority is suspect and each individual is king.

Oh, please; the baggers are followers par excellence. They are perfect examples of the right-wing authoritarian model. The OWSers are something else entirely, discussed in the last post.

I think mass media have made leaders a lot more familiar than they used to be. Consider that during the Lincoln Administration few Americans ever heard Lincoln’s voice. It’s been recorded that he had a high-pitched voice and a dreadful backwoods accent. Most Americans only saw his homely, solemn face in engravings — I don’t think still photos could be printed yet — and read his eloquent speeches in newspapers. These days we get them walking and talking, gaffes and all, in our living rooms. Some leaders have the stage presence to make this work for them; most don’t.

I’m thinking also of a book titled The Mask of Command by John Keenan. It is more about military than political leaders, but he points out that styles of leadership have changed drastically through recorded history. He does this by illustrating four leaders — Alexander the Great, the Duke of Wellington, Ulysses S Grant, and Adolf Hitlet. A mixed bag. He showed how military leadership evolved from Alexander, wearing flashy armor and charging into battle on a big, white horse, to Grant, who set the style for the modern professional military.

Speaking of monuments, all over Washington there are equestrian statues of Civil War generals brandishing swords while mounted on prancing or rearing horses. And then there’s Grant —

The sculptor, Henry Merwin Schrady, surrounded Grant with a frantic cavalry charge and artillery, but even in the 19th century it would have been absurd to portray Grant as flashy. Alexander the Great was finally, utterly, dead.

But then we get to Hitler —

In the modern era, portraying leaders as larger-than-life heroes is the stuff of totalitarianism. Yet this is what Bobo yearns for. He goes on —

Maybe before we can build great monuments to leaders we have to relearn the art of following. Democratic followership is also built on a series of paradoxes: that we are all created equal but that we also elevate those who are extraordinary; that we choose our leaders but also have to defer to them and trust their discretion; that we’re proud individuals but only really thrive as a group, organized and led by just authority.

I’m saying that if Bobo like heroic monuments I believe there are a lot of them in China, of Chairman Mao.

I’ll Have Another is scratched and retired.

Alan Grayson reminds us that the Bush tax cuts are now eleven years old. Bush signed the first tax cut package into law on June 7, 2011 2001.

Bush claimed (as right-wingers always do) that tax breaks for the rich would create jobs in the private sector. Well, they haven’t. There were 110 million private sector jobs in America in 2001. There are 110 million private sector jobs in America today. Despite a population increase of more than 25 million, there are no more private sector jobs today than when the Bush tax breaks for the rich became law.

Further, most of the continent of Europe has been going whole-hog on “austerity” in recent years to bring down government debt, and the result is disaster. Will Hutton:

It could hardly be more sobering. Money has flooded out of Spain, Greece and the peripheral European economies. Signs of the crisis range from Athen’s soup kitchens to Spain‘s crowds of indignados protesting in the streets against austerity and a broken capitalism. Youth unemployment is sky-high. Less visible is the avalanche of money flowing into hoped-for safe havens in the US, Germany and even Britain. The last time the British government could sell government bonds at interest rates as low as today’s was in the early 1700s.

One would think that anyone bright enough to tie his own shoes would look at these results and conclude that more tax and spending cuts probably are not going to help. But the capacity of true believers to deny reality is boundless. The crew at Reason argue that Europe just hasn’t been austere enough. More spending cuts … that’s the ticket!

Of course, in 2010 the famously stupid Veronique de Rugy thought that Europe was getting everything right.

I’ve been haunted by this video of Paul Krugman trying to explain reality to a couple of pro-austerity Brits. The two Brits are obviously well educated and successful, and they seem incapable of understanding anything but budget cuts good, spending bad. The two of them sputter and babble and repeat ideological talking points and look at Krugman as if he has worms coming out of his nose. And you know that no amount of real-world experience would ever make a dent in their fantasies.

At one point, Krugman gets to the bottom line:

“By the way, I think you’ve just given me confirmation of something that people like me tend to say, which is, actually none of this is at all about fiscal responsibility. It’s all about exploiting the current situation to pursue an ideological goal of a smaller state.”

Which is why they can’t be reasoned with.

BTW, at the end of the interview one of the two twits asked “What about Estonia?” Estonia’s economy has improved somewhat, which proves to the twits that austerity works, even if it is failing everywhere else. Krugman addresses that on his blog.

Speaking of religion, see also “The GOP’s Bizarre, Disturbing Passion for Raising Taxes on the Poor.” Also, too,”Not With a Bang, But a Whimper: The Long, Slow Death Spiral of America’s Labor Movement.”

Via Slate, a research group that tracks election coverage has found that in news stories about issues specific to women, most of the quotes are from men. This isn’t exactly news, but the degree to which this is true surprised even me.

When analyzing the gender of who is quoted in stories about women’s issues, 4thestate found that print media quote women only 13 percent of the time. Television news stories quote (or show, I suppose) women only 15 percent of the time.

I would have liked to seen the results broken down by party or political philosophy. My guess is that nearly all of the women are liberals, and the conservative views is almost exclusively voiced by men. I’d also like to see a breakdown of conservative versus liberal quotes. But this is wild enough.