I've seen Brother West on the Colbert Report at least a couple times now and I'm finding that I tend to disagree with this man--despite my respect for his honest, honorable intent--about as much as Colbert's faux-conservative commentating onscreen character, albeit for far different reasons.  He seems to represent the dissociation of compassionate leftist idealism from any kind of pragmatism that would bring about the changes he seeks. 

I reject the notion that idealism and realism are mutually exclusive choices.  After all, what is one without the other?  One way is useless, the other pointless.  Solutions that solve problems bring ideals to reality and that requires the understanding of causal relationships.  Our culture is already damaged so badly by anti-intellectualism from the Right, we don't need more from the Left.  Here's a small, relevant exerpt from last night's show:

Colbert: "You're saying Barack Obama is not acting like he's caring about all the people, that he's acting like he's caring about the wealthy people, but shouldn't he care about the wealthy people and let the care--let the love trickle down."

"...we have to have compassion.  He [Obama] talked about compassion in his rhetoric--democratic rhetoric, technocratic policies tilted toward Wall Street.  I love my brother Barack Obama but in the name of Martin Luther King Jr., in the name of this [the bible] text, I say I am going to speak on behalf of the working people and poor people."

To be precise, my problem is with West's decrying of "technocratic policies."  We live in a complicated society  where choices by those with power can easily have unintended and counterproductive consequences.  Competance in power requires the understanding of the likely consequences of decisions and actions.  Wanting to help people and understanding how to do so in macro-economic terms are vastly different qualities--the ideal and the real, respectively--that must be rectified if West is to see his stated goals achieved. 

The point of bailing out Wall Street wasn't to help Wall Street, it was about helping Main Street who hires the good folks West speaks for.  Last year, we had a banking crisis (specifically the frozen credit) coupled with a crash of the stock market.  The last time this happened President Hoover did what Obama did not--nothing.  Consequently, a banking crisis and stock market crash brought the Great Depression and it's Hoovervilles, populated by the exploding impoverished class.  To the contrary, President Obama made the responsible, keynesian, albeit unpalatable, decision to provide the funds to loosen the credit that small businesses need to survive.  He prevented an explosion of the poor.

"Technocratic" seems to have become another manifestation of human fear of the "other", the unfamiliar, misunderstood, or more concretely the intellectuals who tell people the things they don't want to hear or confront.  They're the people who exacerbate the inferiority complexes of those who cannot accept the changing perceptions that frequently accompany reading and learning.  As I said in a recent entry, we cannot learn something new if we cannot admit to ourselves we don't already know it.  We already have nearly half a nation who think dinosaurs and people lived at the same time and the universe is 6000 years old despite our ability to simply look up at stars and galaxies millions of light years away.  We don't need to perpetuate the belief that simply handing out money to the poor abolishes their poverty--check out rate at which lottery winners go bankrupt within a decade.

Let's find real solutions to real problems, combining the real and ideal, marrying the technocratic with democratic, and maybe we'll learn about ourselves as we come to understand how we interact.

I refuse to label myself in accord with the American political spectrum; I am neither liberal nor conservative. Too often of late, those whose choose a particular position on the spectrum stop giving thought to the important issues of contemporary society; rather, they dogmatically follow the party matching the label. Or worse, succumb to political apathy. This is why I have jumped off the spectrum, stand on neither side of the aisle. I choose to judge each issue according to it's own merits and come to the most rational conclusion given the information available. The world does not need more deluded people starting with the conclusion they wish were true, then proceed to handpick evidence and argument around it. This is the enemy of truth; the best liars mix truth with lies.