NOT SO FAST
Things are changing. The Israelis, who have for forty years here been able to pretend they were innocent David while fighting like an unprincipled Goliath, have finally revealed themselves to be following the insight of David Ben-Gurion in 1948: “We have taken their country … We must do everything to ensure they never return … We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population.” *
The Israelis, as I have mentioned several times, deployed the Joseph Goebbels propaganda playbook to cloak their game-plan with the miasm of victimhood (did Hitler ever attack any country that was not, in some form, ‘attacking’ his beloved Volk, even if only by existing?).
The Israeli-Goebbels playbook was adopted by the Identities here in just about that same time frame, starting in the late-60s. Each was a ‘victim’ of something, each was just speaking up for itself (although, as equally unspoken as the Ben-Gurion insight, was the utter conviction of each ‘revolution’ that it would ‘do whatever it takes’ and ‘by all means necessary’ to secure the agenda it sought; and as with the Israelis, the quiet presumption was that each agenda was meant to ‘end’ an ‘outrage’ so utterly outrageous that nothing, not even the established procedures of a democratic polity, could be allowed to stand in the way of ‘victory’).
In the ‘Boston Globe’ for February 2, 2009, two major harbingers appear. On the front page, the education superintendent is trying to reduce school ‘busing’. Turns out that it’s too expensive for the small number of students who are actually on this or that bus.
The ‘Globe’ considers the matter at some length, and with some actual effort to look at the thing objectively. Unmentioned – and no doubt the paper hopes that there aren’t than many folks able to remember back that far any more – is the fact that ‘school busing’, like sex-offenses and the highly dubious ‘priest-sex-abuse scandals’, was a favorite ‘cause’ that the paper ‘advocated’ back in the day, which in the matter of the school busing plan was 35 years ago.
Things, apparently , have not worked out as originally imagined by those who demanded that the agenda be fulfilled without delay. (It’s not jejeune to repeat here: Can you say ‘Iraq’?) According to the plan – or more properly ‘dream’ – busing would be a short-term operation designed to give inner-city youth a shot at ‘decent’ schools until, it was presumed as a given, the inner-city schools themselves would be brought up to par.
Objections and doubts were raised immediately: neighborhoods would suffer, as would their communities, if children were bused ‘out’ for school. The children themselves, required to take long bus trips in a metro area famous for its unpredictable and heavy traffic patterns, would have to get up very early in the morning to make their journey – day after day, impairing their focus and concentration. (Educational curricula, it was presumed, would remain solid; the desire to learn would either remain solid or the inner-city children would ‘learn’ it from students at ‘better’ schools.)
The objections were dismissed as ‘racism’. The media went along with that. Boston’s tight-knit neighborhoods erupted in demonstrations; the neighborhood sense, reinforced by ethnic and sometimes tribal energy, and not free of racial motivation, burned hot, the less-lovely motivations mixed with a hardly inaccurate awareness of the possible – hardly improbable – negative consequences.
As has happened more times than Our media would care to note, the ‘dream’ – erected into public policy with no useful public deliberation, by ‘elites’ who did ‘get it’ and thus considered themselves in a better position to ‘know’ – has not worked out as originally imagined. Much the opposite.
And it’s been the little people who have suffered, the black inner-city communities even more than the white neighborhoods, the students even more than the adults. As so often happens with this sort of thing.
The operative dynamics of Identity Politics – the antidemocratic ‘revolutionary’ method, supported by the Goebbels propaganda plan, ‘justified’ by the ‘emergency’ of ‘outrage’ and the insistence that the most fundamental ‘rights’ were involved – dispensed with all the necessary workings of democracy and grabbed for the ‘dream’.
But of course – and this will be a dynamic operative at all levels of national political activity, and in foreign affairs as well as domestic – the government, led by the Democrats but then joined by the Republicans over the course of decades, has been instrumental in embracing and then pandering-to Identity Politics; how now then acknowledge that the thing has been a failure? A colossal frak-up?
Iraq. The Economy. The school-busing. The hydra-headed demands of the Second Wave Feminist steamroller, among which the institutions of Marriage and the Family are only the largest blast-zones. Hell, the ‘homeless’, created at the stroke of a pen in the later ‘70s by state governments eager to be given both ‘scientific’ and ‘sensitive’ cover to shed the expense of maintaining secure, long-term mental health facilities (though the Brits had tried it and found it catastrophic and disastrous as early as 1961).
Policy-by-‘dream’, policy-by-‘outrage’, policy-by-macho-gut, policy-by-‘sensitivity’, policy-without-serious-thought … this is a hell of a bad habit We’ve gotten into over the past 40 years. The mistakes, the damage, the blood, the ruined lives and destroyed lives … all those consequences will have to be paid for.
And if We are trying to live-by-bubble, not just fiscally but in terms of how We grasp and comprehend Our lives and the world around Us, then We have truly brought a knife to the proverbial gunfight, and with a mighty dull blade.
A ‘vision’ is a marvelous thing: the human capacity to imagine a better situation is a powerful engine of genuine progress. A ‘dream’ (with all respect to Martin Luther King, who figured rightly that ‘dream’ was more rhetorically rhythmic than ‘vision’) is a much less mature and efficacious affair. They don’t call them ‘daydreams’ for nothing; and they don’t not-call them ‘day-visions’ for nothing. And Teddy Kennedy’s braying about ‘the dream’ at the Democratic Convention last year is an unmistakable marker of what’s gone wrong with Us. And with Our politics. And with Our polity.
And the sibling of ‘daydream’ is ‘nightmare’. And that’s something that should be getting more obvious now.
Meanwhile, in the same issue of the ‘Boston Globe’, the Letters to the Editor continue commentary on a recent (January 25th) column about the mistakes in the abortion agenda (and, of course, policy). A constitutional law professor observes that Warren Burger towards the end of his tenure on the Court realized – and so stated – that he had to “regretfully conclude that some of the concerns of the dissenting justices in ‘Roe’ … have now been realized.” He wanted the Court to “re-examine” ‘Roe’.
From his lips to God’s ear – and perhaps he is now in a position to help things along in that regard. Once again, it’s the little people who have had their lives consigned to hell – women who have been told that it is indeed possible to ‘have it all’: be a single mother, hold a great job, and raise marvelous and correct kids … not hardly. And the inner-city ‘family’ the most shattered of all.
The state’s executive director of Naral Pro-Choice rebuts by not addressing the issue, but rather pointing to … other things: the “profoundly personal nature of decisions about pregnancy and parenthood”. Which they are – most profoundly involved with the person. But “interpersonal” rather than “personal”. One makes one’s decisions about children with one’s spouse, with whom one has entered into a commitment (admittedly hard to do if you’ve subscribed to the Friedan-ian equation of ‘men’ and ‘husbands’ as Nazis and the ‘home’ and the ‘family’ as “Dachau”).
I can’t see how We can blithely accept “unintended pregnancy”; We don’t simply accept a police officer’s blithe assertion that the discharge of his service weapon into a suspect with fatal effect was “unintended”. We expect a certain amount of responsible deliberation from somebody so equipped as to terminate life. Nor do We accept that in an ‘emergency’ there’s no time for ‘thinking’. The entire damned idea of a ‘professional’ is that this is an individual endowed with responsibility in critical situations, and who has prepared for that by making the appropriate ‘thought’ second-nature.
The pilots of that plane that put down in the Hudson not long ago had a most serious and urgent emergency on their hands. They responded as they had trained long years to respond: mastering their emotions, assessing the situation, and carefully but quickly taking the necessary steps.
And if anybody wants to say that the ‘average’ person isn’t ‘supposed to’ be that ‘together’, then We have truly and frakkingly lost the spirit of civilization and of maturity. Every human being – male and female – is ‘equipped’, ‘armed' if you wish, with the power of life and death, especially over new life. There was a time even in America when this was so conventional a bit of wisdom as to be considered beneath serious discussion. Apparently, We need to go back to school in this regard. (Them Kathliks, now, them Kathliks been yapping about this sorta thing for years and years – they just ‘don’t get it’.)
But the executive director goes on to spill some serious beans. She quotes Sandra Day O’Connor (who, it may be recalled, voted for ‘Bush v. Gore’ because she didn’t want to leave the choice of her successor “to a Democrat”): “The ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their own reproductive lives.”
Coupla thoughts, and I’m not even going to go near ‘Bush v. Gore’.
If such ‘participation’ as the former-Justice and the executive director imply includes the current condition of the family; the current condition of the nation’s youth – especially in the inner cities but not limited thereto; the current condition of national political discourse and the efficacy of Our politics; the current condition of untold numbers of single working mothers and overworked parental pairs … well, then the former Justice and the executive director, I would say, have scored a hat-trick: dream, day-dream, and nightmare.
Is one’s “reproductive life”, male or female, really so totally one’s personal own to control? When the capacity to very hugely ‘impact’ a third life so lethally is involved? Is there something else that should be in the equation here? A refusal to be contained, to be Shaped, to be Trellised – this is the Second Wave’s ‘liberation’? It’s a liberation as fatuous and fatal as the ‘liberation’ that We imposed upon the survivors of Our invasion of Iraq.
But most significantly: I question this “equally”. No, not in the way you might think I’m going with this. All human beings are created equal – absolutely; but they are not created “identical”. Nor has Nature – if you wish – ‘evolved’ them identically.
On this same day, the City’s Fire Department is again on the hot-seat yet again. The front-line pieces of apparatus are turning up with defective brakes; this is due to a cutesy game whereby for decades (in an increasingly unmanageable politics, not irrelevantly) the Mayor allowed the firefighter’s union to place union members – not mechanics – in the Department repair shop, in exchange for union support in the elections.
Last month a heavy ladder truck lost its brakes on a steep hill, rolled down the hill, through a main intersection with a busy trolley line as well as vehicular traffic, and into the first floor of a building where kids were in an education class; it’s your guess as to what would have happened had the truck hit a crowded trolley rather than going across to ram into the building. A fire officer was killed outright, but he was the only casualty. Now, an urgent alert to check all brakes on all units has created a shortage of reserve apparatus to replace engines and ladder-trucks sent to the Repair Shop. When an engine (its job is to pump water, which is why it’s equipped with a pump) was taken out of service for possible brake trouble this past Friday, there was no spare engine to send out to replace it in its busy station. The brass sent out a modified Department pick-up that has emergency lights and siren and is painted red but otherwise has little equipment, and has no pump. What, an oncoming shift’s fire officer asked, am I supposed to do with this?
The point is that ladder trucks and engines are equally valued units of the Department. But they are not identical. One has been designed for the task of pumping water, and one has been designed for the task of carrying and deploying a heavy, tall aerial extension ladder.
Readers with some savvy might point out that there is a tendency among some departments to buy what is called a ‘quint’, a truck with both the heavy extension ladder and the pump. But the trouble starts there. The pump engine’s job is to go to the nearest hydrant, that may be half a block and more away, in order to connect to it, suck water into its pump, and then propel the water back up the hose line to the nozzle held by firemen at the actual site of the fire. The ladder’s job is to go straight to the fire-building, anchor itself with huge jacks, and raise that mighty ladder for rescue and other purposes.
Both tasks are essential, but no one truck can do them both simultaneously. The aerial truck cannot waste time hunting for a hydrant, nor – once its jacks are deployed and the ladder raised – can it be moved. The pump-engine has to be near the hydrant for best effect, and it should not under normal circumstances remain directly alongside the burning building, where it would block the aerial’s access. And the ‘quint’ crew cannot simultaneously raise the ladder and effect rescues and also go find a working hydrant, carry hose from the immobilized apparatus to the hydrant, and then start the less efficient flow of water that the pump now has to pull back up the street to itself before it can propel it into a hose-line that nobody is around to hold.
And if the pump in a ‘quint’ needs to go out for repair, you lose the ladder too. And vice-versa. So you can’t be a one-piece department.
You see the problems.
It’s well within the range of possibility that if a person reports a fire and summons the Fire Department, and gets the pick-up, then there will be grounds for a law-suit, since the City sent help that was really no help at all; no matter how good the intentions or how great the willpower, a pick-up cannot be a powerful pump engine.
“Equal” does not equal “identical”. Nature, if not also God, sort of set it up that way. It is this ‘nature’ or this ‘God’ that the grim revolutionaries of the Second Wave have been seeking to overcome for lo these past 40 (Biblical) years. It’s still an open question as to precisely what are the actual shapes of that ‘difference’, that lack of ‘identicality’, but there can be no doubt that evolution does not go to such trouble as assigning the fundamental and crucial task of child-bearing to one sex without also specially equipping that sex specially for its task; while assigning other tasks – and so equipping it – to the other sex. This natural division cannot be blamed on ‘men’ or ‘patriarchy’ without implying that they have the divine power to make that original division in the species. And to ‘command’ Nature, to legislate as if to command it, puts Us back to the level of King Canute and the tides, which cannot be called ‘progress’ at all.
So whether or not one has ‘choice’ is really a valid question at all … is a rather big question itself. Meanwhile, it has to be acknowledged that the vanguard elites of this ‘revolution’ have been sending their less elite sistern into a situation where they are actually ignoring ‘the tides’ … much as a certain Leader sent millions of hapless troops into the wastes of the Russian steppe as if Winter were not able to, or would not dare to, resist the inevitable will of the Thousand-Year Reich. Ach. Oy.
As with so many other ‘reforms’ and ‘dreams’, it is now going to be a big question whether the ‘elites’ and the government can acknowledge ‘problems’ now at all, since to do so would inevitably raise the question as to how such self-assertingly competent elites and governing types got Us into this mess in the first place, and kept it going for so long.
So what happened all this time? The Democrats got onto the crest of a good wave with the first phase of the civil-rights movement, which culminated in the Voting Rights legislation of that first week of July, 1965. That lasted for all of a week, and then the Watts riots brought the whole thing to a crashing, and for the Democrats stunning and terrifying, halt. Nor did the unexpected nastiness of the second phase, Black Power and black separatism, help. The Black ‘establishment’, as it was developing, sensed this and realized that in order to keep things moving it would need to ‘lobby’ just like any other ‘interest group’.
The Dems tried to put the best possible face on things, realizing that it would now be impossible to distance themselves from what had become of that glowing first-phase civil rights era. But they also quietly realized that even if everything worked out well with ‘the blacks’, they still constituted only 10% or less of the population. A much larger demographic would be required to replace the constituencies lost in the first – and increasingly in the second – phase, the Southern and then the Northern urban white folks.
The Second Wave, having made something of a splash with Friedan’s “Dachau” gambit, were available, and ‘women’ were a much larger potential constituency. And the Dems put all their influence behind the Second Wave and all its pomps and all its works. I’d say that the remarkable ‘progress’ made by that Identity was presumed by many to be due to the ‘value’ of its ideas and demands – how else, the average person of the era might wonder, could such remarkable, if not indeed counterintuitive, change take hold in the government so quickly? But of course, nobody would imagine at the time that the Dems were desperate for votes and were willing to sign off on anything the Second Wave pushed their way.
And in those same later ‘60s, the Israelis decided that it was time to make a major push for American public opinion and took Goebbels’ brilliantly comprehensive and manipulative propaganda plan for their bible (sorry). The ‘high ground’ of the ‘victim’, pure and innocent, whose ‘rights’ are beyond question and beyond doubt … that ‘narrative’ and the ruthless ensuring that no other ‘narrative’ would be permitted to exist in the public discourse, is the strategy deployed against American public opinion and discourse.
Both the black and the Second Wave ‘elites’, now emerging, realize a useful tool when they see it and adopt the strategy themselves. The black advocacy builds the second-phase revolution upon the added American element of ‘civil rights’. So does the Second Wave, eventually adding the freighted American term “equality” (while allowing no definition of it except for their own).
This is not so difficult, as the media discover that ‘advocacy’ gives them a chance to ‘shape’ rather than simply ‘report’ national events. And as the Goebbelsian PR strategy starts to produce media-friendly and telegenic ‘scenes’, the media quickly slide into complicity. Perhaps only now is that starting to change.
Nor did it harm the cause to give 18-year-olds the vote, adolescents whose strong suits were emotion and enthusiasm and idealism, not careful thought and the weighing of experience.
As I’ve said before, by 2001 Rove and the Bushist Imperium found a citizenry now sufficiently weakened and en-bubbled, that they were quite used to having ‘the’ story simply presented to them for their appropriate response. There was no sustained kicking of the tires as the march to preventive war took shape and gathered speed. And what kicking there was, the media chose not to notice.
And the financial bubbles had provided a greasy, dizzy simulacrum of a successful and productive national economy, and if the citizenry were no longer used to kicking tires, they were even less disposed to look the shiny-coated horse of ‘good times’ in the mouth.
And here We are.
But there are changes in the wind.
I support the enhanced public ability to assess and deliberate wisely, and to require such activity of their politicians and the ‘elites’ who batten on the public trough. Or who seek to change the entire shape of the Constitutional ethos.
But I think We are all well-advised to adopt the wisdom of Tolkien in his ‘The Lord of the Rings’: times are changing, and great effort must be expended, and if all works well – a long shot – then a better time can be expected. But there will be irretrievable losses to the world, losses incurred by the very success of the challenges to be met. Things would never be the same, even as a new level of goodness may be achieved. For Us, the postwar position of both domestic and international primacy, is now so far gone as to be beyond recall. Current generations of youth will not enjoy the advantages, nor the education, that their grandparents or even their parents enjoyed.
But to be able to learn how to face reality, to remain committed to one’s best self, to be yourself-in-the-present … these are large and deep skills, lessons not to be provided in any university or curriculum. It is a capability for which Americans have never been generally known, though the ever-surprising Lincoln provides a clarion example. It is the side of human-ness that the New World dispensed with, in its urgency to master the this-worldly dimension.
It is time to write a new chapter in the history of the New World. That is the rendezvous Our present generations have with destiny. That is the fierce urgency of now.
NOTE
· Quoted by Stephen J. Lendman in his Post ‘Al Nakba Redux’, Jan. 21, 2009, on his website here.
Things are changing. The Israelis, who have for forty years here been able to pretend they were innocent David while fighting like an unprincipled Goliath, have finally revealed themselves to be following the insight of David Ben-Gurion in 1948: “We have taken their country … We must do everything to ensure they never return … We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population.” *
The Israelis, as I have mentioned several times, deployed the Joseph Goebbels propaganda playbook to cloak their game-plan with the miasm of victimhood (did Hitler ever attack any country that was not, in some form, ‘attacking’ his beloved Volk, even if only by existing?).
The Israeli-Goebbels playbook was adopted by the Identities here in just about that same time frame, starting in the late-60s. Each was a ‘victim’ of something, each was just speaking up for itself (although, as equally unspoken as the Ben-Gurion insight, was the utter conviction of each ‘revolution’ that it would ‘do whatever it takes’ and ‘by all means necessary’ to secure the agenda it sought; and as with the Israelis, the quiet presumption was that each agenda was meant to ‘end’ an ‘outrage’ so utterly outrageous that nothing, not even the established procedures of a democratic polity, could be allowed to stand in the way of ‘victory’).
In the ‘Boston Globe’ for February 2, 2009, two major harbingers appear. On the front page, the education superintendent is trying to reduce school ‘busing’. Turns out that it’s too expensive for the small number of students who are actually on this or that bus.
The ‘Globe’ considers the matter at some length, and with some actual effort to look at the thing objectively. Unmentioned – and no doubt the paper hopes that there aren’t than many folks able to remember back that far any more – is the fact that ‘school busing’, like sex-offenses and the highly dubious ‘priest-sex-abuse scandals’, was a favorite ‘cause’ that the paper ‘advocated’ back in the day, which in the matter of the school busing plan was 35 years ago.
Things, apparently , have not worked out as originally imagined by those who demanded that the agenda be fulfilled without delay. (It’s not jejeune to repeat here: Can you say ‘Iraq’?) According to the plan – or more properly ‘dream’ – busing would be a short-term operation designed to give inner-city youth a shot at ‘decent’ schools until, it was presumed as a given, the inner-city schools themselves would be brought up to par.
Objections and doubts were raised immediately: neighborhoods would suffer, as would their communities, if children were bused ‘out’ for school. The children themselves, required to take long bus trips in a metro area famous for its unpredictable and heavy traffic patterns, would have to get up very early in the morning to make their journey – day after day, impairing their focus and concentration. (Educational curricula, it was presumed, would remain solid; the desire to learn would either remain solid or the inner-city children would ‘learn’ it from students at ‘better’ schools.)
The objections were dismissed as ‘racism’. The media went along with that. Boston’s tight-knit neighborhoods erupted in demonstrations; the neighborhood sense, reinforced by ethnic and sometimes tribal energy, and not free of racial motivation, burned hot, the less-lovely motivations mixed with a hardly inaccurate awareness of the possible – hardly improbable – negative consequences.
As has happened more times than Our media would care to note, the ‘dream’ – erected into public policy with no useful public deliberation, by ‘elites’ who did ‘get it’ and thus considered themselves in a better position to ‘know’ – has not worked out as originally imagined. Much the opposite.
And it’s been the little people who have suffered, the black inner-city communities even more than the white neighborhoods, the students even more than the adults. As so often happens with this sort of thing.
The operative dynamics of Identity Politics – the antidemocratic ‘revolutionary’ method, supported by the Goebbels propaganda plan, ‘justified’ by the ‘emergency’ of ‘outrage’ and the insistence that the most fundamental ‘rights’ were involved – dispensed with all the necessary workings of democracy and grabbed for the ‘dream’.
But of course – and this will be a dynamic operative at all levels of national political activity, and in foreign affairs as well as domestic – the government, led by the Democrats but then joined by the Republicans over the course of decades, has been instrumental in embracing and then pandering-to Identity Politics; how now then acknowledge that the thing has been a failure? A colossal frak-up?
Iraq. The Economy. The school-busing. The hydra-headed demands of the Second Wave Feminist steamroller, among which the institutions of Marriage and the Family are only the largest blast-zones. Hell, the ‘homeless’, created at the stroke of a pen in the later ‘70s by state governments eager to be given both ‘scientific’ and ‘sensitive’ cover to shed the expense of maintaining secure, long-term mental health facilities (though the Brits had tried it and found it catastrophic and disastrous as early as 1961).
Policy-by-‘dream’, policy-by-‘outrage’, policy-by-macho-gut, policy-by-‘sensitivity’, policy-without-serious-thought … this is a hell of a bad habit We’ve gotten into over the past 40 years. The mistakes, the damage, the blood, the ruined lives and destroyed lives … all those consequences will have to be paid for.
And if We are trying to live-by-bubble, not just fiscally but in terms of how We grasp and comprehend Our lives and the world around Us, then We have truly brought a knife to the proverbial gunfight, and with a mighty dull blade.
A ‘vision’ is a marvelous thing: the human capacity to imagine a better situation is a powerful engine of genuine progress. A ‘dream’ (with all respect to Martin Luther King, who figured rightly that ‘dream’ was more rhetorically rhythmic than ‘vision’) is a much less mature and efficacious affair. They don’t call them ‘daydreams’ for nothing; and they don’t not-call them ‘day-visions’ for nothing. And Teddy Kennedy’s braying about ‘the dream’ at the Democratic Convention last year is an unmistakable marker of what’s gone wrong with Us. And with Our politics. And with Our polity.
And the sibling of ‘daydream’ is ‘nightmare’. And that’s something that should be getting more obvious now.
Meanwhile, in the same issue of the ‘Boston Globe’, the Letters to the Editor continue commentary on a recent (January 25th) column about the mistakes in the abortion agenda (and, of course, policy). A constitutional law professor observes that Warren Burger towards the end of his tenure on the Court realized – and so stated – that he had to “regretfully conclude that some of the concerns of the dissenting justices in ‘Roe’ … have now been realized.” He wanted the Court to “re-examine” ‘Roe’.
From his lips to God’s ear – and perhaps he is now in a position to help things along in that regard. Once again, it’s the little people who have had their lives consigned to hell – women who have been told that it is indeed possible to ‘have it all’: be a single mother, hold a great job, and raise marvelous and correct kids … not hardly. And the inner-city ‘family’ the most shattered of all.
The state’s executive director of Naral Pro-Choice rebuts by not addressing the issue, but rather pointing to … other things: the “profoundly personal nature of decisions about pregnancy and parenthood”. Which they are – most profoundly involved with the person. But “interpersonal” rather than “personal”. One makes one’s decisions about children with one’s spouse, with whom one has entered into a commitment (admittedly hard to do if you’ve subscribed to the Friedan-ian equation of ‘men’ and ‘husbands’ as Nazis and the ‘home’ and the ‘family’ as “Dachau”).
I can’t see how We can blithely accept “unintended pregnancy”; We don’t simply accept a police officer’s blithe assertion that the discharge of his service weapon into a suspect with fatal effect was “unintended”. We expect a certain amount of responsible deliberation from somebody so equipped as to terminate life. Nor do We accept that in an ‘emergency’ there’s no time for ‘thinking’. The entire damned idea of a ‘professional’ is that this is an individual endowed with responsibility in critical situations, and who has prepared for that by making the appropriate ‘thought’ second-nature.
The pilots of that plane that put down in the Hudson not long ago had a most serious and urgent emergency on their hands. They responded as they had trained long years to respond: mastering their emotions, assessing the situation, and carefully but quickly taking the necessary steps.
And if anybody wants to say that the ‘average’ person isn’t ‘supposed to’ be that ‘together’, then We have truly and frakkingly lost the spirit of civilization and of maturity. Every human being – male and female – is ‘equipped’, ‘armed' if you wish, with the power of life and death, especially over new life. There was a time even in America when this was so conventional a bit of wisdom as to be considered beneath serious discussion. Apparently, We need to go back to school in this regard. (Them Kathliks, now, them Kathliks been yapping about this sorta thing for years and years – they just ‘don’t get it’.)
But the executive director goes on to spill some serious beans. She quotes Sandra Day O’Connor (who, it may be recalled, voted for ‘Bush v. Gore’ because she didn’t want to leave the choice of her successor “to a Democrat”): “The ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their own reproductive lives.”
Coupla thoughts, and I’m not even going to go near ‘Bush v. Gore’.
If such ‘participation’ as the former-Justice and the executive director imply includes the current condition of the family; the current condition of the nation’s youth – especially in the inner cities but not limited thereto; the current condition of national political discourse and the efficacy of Our politics; the current condition of untold numbers of single working mothers and overworked parental pairs … well, then the former Justice and the executive director, I would say, have scored a hat-trick: dream, day-dream, and nightmare.
Is one’s “reproductive life”, male or female, really so totally one’s personal own to control? When the capacity to very hugely ‘impact’ a third life so lethally is involved? Is there something else that should be in the equation here? A refusal to be contained, to be Shaped, to be Trellised – this is the Second Wave’s ‘liberation’? It’s a liberation as fatuous and fatal as the ‘liberation’ that We imposed upon the survivors of Our invasion of Iraq.
But most significantly: I question this “equally”. No, not in the way you might think I’m going with this. All human beings are created equal – absolutely; but they are not created “identical”. Nor has Nature – if you wish – ‘evolved’ them identically.
On this same day, the City’s Fire Department is again on the hot-seat yet again. The front-line pieces of apparatus are turning up with defective brakes; this is due to a cutesy game whereby for decades (in an increasingly unmanageable politics, not irrelevantly) the Mayor allowed the firefighter’s union to place union members – not mechanics – in the Department repair shop, in exchange for union support in the elections.
Last month a heavy ladder truck lost its brakes on a steep hill, rolled down the hill, through a main intersection with a busy trolley line as well as vehicular traffic, and into the first floor of a building where kids were in an education class; it’s your guess as to what would have happened had the truck hit a crowded trolley rather than going across to ram into the building. A fire officer was killed outright, but he was the only casualty. Now, an urgent alert to check all brakes on all units has created a shortage of reserve apparatus to replace engines and ladder-trucks sent to the Repair Shop. When an engine (its job is to pump water, which is why it’s equipped with a pump) was taken out of service for possible brake trouble this past Friday, there was no spare engine to send out to replace it in its busy station. The brass sent out a modified Department pick-up that has emergency lights and siren and is painted red but otherwise has little equipment, and has no pump. What, an oncoming shift’s fire officer asked, am I supposed to do with this?
The point is that ladder trucks and engines are equally valued units of the Department. But they are not identical. One has been designed for the task of pumping water, and one has been designed for the task of carrying and deploying a heavy, tall aerial extension ladder.
Readers with some savvy might point out that there is a tendency among some departments to buy what is called a ‘quint’, a truck with both the heavy extension ladder and the pump. But the trouble starts there. The pump engine’s job is to go to the nearest hydrant, that may be half a block and more away, in order to connect to it, suck water into its pump, and then propel the water back up the hose line to the nozzle held by firemen at the actual site of the fire. The ladder’s job is to go straight to the fire-building, anchor itself with huge jacks, and raise that mighty ladder for rescue and other purposes.
Both tasks are essential, but no one truck can do them both simultaneously. The aerial truck cannot waste time hunting for a hydrant, nor – once its jacks are deployed and the ladder raised – can it be moved. The pump-engine has to be near the hydrant for best effect, and it should not under normal circumstances remain directly alongside the burning building, where it would block the aerial’s access. And the ‘quint’ crew cannot simultaneously raise the ladder and effect rescues and also go find a working hydrant, carry hose from the immobilized apparatus to the hydrant, and then start the less efficient flow of water that the pump now has to pull back up the street to itself before it can propel it into a hose-line that nobody is around to hold.
And if the pump in a ‘quint’ needs to go out for repair, you lose the ladder too. And vice-versa. So you can’t be a one-piece department.
You see the problems.
It’s well within the range of possibility that if a person reports a fire and summons the Fire Department, and gets the pick-up, then there will be grounds for a law-suit, since the City sent help that was really no help at all; no matter how good the intentions or how great the willpower, a pick-up cannot be a powerful pump engine.
“Equal” does not equal “identical”. Nature, if not also God, sort of set it up that way. It is this ‘nature’ or this ‘God’ that the grim revolutionaries of the Second Wave have been seeking to overcome for lo these past 40 (Biblical) years. It’s still an open question as to precisely what are the actual shapes of that ‘difference’, that lack of ‘identicality’, but there can be no doubt that evolution does not go to such trouble as assigning the fundamental and crucial task of child-bearing to one sex without also specially equipping that sex specially for its task; while assigning other tasks – and so equipping it – to the other sex. This natural division cannot be blamed on ‘men’ or ‘patriarchy’ without implying that they have the divine power to make that original division in the species. And to ‘command’ Nature, to legislate as if to command it, puts Us back to the level of King Canute and the tides, which cannot be called ‘progress’ at all.
So whether or not one has ‘choice’ is really a valid question at all … is a rather big question itself. Meanwhile, it has to be acknowledged that the vanguard elites of this ‘revolution’ have been sending their less elite sistern into a situation where they are actually ignoring ‘the tides’ … much as a certain Leader sent millions of hapless troops into the wastes of the Russian steppe as if Winter were not able to, or would not dare to, resist the inevitable will of the Thousand-Year Reich. Ach. Oy.
As with so many other ‘reforms’ and ‘dreams’, it is now going to be a big question whether the ‘elites’ and the government can acknowledge ‘problems’ now at all, since to do so would inevitably raise the question as to how such self-assertingly competent elites and governing types got Us into this mess in the first place, and kept it going for so long.
So what happened all this time? The Democrats got onto the crest of a good wave with the first phase of the civil-rights movement, which culminated in the Voting Rights legislation of that first week of July, 1965. That lasted for all of a week, and then the Watts riots brought the whole thing to a crashing, and for the Democrats stunning and terrifying, halt. Nor did the unexpected nastiness of the second phase, Black Power and black separatism, help. The Black ‘establishment’, as it was developing, sensed this and realized that in order to keep things moving it would need to ‘lobby’ just like any other ‘interest group’.
The Dems tried to put the best possible face on things, realizing that it would now be impossible to distance themselves from what had become of that glowing first-phase civil rights era. But they also quietly realized that even if everything worked out well with ‘the blacks’, they still constituted only 10% or less of the population. A much larger demographic would be required to replace the constituencies lost in the first – and increasingly in the second – phase, the Southern and then the Northern urban white folks.
The Second Wave, having made something of a splash with Friedan’s “Dachau” gambit, were available, and ‘women’ were a much larger potential constituency. And the Dems put all their influence behind the Second Wave and all its pomps and all its works. I’d say that the remarkable ‘progress’ made by that Identity was presumed by many to be due to the ‘value’ of its ideas and demands – how else, the average person of the era might wonder, could such remarkable, if not indeed counterintuitive, change take hold in the government so quickly? But of course, nobody would imagine at the time that the Dems were desperate for votes and were willing to sign off on anything the Second Wave pushed their way.
And in those same later ‘60s, the Israelis decided that it was time to make a major push for American public opinion and took Goebbels’ brilliantly comprehensive and manipulative propaganda plan for their bible (sorry). The ‘high ground’ of the ‘victim’, pure and innocent, whose ‘rights’ are beyond question and beyond doubt … that ‘narrative’ and the ruthless ensuring that no other ‘narrative’ would be permitted to exist in the public discourse, is the strategy deployed against American public opinion and discourse.
Both the black and the Second Wave ‘elites’, now emerging, realize a useful tool when they see it and adopt the strategy themselves. The black advocacy builds the second-phase revolution upon the added American element of ‘civil rights’. So does the Second Wave, eventually adding the freighted American term “equality” (while allowing no definition of it except for their own).
This is not so difficult, as the media discover that ‘advocacy’ gives them a chance to ‘shape’ rather than simply ‘report’ national events. And as the Goebbelsian PR strategy starts to produce media-friendly and telegenic ‘scenes’, the media quickly slide into complicity. Perhaps only now is that starting to change.
Nor did it harm the cause to give 18-year-olds the vote, adolescents whose strong suits were emotion and enthusiasm and idealism, not careful thought and the weighing of experience.
As I’ve said before, by 2001 Rove and the Bushist Imperium found a citizenry now sufficiently weakened and en-bubbled, that they were quite used to having ‘the’ story simply presented to them for their appropriate response. There was no sustained kicking of the tires as the march to preventive war took shape and gathered speed. And what kicking there was, the media chose not to notice.
And the financial bubbles had provided a greasy, dizzy simulacrum of a successful and productive national economy, and if the citizenry were no longer used to kicking tires, they were even less disposed to look the shiny-coated horse of ‘good times’ in the mouth.
And here We are.
But there are changes in the wind.
I support the enhanced public ability to assess and deliberate wisely, and to require such activity of their politicians and the ‘elites’ who batten on the public trough. Or who seek to change the entire shape of the Constitutional ethos.
But I think We are all well-advised to adopt the wisdom of Tolkien in his ‘The Lord of the Rings’: times are changing, and great effort must be expended, and if all works well – a long shot – then a better time can be expected. But there will be irretrievable losses to the world, losses incurred by the very success of the challenges to be met. Things would never be the same, even as a new level of goodness may be achieved. For Us, the postwar position of both domestic and international primacy, is now so far gone as to be beyond recall. Current generations of youth will not enjoy the advantages, nor the education, that their grandparents or even their parents enjoyed.
But to be able to learn how to face reality, to remain committed to one’s best self, to be yourself-in-the-present … these are large and deep skills, lessons not to be provided in any university or curriculum. It is a capability for which Americans have never been generally known, though the ever-surprising Lincoln provides a clarion example. It is the side of human-ness that the New World dispensed with, in its urgency to master the this-worldly dimension.
It is time to write a new chapter in the history of the New World. That is the rendezvous Our present generations have with destiny. That is the fierce urgency of now.
NOTE
· Quoted by Stephen J. Lendman in his Post ‘Al Nakba Redux’, Jan. 21, 2009, on his website here.
Labels: Abortion, Boston, Civil Rights Era, David Ben-Gurion, Identity Politics, Israel, Joseph Goebbels, School Busing, Second Wave Feminism
posted by publion at 2/03/2009 09:31:00 AM
5 Comments:
I hope you are not placing the attempt to racially integrate American society on your list of the faux emergencies of the Sixties. As I recollect they were all pretty urgent problems and they remain so.
Any street or school honored by the name Martin Luther King, Jr. is even today almost certainly located in an area that is more than 99% black. Irony is heaped upon irony.
More irony: Attitudes of pro-life agitators toward social support for unwed mothers who bring embryos to term in difficult economic circumstances are punitive in the extreme and the most likely cause of the majority of abortions in this country.
Single payer health insurance would go further toward ending the abortion problem than reversal of Roe v. Wade
Not at all. The goal for ‘integration’ was tremendously important; a citizen looking at the prospects for the future in that first week of July ’65 would have imagined a long but vibrant process of ‘integrating’, to ground the work – so long delayed – advanced by both the Civil War and MLK’s civil rights movement.
BUT THEN it was the second, Northern phase – black power and separatism and ‘revolution’ (the word was actually used – that, on top of Watts and its spawn, undermined the entire process of ‘integration’.
And from both ‘sides’: the whites became confused and anxious over the apparent irrationality and the consequences of violence, and the black spokesfolk were dissing ‘integration’ as being too subservient to ‘honky’. So integration died just as it came out of the gate at the long awaited Great Race.
And the Dems, now desperate to pander, signed every blank check thrust at them by whatever ‘spokesmen’ were enterprising enough to put themselves forward. And the Dem support amplified the whole careening mess.
Then the Republicans jumped in to see what hay they might make.
And then after a while, despite the signs that things weren’t getting better and were getting worse, nobody in government wanted to admit that they had made a mistake, so they just kept on – like Vietnam, eerily.
I’m not quite sure about the single-payer insurance as a comprehensive solution. ‘Roe’ is a lot of things, not the least of which is baaad law, baaad jurisprudence and legal thinking, and baaad precedent. On that level alone it has wreaked great damage. And that’s before we actually get to considering the actual ‘abortion’ matter itself, and whether it’s ‘good’ or even workable, given human nature and so forth.
Concern for single-mothers is spot-on, but the entire gambit is much like the Iraq war: having gotten into the baaad thing to begin with, its supporters now seek to hide behind ‘the troops’, who are the pawns in the frakfest, though they signed up for it.
After almost 350 years of slavery and de jure second-class citizenship, white society - through AFDC payments (established after the riots) - raised one generation of impoverished black kids for a relative pittance before 'welfare as we know it' was abolished by Clinton. I am unwilling as yet to mark that account as 'paid in full.'
Decreasing the number of abortions is a goal recognized by all and sundry. Reversal of Roe does not move us toward that goal. Pro-lifers know this. That is why I suspect that they are more about social control than protection of zygotes.
Latin America is full of countries bound by papal concordats where abortion is completely illegal and yet there are more per capita abortions in those places than in the US where the deer and the antelope play. Monetary support and in-kind services like daycare and education for single moms are the only ways to address this issue effectively.
Anything else leads to ideological gridlock.
My primary point is that ‘Roe’ is bad law and sets a bad precedent.
I’ll just note here one of the most insidious and lethal effects it had: the selection of judges – especially Supreme Court Justices – according to a ‘litmus test’, specifically in the matter of supporting abortion (or, later more shrewdly euphemistically, and more thanks to Goebbels’ playbook) ‘choice’.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a notable Second Wave appeals judge who also served as director of the ‘Women’s Rights Project at the ACLU (by then sucked into the morass generated by embracing the ‘spin’ that abortion was a matter of ‘civil rights’ and ‘civil liberties’).
Long before the Republican Party began to succumb to and make use of the either-or, ‘with us or against us ’mindset (simultaneously immature as thought process and toxic to democratic process, and again from the Goebbels-Israeli playbook), the Democrats had allowed this monstrous regression into the highest precincts of national political life.
As to how to reduce abortions, of course the most logical and inexpensive (socially as well as economically) solution would for males and females to respect the power of creating and destroying life that they possess by the age – I think – these days of their mid-teens. Certainly I can no more accept that a female could “find herself” pregnant any more than I can accept that a male can be dumbfounded as to how his sex-partner had ‘gotten pregnant’.
In this regard, the matter of how to conceptualize the place of ‘sex’ is relevant. One approach is and has been that it is a source of ‘liberation’ – from ‘conformity’; this Romantic conception was certainly an aspect of what the late John Diggins called the ‘Lyrical Left’ of the very early 20th century. A variant of this is that it is a source of ‘vitality’, and is ‘natural’, and therefore ‘normal’, and contributes to ‘fulfillment’ and is indeed indispensable to that ‘fulfillment’ – the result in practice ‘on the ground’ and ‘in the field’ is that everybody about to enter into the sexual act can assure themselves that they are on the high and fast road to ‘fulfillment’ and sex – at any time and in any situation – is ‘normal’ and even ‘necessary’.
If I understand the complex interactive dynamics of physiology and psychology,
frequent ‘ejaculation’ is certainly helpful to males, and females access remarkable neuro-chemical and biochemical advantages only through the act of pregnancy. But that is no justification for ‘sex anywhere, anytime’ let alone ‘all the time’.
And no matter how much ‘fulfillment’ – whatever that vague though inspiring concept actually entails – is at stake, so is a third human life.
Another approach is to see ‘sex’ as essential but also as highly volatile, something to be treated as the Navy treats nuclear power on its vessels: a hugely useful source of energy, but highly dangerous and requiring the most careful and competent management.
A primitive variant of this, still deployed by some religious thought, is that sex is simply ‘evil’, although necessary.
“Equality”as it is presently envisioned is almost impossible to achieve under the conditions set up by evolution itself: while both male and female are required for conception and increasing the species, only the female is assigned the task of bringing the conceived life to term. Thus, in order to achieve the aforementioned version of “equality”, the natural, Nature-assigned order of things must be politically eliminated. And We start going down the path of King Canute and the lethal mistakes of Nazi ‘racial’ theory.
The Second Wave, essentially a political operation with only a secondary and highly selective interest in ‘reason’, ‘logic’, or ‘facts’, in order to broaden its base of support among females, had to embrace both the sex-is-good and the sex-is-not-so-simple justifications. This is an anomaly awareness of which, though suppressed through ‘sensitivity’ and Political Correctness, wreaks consequences that expand in effect as Second-Wave ‘reforms’ are spread throughout the society and its institutions.
For example, while everyone can see the wisdom of enabling a court to consider a bank-robber’s prior robbery record – if such exists – when considering the case, the Second Wave insisted that the prior history of a female sexual complainant cannot be considered, whether of sexual-misadventure or the filing of false complaints. This is not ‘equality’ before the law; it is preference.
Which leads to the larger dynamic: in order to achieve “equality”, “preference” must be given. Such ‘preference’ extends to limitations on the very assessment of the ‘demands’ being put forth, or an impartial examination of such ‘cases’ as are put forth in support of such demands. We have – after decades of this – lost the ability to think critically, to analyze critically, or to bring any skepticism whatsoever to matters of great import.
This dynamic feeds the objectives of both Rightist and Leftist (Second Wave) agendas to achieve ‘control’ of public opinion – and, by necessity – the ‘public’ itself. This ‘public’ is otherwise known as, and supposed to function as, The People.
So you see the problems and my concerns.
I don’t know how to reduce the numbers of abortions, except by stopping the conceptions at their source – the sexual act between the dyad. And that requires a huge commitment - not necessarily fiscal as much as moral and spiritual – by the entire ‘community’ of the citizenry to raise children to understand their awesome and awful power.
To allow ‘government’ to do this, as the Second Wave is always trying to push in its queasily Soviet style of agenda, is not only doomed to failure but is a massive abdication of responsibility by the citizens of Our society. Which includes the Boomers, who got Us into this frakking mess to begin with.
That ‘government’ – in either is Rightist or Leftist wig – is perfectly happy to oversee such abdication, is absolutely no testament to the integrity of either the abdication or the ‘government’.
I’ll toss in here what I plan to Post on shortly: ‘Gender’ is clearly not the same type of critter as ‘race’ or ‘class’. While there is utterly no evolutionary or Nature-al basis underlying the classifications of ‘race’ and ‘class’, there is huge evolutionary and Nature-al entanglement in the matter of the male-female distinction. Indeed, it is evolution and Nature that imposed that distinction, long before ‘governments’ or even ‘patriarchy’ (whatever that means).
The Democrats’ failure – through political calculation or imbecility – to recognize this profound reality about the Theater of Operations, ensured a long darkling saga of impossible objectives to be achieved through doomed strategies with the greatest and most lethal of unintended, unforeseen, or witlessly pooh-poohed consequences. Can We say ‘Iraq’?
Since 1801, there has never been a time when nomination and approval of Supremes was not a highly contested political process. It was set up to be so. The Court is, after all, a branch of democratic government. Presidents have had litmus tests since Adams nominated John Marshall for his Federalist views - even if such tests were sometimes as vague as generic sympathy for southern states' rights, Keynesian economic policy or 'lawn order' in matters of criminal procedure.
You are right. Stopping abortion needs to happen "at the source" that is: unwanted conceptions. If evolution may be seen as the natural law becoming conscious of itself, you might what to consider technology's role in the expansion of human options which is generally positive - even if, for other reasons, bad or no use of increased autonomy continues to ensue.
In the "long darkling saga of impossible objectives to be achieved through doomed strategies", abstinence education is well nigh at the top of the list. Fortunately, social controls on women - the unique province of religious patriarchs and their attending acolyte village gossips - are no longer the only game in town.
Your commingling of evolutionary and natural law arguments is welcome here but it needs to take the advent of cheap and effective birth control and over-the-counter pregnancy testing supplies into greater account to shore-up the argument for increased protection of the evolving rights of a developing second trimester fetus.
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