THE INTERNATIONAL VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN AND GIRLS ACT

This stuff never stops. But each time there’s an interesting new revelation or two.

An obscure pol (Delahunt: D, MA) recently brayed in an Op-Ed that he was going to re-introduce this Bill in the Congress. It had – mirabile dictu! – been rejected in two previous Sessions.

Just a few days ago Mr. Delahunt promises to reintroduce it. You can probably make some decent guesses as to why, ruling out that while in one of his frequent and habitual deep contemplations of the state of the nation and his sworn commitment to the common weal he suddenly conceived of the utter and genuine value of this Bill and the urgency of its passage, the aforesaid illumination accompanied by the faint tingle of trumpets and the rustle of angels’ wings.

Possible elements in his sudden announcement: the fact that there’s an election looming; or that he had been tapped by his party to carry the wood for this next attempt at a pander-picnic; or the calculation that such an announcement just before his State’s voters went to a special election to choose between a ‘woman’ and a not-woman to replace the late Teddy K might help mobilize the cadres of the assorted subsets of the feminist revolutions (if so, it seemed to have worked).

Anyhoo, even if the announcement is meant purely as a bit of electioneering bait-and-switch, it got me to look up the text of the Bill.

It really is a doozy – but I mean that constructively: it pulls aside all sorts of curtains and reveals the unifying vision motivating all the agitation. And I have to give credit where credit is due: it speaks well of the Congress that this thing was not allowed to see the light of day. However, the Beltway is pretty far gone, and We should not pop any champagne corks. As Dietrich Bonhoeffer observed ruefully of his beloved Germany in the 1930s: “Once you’ve gotten on the wrong train, walking back through the cars isn’t going to help”. Ach so.

The text of the last attempt at getting this thing passed (dated April 30, 2008) is here. I recommend giving it a read. It’s less than 20 pages long and not really unreadable. In fact, in its clarity, it serves purposes far greater than its constructors might wish.

Section 2 gives us Findings: these are the ‘facts’ selected to go on the record as the justification for the Bill itself – and in case you are wondering: No, there is no official requirement that they be ‘true’ or ‘accurate’; any such sentimental expectations on the part of the voters is, in this urgent and edgy age, “quaint” and not-deserving of serious consideration.

Finding (1) states that “violence against women and girls is rooted in multiple causes and takes many forms, including physical, sexual, and psychological”. Step back from that for a moment, and consider. In the first place, ‘physical, sexual and psychological violence’ covers a huge swath of ground, of human experience, and at varying levels of intensity and seriousness. That’s an awful big mouthful for even the US Congress to bite off, especially given that a) its record of solving large problems (the economy, war-fighting) is rather poor of late; b) for stamping out all of this in foreign countries, the Congress has at its disposal only US dollars and US soldiers – neither of which are doing well right now, the latter because there now aren’t enough of them and the former because there are now too many of them; c) those “multiple causes” promise – like Iraqi and Afghani society – to have all sorts of complicated dynamics, for which a lot of hard thought may be required, with no guarantee of finding any workable solution … and when it comes to such Problems From Hell, the Congress already has a couple-three and does it really need to be buying itself – and Us – another one?

The same Finding continues to the effect that this swirling vortex of violence “affects all countries, social groups, ethnicities, religions, and socioeconomic classes, and is a global health, economic development, and human rights problem of epidemic proportions”. Whew. And Delahunt in his Op-Ed mentioned that passing the Bill would also do a lot for national security, so add in something about that as well.

The US Congress has apparently ‘gone papal’ – since the Pope of Rome is also well known for wide-ranging assessments of the world condition. But then, the Pope is the Pope and you expect Encyclicals from him; and an Encyclical is simply an exhortatory letter by somebody who has been doing a lot of serious thinking. But when Congress gets into ‘pope mode’ there are billions and trillions of dollars (whatever they may soon be worth or not worth) and armies and fleets and bombs of all sizes and satellites and drones and every intention of using them if anybody snickers at the pronouncement. And while doing deep and prayerful thinking about the purification and salvation of the whole world is what a Pope is hired for, We didn’t elect the Beltway banditti to be fixing or purifying the world (about which more later) – indeed, one of the greatest services this generation of Americans might render to all the world’s peoples is to put Our government back on the leash and pull it back into the yard.

Note also the shrewd, and slightly queasy, misuse of terms: “epidemic” is a medical term with a rather clear meaning, and there’s no such thing as a permanent epidemic, which is what the Congress claims is the ‘emergency’ that requires it to act (and it seems they really plan to march into Czechoslovakia and Austria and Poland on the basis of this ‘emergency’ – ach!; about which more below). And when pols start telling you that such-and-such is an economic and a health and a national-security problem all at the same time, you can expect – like any good German or Soviet ‘news-consumer’ – that you will soon be on the starting end of some sort of ‘war’. Read again the chapter on the Wart and the ant-wars in T.H. White’s eternally relevant “The Once and Future King”.

Finding (2) starts throwing scare-stats at Us: “approximately 1 in 3 women in the world will experience violence in her lifetime” … the ‘approximately’ is a nice touch, meant to impress you with its scientific humility so that you don’t stop to ask yourself just who went and interviewed all those people.

And how many males, d’ye think, experience some sort of violence in their lifetime? But THAT, of course, is the question that can’t be asked. Because although the pious bleatfest of a text doesn’t come right out and say it in so many words, the elephant in the center of this feminist dampdream-nightmare is - wait for it – ‘men’. Anytime a ‘woman’ experiences violence, then you are meant to subconsciously remind yourself that there is and can be only ONE source of that violence … to wit, the aforesaid ‘men’.

That’s the huge civic and societal and civilizational problem with this whole feminist victim game, this “woundology” as one female therapist put it: it’s a zero-sum game of gotcha, and once ‘the woman’ is accepted as suffering violence, then ‘the man’ is ipso facto and automatically convicted as the perpetrator. Get beyond the melodramatic media frame for a moment and consider: this is a recipe for civil war, for profound civic division to the point of the fracturing of societies and of polities.

And this Bill would like to share that pain with the entire planet and all its people and nations. Or else (about which more below).

Ditto that “1 in 5 women in the world will be the victim of rape or attempted rape in her lifetime”. After what I’ve seen in definition-creep in the domestic American gender war, I’d like a clearer definition of ‘rape’ and ‘attempted rape’ – because a lot these terms no longer mean for legal and media purposes what the dictionary would lead a decent, innocent citizen to believe.

Finding (4) includes among “the many different types of gender-based violence”: forced or child marriage, so-called ‘honor-killings’, dowry-related murder, human trafficking, and female genital mutilation. These are all repugnant practices – although Multicultural Correctness would insist that ‘outsiders’ (which would include Americans and even American feminists) have no right or even ability to ‘judge’ – a rather spicy irony. But they are densely embedded in cultures often millennia-old.

The Bill clearly expects the US to march into these ancient polities and cultures and start ripping the stuff out like Shylock imagined he would exact his targeted pound of flesh: without any negative consequences. Or like the nanny-governess in ‘The King and I’ simply sailed in and began re-arranging the palace furniture: I honestly do think a lot of the now-regnant Boomers and their spawn, currently moving and shaking in the Beltway, have gotten their ideas of politics and world affairs from the movies they saw when they were kids; in fact, given that they skipped so many college classes for demonstrations, drugs, or sex on the lawn, then the movies of the 1940s and 1950s were probably the only education they really got, beyond the readin’ and writin’ and ‘rithmatic of grade school.

Finding (6) speaks about “recent studies in Africa”. I can’t help but think that the Pentagon is also rather interested in Africa these days, since it seems those folks have – not to put too fine a point on it – oil. I can see in this Bill, as has been seen in far too many feminist initiatives whose alliances were too clever by half, an alliance between the feminists and the Pentagon – and a synergy between such two dark forces, each demonstrably past its glory-days but all the more dangerous for the fact, cannot end well for anybody.

Finding (13) asserts that “increased access to economic opportunities is crucial to the prevention of and response to domestic and sexual violence”. Don’t let these phrases simply flow by you unvexed to the sea. You may recall what police-state tactics have been the direct and intended result of ‘domestic violence’ and ‘sex offender’ regimens in this country – and the Bill seems intent on exporting this frakkery to foreign countries (and will they sit still for it or appreciate Us for the gift?).

Worse, let’s not forget that the only way to ‘increase access to economic opportunities’ for ‘women’ in this country was to take the jobs from – how not to say it? - men. And then when jobs ‘went away’ when outsourcing increased because Congress was pandering without thought of consequence not only to feminists but to corporate PACs, then the remaining jobs and dwindling salaries and benefits were cut in pieces: adults were working for salaries and on jobs that in the Golden Age (1940-1970) were reserved for teens to make pocket-money.* And is this what the Bill would like the US to export to foreign countries? Is the overall strategy, if the Bill has one, to reduce other countries to the level that the Beltway’s policies have reduced America? Is this Bill, then, the equivalent of the infamous ‘smallpox infected blankets’ that were sent to ‘the natives’ as gifts and tokens of goodwill?

And let’s not forget that such increased ‘access’ here has required the wholesale assault on the concepts of family, marriage, and the introduction of abortion-on-demand (or whatever they call it now; I don’t get all the Memos), as well as a host of lesser ‘reforms’. And all of the consequences, intended as well as unintended, but all predictable and predicted, though so many ignored.

Section 3 (“Statement of Policy”) lets another cat out of the bag: “It is the policy of the United States … to condemn AND COMBAT [caps mine] violence against women and girls, and to promote and assist other governments in preventing and responding to such violence”.

First, I don’t recall any such governments requesting any “assistance”. And domestically We have seen an increasing trend (strategy?) wherein the government informs the States that it has decided to be their “partner” and they will like it or they won’t get government funds – the old Al Capone scam erected into a national governmental policy. So now the Bill wants to take this racket into international affairs?

Second, ‘combat’ is a military metaphor. And it not only carries in its train the police-state tactics of domestic US policies such as Domestic Violence and Sex Offense (whose lethal consequences across a wide spectrum including Constitutionality and fundamental American and Western concepts of Justice are only now coming to light), but also promises to spread such ‘wars’ to other nations and polities and societies and cultures. Is this wise? Do We have any right to do this?

Third, and this must indeed be some strategic or tactical ploy, the introduction of the repetitive phrase “and girls” – perhaps to perform the same task as the phrase “the children” has performed here: to provide a telegenic and empathy-grabbing symbol, like the photos of the baby fur-seals provided in the 1980s to various environmental groups. And who can forget that according to the Memos in force at the time, you could and can lose your job for calling ‘women’ ‘girls’?

Further, “to systematically integrate and coordinate efforts to PREVENT and RESPOND TO [caps mine] violence against women and girls into United States foreign policy and foreign assistance programs”. This includes the entire hugely dubious police-state strategy of ‘preventive law’ – whereby the ‘potential’ for committing a crime is itself criminalized and made the basis for arrest and imprisonment or confinement. This is already in place here: it came in with the sex-offense matrix of laws and was then incorporated into the post-911 government policy of ‘detention’ – both of which are only now coming to light in all their awful reality. The Bill wants to erect this into foreign policy, when over here We are just now starting to see the courts try to unravel this awful skein.

Further, “to fully implement the comprehensive international strategy set forth in section 300G of the Foreign Assistance Act of 1961, as added by this Act, which provides assistance to eligible countries to reduce and prevent gender-based violence with coordinated efforts in the criminal justice, health, education, and economic sectors”. This Bill essentially wants to re-create as a foreign policy initiative imposed on other countries the entire ‘feminist revolution’ whose consequences have wreaked such havoc here. **

Further, “to support and build capacity of indigenous nongovernmental organizations that are working to prevent and respond to violence against women and girls, particularly women’s nongovernmental organizations, and to support and encourage United States organizations working in partnership with such nongovernmental organizations”.

So this Bill wants to recreate ‘over there’ the entire panoply of feministical pressure groups and organized advocacies that bethump Us here. And use the full faith, credit, and power of the US (such as that may still be) to do it. What it took the feminist advocacies several decades of agitating and ‘strategizing’ to do here, they want to achieve overnight through US governmental clout. I can’t imagine that a lot of countries are going to appreciate the strong-arming. Or, worse, they may laugh at it as they perhaps have been snickering in their sleeves at America’s domestic ‘wars’ for decades now. ***

Further, “to prevent and respond to violence against women and girls through multisectoral methods, working at individual, family, community, local, national, and international levels and incorporating service, prevention, training, and advocacy activities and economic, education, health, legal and protective intervention services”.

This Bill is a warrant for the feminist revolutionaries to literally take over any government, and a warrant to interfere in the entire civic and societal and cultural life of any targeted nation. You begin to remember Frank Capra’s ‘Why We Fight’ series from the World War 2 era, where he reports that the Japanese Tanaka Memorandum is the written proof of that nation’s world-dominating imperialistic aims. The Bill seeks to erect these aims into formal American law, internationally (as has already, to some unhappy extent, been done in formal domestic American law and jurisprudence).

Further, “to enhance training by United States personnel of professional foreign military and police forces and judicial officials to include specific and thorough instruction on preventing and responding to violence against women and girls".

Notice that those ‘United States personnel’ might be civil police or they might be military. Which again carries the seeds of a dove-tail alliance between feminists and the Pentagon just as over here during the last few decades the feminists – reputedly ‘liberal’ – allied themselves with the American law-and-order Right through the Victim Rights Movement to criminalize their opponents and their targets and ‘gender enemies’. So if the Pentagon needs a ‘liberal’ pretext for further intruding in the sovereignty of other nations then this Bill will hand it a rather telegenic pretext indeed.

Section 300A yields a breathtakingly sweeping ‘definition’: “The term ‘violence against women and girls’ [means] any act of gender-based violence against women or girls committed because of their gender that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual, or psychological harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion, or arbitrary deprivations of liberty, whether occurring in public or private life … and includes physical, sexual and psychological violence occurring in the family, including battering, sexual abuse of female children in the household, dowry-related violence, marital rape, female genital mutilation, and other traditional practices harmful to women, nonspousal violence, and violence related to exploitation”. It goes on to add the same menu “at work, in educational institutions and elsewhere”, as well as any such that is “condoned by the state”.

First, this is so sweeping a warrant that it will justify US ‘partnership’ in any country on the planet that has women in it. And that any government that “condones” such “violence” – which may simply mean any government of a country where such patterns are so ingrained in the culture that it would be suicidal or incite revolution for a government to try to uproot it – is liable to ‘partnership’ and being ‘declared a partner’ by the US (rather than declare war on nations, now, We will simply ‘declare them partners’ – O brave new world!).

Second, you see the same frakkery that has deranged the Constitutional ethos and framework here: there is no ‘private’ sector, no ‘privacy’ (except the Roe v. Wade kind), and thus no boundary between the government police authority and that larger, more vital and indispensable ‘civil society’ of individuals which in the American founding vision is the genuine heart of the entire nation. And does the Bill imagine that other countries will sit still for such a profound invasion?

BUT THEN this Bill demonstrates one of the most stunning and repulsive bits of cynical shrewdery that I have ever encountered in American legislation: “Eligible Countries” – thus countries who are liable to such ‘partnership invasions’ – are defined as “countries that are not classified as high-income countries”.

Which means that any country big enough to tell America to go fly a kite, or any country holding enough American debt that it can threaten to call in its Notes or sell off its dollars, or any country that can afford a half-decent military to turn back the feminist cadres (led, perhaps, by a moon-faced 4-star general in striped uniform pants and sensible shoes) back at the docks or landing fields … doesn’t have to worry because – apparently – the Bill recognizes that they aren’t doing such baaad things to women and girls.

Which means that it is only the countries and governments too poor to defend themselves who will be ‘eligible’ for the full feministical deconstruction of their entire societal warp and woof. And their governments, if they submit to it, will be undermined (and perhaps thus become a US protectorate, by the by).

This is truly repugnant. We have fallen this far. (But it is to the credit of previous Sessions of Congress that this almost diabolically megalomaniac legislation has not come to a vote.)

But it gets worse.

Section 300B establishes a Coordinator of the Office of Women’s Global Initiatives, who will preside over that Office, which Office will be established in the Office of the Secretary of State in the Department of State (just down the hall from Hillary’s office, you have to notice). This Coordinator will report directly to Hillary (the Secretary of State) and shall have the rank and status of Ambassador at Large.

Thus, the Bill will set up an American Ambassador of Women, totally free from the usual State Department operational mechanisms, who will swill Chardonnnay directly with Hillary in the inner office while going over maps and charts. Ach!

But this Ambassador won’t just be for show (like the General). This Coordinator (might We presume ‘she’?) “shall design, oversee, coordinate activities and programs of the United States Government relating to international women’s issues, and direct United States government resources to prevent and respond to violence against women and girls throughout the world”.

That’s an awful lot of power. Those US government ‘resources’, as herein defined, could include aircraft carriers, satellites and drones, mercenaries hired by the government, as well as just about any other ‘resource’ owned or employed by the US government. Which, by the by, also includes the CIA and all those other darker forces. And don’t tell yourself that such possibilities are ‘ridiculous’ – not many decades ago the very thought of a Bill like this would have seemed ridiculous (although, so would the thought that this country could so thoroughly wreck itself so quickly in so many ways).

And will she confer with the actual American Ambassador to any targeted or ‘eligible’ country? Or will she function pretty much as the Bush-era plenipotentiaries and consuls functioned in Iraq?

Or, as the Democrats declared themselves in 1972 ‘the party of women’, will this Bill establish the US as the ‘government of women’? I don’t mean that in any misogynist or macho sense. I mean that an entire government will be committed to enforcing the strategical dampdreams of the more outré cadres of feminism, with all the corrosive ‘deconstructing’ and gender-warring that those cadres espouse.

And she is authorized to represent the United States, and speak for it, in all matters relating to violence against women and girls. Of course, that will be “subject to the direction of the President and the Secretary of State”, butshe will be part of the Executive Branch, not the Congress. Whose members will no doubt be grateful to be left out so they can claim they had no responsibility.

And she will have an Advisory Commission to advise her. Section 300D stipulates that its membership will be “selected from among A) distinguished individuals noted for their knowledge and experience in fields relevant to the issue of international violence against women and girls … B) representatives of nongovernmental organizations and other institutions having knowledge and expertise related to violence against women and girls; and C) academics representative of the various scholarly approaches to the issue of international violence against women and girls.”

As you can see, this is an honorarium-employment scheme for just about anybody Who’s Somebody in feminist circles. And (C) might include just about anybody who has written a book about feminism, or teaches god-knows-what to college-students under the guise of higher education. (See my recent Post on Janet Halley here.)

I don’t want this Post to stretch too long. I’ll add that Section 300G lists the Program Objectives under various headings:

“Increasing legal and judicial protections” lists under 8 sub-headings just about every police-state stratagem enacted under the Domestic Violence and Sex-Offense mania laws (and I don’t imagine that Afghani males will take all that with as much passivity as American males).

“Carrying out health care initiatives” includes ‘women’s health and family planning’, so you know that abortion is in the penumbras there somewhere.

“Conducting public awareness programs to change social norms and attitudes” includes “providing funding and programmatic support for mass media social change campaigns” and that will shade into subverting ‘objective’ reporting, to what little extent in can exist in ‘eligible’ countries; as well as “supporting community efforts to change attitudes about harmful traditional practices” and that, given feminism’s proven trajectory, will include anything male – which should make for some interesting outcomes in the focus groups.

“Improving economic opportunities for women and girls” includes getting women to start their own businesses and starting up the workplace harassment culture that has done so much to drive corporations to quietly but quickly outsource their operations and get the hell out of town.

Section 300K calls for foreign militaries and police to be trained in gender sensitivity. Again, I am not sure that such forces will respond with the same subservient mock-enthusiasm that has compromised American forces.

Section 300L shrewdly requires that funding for all this “may not be provided at the expense of other humanitarian programs”. This is cynical boilerplate, since nobody knows or can know or is supposed to be able to find out where the money comes from for any program. And since ‘money’ – to wit ‘dollars’ – is already a candidate for the Endangered Species List, then this may all become moot at about the same time that America finds itself having to ‘re-valorize’ the Frontier Spirit and Industrial Age grit in order to survive the decline of the nation’s status in the world.

The Section also requires that any and all contracting firms hired by the US become suitably gender-special or gender-friendly or whatever the Memo calls it. It also calls for the deployment of all this authority to assist not only females in ‘eligible’ country militaries but also in the US forces, where they meet with violence against women and girls, workplace harassment, and so forth. So the moon-faced general with the striped pants and sensible shoes will now be able to call upon an Ambassador who swills and chills with Hillary in her battles with the Pentagon mastodons and mastodonlings.

Oh, and the Coordinator-Ambassador will see to it that there are more women officers in the military. And see that UN forces do likewise. But of course.

Well, that’s the gist of the Bill as I see it.

It seems to be pretty much a shopping list in Bill form of just about everything that ‘governance feminism’ wants to see happen in a country. And a pretty comprehensive summary of all the stuff that governance feminists have pulled off ‘here’. For that alone, the text of the Bill is worth the read.

But it also comprises a strategy: what the governance feminists have done ‘over here’ they now want to do ‘over there’, or at least in those countries that can’t fight back and are too cash-starved to laugh at the lunacy of it all (America has yet to see any public voice courageous enough to observe that The Empress Has No Clothes – as in the famous fairy-tale scenario.)

I don’t know what to think. It seems strange that just as the some of the dire consequences of so many feminist initiatives are becoming clear over here, there is this Bill that wants to erect it all into the foreign policy law of the land and spread it around the world. It seems a massive irony that this is happening just as the stature and role of the Unites States is visibly and vividly declining from its post-World War 2 zenith.

It’s almost lunacy when this Delahunt asserts that the Bill will also – by the by – enhance US national security. I can see this Bill getting a lot of governments and peoples mad at Us for trying to deconstruct them – which is an inevitable corrosive consequence of feminism as Theory and as national policy.

Nor can I see it enhancing Our national security if the actual governments are destabilized either because they resist this stuff and are deprived of foreign aid or accept it and lose legitimacy in the eyes of their peoples (male and female). Which brings up the never-spoken feministical assumption that gender Identity will trump cultural and social Identity; certainly We are seeing an awful lot of people around the world who don’t consider their potential Identity as members of a democracy to trump their lifelong Identity as members of a culture, religion, civilization.

Nor do I imagine that American feminists will be any less ham-handed and thoughtlessly impetuous (no matter how shrewdly ‘strategic’) than any other types of American government missionary undertakings, especially the most modern form of American missionary zeal that invaded Iraq and Afghanistan. Indeed, the excesses of their domestic gender-wars have even noted American feminists and ‘progressive’ publications starting to gingerly propose dialing it all back and that, possibly, mistakes were made.But the past 40 years’ worth of revolutionary agitation cannot but remain vivid in any mature person’s mind. And how can you get a career feminist cadre, life centered upon the ‘high’ of revolutionary righteousness, to dial back? Stalin’s solution, when he had to dial back every Communist interpretation of Marx and Lenin except his own, shot them all or sent the ‘venial’ offenders to the Gulag.

Perhaps, seeing the magic aura of protection afforded by Political Correctness now beginning to fade as the frakkery becomes more obvious, the feministicals are trying to sink so many roots that they will become part of the Beltway jungle, impenetrable and irremovable.

Or maybe this is an instance of the gods driving mad with hubris those whom they will destroy.

Perhaps believing their own klatschy propaganda that they have ‘vanquished’ their ‘enemies’ (i.e. the gender-enemy of the revolution, men) domestically, they are now ready to go forth and subdue the rest of the world. In which case they might recall that even Stalin in his prime realized that the best he could do was to enforce ‘socialism in one country’ and leave world-revolution to other godlings and demons beyond his ken. But that brings it all back to Hitler and Barbarossa: he thought it would be a sure thing.

I don’t mean to be tendentious with these historical references. The femisticals themselves have always brayed about ‘revolution’ and have read all the relevant playbooks, left in History’s ashcan among the wrack and ruin and blood.

I very much do think that there will be blood if this thing succeeds. It is a testimony to the deeply and uniquely ingrained civility of American culture that the feministicals – even with the witless support of the government – could do what they have done here for so long and have not engendered a ‘backlash’ that would make a few negative comments look like child’s play. Other peoples are not so profoundly civil in their habits.

Nor do I think that their efforts to recreate the classic PC campus ethos of the current American university will succeed in the dark and bloody ground that is the wider world, not only beyond the campus but beyond the American borders. As Stalin, at a state dinner, replied coolly to Churchill’s indignant query What do you do with dissenters, Marshal Stalin?: We shoot them. Stalin represents a dark world beyond the small circle of Western democracy’s campfire, and in their hyperexcited deconstructing and demonization of Western culture the feministicals have lost sight of just how fragile but unique and marvelously valuable the Western tradition is in this darkling world.

And I think We are also back to John Adams’s comment that America will be a model of democracy, but not an agent around the world. And that the country will not dissipate itself – fiscally, diplomatically, or morally – by “going abroad in search of monsters to destroy”. It is in this sense that the feministical revolution and its necessary gender-enemy excitements have always been profoundly antithetical not only to the Constitutional ethos but to the genuinely American vision of the Founders.

As I said, it is to Congress’s credit that this Bill has failed to come to the floor twice.

But as We saw in the legislative chicanery that enabled the now infamous Megan’s Law in 1995 in New Jersey, there might come a point when advocates figure that there are enough ‘friendly’ variables in play to give it a go: a vivid and outrageous instance of violence, a Speaker of the Assembly eager to garner votes for a run for higher office who is willing to circumvent all known legislative procedures to force a rapid passage, and a Chief Justice known to be ready to provide cover of Law when the law inevitably and quickly came to be challenged, and a media more interested in settling quickly on a simple, good-and-evil script that would govern its coverage to the exclusion of more serious and acute analysis.

Obama will be facing his profoundly baffling array of challenges, Congressional elections will be coming up, Hillary is Secretary of State … who knows?

Of course, the economy has yet to take its most dangerous plunge – the cessation of the dollar as the world’s ‘reserve currency’. And if that happens, then US ‘influence’ will decline rapidly. And there will be worse consequences across the board.

Interesting times indeed.

But this Bill is a baaaad thing. Only cash or bullets can sustain it.

NOTES

*Not immediately relevant to the topic of this Post is not only the effect of the jobs and then the salaries being halved as the workforce was doubled (‘women’ into the workforce) but then the effect of the pool of available workers (American males and females) being further increased as virtually unrestricted immigration brought many dozens of millions more into the country. After Tip O’Neil’s shrewd invention of PACs to funnel cash to Congress in exchange for whatever its corporate contributors wanted, and the 1972 Democratic determination to forsake ‘white working males’ to become ‘the party of women’, the Reagan contribution to the mess in the 1980s was to keep up appearances by borrowing money on the strength of America’s World War Two general world hegemony (which the old showman got everyone to believe had come back, just as ‘the battleships’ had risen, resurrection-like, to sail the seas again in all their stern and unconquerable glory).

And after a while, pandering to the Identities was the only way to keep any ‘politics’ going, and pandering to the corporations was the only way to keep ‘the economy’ going. And then after 911 Bush the Egregious tried to combine the feminists’ ‘emergency-victim-stampede’ strategy with Reagan’s it’s-1941-in-America strategy in order to desperately come up with an excuse for America to cut itself a place at the Eurasian resource-heartland table; American industry had been frittered away, its citizenry had been reduced to fragile ‘victims’ and sassy ‘survivors’ with no jobs and lots of debt and a lot of old folks watching wayyyy too many buy-this-drug commercials and We neither produced much anymore nor could pump the oil We had become addicted to.

Bush’s tragedy – to the extent that the word might apply to him – is that he could not fully justify his war(s) without telling the awful truth about just how far down the hole the Beltway had taken the country in the previous decades. To tell that much truth would have risked - ummmmm – civil unrest on a vast scale, as well as risked undermining whatever authority and legitimacy (‘the Mandate of Heaven’, as the Imperial Chinese called it) that the Beltway and the national politicians still possessed. We made nothing anymore, We had no more oil, and We needed to use whatever cards We still had (i.e. military technology) to get Ourselves a place at the Great Table and the Great Game, because the Table and the Game were evolving away from Us and We were on the way to becoming a second-rate power and a third-rate economy, and THAT frakking fact was the fruit of the era 1970-2006 in America. And there is NO putting lipstick on that pig.

I think (and this Note is clearly evolving into an entirely separate Post) that the Beltway in 2001 saw the US in the same position as the Germans saw themsleves in July, 1914: this crazy thing from the Balkans was something nobody had expected, but come to think of it our position is only going to get worse on the world stage over time, so if we are going to have a showdown battle with our present and future rivals, then better sooner than later, and this thing from the Balkans may be just the pretext we need. That didn’t work out so well.

**That 1961 Act provides that “no assistance will be provided to a government which ‘engages in a consistent pattern of gross violations” – so We see here in this Bill an attempt to foist upon the rest of the world the Al Capone scam: you want any help, you do things our way … or else. And I don’t think other countries are going to appreciate such a ‘protection’ racket, even when it is presented to them as a matter of ‘rights’ and of ‘progressive liberation’. Especially so profoundly divisive and damaging a racket.

***And if the dollar ceases to remain the world’s reserve currency – which is the ‘other shoe’ in the fiscal crisis that has yet to drop – then We are going to become a 3rd-world nation almost overnight (or at least resemble Germany in the late 1920s and very early 1930s) and ‘the dollar’ is going to go overnight from its Golden Age status to something resembling the Italian lira of 1955. Then what?