AFGHANISTAN GOES GOLD

And they say History is dead. Or at least doesn’t repeat itself.

Gold and lithium and other great stuff discovered in (under, really) Afghanistan! Or so they say.

Take a moment to give a thought to the Count Duke Olivares. He pretty much Moved and Shook Spain in the increasingly queasy days of the early 1600s. A hard-worker, vain and a little fussy and verrrry techy about his honor and his clan (so many of them were back there and then) yet a hard-working, conscientious senior civil servant trying to keep Spain’s finances going in the service of his young King, Philip IV, of the Spanish Habsburgs.

He had inherited the ducal title, but on his own earned the higher rank of Count – but he got the King, who relied on him greatly, to allow him to combine both titles; hence the odd combo-title: Count-Duke.

Neither of them had a good time of it. They were born into the task of keeping Spain going as a world-hegemon Empire just as her fabulous ‘free’ riches (silver, gold, nice shiny stuff) trickled out. And what there still was to be loaded onto ships was now subject to the more or less official predations of an English navy (not quite yet the Royal Navy of yore – which itself now has, alas, more admirals than ships – just like the US Navy now, come to think of it, but let me not digress).

But the Count-Duke Olivares (hereinafter: the CDO) had a deeper level to him: he was concerned for Spain’s moral and spiritual decline, noting that after all the hegemon-ing, the Castilians, in his opinion, had developed an aversion to hard work and were getting soft. He may well have sensed the specter of Rome standing in a dark chill pool of air just behind him; not the glittering and gaudy Papal Rome of the early 1600s but the tottering late Empire, sliding down into the choppy waves of History in the 4th and 5th centuries A.D.

Spain, he saw with the eyes of a practical mystic, was caught like Laocoon in the toils of mighty forces arrayed against her, both within and without. She was surrounded by burgeoning national monarchies, and within beset with unhappy colonies (the occupied Netherlands the most vitally troublesome) and even unhappy peoples and regions within metropolitan Spain herself.

She was caught in an awesome vortex: in order to retain her Empire she had to have a lot of money, but the taking of huge chunks in taxes or tribute (the plunder now dying out) was creating deep and active unrest among the ‘partnered’, those – not only peasants as in the Medieval times, but also the merchants of the growing cities and the landed classes who had seen taxes as being rather beneath them – who were exhorted to come to the aid of their monarch with purses and wallets; only thus could the still-numerous (but never quite numerous enough) Spanish armies, once the military wonder of the West, be kept in the field – as garrisons, as occupying forces, and – oy – as tax collection enforcers and to keep Spaniards themselves in line.

No cash, no power – but the more power you exerted to get the cash, the more cash you burned more quickly, and then you had to start the whole thing over again to get more cash.

It has a certain familiar ring to it, no?

So the CDO had to support both increasing numbers of wars and increasing domestic taxation. And try to make it seem like a Good Idea that Would Work if Everybody Just Gave It Some Time, Shut Up, and Forked Over More Cash to the government.

Yes, a very familiar ring tone indeed.

Spain’s cycle of vigorous but increasingly inefficacious decline continued on. Like Rome, she took a long time to die – surviving until the early American Republic, when she lost Louisiana to Napoleon (whose ‘French century’ would last a little over 15 years) and then into the Modern Industrial Age, when in 1898 her obstreperous Cuban possession and her hugely well-placed (location, location, location) Philippine possession offered the so-underestimated McKinley the chance to loudly send Admiral Dewey to Manila Bay to crush the Spanish squadron there and to quietly send America’s first overseas military expeditionary force to squash the natives and provide them instead with a change of imperial occupiers.

And Washington elites have been making History jump through their hoops ever since – or so they say.

But here, just now in American history, as the entire field force of the Army is tied up in the oversold campaign to liberate Iraq and the always-in-progress victory in Afghanistan (colloquially known as the Graveyard of Empires, but Washington elites make History, they don’t read it), and with the national economy down on the ropes never fully to recover its erect stance again, ‘The New York Times’ – in its official role as cheerleader to the elites – reports that Gold Found in Afghanistan!

YEEEEEEEE-HAWWWWWWWWWWWWWW!!!!!

California in 1849, Alaska in the late 1890s, and now Afghanistan!

Of course, there IS the minor point – which may not have occurred to more recently educated readers – that the former two venues were the property of the United States – bought and paid for in blood or cash and a bin full of solemn treaties – whereas the latter is currently the property of a tribal confederation whose quaint dress and customs (young boys, among many others) belie the fact that they have updated an ancient and ferocious warrior competence with the most modern weaponry and would pretty much like to be left alone. Unless there’s a few bucks to be made – in which case they will want to be left alone after they have separated the current overconfident whackjob ‘partners’ from their folding money.

Compared to the millennia-long Afghani competence on their own home-turf, the bemedalled ‘warriors’ and ‘warriorettes’ of the American hegemon bring to the intricately-prepared local table a pile of fast-food indeed. And I don’t think this is all going to turn out like a made-for-kiddies Hollywood goo-goo flik, where the solemn and death-matured locals melt in front of the gushing kiddies of the hegemon, put down their sour pusses and weapons, and learn to love supersized sodas and fries as the glorious new normal. A hippopotamus will dance classical ballet in a tutu before that happens … although the Boomers – true to form – may think that that Sign of the Fulfillment has already happened under the administration of Mr. Walt Disney, who was perhaps president somewhere in there between Lincoln and Rose-a-belt. Or maybe he was the Veep, like Cheney only nicer.

Anyhoo, now – they say – there’s gold in them thar hills.

Our Sioux brothren and sistern can attest to what happened to solemn treaties when gold was discovered in the Black Hills back in early 1876, and the events of June 25th of that year on the Little Big Horn.

Is there gold there?

I only ask because at this point, alas, it is not inconceivable that a Beltway that has gotten itself so deep into such tectonic doodoo figures that it can make folks (formerly known as The People) back home think that things are great so go on vacation and go shopping.

Already the Beltway – ever thoughtful – is thinking about how little the Afghans know about running big businesses, and how little they know about environmental protection (let alone about making their womenfolk CEOs), and how their not-so-far-away Chinese neighbors might want to drop by and set up shop.

Perhaps, then, like so many natives before them, the Afghans need to be ‘partnered’ for their own good – that thus they might more deeply and wisely enjoy the blessings of liberty, modernity, and the full panoply of Correctness. Like’ the children’, they need to be protected. At all costs.

Thank God, then, that Our troops are already there. God worketh in mysterious ways, if He (She) were to exist.

And perhaps, with the national kids (formerly known as The People) stuffed into the back of the national family SUV or minivan and mindlessly squealing and chirping about mountains of ice cream and lots of easy fun, the elite National Parents in the Beltway can glean a few minutes of peace and even garner a bit of congratulation.

After all, the National Parents have been following a whole lotta baaaad policies that have come a cropper in a heepa baaaad consequences – foreign and domestic – and yet still haven’t lost their authority … not when they promise ice cream and easy, sempiternal fun.

Which is why kids are great, but not when you’re trying to run a Constitutional Republic. For that you need adults – rather serious-minded ones, not unlike the Afghanis, come to think of it, whatever their personal affiliative predilections.

But even if there is gold and lithium (critical for the AA and AAA batteries without which the imperial gendarmerie of warriors and warriorettes cannot function) in them hills, there’s only a trillion bucks or so. And – what would the CDO and the Hapsburgs say? – a trillion or so doesn’t amount to a hill of beans in this world of debt that We are in now.

Afghanistan is not going to be Our ‘New World’ that saved the bacon of Spain in the 1500s. It’s the 1600s now and things have gone far above the poor power of a measly trillion bucks.

We are in History’s world now.

ADDENDUM

We are now informed that the General commanding Central Command, David Petraeus, passed out briefly while being quizzed about the war by Senator McCain.

Are We to believe that Senator McCain is so acute and intimidating an interrogator that he can make 4-star generals pass out from fright?

Or are We to believe that the situation is so bad over there that Petraeus was shocked into passing out by having to make his report?

Or are We to believe - the official excuse - that he hadn't had his breakfast that morning and had forgotten to hydrate himself (civilian translation: drink enough water)? I have often commented on the decline in resilience of the pampered or at least un-challenged, and certianly underparented, children of the Me generation and its follow-ons: the weakening of standards of strength (characterological and maturational as well as physical) as double-standards became lowered standards. But now it appears that general officers, and a Theater Commander to boot, are unable to 'go without breakfast' without getting sick.

But that this man forgot to drink water? He has a rather large staff precisely so that he doesn't have to remember to do anything and thus can focus on winning the campaign. They'd remind him to change his undies if they had to.

Or was this a ploy to get out of a session where either the questions were taking an ugly turn or - perhaps with the sympathy of understanding congresspersons - nobody officially involved really wanted to go into the subject at length? Or perhaps the PR squad figured the best way to go was to provide a soap-opera Moment that would distract from whatever unhappy information actually arose in the session.

There are many possibilities. But there is one possibility that is simply beyond belief: that a 4-star general, Commanding in a theater of operations where combat is not developing as well as had been promised, forgot to eat his breakfast or drink some water and fainted because of it.

If that's really the truth, then things are much worse than anyone had dared imagine. On so many levels.

AMERICAN DEFICITS THEN AND NOW

Over on the Counterpunch site the insightful military commentator Andrew Bacevich conducts a useful bit of history. In light of Obama’s suggestion (see the immediately preceding Post) in his Commencement Address in Ann Arbor, this is all to the good.

Bacevich’s first point it to observe that the greatest and most dangerous American deficit is in self-awareness. He’s in good company here: the ancient Greeks were strong proponents of it in their best moments: Know Thyself.

In fact, they had worked out a rather comprehensive view of things. Socrates put it well: “Wars, factions, and fighting, have no other origin than this same body and its lusts. ... We must set the soul free from it; we must behold things as they are. And having thus got rid of the foolishness of the body, we shall be pure and hold converse with the pure, and shall in our own selves have complete knowledge of the Incorruptible which is, I take it, no other than the very truth.”

Human beings, as individuals, must free themselves from false or illusory awareness, which they so often incorrectly deem ‘knowledge’. Rather they must always try to see the world as it is and things as they are.

But to do that humans must see themselves as they really are. Each individual human must accept this urgent and profound task. (Which is something all Citizens should do as well.)

Nor is this simply a matter of training the mind; it is a matter of disciplining the soul. (Which gets you into the whole territory of what Christians came to see as Original Sinfulness – the seemingly universal tendency of humans to deny their own best Ideals and their own best potentials.)

Plato came up with the allegory of the Cave. There are those who are seated in the Cave, facing the back wall; they have been chained there all their lives. A fire is burning behind them and on the back wall of the Cave, which is actually on the wall in front of them, they see shadows of persons and things passing between their backs and the fire itself. There are thus projected on the back wall of the cave the gauzy shadow-shapes cast by the movements in front of the fire.

The chained come to mistake these half-phantasmic forms as ‘real’, being the only type of thing they have ever seen.

One person (nicely called by Plato ‘the philosopher’) manages to get out of his chains and walks toward the fire, thereby coming quickly to realize that what ‘everybody’ has been calling ‘reality’ is nothing but ephemeral shapes; and he sees the real moving persons who have cast those shapes in the first place. Human beings, perhaps carrying objects like stones or blocks of wood or statues … to the chained they all are of equal ‘weight’ and ‘reality’.

The philosopher quickly comes to see that there are humans and there are stones and assorted objects, and even statues that are cast in the human form (or fantastic animal forms) but are not alive (though they are ‘real’ in their own way).

And then imagine that the philosopher is brought outside the Cave into the full light of day and the real world in its fullness.

And then imagine that, in a fit of compassion and the eagerness to share his new knowledge he goes back to his still-chained compatriots and tells them all he has seen … and they try to kill him. It is, after all, easier to kill the messenger than to try to adapt yourself to a new reality (or reality instead of phantasmagoria) after you’ve spent your life getting used to the phantasms. Such is Our species – at the lower end of its range.

Such are the trials of the philosopher – of any human who tries to penetrate more deeply and fully into the truth and reality of self and world.

Bacevich sees America as being historically (if not also congenitally) unable to sustain awareness of human knowledge’s limits and incompleteness, and thus Americans lack the humility, prudence and caution that accompany such a clear sense of limitation.

Which can result in imprudence, overconfidence, haste, impatience, in addition to all the mistakes and bad consequences that flow from whatever actions are taken in such a state of illusion.

And once you’ve started racking up a history of such mistakes, it’s also easier to forget them than to fix yourself, let alone face the frak you’ve caused.

You can accomplish that by the low road: distracting yourself and dulling your senses to the wrack and ruin, turning yourself into – for all practical purposes – what used to be called a ‘moral idiot’ and is now called a ‘sociopath’(although that clinical term leaves out the moral bit – which is unreal, I would say).

Or you can take the high road and believe that what you’ve done was God’s will and so it simply can’t ultimately be a frakkulous mistake. Woodrow Wilson, in 1919, having successfully maneuvered his country into war in order to prove his own greatness and to force the country to grow into its own Noble Destiny (as he saw it), confided that “If I didn’t think I was doing God’s will I’d go mad”. Which is what happens when ‘great things’ and ‘noble secrets’ result in wrack, ruin, and the queasy awareness that the Golden Goal (such as ‘an end to war and militarism’) is still not within reach.

The most recent episode of Showtime’s “The Tudors” rather remarkably has the Duke of Sussex returning to a castle accompanying Henry VIII on a royal visit, only to be confronted in his bedchamber by the ghost of the castle’s previous owner, a nobleman who led a popular resistance against Henry’s suppression of the Church; Suffolk, in order not to lose the love of his King, had led the royal forces and mercilessly put down the resistance, killing men, women and children to make an example and betraying his word to this now-deceased but hardly ‘dead’ gentleman who sits before him. America has learned only to laugh at ghosts in movies; there’s sooo much more to it than that. We have lost communion with the ‘dead’, and especially with those whose death came about on Our authority.

With the Marines back in Marja, in Afghanistan’s Helmand Province, Bacevich reminds Us that We have already been there, in the days of Ike: the US Agency for International Development (USAID) had decided that a massive agricultural reform project would be just the thing to domesticate ‘the natives’ and convince them to set down roots. It was working in thousands of American Suburbias, so why not everywhere else?

(Although, as We know now – and were informed in 1963 courtesy of Betty Friedan – each of those Suburbias was a Dachau for women and – courtesy of Alice Miller in 1981 – an Auschwitz for children. You’d think that after such revelations Americans of Left or Right persuasions would want to re-think their too-optimistic assumptions about their latest conceptual fads, but … let it never be said that Americans since 1945 can be legitimately accused of thinking-too-much.)

Not that anybody was trying to ‘liberate’ anybody. It was just that the Pashtuns of Helmand had been reading the papers and traced a line of US blurbing for ‘self determination’ stretching back to 1919 (not so very long ago as memory goes in that part of the world) and throughout the excitements of 1939-1945.

But neither the Afghans nor the Pakistanis – the favored US players on that part of the Board – wanted to see an independent Pashtun state. So the US conceived the idea of distracting the natives with tractors and Tupperware.

Well, tractors and Tupperware and a huge dam – but the Americans didn’t quite do their homework on the local hydrology. And toss in the 15 acres, 2 oxen, and a lifetime supply of free seeds – but the Americans didn’t quite do their homework on the local ancient and deeply rooted culture.

Needless to say, when the Soviets arrived in Afghanistan in 1979 they could still see the skeletal steel and concrete remains of their American predecessors’ failed efforts at politely distracting the natives.

Even though there exists a 1973 US study of the whole misadventure there, citing a “plague” of “cross-cultural misunderstanding and technical miscalculations”, Bacevich figures that the current American foray – something along the lines of ‘armed missionaries’ masquerading as ‘armed social workers’ – isn’t going to do things any better.

Although, come to think of it, the squeaky and decaying pump of the ‘Washington Post’ was conveniently primed with the waterous wisdom that this time the Americans would get the dam and agriculture stuff right. And maybe this whole new kind of ‘war’ too. Gee, that’s swell!

Bacevich acutely lists the core problems – not just the ‘technical challenges’ that no doubt will be reported as ‘largely solved’ in this generation’s version of the Five O’Clock Follies, but rather the profound assumptions as to what ‘reality’ is over there.

Dr. Socrates to Cave One stat! Paging Dr. Socrates!

In a soberingly low-key delivery, Bacevich ticks off the lethal American mis-assumptions:

“a) that the Pashtun way of life is defective; b) that the Pashtuns know this and yearn for something better; c) that United States officials understand where the problems lie and by mobilizing American resources and skill can repair them; d) that in doing so, the United States will both improve the lives of ordinary people and enhance America’s standing in their eyes and in the eyes of many others.”

One is reminded of the fact that Titanic was already doomed in her design stage by the use of hand-driven iron (rather than steel) rivets in vital areas of the hull; by the reduction in height of her watertight bulkheads (to make room for grander staircases); and by the reduction in the number of lifeboats (to make for grander views from the – you’d think aptly called – boat deck).

But of course, if the ship is unsinkable to begin with, then you don’t have to pay attention to the sinkage stuff, do you? Good frakking grief. It’s amazing the Brits built her before We did.

We have yet to see how the countries of the world are going to take this latest form of colonialism: call it the Humanitarian Grandiose variant of the colonialist enterprise.

Bacevich nicely hits the nail on the head. The Beltway Bear is utterly certain of its possession of the One, True and Right Ordering of Things: “secularized modernity”, consisting of a free-market economy, the rule of law, respect for human rights, quality education, and – but of course – ‘gender equality’ (a code term whose precise practical contents and consequences are still not fully known). Toss in, he adds, birth control to keep the birth-rate down.

Looking at his analysis, I am beginning to see a verrrry historical pattern: We are heading into a series of colonial and resource wars (the oil and cash are running out and the industrial capacity is already out-sourced) that the ‘elites’ of both Left and Right can love.

A nation sitting on top of desirable resources – even if it’s just a desirable location (location, location) – needn’t be formally occupied for the sake of ‘oil’. Nor need it have an odious ‘regime’ as did the Iraqis.

It need only be some version of non-secular patriarchal oppression (which, as the feministicals assure Us, includes most of the rest of the world). Such blasphemous (as it were) oppression would immediately justify a mission civilisatrice for the purpose of ‘liberating’ all the oppressed and spreading the enlightenment that only postmodern American culture can bring. The Great Board is back in play, but now for a ‘good’ purpose. Yah.

This was precisely McKinley’s scam when he forced a war on decrepit Spain in order to grab the Philippines (so close to the Open Door of a decrepit China just waiting to be turned into a ‘market’): he would civilize the benighted natives, bring them culture, and stay around and in charge for as long as it took to see the job completed.

Of course, in McKinley’s day America had other things to do than engage in extended foreign wars, and the resultant Filipino (pick one: revolt, insurrection, insurgency, resistance, patriotic war against the invader, terrorism) that lasted four bloody and vicious years was unsought (though in preparing that generation of Americans for their role as world-class ‘players’ it had its uses).

Nowadays, however, a far different and much-diminished America has nothing better to do. So ‘humanitarian liberation’ in the form of spreading that Correct culture that the Beltway’s mission civilisatrice against its own People (namely Us) has achieved (the Beltway would like to think) will now be a secular blessing that will be shared with (read: imposed upon) the cultures of any under-developed country that can’t defend itself and hasn’t got anybody else to stand up for it (like Serbia in 1914, that had the Russia of Nicholas II behind it and thus lustily led the way into World War 1).

But of course, the natives nowadays are no fools (if indeed they ever were). They know that to accept the American ‘partnering’ or ‘liberation’ is now going to mean the deliberate and sustained deconstruction of their culture (and I am not suggesting here that all other cultures are ‘good’ and ‘nice’ or couldn’t use some work).

So they will fight.

And so We will have a fight – many of them, most likely. And they will go on.

Which is pretty much a fine working example of the ‘self-licking ice cream cone’.

But those fights will be furious and bitter. Not because the ‘natives’ are fuddy-duddy ‘backlashers’ but because they know freakish danger when they see it and they will fight for their beliefs and their folkways. Because they know, as the frakkulously imbecile cadres of the Revolutions of the Identities over here did not know and have never learned, a culture is a living thing, and things are connected to each other like the intricate weavings of, say, a finely-woven rug. And if you pull out one thread, or a whole bunch, the thing is soon going to come apart in the winds of Time and Events.

And most ‘natives’ aren’t going to sit still for that.

And We are no longer the Masters of the Universe. Not in the goofy, gap-toothed version embodied in American boys encountering the Cargo Cult natives of the South Seas in World War 2, and not in the gimlet-eyed, lock-and-load, embrace-the-suck sand-troopers of Our current misadventures. (And upon them all be peace.)

We are becoming truly decadent.

Cut loose (officially and among the now-entrenched ‘elites’ anyway) from any Beyond except the American Shinto of the idolatrous, nation-worshipping Fundamentalists, We are now like a Ferris Wheel that is no longer restrained by its struts, drunkenly careening through the Fairgrounds, carrying its passengers (namely Us) with it as it rolls over persons and properties, until at some point it will crash into something big enough to stop it, or it will lose enough momentum so that its own weight will pull it over, carrying its passengers (namely Us) with it.

I’m not sure that in a situation like this ‘optimism’ is the most constructive – or the most mature – approach.

In looking at the Beltway nowadays, I am reminded of the story of the scorpion and the lion. Both need to get across a large and strong river. The scorpion can’t swim and asks the lion for a lift. The lion demurs: your kind bite and you’ll kill me in the middle of the river. To which the scorpion replies: If I did that we’d both drown, and that wouldn’t be very rational, would it? The lion sees the rationality in that and takes the scorpion on his back. In the middle of the stream, the scorpion bites the lion. As he feels his strength ebbing away, the lion says to the scorpion: You’ve killed me and now we’re both going to drown – why did you do it? To which the scorpion replies: Because I’m a scorpion and biting is what I do.

Are We now become a scorpion, with only one thing left that We can do: go out and bethump other peoples for whatever ‘good’ cause happens to come to mind? And grab their stuff? While claiming an authority of a God whom Our elites claim doesn't exist to deconstruct their culture in the name of some 'good' that We are somehow authorized to impose anywhere We can land enough troops?

It didn’t have to be this way. We were set up to be a MODEL of democracy, not its AGENT. We weren’t going to be going abroad all over the planet “in search of monsters to destroy”.

But as America’s place in the world became more torturously complex, its People precisely became less able to govern their government.

And if in the 1890s and in 1916 that war-making was accomplished by Jingoist ‘real’ men and Wilsonian ‘noble’ men, now it’s being done by the cadres of Universal Correctness allied to the neocon Jingoist ‘wannabes’ and the Fundamentalist ‘deputies of God’.

This, really, begins to resemble the freak-show of Medieval ‘politics’ and wars.

It’s time for the shareholders to ask if indeed the clowns haven’t taken over the circus and to decide if itsn't indeed time to step up and step in. This government very much needs to be governed.

I don’t see any other way to save what remains to be saved.

HOW IT ALL HAPPENED

Every once in a bit it’s good to step back and take a look at the Big Picture. There are now frequent such attempts to look at where the economy went wrong, and efforts to look at where the War on Terror went wrong have been around for some time.

For the record, here’s my take on things.

In 1948 the Truman Administration founded the National Security State which required that the government “scare hell out of the American people” so that they would see a ‘reason’ for the dual development of governmental intrusions in domestic affairs and the lives of the citizenry and of governmental expansion of the military as its primary weapon in the Cold War. In that same year Truman, facing a difficult election, chose to recognize the new State of Israel immediately and without question, saying that he had no “Arab voters” to worry about; he had been advised against it by diplomatic opinion around the world, which worried that the Israeli presence would only exacerbate the Middle East region and was ultimately fated to fail, though only after much bloodshed.

In 1965, LBJ signed off on the Voting Rights Act in the first week of July, while simultaneously fearing that he had ‘lost the South’ politically ‘for a generation’. Almost immediately the ‘Southern’ civil-rights movement hallmarked by Martin Luther King’s spiritually-based, inclusive and non-violent call to national right-doing was vividly undermined by the Watts riots, and along with King, Johnson and the Democrats were also fatally undermined. In the same year, Betty Friedan likened woman’s place in the American home and family to “Dachau”. And Seymour Melman reported that the American industrial infrastructure was now aging and losing its vitality because too much capital was going into military development and not available for investment in industry; other nations’ industrial infrastructures started to surpass America’s.

In 1967, as a US Navy ship was being repeatedly attacked by Israeli jets and attack boats and crew members were dying, LBJ ordered the rescue jets from US carriers turned back because he needed the Israelis as his agents and ‘allies’ against the Soviets in the Middle East (where all the oil was). Johnson also had no ‘Arab voters’, but he had ‘lost the South’ and he knew that he, like Truman, had – ummmmm – an other type of voter. And the government pursued its intention of instituting a massive program of ‘affirmative action’; it was said to be essential to affirmatively engage ‘racial quotas’ but that the program would only need to be temporary, lasting perhaps seven years or so, a decade at the most.

By 1968, the Democrats were faced with a Vietnam that was now irretrievably gone down the tubes. And also with a civil-rights movement that had evolved into a second, ‘Northern’ phase that rejected King (killed in April of that year) and instead emphasized violence, racial exclusivity, and revolution, and whose public stance was not to make exhortations but rather to ‘issue demands’. Worse, the Democrats found to their horror that not only had the South turned against them – as they had expected – but the working-class voters from the Northeast had also turned against them, thereby not only dealing a lethal blow to FDR’s New Deal coalitions but exposing the Democrats to the possibility of implosion as a viable political Party.

In 1969 the US domestic oil industry first became unable to meet national demand and the country began to import oil.

In 1970 other national economies began to surpass the US economy in various measures of output or achievement.

In 1971 Nixon abrogated the Bretton Woods agreements, and started to ‘float’ the dollar. There was a ‘sugar shortage’ that seemed to come out of nowhere which, among other things, tripled the cost of a candy bar because of the ‘emergency’. Almost immediately afterwards, there was a ‘beef shortage’ that raised the price of sirloin from around 40 cents a pound up over a dollar. Both the Cuban-American sugar growers of Florida and Louisiana and the Western cattle owners were groups that had supported the Republicans politically.

Also in 1971, on July 2, there arrives the 26th Amendment, granting 18-year-olds the right to vote. This is another in the Dem policy of raising up replacement voting blocs, ‘demographics’, Identities. But voters who aren’t even old enough to drink (and will turn out to be only a day past the ‘childhood’ of sex-offense laws) are a dubious proposition. Youth’s gifts do not include deliberation, patience, circumspection, prudence, and a large body of experience upon which to draw upon when analyzing a proposition for its possibilities, negative and positive, and its possible consequences, ditto. This will have an even more significant effect on the level of national political discourse, on electoral strategies, and on the quality of public thinking. Nor did anyone bother to recall that it was precisely among the young that Hitler was most successful in attracting voluntary adherents – their unthinking, eager, ready enthusiasm was precisely what the Reich was looking for in its citizens and agents. Each of the four great replacement ‘Identities’ raised up by the Democrats – the second and revolutionary phase of the black civil-rights movement, the Second Wave of feminism’s version of ‘women’, the young, and the Jewish vote (wooed by a unilateral government embrace of the State of Israel) – would have a significant effect on the quality of political thinking and discourse … long before the likes of Atwater and Rove. *

In 1972 the Democrats declared themselves “the party of women”. The South was gone; the ‘working class’ was upset both with A) the Democrats’ increasing embrace of whatever ‘demands’ that the civil-rights movement (the Northern or violent phase) and the emerging women’s movement were making, and B) with the queasy, rubbery, un-solid sense which was now becoming palpable if not obvious in the national economy. Identity Politics was now establishing its dynamics at the highest levels of national policy as the Democrats sought to cement their relationship with the two new Identities of ‘blacks’ and ‘women’ (and to some extent Native Americans, though they were not a numerous voting bloc – for historically obvious reasons). A budding Political Correctness – widely adopted by the media – made it difficult to conduct public discourse about the positive aspects of anything that the Identities’ representatives wanted to end or the negative aspects of anything that the Identities’ representatives wanted to initiate.

In 1973, following a belated Israeli victory (with American help) in another Middle East war the oil-producing nations, many of them Arab, formed OPEC.

In 1974 the first ‘gas shortage’ developed. Oil prices started climbing, first breaking fifty cents a gallon and then – despite media assurances that such an increase was temporary – a dollar a gallon. They have never stopped climbing (except for the last six months, which are reported to be the calm before the storm).

In or about 1975 mention first began to be made of ‘diversity’, which was revealed to be the proposition that many ‘minorities’ – not simply the black community – needed to participate in affirmative action quotas; the reason for this was that the country was too ‘white’ (and ‘male’) and that such diversity would be good for the country. No attention was paid to the dark assumption underlying this: that the existence of any minority of any kind indicated a fundamental injustice requiring government intervention in the society and the culture – a presumption with ominous consequences for a democratic society.

After all, if there is a ‘majority’ of anything in any respect, there has to be a ‘minority’ of the same thing in the same respect. But the danger was: if it is assumed that anybody can do anything, then if there is a situation where fewer numbers of somebody are not doing something, that can only be – according to the presumptions – because the fewer numbers are the proof-positive result of skullduggery. And the government – courtesy of the Dems – seeps in, or floods in, to ‘fix’ that, to uncover the skullduggery and its perpetrators. Anywhere, everywhere, anytime, all the time. That’s going to have ominous consequences for a democratic politics and a democratic society.

In 1976, with Jimmy Carter elected as a ‘peoples’ candidate through the working of the newly-restructured Democratic Party electoral rules, House Speaker Tip O’Neill, the old-fashioned boss of Capitol Hill, chose to conduct a power-struggle with the ‘people’s President’, and worked to block Carter’s initiatives, though Carter was a President from O’Neill’s own Party. O’Neill conceived, and then strong-armed corporations into accepting, Political Action Committees (PACs) as a form of contributing to individual Members of Congress; the sweetener was that such contributions would ensure friendly consideration from the pols on Capitol Hill. The pols thereby set up the game they would play even unto the present day: pander to the Identities no matter what wjackery they 'demanded' while collecting hefty cash payments from the corporations through PACs - the 'voter' no longer really figured into the scheme at all.

In 1977 in San Francisco Harvey Milk and the mayor of San Francisco were shot and killed in City Hall by a disgruntled former city official. That gentleman would offer as a defense at his trial that he had been rendered temporarily insane by ingesting too much processed sugar in fast foods and junk food – the so-called ‘Twinkie defense’; the most disturbing part of the whole thing was that a jury of reputedly average reasonable American adults accepted the defense.

Also in 1977 Alex Haley’s “Roots” made a huge splash as a book and TV movie, predicated in part on Haley’s search for his own African ancestry and getting back in touch with it, including the testimony of a native ‘griot’. Doubts arose and were pooh-poohed, and shouted down as ‘incorrect’ and ‘insensitive’. It was not until 1993 that it was established even by Haley that things were not quite so, and that – among other things - the ‘griot’ had been coached. Despite that the defense was made that Haley’s assertions were “essentially if not factually true”, similar to Andrea Dworkin’s assertion that she didn’t need ‘facts’ because she relied upon her own ‘experience’. “Facts” began to “not matter”. Noticing that ‘facts’ did not add up, or even doubting the asserted ‘facts’ became ‘incorrect’ and a no-no. The almost inevitable effects on public discourse were not noted by any of the ‘elites’. **

In 1980 the film “Ordinary People” depicted such an ‘ordinary’ family as living in a toney suburb, owning a high-performance foreign car, headed by a father who was an architect and who had a computer at home on his desk(!). It dealt not with issues of social-justice such as in the 1930s “Grapes of Wrath”, but rather with the family dynamics and assorted personal pains of the perfect-toothed individual members of this ‘ordinary’ family. It was considered very ‘sensitive’ and ‘insightful’; it was clearly a work of therapeutic insight rather than of traditional American economic and class insight.

In 1980, with Reagan’s election, O’Neill declared ‘bipartisanship’ to be the Democrats’ primary value; any ‘opposition’ in affairs foreign or domestic would be in essence suppressed, although some harrumphing and braying would be occasionally made in order to keep up appearances.

In the mid-‘80s the Savings-and-Loan scandal suddenly revealed massive financial malfeasance by major elements of the banking and entrepreneurial community, despite the existence of government regulations and regulators. Billions in taxpayer funds went to clean up the mess. Adults started to show up in jobs that had been traditionally taken by teens for pocket money.

In the mid-‘80s the ‘pre-school sex abuse’ mania started up; numerous children were believed to be sexually abused by day-care center providers around the nation, and many children ‘testified’ thus after leading and manipulative questioning by self-termed ‘experts’ and assorted law-enforcement personnel. Only when children reported adults in dragon suits and other exotic garb and some ‘raped’ children were found to be intact did things slow down, and many of the convicted were then exonerated and released from years of confinement. No significant connection was made between the newly-popular day-care centers and the national explosion of the number of families where both parents now had to work in order to make ends meet or for other reasons, or single-parent families where the parent had no other alternative but day-care. The numbers of abused tykes were said to be in the hundreds of thousands, perhaps – it was put forth – millions.

In 1985 one Lenore Weitzman, in her book about divorce "The Divorce Revolution, asserted that post-divorce men experienced a 73% increase in income while women (and the children, since custody was almost always awarded to the woman) experienced a 42% decrease. Questions immediately arose as to her figures and her research notes, which she refused for quite a long time to make available for scientific examination and corroboration. It was later discovered, after she finally had to make her research notes public, that she had used an absurdly small population (228 couples in Los Angeles) and had, among other things, failed to include costs to the man including alimony, child support, mortgage payments on the house that he no longer lived in. Despite that her figures continued to be used, she was invited by feminist advocates to address state legislatures, her figures were cited in appeals court decisions, and in 1996 – fully exposed – she was yet invited by Bill Clinton to speak in Washington. Not only ‘facts’, but accuracy and truth, no longer mattered, even to courts and legislators.**

In 1987 the Tawana Brawley case held public attention: a missing black teen was found smeared with excrement and scantily clothed; she claimed to have been abducted and raped by several white males, among whom were law enforcement figures. Al Sharpton among others raised the case up into national consciousness, with an eager media providing the public exposure.When it was finally discovered to be a hoax devised to cover the girl’s absence from home, Politically Correct opinion, led by Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, insisted that it didn’t make any difference whether she was actually raped or not since the most important element of the matter was its symbolism in calling attention to ‘white male oppression’. Naturally, the 'numbers' of such oppressive incidents was said to be stratospheric.

In 1988 in the Persian Gulf a state-of-the-art radar system on one of the Navy’s newest cruisers shot down an Iranian passenger jet, killing all aboard. It turned out that the system, hugely expensive, was only designed to distinguish between assorted military targets, and could not distinguish civilian from military aircraft, even though the civilian craft was transponding its identity. The crew of the cruiser did not want to override the computer’s assessment of the situation and fired the missile. If there was a lesson to be learned about thinking very carefully and conducting careful analysis before sending military forces into situations other than outright war, that lesson was not learned.

In 1990, in August, Saddam Hussein, the US protégé in the Iran-Iraq war, invaded Kuwait to shore up his ailing finances which had been sorely depleted by the eight-year war against the Iranians. While the US provided the bulk of the forces sent against him, public concern about US inability to foot the bill for such a large operation was allayed when other large economies, the Japanese among them, offered to pay for the operations in lieu of sending large military contingents. In the military equivalent of a fairy-tale scenario, Saddam obligingly kept his forces locked into static position, taking no action whatsoever, as the US took months to assemble the bulk of its Army and support forces and position them perfectly (a replay of the French Army doing nothing as the Germans prepared their next move in the Sitzkrieg of 1939-1940 on the Western Front). Saddam’s important role in the ensuing American victory was never recognized.

In 1991 the USSR dissolved itself, ending the Cold War.

In 1992 in Planned Parenthood v. Casey the Supreme Court continued the legal fiction that a woman’s grounds for abortion could include health grounds; the criteria for ‘health’ might extend to include nothing more serious than a desire not to carry the developing fetus to term. Acknowledging the weakness of Roe’s legal reasoning, the Court nonetheless refused to overturn that case with its basis in flawed legal reasoning because many women had come to depend on the advantages that Roe afforded them. The fetus would have no right (or reason) to depend on the women, apparently.

In 1993 Bill Clinton took office.

Throughout the early ‘90s, ‘business’ changed: rather than a number of older, more experienced adults running businesses that produced goods, younger hotshots simply ‘acquired’ new businesses in an leveraged buy-outs, not because they knew how to or even intended to produce goods, but simply to reap the revenues generated by effecting the acquisition and buyout transactions. Rather than take this as a symptom of something going fundamentally wrong in the economy, ‘experts’ declared that this was an entirely new type of ‘economy’, one based on F.I.R.E (finance, insurance, real estate) rather than on producing tradable goods for the domestic and world markets. This new economy would not require ‘masculine’ skills like the ‘old’ industrial goods-producing economy, but instead would be a push-button, conference and negotiation and transactional paperwork economy, producing ‘ideas’ rather than goods, and requiring only a knowledge-class and a service-class, thereby keeping ‘the women’ happy since the new ‘work’ would not be ‘masculine’, and setting the fate of many of the new immigrants who would provide the cleaning, delivery, and nanny services. Neither the Democrats nor the Republicans took exception.

In the early 1990s a disturbing number of studies began to find that the majority of domestic violence initiators were the female of the dyad, a fact not refuted but shouted-down by relevant advocates. It was not noted that there was a disturbing similarity to a standard Israeli publicity gambit of not refuting facts but rather disparaging the researchers or those who had the temerity to raise unpleasant and inconvenient facts. At this time, Naomi Wolf in her book “The Bonding Myth” asserted that 150,000 females a year died of anorexia, a ‘fact’ repeated by Gloria Steinem and numerous others. A check of Center for Disease Control figures revealed that in 1983 101 deaths from anorexia were reported, 67 in 1988, and 54 in 1991. After much shouting-down, the advocates then asserted that “up to 70” deaths were misdiagnosed as ‘heart failure’, leaving un-addressed the remaining 149, 500-odd asserted ‘deaths’. Pressed for her basis for the numbers, one advocate refused, claiming that the figures were “for the guidance of advocates” and apparently nobody else’s business – although it was the advocates who had taken public the number “150,000” in the first place.

Huge numbers were now being thrown out into the public forum, and used as a basis for laws and court cases, by legislators and judges, although they appeared to be completely fabricated and their advocates refused to make their research and methods public. I repeat here what I have said on this site before: Bush and Cheney must have looked at all this and figured, in 2001, that the entire spectrum of American culture – public, legislators, judges, media, intellectual elites and academics – would accept just about any numbers or assertions that were placed before them – with consequences We are now seeing, in blood, death, and destruction, including thousands of soldiers, and untold hundreds of thousands of civilians, mostly women and children. And the squandering of America’s moral capital in the world community. And the squandering of hundreds of billions – probably two trillions and more – of dollars that We cannot afford.

And in 1994, the ‘Violence Against Women Act’ – part of a larger crime bill – was passed, thereby involving the police power of the government in the very hearths of the citizenry; it was based on the fear that many persons, particularly women, felt in relationships that they themselves participated in or even initiated. Parts of the Act were later found to be unconstitutional; Joe Biden, a major supporter of the Bill and Act, had defended it even before the court challenges, claiming that “it may be a bad law but it sends a great message”.

In 1996 the rare outrage of a child’s abduction by a sexually deranged adult resulted in the explosion of the sex-offender laws, whose requirements for Soviet-style ‘registration’ and Chinese-Communist-style psychiatric confinement were justified on the basis of the legal fiction that they were not ‘punitive’ but only ‘administrative’, ‘rehabilitative’ and in the service of public safety. Lincoln’s observation came to mind: in response to Southerners who claimed that slavery was ‘good’, he observed that this was a most unusual and extraordinary ‘good’ that nobody wanted for themselves but that they were most desirous to see imposed on others. It was not noted that the whole mania coincided with the large number of children not under the direct care of their both-working parents or single-parent for long periods of time during the day or evening. Nor were local-media discoveries as to the misrepresentation perpertated by the initial set of parents allowed to interfere; nor were the huge 'numbers' provided provided by 'advocates' subjected to analysis.

In 1996 Bill Clinton signed the Telecommunications Act which, among other things, allowed a few large single owners to control numerous media outlets. He also, as noted above, hosted the discredited Lenore Weitzman in Washington.

In 1999, Bill Clinton signed the Act repealing the restrictions imposed by the post-Depression Glass-Steagall Act. With the industrial base gone, the pols on Capitol Hill had no ‘economy’ to keep the citizenry ‘happy’ and found themselves completely beholden to the economic elites to provide even the semblance of an economy.

In late 2000, the Supreme Court intervened on the flimsiest of legal fictions (a gambit at which it was proving quite adept and experienced) in the Presidential election and by stopping a crucial recount, effectively created George W. Bush as the winner and next President.

On September 11, 2001 airline hijackers, primarily Saudi, destroyed the WTC towers in Manhattan. Although the performance of all responsible agencies of the Federal Government – from the FBI and CIA to the Presidency itself – was hugely dubious, the public’s attention was distracted by the President’s immediate erection of a Global War on Terror. As part of his hugely enhanced powers as a reputed ‘war President’, which were then further declared to be limitless by the workings of a quasi-monarchical theory called the “Unitary Executive”, Bush ensured that public opinion would not only be distracted but its access to information about the workings of the government and Administration suppressed.

In 2002, the now unregulated F.I.R.E sector created a Bubble based on shuffling around packages of far too easily-granted mortgages. The citizenry was distracted happily by a huge expansion of domestic credit based on the ever-increasing ‘value’ of their mortgaged homes. The coincidence between the sudden ‘wealth’ enjoyed by citizens of all classes and the distraction from both the investigation of the 9-11 failures and the monitoring of the war then being brewed inside the Beltway was not widely noted. An economy now hugely diminished in its productive industrial goods-making capacities, yet required to provide employment not only for males but for females and increasing numbers of immigrants, had reached the point where it was simply creating ‘wealth’ based on a bubble willfully conjured by financiers and – I have to believe – knowingly abetted by A) a Congress that had no effective plans of its own and didn’t really want that fact widely discussed and B) an Executive that simply wanted the public distracted from investigating either its past malfeasances or its present plans for aggressive invasive war.

In 2003 an invasion of Iraq was effected on what proved to be false pretenses of WMD, although from the very beginning the possibility of the secularist dictator Saddam Hussein being in cahoots with religious fundamentalists seeking to erect theocratic government was hugely dubious on its face. It was then claimed that the purpose of the invasion was to bring ‘democracy’ to Iraq, although if invasive war is a preferred method of instituting ‘democracy’, then there were a large number of regimes in need of change whose overthrow would have been far less militarily complex than Iraq’s.

But no other country in the Middle East or anywhere else provided what an Occupied Iraq could provide: a ‘place at the table’ in the now-crucial oil-heartlands of the planet / for a seriously declining hegemon with huge international debt and no means of ever paying it off / and an unslakable thirst for cheap oil in a world where the increasing demands of developing national economies much closer to that oil would only drive up the price / and with a perennially besieged ‘ally’ state in the Middle East erected through invasive force and violence, supported in the interests of the hegemon’s domestic politics, that was in desperate need of decisive strategic support / and a perfect political ‘cover’ for its ‘Griff Nach der Ol-Macht’ in the confluence of Rightist and Fundamentalist ‘patriotism’ and so-called ‘liberal’ “humanitarian intervention” and the applied merits of the public’s rage and ‘pain’ over the 9-11 attacks .

And on top of that, the Bubble created by the mortgages wouldn’t last forever and then what to tell the American citizenry? Tell them that the last 40 years of the government’s stewardship had resulted in a fractious domestic cultural civil war fueled by vastly untruthful figures and driven by crass political expediency that had effectively balkanized and dumbed-down the citizenry and prevented its operating as The People, to the detriment of an economy whose decline was then ignored by the stewards and hidden from the public, which was itself distracted first by those core cultural controversies and then by blizzards of unsecured ‘credit’ that lured vast numbers of citizens into a Little Big Horn of personal debt while blissfully imagining that America’s winning streak would not only last but increase?

The key to saving the whole game would be a quick and decisive victory in Iraq – ‘victory’ defined as beheading the Iraqi government and creating for all intents and purposes an American protectorate or ‘wholly owned allied government’ that would put the patina of legality on that marvelous strategic possession of the Iraqi oil that would solve all the Beltway’s problems – foreign, domestic, financial - in a single stroke. Maybe Iran could then be taken – that would make things even better and would keep the Israeli ‘ally’ happy, the Israel whose PACs provided the perfect conduit to kick back to the pols taxpayer cash that the pols had originally sent to Israel to begin with. What was not to like?

In 2009, with the quick and decisive victory bungled away (if indeed it were ever possible to begin with), and the economic Bubble having burst and the citizenry reduced to a level of risk which it was not fitted to handle well, and Iran now in a far stronger position relative to the much-diminished former hegemon, the Beltway has few options: since it absolutely must retain a place – some place – ‘at the table’ for the indefinite future, then Afghanistan is left as the only usable pretext. However, with no ‘victory’ (an impossible outcome in any event) in Afghanistan capable of being strategically decisive as to the control of oil, and with the prospects of continued military dominance on the world stage starting to fade perceptibly, then the US will have to find a way to make the rest of the world respect its power – or else be reduced to a regional power itself, and possibly a bankrupt one. Afghanistan offers no strategic answers, but provides a temporary excuse for staying around in the neighborhood until – as Mr. Micawber might say – something ‘turns up’. Uncle Sam is now Mr. Micawber. That can’t be good.

The ‘Global War On Terror’ was a fiendishly clever justification for what the Beltway knew the US was now going to have to become in any case: a bankrupt former-hegemon resorting to world-class, world-wide strong-arming and hold-ups to keep up appearances and the payments on all its stuff. But I don’t think that the Beltway ever imagined it would fail so badly on the very first phase of its plan. That’s the Beltway’s fault: no odds-maker in Las Vegas would ever have given good odds for the Plan anyway – which is part of the reason it was all so hush-hush.

That, and the fact that the Beltway has been planning the type of thing that Imperial Japan and post-Weimar Germany paid terribly for having done. (Also that bald Italian guy with the great set of uniforms.)

And the US must resurrect its industrial, goods-producing capacity, and will have to single-mindedly focus all national attention on that project so as to achieve it (or re-achieve it, alas) as soon as possible. This is not a case of ‘turning back the clock’ but rather as coming back onto the solid roadway from a feckless, witless, half-addled foray off the road into the ‘shortcut’ of a swamp.

This will be hard to do without having to disarm the ‘outrage’ of the Advocacies that their several ‘revolutions’ are being ‘sold out’. It will risk having to admit that a great deal if not most of the ‘creative destruction’ – culturally even more than financially – of the past several decades has been greatly mistaken; hugely fraught with lethally negative consequences if not actually a mostly baaad idea from the get-go. It will take consummate political skill to manipulate events so as to prevent such a showdown and such a bald statement of fact. As things stand now, We desperately need facts, while We also desperately need to avoid being distracted by facts.

The solution will be to keep the focus on the actually important facts rather than on the symbolically important facts. At this stage, this will require skills long-neglected among the citizenry, the media, and the government Branches themselves: dealing with the Actual instead of the Symbolic.

All in all, the intentional use of fear, outrage / through the use of hugely dishonest assertions and numbers / to create ‘emergencies’ of various sorts / that can stampede the citizenry / into acquiescing in the most dangerous expansions of government power / aided and abetted by a media that both avoids substantial and skeptical analysis and indulges in partisan coverage tailored to its owners’ calculations of their best corporate interests / while the citizenry allows itself to be distracted from its crucial task of functioning as The People / while considerations of Party and personal advancement overwhelm any responsibility legislators and public officials might feel for ensuring first and foremost the common weal …

These, I would say, are the highlights of what has gone wrong.

Obama can’t solve all of this, and certainly not overnight. Nor can every interest can get what it wants, and even if he is going to give one or another ‘interest’ something that it wants, he’s not going to be able to say so clearly. This is going to upset the Advocacies who are used to being pandered to; the wealthy and the corporate interests who are used to getting their cash in the form of financial and tax legislation while they make whatever money is left to be made on what’s left of the economy; the PAC contributors who are used to getting what they have paid for; and the media who are not used to having to think things through to figure out what’s really going on and where things are really headed.

I don’t know how much time We have left afloat, but watching all these folks try to deal with the new world order of 2009 should provide much food for thought and meditation.

I’m still going with supporting Obama as he picks his way through this vast and intricate minefield, the one that We have been sowing for decades now. If he can’t do it … there won’t be any real chance left.

NOTES

*There were other Identities among the replacement demographics: gays, lesbians, and the disabled and the elderly are notable among them. By 2000, We were a nation indeed more solicitous of ‘creativity’ and ‘sensitivity’ than of ‘productivity’ – as Bateson had hoped would happen as far back as 1990 (see the immediately previous Post).

You have to ask yourself what Congress was thinking when it allowed – indeed abetted – such an assault not only on the national ethos and culture but also on the very heart and soul of national ‘productivity’. In fact, it might be accurate to imagine that the ‘outsourcing’ of jobs did not precede, but rather was enabled by, the general assault on the culture of productivity and those who for the entire life of the nation had provided it – the workers, supported indispensably by the institutions of marriage and family.

If so, then the assault on the ‘work ethic’ and on ‘men’ in general, resulted in consequences that were treacherously evaded by A) creating the supremely fatuous fantasy of a world-hegemon supporting itself on merely on ‘knowledge and ideas’ and ‘service’ rather than the production of marketable goods; and B) creating a ‘substitute’ economy – a bubble economy – that provided the ‘appearance’ of economic competency and wealth even though the actual bases for such competence and wealth were eroding, and eroding under the pressure of a Beltway-supported ‘war’ against what the Identities were pleased to call “the dominant culture”.

So many turkeys are now come home to roost: the ‘valorizing’ of ‘symbolic’ over ‘real’, of appearances over fact, of the narrowly and baldly political over the common weal, of political gain and power over truth and truthfulness. And in all of this, the utter evasion of consequences, from the simple consequence of having to conform one’s actions to proven facts to the abyssally more challenging consequences of having to face up to the wreck after so much damage has been done by willfully ignoring facts and truth – to lives and to nations (including Our own), such that only the most sustained spiritual maturity and strength can bear up to the duties now required.

**For a stunning and comprehensive compilation of such dubious figures and assertions, and how even when finally exposed they were still retained as valid in public and elite discourse, see the combined 1200 pages of investigation and analysis in Paul Nathanson and Katherine K. Young’s two books “Spreading Misandry” (2001) and “Legalizing Misandry” (2006), published by McGill-Queen’s University Press. Jean Bethke Elshtain's review of the latter is here.

CAN THE UNSOUND BE HEARD?

Truthout carries an AP article by Glenn Johnson. “Obama Says US Strategy in Iraq Is Unsound” (http://www.truthout.org/article/obama-says-us-strategy-iraq-is-unsound).

The article – and Obama – quotes George C. Marshall, author of the famous Plan (who at the time was attacked as un-American and maybe ‘pinko’ by a number of braying folk, many of whom had not seen combat in the late war nor proven themselves fitted for bearing great responsibility and fulfilling great and unforgiving tasks, but who had found national politics congenial enough for their purposes).

“The whole world of the future hangs on a proper judgment”. Wellllllllllll, that rules out a lot of folks who’ve joined us only in the past 40 years. Indeed, it also rules out far too many of the Greatest Generation still around who seem only to recall the sodas and the shooting, or at least that’s all the media pick up on.

“Judgment” … ? Oh, I would never presume to judge anybody. Oh that would be judgmental, and we’re Vatican 2 Catholics, you know. You can’t judge … Jesus or Buddha – one of them anyway – said it’s bad. Judging is divisive; we are uniters, not dividers. Sigh. It seems like nobody gets judged anymore. Except sex-offenders. And nobody judges anybody else. Except if those anybodies are sex-offenders. And it all makes sense. (We don’t want to be around when the historians of the future – if our own mis-mal-and-non-feasances don’t lead to a new Dark Ages somewhat before then – start trying to make sense of these times.)

It’s a wonder any child born in this country since 1969 has survived, being taught from the get-go not to ‘judge’, s/he would have kept putting that pudgy little paw on the hot stove until the little nervous system went into shock.

But judging is precisely what grown-ups have to do.

And – the even harder part – in a grown-up way.

We have to inform ourselves, decide, and take all the action appropriate to our role. We study and learn from others, we think and deliberate with others, and all of us make our thoughts known to our representatives.

So, holy hambones, folks! If enough of Us were doing the job, who’d have a lot of time for boredom, emptiness, and all the demonics that rush in to occupy vacuous lives … ?

Yes, I know, ‘vacuous’ is a judgment … but I applied it in the abstract, in general, conceptually, and not for the purposes of disrespecting or hating-on anyone. Was that not clear? I’m sorry, but I won’t apologize.

Obama raises a second question: “Imagine for a moment what we could have done in those days, and months, and years after 9/11.” Yes.

But I imagine what We could have done in those days, and months, and years after 1991 and the fall of the Soviet Union. Instead, Hahvahd sent over a shiny prize gelding that merely provided a hoofs-on-the-ground example of how persons of high social status in a capitalist system can turn a buck for themselves no matter how wide and deep and broad the moral urgency and history-laden significance of their task. Future, hell, son – get into futures plural!

Strange, how once the Soviets were gone, the Americans were – like the wizard of Oz – revealed to have no solid grasp at all on the priceless gift of Liberty, nor on Truth or Justice or – surely – Love and Charity, nor – increasingly – even on their own affairs or their own government. Hence the monstrous thing now lumbers drunkenly through the world-park, loose from its handlers, causing great carnage, still a noisy and burly thing, trumpeting and stamping, fuelling itself without thought for limits – it will not be oppressed by limits nor contained by boundaries … once that was the great genius of its youth.

We are its handlers. What have We to say for Ourselves. Inquiring minds want to know. Angry hearts. Saddened souls. All are wondering … where is The People?

HOMELESS CANARIES

Up in Boston the erstwhile ‘liberal’ paper, the ‘Boston Globe’, has an article in its July 11 edition, that serves, I think, as one of those warnings often attributed to ‘heroic’ (to use the word as it is so often misapplied these days) canaries who famously sacrifice themselves by keeling over when the atmosphere in a mine is getting lethally unhealthy.
(http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2208/07/11/killing_of_homeless_man_leaves_questions/)
There are probably more of Us now who might be thinking the uncomfortable thought that this country is becoming more and more like a ‘mine’, serpentine, dark, mysterious and capable of suddenly becoming lethal to anyone who happens to be in it. And who can blame some one for such thoughts nowadays? But that’s not where this Post is going just now.

The ‘Globe’, albeit with not so much instant, just-add-ink ‘outrage’ as has been its wont over the past few decades, reports – if we may say – that on July 4th (of all days) a homeless man was killed in broad daylight in the heart of famed Boston’s visitor’s mecca – the Fanueil Hall and Old State House area – by another homeless man. And that numerous passers-by saw the fracas, but kept on walking. This, the paper observes, “leaves questions”. Ya think? Ya frakkin’ think?
Many people – visitor and resident alike – simply looked the other way or – far worse – didn’t ‘notice’. As one interviewee said, it looked to be just another everyday fight among the raggedy formations of homeless who congregate for drinking, pan-handling and – what the hell? – for laffs just south of the (soberly profound) Holocaust memorial and just north of the actual Faneuil Hall marketplace, across the street on one side from the historic chowder house from whose upper windows the roomer who would become Louis Phillippe of France once looked down, and on the other side of the steet the weird, concrete fortress of ‘new’ City Hall – courtesy 40-plus years ago of an untested young architect very much favored by the Kennedy family – and, more specifically, the mayor’s office with its high, wide, though apparently shallow, view of the historic heart of the city.

It might seem odd that the homeless can make their way to these family-friendly, historic precincts; counterintuitive, even. The city’s historic facility for those formerly known as ‘bums’ was located a longish way to the south, at the Pine Street Inn, close to Dover Street, in a South End neighborhood that by the middle years of the last century had become well-established as Boston’s equivalent of Old New York’s Bowery. The Inn was well-placed to provide convenient haven for its ‘client population’ as it might be called today. Pan-handling, loitering, disturbing the peace and public drunkeness were all illegal, the ‘clients’ were uanable or unwilling to carry on a more-or-less ‘decent’ civil life: exercising the self-restraint yet courteous surface civility that enables large urban citizenries to get on with life and each other year in and year out.

But for reasons that probably had more to do with ‘appearances’ than with common sense, the late, working-man’s pol, Congressman Joe Moakley – who after years of public service in “the fleshpots of Washington City” (General Sherman’s phrase) had morphed into the portly, well-coiffed, expensively suited and shod Representative J. Joseph Moakley, undertook a little project. At some point a decade and more ago, he stretched forth his brawny if nicely cuff-linked arm and wrassled a former bank building for the use of ‘homeless’ folks. Said building, squat and solid, recalling a banking system that by then no longer existed, was in the heart of the Government Center, just the other side of that City Hall that overlooked the July 4th killing scene.

The reader might be tempted to exclaim the exclamation uttered in consternation by that Southern matron so vividly imprinted into American popular lore by that advanced institution of Art for the sake of Art, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer: “In Atlanta?!! How’d they evah git heah?!!” How indeed, and thereby hangs a tale that may be of more than notional use to Us in this Year of Grace the 2008th and of the independence of the United States the 232nd.

As the 1970s progressed, and that society of well-intentioned sorcerer’s apprentices entitled the Democratic Party was trying to let even more millions of flowers bloom in order to register the said flowers forthwith on the voting rolls, it was proposed by assorted medical and psychiatric experts and social workers, supported by myriads of well-intentioned and determined Identity-types who figured that any massive social and cultural change is a massive social and cultural liberation – and ruat coelum … it was proposed that the many folks residing voluntarily or otherwise in state mental institutions were actually not crazy, were even perhaps saner than most of the citizenry at large (chained to the gray-flannel suit drudgery of family responsibility, job responsibility, and generally to a certain repulsively unimaginative and uncreative and conformist adulthood), and could in any event be ‘managed’ by new-to-the-market wonder-pills dispensed by much less monstrous (and much less expensive, the pols quickly and shrewdly noted) ‘community mental health centers’.

At the time it seemed like it might be the thing to do: grown-ups had gotten the country into Vietnam and then lied about it, decent responsible citizens were lied to and betrayed by the very government in which they had reposed their trust and confidence, the adult citizenry thus played for fools in front of the kids who felt they had shown everybody in ’68 that their way of doing things was more effective and a hell of a lot more fun, and – after all – weren’t ‘decency’ and ‘responsibility’ empty words used by oppressors to oppress the oppressed and – even worse – the oppressors were, not to put too fine a point on it, ‘men’ ? … which was the crowning indictment of the day. All of which by the mid-1970s enjoyed the support of the Democratic Party, only a few of whose apprentice sorcerers had started to wonder if by that time the tail weren’t starting to wag the dog.

The professionals and ‘experts’ assured the never-robust minds and hearts of the pols that ‘this could work’, that they would be greeted as liberators, that vast hordes of presently debilitated folk (it was already considered declasse to refer to humans a ’souls’, let alone as generic ‘men’) could be released forthwith, into the broad sunlit uplands of sanity and freedom, required only to maintain voluntarily a careful regimen of medication acquired by getting oneself to the afore-dreamed community mental health centers. And the walls came tumbling down, as in any good fairy tale.

Of course, the hardly un-obvious thought that persons who for decades or for a lifetime had been unable to organize their interior life and sustain even a modicum of a societal life … that observation was raised, but it was a time of many flowers blooming, and – far more ominously – of the increasing inability of state governments to pay their bills. And the professions and paraprofessions were finding themselves increasingly called upon with urgent and official deference in this new and more sensitive America. What was not to like?

People behaving oddly started to be seen on city streets. Worse, it became quietly clear to many citizens that the police were no longer doing much about it. Public laws that most people took for granted were wiped away almost overnight; and had to be, if these unstable folk were not to be apprehended a dozen times a week.

And it also became clear that the papers were either ignoring this new development or – increasingly – were ‘hailing’ it as an excellent example of sensitivity and liberation in action. To look askance, to worry, to ask to kick the tires … that was to be considered a backlasher, a racist about something that had nothing to do with race (the advanced vocabulary of Advocacy and Sensitivity had not yet been developed, its dictionary – carrying the weight of semi-law – not yet compiled).

Somewhere in there, somehow, a fellow named Snyder hit upon the idea of surfing the wave of glitz-and-greed madness unleashed by the new Reagan Administration’s chirpy embrace of wealth and confident, robust selfishness. Snyder would do it, in a fine feat combining the best insights of advertising and deconstructionism, by focusing on the symptom rather than the cause of the problem: people weren’t crazy and incapable of keeping themselves on medication; they were just ‘homeless’.

And somehow, for God only knows what combination of reasons and ulterior motives, the alcoholics were brought into the tent. No, these folks weren’t addicted so deeply to a substance that most of them might indeed never be able to carry on even the most basic responsibilities of societal participation; these folks weren’t so deeply enmeshed in still-unknown complex inner physical and mental and characterological dynamics that it would be only in the very very best of ‘cases’ that an individual among them could be cured, rehabilitated, or what-have-you. No, these folks were simply ‘homeless’.

Now you might observe that the folks were homeless precisely because they were unable or even unwilling to keep a roof over their heads. And that there was no small probability that these folks might – if given a roof and its attendant responsiblities – reject the whole proposition and go back to the bottle. But naysayers don’t last long once a revolution has hit critical mass, once a ‘wave’ is going; not even John Wayne on his best day ever stood in front of a stampeding herd with a six-gun and figure that he could stop it with just some common sense, a little authority, and the punctuational effect of a six-shooter judiciously discharged.

Truth and common sense don’t fare well in revolutions or in wars. And maybe that’s why now both the Democrats – ‘Liberals’ – and the Republicans – ‘Conservatives’ – don’t really care for the stuff; and why ‘wars’ in the service of revolutions (no matter how well-intentioned) or in the service of national security (ditto) both lead to the same abyssal twilight world. The road to Total Sensitivity and to Total Security is paved with good intentions.

And with the necessary repeal of whatever shreds of public-behavior laws were still left on the books, hordes of drink-addled ‘homeless’ now took to the streets along with the mentally-addled, and in not a small number of cases, the individuals were dually-addled.

Not that all this was presented to Us as such. While the streets became the stage for dozens and then hundreds of incidents that a few years before would never have been allowed to happen or to develop, the citizenry were expected to focus only on the chosen pretext for the changes: that there were, it was ‘reported’, countless families who where ‘homeless’ .. because of Reagan’s cheap and stingy economics.

There may indeed have been some (and now that his ‘heirs’ have had the keys to the cashbox for so long, there may indeed be a whole lot more). But back then you never saw a ‘homeless’ family walking down the street, staggering, shouting, looking for change. Wherever those families were, they were keeping themselves invisible, and doing a far better job of it than the accumulated generations of legions of Soviet spies reputedly patrolling the Main Streets of America.

This new-model bunch, the ‘homeless’, weren’t the Depression-era ‘bums’: the people who had sustained a responsible and modestly successful work and family life, until suddenly undercut and indeed betrayed by the venality of the Wall Street biggies and the pols who loved them. What was now loose was a large population of folks who had never been able to achieve social or often even personal maturity and efficacy. What had changed was that now they were ‘liberated’, free to carry on in the streets, just another aspect of the ‘rich’ (that monstrously duplicitious code-word) diversity (ditto) of modern American life in all its cutting-edge, sensitive success. They didn’t really ‘produce’ anything, but – though the point was not clear at the time – neither was America, any longer. Reagan’s gooey frosting was only that – there was nothing under it. Not that most people would get to enjoy it, anyway … only the ones who got to the groaning but gated table of Ronnie’s ongoing birthday party.

What could the average citizen do? Confronted increasingly by unpleasant when not actually dangerous behavior on the streets, unable to summon the police, unable to risk mentioning it for fear of being labelled as ‘insensitive’ or ‘hateful’ or half a dozen other epithets from the armamentarium of Political Correctness, people – in the manner of Soviet citizens – simply learned not to see. As was increasingly becoming the case with your own home phone, which was no longer automatically answered after the one-too-many times that the party at the other end was a telemarketer who damned well knew you were trying to eat dinner; you no longer ‘listened’ – as citizens of functional societies listen – as you walked down the street, no longer ‘paid quiet attention’ for a voice that might be in need and that had a right to your attention and concern in this particular rare emergency that had intruded upon an otherwise relatively functional life.

Too many times you had walked down a public street and looked up in response to a ‘good morning’ or a ruder ‘hey’, only to find some ‘homeless’ character, looking for cash. The ‘emergencies’ of the homeless were not the occasional ones of people who are able to more or less manage the tasks of living, but rather the ongoing emergency of someone who creates one emergency to solve a prior one, and who now – after decades of sensitivity and richness – expects that citizens will – have to, even – do what the pols no longer wish to do.

Nor are we talking about a few individuals and their emergencies, however ongoing. We are talking hundreds, even thousands, in any city of size. Like the bunch that hung out at the far end of every schoolyard, smokin’ and laughin’ at the dopes that went and did their homework last night; school days, school days … so old-fashioned.

And the tendency of these individuals to congregate in areas that promise an audience and a target-rich concentration of potential cash sources means that some of the most heavily traveled and most societally significant public spaces are now shadowed by packs of these folk, and only traversed by citizens who have taught themselves not to ‘see’. Not to see anything. Or hear anything. Not to respond. Just to get where they have to go. Like modest but determined quarterbacks whose plan is precisely not to have any encounters on the field enroute to the goalposts.

This state of affairs is no way to conduct a society. I often wonder how parents can shepherd their kids or school-teachers shepherd their class-outing platoons through these congregated packs, but perhaps the kids too now have learned not to see and not to hear.

Can it be any coincidence, I wonder, that citizens who cannot see and cannot hear and will not allow themselves to get ‘involved’ in the dubious and seedy soap-operas of a half-dozen ‘homeless’ in the space of each city block … that these citizens didn’t ‘see’ and didn’t ‘hear’ anything as their government led them into an aggressive foreign war, on the most dubious and fraudulent of pretexts. And as their government – still seeking to keep Ronnie’s party going – regressed the very foundations of the country’s economy – against the hard-won wisdom of the Depression era generations – to benefit the few rich upon whom the pandering pols can reliably count for cash and dinner invites and junkets and post-retirement sinecures.

If as individuals – and not without reason – so very many of us have trained ourselves to go into a certain type of ‘interior exile’ (that’s what the Germans called it, when you were faced with a public affairs that was going to hell and you couldn’t stop it) then what is the danger that such an ‘exile’ will – so to speak – spread to Us as members of The People? That the ‘self’ adopted to wade unreceptively through shoals of hopelessly ‘homeless’ will contaminate the self that is expected to discharge the duties of a People? And that this will be passed on to Our kids – the upcoming generations of The People – through example and the subtle but implacable osmosis of children watching their elders for clues as to how to live, hearing what we so often don’t say, seeing what we so often don’t want them to see – in us.

So, as so often, I am driving at this: this type of ‘Identity’ problem poses a dual challenge: it must be addressed as a matter of public policy, and not simply through the revolutionary and anti-democratic agitprop manipulations of a now hyper-developed ‘Advocacy’. But it also must be considered as one more corrosive development eating away at Our very capacity to exercise the demands of ‘strenuous Liberty’ and to discharge faithfully and competently the awesome responsibilities of a People, of The People in the American Constitutional vision.

Do folks think that at this particular point in the electoral cycle it’s too touchy a subject, even if it’s not downright ‘insensitive’ to mention the problem? Well, it’s gone on too long to put it off. And worse, it seems clear that since both Parties are now besotted – to put it charitably – then no matter who wins in November and no matter which Party is in the White House and/or controls Congress, this whole Miasm will continue to blind and choke Us. Jack Balkin, an attorney who blogs rather astutely, says on his site that the National Security State has been replaced now with a National Surveillance State. And that both Parties are committed to enhancing that and to increasing government’s control over our lives and Our life.

Myself, I think that the National Surveillance State is just a beefed-up version of the National Security State. But the National Nanny State, begun by the Democrats though costumed as ‘sensitivity’ and ‘liberation’, is as willfully and necessarily inimical to civil liberties and the fundamental role of The People as any more clearly totalitarian scheme. The government came after the ‘men’ and the ‘sex offenders’ in a stupendously brazen violation of scientific accuracy, judicial impartiality, and plain truth. Whom will it come after next? Will the Democrats repeal the bad laws, do you think? Or – ‘for the children’ or as ‘just the next logical step’ – read emails to find out who is thinking bad thoughts, whatever the current definition of ‘bad’ happens to be? And if those ‘bad thoughts’ include disagreement with the government’s agenda … then the Nanny State and the Security State will have formed the beast with two backs; something that not even Hitler or Stalin imagined in their most lurid professional dampdreams. And as those two forest fires come together, there will be a firestorm so hellishly hot that nothing short of a very very hard rain will be able to put out.

Getting back to Boston, the shrewdly chosen cover selected for the Government Center placement of numerous ‘homeless’ was that it was a shelter for ‘veterans’. It looked great, and to a nation unfamiliar any longer with military life, then it seemed a good thing. But as any noncom will tell you, there are your good enough soldiers – even if they aren’t really good shots, and then there are your ‘shitbirds’. These latter are the ones who came in unripe and were unable or unwilling to accept whatever structure that military life and mission can offer. Out they go – often with the clear relief of the military – and can later lay claim to being ‘veterans’. So there are ‘veterans’ and there are ‘veterans’. The man killed in broad daylight was a ‘veteran’, although with a no-doubt ‘troubled’ past. It may well be that his killer is also such a ‘veteran’. Another such ‘veteran’ was just arrested south of Boston on Cape Cod for reporting a great white shark sighting, on Cape Cod, in the beach season; he claimed an address at a shelter and employment on a non-existent fishing boat operated by one “John Kennedy”. (Come to think of it, another ‘veteran’ played a decisive role in the life of a certain ‘John Kennedy’, once upon a time.) We canot allow Ourselves to dwell on the level of appearances, as the ‘sensitive’ heart would demand.

But I’ll share something. On the 4th of July this year, on the same day as the killing downtown, I was on a project that had me in the Boston Metro area. Trundling along on mass transit – almost empty on this holiday morning – I looked up to see a young man in his early 20s take a seat. He was wearing a baseball cap, bill to the side; he was wearing camouflage pants, in the Air Force coloring of grays and blues; he was on crutches. His backpack was military-looking, and sported a sewed-on black strip with “U.S. Army” in gold letters. His back was to me as he engaged in animated and intense but not unfriendly conversation with a young woman sitting just up from him.

At my stop he too was getting off. He was certainly injured somehow. I stopped to let him off first; ‘You first’ he indicated with a glittering smile. I got off, and within a step or two he was alongside me, and without further ado said to me: Didja see me talkin’ up that babe? Typical stuff; I looked at him: not bad-looking, bright-eyed, and with a particularly fresh-looking welt under one eye. It could as easily have come from a bar fight or a drunken motor-vehicle accident.

Is he a vet, I wondered? Not one of the I-was-with-Custer stories you hear on the bricks of the Government Center, but a returnee from this monstrous conflagration that We have allowed so many of his generation to wade into. The welt under his eye was too fresh to be from Iraq; it would have taken too long for him to be sent back here; the leg injury – if there was one under the crutches – didn’t seem to be the type of thing that would free a soldier from the Eastern Front’s unslakable thirst for ‘boots on the ground’.

Am I going to just let what may be a real ‘life’ fresh from the cauldron of this war go on its way, with no offer of help, or even of just some conversation? He looked like he could talk a while, and tell quite a story. But who could tell? The uniform bits could have been purchased; the crutches, even.

I smiled and told him I had heard him talking-up. And then I increased speed with a gentle nod and moved on. His path took him up a different street.

Was he a vet? Was he in need? I don’t know. And I’ve seen too many ‘veterans’ in the Government Center to simply figure a vet is a vet.

But many of his generation are coming back (and if stop-loss could be revoked there would be even more). What can We offer them? The problem of ‘identity’ – ironically – raises up its head here. The military’s treatment of unmistakably authentic veterans is such as to give any citizen cause for abiding anger. The question of how to deal with not-quite-so-authentic veterans is a distinct question, although also a very real one.

All the while, We face a culture ‘war’ on many fronts, domestic as well as foreign. The culture under sustained attack here is a culture of maturity and decency, shaped by ideals America has held dear (however much it has failed to fulfill them in practice), governed ultimately by a People ready, able, and willing to exercise the powerful if weighty responsibilities prescribed by the Founders.

This is the fundamental American identity. In the erosion and clouding of it over the past decades lies the central cause of all the other problems that now beset Us in Our increasingly erratic and eccentric gyrations in national affairs domestic and – equally ominously – foreign.
Lincoln was profoundly right to exhort Us “to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and for his orphan”. But We can never forget that Lincoln addressed those words to a People, to that People upon whose shoulders – by right of citizenship – rested the awesome responsibilities the exercise of which was indispensable in order to ground and guide a democracy and a Republic and its Legislative and its Executive and its Judicial.

To care for the veteran We must, and gratefully so; to prevent the soldier from being needlessly deployed in dubious adventures incompetently entered upon is also Our responsibility.To govern Ourselves so that We can decently interact with others is a prerequisite in any case. Otherwise there shall never be a just and a lasting peace, among ourselves or with any other nation.

GUNS, WOMEN, AND WRONG

Matti Friedman of the AP reports that Israel is debating women’s role in combat (http://www.boston.com/news/world/articles/2007/05/13/israel_debates_womens_place_on_battlefield/).
It caught my attention because the Israeli feminist who is pushing for widening women’s role in that army’s combat forces says outright the kind of things that were sorta not mentioned by the salesforce when women-in-the-military/women-in-combat was for sale over here.

Naomi Chazen, an Israeli feminist, says “The move is not crucial for the army, but for Israeli women”. You would think that in a small country surrounded by slavering enemies and itself having pissed many of them off and having also just recently lost a serious land operation … you would think that the army’s best interests would be paramount. But that would be not-getting-it. That would be not really understanding the nature and dynamics of the feminist advocacy in this matter; revolutions do not brook ‘other’ concerns.

“The army plays a central role in Israel … if the army creates inequality on any basis, these values get into Israeli society”, says Chazen. So it’s not about the army or military success, it’s about equality. And “any basis” might include that women are not well-suited for the hell of combat. Neither ‘facts’ nor ‘science’ nor the weight of historical praxis will be allowed to impede the revolution (as Goebbels once opined candidly: “Truth is whatever the Party thinks is good for the German people”). Nor will discussion or research be permitted, if they start to head in the undesired direction. Nor will the actual realities of … umm … reality – combat, say, for instance – be allowed to interfere.

It’s about ‘equality’ – although how that value is derived from the suitability for combat is a little foggy. And its proponents intend for it to stay that way. The army is a stepping-stone to the revolution’s stronger position in society, and that’s all that really matters to the revolutionistas. This was the gambit deployed by the American sistern, but it was the early 1990s and it didn’t look like there would ever be another war involving Americans, and if one came it would resemble battle as waged on the concierge-level suite that was the bridge of Picard’s ‘Enterprise’. Israel, currently, faces far more serious potential combat. Combat that’s gonna sorta look like what American forces are facing in Iraq as We speak.

An Israeli general observes that “such principles [as the revolutionistas espouse] cannot drive military policy in a country that feels its national survival is at stake”. He’s being too modest: “Feels its national survival is at stake”? If the Bushist Imperium wrecks the Army and the Marine Corps and locals take the opportunity thus afforded to march into Israel (whatever its boundaries are), who’s gonna stop them? There won’t be anything left boot-wise except the Rhode Island National Guard, and Our bad-ass Navy and Air Force missiles are notorious for blowing up whatever they run into, and if the baddies are on Israeli streets, then We will wind up destroying Israel in order to save it. So the general understates the case.

He continues: “As we’ve seen in other armies [hint, hint!], gender integration causes sexual tension and is detrimental to combat performance and it’s just not worth it. It’s not coincidental that throughout human history, men have done the fighting.” Well, the Americans certainly can’t disagree – April was an ‘Awareness Month’ and by amazing coincidence We were blitzed with ‘news’ that female soldiers are being raped and abused in record numbers by our erstwhile ‘heroes’ in Iraq and that women are refraining from going to the latrine in the middle of the night because they are so fearful of being raped. Either there are a couple-three stupendously busy and robust bad apples over there or the women are letting us know that we don’t have many heroes on the ground over there after all. Or maybe you can be a hero and a sex-abuser? Or is that thinking too much?

Of the Israeli general Friedman delicately observes that “feminists might call his views old-fashioned”. Yah. As if that settles anything. Gravity is a view that’s kinda been around a long time now, too. The functional solidity of matter is kinda long in the tooth. And – as Quaint Al noted, taking his cue from the revolutionistas – the Geneva Conventions and the Constitution are kinda old-fashioned and quaint too. The hot ironies! Let’s change all that stuff! C’mon! Whaddah-ya? A sissy?

Friedman, wisely, sidesteps the yawning abyss she has just opened, shifting to the question of whether Israeli women really want to be in full-frontal combat (currently, they are very much segregated and assigned support duties). Wisely from the viewpoint of her career, but it is precisely here – where the Boomer idiocy about being ‘over 30’, shrewdly surfed back then by the revolutionistas, is applied corrosively to huge cultural and societal questions – that the matter has to be decided. Which was precisely why the Advocacy back then not only avoided it but used its new clout (those desperate Dems and bored media types) to discredit the very concept that something that had been around a long time could be worthwhile. (Truth be told, JFK had used the same gambit to discredit Eisenhower and Nixon at the decade’s outset).

Worse: As Christina Stansell observes in her TNR article “A lost history of abortion” (http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=20070521&s=stansell052107), in the current Supreme Court decision in Gonzales v. Carhart “one hears the echo of the anti-choice movement’s new emphasis on abortion as a de facto violation of something at the very core of women’s being”. Now I am not here taking a position on abortion; I am pointing out that Stansell is calling “new” what was among the very first objections raised to abortion decades ago; and one which the Advocacy quickly moved to squelch by discrediting it. Theory was deployed to the effect that there is no such thing as ‘women’s nature’, that ‘women’ have no ‘nature’ (Men meanwhile were defined as ‘rapist’, which urge to perpetrate was so widely defined as to constitute for all practical purpose a ‘male nature’). And the huge danger lurking in this gambit – that if human beings have no ‘nature’ then there are no natural protections on their behalf that any government or constitution is bound to observe … well, who knew? It was the Sixties! It was an Emergency!

In the same informative article, Stansell quotes Mr. Justice Kennedy as being concerned that if a woman is going to contemplate so grave a procedure, she should have access to as much information about it as possible, and that it is in the State’s interest to ensure that she has access to that information. This, to the revolutionistas, is interpreted as “paternalism” (by, of course, the Patriarchy). Men don’t have the right to tell women what they need. That society has a right to deliberate about major changes to its ethos … well the outrageous Emergency of women’s oppression simply required that all those inefficient and quaint democratic processes be dispensed with. Who says people need to be accurately informed? A question that Rove and Cheney - those unsleeping children of darkenss - took to an entirely new level of play.

You can't be showing 'consequences' to somebody if it's going to maybe change their mind! What's consequence got to do with it? Anyway, we're making history here and eggs (if we may) have to be broken. And when the Imperium then borrowed the revolutionistas' playbook and took the game on the road to Iraq ... oops.

And so the laws were ‘overhauled’ and ‘reformed’. And into the broad sunlit uplands We went. Or were supposed to.

Meanwhile, the Israelis now face a far graver and immediate crisis. And that may in a way be a blessing: while the revolutionistas over here have forced the ignoring of many an elephant in the room, you can’t ignore a military situation right there in front of you, any more than you can sit in a football stadium of a Saturday afternoon and claim that patriarchal oppression explains the lack of female professional players. It’s all too obvious and right there in front of you. Better to go about it as the Harvard faculty does: gassy hype and bloviating abstractions and hyperthyroid outrage conveniently packaged and delivered for the hype-greedy evening news.

This is why the Pentagoons – sisters (if we may) under the skin to the revolutionistas – want to control the media: the bodybags and the wounds - all the consequences - would be too vividly and undeniably clear to The People, and then what would happen?

What indeed?