WAR PERPETUAL AND SOCIAL

Over on Truthout (originally on Tom Dispatch) Prof. Andrew Bacevich has another piece about learning the right lessons from the military adventures of the Bush era. (“Is Perpetual War Our Future? Learning the Wrong Lessons from the Bush Era”, http://www.truthout.org/article/learning-wrong-lessons-bush-era.

Some thoughts come to me.

Among possible lessons that are floating around (he’ll get to his own list of substantive lessons later in the piece), Bacevich notes that ‘sustained presence’, rather than quick and massive decisive victories, will be the norm. This is not the American way of war, not since Vietnam. JFK said more than he thought that January day in ’61 when he admonished Us that We must now wage a “long twilight struggle”. We don’t do long and twilight so well; We like quick and bright and shiny; and rather than ‘struggle’ We like whomp-and-stomp, shock-and-awe.

There was a movie 30 years back or so – ‘Force Ten From Navarrone’: an American (Harrison Ford) and a Brit who’s the actual explosives guy (Edward Fox, I think) are blowing up a huge dam deep in Nazi-occupied territory. To the American, it’s crazy to send a small contingent to do it, and then he finds out as well that the Brit will rely on a small explosion to do the job. Having made their way into the deepest and lowest levels of the dam, and the charge planted by the Brit, they make their way to a ridge overlooking the dam and watch and wait. The time goes by, there’s a tiny muffled sound from somewhere and then … nothing. The Brit calmly lights his pipe; Ford fumes. Now what? The Brit explains that a bit of patience is required. After a while we see a spidery set of cracks open up along the face of the dam, down at its base, and then a trickle of water, and after a bit, increasingly, more cracks and more water until huge chunks give way under pressure of the pent-up river and the whole thing sorta dissolves into a massive flow of water.

The Brit observes the American’s disappointment with the whole proceeding. The Yank was expecting a nice big Yankee explosion with a fireball and a huge bang and lotsa smoke and debris and probably some German body parts raining down. The Brits had used a small charge, shrewdly placed to take advantage of the dynamic forces of the dam’s massive bulk pressing down upon itself and the weight of all the water held back by the dam and the river’s rushing force constantly pushing that water forward against the dam. Most of the heavy-lifting would be done by those ‘local’ forces; the royal explosives would merely get them started. We needn’t mention that had a ‘large force’ been sent in the first place – ala Yank – it would have required a division or a corps, and even then the outcome would have been verrry iffy.

Another ‘lesson’ floating around is that “hard power will be merged with soft power”, “military action with political purpose … the soldier on the ground will serve as both cop and social worker”. This idea has been around for a while; a Marine commandant of a decade or more ago gushed that ‘my Marines can do it all’. A first-class spirit but a second-class idea.

If it’s a big gap between police officer and social worker, yet it’s still a doable do. Indeed, the militarization of police – the weaponry, the armored vehicles, the black combat uniforms and boots, the shaved and polished heads – is probably not a good idea; police work requires – in Our constitutional setting – a certain but solid patience and respect for conditions and persons that a) is not useful in actual combat and b) demands a deep and practiced maturity rather than a chimpish propensity to shoot-first and let-god-sort-it-out-later. So in a way a municipal police officer is closer to a social worker than to a combat infantryman. Jurisdictions that send their officers to Blackwater training, take note.

Still, in military situations where the locals have not been goaded into Resistance, and where the enemy actors (‘troops’ only if you’re lucky) give you some breathing space, then social-bond-building is indeed useful. Of course, Iraq is too far gone for that now, and I doubt Afghanistan would ever have tolerated a ‘sustained presence’, even of social-working troops. Open 4th Generation Warfare (4GW) – asymmetrical, sudden, ever uncertain – is going to require skills more refined than a WW2 combat infantryman, but still not at all ‘social work’.

And how does one wage war ‘maturely’, how ‘sustain’ it in that sad but profoundly solid way that Lincoln sustained his war? Even if that question could be answered, it is hugely doubtful that any boot-camp or Academy could turn out Lincolns in battalion-sized numbers, and keep doing so reliably over the long haul.

Nor, I have to say, can We any longer credit that Second Wave’s inferences to the effect that the infusion of ‘women’ into the military would make it both more ‘sensitive’ and more effective. A certain set of ‘feminine’ qualities, certainly, would help in the social-working, if they were maturely seated in the individual soldier’s personality, but that’s a big If in females as well as in males. And in current American society, a very big If. And it seems that the ‘revolution’ itself is not of one mind as to whether ‘sensitivity’ is actually ‘feminine’, and if so, whether it is by ‘nature’ or by ‘social construction’. But these are still-molten doctrinal disputes among the mothers of the revolution, male as well as female, and need not detain Us here.

The quality of political leadership needs to be improved. Ah, well, yes, but … where does this problem stem from? We are now bethumped by a politics both radicalized to its polar extremes and also confined to surfaces and appearances. The ‘radical politics’ (if such are even compatible with a democratic ethos) of the late ‘60s drove the Dems to their extreme Left, catalyzing a similar Republican shift to its extreme Right, while simultaneously a telegenic agitprop politics of ‘outrage’ and ‘victimhood’ and ‘absolute demands’ made it impossible for any sober give-and-take, the meat of a mature democratic politics. Hence politicians for some decades now have not found maturity or substance to be of any professional utility; and thus too the characteristics of maturity and intelligence and seriousness and even integrity have become less notable among the Beltway elect-eds. Although there have been those throughout Our glorious history who would allow as how integrity has never found itself an office in Washington City. General Sherman, certainly, had no use for the place or its professional denizens.

Perhaps the All Volunteer Force (AVF) might be replaced by a conscripted one. There are advantages, certainly: a much larger force, the re-involvement of the American citizenry, all the people, in the matter and action of war. That can be of great utility in itself. It can also have remarkable maturational benefits for society as more and more age-cohorts get a least a basic trellis-experience and some basic capacity for self-mastery. And a common experience as well. All good indeed.

But the inroads of juvenilism and Identity-ism are deep and broad. Generations of youth, over the past four decades or so, have been raised in a general ethos of aversion to ‘maturity’ and outright hostility to any ‘commonality’ among Americans. This is a profound damage, already deeply set and far along, that has yet to be addressed among Us.

So too, while it would be a wonderful boon to young individuals and to society as a whole to provide an opportunity to ‘sacrifice’ for ‘America’ … well, I think just saying that phrase out loud indicates how badly damaged Our common weal is. Decades of ‘victimhood’ and ‘empowerment’ have loudly disparaged ‘sacrifice’ in favor of getting one’s way and one’s piece of a pie; and for far far too many youngsters ‘America’ is not the primary matrix of identity, is indeed the perpetrator of oppression against them. How any house so divided … but Lincoln saw that. And he got it from Scripture – and we dassn’t go there.

Hence, an ‘open relationship between military and society’ would be a great boon, but also a hard one to engineer.

Because, as Bacevich gets into his own acute proposals, he drives home the fact that “the nature of war is not subject to reinvention”. Our present debacle on the Eastern Front, now under threat of expansion not only by military conflict with Iran but by confrontation with a resurgent Russia (in less than a decade We have passed from the gravid possibilities of a world without Communism to the international situation of the late 18th or even 17th century, except with automatic weapons and nukes … and Our government, and We the People that should ground that government, have had more than a little to do with this development, this devolvement). Sackcloth, ashes, or prayer – anyone … ? A firm resolution to amend one’s ways and to do the right?

Rove’s witless boast that ‘we make history’ – which History, if not the original Author, has laughed to scorn – was not original with him or his ‘side’. The deconstructionist dictum that there is no objective reality or anything moving human affairs except political interest and political power … that was enshrined by a Democratic Party increasingly listing to its left, until finally the only way one could claim that anything at all was on the level was to hold one’s head in a pronounced tilt, making one look like a puzzled duck and no doubt contributing mightily to the Dems’ fear of looking ‘unmanly’ and weak.

Not that the Republican embrace of its Inner Chimp improved matters at all. Forget donkeys and elephants; We are now confronted with a stark and dispiriting choice between Ducks and Chimps. We are sore bethumped; and in a heepa trubble. And if the ducks seek to swagger a bit, and the chimps try to peel their bananas a tad more delicately, this will help Our strategic situation not at all.

The ability to strategize is another of Bacevich’s lessons-learned. Strategy requires a lot of things no longer held in high esteem in these parts: the forebearance to take any action until one has obtained clear, objective, factual information; performed comprehensive analysis of options and then analyzed each of those possible options for potential consequences; selected objectives proportionate to one’s resources and potential capacities as well as one’s needs; the refusal to be distracted by what one has determined to be irrelevant or secondary to one’s goals and objectives; sustaining an efficacious commitment to one’s plan under all manner of adversity and uncertainty.

Now, this is a lot to expect from senior officers selected from the ranks of a military drawn from a society where all of the above are considered too ‘masculine’, ‘controlling’, ‘up-tight’, ‘rational’, ‘insensitive’, ‘elitist’ … and so on. Hell, not even the politicians are like this anymore.

And this menu of skills is also vaguely familiar, no? It might conceivably serve as not a bad template for conducting one’s own affairs and life, might it not? Might actually be a parts-list for the old vessel called ‘maturity’ … although, as has been discovered in the process of trying to restore the ‘S.S. United States’, splendid liner of 1953, this country no longer has the skills to restore the vessel that it once so capably built. We are so much poorer than We were then. All around.

“The utility of armed force remains finite.” Ah, now there is a word: ‘finite’. To be limited. Since ’68 the whole push has been that ‘limits’ were for fuddy-duddies, and were the engines of oppression. There were no limits, and the with-it American could reach for the sky. Still, while a vine with no fence isn’t such a problem; a vine with no trellis cannot then be restrained by any fence, but only by a solid wall. Prison, anybody … ?

And so We have. We incarcerate a larger proportion of citizens that any Communist nation ever did. Every year, legislators who can no longer muster the courage to say Hold On A Minute, Here pass increasingly unworkable laws without any deliberation and figure that the Courts can go to the trouble of actually looking at the enacted monstrosities carefully and can take the heat for stepping up to exercise responsibility. ‘Police action and incarceration will solve everything’; how easily then We slipped down the greasy chute to ‘military action will solve everything’.

And as Our domestic laws came to permit ‘preventive’ police action, so Our foreign policy brazenly and brassily trumpeted its right to wage preventive military action. Does one need a course in map-reading to determine the course and trajectory of the ship of state? Of Our country and Our society?

He concludes by observing that the country needs not so much a bigger military as a smaller foreign policy. Self-restraint: a hallmark of maturity. Gall and wormwood to the advocates of loud and immediate ‘outrage’ and the issuance forthwith of loud and implacable demands. Bush didn’t invent this method of doing foreign policy. He just did in foreign policy what has been going on in domestic policy for decades.

Of course, now he faces – gack! – ‘limits’, not only the limits of military resources drained by a poor strategic plan, but also the limits created by other nations – and not little ones – reacting with force and determination of their own. Amazingly, a society drenched in the concept of ‘backlash’ – expanding that interesting concept to include simple uncertainty and doubt or skepticism as well as outright opposition and hostility – was not prepared for ‘blowback’ from other nations whose interests Our government had sought to bethump. If the golden opportunities of the post-Soviet ‘90s are now irretrievably gone, the golden era of a consequence-free America – foreign and domestic – is now at an end.

Summer’s almost over. And this is gonna be a tough year at school.

THE PAST IS TOMORROW

Alexander Solzhenitsyn is dead. I wonder how it will play?

His remarks delivered at Harvard in June of 1978 are reprinted on Truthout (http://www.truthout.org/article/a-world-split-apart).

I remember Bill Mauldin’s death: that marvelous cartoonist, the creator of Willy and Joe, the two haggard but humorous infantry grunts who lived in a world of mud, rain, bureaucratic imbecility, incoming shells and foxholes somewhere in World War Two. Mauldin had the ill-fortune – perhaps – to die early in the current Iraq debacle. Once the most popular of WW2 cartoonists, neither the military nor the government wanted to think of him at his death, and his passing was almost un-noticed. War was too glorious and lightning-quick, so why waste time on such a ‘quaint’ cartoonist? The same was apparently felt by the national leadership of the assorted veterans’ organizations, always so quick to lend benefit-of-history to government gambits, for the price of being allowed to dress up in odd bits of uniform and shake the occasional Unitary hand or half-salute whatever emblem looms up into a fading, blurred vision.

Nor did any of the Identities, erstwhile tribunes of the ‘little guy’, take note. After all, Correct usage requires that one does not ‘endure and prevail’ in the midst of sustained hardship, but rather that one complain and see where something can be shaken loose on one’s behalf. And – being WW2-era white guys – there was no real Identity into which Willy and Joe fit. Nor does simply being ‘American’ really hold much traction any longer.

I recall Solzhenitsyn talking at Harvard back there 30 years ago. And being kind of surprised, naïf that I was. I had assumed that the ‘liberals’ of the Hahvahd faculty would embrace him, liberals being strong on liberty, as the similarity of the two terms would suggest.

But no, they were not at all amused. They had, after all, displayed their distaste (not altogether misplaced) for unbridled American capitalism by embracing the ideals of the Marxist-Communist Revolution, conveniently forgetting that a revolution-with-ideals and an ideal-revolution are not quite the same thing. It’s not an infrequent error: you sit around looking at flat maps covering vast swaths of ‘reality’ and figure that success will follow the sweep of your hand; only those who have to operate on the actual ground can see the hills, valleys, ruts, ridges, and assorted treacherous impassables.

So here was Solzhenitsyn, fresh – you should pardon the expression – from the actuality, from the reality, of that Revolution, speaking to a number of the educated elite who were themselves in the midst of their own unacknowledged but very cutting-edge revolutions over here.

“Veritas”, he reminded them, was not easily grasped, nor that grasp easily maintained. One pursued truth through a continuous maze of illusions and chicaneries from outside one, and a fog of irresolution arising from within. There is no ‘easy’ Truth, as there is no ‘easy’ Liberty; both, indeed, are ‘strenuous’ in their demands.

Little did he realize that he was speaking about the failures of a Revolution and the moral failures of its revolutionaries and votaries to those who were themselves in thrall to the excitements of revolution, and the even easier excitements of destruction and deconstruction.

And thus in addition to their ‘professional’ umbrance taken at his denouncing the methodology and psychology of ‘revolution’, they were doubly miffed when he put his finger on the core of the revolutionary gambit: a betrayal or deconstruction of Truth. They themselves were supporting the Blooming of a Million Identities precisely by deconstructing (denying) the concepts that i)there existed any objective truth, ii) that truth existed anywhere except in the construction of ‘stories’ by those in power, and iii) that there existed any truth whose origin was beyond human-ness itself, and most surely iv) that there existed such a concept with an origin so authoritative as to be designated ‘Truth’.

He didn’t so much trace out the darkling path that would capture any would-be votaries: that a ‘revolution’ so conceived and so dedicated could only destroy (‘deconstruct’), but could not create without constructing and then enforcing its own ‘authority’ upon all the citizenry. Instead, he remarked on what I would call the soul-strangling Flatness of a world which could not anchor itself in any principles beyond itself. The revolutionistas were committed – willy or nilly – to placing American society on a high stairway with no banister or railings; anyone using it would have to balance himself, herself, themselves – because there was to be no balancing, steadying, grounding assistance from outside the human self.

This was not what the multi-colored Guards of the revolutions wished to hear. Bad enough that he denounced the fundamental and essential shallowness of their Project; but he then pointed out that when divided against itself, no world or any “Kingdom” upon it can stand. The divisions of the Identities and their respective ‘stories’ and ‘politics’ were precisely the structures that were to shape the brave new world, and the engines that were to fuel its dynamics. Nor were those dynamics much longer to resemble a democratic ‘politics’ in anything but appearance.

There was as well, he noted, a loss of “civil courage” in the West. Now I state immediately that “civil courage” can be used as a cover for the most cynical and repulsive chimpery. Against such chimpery The People must be constantly on guard – but that goes with the job of being The People.

Equally relevant is that this loss of “civil courage” results in the abdication of The People from Its task of grounding the government in all its branches; if the government is the great wheel of the ferris-wheel, then The People are the struts on each side that hold it steady. And upon what, then, is The People grounded? In solid earth? Upon rock? Or upon sand, soft and shifting? Of course, for the Revolutions of the Identities, the whole idea was to soften up everything in order to squeeze their hydra-headed agendas and priorities (‘values’ is too dignified a term) into the whole process.

But that required reducing the American Experiment and the workings of American society and democracy to a soapisch agitation over this or that ‘story’ being pushed upon The People, like a bill long-due from some unknown purveyor. The loss of “civil courage” stemmed from The People – youngish and emotional and impatient and insistent – forgetting what the Founders had always before their minds in vivid and alarming clarity: that their Constitutional vision involved a government that was not only constructed like a careful machine, but was also subject to the same dangers as any machine: if you forget the principles upon which it works, then the thing is going to break or stop working, and if it’s big enough, it’s going to crash. Oy. Who knew?

“Courage” and its decline among Us … Solzhenitsyn sensed it 30-plus years ago. How can one be courageous if one doesn’t know what to be courageous about? How can one be courageous if all ‘courage’ is instantly vilified as ‘masculine’, ‘oppressive’, ‘hateful’, ‘shrill’, or even just ‘quaint’? Surely there is a hugely fruitful personal and civic space between the utter lack of courage and the aggressive imposition of one’s own beliefs? But to the revolutionistas one could only be ‘courageous’ in the service of the revolution; against the ‘revolution’ any opposition or even honest doubt was the same: a willful obstruction to be overrun.

And their ‘happiness’ was – Solzhenitsyn inveighed – “morally inferior”. It was what might be called ‘merely of this world’, it was Flat. But of course, if one assumed that there was a God, a Judge or at least a Judging force in place over this human dimension, then there would be no emergency justification for pushing aside all laws in order to ‘get’ presumed evildoers before they ‘escaped’ through death (can one keep a straight face when reading of a 70-year-old nun prosecuted for a sex-offense decades ago?). The Flatness of the revolutionary ethos, here as well as in the USSR, was essential to the revolutionary ‘success’: all would have to look to the revolution here and now, not to some other authority, and certainly not one beyond Space and Time, for justification and for vengeance (not to say ‘for Justice’). The “dependence” of the individual on “state pressure” (once the state has been taken over by the revolution) is hugely intensified.

Even in the ‘70s, there was the deconstructive thrust against – ironically enough – ‘judging’. One could not say – and should not think – that this or that was ‘inferior’, let alone ‘morally inferior’; one should be tolerant of all things. But again: this responsibility of ‘tolerance’ was not universal: it was incumbent upon any individual, yet only in matters designated by the revolutions as in the service of their agendas. In regard to anything against the service of a revolutionary agenda, one did not ‘tolerate’; one judged ... and denounced. Thus too the “dependence” – in this case through fear rather than need – of the individual upon “state pressure” is hugely intensified.

And so in the heyday of the tolerant and nonjudmental and relativistic and sensitive Identities this country has seen an efflorescence of prosecution and incarceration; when the necessary suppressive acts against each of the ‘enemies’ of each Identity are toted up, it becomes immediately clear that Ours is a society in which huge swaths of the citizenry are liable to judgment, if not to Justice. Proportionately, more American citizens are incarcerated than Stalin ever managed to do; in a sense, this country is itself becoming one big prison, as Solzhenitsyn characterized the USSR.

But of course, he would mean it in a far more profound sense: this country has become so Flattened that it is indeed an existential and even ontological prison, the citizenry trapped in an ever-shrinking dimension like adventurers trapped in a room whose ceiling is coming down and preparing to crush them. The votaries of revolution at Hahvahd did not want to hear that.

But as it has become Flattened, American society and its ethos have also become unstable. It’s as if one tries to steady and secure a rowboat in a heavy sea only from aboard, without relying on an anchor or a line securing it to a pier or a larger vessel. It’s dynamically impossible; no rower can manipulate the oars long enough and accurately enough to keep the boat’s balance and its position relative to the crushing waves. Our philosophical and ethical and moral grounding is dissolved by the universal solvent of ‘deconstruction’, and now We are truly ‘at sea’, in a very small boat.

But he also went deeper: he put his finger on that most touchy of subjects: mediocrity’s relationship to American democracy. If there is to be a total ‘equality’, cutting across all spheres of life, thus an equality of outcome as well as of opportunity, of talent as well as of achievement, then the entire dynamic will be to skew toward the least common denominator. And thus away from any striving toward some excellence in an area of one’s individual life, or of the societal life.

And thus any freedom ‘won’ by any individual group will necessarily be ‘governed’ by a much-diminished capacity for judgment or any ethic of excellence in self-development or societal development.

And thus, given that there is a dark potential in individual human beings to not-develop themselves, concomitant to their willingness as citizens to be ‘governed’ by a ‘leader’, then Solzhenitsyn saw that “freedom” would “tilt in the direction of evil”. Yes, it all started with “a humanistic and benevolent concept according to which there is no evil inherent in human nature; [and that] the world belongs to mankind and all the defects of life are caused by wrong social systems which must be corrected”. In pulling all of its citizens’ endeavors to itself, the revolutionary state pulls the ceiling down, even if it appears to push the walls out so as to ‘expand’ the life of its (now-captive) citizens.

You can judge for yourself whether he was prescient.

Certainly, the “hastiness and superficiality” that he sees are “the psychic disease of the 20th century”, as are the “in-depth analysis of a problem that is anathema to the press” and “the sensational formulas” that have replaced analysis. And this awful synergy is comprised of the primitive and unthinking emotionality that is essential to the propaganda state and to the manipulations of professional Advocacy; it is also thus comprised as a result of the ‘non-rationality’ of the enlightened feminist mind and the unthinking impatience and still-unripened mental processes of ‘youth’.

And so “there is a dangerous tendency to form a herd”. And as if that weren’t bad enough, such herd-ing can only lead to “shutting off successful development”. Individually or societally he doesn’t specify, but I’d say that it’s both, and that the formation of such a negative feedback loop, of such a dark symmetry, can only increase the rate and angle of decline.

And yet to protect themselves, individuals and groups will construct a sort of “petrified armor” around their minds, shutting out any awareness of the actual operating dynamics and the consequences of the ideas and movements they have embraced.

And such “armor” will only be pierced by “the pitiless crowbar of events”. As medieval folk knew, a blow sufficient to shatter armor will most likely proceed to break some bones inside that armor. Maybe a lot of bones. Nor can We permit Ourselves the almost clinically-significant denial of such as Douglas Feith (the noted Georgetown perfesser): having prophesied that Our troops would be greeted with flowers, and watching the actual films of Iraqi crowds precisely not-throwing flowers, he instantly simpered that they were intimidated by the presence of armed former Baathists on the streets, but were “thinking flowers in their heads”, an assertion that surpasses even the theory of ‘recovered memory’ in its demonstration of malicious fatuousness.

Solzhenitsyn's was a clear eye and a strong voice. We did not listen to him then. And now We are where We are.

They say that Obama is not hugely ahead of McCain, and that this seems a bit odd. And that it will be all about Obama as a person. No. It’s not odd because the Dems know, as do the Repugs, that there is still a vast and deep reservoir of concern among voters as to the wisdom and integrity of the Dems and their 40 years of the Revolutions of the Identities, and their pols’ decades of trying to cushion themselves from the consequences of the vastly deleterious ‘revolutions’ embraced by the Party after ’68. America’s civilization and its economy, its very ethos as a Constitutional republic, were quietly perverted in the Dems’ quest to somehow keep a lid on things that they themselves had induced.

How can Obama – or any individual – really change the course of all these decades’ worth of revolutionary deconstruction and destruction? They figured that the ‘destruction’ would automatically ‘create’ replacements for what it consumed, but such was not the case. Even a five-year old could have told them that.

So now, after a horrific 8 Republican years in which the economy, currency, military competence, international diplomatic stature, and reputation of this country – to say nothing of its moral integrity and maturity – have all been dragged in the mud of aggressive war and greed-and-lie-fueled enrichment … even now the Dems still cannot rely on a clear, let alone easy, victory in the election.

Drunk and at the helm, their Party will not accept that sobriety might increase their performance. They will remain drunk and at the helm, and hope that somehow the Republicans will screw up even more, and that somehow folks will agree to forget all that has happened, and agree to indulge in the lunatic fantasy that any one human being in the Oval Office will be able to improve Our situation sufficiently at least to avoid disaster.

As if Kerensky was going to be able to keep Lenin at bay. Solzhenitsyn would have known that.

THEY WORK FOR US

Over on Counterpunch there’s a multi-author article about the military and its relationship to civilians (“The Can-Do Troops and the New Anti-politics”, www.counterpunch.org/chowdhury05262007.html.)

It asserts, and not inaccurately, that “since the draft was abolished, the military has re-branded itself as a collection of experts”. Yes. “The model of the citizen-soldier no longer applies, because citizenship is no longer linked to military service.” Also yes.

And worse: the Reagan-era gambit was to enshrine ‘the military’ not only as an embodiment of the American spirit, but as the best embodiment of the American spirit.

‘Citizen’ became a title of second-class status. ‘Citizen’ became ‘civilian’, the latter term delivered with a deprecating or self-deprecating lowered voice.

But this is a government “of the people, by the people, for the people”. Surely at Gettysburg – of all places – Lincoln could have enshrined the ‘soldier’ as the acme and epitome of the American spirit. Surely, the fact that he didn't was not due to absence of mind. Instead, he was profoundly grateful for their service and their sacrifice, but he placed that splendid and genuinely glorious gift of their toil and their blood and their lives in proper context: as a service to and a gift to The People, upon Whom the Union and the Republic ultimately rest.

And indeed, he saw those soldiers as citizens who would, one day, doff their uniforms and once again take their place fully among the citizenry. He would then no longer be their commander-in-chief but would revert to being their employee, the employee of The People. He would be answerable to them. That was the natural order of things in the American ethos. It was to preserve that ethos that they and he found themselves at Gettysburg. Lincoln saw that. And accepted it. And acknowledged it.

The military of the immediate post-draft era took its cue from the powerful example set in the New Deal, in the massive organizational mobilization of the Second World War, and was even then in the ‘70s exploding into the civilian sphere through the administration of the Great Society and the revolutionistic implementation of the agendas of the several Advocacies: the ‘experts’ are the only ones who really ‘get it’ and are the only ones who really ‘can do’ it. The People must simply accept their status as distracted if not also backward ignoramuses in need of leading. Indeed, it became a classic trope of every Advocacy’s founding ‘emergency’ that The People or a sizable chunk of The People were pretty much the problem … the oppressor, the perpetrator, the (fill in the blank).

And so the ‘experts’ (and thus the government that employed them) flowed in and swelled up, and – it appeared at the time – with huge success and the unstoppable momentum previously ascribed to ‘historical inevitability’ or ‘God’s will’. It would have been, one might say, negligent of the military not to adopt such a winning gameplan. Anyway, the vast (by American standards) citizen armies that waged the sustained, up-close and personal combat of the Second World War would no longer be required. We sure as hell weren’t going to engage the full panoply of Soviet or Chinese hordes on the Eurasian landmass. Hi-tech armor and air strikes and atomic cannon (yes, we had them) and a lot of other countries’ ground troops would do the trick, if the Commies were ever crazy enough to try it. The chances of Elvis ever actually having to ship his guitar to the rear and get right with a rifle and a bayonet were slim to none. He and the rest of the ‘kids’ over there could get some exposure to Europe on the government’s dime; the grown-ups would do the heavy diplomatic and economic lifting.

But then ‘expertism’ and ‘government expertism’ got a second and more insidious wind in the massive domestic intrusions occasioned in the ‘60s and the ‘70s back here. And in a hugely ill-advised effort to find William James’ “moral equivalent to war” the Advocacies and the police on all levels reported the need for ‘war’ … on this or on that.

And that lead to what the article quotes from a Texas (!) State Senator: that “we (We!) are all soldiers in the War on Terror”. Apparently the so-named War on Terror does not require The People, but rather that all people be ‘soldiers’. Surely, that firm conviction explains the Administration’s assaultive pruning of the no-longer necessary constitutional and democratic processes and its hurt feelings at any dissent from the programme. ‘Soldiers’, after all, don’t get a say in what happens to them; their generals and leaders do not work for them – rather, ‘soldiers’ take their orders and do what they’re told and die when it’s their turn. And thus the Administration’s insistence – echoing every drill-sergeant in every army in every age of history – that ‘this isn’t a debating society’.

And thus this country is a society that no longer debates. The People aren’t supposed to debate since The People have been reduced to a soldiery. And thus The People – long bethumped by the Political Correctness of the Advocacies – are no longer used to debating. And thus the younger generations – hugely distracted from birth even as they are increasingly protected – are increasingly incapable of debating or even of noticing that debating – even more than ‘manners’ – no longer exists. One finds oneself reduced to the plaint of Chester A. Riley: “What a revoltin’ development this turned out ta be!”

Except that few now even seem ‘revolted’ by it. We are ‘offended’ – oh yeah! – by every damned thing under the sun, but We are not revolted by the corrosion and corruption of the Republic that was entrusted to Us. The children of light are getting a little dim.

We are coming to resemble – it can now be said – not ‘The Union’ but the old Confederacy, that military-besotted elitist hierarchical society where there was no middle-class, but only a pretend-aristocracy (morally debased) lording it over a harlequin serfery of ‘crackers’, slaves, and a smattering of mestizos, octoroons, and Indians, and everybody harassed by bible-thumping preachers to accept what-is as God’s will so shut-up and get on with it. No middle-class and no citizenry. And surely, no People.

Have I lived to see the South finally defeated a century later than the history books said, only to then see it ‘win’ almost a half-century after that? As Pogo would say: “Gack!”


The soldier works for the citizen. The soldier is of the People, is raised up by the People, to fight for the People. And will return to the People.

As Washington refused to wear his Revolutionary War uniform when he was President, and as it was insisted that the President be addressed by no honorific title but only as “Mister President” (like even the torture-whores do on ‘24’), so the Citizen’s is far more of an authoritative responsibility than the Soldier’s. In fact, it has probably been one of the toxic results of the militarization of Our society and culture that so many rights of the Citizen and the rights of so many citizens have been curtailed without public alarm: what’s a citizen anyway, or a citizen’s rights? Let’s be patriotic and go shoppin’! The experts know what they’re doing; ‘civilians’ would only get in the way.

We are Citizens, not civilians.

And if We had been doing Our job, then perhaps so many of our soldiers wouldn’t be dead now, or losing their lives, or their minds, or their spirits, or their souls, over there on the eastern front now.

Nor is it sufficient to say: ‘the troops want to stay over there, so who are We to say no?’ It’s Our call, not – bless them – theirs. We are not their commander-in-chief, but then again they are not ‘Presidential’ troops; they are American troops and We are The People. Nor are they ‘Congressional’ troops (and that seems increasingly obvious). And it is a consummation devoutly to be wished that the Supreme Court will not seek to reprise its Election-2000 clusterflok by assuming command of the troops in the field and making them ‘Judicial’ troops.

The People are responsible for the Soldier. In good times and in bad, in sickness and in health, for richer or poorer, for better or for worse … And do We wonder why that responsibility has been neglected?

WHEN VICTIMS GO BAD

I’d like to move beyond this matter, but things keep developing, and the whole thing is important not only for itself but as a template for other and even larger national policies – foreign as well as domestic – and as a source of reflection as to how We came to be infected in the first place .

In “Commonweal” magazine, Mark Sargent has a piece entitled “When Abuse Victims Squander Their Moral Authority”, which tells us so very much more than it intended to (http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/article.php3?id_article=1915).

Apparently there are now flying squads of members of an organization called SNAP (Survivors Network of Those Abused by Priests). These units have taken it upon themselves to target those “about whom the diocese [of Wilmington, Delaware] found ‘credible or substantial complaints of sexual abuse of minors”. That diocese had contributed to the tribulation by releasing the names of twenty or so former priests in that category. Most of them were ‘former’ by means of having died (thus facing a Court without SNAP input and quite possibly therefore the self-declared victimery would not accept Its findings).

At least one of the twenty was still above-ground, although he had ceased serving as a priest 20 years ago or so, and lived now in another state. Apprised of his residence within their ‘jurisdiction’, that local chapter of SNAP “went door to door in his neighborhood distributing a file of documents with the title ‘Community Notification Project: Protect your children from a credibly accused sex offender’”. This last despite the fact that the gentleman has never been charged with, let alone convicted of, a sexual-abuse crime. A similar deployment in another state resulted in a priest whom the FBI and local police had investigated and declined to charge being “hounded” into resigning his pastoral duties and leaving the state.

There’s as much to say about the magazine as there is about the SNAP-squads. But first it has to be noted that nobody who lived through the era of Mao’s Cultural Revolution (the immediate progenitor of Our own unruly brood) can be surprised except by the queasy realization that “it” is most definitely happening here.

The magazine is to be commended for sticking its head up out of the media formation and actually addressing (however delicately) the heretofore sacrosanct and unask-able question of the behavior of some of these groups. Still and all, no reader aware of our modern American reality can read the article without making the necessary mental bracketing: Who has declared any member of these groups a “survivor”? On what demonstrable authority is the privilege claimed? For, after all, to ask such a question is not merely to be flint-hearted in the distribution of sympathy; these ‘victims’ apparently consider themselves above the law or beyond it – perhaps because the ‘emergency’ of priestly sexual-abuse has over-ridden the rule of law for quite a few years now.

The SNAP-pers apparently feel that ‘sexual abuse’ is such a pressing and outrageous emergency that any scruples about slander or libel are irrelevant, that concerns for ‘accuracy’ are indications of “sympathy for a devil” (to borrow a phrase), and that no DA in his/her right mind would dare to bring charges against them anyway. No doubt behind this thinking lies the old soviet presumption that members of the class of oppressors and ‘objective enemies’ by definition cannot be ‘victims’, and conversely that no class of ‘victims’ can victimize. You can’t say that the soviet system really had an appreciation of the unsleeping duality of human nature. Now the Catholic Church did and – buried beneath a few decades of smiley-faced goo-goo fluff – still does.

And of course, what is the definition of ‘sexual abuse’? This question does not represent a ploy of ‘denial’ or ‘minimization’, such as would get you a sound verbal and emotional thrashing if you raised it in group-therapy. This is the urgent and grave question of what precisely is it that is being targeted by the criminal law and its penalties, in order to assure a just and accurate conviction and a punishment proportionate to the act(s) proven to have been committed. Thoughts? Words? Deeds? What sort of deeds? How old is the ‘child’? (The ‘child’ could be a day or two from starting military recruit training).

There is a price to be paid for a lascivious use of the criminal power. For one thing, society is deprived of whatever contribution the convicted might have made or might make (especially nowadays, when having paid one’s debt to society or even having been adjudged as not having a debt to pay is no guarantee that a flying-squad of ‘victims’ will not appear to wreak a ‘service’ that in an earlier and more candid time was called ‘vigilante justice’. Further, society creates enemies for itself if it becomes lascivious in its deployment of the violence of criminal justice; and if in addition that society were to dispense with Truth, with accuracy, with Justice itself, then such Enemies thus raised up would be formidable and relentless indeed. Has that not become rather clear from Our experience on the Eastern front?

The magazine has also failed – though it is hardly alone in this – by accepting the essential premises of the Maoist script: when a bunch of Red Guards/Victims show up on its doorstep muttering and wailing, the magazine instantly adopts the submissive posture of the ‘discovered’ or ‘uncovered’ (so to speak) counter-revolutionary or ‘revisionist’ who is respectful of his heroic discoverers and now wishes only to be allowed to apologize to ‘the people’ for his errors of (fill-in-the-blank) and will gratefully accept any re-education that the heroic vanguard of the suffering masses might choose to impose.

Or – at least – the magazine is willing to accept that ‘the priests’ are guilty and join the baying chorus. Which is not quite so courageous.

This is a trahison, no matter how thickly cloaked in ‘sensitivity’, ‘contrition’ (justified or not), and ‘open-ness’. Certainly, a priest who has been proven to have had sexual relations with a child is responsible for great criminal and moral and – let’s not mince words - supernatural consequences. But in the criminal law there is no legally usable ‘class’ of such priests whose ‘members’ are instantly and indubitably certifiable by their very nature as criminally guilty. Perhaps this is why the victimists harbor a barely-hidden resentment toward any of those keepers of the criminal law who still insist on the traditional stringencies of evidence and proof to determine guilt in each individual case.

For the victimists, the civil law is an easier nut to crack in theory and has proven hugely useful in practice. Once they permitted actions to be presented as a ‘class’ action, then the courts instantly created two ‘classes’ in the public mind: the class of ‘victims’-before-the-proof and the class of perpetrators-before-the-proof. With such a boundary crossed, the conceptual possibilities of monetary remuneration increase exponentially, and if somehow the ‘class’ can be determined to have a common and large asset, then attorneys of a certain sub-specialty will join the cause.

Once the media have joined in, responding to your PR spin of an ‘outrage’, an ‘emergency’ and ‘a hidden conspiracy unmasked among us’, and with sex thrown in on top of all that … once you’ve got those conditions going, then a good old southern California wildfire and firestorm are inevitable. Nobody who has seen those tornado funnels of dark hot fire up close rising up hundreds of feet in a spiral of ferocious destructiveness can fail to appreciate the tremendous energies unleashed by the properly nurtured combination of elements properly set alight.

If then the courts yield their ancient trust and loosen up rules of evidence, statutes of limitation, and the presumption of innocence until proven guilty, if indeed the courts or – worse – the legislators, grant an initial characterization of a claimant as a ‘victim’ or a ‘survivor’ before any adjudication or verification of such a claim has taken place, then several more of society’s defensive firebreaks are overrun – abandoned, actually.

And by the time all of that is ‘going good’, then only the hardiest bishop would want to risk the monstrous and dubious expense of defending each civil claim. But each such acceptance of a ‘class settlement’, though well-advised from a purely legal point of view, reinforces the completely undemonstrable assumption that each ‘claim’ thus settled was real and accurate. And it is that intensifying public misperception which thus toxifies the atmosphere for the (relatively very few) cases that come to the probing test of a criminal trial.

Not surprisingly, numbers given out by media – based on numbers given to the media by advocates and ‘experts’ – don’t seem to add up or don’t add up to percentages that stand out from the norm. This point, of course, is countered by the dual claims that a) in a church that claims its priests are so ‘good’ then any deviation at all is ‘horrific’ and b) if we base our expectations on ‘zero tolerance’ then it’s worth it if ‘only just one’ potential victim is saved. But should we invade a foreign country because the government has declared ‘zero tolerance’ for (fill in the blank)? Should we invade a foreign country in order to ‘save only one’ victim of (fill in the blank)?

And while the Church has high expectations of its priests, the Church has never lost sight of the fact that human beings can fail to live up to their calling.

Indeed, it is precisely the Church’s patience and tolerance of weakness that have been seized upon voraciously by the victimists as proof that there is a ‘cover-up’ massive in proportion and sacralegious in nature.

The bishops have not responded well, indicating that John Paul II’s great purge of the episcopacy that brought in dozens of ‘doctrinally strong’ prelates did not bring in particularly strong men. The Maoist ballet – the performance of which requires two – was greatly abetted by the cravenness of the American episcopacy, the ecclesiatchiki who yielded their priests to the victimist furor as easily as they betrayed their pope to the war-mongering of the Bushist Imperium.

The heavy burden of the Church, that She bears through the ages and will ever continue to do so, is to bear witness to Sin and Grace, sinfulness and redemption, the crooked lines with which God writes the history of humankind. For every one bishop who ‘covered up’ a monster, there were a half-a-dozen who tried – ineptly as often as not – to maintain some decent connection to a struggling soul.

Certainly, priests who err must accept the consequences. But those consequences must be proportional to the crime that has been proven to be committed. The Church owes that to Herself – to betray that is to betray Herself and Her mission. And if it is the instant retort of the victimists that the Church has clearly betrayed Her nature and mission in these sex scandals, then the Church would be the first to admit the imperfectness of Her efforts.

But in the modern Moment in which Americans consider the failures of the Church (whatever their actual proportions), We can hardly ignore the monstrous betrayals of nature and mission, of character and of integrity, that have gut-shot the whole Iraq effort, undermined the economy, and de-centered the government’s administration of Justice and Law and its adherence to Truth and Integrity of Character. We must soon face up to the fact that enacting mass-media autos-da-fe does not build the moral strength and integrity – individually or societally – that enables Us better to People the Republic and its government. In fact, the indulgence of such sustained demonstrations may well have contributed to the massive erosion of Our seriousness and competence, Our ‘gravitas’, as a People.

In the matter of all of these accused priests I would propose the following questions? Was his guilt determined by a trial and finding by a jury? What specifically was the act with which he was charged? (‘Abuse’ or ‘molestation’, those revolutionary buzzwords, therefore are not sufficient). If he was simply lumped together in some sort of civil ‘settlement’, then I would refrain from coming to any conclusion until fact was clearly established If I saw ‘numbers’ I’d pull out a pencil and do a little math for myself.

And if I found out that my priest was indeed ‘guilty’, I’d want to know whether it was of child-rape or something else altogether. On the basis of a laudable and visceral public rejection of sex with children it seems that a lot of other things have been tossed into the net to fatten up the final figures touted to the press.

It was the old soviet ploy to recoil from the foregoing type of proposal like a vampire from holy water, effecting a pose of righteous indignance and braying that such requirements would interfere with the administration of ‘justice’ against these class enemies of the people. That ploy cannot be indulged. We cannot afford it: legally, culturally, morally.

The Catholic Church in this country, it seems to me, has been the target of a Cultural Revolution masquerading as A Hundred Flowers Blooming. Its hierarchy has not performed well, its ‘elites’ are divided and fractious, and – so American – none of those involved are able to take the Long View (‘Long’ in Catholic time, not Bush-Pentagon time). Nor for that matter – again, so American – are those involved able to take the High, the Wide, and the Deep View. And there are other forces in contemporary society that do not favor a robust Catholic presence.

And yet the world and even We are in great need of a wisdom that can sustain through times of genuine mass privation and horror. The biblical lean years are coming, and will no doubt arrive long before the far more adolescent-friendly End Times. As adults or adults-to-be, each American needs all the help s/he can get to sustain a mature and robust humanity and civic competence.

The search – relentless and squinty – for ‘purity’ is, historically, not a ‘Catholic’ obsession at all, but rather a Protestant one. Just as the Catholic Inquisition was begun as an intellectual inquiry into heresy, and it was only at the time of the Reformation that witchcraft became an overriding subject of inquiry (not improbably because the Protestant Reformers simultaneously needed to maintain a usable ‘enemy’ to bolster religious fervor while avoiding too deep a concern for ‘heresy’ since they were all, pretty much by definition, liable to that charge). The Catholic ethos became the ‘primitive’ earth-besotted, emotionally and materially besotted archaic miasm out of the darkness of which the pure and dedicated Reformers and their flocks created themselves from an act of focused will in response to a new Exodus and a refined Covenant.

The Church, though male-dominated, remained committed to and rooted in a Vision of human existence that is robustly Incarnational, respecting the blending of Spirit and Matter that reflects the human reality as Created, that is patient with the human instability that etches those myriad crooked lines – some so stunningly bloody and deep – that mark our history as a species. I will not reduce matters to the current specious conundrum of ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’; the Church’s Vision seems profoundly human. The world as We know it, the world as it will or might or must become, cannot afford to lose It.

CRIME AND GOVERNANCE

Max Boot has an Op-ed in the “Los Angeles Times” (“Keys to a successful surge”. www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-oe-boot7feb07,0,4299148,print.column?coll=la-opinion-rightrail).

He discusses the cutting-edge in Counterinsurgency Theory. Several points draw his attention: A) The population will be governed in its loyalties by which side demonstrates the most strength and can control violence to its own purposes; B) Insurgents will not be hindered if when arrested by lawful authority they can take advantage of “the many normal safeguards built into the judicial system” to effect their quick release; C) “Clearly, more than any other kind of warfare, counterinsurgency must respect the principle of a single direction. A single boss must direct the operations from beginning until the end”; D) “Control of the population begins obviously with a thorough census. Every inhabitant must be registered and given a foolproof identity card.”

Let us pass over with only a moment’s serious regard the fact that you can’t – apparently – start operating a Democracy if you’re faced with a counterinsurgency. The best you can go for appears to be some form of military-authoritarian boot-camp society. Let us note soberly that having once ensconced a military and a junta-government in such a strong position as this Theory requires, the odds of thus further developing in an orderly fashion into full popular Democracy are somewhere south of zilch.

Let us instead give full and undivided attention to the thought that this very same Counterinsurgency Theory seems to be the operative model for governing here, at home, domestically, in these United States. Whether pressed by the Neocons for the purpose of spackling up the population to serve the needs of empire, or by the Fundamentalistics in order to spackle up the population to serve the needs of a vengeful “Jee-zuzz”, or by assorted Identities to ensure no popular opposition to their various agendas, or by the ‘soccer parents’ to ensure that their children – increasingly carrying on in their parents’ absence – will grow up (as if in compensation) in a risk-free, totally secure ‘world’ … this Counterinsurgency Theory seems to have become the many-rooted, de facto governing model for this Republic.

And that means that We The People are now simply envisioned as “the population”, an easily excitable, not very with-it, herbivorous herd that needs to be controlled and headed in the ‘right’ direction. Among whom there are un-named hordes of wild criminals of various violent proclivities, seeking to do to “us” on a daily basis what was done to the Twin Towers all in the space of a few minutes.

Staring at those disturbing tea-leaves, wondering where all this came from and how it has managed to become the domestic policy of the United States, then pick up the newly-published “Governing Through Crime” by Jonathan Simon (Oxford University Press).

Simon’s thesis is that somewhere in Time our government ceased to simply ‘govern crime’ and sought instead, and with a sustained and mighty effort, to govern THROUGH crime. The ideal ‘citizen’ and the ‘idealized political subject’ of the government then ceased to be ‘the yeoman farmer’ of the early 1800s, the pioneer, the industrial worker of the later 1800s, the immigrant of the early 1900s … but rather became ‘the potential victim of crime’. And the job of the government has thus mutated into serving that idealized citizen-victim by avenging and even preventing the crime that endangers that idealized citizen. This has become the American ‘Script’, the American ‘Story’ for this era.

We are well-advised to consider that if it goes on, it will also be the last-ever American Story, at least insofar as we are a Republic.

The job of the American government is thus not the preservation of rights, nor the protection of pioneers, nor the opening up of ‘new lands on the frontier’, nor the protection of the worker’s rights and the owner’s rights, nor the provision of jobs and great public works nor the guarantee of decent wages and reliable jobs, nor even the provision of decent education (who nowadays can say what should be taught?). Indeed, given the peaking of the American postwar production hegemony in 1969, the government wasn’t going to be able to keep any such promises. And given the Vietnam War it wasn’t going to able to guarantee ever-victorious military undertakings either.

What then was a government to do?

J. Edgar Hoover, of course, had been an early federal-expansionist via the police power of the government. Taking over the predecessor to the FBI just after World War I, he quickly cut his teeth on ‘Reds’, and when that ‘Scare’ was surfed out, he was on to ‘gangsters’: not, curiously, the big mob bosses, but the more vulnerable independent (if showy) entrepreneurs, especially ones who drove automobiles across State lines. Here was a fine new frontier for the Federal police power to colonize, and it did.

After the diversions of World War Two and the occasional Nazi spy, there was another Scare involving the Soviets and Joe McCarthy, and then – amazingly – it was Bobby Kennedy – himself a former prosecutor – who saw ‘crime’ as an excellent vehicle for enhancing his brother’s and his own political service.

After the assassinations of JFK, Martin Luther King, and RKF himself, and the profoundly jarring experiences of the urban riots of the later ‘60s, and the overall Anything Goes attitude of the Boomers (in their youth), the Omnibus Safe Streets Act of 1968 becomes, for Simon, the foundation for an American “National Crime State” (my own term) that rivals Gore Vidal’s description of the National Security State that arose after World War 2.

It is the unspoken and rarely seen growth and subsurface efflorescence of this National Crime State – its mentality, its vision of the place of the individual citizen and of the role of the government (Federal and State) and of the prosecutor, and the ‘changes’ (to put it nicely) it required in American law and justicial practice – that Simon isolates as the great and dangerous development underlying the challenges the Republic faces today.
When the Democrats (see the earliest Posts on this site) embraced the assorted Revolutions of the Identities in the later 1960s and afterwards, the (hardly unrelated) spike in ‘crime’ – from ‘pot’ to ‘drugs’ to all sorts of violent acts to all sorts of arguably ‘deviant’ behavior and acts – became a richly potent wedge for the now-waxing Republicans, precisely as the ability of the Federal government to continue the essential New Deal preconditions of constant expanding economic well-being decreased. Nixon was a ‘law and order’ man who was gonna get ‘tough on crime’. He and Agnew and Mitchell …

The Reagan-era, ushered in by his election to the Presidency in 1980 but pre-figured in his tough-on-crime governorship of California in the mid-‘60s, capitalized on the crime issue, focusing on the South American drug-lords (while barely noticing the S&Ls being devoured by assorted well-connected Republican-leaning piranha and sharks). To meet the emergency and the threat posed by those South American drug lords the ‘war on drugs’ was declared, and all manner of jurisprudential damage was done to constitutional structures in an effort to get a clear line of attack on drug-lords, drug-sellers, even drug-users.

Simon doesn’t spend as much time as might be spent on a couple of other monster developments, but he raises them and limns them accurately enough. First, the development throughout the 1970s of womens-liberation issues in such a direction that women’s vulnerability to men was presented as primarily a violent-crime issue, toward the meeting of which ‘emergency’ and the ‘suffering and outrage of the victims’ Federal police power had to be expanded even more than it had been in the civil-rights era of the late 1950s and the whole of the 1960s.

Second, the (distracting) framing of many of the Democrat-connected social changes as ‘moral’ and ‘religious’ issues, abortion quickly passing pot-smoking and ‘free love’ as a powerful trellis upon which oppositional forces could shape themselves, with (Republican) governmental help. To add to this the Fundamentalistic sensibility – Manichaean, intolerant of ambiguity and impatient of dissent or delay in the gratifications of its vision – created (I would say) an intensely powerful cultural fire, one that could be stoked to power large engines indeed.

That the Fundamentalistic sensibility as described is in a sense a mirror-image of the ‘revolutionary’ sensibility of that age’s feminism and the advocacy stance of other emerging ‘Identities’ merely indicates how inter-tangled these powerful societal and cultural forces were beneath the surface appearances of polarization and ‘total oppositeness’. And the governmental march toward enhanced police powers, necessary to re-authorize itself as the Avenger and Crime-Preventer to the American citizen (white, black, male, female, young, old … any victimization would do, so long as it was not economic or ‘class’ related).

He spends some time with one of the most powerful loci of these titanic forces: the sex mania that united ‘parents’ and ‘fundamentalists’ and ‘women’ against (the least numerous forms of) men and the most outrageous, if rare, types of sex-related crime. That this mania is still raging and Mr. Simon still has a scholarly career to keep might explain his less-than-extensive treatment of this still-roaring conflagration, but he does discuss the issue and everything he says is accurate.

And he does give substantive treatment to the sex-offense mania’s immediate predecessor: the domestic violence surge, which resulted in liberty and privacy being interfered with by the government merely on the allegations of an individual – a hole cut in the watertight bulkhead of Constitutional protection which – whatever its good intentions – has created damage that may never properly be mended.

Very interestingly, within this National Crime State he distinguishes between the enhancement of the role of the prosecutor and the weakening of the role of the judge. This, I think, is one of the quiet and almost counter-intuitive developments that has helped militarize (and thus threaten) the classic constitutional praxis of law enforcement and the administration of justice. The judge in the American system, in his/her sentencing power, wields the power of mitigating punishment if – s/he decides – this particular case so warrants. But it is precisely the need of the National Crime State to demonstrate its authority to the citizenry, and strengthen its bond to the (law-abiding) citizenry, by most vividly if not also floridly demonstrating its punitive power and resolve.

To secure that objective, the role of judges has been publicly defamed and – the pols eagerly piling on – statutorily restricted and decreased. Prosecutors, as the efficient avengers of the victim and comrade-in-arms of the sturdy but hard-pressed police, can cut through the ‘crap’ (we think of Max Boot’s counterinsurgency theorems) to secure the objective, the victory, of conviction and maximum imprisonment.

And prison itself – once a method of rehabilitating and ‘correcting’ the inmate – now becomes a technology-saturated ‘warehousing of garbage’ operation, the objective merely being to make the inmate’s life as risk-free (to any of the staff) as possible by isolating him (mostly ‘him’) from human contacts. But there are few supermaxes, although it’s a vision to sweeten the dreams of far too many victims, advocates, media types, pols, and citizens – although not, I think, of so many prison-administration professionals.

And more abstractly but hardly less cogently, he spends some time on the consequences of this National Crime State (again, my term, not his) on American civic and societal and cultural life. The embrace of the illusion that there could ever be anything such as perfect security or total safety or zero-tolerance; the formulation of one’s personal and social identity as a victim – whether passive and ‘devastated’ or enraged and vengeful; the acceptance of the non-humanity and the non-rights of (large) numbers of citizens, whether having been convicted of a crime or not; the approval of the government’s authority to ‘preventively’ incarcerate persons targeted as ‘potential’ criminals (and who isn’t?); the learned and reinforced mistrust of large numbers of other citizens, be they strangers or family members or persons of societal or cultural ‘authority’ … what will be the effects – specific and cumulative – of all these?

I would add, in the light of Max Boot’s musings, that the needs of the National Crime State and of the National Security State and of the National At-War-With-Terrorism State and the National Empire-for-Survival State … they all require sorta the same type of folks for their populations. And that type is not the Citizen, nor in the aggregate The People, nor necessarily educated nor independent nor mature nor spiritually nor morally developed.

The challenges that faced 1st Lt. Watada (see the Post immediately preceding this) are facing Us as The People. Our rendezvous with destiny is here now, calling Our name.

PROUD LIBERALISM

Jonathan Cohn at TNR Online has a piece on why liberalism should be proud of itself (“Proud Heritage”, http://www.tnr.com/doc.mhtml?i=w070122&s=cohn012607). I’d like to agree, but … lemme explain.

A couple of days ago I came across a quote from JFK: “We are not afraid to entrust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values. For, a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.”

It hit me quietly - like a single rock in the stomach instead of like a ton of them on my head – just how much things have changed in this country since then. Can you imagine quoting that passage nowadays? Can you imagine standing up and saying this to a Congress (either House) that doesn’t want to say that the idea of the earth being only 6000 years old is kinda not a good basis on which to conduct the affairs of this Republic? That is willing to pass a unanimous resolution that to even mention in public that you can’t find actual scientific proof of the long-lasting and dire effects of sex with children merits Congressional denouncement? (And to prove just how different things are nowadays, let me say right here that I do not in any way approve of or advocate sex with such little lives).

Things have changed. And not for the better, I think. And it was the ‘liberals’ who wrought (wreaked?) this change. Cohn quotes FDR that liberals “recognized … the need to find through government the instrument of our united purpose to solve for the individual the ever-rising problems of a complex civilization.” And, Cohn, goes on, FDR then adds: “We of the republic sensed the truth that democratic government has innate capacity to protect its people against disasters once considered inevitable, to solve problems once considered unsolvable.”

Well, FDR here demonstrates the American polity’s ongoing but subsurface search for the answer to the question: who should govern – the Quality or the Equality? The import being that you can be governed by those who know best (in the early Republic that would be the planters and the planter-statesmen and the college educated gentlemen) or by the mob of just about anybody – merchants, farmers, and – increasingly – urbanized and immigrant folks.

By the early 1900s Progressivism was asserting that those who could manage this increasingly complicated civilization, but of course managing it benevolently on behalf of the less capable masses who were either uneducated or too busy trying to keep a job … those “managerial Progressives” as Richard Slotkin describes them, would be not only the guides but the trail-bosses for the great wagon train of The People as it made its way across the wild West deserts of Time and History.

But of course, The People cannot have a ‘wagon-master’ or a ‘trail-boss’, because to do so corrupts each individual citizen’s ability to think things through and the common ability to deliberate together and reach a decision. As Emiliano Zapata said when that successful and patriotic leader mused upon governing Mexico: a Strong Man makes a weak people.

It was the Progressive conceit that the nation would remain healthy because the managerial Progressives would wisely shape and execute the best social policies. But that comforting imagined outcome did nothing to address the question of whether The People would remain healthy if their decision-making capacities and their individual thinking capacities and their common deliberative capacities were allowed to wither. And what might be the implications of such withering for The People, for the Republic, for the future of the nation?

The Progressives, manly and robust and bustling American pragmatists, did not allow themselves to be detained by such philosophical considerations: real men, real Americans, didn’t get “sentimental” like ‘wimmen’ or waste time on abstractions. In many ways they were mirror-images of the voracious Robber Barons: If it ‘works’, it’s true and good. “Sentimentalism” was as ineffective and downright dangerous in staying the final blow against the ‘savage Indian’ (and later the savage Filipino) as it was in staying the final blow of bracing economic competition against the obviously weak losers who could not keep afloat or alive in the eternal struggle that was unregulated capitalism. America would always be a Frontier of one sort or another, and on the Frontier you can’t afford to refuse or even delay the bold, decisive action that could save your life just because you’re squeamish about blood and feelings.

Even as the ranks of native-born Progressives were joined by newly educated and socially impassioned Jewish immigrant-children now in robust and eager youth, the unspoken conviction remained that society’s only defense against a Robber Baron elite of hyper-wealthy bosses was a dedicated and educated managerial elite who could operate the levers of public policy for the good of all. And on its good days, do battle with the already-advantaged forces of the Robber Barons, of ‘the interests’.

But whatever the intention – and in some ways the differences were certainly large – the Robber Barons and the Progressives were both constrained to shape themselves in response to the massive and monstrous flowering of economic wealth that increased exponentially in the decades between the Civil War and the Korean War. Complexity required experts to nurture it and to manage it; The People could not all be experts.

But that sensible and realistic observation was often followed – in time – by a far darker and not necessarily logical conclusion: that The People don’t ‘know’ and ‘can’t know’ enough to have an impact on American development(s), and that therefore The People no longer count as ‘players’. They are at best a wagon-train in need of a boss, at worst a herd of cattle needing cowboys to move them along in the right direction. Their future was no longer – indeed could no longer be left – in their own hands. The shape of their future, the shape and quality of their lives and their society – ditto.

The managerial mindset came a cropper sometime in LBJ’s Presidency. The war in Vietnam was not well-managed and nobody could ever feel Robert McNamara was benevolently working for the good of all; the Glorious ’65 had led to riots and – alarmingly – some new type of resurrected racial-obsessiveness called ‘affirmative racism’, and none of any of it sounded quite good. And then, in what Cohn aptly (if unwittingly) describes as “the next logical step”, a follow-on revolution was suddenly raised up, wound up, and sent crashing along the public way: feminism. And there were follow-on ‘logical steps’ as more and more nascent ‘identities’ created themselves and rushed the public space.

But ‘logical’ wasn’t the key here, and Cohn’s and the Progressives’ emphasis upon it reveals their managerial set of mind rather than any larger vision such as the political or the fundamentally democratic. “Doing good the most logical and efficient way” is the watchword of the managers, because getting things done efficiently is what managers know how to do. When all you’ve got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Ask the Pentagon managers.

Efficiency, as any good revolutionary knows, must brook no delays and no distractions. Intensity and concentration leading to the objective in the quickest possible time is the only allowable mode of proceeding. Nor can a revolution be questioned or doubted; its momentum, perhaps even its very validity, could be lost once the sustaining wave of the pressure of events is allowed to subside or pass by.

So the assorted revolutions went on, and nobody was allowed to speak about how fundamentally undemocratic a revolution on behalf of the people could be.

Can a revolution be ‘liberal’? No. Not in the sense of Liberalism as it was classically imagined in the 19th and previous centuries. Then, Liberalism was an antidote to monarchical or tyrannical authority, based on a respect for the individual human being and an Enlightenment faith in the power of human Reason, especially when platformed on a well-set and virtuous Character, to liberate among societies the energies latent in the ‘higher ranges’ of their members’ skills and gifts. Organized religion, to the extent that it discouraged a capacity for personal achievement and inquiry, was considered an active oppressor of persons; but there was always the ancient Christian conviction – even if in the Enlightenment it exerted only the illumination of afterglow – that there is indeed a Vertical dimension to the human self and a Beyond dimension to human existence, and that Answer would have to be made someday to that Beyond, and that – more happily – its assistance in the form of Grace might be implored for life ‘down here’.

Such individuals were worthy of and capable of thinking, coming together and conducting deliberation, and deciding. Such a Process, allowed to the remarkable human gifts so valued in the Liberal vision, would in the fullness of time yield worthwhile results to the community governed by such principles and by such a vision.

Revolutionaries share no such Liberal appreciation. People are sheep to be led by the illuminated vanguard, objectives are too important not to be ‘achieved’ in the quickest possible time, and nothing weak enough to be swept aside is worth keeping anyway. Nor can any obstruction or delay be tolerated. Revolution is a serious business, its seriousness being a result partly of its awareness of the pain it seeks to alleviate and partly a result of the primal bloodlust evoked by the awareness of the destruction it is about to inflict.

A ‘liberalism’ grounded in what has been for all practical purposes a revolutionary mindset and heart-set will be a very contorted liberalism indeed. And perhaps for that reason the Democrats turned to pandering, both to the Identities they had raised up and to the oligarchies of power and influence – “the interest” – that had quietly engorged while attention was focused elsewhere. In their deepest heart, the Democrats knew that the ‘new’ liberalism would undermine The People and the Republic; they saw no solution and into the vacuum of their ineffective power they poured the money and favors from those whose presence their difficulties had invited.

Mr. Cohn says, we should not be ashamed of the label “liberal”. But we should not be too quick to apply it (in its capital-L form) to ourselves or to those who would claim it. The present-day complex civilization poses powerful challenges to Liberalism. But small-l liberalism cannot answer those challenges; it can only appease them.

But that’s a once and future story.

HEDGES FASCES

Chris Hedges sounds the alert about Christian Fascism (“Christianists on the March”, www.truthdig.com/report/item/20070128_chistianists_on_the_march/). He’s always a worthwhile read.

He had a professor 25 years ago at Harvard Divinity School who then, at the age of 80, had told his students that when they were his age they “would all be fighting the Christian Fascists”. The rise of the Fundamentalist Ascendancy, in the military’s enlisted and officer ranks and among its religious (chaplains) and legal (JAGs) professionals has been noted at various places on this site (see, inter alia, “Bishops Bombs” and “Warrior Professionals”).

The present concern is that proto-fascists have now found “a mask for fascism in the pages of the Bible”. This presumes that the Fundamentalists are proto-fascists. Such a presumption is hardly unwarranted. The Fundamentalist mindset and heartset share most of the characteristics of a pervasive and comprehensive immaturity (or of the maturationally-challenged, if you prefer). Persons thus afflicted do not handle stress well, such as the pressure of change and dealing with the consequences of change – whether that change be ‘positive’ or ‘negative’.

So given – on top of that – the profoundly negative economic developments in our society over the past 30 years (masked as much by conveniently distracting revolutions of the culture-wars as by Reagan-ish burblings), such persons are hugely agitated. Nor, given their core weaknesses, will their responses to those very real and dangerous developments be very ‘mature’. Instead, they will resort to the more primitive of the classic defense mechanisms, Denial, Fantasy, Projection being especially probable.

And when all this is done in groups, when a trellis is provided around which such persons and their anxieties can gather and provide mutual stimulation (‘support’ is too constructive a word to describe this dynamic), you start to see a real storm developing. Thus the role of the Bible Bhagwans who have provided (for a very large fee) just the trellis that will support – but also ensnare – these desperate folk.

Worse, if and as the economic situation worsens, then the middle-class itself will be endangered, and many persons who under even modestly good economic circumstances would be able to function ‘at the higher end of their range’ – as the social workers like to put it – will slide ineluctably toward ‘the lower end’ of that range, their falling spirits and souls raining down into the superheated maelstrom of agitated folk whose lesser range had already doomed them to the Fundamentalistic cauldron.

But such whackery – religiously formatted as it may be – is not sufficient for fascism. Fascism requires an idolatry of the State and an eager willingness to submit to it (ironically to be – in the gay argot – a ‘bottom’ to the State’s and the Leader’s ‘top’). But here too, Fundamentalism fills the bill. A shallow if vivid and jangling religious vision, it makes no more effort to plumb the heights and depths of existence than it seeks to explore (let alone master) the heights and depths and breadths and lights and darknesses of the individual human soul. Consequently, possessed of no comprehensive Vision, unable to penetrate beyond the appearances and the surfaces of this Horizontal ‘world’, unstabilized by and keel or any sail and unballasted by doctrine or sacrament or sustained theological deliberation and contemplation, the Fundamentalists scud and scutter along those surfaces, bewitched by those appearances, a true flotilla of the maturationally-damned, a plague of Sunday-boaters-from-hell. And, yielding to the ur-human need to believe in something, they raise up what they find in their shrunken world: the State.

Unlike Soviet Communism, Fundamentalism does not claim to eradicate ‘God’ and erect itself in His stead. Unlike National Socialism, Fundamentalism does not claim that it itself is the fullest manifestation of God (though Hitler shrewdly allowed such fantasies to persist in his Reich). Rather, Fundamentalism a) hides itself in the whackier, less mature approaches to the Bible’s difficult conceptual terrain, and thus arrayed in cloth of fool’s-gold, it then b) yields itself to the power of the State and the seductive, almost priapic, strength of its Leader (which starts to sound like a Rove-ian crush on said Leader, but in any case regresses the Fundamentalist societal and political vision back to the Babylonian, if not the Hittite).

Thus rather than replace “God” with the “State”, they sink God into the State by claiming that the State in whatever it does is doing God’s will. Thus the State is justified in its existence and in all of its actions (and any doubt or criticism of the State is pre-emptively not-justified). Or at least as many of those actions as conform to the fantasy that the Fundamentalists have created and draped over the State. When the State fails to conform to the actions they expect of it, they will first try to blame that on ‘subverters’ of the State and only in a last-ditch situation will they turn against the State (in which case they will need to be selecting and erecting a new idol pronto or else face the upwelling of all their anxieties, fears, and darker passions; the State (or the idol) serves to cap that gusher and tame the well of darkness for which they have never developed more mature modes of mastery).

So the Fundamentalists can be seduced and co-opted by the State and – as has developed through the workings and sleazings of the National Security State and the Reagan-ish oligarchical State – they can be made the pious (in a jangly sorta way) front behind which the promises and goals of the New Deal are undone. In this regard, Richard Slotkin in “Gunfighter Nation” discusses the early 19th-century argument as to whether the country and Americans are better being governed by Quality or Equality – by those who are ‘capable’ or by everybody since all are ‘equal’. ‘Capable’ would be a good choice, except that there is no guarantee that Jefferson’s ‘natural aristocracy’ (of talent and achievement) would not be taken over by the ‘legacy aristocracy’ of generations who simply inherit wealth and social position and political connection, or by the ‘corporate aristocracy’ of ruthless achievers who master monster corporations and become therein encased like Annikin Skywalker became trapped in the exo-shell of Darth Vader. Art follows life and vice versa.

But this site always maintains that the Fundamentalist urge to “dismantle the open society” was sucked into a national vacuum first created by the Left, by the Democrats’ fear-filled but voracious embrace of the assorted ‘Revolutions of the Identities’ after the Party realized just how much its achievement of the Glorious ’65 and the almost simultaneous conclusion of the postwar American industrial hegemony had weakened its demographic base.

Few Americans except the Southrons doubted the social value and almost-existential validity of removing the final hindering disablements then still imposed upon ‘the Negro’. Even though these were nonmaterial social and cultural issues about which ‘science’ could provide little dispositive evidence, there was a large consensus that what people around the country were seeing on television – Southron police and sheriffs caught in the act of enforcing the Jim Crow imperium – was definitely not what this country stood for nor what the American citizenry believed about itself.

Yet the premises, claims, and programmes of the follow-on Revolutions – and they followed pretty rapidly – enjoyed no such consensus whatsoever. Nor, being revolutions, presided over by revolutionaries or at least by persons operating out of the revolutionary mindset (although the fact was soft-pedaled to the point of being deceptively misrepresented), did they seek to be leashed to the necessarily long, slow civic process of genuine education and deliberation – at the end of which they might still not achieve a consensual majority among the citizenry.

Thus the end-run around The People and corrosive undercutting comprised of legal tactics employed in the ‘civil rights’ field, but ripped from the societal context of consensus which the civil rights movement (at least as it existed until that Glorious ’65) enjoyed. And thus the revolutionary zeal to stifle dissent and the open discussion of important issues through the strangle-hold of Political Correctness, which itself was presented not as the assault on democratic ethos which – willy or nilly – it truly was but rather as a noble rescue exercised on behalf of victims and in the name of sensitivity. Robespierre could have told them what they were doing: “Terror is the emanation of Virtue”. But perhaps they knew that. The Virtue of the Left fueled an assault on the open society far more sustained and procedurally corrosive than the Virtue of the Fundamentalists.

Against the perennial human need to ‘believe’, the revolutionaries of the Left (or whole-heartedly embraced by the Left) demanded a Flattened world where no Virtue, no Reason, no Tradition, no Common-Sense, and ultimately no God could judge their programmes and the results that they demanded forthwith. With the assistance of the voter-starved Democrats and a media who thought it was helping, the debatable programmes and objectives were quickly and forcefully emplaced, even as it was not permitted to debate them or even mention that no debate had been had. The People were denied access to the Truth in its most democratic emanation: public deliberation.

A vast abyss opened up, and into that vacuum there was no force to speak for ‘belief’ and for any ‘other’ world or any ‘other’ dimension to this life … except for the agitated, over-compensating Fundamentalists, whose Bhagwans shrewdly stoked and stroked them even as they delivered them into the maw of the State.

We The People cannot allow ourselves to be drawn into an either-or dilemma: either the Flattening world of the ‘secular’ Left ‘liberals’ or the Fantasizing world of the apocalyptic, State-idolizing Fundamentalists. Nor, repelled as many of Us may be by the sheer primitive violence of the Fundamentalistic ethos, should we simply rebound – like loose electrons – into the orbit of the Flatteners who created this vacuum in the first place.

We must create our own path back into the solid but fertile ground of mature belief and a civic culture grounded in a mature citizenry, in The People. And we don’t have much time for so large an order. I hold no utopian view that this can be achieved easily or fully, nor that once achieved we shall suddenly find ourselves on “the broad sunlit uplands” of perfect security and perfect freedom. The world – this life – will not hold still for such a confinement, and its wildness will always demand our disciplined but not agitated attention.

Neither Flattener nor Fantasizer be. Rather, be – as da Duke, John Wayne liked to put it – a ‘pilgrim’, and pilgrims together let us set sail to renew our world and our much-vexed Republic.

THE FREE WORLD

Just a bit more on this sex-offense Script and the doctrine that underlies it. Robert Jensen has an article on the Atlantic Free Press site (http://www.atlanticfreepress.com/) entitled “Media reform should include critique of sexual exploitation media”.

The pornography trade should be stopped. He notes, rightly indeed, that seeking to reduce “toxic” pornography is no different from seeking to eliminate toxic foods. It is harder, however, to assess the exact effects of pornography on the mind and to ascertain the pathways through which those effects are created. We are in the intangible realm of mind, not the physical and material realm of food and physiology. This is the scientific problem that faces us in these intangible affairs.

Worse, of course, is that an attempt to rapidly address the problem, and through policy and – even more gravely – through the alteration of criminal law and – even more gravely – through the alteration of fundamental requirements of Due Process … such an attempt, based on such presently meager knowledge, is not wise. In the related area of sex-offender law and policy, as noted else where on this site in the review of Eric Janus’s new book “Failure To Protect” (see "Prosec Nation" on this site), huge changes have been wrought on the basis of what even that well-disposed author acknowledges is very little knowledge indeed.

To apply the analogy of palpable problems to these intangible matters is bad science. Of course, if we assume that we are dealing here not with a scientific inquiry but rather with a revolution, and that consequently we are not dealing with principals who are seeking objective facts and actual knowledge, but are rather seeking to ram home an agenda using science as a fig-leaf to ease the sensibilities of a putatively rational public … then we can see how such large errors in formal scientific inquiry can be so widely effected, and by many whose education and profession should lead them to know better.

Equally ill-advised is the next point Jensen makes: that a “civil rights approach” to pornography is an appropriate “legal strategy” through which to address the problem. Do we have a “civil right” to be “free” of pornography? Of unhealthy – but not tainted – foods? Are we then to give the government the power that would be necessary to ensure a “risk-free” world and life for ourselves?

And as proposed by Jennifer Pozner on Alternet (“A Culture of Rape”, www.alternet.org/module/printversion/35514) “… American culture and law needs to find real solutions for punishing serial rapists or, more importantly, preventing men from perpetrating such criminal behavior in the first place”. Her thoughts raise some substantive questions.

Does not ‘American science’ need first to find out as much as it can? Have we not always had laws against rape and serial rape? Do we not have the punishments? Didn’t we have those punishments in place before the wide-ranging sex-offender laws? Weren’t – according to the government statistics – sexual assaults on a downward turn since 1976, a full 20 years before the great sex-offender push of the mid-1990s.

And if we are to explore the possibilities for American culture’s “preventing” male criminal behavior, do we also deploy the awesome criminal-prosecution power of the government to “prevent” crime? Do we start down that dangerous road? Indeed, we are already well along it, and such ‘prevention’ and – let’s say it – ‘pre-emption’ has now infected foreign policy and the military posture of the government, and has led to the current ominous mess in Iraq.

Can we ‘prevent’ crime? Can the Constitution bear such an awesome load? Can we punish all crime? We have already started down that road, through the unholy alliance of revolutionaries of the Left and the neo-Puritan furies of the Fundamentalist Right. Now them Kathliks, they never figured to ‘prevent’ crime (or sin); they figured it was ineradicable – which was why it was called Original Sin. Their ethos was woven from a certain patience with the inevitable and a clear-eyed awareness that if crime or sin were to be totally stamped out, the population of the entire world would have to be imprisoned, if any government could stand long enough to implement such a program. The fact that the U.S. now holds one-quarter of all the imprisoned convicts on the planet suggests clearly that this road of criminal-law and imprisonment will take us to a very dark place. If the actions of ‘men’ are to be singled out, then almost half the citizenry is theoretically liable to imprisonment. And if the government is empowered to deploy itself against ‘men’ today, then what is to stop it from deploying against other ‘enemies’ down the road?

To ‘inform’ the American “culture” is certainly an excellent goal, if the citizenry be accurately informed and then allowed to deliberate a course of action. But that is not what is being suggested by the relevant Advocacies and it has not been their gameplan so far.

They are not pure ideologues. They are very rightly aroused by the crimes that are being committed. But anger and outrage, no matter how compassionate or in what good cause, are no basis for policy, let alone for law.

To exercise prudence in the awefull matters of the criminal law is not “insensitive and insulting to the victim and to all women”. It is the responsibility of the government to deploy its terrible power prudently against its citizenry and – in this matter – against half that citizenry. The mollification of outrage is not all there is to Justice; to imagine that it is constitutes a massively inadequate conception of the situation and such a lack will lead to monstrous consequences, as we are seeing in Iraq now.

None of this is to condone rape or any sexual violence. And ‘boyo’ behavior, and the cultural foundations that support it, do indeed need to be accurately assessed so that they can be changed. It is not only women who suffer from it; the ‘boyos’ themselves are hugely diminished and deformed by such behavior and such cultural presumptions, and so are We as The People, and so is all the world that can be reached through the levers of power that such ‘boyos’ control.

A masculinity that can produce a Washington and a Lincoln – to name but two among innumerable examples of matured manhood productively contributing to civic life, however inevitably flawed in one way or another – is surely an asset that the nation and The People cannot afford to waste. We are all flawed, male and female. It is the nature of our kind, if them Kathliks be believed. And the climb to maturity is a long, hard, staggery slog, no doubt about it. But it must be begun and sustained by all, and the more who are so engaged, then the more will mutually support the others.

This great project, this Old Frontier – this Ancient Frontier – cannot be reached through the lascivious application of the criminal law. As a matter of fact, it requires much of the resources – mind, spirit, Virtue, Truth – that have been disposed of by the very Theory that was embraced by the proto-Advocacies themselves decades ago, to the extent that any coherent and comprehensive thinking grounded their agendas at all.

So there is much work to be done, by all of Us. Nor is this a situation that can be undertaken with a certain leisure. So much of what has already been done has borne baleful consequences, in our domestic affairs as in our foreign affairs. We must fix the aircraft in turbulent flight, repair the ship while she is underway in heavy seas that will not calm any time soon. It is our rendezvous with Destiny, but a situation much of Our own making.

We must ‘own’ that, as we must ‘inhabit’ our Present and as we must People our nation. Only thus can we continue towards true freedom. But we will never reach ‘perfect’ freedom, hence never ‘perfect’ security. It is a fate we share with all the peoples of this earth. And it will be a first liberation to realize that, and a second liberation to accept it. And thus to climb together from there.

DINES WITH THE REVOLUTION

Gail Dines is a sociology professor specializing in race and gender issues; she is on the faculty of Wheelock College in Boston. She has an article over on Counterpunch (www.counterpunch.com/dines01202007.html). She is not pleased. She was interviewed by Paula Zahn on CNN when the Nifong mis/mal-feasances were brought to light. Upon reflection, she considers herself to have been “ambushed” and “set up”.

We are first given several paragraphs that apparently are designed to show us that the pre-screen producer “conducted a thoughtful interview, unlike any I have had”. Thus she decides to do the show, attracted and reassured by the ‘thoughtfulness’, and thereby simultaneously establishing herself as someone alert to such ‘thoughtfulness’ and no doubt full of thought herself.

From this producer’s line of questioning she concluded that this would be a show dealing with “the historical and contemporary issues of violence against black women in this society”. Still, she then says it took “four phone calls” for her to finally agree to do the show.

When suddenly … in the limo on the way to the Durham court house she got a call “from a different producer” who said that the show was going to focus on race and not gender. The professor, intimating a large experience with talk-show honchos, “knew enough not to argue with a senior producer an hour before taping” and so she “simply agreed”.

Thus the ambush.

At this point in the article, she starts to share with us the views that CNN apparently didn’t want to deal with. We don’t really know though, because the professor quotes nothing of what she said on camera. Instead we are told that she asked Zahn after the show how Zahn could “do a show that once again leaves this woman stripped of her dignity and rendered invisible as a human being”. Zahn - indicating a large experience with agenda-driven talk-show guests - simply smiled goodbye.

Arriving back at her hotel half an hour later, the Professor finds she already has a passel of “hateful” emails, all – she points out – from “men”; it is a “flood” and a “barrage”. She is taken aback at such an outburst. In apparently innocent perplexity, she takes a look at the video of the show. And there it was: the show on that video is not about raceandgender but rather billed itself as “an examination of the ‘rush to judgment’ on the part of the media and society”.

But at this point, the ambushed victim wallowing stunned in the water suddenly makes sail, hoists colors and runs out her guns. And who can be surprised? Who can be surprised at her discomfiture in the interview or at her self-serving article? CNN was looking at a very significant reality, one that the Professor and her cohorts, colleagues, and accomplices - some females and some males – have been at great pains to obscure for all of the 20 years that she has been professoring and more.

There is indeed a ‘rush to judgment’ and the slow, careful, steady process of Due Process has been eroded by the superheated efforts of the Advocacy. Nor is this unintended. The whole gameplan was designed not to open room for more balance achieved through deliberation, but rather to simply quickly wrench the justice system into a stance more favorable to the programme of the Advocacy.

Of course you can’t just go and exercise such violence on the system and not expect some interference. You can’t go whacking the walls of a court-house with axes and not expect some folks to inquire as to what you think you’re doing. So you need an ‘emergency’, or a set of interlocking emergencies, that will ‘explain’ your haste and why you don’t simply go through the doors during regular hours.

Thus you have to create the emergency of having to ‘rescue victims’, and raceandgender work actually gives you a two-fer. This is how the Advocacies have carried on seriously corrosive agendas for decades now: they’ve been pretending to be the Fire Dept. Rescue Squad. It’s a wonder that it’s taken so long for the Iraqi resistance to pick up this strategy: masquerading as ‘emergency’ crews or ‘good guys’ in order to get in and do what they’re going to do.

The Professor quickly elides two substantive but different matters: a) the very acute question of the ‘rush to judgment’ that is has been an established Script in sex-offender melodrama for almost two decades now and b) the feminist complaint that the simple reality of not-accepting a self-declared victim’s story at face-value immediately is itself a collusion and a form of further assault.

The former matter has been dealt with at length elsewhere on this site. The latter has too, but Dines here gives us an instant example of all that’s going on with this raceandgender gambit in the case. First, there is the use of the word ‘victim’ without any qualifying ‘alleged’, which has the effect of presuming the veracity of the alleger’s (allegator’s?) claim(s), when actually the whole purpose of a trial is to determine – at its end – whether an act was indeed committed, which if it was committed would then and only then make the alleger a ‘victim’ for public purposes.

Second, there is the instant equation of doubt and skepticism about an alleger’s claims with some form of wrong-headed or even criminal refusal to help, which is then immediately construed as an insult to the alleger and as a ‘re-victimization’ of the alleger.

Now this type of carrying-on is a recipe for disaster in a legal system. The whole purpose of Due Process is to conduct a thorough and reasonable inquiry, sift for truth, and deliberate carefully in order to make a determination. But this is not the revolutionary’s way; the revolutionary’s way is to force one’s programme or agenda upon events, and in that work time-consuming ‘deliberation’ is the functional equivalent of cowardice and obstruction, a firefighter dawdling so as not to have to go into a burning building and rescue victims. Lenin found early on that not only Czarist-leaning judges but any judges who believed in the process of Law had to be done away with it because they were slowing down the work of his revolution. A true Soviet judge would need almost no time to determine if an accused would receive the weight of criminal sanction; many times it was simply the fact of ‘belonging’ to a certain class that constituted the ‘crime’; Stalin improved upon matters by making justice ‘presumptive’ and ‘proactive’: if you had even a moment’s access to a Westerner, then you might now doubt the wisdom of the Soviet system and why take that chance when you can be sent to Siberia to help build things?

So only then does the Professor get around to the true source of her ire: “I appeared as not just a gullible fool, but even worse, a gullible fool with a feminist agenda”. So there it is. But it’s even worse, I think: it was her flawed agenda that resulted her in taking a foolish approach to this case, and she was then caught out on the show, when it became clear not only that a) the ‘men’ in this case were not guilty and the ‘victim’ had indeed made some truth-challenged – if you wish – assertions, but also b) the media were not going to ignore the obvious this time in order to hew to the correct Script. The horror!

The Script is – and the Prof deploys it with the skill of a casino card-dealer – that the woman was victimized, that the men were boorish and violent criminal oppressors, and correct-thinking requires outrage at the men and immediate, unqualified sympathy not only with this victim but with all women-victims (the terms being for these purposes almost interchangeable). Running right by the fact that the alleger was a professional stripper and had accepted this gig at her usual rates, the Prof starts swinging her axe at something else: The show “leaves this woman stripped of her dignity and rendered invisible as a human being” and “it is the lying, black stripper and the amoral D.A.” who must be guilty. This, the Professor seems to think, should not be accepted as true even if – in this instance – it is true. That the woman “was bought and sold” precisely because she had advertised herself as a commodity is not a fact that the correct citizen notes.

But it apparently is true. And the defendants in this case – unlovely as they are – were facing serious and lifelong criminal consequences (nor would we want to accept the judicial fiction that sex-offender registry is purely ‘administrative’ and done to help keep track of you so you can be notified when ‘a treatment’, perhaps ‘a cure’, is ready).

And the defendants certainly are, to no small extent, unlovely. She quotes an email one of them sent which indicates that these boyos are in need of serious maturity: characterological, emotional, social, and spiritual. The thought that they might go on to positions of power in the military or business or law enforcement is deeply disconcerting. The thought that many of their kind, of previous age cohorts, are already in such positions is positively alarming (nor can the inhabitants of Unitary-Executive Land be discounted in such considerations).

But we cannot solve the ‘boyo’ problem by dismantling the legal and justicial protections that keep us the Republic and the democracy that we are. Nor can we much longer tolerate not only the consequences of such dismantling, but the noxious inability to see and speak Truth to the ‘revolutionary’ elements that have been whacking away (with some good intention) at the carrying-walls of our society and culture and Constitutional protections.

I am not speaking here for a return to ‘boyo’ behavior (and indeed I fear we are now in the throes of ‘boyo’ government). Nor am I speaking against actual victimization. But I am speaking against the ‘revolutionary’ solution that, duplicitously, has been deconstructing the structures and fabric of law, justice and culture for decades now while claiming to be simply a well-intentioned rescue mission in an extreme emergency. That was how the boyos in Washington City spun the war in Iraq.

We may presume that much of what Professor Dines professes is taught to students at her college, and to the extent that her material is representative of mainstream doctrine in the universities, that it is taught to many students at many institutions. And has been for quite a few years, even decades. So how many students and – far more numerously – graduates are now among us operating on the tenets of this ‘education’, conducting a life and a societal participation on that basis? And what consequences accrue from that?

The times are changing and a hard rain’s going to fall. Down with the revolution. Up with the Republic.