OLD THOUGHTS VERY NEW

Before I get back to the inimitable philosophical stylings of Catharine MacKinnon I have to put this essay up.

I just finished reading for the first time the December 29, 2008 issue of ‘The Nation’ magazine.

I find that there is a tremendous value to reading ‘old’ journals of opinion ‘fresh’. As you get into the reading, you are of course absorbed into the streams of thought that were very much ‘fresh’ and usually ‘urgent’ and presumably insightful when they were written. Yet simultaneously your mind is informed by all of the actual events that you know have happened since the articles were written (now 3 full years ago and a bit).

It’s a rather stimulating and useful mental exercise on several levels.

So to a couple of the articles or columns and the thoughts they prompt.

Eric Alterman discusses the up-coming Presidency of Barack Obama in terms of whether Obama – as a welcome relief to the outgoing George W. Bush – is going to repeat the failures of a longish string of Democratic  presidents who failed because of their “militant liberalism”.

First he tries to dispose of the fact that “barely one in five Americans embraces the label ‘liberal’ to describe themselves”.

“This is easily explained”, Alterman breezily asserts, “by the mountains of opprobrium that conservatives – working hand in glove with a cowed MSM [mainstream media] – have heaped on ‘liberals during the past three decades and the negative associations that have resulted”. So, it’s all been the work of a predominantly conservative and cowardly MSM and the ‘conservative’ political machines themselves.

I think not.

First, I am not at all going to get into the ‘liberal’-vs-‘conservative’, he said/she said kabuki that has come to pass for politics and political commentary over the past Biblical 40 years here. In my view, the ‘liberals’ are not really liberal, and the ‘conservatives’ are not really conservative. And they both are “sisters under the skin” insofar as neither of them have any use for any “deliberative democratic politics” or the Framing Vision which anchors the entire Constitution and the political vitality and survival of the American Experiment and the Republic on the robust fundamental of a three-point circuit consisting of The People, their elected representatives, and the Sovereign Authority of the government, all of which is underlain by a common and mature commitment to that Framing Vision.

Second, as We have been seeing since the very early 1970s – and especially after the stunning defeat of the Democrats’ New Order Party vision in the presidential election of 1972 – The People, given what may have been their last chance to kick-tire and deliver their judgment on that vision, utterly rejected it, 49 States to one (the hold-out being Massachusetts, politically controlled by Teddy Kennedy and his powerful electoral machinery in his home state).

Third, I would have wondered then – and certainly so now – if Alterman et al. aren’t trying to pull a leaf from the Israeli playbook: that if you object to anything the ‘liberals’ have done or to any consequences that have flowed therefrom, then you are a ‘conservative’ (and a ‘backlasher’ and etcetera and etcetera). After all, especially now that the aura of national ‘wealth’ has been burned away, all sorts of consequences of so much of their agenda are now suddenly appearing, as if by magic although actually they have been hiding in plain sight for decades.

So it is hardly outré to imagine that The People sensed something very wrong, perhaps even very dangerous, deep in the Democrats’ vision for the country’s New Order.

Indeed, Nixon (for whom I hold no brief) realized that some sort of ‘elitism’ – comprised as We now have seen of both homegrown Progressive elitism and the shockingly Alien Universe of Marxist-Leninist thought as shrewdly developed by Antonio Gramsci and already by 1972 embraced (without attribution) by radical-feminists here - was lurking in that Democratic New Order.

Recognizing that ‘elitism’ Nixon made a hardly-ungrounded claim that the views of a vast majority of Americans – whom We now know to have been classified in the Gramscian scheme as bourgeois, dominant oppressors of the marginalized (all of which are Gramsci's terms), and in radical-feminist thought as being a huge bunch of oppressive lumps who ‘just don’t get it’ – were being sidestepped and utterly disregarded (as per the gameplan of Marx, Lenin, Gramsci, and the radical-feminists who had filched that gameplan for their own purposes).

That vast majority of Americans constituted, in Nixon’s phrase, “a silent majority”.

Apparently, by 2008, even Alterman has to admit that that group remains very much in the majority.

Rather than engage the idea and examine the whole matter, Nixon – who voiced it – was wholly discredited by the later (and in light of, say, LBJ’s machinations in regard to Vietnam and Israel’s acquiring nuclear material for their upcoming Bomb,utterly secondary) Watergate brouhaha.

But – of course – while the messenger was slyly done in, the reality of the message, to the extent that it was real, remained very much alive, despite the best efforts – widely picked up by the MSM – to spin it as merely ‘backlash’.

But the spin-stampede was kept up in a massive elite-driven and Democratic and Beltway-supported demonstration of all the primary plays in both Gramsci’s and Goebbels’s game-book. Thus unto this very day.

Of course – as We now know – “majoritarian politics” and “deliberative democratic process” had already been written off by the Dems at the behest of their newly-embraced radical-feminist clients, whose ‘philosophy’ was slyly plagiarized from Gramsci and that Alien Universe. Since most Americans ‘just didn’t get it’ then they would have to be herded, stampeded, or penned up into irrelevance. Or: if The People failed the elites in 1972, perhaps then The People need merely to be replaced: youth were given the vote and immigration increased to bolster the possibilities of destabilizing the Culture that had rejected the elite dampdreams.

While all the while, the whole thing was spun as merely a continuation of MLK’s marvelous and genuinely American vision, calling all Americans to participate in a “new birth of freedom” for the American Vision.

But, of course, what had happened by 1970 or so was that the entire American Framing Vision had been written off in favor of a) an elite-driven imposition (with the full collaboration of the Beltway) and of b) that thorough-going and multi-form assault against the ‘dominant, hegemonic, oppressive’ Culture that Gramsci had envisioned (and those descriptive terms are his, not radical feminism’s) as the best way to undermine the target Cultures of the West.

Alterman says that if you change “liberal” to “progressive” then you will double the “number of respondents” who identify themselves on that end of the spectrum.

But that is hardly a solution here. “Progressivism”, even as a natively American movement, had always relied upon ‘elites’ to help educate the unwashed masses of newly arrived immigrants. And, in a hardly irrelevant coincidence, Progressivism was contemporaneous with the burst of anarchist and socialist thought already running at high speed through Europe and Russia. As was, by amazing coincidence, Gramsci’s thought.

But to embrace and unleash this approach on the mature postwar American polity and politically mature Citizenry in 1970 and since then was a hugely dubious and dangerous gambit, even without taking into account the stunning presumptions of Gramsci that the whole targeted Culture was rotten and irredeemable and had to be undermined and attacked as often and as widely as possible, and by any means necessary.

Alterman then goes on to sniff assertively that “it’s rather a stretch to argue, following George W. Bush’s Vietnam-like Iraq misadventure, that Obama is likely to reprise [LBJ’s and Bush’s] catastrophic combination of arrogance and incompetence”. And here We are in 2012 and what do you think?

But I would agree with him, to some extent, that Obama did not “reprise” that “arrogance and incompetence” exhibited and deployed by his aforementioned presidential predecessors. Rather, I would say that Obama – a callow and youthy as well as ambitious fellow – merely found himself indentured from the get-go to the nefarious dynamics of that Alien political Universe that by 2009 was already (irretrievably?) embedded in the nation’s politics and its political discourse (greatly and intentionally corrupted and weakened by decades of dishonest and distracting spin into nothing more than a mostly immature kabuki of dueling cartoonish conceptions and assertions, into which no light of clear analysis was allowed to intrude).

Whatever his natural fall-back gifts, he wound up reverting to them in order to keep himself afloat in the treacherous riptides between the Scylla of the National Nanny State and the Charybdis of the National Security State, between the now-embedded pandering government indenture to both Big Identity and Big Money.

And here We are in the Year of Grace Two-Thousand-and-Twelve  and of the independence of the United States the two-hundred-thirty-sixth.

America is, Alterman perhaps regrets, far “less liberal than Europe”. But he refers to a Europe wracked by Eurocommunism, which was the 1970s erection of Gramsci into a Plan by numerous European nations whose Socialist and Communist Parties were already trying to somehow find a new role for themselves, given the brutal postwar and post-1956 revelations of Leninist-Stalinist Communism’s treacherously violent wrecking of the very ‘masses’ in whose name that regime – in Russia and in the satellite nations – imposed its ‘visions’.

Thus in Christopher Hayes’s article “The Pragmatist”, that author seeks to explain what it might mean to say that Obama is a “pragmatist”.

He notes a then-recent George Packer essay proposing that in order to secure election, Obama’s campaign rhetoric  had been neatly designed to send out ambiguous messages that would lead both “progressives” and “post-partisans” to think he was on their team.

That “post-partisan” is a clear if oblique reference to the fractalizing partisanship that is built into the Gramscian-derived Identity Politics.

In the context of Beltway dynamics, to be “pragmatic” therefore means  that one is not going to remain restricted by – or committed to – the de rigeur (one could say ‘ideological’) requirements of that Identity Politics so irretrievably permeated with Gramsci’s thoughts and plans  from that Alien political Universe of Marxism-Leninism and Eurocommunism.

But the restriction of having to satisfy its now decades-old Indenture to the Far, radical feminist Left constitutes one of the only ‘reliable bases’ of the Democratic Party – which had been precisely the pols’ intention to establish 40 Biblical years ago.

In the service of which they had to slyly (and treacherously, in light of what they had sworn to preserve, protect and uphold) begun a double-life: for public consumption praising the American ‘thing’, while claiming to merely demonstrate their wise and effective chops in implementing ‘reforms’ and ‘continuing’ MLK’s great civil-rights work; and yet actually betraying all of that in order to implement whatever their New Order advocacy bosses and bossettes wanted.

Thus the Beltway and almost the entire sitting political class (in 2008 as well as 2012) were already into a verrrrry baaaaad habit of duplicitous treachery, for which ‘pragmatism’ is very much too nice a term.

If even in 2008 Obama and his strategy staff realized that somehow he had to distance himself (and the Party?) from at least the appearance of its indenture to Big Identity, then the 2008 version of ‘pragmatism’ was only going to be rhetorical, because the vampires and vampiresses of that Alien political Universe had now gotten very used to being in the Beltway house (having been invited in by the gate-keepers themselves) and, indeed, with the help of a helpfully unreflective and shallow MSM had gotten wayyyy too many folks thinking that if If it’s Democrat, then it’s ‘liberal’ – and Gramsci and the Eurocommunists are nothing if not anti-liberal and anti-Liberal: for them only ‘radical democracy’ will do, and that type of ‘democracy’ doesn’t include ‘deliberative democratic process’ since so many Citizens are enthrall to Dominance, Hegemony, and Oppression (whether the poor chumps realize it or not).

And when Hayes reports that Obama “plans to govern from the center-right of his Party” then that’s not usefully insightful either. Because by 2008, both ‘left’ and ‘right’ had been long-trapped in the swamp of endless cartoonish assertions of one’s ‘position’ – accompanied by all sorts of TV-friendly sound-and-light effects. But nobody of importance on either ‘side’ wanted to look more deeply into mattes, for fear of exposing the Gramscian Elephant in the middle of the national political room.

Nor did the MSM want to risk its ‘access’ to A-list dinner parties by mentioning the Elephant either.

In that context, to be “open-minded” and not “excessively partisan” – which to all appearances seem worthy objectives – could only mean to the Far Left cadres that you were not going to consider yourself bound by any ‘fetishizing’ of the Constitution, traditions, principles, or any of the other tools of America’s fundamental Hegemonic Oppression of its “marginalized”. While to the Rightist or even centrist, such an assertion would seem fatuous and guaranteed to fail, in light of the fanatical rage of the cadres (and ‘advocates’) of the Far Left bases who would no more consider yielding their ‘revolutionary’ gains than any Scriptural demon would politely leave a possessed body if asked nicely.

And – let’s face it – ‘pragmatism’ by 2008 meant simply layering yet one more level of unprincipled plasticity over an already hugely ‘plastic’ and mushy sense of principle that had been cemented into place by the original Beltway trahison in the early 1970s.

The name of Cass Sunstein flits by in the article, a University of Chicago law professor who had a nice little run explaining how Obama was not really a “flip-flopper” and not a “doctrinaire liberal”.

But of course, by 2008, both ‘liberal’ and ‘conservative’ had morphed together into a new Leviathan (or, in the Left’s Nanny State, Leviatha) that had no use on Left or Right for any ‘deliberative democratic politics’. Either the emergency of ‘oppression’ or the emergency of ‘national security’ required an engorged and intrusive and impositional government that knew far better than its Citizens or than The People what had to be done.

So commentary at the level of even bosky academics like Professor Sunstein and his ilk was, if more polite and polysyllabic than in-your-face radical feminist crowing or Fox News declamations and insinuations, about as useless.

Sunstein burbled that Obama was a “minimalist” who “prefers solutions that can be accepted by people with a wide variety of theoretical inclinations” – that is “his defining trait and chief virtue”.

Very nice.

But in the context of what had been going on in American politics since 1972 at least, then such competences were guaranteed to be of little use and would create even further damage. Because at the heart of American politics for the past 40 Biblical years has been a truly Either-Or Question that demanded to be recognized and Answered: would the Framing Vision of 1787 or the Gramscian vision derived from Marx and Lenin be the ‘ground’ for Beltway policy and legislation and for the ‘elite’ vision of what was needed for this country?

On that Question , I am saying, there truly could be no waffling and no middle-ground. You cannot simultaneously support the Framing Vision (shared by MLK, embodied in the Constitution) and the Culture which that Vision informs, and also the Gramscian vision that democracies are merely bourgeois tools of Dominance, Hegemony, and Oppression (adapted by radical feminism here, of course, to include Patriarchy and etcetera and et cetera) which along with their Cultures had to be attacked, weakened wherever possible, torn down, and replaced no matter what it took nor how long it took.

Like Hitler who, when initially planning the Wehrmacht’s invasion of England in the summer and fall of 1940, paid little attention to the “mere 20 miles” separating the Greater Reich and England, traditionally called the Channel. So too, the Beltway biggies apparently figured that they could paper over the genuine abyss yawning between the Framing Vision (to whose defense they were formally sworn) and the Gramscian Project (which was the price the radical-feminists were going to charge for ‘delivering’ the allegedly monolithic ‘women’s vote’). How, after all, could a simple ‘abstract’ matter of ‘principles’ and a long-past history really interfere with the big plans of major Macher in oh-so-cutting-edge modern American politics? How many divisions does the Framing Vision have (to borrow a trope)?

Thus the Beltway as it descended into the Valley of the Little Big Horn (to borrow an image).

Thus, Hayes quotes Packer quoting Sunstein, it is wrong for people to “expect Obama to be the anti-Bush” (remember him?).

After all, says Sunstein, the only problem with Bushism “is not its content but its form”. Which precisely reveals – although slyly costumed – the fact that by 2008 both ‘liberal’ Nanny State and Rightist ‘Security State’ subscribed to the same content: The People can’t be trusted to know what’s good for them nor to govern their own government. And that, I am saying  – ‘justify’ it how you may – is pretty much the end of the Republic in a nutshell.

In trying to make the Great Experiment of 1787 a lot less demanding and ‘oppressive’, the Left grossly weakened it (and hardly surprisingly, considering they imported Gramsci’s methodological refinements of Marx and Lenin to do the job). And into that vacuum the ancient demon of Leviathan, traditionally seen as arising from the Right, did indeed awaken and burst back into the American polity, since the Left – out of the purportedly best of intentions – had weakened the walls built by the Framers to keep that ferocious Kong a safe distance away. And the sworn defenders and guardians of the Wall had, in 1972, happily put all the government’s resources into the Project.

What a movie! Or, to borrow the master vampire’s best line from the 1985 movie of the same name: “Welcome to fright night … for real”.

And here We are in 2012.

But back to 2008.

Obama, continues Sunstein, is really the “best kind of anti-Bush” because he is not “ideological”. But that’s bullplop. The entire Democratic agenda had become indentured to ideology the moment it invited Gramsci inside in 1972, brought to the nation’s Beltway entrance by radical-feminists insisting that such an Approach and such a Stance were simply the most ‘cutting edge’ and ‘fresh’ and ‘rich’ and ‘creative’ and ‘transgressive’ stuff and was completely their own invention and just a more efficient way of realizing MLK’s truly and genuinely American  civil-rights Project.  Should the Beltway pols – especially the Dems – join and support them, the radical feminists prophesied, they would make History rather than be oppressed by it, and they would all be greeted as liberators.

Not hardly.

Sunstein intones that it is a fallacy to think that “all ideology is dangerous”. Meaning by 2008 that commitment and faithfulness to an overriding (and underlying) vision is not always dangerous. It is only dangerous when it is some other vision than their Correct elite vision (which, as I have said above and in the immediately prior Posts, is actually Gramsci’s and the Eurocommunists’ and Marx’s and Lenin’s vision about how to go about wrecking a well-established Western, democratic polity and its Culture).

If even – as Hayes slyly notes – Pat Buchanan observed that Bush’s biggest failure was his “embrace of ideology” (and I don’t at all deny the accuracy of that statement) yet We have to realize that the Beltway had been indentured to an even more Alien ideology – and even more lethally dangerous for being ‘spun’ as ‘liberating’ – since 1972.

So the kabuki mudfight between ‘pragmatism’ and ‘ideology’ had been nothing but a magician’s distracting trick for decades by 2008. And still is today.

Starting to get wrapped up in the toils of his own conceptual incoherences, Hayes then tries to point out that after 9/11 “pragmatists of all stripes – Alan Dershowitz, Richard Posner – lined up to offer tips and strategies on how to best implement a practical and effective torture regime, but ideologues said no torture, no exceptions”.

But by 2008 any essential and fundamental loyalty to the Framing Vision and its ‘traditional’ virtues had long been ‘deconstructed’ by the ‘liberals’ and the Left precisely according to Gramsci’s gameplan. The objections raised against torture had to be only ‘practical’, because to claim any authority for the Framing Vision (and ‘virtues’!) was considered career-wreckingly not-Correct.

Indeed, as Rawls (and more recently Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen) had tried to assert, any commitment to any “comprehensive system” of explaining and grounding life and human action was inadmissible in American public discourse. Unless it was his and their Correct comprehensive system, which anyway was not based in ‘abstractions’ about traditions and classical Virtues, but rather in the (Gramscian and Eurocommunist) presumptions that a) you could not legitimately Ground and restrict humans’ ‘autonomy’ on the basis of such ‘abstractions’ but that b) you could ground such restrictions on merely human feelings and the insights of any particular historical moment.

Which turned out to be a ‘fence’ about as useful as an artfully constructed wall of oatmeal and corn-flakes in stopping either Leviathan or Leviatha.  As We have now seen.

The Framers sought to boundary government because it would be made up of human beings and, the Framers knew, humans also needed boundaries not simply to ‘restrict their autonomy’ but to give them some reliable (and hopefully decent) Shape.

Absent such restrictions, human beings became mushy exo-skeletal insects and without the exo-skeleton to boot. And quite probably irrational and violent on top of everything else.

Humans are not ‘born free’ because, the Framers were convinced, they are born with a disturbing predilection to wreck other humans’ lives in pursuit of their own satisfactions. And the governments humans erect tended to do the same.

To give in to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s bland and burbly happy-face assumption that if there were simply no ‘society’ with its laws and customs and folkways then humans would be happy and good … that struck the Framers as the height of lethal and witless imbecility.

Who can deny it?

Hayes tries to recover himself by going for the spin that it is only the Right that is ‘ideological’ and that the Left’s ‘pragmatism’ is a counter to that. But the Left is committed to an even more fundamental ideology: that there is no Ground Beyond this life that somehow authoritatively (and benevolently) sets limits to human actions and beliefs in the service of helping humans reach their most Genuine Shape.

Such a Ground and such a Beyond would obstruct and ‘oppress’ the ‘total autonomy’ demanded by the Far Left bases, spear-headed by radical-feminism and now after 40 Biblical years distributed widely like a toxin throughout the American body-politic.

Nor is Belief on so profound and vital a level really adequately describable as ‘ideology’, as Hayes then tries to assert.

Certainly in Western Culture, built willy or nilly upon the bedrock of the classically Christian (not to be confused with the ‘Christian fundamentalism’ brought to the table in the Reagan years) Vision, this ‘comprehensive Vision’ (Rawls got that part right, at least) served the Framers as an unstated but utterly reliable bedrock upon which to build their American Framing Vision.

Without that Vision, the whole American Experiment would not work, could not function. Thus neither ‘secularist’ America as sought by ‘liberals’ here nor religiously fundamentalist cultures such as Islam nor Marxist-inspired cultures, have proven themselves hospitable to a genuinely ‘deliberative democratic politics’.

And without that ‘deliberative democratic politics’ the entire Framing Vision and the Constitutional machinery and the Republic cannot stand.

Hayes then works toward his conclusion by tying in Obama’s ‘pragmatism’ to the historically American philosophy of Pragmatism espoused principally by William James in the first decade of the 20^th century.

For James, as Hayes says, Pragmatism meant a “skepticism toward certainties derived from abstractions” and that “truth is pre-eminently to be tested by the practical consequences of belief”.

But surely, Gramsci channeling Marx and Lenin is based on a whole trunk-full of presumptions and ‘abstractions’ that must be taken as a given if you are to ‘get it’.

And most certainly, if We are to consider the track record of the Marxist-Leninst system, however variously re-jiggered over ensuing decades, then its “practical consequences” have been irrefutably baaaad.

And I say that if We are to consider the track record of the Gramscian-Eurocommunist Project here, especially without fear of being considered politically un-Correct and a ‘backlasher’, and especially on the profound but vital foundational level of its effect on the most essential and utterly principle of Our Republic, then I think the conclusion must inescapably be that things have worked out far less than well.

Our politics and political discourse are truly deranged, and thus seem so ineffective at addressing national problems, precisely because the problem on this profound level has not been addressed and indeed is being either ignored or spun as ‘progress’. *

It is, on this level, nothing of the sort.

Obama, Hayes says, “has no taste for culture war”. But that is precisely and unavoidably what the Gramscian and Eurocommunist gameplan call for.

Further, Hayes tries to go for the high-ground by quoting Lincoln: “We are not enemies but friends … Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection”.

But the Gramscian ‘war of positions’, the font and origin of Identity Politics, and essentially committed to an eternal war of “antagonisms” (via Chantal Mouffe’s “radical democracy” – which is no democracy at all), has already precluded any such appeal to Lincoln’s superb Vision. And to MLK’s as well.

You cannot simultaneously embrace Gramsci and appeal to Lincoln. They come from fundamentally different political Universes and the former is lethally Alien to Our own as well as lethal in and of itself.

There is an old Catholic maxim: suaviter in modo, fortiter in re. It translates roughly as: be decent and skilled in how you apply your principles, but be unshakeable in your own commitment to those principles.

It was, I would say, precisely this that both Lincoln and MLK were going for. But their unshakeable commitment was to the principles of the Framing Vision – which is precisely where the Gramscian-Identity Politics Project differs necessarily and inalterably.

Nor is it a matter of making the imposition-by-elites (those who ‘get it’) a little ‘nicer’. The entire ‘anti-majoritarian’ Gramscian Project must be abandoned and all matters and demands and ‘issues’ returned to the aegis of the Framing Vision, that is to say of a genuinely ‘deliberative democratic politics’, in which a fundamental common bond of Citizenship and commitment to the American common-weal override any other considerations.

The active and vital circuit of The People, their elected representatives, and the Sovereign Authority of the government must be re-established and nothing must be allowed to undermine it.

This is a slower and more deliberate process, but it is the only one that respects the Framing Vision (and sustains the Republic). The alternative for Lincoln – as Hayes mentions – was a terrible Civil War. In Our modern situation, it has been a Gramscian ‘war of positions’ or Culture War in which the Citizenry have been divided presumptively (and ideologically) along the axes of the Race and then – even more lethally – Gender. And, additionally, huge swaths of the Citizenry were presumptively branded as ‘hegemonic, dominant, and oppressive’ (Gramsci) and ‘patriarchal’ (radical feminism).

This has to be stopped. As Lincoln also said, quoting an ancient text Grounded in the Beyond: “A house divided against itself cannot stand”.

NOTES

*In that regard, this article helpfully exposes the happy-faced burbling by which one recent author quotes another of her sistern to the effect that a) Nietzsche’s assertion that “truth is merely an illusion that we have forgotten is an illusion” has been “central to the liberal critique of American ideals” and that b) Nietzsche’s “perspectivism” – that there is no truth except what you can see from where you are standing, thus no truth except your own point of view – is also “central” to that “critique of American ideals”.

Nor can it be denied that “perspectivism” is on its surface simply a euphemism for relativism and in its substance an even more lethal proposition than relativism: not that positions or beliefs are all ‘equal’ but that each individual (or Group or Identity) has its own ‘truth’ which must be ‘respected equally’.

I would add that the radical-feminist Gramscian Project has not been simply a “critique”. If it had been only that, then it could have been proposed within the national political discourse, deliberated upon, and The People would have engaged in ‘deliberative democratic politics’ and things would have proceeded – vigorously no doubt – from there.

But precisely because The People ‘just don’t get it’ then this ‘critique’ became a ‘war of positions’ and a Beltway policy of imposition. And a sustained assault on the Framing Vision and the Constitution, the Culture, and the common-weal which they both vitally sustain.

 

CHASE MADAR AND GITMO

The noted New York attorney Chase Madar writes a nifty short piece in the excellent “The American Conservative” magazine: “Obama’s Gitmo”. (‘The American Conservative’, August 2010, pp.18-20; subscription required for online access.)

I think We have reached the point where the old early-Obama era plaint that nobody has given him a chance can be put aside: the gentleman ‘owns’ Af-Pak and has taken over ownership of Gitmo and all the pomps and works of ‘black holes’ and ‘detention’. If there is a Beltway Blutbund – and there is, although the Record-Keeper may not actually be part of the Beltway Band – then Obama has made his bones, paid his dues, and done what was necessary to assure the rest of the Gang that he can be relied upon.

He joins an elite Band – and only they will be surprised to realize that where there is a Record there will be a Reckoning. And from those who have held great authority much will be required.
Boy, is the Beltway in trouble now!

Thank God that the Feminist Revolution has deconstructed all the capital-letter Beings, except those of the female gender – so perhaps Hecate or Athena or the Parcae will make allowances in light of services to the Revolution.

Let’s see how all that turns out as Time goes by.

Madar reports that Obama – presiding over all that ‘concern’ for the ‘children’, especially their ‘safety’ (once they have survived the ‘choice’ test, anyway) from assorted predators and unhappiness – will now be deploying the full faith and force of the United States government and its military justice system (as polite convention calls it) against – wait for it – a 15 year-old.

Well, he was a 15 year-old when he was captured outside Kabul in 2002. He’s 22 now – and if getting your bum pinched by a lewd old priest will, they say, ruin your life, then what do you suppose this kid’s life is going to be like? For seven Biblical years he has been a ‘detainee’ of the Imperium – and has seen the pictures on the honor-wall change from Bush the Egregious and Cheney the Diabolic to Obama the Good Guy and Biden the Bonhomic.

Not that it’s done the kid any good.

He will not have had his life ruined in vain, however. As a special honor to him, the government and military lawyers have (had to) come up with an entirely new charge: “murder in violation of the rules of war”.

Neat. All the repugnance of a murder and the patriotic cachet of ‘war time’.

Although humanity – in the brief moment of Time since it has managed to somehow put limits on the sovereign power of kings and governments to war and to kill ‘legally’ – has never thought it wise or prudent to go charging anybody with murder on a battlefield – where killing is somehow the thing you’re supposed to do. In fact, more soldiers have been shot by their bosses for not-killing than for killing on a battlefield. That’s the way it is in the precincts of War.

But the kid’s not a POW – he’s a ‘detainee’.

More than 600 of “the worst of the worst” at Gitmo (remember that term of opprobrium?) have been re-classified as the Not-So-Bad-of-the-Bad … according to some theological illumination and mode of revelation vouchsafed only to military honchos and their legal staffs.

The 180 or so remaining include Omar Khadr, our kiddo from Canada. I’m guessing that the efforts to help him – from UNICEF and numerous human-rights groups – have actually sealed his fate: the Imperium can’t let him go, since he will have a camera in front of him instantly – and it will have a microphone attached; the Imperium can’t try him because they haven’t got any evidence – except maybe perhaps according to this Murder-on-the-Battlefield charge, but the charge was devised as an actionable offense long after Khadr was taken, so there’s the old Constitutional Ex Post Facto problem.

But then, since when in the past few decades has any “quaint” Constitutional principle slowed down the Right or the Left in the pursuit of their assorted – and oft dove-tailing – agendas?

And there’s the ancient legal wisdom nulla poene sine lege (no punishment without there first being a law against the act) – but THAT’S Latin and that’s so Western and Male and therefore so patriarchal and oppressive and anyway he’s a guy not a ‘woman’ and on top of all that it’s a national emergency and – why not? – throw in a dash of raison d’etat. Oh, and God’s Will – although there is some question of that Entity’s having been Deconstructed … although rumors of His death may have been greatly exaggerated.

Oh, and there’s the problem of ‘torture’ coming up in the trial to explain his initial, since-retracted ‘confession’. The government seems rather avid to avoid having THAT topic come up for examination, perhaps even more now that “24” has had its Series Finale and that ‘groundswell’ of hoohah-for-torture has sorta gone away.

But then Madar gets to a hugely significant problem, one that is a fatal problem not only in Khadr’s case nor in the military-commissions system but in the entire military justice system itself (although Madar for whatever reasons avoids going all the way back to the mother-system): Undue Command Influence.

To understand this problem, you have to understand the difference between Law as it operates in the American Constitutional civilian system, and Law as it has been snipped and sliced to fit into the military system.

In civilian trials and the process leading up to them, there are – far more than in the military – a roster of independent actors: the law, the judge, the prosecutor and the police, the defense counsel, the jury, and toss in the witnesses. While there are numerous informal connections – especially in, say, a small town or jurisdiction – yet the process is designed to work in such a way that the integrity of all the official actors and their dedication to the Truth above all, works to create the ‘adversarial space’ whereby the case for defense and prosecution is presented to the jury under the gimlet-eye of the judge.

Yes, in civilian praxis there has been a great deal of short-cutting and deal-making; but it’s frowned upon and few will admit it, let alone boast about it publicly.

BUT in the civilian adversarial system there is NO organizational requirement – on the most profound and core level of the essence of the enterprise – that requires that one side (and the ‘government’ side at that!) MUST control the process PRECISELY in order to bring about Victory (= conviction of the accused). AND THAT, on top of all that, all of the major actors in the civilian system (judge, cops, prosecutor, jury, most witnesses, AND the defense counsel) are all employees of one of the Parties to the trial.

But in the military legal system there is all of that. And more.

And that Party is not only ‘the government’ as representing the ‘victim’, and not simply the government as proclaiming itself as the ‘victim’ (the defendant has allegedly committed an act which in addition to its own elements also has harmed ‘good order and discipline’ of the forces), but also the government in the person of the Commanding General (Convening Authority) who decided to order the court-martial in the first place.

So the government - in the person of the Commanding Officer/Convening Authority - is at the same time all of the following: the Sovereign upon whose authority the case is conducted; the 'victim' against whom the defendant has allegedly transgressed; and the Employer of ... the judge, the jury, the prosecutors, the investigators and cops, most of the witnesses, and the defense counsel. Oh, and the defendant too.

And since this is a military setting, then if you are a general-officer, and you outrank everybody else in the courtroom (many of whom are under your command)- then the myriad opportunities for you to exert Command Influence on the outcome of the trial can never be reliably squelched.

Because the essence of a military organization is that it is hierarchical: everything revolves under ‘the Command’ which means the Commanding Officer – and that worthy lives in a world where entire staffs and all career subordinates have honed to a nicety the ability to glean – from the merest lift of an eyebrow or the intonation of a voice – exactly what the Boss does or does not want to see happen.*

So then, in every military operation, you know your Boss expects Victory. That is true for every uniformed member, especially the ones close to the Boss, and on the staff – such as Supply, Operations, Intelligence and – you betcha – lawyers.

So then, since a court-martial is something the Boss orders, and is for you the lawyer exactly the type of military operation that is your specialty, then … you know what you have to do.

And for those in the home audience that think nothing could go wrong in this system because “everybody has sworn an oath to do the thing right” … well, there’s a bridge for sale in Brooklyn you might be interested in. **

So Undue Command Influence is a scam on several levels, and it’s built so deeply into the military legal system – arising, in fact, from the very military soil in which the military justice system’s foundations are laid – that very few folks notice the corrosion.

Command Influence is by its nature corruptive, in this system. You know how corrosive it would be if the Governor called the judge in for a chat just before your case was to come up; why would you think it would be any less grievous a crime against true-process for the commanding general to call the judge in for a review of the judge’s performance the night before your trial? Or maybe for a friendly rubber of bridge? What’s the diff?

So the phrase “Undue” Command Influence is just some cheap rhetorical trick by the military lawyers to trick you into assuming that while there is such a BAD thing as “undue” command influenc , yet still command influence itself is a Good Thing.***

To which the only decent response is something South-Central European: something like Hah! Phooey! I spit three times! … Or words to that effect.

And of course, beyond the simple (but lethal) dynamics of military organization and ethos, there’s the problem that arises when higher-ups are pushing even the Commanding Officer, who is also the Convening Authority in your case, to get some usable ‘results’.

So, for example, if this is going to be Dirty Rifle Awareness Month, then the next 5 shlubs to show up with dirty rifles get a court-martial whose results (foreordained) will “send a message”. Ditto if this is, say, Disrespecting Underperforming Recruits Awareness Month: the next 5 to get caught OR even just the first 5 you can make even a halfway believable case against … are going to ‘become a Message’ as the Zen of military convictions would put it.

You can imagine what would happen if you were to take this already loaded system and put it in the service of a strongly-favored Beltway or White House ‘initiative’ – whether it be gender issues or terrorist issues.

And in this case, Madar notes, the Convening Authority was so eager a scout that he didn’t even wait for ‘guidance’ from above (not to say Above); instead he went forth pre-emptively and “proactively” to make sure he had some cases ready that were “sexy”.

Yes, Virginia, even in today’s (multi or trans) gendered military costume-party, you can still want and get “sexy”.

For a brief moment, Madar loses his way in the ever-shifting sands of spin and subsurface reality that is the Gitmo-Military Justice underworld: “One might expect that a legal system thus rigged would greatly appeal to its prosecutors”. Yea, verily. You not only are pretty much guaranteed a ‘win’ every time you go out to the mound, but you also get medals and promotions on top of that – and all for simply not-being a defender. (Not to worry though. In a masterly show of military personnel management, defense counsel get medals too, so long as they lose the case – and that will tide them over until they too are assigned as prosecutors somewhere, and can really dig into the professional steak.)

“Until now, one would have been wrong.” Willy-Tango-Foxtrot?

But where Madar is going with this is that for a few golden years at Gitmo a wondrous thing happened: young military lawyers (the savvy older ones soon enough came to see that the whole thing was a careerist’s minefield) actually stood up for their clients and were willing to ‘go public’ if they had to.

Those young military lawyers – some of whom perhaps helped Madar – are indeed to be congratulated. But their good works will not go un-noticed “een Behrleeeen” as the Gestapo agents used to hiss in the war movies, and their chances of a long and happy military law career are mostly shot. But they have actually been trying to Do the Right Thing … which is rare enough in any military, but even more so in a declining military where the really good seats for musical career chairs are becoming fewer and farther between.

Madar senses that that Moment is passing. The brave spirits who kept the lamp of opposition burning during the Bush-Cheney Imperium, hoping for the day when a more decent power came into its own, have now seen the White House merely photoshop Obama’s head onto the entire monstrous panoply.

Ach.

So Madar is probably right when he sees that “this may spell the end of a golden chapter in JAG history”. Although I would suggest ‘the end of THE golden chapter in JAG history’ … or perhaps ‘the end of the most unusual and impressive chapter in JAG history’.

As I have often said on this site, in the military world there is no Virtue except Victory. With that anything else can be written-in as a Virtue, but without Victory the losers won’t get to write anything.

And anyone who thinks that if you take the military oath and get some rank on your uniform that you are somehow freed from the surly bonds of Original Sin, take a look at the way the Pentagon has been jiggering the casualty counts – with the help of its Doctors and Nurses – in order to make it seem like there are only 50 or 80 thousand casualties from the Greater Southwest Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, instead of the possible half million.****

Truth – as the 18th century Royal Navy sailor would say – “don’t enter into it”.

NOTES

*In their Long March through the military, the cadres of the Feminist Revolution realized this clearly. Hence while 20 or so years ago the civilian world was bethumped by a myriad of laws and regulations promulgated to prevent workplace harassment and increase workplace hiring, the military was bethumped with regulations that specifically warned against facial expressions, tones of voice, OR EVEN the act of not-speaking when a certain subject or person was brought up … as falling afoul of the new gender-programs. Much as Thomas More found to his undoing in Henry VIII’s ‘great matter’, your silence alone could cost you a career in the gender-crazed pandering of the military since Tailhook.

**This is not a new problem – professionals in the military – but it is increasingly lethal as the Imperium embarks on increasingly frakkulent misadventures. If you are, say, a Doctor – then you have taken the Hippocratic Oath. OK, fine. But what happens when you THEN take the Officer’s Oath in the military …? (Hint: the military can send you to the rockpile for disobedience; Hippocrates doesn’t have that authority … not in this world, anyway.) Ditto chaplains (although the Fundamentalists got around this by proclaiming that since the military was run by the US which was Deputized by God, then any military order is God’s order too). And thus also lawyers – and Lady Justice is as toothless, for all practical purposes, as Hippocrates (although there is that next world ... but Americans are notoriously so dazzled by this one that they have never paid much attention).

***Which is why the military approach is such a favorite of prosecutors in this victim-heavy Age: once the dice are as loaded as the military system, then you can pretty much do whatever you want. And also why the military approach is so attractive not only to the Right, but to the cadres of the Left who consider as 'quaint', 'obstructive' and 're-victimizing' any attempt by the legal system (rules of evidence, statutes of limitation, and such) or by the defendant to somehow slow things down to make sure Truth is discovered. The Revolution is not seeking Truth, but only the Correct Outcome; it already knows the Truth and the legal system and the 'trial' is simply to 'show' everybody the power of the Revolution and to 'send a message'.

****See here and here

ISRAELI DIPLOMATS AND OUR DIPLOMACY

H.D.S. Greenway makes an interesting point in an editorial about the troubles presently bethumping the Israeli consul-general up in Boston.

As you may recall, that worthy recently sent back a candid assessment to his superiors, based on his observations about Israel’s position in the opinion of the American public and – Boston being the home of so much institutional brain-power – America’s ‘elites’.

And that’s what his government sent him to do. As do all governments when they send ‘accredited representatives’ to a foreign country.

Nations, as DeGaulle said, are “cold monsters” and as some English gent said, a nation “has no eternal friends, only eternal interests”. While it is a lovely thought, there is no ‘family’ of nations and probably never could be. Though given the radical feminist revulsion at ‘family’ as a basic concept, it’s mickle curious that the ever-Correct Beltway elites continue to pretend that the Israeli State is American’s BFF and indeed closer to the heart of the Beltway banditti than any State in the Constitutional family, such as Louisiana (still minus a major city after Katrina) or the Great State of (fill-in-the-blank).

Indeed, DeGaulle’s greatest problem was that it seemed hard to love humanity and still remain faithful to La France. Somehow, the Beltway has cut that Gordian knot of DeGaulle’s, although I’m of the opinion that a ‘perennial’ problem is perennial precisely because it is insoluble, and anybody who brays that they have ‘solved’ it is probably trying to sell you something.

The consul-general had written in an internal memo that “the settlement dispute was doing ‘strategic damage to Israel’ because it was alienating the American administration”. Obama, famously, has started to try to correct the domestic-politics driven Beltway preferential subservience to the Israeli State and its interests.

Israel, of course, is not technically an “ally”, much as the Beltway would like Us to simply believe that it is. A treaty of alliance – especially a defensive alliance – would require a precise statement of the official boundaries of the respective treaty-nations, so that it would be crystal clear when those boundaries were violated by some other nation, thus triggering the military assistance. But the Israeli State has always refused to do that, because deep down its perennial objective is to take over Biblical Israel, lock stock, and barrel, and clear away any life-forms already living on the property.

And in this, the Israelis have modeled themselves upon two recent Great Powers.

First, America, whose violent and thorough dispossession of the native tribes proves to the Israelis’ satisfaction that their own plans are as American as apple-pie.

Second, not quite as completely: the government of Germany immediately following the Weimar era, whose quest for what it saw as its rightful Lebensraum to the East was ruthlessly – though unsuccessfully – carried out with much blood and iron. Although that German plan envisioned the enslavement of the subject Untermenschen; the Israelis, to their great satisfaction, are far too moral to enslave anybody. They will go the American route, eliminate the offending lives, and claim that it was God’s will. Or, from a secular point of view, a (charmingly Darwinian) ‘existential imperative’.

Plus ca change, as DeGaulle would no doubt have said.

Oy.

With the exception of Eisenhower, every American President starting with Truman has played to the domestic Jewish vote by embracing Israel. JFK, of course, did not at all approve when he heard of Israel’s illegal top-secret program to build its own nuclear weapons, but then – some might say Providentially – he was suddenly taken from the stage.

LBJ, addled and desperate as he saw his war in Vietnam going to hell and his civil-rights initiatives going up in the smoke of a hundred urban riots, reached out to Israel with an indomitable will to truckle in friendship. Did they attack and kill US sailors on a Navy vessel in broad daylight and try to leave no evidence in the form of survivors? LBJ preferred that all of the sailors would have died and gone to the bottom with the ship rather than “embarrass our Israeli frens”.

Since the formation of that (in the acute if distasteful Nazi argot) Blutbund, the Beltway – first the Dems, then the Republicans, and then the indistinguishable nomenklatura into which the un-diselectable lump of pols and bureaucrats has now congealed – has pandered to the interests of the Israeli State, following as slavishly, if more stylishly, than a demented basset hound.

All to Our great damage and lasting detriment.

I can’t help recalling that in when the first Arab oil-embargo in 1974 came along, it struck me as perfectly predictable, considering that the Arabs would have probably been upset at Our giving the Israelis so much military and financial support. Especially when it was clear that We could no longer pump enough oil from domestic American sources and would have to rely on other folks’ oil. And then when you added in the size of some of those early-1970s cars, it sort of screamed out to you that it would very much be in America’s interests not to piss-off anybody sitting on big reserves of the stuff.

But no.

As the presence of Israel – especially given its insidious ultimate objectives in the region – inflamed the neighboring nations (precisely as had been predicted in 1948 by the many competent sources familiar with the Middle East and the dynamics of nations) this country just bulled ahead, driven by domestic politics. Originally, that meant the Democratic Party’s desperate need to woo and ‘lock-in’ reliable voting blocs, but then also by newly-invented (by the Democrats) PAC money funneled to the pols by the shrewd Israeli gambit of forming its own PAC to reward Congressional supporters. Later, the Republicans would be allowed to ‘buy in’, which they did.

And where the Israelis took advantage of the Democrats’ ‘secularizing’ of American culture in the 1960s and 1970s (most likely on the assumption that the less ‘Christian’ America was, the less ‘anti-Semitic’ or at least anti-Israel it would be), yet in the 1980s, with the Reagan-era embrace of a militant and militarily-aggressive Fundamentalism, the Israelis suddenly became BFFs with the rabid Fundamentalist Right. An overture that was paid for by the Fundamentalists’ suddenly ‘discovering’ that the fulfillment of all their expectations of Jeezuzzz would require the faithful to fully support Israel first.

And on and on.

I also can’t help thinking that the militarization and regimentation of American society over the past decades has been in no small part* a result of a ‘migration’ of Israeli society’s own militarization. The American Right has always been liable to a corporatist and militarist conformity, and the Left embraced a ‘revolutionism’ that equally called for government intrusion (as for example, the radical feminists bringing government police power not only into the hearths but the very bedrooms of the citizenry).

The consistent stoking of ‘fear’ and the sense of being ‘threatened’, coupled with the valorization of a ‘victimhood’ whose awfulness would justify ‘whatever means necessary’ to counter an ‘existential threat’, could as easily apply to the radical feminists’ characterization of women in a 'patriarchal' society as it could an Israeli state surrounded by numerous threats that its own existence and actions had inflamed. And such driving of the public mood toward both ‘fear’ and the desire for ‘vengeance’ – creating a stampede almost literally – also mirrors precisely the tactics of Goebbels’s propaganda objectives in a long-ago 1930s that now seem never to have gone away.

The integrity of Our own political principles is now deeply compromised in a densening matrix of ways. Congress is now enwhored to the Israeli state, and most pols are now so indentured and compromised that it is hardly inconceivable that they dare not change course for fear of their long treachery being exposed.

Worse, as Obama, having had to accept numerous old school pols onto his team in order to secure election, tries now as President to re-introduce some of the ‘balance’ that was last seen in the suddenly-stopped Administration of JFK, he is being undermined by precisely those pols – such as Joe Biden and Hillary – who have for their entire careers made their indenture to Israeli policy objectives a remunerative badge of honor. It is not inconceivable that they both will seek to oust him in the next presidential election. And if anything happens to cut short Obama’s Administration, as happened to JFK, then Biden will even more quickly return America to a full indenture.

None of this makes for a good night’s sleep.

But if the 1930s are baaaack, then nobody should be expecting to get one anyway.

NOTES

*The corporations' desire for a more disciplined workforce, and then for a workforce that could be controlled as it saw its jobs and benefits dissolved through ‘globalization’, and the Left’s inherent predisposition to increased governmental intrusiveness in pursuit of the demands of its Identities, were even larger factors.

OBAMA AND THE POPE

Obama meets the Pope. Good.

Yet it’s odd.

They are breathlessly and ponderously reported as having significant exchanges on a host of pressing world issues: the environment, world health, war and terrorism, the world economy, the poor … the list goeth on.

Good.

And yet: they met for 30 minutes. Back in the day, Churchill conferred with FDR, the Joint Chiefs – led by the redoubtable George C. Marshall – met with the British Imperial General Staff, Churchill and FDR met with Stalin, hell – Winnie and FDR even met with Chiang Kai Shek (or however his name is spelled nowadays) … and not even those table-fulls of such galactic wise men ever polished off the agenda usefully in 30 minutes.

But of course We now live in The Age of Alice (as in ‘Wonderland’, the March Hare, the Mad Hatter, the Red Queen, and other significant figures). The People have become used to believing far more than six impossible things before breakfast. And then feeling good about it: safer, reassured, more confident … and thus free to worry about Michael (as in Jackson), celebrity melodramas, and the other soap operas to which Our cartoonish ‘worldview’ has been reduced.

This will not serve Us well. Nor will it end well for Us.

And then it must be factored in that Obama must have spent a few precious minutes handing the Pope a letter from Teddy Kennedy.

You wonder why the President would eat up precious minutes handing over a letter that could have been mailed on ahead, or delivered by the appropriate underling to the appropriate underling. Where are Obama’s priorities? Or did he lose precious time in a fit of absence of mind?

A Soviet reader might have a few thoughts: it was some sort of payback to Teddy from the Prez. Or perhaps the Prez got something out of himself: maybe it helped distract the Pope – or at least the public – from issues that wouldn’t generate such good buzz: abortion, say, or the usefulness – or even the reality – of Charity and Truth (about which the Pope had just written rather cogently and at some length).

Or perhaps Obama just wanted to ask the Pope to pray for the United States – which at this point would certainly be appropriate. Although it might not sit well with the still-growling and hardly humbled Fundamentalist Ascendency over here, who in any case hold as an article of dogma that God eternally selected – indeed deputized – the United States government as His right arm. Nor with the ideological feminist cadres who have long proclaimed as an article of revolutionary dogma that folks who believe in capital-letter realities like Charity and Truth ‘just don’t get it’ and should not be permitted a voice in public venues. And they say that Islam has trouble with dogmatic fundamentalisms?

Puh-leeeze.

Of course, it’s also curious that Teddy is asking the Pope for prayers. Not that it hasn’t happened before. As one of his last acts before his death, Richard Cardinal Cushing of Boston interceded for Teddy, directly. Although not with ‘God’ – as that entity was once styled.

Rather, and more mundanely, the eminent Cardinal interceded rather directly with the parents of one Mary Jo Kopechne, deceased, who in the late summer of 1969 were asked by their local court, to wit the Court of Common Pleas of Luzerne County (PA) to weigh in on whether the Court should honor a request by a sister jurisdiction – the Office of the District Attorney for the Southern District of Massachusetts (among whose jurisdiction are included venues such as Edgartown and Chappaquiddick Island) – for an exhumation of their daughter’s recently interred remains for the purposes of an autopsy to determine cause of death (among which causes criminal negligence or worse might figure prominently).

The Cardinal – busy enough, one would think, in his own Archdiocese of Boston – took time out of his schedule and expended a significant chunk of his dwindling energies, to travel to Wilkes-Barre, PA, where he proceeded to call upon the bereaved parents (Catholics, by the by). Why the Cardinal didn’t just mail them a letter, or call them, or even send his thoughts through the appropriate episcopal channels (however influential the Archdiocesan See of Boston may be or may think it is, Pennsylvania is not within its jurisdiction and – indeed – the Church of Rome had actually rather thoughtfully provided Wilkes-Barre and environs with an episcopal authority of its own) ... why he didn't do one of those things is left up to the reader.

But no. His Eminence the Cush wound up on their doorstep – for all practical purposes. He thought it meet to remind them that it was their duty as Catholics and Christians to oppose any exhumation – out of respect for the remains and the sanctity and dignity of the human soul. Which – especially in a prelate not widely known for his theological illuminations – was a rather definitive pronouncement (and rather largely incorrect).

Reasonable persons may wonder at just how much use this pastoral intervention was to the parents. (It would not long afterward turn out that it was useful to the tune of $140,000 – in American dollars of a far more solvent era). But surely, it was of use to the Honorable Teddy. One Judge Bromiski of the Luzerne County Court of Common Pleas divined against his sister law-enforcement entity in the Southern District of Massachusetts and refused to allow the exhumation (and thus the autopsy).

After all, he reasoned – as it were: In order to permit an exhumation, you have to have some amount of evidence that you are justified in doing it because there you will find evidence of a crime. Nice: Catch-22 for real. The very purpose of an autopsy is to determine if a death might indeed be the result of criminal action. But if you are told that you need evidence of criminal action in order to exhume the body and perform the autopsy in the first place … well, you see where that goes.

My, my, my – as Southern matrons of the antebellum era would acutely cluck. Or: mah, mah, mah.

Well, they are all now within the direct jurisdiction of another Court and another Judge.
Well, almost all of them. Teddy is still more directly liable to the lower courts constituted in and for this lesser dimension.

And by a remarkable coincidence We are rapidly approaching the 40th anniversary of the Affair Kopechne, and the Honorable Senator himself is rather acutely sensing the imminence of that far less fix-able Court and that far less reach-able Judge.

So, true to form, he is going for the heaviest connections he can get his hands on, which in this case means getting the President of the United States to play mailman to the Pope of Rome.
Wow. To use Churchill’s words: “Some chicken, some neck”.

But Teddy isn’t about so ennobling a dirty business as carrying a World War through to victory against fascism, militarism, and the Hitlerite hordes threatening to undermine and overthrow the very fundaments of Western Civilization. Truth be told – as charitably as possible – Teddy has done more than his share to further those dark purposes.

But with whatever authority the Pope has that has survived the deconstruction strategies of those American ‘elites’ who ‘get it’, Teddy wants to be able to ensure his legacy and fix the Judge.

In an earlier, less enlightened, more brutish age, such a cluster of realizations led blood-and-treachery—soaked Renaissance rulers to commission the building of chapels, sculptures, paintings, and other works of art that remain the treasured material heritage of the West and of humanity.

Teddy, however, will send a letter and try to fix the Court and the Judge by turning to his connections to avoid the consequences.

Somehow I see this as emblematic of what has happened to Us.

Ditto, some priest, a theology professor at Boston College, who bleats helpfully if inanely that “Clearly, when one Catholic asks another to pray for him, this is a sign of both vulnerability and trust”. Yah. Never let it be said that The Honorable Teddy can’t get benefit of clergy when he decides to hire it.

Meanwhile, another ‘professor’, at Notre Dame, piously and authoritatively bleats that it is “poignant and instructive that Senator Kennedy seeks peace and reconciliation with ‘Holy Mother Church’ [qoutation marks in the article itself] as he nears the end of his earthly life”. Oh yah. Though hired and paid as a history perfesser, Doctor Appleby, originator of the foregoing comment, appears unfamiliar with Ameroican history as recently as 1969 (although nowadays even perfessers with Ph.D.’s may consider 1969 ancient history – and given what We accomplished in that year, like putting a man on the moon, it is indeed ‘ancient’, on sooooo many levels). Gone, baby, gone.

As is the late Ms. Kopechne.

Although, of course, only in the eyes of the foolish – as St. Paul sayeth.

For at the end of the day, there is a larger Reality, a more insistent Truth, a stronger Justice.

Neither the Honorable Teddy nor his well-remunerated minions nor his genuine or tactical supporters prefer to think about that reality.

Not that it makes a whit of difference to that Reality itself.

Which, at long long last, Teddy is beginning to realize.

May the rest of Us go and do likewise.

While there is still time.

OBAMA AND IMMIGRATION

IT USED TO BE

The President wants lawmakers to make immigration a priority.

That’s a good idea.

Although We now have so many problems facing Us that even if he came up with a good idea for each of them (and don’t forget that some of them are interconnected, ‘synergistically related’ as the wonks like to say)the Hononrable Congress is going to have a time thinking its way through them. Especially since the standard operating procedure on the Hill for a couple-three decades is simply to sit back, see which PAC contributes the most or which Identity threatens the most, and go where Greed and Fear lead you. It’s not the height of maturity – but in a ‘sensitive’ America who wants to hate-on them or ruin their self-esteem (if it’s even possible to dent the self-esteem of a sitting national politician).

“It’s going to require some heavy lifting” he says. Marvelous. When was the last time they were told that in the Beltway? The only heavy lifting they’ve had to do is shaking hands and collecting checks from PACs and pandering to too-interested lobbies and advocacies of pained and noisy Identities.

The whole idea thirty-plus years ago was that they would never have to do any heavy-lifting again. They made a stint in Congress into a classier equivalent of the old ethnic ‘getting on the city’ gambit, where the award of a city job for services-rendered to a pol or simply by being an annoying but essential in-law of his meant that one would never have to really work again. It’s very heaven, in a flat-souled, porcine way.

Thus the Dems retained their electability by raising up Identities around this or that ‘fear and outrage’, and then granting the advocacies and lobbies for those blocs whatever they ‘demanded’; while simultaneously raking in the cash from the PACs that Tip O’Neill had invented specifically for the purpose: corporations, lobbyists, hell even foreign countries (that bumptious ‘ally’ on the far shore of the Mediterranean) could get in on the act if they were willing to pay to play. The Reagan-Clinton-Bush the Lesser years made the two administrations of Ulysses Grant look like a church picnic for the hopelessly imagination-challenged.

But then, courtesy of all the deconstruction work going on, there were no challenges to the imagination: nothing could stop a fantasy fueled by greed or the lust for power and influence and control. There was no ‘morality’ (that had to go in order to grease the skids for the abortion agenda); nobody could ‘judge’ you (that had to go in order to make room for all the alternative and ‘creative’ lifestyles and life-choices); nobody could say they disapproved of you even if they did judge you (that had to go in order to squelch public resistance to all the new pandered demands); nobody – frankly – could tell you what to do with your own life (that had to go in order to make room for abortion, but the concept migrated quickly to issues dearer to the place-holders on the Hill: they couldn’t be ‘judged’ for cementing themselves into place in their Districts).

Nor, having paid, did any of the players really want to see whole new bunches of Honorable Electees trooping into town, who would have to be paid and broken-in all over again.

If the honorable generals and admirals made robust use of the Pentagon revolving door, their erstwhile bosses on the Hill entrenched and fortified for a permanent occupation. Perhaps the most expensive political boondoggle facility isn’t in the Green Zone in Baghdad, but somewhat closer to home.

So what about immigration then?

I have no answers.

But it seems to me that We should start approaching these little political matters not as soap-operas but as police procedurals. Nor do I mean such high-production-value but egregiously phantasmagoric shows like Bellisario’s pair about the JAGs and the so Freudianly-aptly named Naval Criminal Investigative Service.

No. I’m thinking more along the lines – let me date myself – of ‘Hawaii 5-0’, ‘Kojak’, and ‘Columbo’. And with a hefty dose of Darren McGavin’s ‘Night Stalker’ as well. In other words, turning a gimlet eye on the ‘narrative’ that ‘it’s all good and there’s nothing to see here’, and start kicking those tires so you can answer accurately the basic question of who would benefit and who had opportunity, all the while deftly sidestepping all of the assorted stories, press releases, and fake evidence planted in your path by party or parties as yet unknown.

So in this immigration thing – again, I have no answers nor pretend to – I would say that any professional lists of those-with-motive would have to include the following:

The Democrats, who would benefit by bringing in fresh new voters who would be either so grateful to be here, or so unaware of how things used to work in this country, or so used to how things used to work in their own countries of origin, that they would simply vote happily for them what brung’em to the dance.

The radical ideological feminist movement, who would hasten the death of that ‘America’ associated with and tainted by ‘white, industrial-era males’ and all their dripping violence and lumpen macho rationality, by bringing in whole bunches of folks who – being ‘poor’ and ‘oppressed’ (somehow) and therefore ‘good’ - would before long cancel out the hateful white, industrial-era male dinosaurs, their world and their civilization, with all its oppressive adulthood, maturity, and aspiration – however shaky – to some amount of virtue.

The radical ideological feminist movement, who would allay the fears of scientists and pols who feared a demographic flat-line of zero-reproductive replacement (all those abortions that liberated women would be flocking to get) by ‘keeping the numbers up’ through immigration. And of course, those immigrants would soon quickly start having kids who would not know the way the once-but-maybe-not-future Republic was designed to work, and then that generation would have kids … and so on.

The radical ideological feminist movement, who would need a lot of nannies for all those liberated women who would be taking high-paying executive jobs and would need somebody to take care of the kids, if either hubby was also employed or there was no hubby. Also for leaf-blowers, gardeners, pool-persons, and younger folks who would be day-laborers for the contractors who would be building, installing and maintaining the McMansions, lawns, gardens, and pools.

The Republicans who would need a lot of those same nannies, leaf-blowers, gardeners, pool-boys, and younger folks who would be day-laborers for the contractors who would be building, installing and maintaining the McMansions, lawns, gardens, and pools.*

The corporations who would be needing a whole lot of cheap and pliable labor to break the unions and essentially dissolve the New Deal and the Detroit Consensus. For which purpose the Democrats, under the tag-team of Clinton and Clinton, and the Democratic Leadership Council, and others as yet unindicted, did deliberately fabricate and provide the ‘cover’ theory of ‘globalization’. The afore-mentioned theory did deliberately and with malice afore-thought misrepresent as merely a way for American corporations to produce goods more cheaply abroad, what really was a scheme that resulted in not only the jobs but the profits of the production going and remaining overseas. For which many PACs were gratefully rewarded by those few who profited greatly.

And the ‘new economy’ entrepreneurs whose job market – burdened by the overnight doubling of the potential workforce that needed to be employed by the ‘liberation’ of women – required that salaries be correspondingly chopped in half and benefits reduced, for which purposes a wholly new workforce, unfamiliar with the old ‘industrial-era’ status of steadily and well-remunerated employed workers, would most suitably answer.

And, lastly, the entire Beltway association of elected pols, who stood to gain immensely from a citizenry largely ignorant of the responsibilities of The People and of the role of the individual Citizen, or too pre-occupied with earning a meager living to learn, or too fearful of biting the hand that fed them to object to whatever their new master-government chose to do.

Well, that’s my initial list of suspects. It isn’t complete, but it should provide enough to start Our investigation.

Now, mind you, I am not saying that every single individual immigrant is going to fall into all these characterizations. I’m saying that this was the way the suspect-perpetrators would have imagined their plan would work out, by and large.

And in those expectations, I think they were correct.

Nor can We forget that many of those desperately seeking entrance were utterly undone by the effects of the afore-mentioned ‘globalization’, that wrecked their livelihoods in their own countries of origin.

So many Clintonian turkeys coming home – or at least here – to roost, as it were.

Nor can We forget that while such deconstruction was going on in this country and against its People, the Reagan-era stratagem, begun under Nixon the decade before when the currency was cut loose from the realism of the gold standard, was to provide the appearance of ‘wealth’ for all by enabling easy credit. Which credit was provided by other nations’ purchase of Our debt in the form of Treasury bonds, while Our new ‘knowledge’ society produced nothing but a few ‘ideas’ (famously inedible) and mountain-ranges worth of paper ‘instruments’ of increasing complexity and increasingly dubious integrity.

Nor can We forget that We allowed Ourselves to be thus seduced, indenturing Ourselves and Our posterity unto the umpteenth-generation with debt uncountable.

So that at this point immigrants are invited into – or invite themselves into – a country that has no means of providing them either with a living wage or with the reliable promise of sustained employment.

Nor can We forget that the nation for which the Statue of Liberty was cast and to which it was presented as a gift, was a nation bursting with a potential that required the labor of as many willing hands as it could find (and its Democratic benefactors could entice). And that it would be an indication of the most profound imbecility if the Democrats of recent decades imagined that they could simply run the same play that had worked a century before.

Nor can We forget that fully a third of the Italians – to take one example – who entered at Ellis Island returned to their home country for good, having realized that the American streets were not only not paved with gold, but were actually built on filth and blood even more than on honest sweat and toil.

We are not in a position to be making any promises. Nor is America any longer the fabled Land of Promise.

So I’d say that – yes – some heavy-lifting is indeed required.

NOTE

*When I use the terms “Republicans” I do not mean the party of Teddy Roosevelt, sticking up for the environment and for regular folks against the corporations, “the interests”, and the “malefactors of great wealth”. It was the Reagan ‘genius’ to use fake money fueled by increasing debt to make everybody think that they were now part of the ‘wealthy’ class; so that what was done for the malefactors was – according to the illusory ‘narrative’ – done for everybody. Nor did the Dems find this a baaaad thing, and they declared themselves ‘bipartisan’ forthwith, to hide the fact of their treacherous collusion and – let’s face it – collaboration. They were, after all, the inventors of PACs in the first place.