AUTHORITARIANISM AND AMERICAN POLITICS

Over on Salon Glenn Greenwald interviews the two authors of a new book with that title.

It’s a topic close to my heart because I think it’s a key dynamic in one of the most fundamental trends in the country these days.

Nicely, the authors note that first and foremost, an ‘authoritarian’ is not primarily defined by his/her “fealty to authority”.

This is a good point. There can be all sorts of reasons for such “fealty”, and it may not exactly be for the purposes of a personal need to rely on authority. There is, for example, a ‘tactical’ type of fealty whereby one simply and simplistically sticks to a particular ‘line’ because the success of one’s group of its agenda is more important than the truth, accuracy, or efficacy of any particular point or assertion made by the group in order to further its purposes.

So, for example, Edmund White in a Salon interview refers (nicely and in the same general timeframe as Greenwald’s piece) to a “Stalinist” requirement informally but very palpably imposed upon gay writers of the ‘70s and ‘80s: the gay advocacy did not want to see any writing that put ‘gays’ in a bad light by showing immaturity or addiction or unripeness or pretty much any unpleasant, repugnant personality characteristics at all. White is right as a writer to take issue with that; to hew to such a ‘line’ quickly undermines the integrity of serious writing, which is to give some view of how things actually are in people and with life. There are no ‘perfect’ individuals in this broken, smokey, befogged world and to write in such a way as to suggest that there are is treason to the integrity of the writer’s calling.

And it also quickly shades into propaganda. And for the purposes of genuine knowledge, and certainly for the purposes of an informed Citizenry able to exercise its responsibility as The People, it is a lethal trahison indeed. Either readers – who also must be Citizens and human beings – will accept such simplistic characterizations, or else they will begin to mistrust the writing as independent-minded Russian readers read government and Party pieces in Pravda and Izvestia back in the bad old days.

And of course, such cartoonish portrayals can as easily be deployed against folks as well as for them: to demonize a group of individuals or a set of ideas as well as to put them in a good and shining light.

The political competence of the Citizenry, and quite probably the moral and human competence as well, is eroded by a tendency to accept the ‘cartoonish’ as a useful mode of viewing reality and other folks and ideas.

Instead, the authors here see the fundamental characteristic of ‘authoritarians’ as being “a cognitive style”: a way of thinking about anything that is deeply flawed and leads to grossly inaccurate and distorted ‘knowledge’ which then supports a profoundly unjustified arrogance (‘confidence’ is too nice a word for it) and lack of humility and lack of serious and careful deliberation. (And can you say ‘Iraq War’?)

Quoting himself from an earlier piece about an earlier writer on the authoritarian mind-set, Greenwald describes the authoritarian type: “driving through life under the influence of impaired thinking … exhibiting sloppy reasoning, highly compartmentalized beliefs, double standards, hypocrisy, self-blindness … and to top it all off a ferocious dogmatism that make it unlikely anyone could ever change their minds with evidence and logic”.

Now, recall that I have distinguished the ‘tactical’ authoritarian from the – let me call it – the ‘cognitive’ authoritarian. The former simply hews to the line even if s/he knows it’s inaccurate, simply for the purpose of the group’s or advocacy’s political success.

Although, I don’t think anybody can really sustain such a ‘tactical’ commitment for long without doing seriously damaging and degrading their cognitive abilities and even their moral integrity: in order to keep supporting what you know to be inaccurate places significant strains on a person, and before too long, I would say, you have to start pulling wires out of yourself here and there to lessen the jangling interior alarms and the nagging sense of dissonance between what you are doing and what you know to be true … perhaps why so many politicians and public intellectuals seem to be more or less ‘unreal’.

And that’s where the “self-blindness” comes in, which cripples any possibility of an individual being able to follow the ancient wisdom to “Know Thyself” (the Greeks) or to ever achieve the ability to “Be Yourself in the Present” (Eastern thought).

And of course, if you can’t know yourself, then you’re not going to really be able to know anybody else, which undermines the ability for genuine empathy and respect – for fellow Citizens, for other human beings, and for ‘strangers’ and ‘others’ whose folkways and mindsets are different from your own.

The ‘cognitive’ authoritarian, then, becomes locked into a cartoonish view of life, others, the world, and him/herself. (And the ‘tactical’ authoritarian, over the long haul, winds up locked in the same cage.)

Of course, the aim of propaganda has always been to lock people into just such a cage, where they can then predictably be relied upon to follow the ‘authority’ of their government’s or their group’s pronunciamentos.

The Communists from the Left, the Fascists from the Right … those governments all wound up in putting their people in the same cage. And those governments also thereby made themselves dependent on the moral and conceptual violence of propaganda, as opposed to the moral and conceptual gleam of truth and accuracy.

So ‘cartoonish’ thinking and propaganda cannot easily be ‘baptized’ – even by ‘good’ intentions. (And did you ever encounter a propaganda that did not claim ‘good’ intentions? Did any propaganda ever describe itself as having ‘bad’ intentions?)

And their lethal toxicity to individuals and polities cannot be neutralized: poison is poison, no matter why it is introduced into a system or an organism.

Camille Paglia, in an earlier piece in Salon, asked a question that flows from all of this: “Why has the Democratic Party become so arrogantly detached from ordinary Americans?”

Now first off, let me say that as always this is not a political rant against Democrats and ‘for’ Republicans. At this point in Our history, both Parties are now grossly compromised; they have, as I have said in prior Posts, congealed into an un-diselectable nomenklatura that is now most usefully studied by applying what is known of the Soviet ‘elites’ of the 1970s: they knew it was all a wreck, a failure, and a sham, but could only think to keep their own gravy-trains going until they could die and get out of town.

Which, I say, is why so little genuine public input – no matter how accurate – seems to have any effect on the denizens of the Beltway at all anymore. Not only are those denizens ‘tactical’ authoritarians a dozen times over because they’ve been writing and accepting checks for supporting the most dubious things (from the Left and from the Right, the ‘advocacies’ and the ‘corporations’ and money interests). But also that by now many of them have devolved into ‘cognitive’ authoritarians, with only the ability to view grave and deep and large public issues as cartoons with simplistic answers.

And now, then, on top of all that, they have a visceral, animal-like sense of being under threat of losing their gravy train – and you can imagine that such a visceral realization is not going to prompt any higher conceptual or moral functioning.

So they’re locked into the old ‘Moscow’ mindset from the baaaad old days, and can only act to protect their own interests and raise a lot of confusing dust and bray out loud trumpeting noises to confuse and cloud any public efforts to get a clear picture and chart a useful course.

And of course, at that point, Moscow and its banditti had been responsible for soooo many bad ideas and failed programs that they couldn’t even admit it without creating the risk of delegitimizing and indicting themselves outright. So appearances had to be kept up at any cost and by doing ‘whatever it takes’. And so the whole structure became just a plaster sham, a bigger and more violent and more powerful sham than Mussolini was ever able to achieve with his ‘reincarnated Roman Empire’; “Upper Volta with rockets” as one wag of the era put it (‘Upper Volta’ being the name of a small and struggling Third World sovereignty of the day.)

Oy.

This, I think, explains Paglia’s description of the problem: Though they “claim to speak for the poor and dispossessed, Democrats have increasingly become the party of an upper-middle-class professional elite, top-heavy with journalists, academics, and lawyers … Weirdly, given their worship of highly individualistic, secularized self-actualization, such professionals as a whole are amazingly credulous these days about big-government solutions to every social problem. They see no danger in expanding government authority and intrusive, wasteful bureaucracy … which often made gestures rather than arguments and brimmed with emotions and sneers.”

Because when you can’t afford to do or to allow any serious thinking about the laws and policies you’ve passed, then political discourse must be reduced to the level of “emotions and sneers” because any examination that’s more competent is going to expose the whole sorry and lethal racket: the baaad ideas, the conceptual incoherence, the potential (and in many cases very probable) bad consequences and the costs, and the outrageous reality of a government that will say Yes to anything now without serious thought. (No: shrewd tactics, even when ‘successful’, cannot substitute for serious thought – although they seem to think it does in the Beltway now.)

And that’s as true of some of the most vaunted initiatives of the ‘advocacies’ of the Seventies and since then as it is of the deeply metastasized Congressional indenture to corporate and financial interests and Big Money.

It’s true, as I said, about both Parties now, equally sunk in cartoonish thinking and indentured by check and threat of exposure to assorted entities that have paid them off with votes or checks, or just the threat of exposing them now that they’re in this thing so deep and have been so for so long.

With all due respect to that Great City and to Obama’s political home turf, the Beltway reminds me of Chicago in the days of Al Capone, with Congress being the Board of Aldermen (male and female, of course).

But Paglia also goes on to offer a worthwhile thought as to how this happened: “dreaming in the 1960s and ‘70s had a spiritual dimension to it that is long gone in our crassly materialistic and status-driven time”.

Well, yes, sorta. We have become shallower and more distracted from the serious challenges and the serious responsibilities that The People bear in the Constitutional vision, and even from the essential competence that such a People must possess as individual Citizens. The ‘youthfulness’ today merely enshrines unripeness and lack of maturity (which is ‘youth’ by definition, neurobiologically speaking) and after decades has created large cohorts of chronological adults who still haven’t been taught to engage and deploy their highest human brainparts and potentials).

And the ‘victimist’ mentality reduces the citizenry to a bunch of helpless gazelles on the savannah, looking to be protected by a government that would like nothing better than to increase its control of a populace that sooner or later is going to discover how treacherously (if often witlessly) it has been betrayed. And further, a ‘victimist’ mentality that fractures the unity of The People, dividing citizens into the ‘pure and good’ and ‘the incorrigiblly monstrous and evil’ – with incalculably toxic consequences for the Republic.

But I can’t just leave it at that, with her thought that “the Left is an incoherent shambles” now “partly because the visionaries lost their bearings on drugs, and only the myopic apparatchiks and feather-preening bourgeois liberals are left”.

That’s true as far as it goes.

But it was inherent even in the visions of some of the Civil Rights Movement, once it became clear in the very early Sixties that the government was indeed starting to bestir itself to take action. Although the classical civil-rights leaders such as A. Philip Randolph and Martin Luther King simply wanted to let the government clear away the obstructions so as to let ‘the Negro’ participate toward the national dream, even back then some black leaders were suggesting that the government needed to stretch forth its mighty arm and rearrange the playing field and put its thumb on the scales of Justice and Opportunity on behalf of one group over another. Which was an invitation to all sorts of mischief, as the Framers always feared and knew.

And so then ‘advocacy’ – which in the beginning was simply a true grassroots effort to end the genuine outrage of Jim Crow – started to become an Advocacy, replete with an agenda, a party-line, offices inside the Beltway, a need to make alliances that didn’t pass any smell test, and a need to adopt all sorts of ‘philosophical’ and conceptual approaches that would ‘justify’ whatever had to be done to get what you wanted.

And then suddely there were a flood of ‘advocacies’ beyond the classic ‘Negro’ Civil Rights advocacy, that arose almost immediately in the early Seventies, and some of them had read way too much Mao and Marx (and even Goebbels) for their own – or Our common – good.

And so now neither the Left nor the Right, the Democrats or the Republicans, are really interested in truth or accuracy or serious thinking at all.

Rather, the game now is just to keep everything together as it is and as it has been, and maybe hope – like Mister Micawber – that “something will turn up” to save the whole show and keep the gravy flowing in the established troughs.

Which is probably what We are doing over there in the Greater Southwest Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere that Our military has been sent to establish: find or get control of some saving resource, sort of the way the 16th century Spanish Empire suddenly got its hands on the gold and silver of the New World, and so purchased a new lease on a rotting life.

The rot is deep now here.

And that is the fierce urgency of now.

SOME SHORT THOUGHTS

I came across several small but not insignificant points in the past couple of days. I’m lumping them together here, since they don’t support a full-sized Post individually. If I don’t have a hyperlink for the reference, I’ll give it the old-fashioned way.

In the February 2009 issue ’Reason’ magazine (p.7), a sidebar contains an interesting comment. One Kate Gordon, co-director of the advocacy group Apollo Alliance was asked where she came up with the number of 5 million as the number of green jobs that would appear under Obama. She refused. Instead she simply blapped: “Honestly, it’s just to inspire people”.

Ah. In case anybody still thought that when public or quasi-public or self-declared public figures publicly assert a fact in support of a position, some effort thad gone into ensuring that the fact or number was accurate. Y’know – so as to give The People accurate information.

Nah. This advocate’s got something better in mind, I guess she’d want to say: instead of trying to inform Us, she’s trying to inspire Us. Sigh. Like the guy on Oprah a couple of weeks ago whose dead mother came to him in a vision and told him to share a story that never quite happened, that is from the realm of ‘memory’ rather than ‘fact’. Not quite a repressed memory, but closely related to it, and both from the clan Spectral Evidence, and so easily asserted as ‘truth’, as long as nobody can prove otherwise.

We were in enough trouble when Truman decided that he needed to scare the hell out of Us in order to wage the Cold War. And when Pentagoon contractors began lowballing bids in order to win them, secure in the knowledge that they could later add-on and inflate and extend and otherwise multiply their charges. And then it spread to the civilian sector – and who can forget the famous Massachusetts Big Dig, accepted as a bid at 2 billion, and coming in at 16 billion, with significant and lethal structural deficiencies to boot.

Along came the Advocacies and decided to take the same tack. Forget trying to ‘inform’ The People; just ‘inspire’ them. And upon such bases, rather significant public policies were hastily conceived and even more hastily enacted and clumsily implemented without taking into account consequences and informed public deliberation.

And who can now trust figures from the government or from ‘advocates’, trying to lull Us into complacency or frighten Us into concurrence?

Upon them all, turn a gimlet eye, and don’t be afraid to pull out your own pocket calculator.

***
On page 9 of the same issue, another sidebar article reports that a study accepted for publication in the Journal of the American Medical Association has concluded after a substantive review of the literature and reports that “available date do not support assumptions that uninsured patients are a primary cause of overcrowding” in Emergency Rooms. This is ‘off’ (in NYPD lingo) the recent spate of state initiatives requiring all citizens to carry health insurance under pain of financial penalty, because – the sweet irony! – of the ‘emergency’ of Emergency Room overcrowding. You could make a good case that this was actually a ‘tax’, since the state was looking for ways to fund health insurance for those who don’t have it – but since it was an ‘emergency’, it has passed in several states, and may ‘go national’.

Actually, the JAMA report goes on to say, it’s not persons with no health insurance who come to the Emergency Room and tie it up, it’s persons with subsidized insurance who do – and that’s precisely the population the state plans seek to increase by forcing everybody to pay in. It started, you may recall, with motor-cycle helmet laws.

***
On the Counterpunch site, in the article “The Dershowitz Check-Up Continues”, dated January 8, 2009, Franklin Lamb goes to some length to critique the stylings of one Alan Dershowitz, tenured professor and attorney extraordinaire, who describes himself as being “Of Counsel to the Government of Israel”.

The Dersh, as one of his students describes it, advises Israel “how to appear to be acting legally in the eyes of the American public”. From the mouths of babes {not to be taken as a denigrating gender reference but rather as the classic translation of the Latin ex ore infantium}.

This, I think, is one of the major problems with the lawyerization of the government in the past 40 years. It’s not about the substance of your actions as they relate to legality; it’s all about and only about the appearance of your actions.

It’s grossly insulting to Us, whose tax dollars are paying for and supplying so much blood-shed around the planet, and certainly in the case of Dersh’s client, the aforesaid Government of Israel, to which he appears to be playing the combined roles of Tom Hagen’s consiglieri in ‘The Godfather’ and the Yoo-Bybee team of Presidential legal counsel who found torture OK, so long as nobody got caught.

And isn’t The Dershster also acting as an advocate? And don’t We all know what those numbers and assertions are worth. Too bad he didn’t advise the Israelis to just claim they were doing it for ‘the children’, or produce a ‘study’ that said that Gaza had the highest concentration of unregistered sex offenders in the Mideast. He might have saved the Israelis a lot of inconvenience; the method, certainly, is well-tested and capable of dissipating substantial chunks of truth and reality. Just what the aforesaid Government needs, especially now.

***
Over on Salon, Camille Paglia writes in her January 14, 2009 column that – har de har – she isn’t afraid of death since “It must be like a long sleep – delicious!”. How many times have We seen this played out: the callow and the cocky go out into the deep water beyond the warning-floats, and you’re a fuddy-duddy and ‘you just don’t get it’, right up until the moment when you absolutely must effect a rescue right this minute. Between the National Security State’s adventures in war-making and the National Nanny State’s adventures in remaking the whole culture overnight … it’s no wonder there’s a bit of rescue fatigue among the citizenry.
But, perversely, it’s precisely that fear that drives the original adventurers to keep up both the in-your-face attitude and the ‘emergency-rescue’ alarm.

It’s a wonder any of Us have any time to think about deeper things – like, say, death and the afterlife. Paglia has written herself a pass – it will be a long sleep. No need to wonder if her self-authorized pass will get by the gate-guards; there’s nothing but sleep on the other side. Over the millennia, a few have sensed otherwise.

There was a Judgment and then perhaps a stretch in some form of atonement mode, and then eternal consciousness in Heaven. Or, on the other hand … eternal consciousness elsewhere. But sleep? As if beyond this life it’s just one long Saturday morning sleep-in?

Them Kathliks figured that having made so wondrous a creature as man – human being – then God would want the individual’s consciousness, self, soul, to remain in existence (and awake) forever. That being the case, there was a powerful motivation for doing the right thing (as often as you could manage), and a powerful consolation for those days when you didn’t think you could put up with leading a decent life in this Vale of Tears.

If there’s nothing but sleep afterwards – if, as students say, ‘there won’t be a test on this’ – then just how much serious application and performance can We expect in the great High School of life?

I wonder: Washington, Lincoln, and a host of other national politicians, had a double reinforcement for conscientious and principles performance in the offices to which they had been elected. They of course were answerable to The People, but they were also – and they very much were aware of it – answerable to God (in some form or another). And when in those cozy dark corners of the Beltway (or Washington City, or whatever their era called it) it happened – as it so often does in government service – that none of The People were around at the moment, they were still held to their sworn duty and their integrity by the inescapable Presence of God.

Conceptually, it’s a pretty significant factor in sustaining a ‘decent and upright’ government in all of the Branches. Curiously, in the past forty years of de-Godding the whole shop, government and its elected officials have clearly been unable to sustain ‘decency and integrity’ merely on the one engine of respect for their sworn oath to The People and to the Constitution. The national Aircraft has lost altitude and speed, and ain’t quite able to stay on the level. And it seems it won’t be much longer before she’s sucking squirrels into the nacelles. Welcome to the new New World Order: otherwise known as Treetop Airways.

You’d think this would scare the pols, but No. They rest in the sure and certain belief that you can fool some of the people some of the time, and that’s usually good enough. And that God protects drunks, idiots, and the denizens of the Beltway.

And perhaps they figure that on the other side there’s only Ms. Paglia’s eternal “It’s Saturday morning” (which were the lyrics to a goo-goo Sixties song the rest of which I forget). Or perhaps they figure that they’ll find a Politician, like unto themselves only bigger, and they’ll be able to strike a confidential deal. Or perhaps they keep in their back pocket (or purse) the napkin from the last Congressional Prayer Breakfast, autographed (and dated) with an indulgent guffaw or chuckle by some slick Fundamentalist big-hair or the Cardinal-Archbishop of wherever.

I think somewhere they are being laughed to scorn. But that’s for them to find out.

Our job, I would think, is to try not to wind up in the same situation.

***
In ‘The New York Times’ edition of January 12, 2009, David Johnston and Charlie Savage report that “Obama Reluctant to Look Into Bush Programs”.

What caught my eye was a by-the-by to the effect that there is “a need to establish trust among the country’s intelligence agencies”. Well, that may indeed by an issue. But I don’t think it’s the core problem. The core problem is re-establishing trustworthiness there inside the Beltway. The problem with this government isn’t that The People don’t trust it (so The People simply need to be somehow persuaded to invest their ‘trust’ again). No, the problem is that The People don’t trust government, or its figures or its ‘stories’ or all of its pomps and works, and that the government needs to start behaving itself.

But that’s what the younger Luther figured he could convince the Papal Curia to do, back when he still figured everything was either on the level, or that the ‘elites’ basically wanted to conduct affairs on the level and just needed a little reminding. That didn’t turn out so well.

Yes, the reporters go on to note that the intelligence community would like to not have to be constantly “looking over its shoulders”. Well, one very tried and true way of not living your life constantly looking out for police cars is to not commit any crimes that would attract the attention of the law. Or is that too ‘quaint’? Or too ‘pre-postmodern’? Or too ‘judgmental’? Or too ‘conventional’. Or ‘just the same old thing’ and not sufficiently ‘creative’ and ‘innovative’?
We have been treated to far too many (safely) retired generals and admirals and assorted civilian biggies who only came out against the profound outrages of the past decade when they were no longer in a position to influence events (Major General Antonio Taguba is most honorably excepted here, among a few others). Former JAGs who are now ‘shocked, shocked’ although they gamed everything well when they were in their bespangled uniforms – these people must think We are complete imbeciles. If so, We must ask Ourselves where they might have formed that opinion – for whatever else a general officer is, he is a shrewd sizer-upper of odds and probabilities when maturing his little plans.

***
On Truthout, under date of January 14, 2009, Maya Schenwar reports that “Congress Aims to Take Back Constitutional War Powers”.

Well, from her mouth to God’s ear. Although after what We’ve seen in this Gaza debacle, and after decades of just about every serving Congressperson giving away every bit of responsibility s/he could like it was a chunk of kryptonite, and after what We saw following the 2006 elections, I’m not going to break out the champagne yet [it is said that on the day Generalissimo Franco died, Spain ran out of champagne].

Perhaps Congress would like to take back its power over the currency, which in 1913 it gave to the newly-assembled Federal Reserve Board, a ‘delegation’ of its Constitutional power which it quite possibly did not have the authority to make. And while in the mood, it might take back the authority for the Executive Branch (through the military) to conduct criminal justicial process, a ‘delegation’ which it not only colorably didn’t have the authority to make, but which on its very face contradicts the very core principles of the Founders’ vision in the matter of keeping the Courts and the Executive separate. Very little good has come out of either ‘delegation’: We are going broke under the auspices of the Federal Reserve and Our civilian justice system is becoming increasingly militarized under the aura of the military justice system.

***
Last but not least, Helen Thomas reports, again on Truthout, under date of January 9, 2009, that in response to a question from ABC News as to how history will judge his stewardship of the past 8 years, the Adult-In-Chief said flatly that he “won’t be around to read it”.

Now, you don’t have to have a Ph.D. in anything to start unpacking that queasy comment.

This is the quintessential Bush: an unripe who’s only concern about his performance is that History (and The People) ain’t gonna catch him, because he’ll have gotten out of town before anybody can figure out all the stuff he’s done. Ruined lives, aggressive wars, the economy gone beyond any hope of recovering its pre-Bush dimensions … hey, he’s gettin’ outta town.

This specimen got to the Presidency. That is not a really strong advertisement for the state of Our politics. Sure, there were some lesser lights back in the days when the President had an army and navy of less than fifty thousand members combined, when you could walk up to the White House and bang on the door and get an answer. But this guy made it to the top when this country was at the zenith of its power and influence. There’s a fair chance that ‘they’ out there in the world don’t hate Us; they’re laughing at Us.

Except that if We (or the Beltway denizens) feel like it, death-dealing military force can be dispatched to any place on the planet to whack enough locals so everybody will wipe that smile off their face.

But they’re probably wondering why We should be taken seriously at all. If We can elect – or at least pretend to have elected – this guy, then just how ready for prime time are We? World power? Model and beacon of Democracy to the world? If Ben Cartwright and his boys had carried on like this, the Ponderosa would have been taken by eminent domain and broken up into development lots. Ben, Ben, We hardly knew ye. Forget Joe DiMaggio, sportsfans – it’s Ben Cartwright who was the greatest loss. And it’s not “lonely eyes” that We need to be turning; it’s “unserious eyes” that have gotten used to looking upon wayyyyy too much dreck and calling it ‘good’.

Too many folks are going to be using the Obama Inauguration as a quick and easy way to blame it all on Bush, simultaneously absolving themselves and reassuring themselves that everything will get back to ‘normal’ now, everything will get better. Bush was some sort of mysterious freak of political nature, that’s all.

Not hardly. We did this to Ourselves. And We inflicted this weasel on the rest of the world. Nobody’s going to forget that, except too many of Us.

Cocky and crapulous to the last, he’ll swagger off campus – having never done any homework, having never passed a test. He caused more damage than the Russkies ever dreamed of (name one US city that was lost to the USSR; Bush lost New Orleans) and though Khruschev didn’t bury Us, it seems that We are almost buried nonetheless, just a few years beyond what Nikita predicted. Mikhail Gorbachev recently mused that the US now has capitalism for the poor and Communism for the rich – have We, in the end, no shame?

Maybe Bush expects that when he’ll be ‘not-around’, he’ll be sleeping Paglia’s Saturday morning sleep. Or maybe he figures that God fell for all his feculent fraudities. Or maybe he really does believe that the Sacred and Patriotic Moon-pie Heaven of the Fundamentalist Ascendancy is exactly what he’s going to find, where he’ll be once again cheered as he lands on the flight deck, with St. Peter obediently waiting to strike up Hail to the Chief and God saluting him as a fellow Chief Executive. Do you think Bush isn’t that far gone? Do you think he ever wasn’t that far gone?

As far as he’s concerned, that for Us to find out.

OLD COOTS

In her always stimulating column on Salon, Camille Paglia has a back and forth with a reader who’s not sure he likes the phrase ‘weird old coot’ “Who are you calling a ‘coot’?” (http://www.salon.com/opinion/paglia/2008/07/09/russert/).

In light of what I’ve said in the immediately previous Post, let me add this: coothood is not primarily a matter of age. If you’ve been doing your homework as a growing adult over the course of your life, then (barring some catastrophic event like a stroke) you don’t suddenly become a cranky, half-witted, small-souled, mean-spirited, small-minded pain-in-the-stern-tube. You have to work at that, over the course of a life-time. But it doesn’t just happen as a function of inhaling too many years’ worth of birthday-cake candle smoke. As Fielding observed (more or less): ‘It is said that alcohol will dull the passions – and so it will, in a dull man’.

America has always had a bias against age, although not as clearly as you might think. Even in frontier times, a certain age – properly made use of – enabled one to see or carry out options that might be invisible to the inexperienced or emotion-blinded eyes of a younger man. We recall John Wayne’s aging cavalry captain in “She Wore A Yellow Ribbon” and his even wiser, less shooty ex-gunslinger in “The Shootist” (his last film, perhaps not coincidentally). These characters were not competent just because they were old, but the character derived a certain heft, a genuine gravitas, from having paid attention to his years as they presented experience to him, and from having then had the gumption to incorporate changes into his way of going about things. This is called ‘maturing’, once considered an important part of Western Civilization. Perhaps it can be rehabilitated on campuses that cost north of 60K a year if we also point out that many non-white and non-European societies have also had a demonstrated respect for the process.

The Awful ’68, coming as it did so quickly on the heels of the Glorious ’65, continues to plague Us. For that the too-easily satisfied “Greatest Generation” can be given a good swift thank in the butt: they were adults in ’68, and they yielded their positions without really much of a fight at all. (Of course, they weren’t just up against ‘the kids’; they were up against the entire weight of the Democratic Party, which had quietly concluded that women and youth and whatever else came down the pike were their ticket to continued political control).

It stuns to think that so many of those millions of fresh-faced kids came back from the War with the queasy feeling that they’d never feel so alive again. Even though they all felt the soldier’s relief at going home and ‘getting back to normal’, it seems that they left something back there on the fields of Europe and the Pacific. Nor did it help that the whole country’s effort to ‘get back to normal’ included a hefty – and hardly unsurprising – dose of peace and quiet, purchased by a certain ‘conformity’ that itself was partly just the natural outgrowth of habits learned in military (and naval life): there’s a right way to do things, and if you just pay attention, you minimize the chances of getting yourself and your pals blown up – and the better you are at this, the fewer ‘emergencies’ you and your unit will have. ‘Emergencies’ – sorta every schoolkid’s favorite rush – were not really appreciated at 20,000 feet or 2500 miles from nearest friendly land or 60 seconds before the advance elements of the enemy assault made contact with your picket line. “Oops” was not often an apology that you got to make twice in the unforgiving world of a military at war.

‘Emergencies’, after all, had gotten the Germans a government that plunged them, Europe, and just about everybody else into a war that flattened them as a nation. In a way, it was kinda good, because it’s harder to stampede folks who have ‘managed’ themselves and their lives on the homefront or on the battlefront. The ‘50s were kinda quiet because folks had had a bellyful of ‘emergencies’ and because they had in some very real ways ‘grown up’, matured, to the point where they neither craved ‘emergencies’ nor went all kablooey if one came up.

But somehow We got to ’68. And got stuck there. Until We started going downhill.

Back to ‘coots’. If you do your job right all along as an adult, you can wind up as something of an Obi-Wan or one of those sage older women on Masterpiece theatre. And if the ball takes some bad bounces, you still remain ‘you’ with the gifts of maturity that nothing (barring those nasty cerebral catastrophes) can take away from you.

Even if your culture doesn’t appreciate maturity, or wouldn’t know it if it tripped over it. Even still, maturity brings its own rewards. And actually, in relational circles, its heft will sooner or later, quietly make itself felt. Maturity has a gravitational pull like a black hole: even if it can’t be seen, things around it move in response to its effect. The ‘strings’ that are the building blocks of material reality (material used figuratively, as the big picture theorists use it) respond to maturity’s ‘vibes’ (and thereby ’67, if not ’68, finds some vindication!).

So avoid coothood by embarking on the journey toward maturity now. And with some luck, the combined maturities – at whatever stage each of Us manages – will exert enough gravitational pull to restore the common weal and preserve the Republic.

CHRISTIANS AND MORMONS

In her Salon article of yesterday, Camille Paglia also touches upon Mitt Romney (“A cause they’ve long ago forgotten”, www.salon.com/opinion/paglia/2007/05/09/scarborough/print.html).

She’s not pleased that the Mormons are not being taken at their word (or demand) that they are indeed “Christians”. After all, she huffs, there’s no reason for those bossy Fundamentalists to be the gate-keepers of who is and is not ‘Christian’. Who – so to speak - died and made them God?

I am in absolute agreement with her that the stereotypical Fundamentalists are in need of serious nemesis. They are arrogant, under-informed, gummint-worshipping zealots when they are not actually whackjobs. Who mightn’t draw some consolation for life’s dusty journey from seeing legions of angels come down and go after the most florid Fundies with flaming warrants and divine SWAT? During such a raid certain municipalities in this nation might resemble Berlin when the Soviets started coming up the street, but who could deny that the inhabitants had it coming?

That being said, I think she has drunk too deeply of the cup of modern culture in regard to this ‘Christian’ matter. Religion is not just a matter of personal choice or (in the Morman instance) specific-group choice. Just as the Mormons will not acknowledge a person as a Mormon merely because the aspirant has publicly declared a liking for their religion (and maybe even bought a bunch of stuff for sale on the website or at the gift shop), so too Christians (broadly, not Fundamentalistically defined) cannot accept a group such as the Mormons simply because the group has suddenly – for whatever purposes – opted to declare its abiding fondness for Jesus.

Nor does the simple feeling of abiding fondness for Jesus constitute ‘Christian-ness’ or ‘Christianity’. Not any more than feeling reely reely sad about Princess Di’s death automatically accredits one as a scholar on all things British. But you can see where the confusion might arise in our modern American reality.

Christians – as diverse and variously-diagnosable as they sometimes are (the multi-culti PC buzzword ‘rich’ doesn’t even begin to encompass things here) – are identified by their acknowledgement of Jesus Christ as the Son of God and as Himself divine, and by their sustained aspiration to shape self and life according to His precepts.

Upon that rock the tides of many religions have rippled. Nascent Islam recognized Jews and Christians as People of the Book, recognized Jesus as a wise man and one of the great prophets, although only a precursor to the Prophet Mohammed. The Mormon approach was different: Joseph Smith made everybody divine in some form or another (quasi, semi, formerly, futurely, metaphorically) and thus Jesus was a Reely Great Guy whose life should be given a close look by the Mormon faithful. Jesus was not, however, divine in the sense of being THE Son of God, the only Son of God, God Made Flesh as Definitive Redemptive Revelation. Nope.

Without getting into the specifics of Joseph Smith’s revelations and illuminations and limiting oneself to the theological, the thoughtful student would have to say that Mormons are not Christians, and Mormon insistence on being considered so is not sufficient grounds for allowing them to wear Jesus t-shirts immune from public challenge. They are no more Christian than Blackwater gun-toters are officers of the United States armed forces even though the Blackwaterites have bought a lot of the neat stuff that said officers frequently wear and carry. And – it has to be admitted – in our modern American reality, appearances can so often pass for substance and reality among the distracted and too-polite-to-raise-insensitive-questions citizenry.

But in many areas of American life and culture now, the time for questioning – however painful – has come. Government officials don’t want to be questioned and would rather we all focus on the future and just move on (I’m sure Al Capone would have wanted to urge that approach on the judge if he thought American justice could ever be witless enough to take it seriously … but those were less enlightened times). Before that, various advocacies didn’t want their horror-stories or their ‘numbers’ questioned and threatened to feel even more pain if We tried (who can forget Cleavon Little’s magnificent performance holding his own gun to his neck in front of the townsfolk in Mel Brooks’ “Blazing Saddles”?).

Now the Mormons, for some reason, are insisting that they be called Christians (and assume that We are sufficiently house-broken to keep our questions to ourselves without their having to threaten about pain, insensitivity, moving-on, patriotism, and freedom of religion). Well, actually, they are questioning anybody’s questioning of their being called ‘Christian’, as if they had been acknowledged as and had claimed to be Christians all this time and any current doubt as to their achievement must be sinisterly motivated. Perhaps politically motivated.

Like positioning one’s co-religionists for a run on the Presidency is politically motivated. That sort of thing.

Well, while Christianity is – thankfully – not completely identified with Fundamentalist whackjobbery, it is also not completely identified with modern American Gimme-Iwanna culture. It still has a Shape, a Trellis, that gives its being an ‘identity’, and thus sets boundaries, and those boundaries work both ways: Christians should and should not think or do or cultivate a desire for certain things, and persons not willing to trying to follow that regimen cannot be classified as Christians. No matter how much they wanna, no matter how much they demand Gimme, no matter how much their prospects for the Presidency are thus diminished.

The Mormons have – very shrewdly – overcome their early weirdness by making themselves into the American equivalent of Hitler-era ‘Aryans’: the quintessential exemplars and embodiment of all that is ideally best in the culture and the citizenry. And, being quintessentially American as well, the Mormons are banking on Us folks figuring that anybody who’s gone to so much trouble to be American should be allowed whatever they like in the store. After all, what’s Christianity but a commodity or a label anyway, so why can’t We give it away for free as a reward sometimes? If it’s justified, of course; folks have to earn it. Although demanding, if it’s done loud enough, is a form of ‘earning’ nowadays.

Human beings have a perfect right to make certain demands: demands in Justice, grounded in the rights each individual enjoys as a human being (you can see why the Imperial Unitariat is not real high on Kathlik flosofy now, especially if it’s preached to troops, especially guard-forces at … ummm … well, we don’t torture anyway so why go on with this sentence?)

Demands based on Desire rather than Justice are something else again, and enjoy no such privileged position. In fact, it’s insanely irresponsible to accord Demands-of-Desire the same authority as Demands-of-Justice. Which perhaps is why ‘questioning’ the clouds of ‘demands’ made here and there in the later Sixties and the Seventies was suddenly made out to be a not-Good Thing. ‘Desire’ was replacing ‘Justice’ as the engine of authority in Our society and Our culture. To try to distinguish the difference was simply being Oppressive and Insensitive; Nice people didn’t do such things.

Our niceness has led to some monstrous things. Our government – as is the nature of that beast – saw its way clear to serve its own ceaseless appetites, and while We were satisfied that We had blocked the rare Strange monster who kidnapped, abused, and murdered this or that child, the government took dozens of thousands of our slightly older young and sent them on an invasion-of-choice that has kidnapped, tortured, and killed untold dozens of thousands of other peoples’ children. We have been remiss.

It’s pure politics that nowadays the Mormons want to be considered Christians so as to tap into the Rove-ian ‘base’. It’s what the Unitarium wants, surely. But the political conundrum is that the aforesaid ‘base’ is so reliable precisely because it does draw hard and fast and clear lines of demarcation between itself (“Christian”) and all others (Islamofascists, Frenchmen, gays, Democrats, Kathliks, and – presumably still - Communists). The Rove-ian hope, I wager, is that the base are mostly ‘believers’ and not ‘thinkers’ and so most of them will not stop to reason through the proposition if they can be told a good enough ‘story’ to make them feel good about it (not much different a dynamic from the assorted Advocacies of the Left, come to think of it).

The Mormons are welcome to support one of their co-religionists for President. Diluting or doing an end run around the substance of American belief and the capacity for reasoned deliberation is not welcome. And if they have Our best interests and Our commonweal at heart, then they won’t try it. We’ve got enough trouble on Our hands now as it is.

WAR’S WARRIORS

Over on Salon Camille Paglia (yippee – she’s back!) talks about a recent military funeral (“A cause they’ve long ago forgotten”, www.salon.com/opinion/paglia/2007/05/09/scarborough/print.html).

The funeral is for a Marine junior officer, age 26, killed near Fallujah, on his second tour of duty. His father is a Marine Reserve colonel, which start to thicken the plot. The ceremony is held at the Willow Grove Naval Air Station itself; the eulogy is given by a Marine general, head of the Marine Air Wing stationed there.

Questions arise, and not simply the obvious point that nowadays the Pentagon suddenly has reversed course and wants funerary ceremonies fully publicized (although – like Goot Chermanss and Soviet citizens, We are not supposed to have the bad civic manners to ask Why or to recall that just yesterday the official position was exactly and irrevocably and ontologically the opposite). Why at the Air Station? Why an Air Wing general speaking (the deceased was – as best can be discerned – a ‘grunt’ officer, engaged in infantry ops).

Answers suggest themselves: The colonel wanted the best for his boy and he had the rank and connections to get it. The general spoke because in the modern Fundamentalist-besotted chaplain corps no reliably competent chaplain could be found equal to the occasion.

But why was the occasion so heavily publicized? And anytime a general officer speaks publicly, it’s going to make news so why did this one even permit himself to step up to the klieg lights?

His comments start to shed light, revealing perhaps more than We are expected to absorb. “Welcome home, warrior” the general intoned, in the accents of an ancient age. Then, less anciently: “It’s absolutely an honor to be part of your homecoming”, he addressed the casket (presumably not extending his hand for a fraternal shake).

So. We are Sparta now. Or perhaps a certain European country in 1944. Let’s not mention the war – let’s just emphasize the fact that you’re dead from wounds and we’re glad to have you back. Ja. Yah.

More suggests itself. Is this episode a roll-out of the new Pentagon spin, officially sanctioned from above (most generals don’t get to be generals by doing public stuff that is not officially sanctioned by the Pentagon)? Or is it some indication that within the Services themselves – certainly the tightly-bound and tightly-wound Marine Corps – the fighters are resentful of how they are being mishandled?

The ‘Leadership’ was nowhere to be seen. Of course, from the bunker in the capital and – what the hey? – the forests of East Prussia the Leadership had suddenly materialized to welcome a visiting head of state. And that head of state showed herself to be as unamused about having to be photographed with them as, say, Marshal Antonescu, when he had to make an official visit to the forest to hear how things were going and – ach! – not-going on the Eastern Front.

But the Marine Corps’ effort to preserve something for itself, of itself, isn’t going to be enough. Not hardly. It cannot be enough that one wars and that one is a ‘warrior’. A soldier of a democracy must – as Douglas MacArthur stated in clarion prose – “defend the defenseless”. Such is not the consequence of preventive, invasive war – as MacArthur and that entire Nuremberg and Geneva generation realized even then.

Am I blaming the soldiers – now as reprehensible a gambit as ‘blaming the victims’ was not so long ago? No.

I am blaming Us. The blood of 1st Lt. Travis Manion and all his colleagues (and upon them be peace) – dead and wounded, damaged in body or in spirit – is on Our hands, for they were sent there obedient to Our word. Nor can We indulge in a Diana-zeit self-flattering gush of maudlin but artfully klieg-friendly sentimentality. No flowers, no ribbons, no plastic flags. Rather, We must exert Ourselves to perform Our own ancient task: the work of ‘strenuous liberty’. We must think, and deliberate, and decide, and then – the government having gotten into a very bad habit of not paying attention to what We think since We haven’t been doing much of it for so long – make Ourselves heard where it counts.

Do we grieve for our losses? Well, they are precisely that – Our losses, incurred by obedience to Our word. And words have consequences. And the buck stops with Us. Allons, enfants de la patrie! Our own enfants are depending on Us.