BAAAD MOVIE, BAAAD FANTASY

Over on Salon, the always-worthwhile Gary Kamiya writes today about McCain’s inconsistencies (so shrewdly wrapped up in flag-waving): “Waving the Flag on Iraq”, http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2008/07/29/mccain/).

Coupla things come to me.

One, this ‘shrewd packaging’ has been around for a while. It’s reprehensible and it is precisely antithetical to a democratic politics. Democratic politics, We may recall, presumes that The People are informed accurately and promptly of all material relevant to matters of large and grave public import. But let’s not think that Mr. Obama’s election (and I do not seek Mr. McCain’s election at all) will make all of this dreck go away overnight. As I mentioned a couple of days ago, the Attorney-General of Massachusetts recently stashed a Patriot Act-type ‘administrative subpoena’ authority for any possible crime deep within the text of a child-sex-offense law; like any good bank-robber, she used ‘the children’ and ‘sex-offenses’ as a shield to give the Commonwealth its own Patriot Act. And the Legislature and the Governor went along with it, the former voting for it in Patriot-Act-level majorities. Lovely. One can only wonder what will be ‘the next logical step’.

Second, Kamiya quotes McCain from recent comments:

"Above all, America would have been humiliated and weakened. Our military, strained by years of sacrifice, would have suffered a demoralizing defeat. Our enemies around the globe would have been emboldened. Terrorists would have seen our defeat as evidence America lacked the resolve to defeat them. As Iraq descended into chaos, other countries in the Middle East would have come to the aid of their favored factions, and the entire region might have erupted in war. Every American diplomat, American military commander and American leader would have been forced to speak and act from a position of weakness."

Now, there’s a psychiatric term for this: projection. It’s when the (rather disturbed) patient feels that the badness inside of himself actually resides in some other person. So, in this case, everything patient McCain claims is a problem with Mr. Obama and the Democrats is actually a state of affairs rather directly attributable to himself and the Republicans (and wayyyyy too many Democrats). Because every single element of the nightmare vision he ticks off in his above quote has come to pass, as a result of Republican and his own action.

Yes, even the lasts point about American military commanders now forced to speak and act from a position of weakness. Over the weekend I came across a broadcast of ‘Tora, Tora, Tora’, the early ‘70s big-screen retelling of the attack on Pearl Harbor. You may recall that scene at the very end: Admiral Yamamoto explains ominously to his staff that their rather successful attack was through unfortunate circumstances made before the declaration of war was delivered to the Americans. He walks out onto the empty deck of his Imperial battleship, looking at the vast empty sea, with the text of his thought superimposed on the screen as the music swells to a satisfying (for an American audience) conclusion: “I fear we have only wakened a sleeping giant, and filled him with a terrible resolve”.

Yes, I know how ruthlessly Incorrect he was: it should have been ‘filled him/her with a terrible resolve’. Try to move beyond the shock, now. It came to me that the movie was hugely and queasily dated; ‘the Americans’ aren’t a ‘giant’ anymore, however much they may be asleep. And they aren’t going to be winning any World War 2’s again. It’s already a period-piece, not only of 1941 but of 1971. That America is gone, baby, gone. When I saw it on the big screen back in the day, the idea in the back of my head was that, Yup, this is us, and now on top of the battleships we have nukes and B-52s and we can do the World War Two thing again whenever we have to. Not. Not ever again. And we still have the same B-52s by the by, now over half-a-century old.

Kamiya also notes that “the war is still going on, which mutes criticism of it.” So far so true. But it comes to me: this means that for a lot of powerful folks, the war will have to keep going on, if for no other reason than to prevent ‘criticism’ (and examination, and -oy! - investigation of it and them and all their pomps and all their works). We see this in assorted domestic initiatives and madnesses of recent vintage: by this point so many important folks have done so much that they’d rather not talk about to keep the things going for so many reasons that they’d rather not talk about … such that they can’t even begin to try to implement saner and more rational policies for fear of exposing all they’ve done, bringing it into public awareness. And it’s all too big a frak-up to deploy the old Pentagon scam: We did nothing wrong and we’ve already fixed it so it’s old news and let’s move on.

And Kamiya very rightly notes that what has had any success at all has been not the macho, go-it-alone, suck-on-this, aggressive ‘war’, but rather “painstaking police work, diplomacy, with sometimes unpleasant actors, good intelligence, the skillful use of carrots and sticks, knowing the local terrain, avoiding self-defeating moral posturings”. I’d like to point out that this list of options requires maturity, patience, and lots of stuff once associated with grown-ups, and grown-ups who were kinda ‘civilized’ and could live in a society of other grown-ups.

We are hell-and-gone from that now, and even Our government shows it. We elected these unripe chimps and sleazy kewpie-dolls, and they went and brought in others even worse than themselves. Maybe the Fundamentalist whack-jobs are right: there’s some sort of demonic possession here. Of course, rather than take the advice of them old, conventional, kinda unmanly Kathliks, the average Fundoozie will try to solve the problem with a trusty fowling piece, which won’t work on the type of possession now bethumping Us (and the rest of the world, and all its women and all its children, to say nothing of all the animals – as Scripture saith). Or perhaps vegetable oil will work on vampires in lieu of the unmanly Kathlik holy water. Such is the state of theology among Us these days.

Anyhoo, even if one doesn’t quite feel comfortable with the theological aspects of all this, one might retain one’s union card simply by discussing the psychological aspects of it: maturationally, We have lost a lot of ground in the past few years and decades and Administrations. Currently, We are ‘not quite performing at the higher end of Our range’, as the social workers tastefully and sensitively put it. Preventive aggressive assaults, locking lots of folks up, torturing them … oh my, there is some work to be done here, dear … are you insured?

Lying on the national couch will no longer be for the liberations of free sex while high as a B-52. It will be court-ordered, in order to see if We can stand trial. How in the high Sixties have We come to this? We had such promise once. Ah well, there are a million stories in the naked country.

Kamiya also acutely notes that McCain is banking (Wheeeee! Sorry!) on the media and Us not having much “memory”. Memory, except for the dubious though telegenic ‘repressed’ kind, is also a grown-up thing, if it’s to be done right. After all, the same mind that is trying to remember also houses the fantasy and dream functions, and the firewalls aren’t all that solid. And when the patient has done some things so bad that s/he finds it too painful to remember – not because of ‘tromma’ but because of dadblasted inescapable guilt – well then, the patient would experience a certain palpable urge toward a very selective, perhaps creative, memory. Like how We imagine that the arch-secularist and old-school Saddaam had up-to-date WMD and the means to deliver them, and that he was throwing nightly brewfests for radically religious jihadis in his in-house bar at one or another of his palaces. I mean, We wouldn’t just up and go over and whack him, would We? Gee, doc, that’s not me … is it?

Is it?

WHODUNIT? WHUDTHEYDO?

Matt Taibbi (“Economic Realities Are Killing Our Era of Fantasy Politics”, www.alternet.org/story/91927) quotes Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders that “the middle class is disappearing; in real ways we’re becoming more like a third-world country”. It’s too true. And the U.S. is becoming a 3rd-world country not only because the middle-class hasn’t got the financial substance to keep itself going anymore (all the money’s gone up the ladder to the megarich) but because – like a classic third world backwater – this country no longer has much left of the industrial and skills base to change this queasy slide to bananaless-banana-republic.

Taibbi quotes Sanders’ urgent solution: “Corporate America is going to have to reinvest in our society”. Well, yes, that would be good – and if corporate America hadn’t disinvested, then We wouldn’t be in this mess now. But who’s gonna make corporate America do it? Congress? A bunch of panderers who no longer even read the bills they pass?

I think there’s always been an unspoken ‘contract’ between the citizenry and Congress: they’d only pass laws they’d read and debated and concluded were good for the common weal, and we would follow the laws and respect the legislators and do our best to make things work. That contract has been broken, and it was first broken quite some years ago: Congress (starting with the Democrats 40 years ago) took advantage of our trust, passed all sorts of whackjob laws for its own political gain, and then cynically prostituted itself to the big-money interests while the little folks – bethumped by words and impossible and toxic laws – played the role of donkey, with no option but to accept yet another load in the basket, and clop along the hot, dusty, and increasingly pot-holed road.

And lest anybody want to console themselves with the thought that it’s only been the Republicans doing this and only for the past 8 years, William Greider’s opinion is that “the Democrats were in collusion virtually every step of the way, and sometimes they led the way”. And not only in collusion with the post-9/11 intelligence and war and eavesdropping and torture stuff, but for decades before that with allowing the country’s (and the middle-class’s) economic base to erode away, to the economic benefit of the uberbucks bunch .. and the Dems themselves, who got their cut packaged as ‘campaign contributions’ through PACs and other sewer-conduits. (‘Nightmare on Wall Street’, www.alternet.org/story/92286). What the Dems have done in abetting the civil-liberties and foreign policy messes of the past 8 years is only the second half in a game they’ve been playing for decades now.

And not only in economics: the symptoms and dynamics of “war psychosis” as described by Sir Michael Howard were introduced into Our domestic national politics by the Democrats in order to further the revolutions of their fancied Identities 40 years ago. To arouse within the citizenry “an immediate expectation and demand for spectacular military action against some easily identifiable adversary, preferably a hostile [but not too powerful] state …” Take out ‘military’ and substitute ‘legal’ or ‘criminal’ action; substitute ‘group’ for ‘state’ .. and you’ve pretty much got the gameplan that has been going in Our midst for the past 4 decades. And that means that it had been going on for 30 years before 9/11 came along.

And just as “the Bush regime decided to formulate and implement a foreign policy that placed a premium on unilateral military action … deliberation, debate, and diplomacy were jettisoned …”, so too for decades before that the Democrats indulged the Identities’ demand that public deliberation and wide-ranging debate on social changes be jettisoned in favor of unilateral government action in the service of the Identities’ assorted agendas. And as that happened time after time, for decades, The People’s ability to maturely become informed, deliberate individually and communally, and achieve such consensus as was possible went by the boards. The People’s maturity regressed to processing information without critical thought, or regard for proportion, context, or even consequences. And now, politically, societally, economically, as well as militarily … it’s all hit the fan at once, in this Year of Grace 2008. (‘A Kinder, Gentler Imperialism?’, http://www.counterpunch.com/).

So Our politics has indeed been a “fantasy” for a long time; and now so is Our money and Our military and – to a frightening extent – Our maturity. Let’s leave ‘moral and spiritual integrity’ out of it, just out of a decent respect to readers with heart problems.

And all this has contributed to the ‘militarization’ of civil culture. The military is one of the last bastions of American institutional culture where – to some extent at least – a decent respect for actual realities has to be maintained simply to get its job done. It has hardly escaped the past 40 years unharmed in that regard; and to observe things military for years here has been to be continuously reminded of Wehrmacht generals trying to fight the war in the Ukraine and telling Berlin that it would be far better to cooperate with the mostly anti-Soviet Ukrainian population than to shoot them and make enemies-in-the-rear out of an entire populace; No said Berlin, that is politically incorrect – shoot them all because they are only Untermenschen and – besides – we want their land and resources for ourselves. Ach. And the consequences of the Party’s political correctness blew back in their millions.

The military is also one of this country’s last bastions of at least a modestly coherent identity as American. So many in this country see themselves and are only invested in themselves as ‘victims’. And the feminists (of that so-soviet Second Wave, certainly) see themselves not as Americans first but as ‘women’, and with a primary allegiance not to other Americans (half of them the hated and sex-maniacal ‘men’) but to ‘women’ oppressed around the world (by even more ‘men’). No wonder that in a nation whose society is wracked by – for all practical purposes – a civil war (along gender lines rather than regional or class lines) then there is a strong undertow pulling many toward the military ethos if for no other reason than to keep a grasp on some sense of being ‘American’. Thanks, Dems.

Of course, it’s just icing on the cake that the culture of ‘manly’ Southern militarism, justly bashed into nostalgia by Mr. Lincoln’s Grant and Sherman and those eerily-strong-souled boys in blue, came seeping back, as the glow of a truly civil American cultural and social and political community receded under the fiery clouds of Identity-ism in all its forms. So now if anybody among Us wants to identify as 'an American' it’s the military way or the highway. We might as well look at American culture prior to ’68 the way we look at European culture prior to 1914: the lamps are going out all over, and we shall not see them lit again …

Thanks, Dems: you created Identities, de-created 'American' identity, and re-created the Confederacy. Nothing do-nothing about your congresses. No sirreee. The South wound up winning the thing after all. Meanwhile in foreign adventures the imperial Security State hides behind 'the troops' and in domestic adventures the policed-up Nanny State hides behind 'the victim'. I think the Nanny State is going to wind up killing as many folks - one way or another - as the Security State, and the Nanny State will have wreaked more damage on the Constitution to boot. And yet, like the Security State on the Eastern Front, it meant so well. The hot ironies!

Good sweet frakking Divinity! What has happened to Us? Where do We go from here? August is coming, and if it’s anything like August of ’14, or August of ’39 …

YOUTH ISN’T TRUTH

Over on Truthout it is reported that California Democrats are trying to get 16-17 year-olds some type of vote (they call it ‘preregistering’), and seek to allow 17 year-olds to vote in the primary if they will be 18 by the general election. See “California Republicans Cool to Youth-Voting Bills” (http://www.truthout.org/article/state-republicans-cool-youth-voting-bills)

As is evident from its title, the article (originally from the ‘San Francisco Chronicle’) has clearly given this thing a certain spin. Something like: stuffy old grown-ups get in way of the future and a better life for all of us kewl types.

This is a re-run of the play the Dems deployed in ’71 when they got a constitutional amendment passed to give 18 year-olds the vote. The argument then was that if they could die in Vietnam they should be able to have the vote (neatly sidestepping the huge question as to whether their brains were sufficiently neurobiologically matured such that they could exercise any vote that they might ‘have’). But the drinking age was put back up to 21 after awhile; it seemed that the kids could be trusted with military weapons that could destroy whole city-blocks but didn’t do well with beer. And as mentioned here a couple of days ago, experienced special-forces ops seem to require an older, more matured brain – with, say, 30 or so years of experience under its belt – rather than the impatient and inexperienced – perhaps not even fully formed – brain of a late teen or a twenty-something.

If this were a matter of maturely considering the situation and going with the best available evidence and thought, you would expect the Dems to figure that maybe the voting age should go back up to 21, at least. But no. This is, like it was then, hell-and-gone from ‘mature consideration of the common weal’; it has now as it did then everything to do with the Dems garnering ‘votes’.

You might think that a moment’s step-back from the current national train-wreck might lead any responsible adult to consider that decades of conducting national politics according to ‘feelings’ and the surface appearances of things, rather than a sorta grown-up coming-to-grips-with the complexities of serious matters, would lead us away from a kid-friendly emphasis on ‘coolness’ and total, instant fulfillment of whatever ‘good’ the brain has currently latched on to. A politics of feelings and appearances has utterly debauched and derailed our politics and undercut our common weal.

In support, the media report ‘feelings’ rather than issues, pols are concerned not only primarily with ‘feelings’ but even more importantly with making sure that they appear to be sensitive to feelings. Feelings unrealistic, immature, and downright dark have deformed Constitutional theory, jurispraxis, and the criminal law; soapisch and celebrity-besotted political ‘campaigns’ have led to the selection of Bush as President, and a current roster of candidates to replace him that features an aged, dubiously distinguished eccentric and a well-intentioned man with little actual experience, who himself has just recently triumphed over a woman who claimed that being the wife of a President went a long way to qualify her for the Presidency itself.

This is no way to run a Republic. And we shall not remain one very long.

‘Youth’ was one of the Identities desperately raised up by the Dems to replace the enraged Southern whites (who with their whackjob preachers achieved an Ascendancy in the past fifteen years from the consequences of which We shall never fully recover) and the soon-to-be-obsolescent blue-collar industrial males of the soon-to-be Rustbelt, whose obsolescence the Dems did much to hasten in their two-faced orgy of pandering to feminists who hated ‘men’ and corporate barons who hated giving money to workers. Mr. Obama may be very well-intentioned, but he faces a well-entrenched treachery that has had decades, on both sides of the aisle, to settle in. Mr. McCain, no doubt, will consider the present state of the affairs as The American Way, and continue – like Superman – to ‘do whatever it takes’ to preserve it.

‘Youth’ is not known for its ability to deliberate. The brain itself hasn’t fully formed, let alone the individual’s ability to effect a mastery of the integrated operating system of brain, body, emotions, character (or what is left of that concept in education) and even spirit (ditto ditto ditto). Nor is it possessed of a database of experience from which analysis can be widely and deeply made through comparison and contrast. Nor is it known for its ability to sustain a course of action once chosen. This is not a ‘failure’ in youth; it’s simply the way youth is given the factors available and unavailable to it at this phase of development.

Nor is it known for its ability to speed-bump the connections between feelings and the step-back capacity to reflect. Nor to reflect on alternatives. Or consequences.

We can see how a too-youthy politics is hardly a wise path for a Republic, or any government. Yes, the youthfulness of the National Socialists is an awefull if little-considered truth; but even Hitler saw that once he had achieved power he had to have maturity and competence to achieve his visions (in the end, it was his own profound unripeness, not that of his people, that did him in); he decapitated the youthful SA with its impatient, erratic, brutal idealism, and quietly engorged the professional military, while raising up the vampiric SS and Gestapo to keep the citizenry in line.

You might think that at such a critical juncture in the national history as 1968, the Dems might have thought things out more carefully: it was clear that the era of incredible advantages accruing to the U.S. by its being the only undamaged great nation to emerge from WW2 was coming to an end; Seymour Melman had already begun warning that the American reliance on a Permanent War Economy was robbing the nation’s industrial base of capital to modernize, as the Pentagon’s budget grew and grew. The basis of our economic strength was eroding just when the magical era of our almost total industrial advantage was passing away; the economy would become harder pressed to provide jobs for ‘the working man’; an over-reliance on military spending could lead to overseas military adventures – and even in 1968 it was becoming clear that not only was that happening, but that it wasn’t working out very well either. It was time for some serious grown-up thinking.

But no. The Dems were thinking short-term; in terms of survival. Their own. Did society need to become less ‘male’ to satisfy the feminists? Call it a liberation and give them whatever they demanded. Did ‘grown-ups’ turn off the kids and frustrate their dreams? Let everybody get in touch with their Inner Kid (JFK had already played this card in ’60 to cancel out the age and experience of the Republicans) and let’s stop hemming and hawing and being stodgy and start being ‘hip’ and ‘sensitive’ and whatever.

And here We are. Forty years later. Our politics are a laughing-stock around the world (though the national media sensitively and shrewdly shield Us from the snickering); Our economy is based on a Rube-Goldberg set of illusory, immaterial barterings that have only served to enrich the mega-rich; the working folks and now the middle class, their faith in the Dems as the party of FDR and his promises betrayed, are hard-pressed just to make ends meets, while bombarded with Bubbles backed by pious government assurances and made-for-TV ‘outrages’ blared regularly and nonstop on TV and cable ‘news’.

The national ability to process information has been hugely changed. And degraded. We as a society process information now as emotion-addled kids, having regressed from adulthood and adult-brain processing capabilities in an orgy of scornful tossing-away; alas, the baby of maturity (sorry) went out with the bathwater of formal dress and manners.

This has served well those elements that need Us only for Our labor and – once every few years – Our votes. And after 40 years, that includes both the Democrat Party and Republican Party, no longer usefully described as Liberals and Conservatives, but merely as anti-democratic Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum. We bid fair to morph into a Cromwellian – though ‘sensitive’ – police state at home and an imperial policing state abroad. But we'll be doing it 'for the children' and 'to spread democracy'.

If the economy doesn’t lose minimum airspeed first. Or the rest of the world decides it will carry on its affairs in some currency other than dollars.

Then the infantilized citizenry will collapse into high-stericks, and for once will justify the increase of government control of their lives; Americans will return to the womb of tyrannical government as today’s failed and unripe twenty-somethings (canaries in the mine?) are returning home to live with their parents – simultaneously grateful and sullen, their development as adults derailed, their capacity to participate in a mature society stunned into impotence.

Well, that last part is what I’m afraid may happen.

But there is still time. Or maybe there isn’t. But even if there isn’t (and I’m not saying that) We are Americans, and the heritage entrusted to Us is to pool our maturities and come together as The People, to raise up a decent government faithful to the Founding and obedient to Us. If We lose that type of government, then We have lost America and We have lost Ourselves. It’s kind of a ‘1776’ moment. Do We still have the chops to pledge Our lives, Our fortunes, and Our sacred honor?

This is no job for kids. They need to learn, but for that to happen, they need to be taught. By example.