GLENN GREENWALD YES BUT NO

Glenn Greenwald, over on Salon, has a meaty piece about the national public reaction to the Christmas attempt by that gentleman who wanted to blow up an airliner using his underpants.(Which makes the Japanese use of military airplanes to blow up the battle fleet at Pearl Harbor seem not only thoroughly professional but – well … serious, in a grown-up kind of way.)

He makes some excellent points, but he also demonstrates the problem with even good writers, reporters and commentators who for whatever reasons have to keep within certain ideological bounds: unable to ‘notice’ certain causes, their resulting analysis is inadequate, and thus any solutions based on the analysis are going to be flawed, and the solution will not work – and the problem will go on.

Greenwald generously and rightly applauds David Brooks at the ‘New York Times’ (and I am no fan of Mr. Brooks) for Brooks’s observation on “the childish, contemptuous and hysterical” national reaction, which – Greenwald acutely adds – was “egged on, as usual, by the always-hysterical American media”.

The media, of course, have become addicted to the sustained and professionally managed agitprop of the past four decades or so. From the vistas opened up in the era of the first phase of the Civil Rights Movement, when news cameras brought home to every American just what the frak was going on in the Jim Crow South, and through the Vietnam War era when they did ditto as to what was going on in a foreign war touted as necessary for democracy, the media became hooked on the viscerally and visually gripping.

When the assorted Advocacies of the newly-erected Identities, borrowing those brutal but brilliant leaves from the Goebbels playbook (taken home by Americans as spoils of victory), began to stage assorted agitprop scenes literally made-for-TV to demonstrate the ‘outrages’ for which they demanded the immediate granting of their assorted demands and agendas, the media found it hard to say No.

There were all the elements that made both soap-opera and disaster footage so gripping, and after all it was all in a good and ‘liberal’ cause. Good business, good ‘ethics’, and – truth be told – it was intoxicating not to simply ‘record’ history, but actually to ‘shape’ it. Wheeeee.

After several decades of ‘victims’ and ‘stories’ – buttressed by shows such as Jerry Springer and Oprah – the media were not only addicted, but now so compromised by ‘advocacy’ that they couldn’t get off the stuff.

And when the ‘conservatives’ took to using the same playbook, hoping to reproduce the prior decade’s success of the ‘liberals’, all the media could do was to accord the whackery of the Right the same worshipful attention as they had accorded the agitprop of the Left.

Hysteria sells.

Greenwald very rightly limns the symptoms: “A citizenry has been trained to expect that our Powerful Daddies and Mommies in government will – in that most cringe-inducing, child-like formulation – Keep Us Safe”. And when it appears that Government has failed in such parenting, the response “is an ugly combination of petulant, adolescent rage and increasingly unhinged cries that More Be Done so that nothing bad in the world ever happens to us”.

Bingo.

As I have been pointing out as recently as the immediately preceding Post on the defeat of Martha Coakley’s Senate bid up in Massachusetts, Americans have become much more childish (not the same as ‘child-like’); nor has it helped that Political Correctness forbids such Judgmentalism, Ageism, and Elitism and just plain outright discrimination.

But any judgment is in a way a form of discrimination – it’s a sign of discriminating taste or prudence to avoid large puddles while driving, either to avoid dirtying the wax job or avoid wrecking the wheel assembly on a pothole hidden beneath the calm dark surface of the water.

Adults have to make judgments all the time; children mature by learning how to judge – to discriminate – accurately and wisely. Otherwise they wind up doing stupid and sometimes dangerous things; it’s a hallmark of immaturity that one cannot make the type of judgments that enhance life (one’s own or others’) and indeed cause damage to that life or those lives. A husband and father still doing teeny-bopper snowboarding or skate-boarding at an age when his reflexes and muscles aren’t what they used to be … is still not quite ready for primetime.

But of course, once you’ve made commitments – including the huge commitment of making a baby or three – then you’re in primetime whether you really want to be or not.

The recent national solutions have trended strongly not toward increasing maturational competence to face an increasingly complex world, but rather to reduce the urgency of maturity by reducing the consequences of immaturity … and calling that ‘realistic’, ‘progressive’ and ‘normal’. Thus the now semi-permanent national buffet at the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party.

(The Left side of the table, of course, is matched now by the Right, which is convinced that one can export Democracy at the point of a bayonet, blow up the locals, grab their valuable resources, and expect to be greeted as liberators – and to react with petulant dismay when the locals respond with counter-violence and – on top of that – have the temerity to stymie the multi-trillion dollar military which is this nation’s last claim to planetary primacy.)

These are, really, the types of things you expect to observe – with a politely straight face and compassionate but tastefully distant gaze – in the day-room of any secure haven for the permanently or temporarily unhinged.

In addition, of course, there is now the confluence of both streams, such as in the Left’s support for military invasion in order to “stop anything bad in the world” from happening to any other country’s folks where – nicely – the US government feels their pain. When two such roaring fires of frakkery as Our present Left and Right burn toward each other, We are looking at a conflagration of flaming frakkery that will make the Great Chicago Fire (wiki it if you have to) look like a small-town garage going up out on the county road.

So how to “demand that genuinely inept government officials be held accountable” when an increasingly inept (by reason of immaturity and civic incompetence) Citizenry expect no such consequences to apply to them? (Which is not to imply that the Consequence God will allow them such an extended paid vacation.)

Ditto when Greenwald sharply connects the dots between children lying in bed scared of night-monsters and adults lying in bed scared of “scary Muslim monsters”. And that the adults now want to be protected by government just as the child wants to be protected by its parents (or by whatever modern simulacrum applies to its domestic situation).

The Regulatory-Preventive Nanny State doesn’t want Citizens, it wants Children. Just as the Rightist National Security State doesn’t want Citizens, it wants obedient pawns and patriotic fundamentalists.

There is a jingoism of the Identity-besotted Left as there is a jingoism of the Nation-besotted Right. Both seek to control those who ‘just don’t get it’ or don’t own enough to count in the wider glorious vision; and who don’t belong to the society of whichever elite cadres possess like frenzied but determined mandarins the One True Path to the bright, sunny uplands of supremacy, however defined.

Greenwald quotes John Adams, and nicely so, to the effect that “Fear is the foundation of most governments, but it is so sordid and brutal a passion and renders men in whose breasts it predominates so stupid and miserable …” [italics are GG’s]. And I would add that such fear makes people vengeful and so agitated that they stampede like a herd of spooked cattle.

Greenwald continues the quotation: Adams (writing in a now far-distant 1776) is confident that “Americans will not be likely to approve of any political institution founded on it”. Well, that was then.

But such Fear has been the staple of American ‘progress’ for four decades now: each Identity provided sustained agitprop vividly asserting that its particular demon-enemy was fearfully and uncontrollably and incorrigibly evil and that in order to alleviate the fear (and the pain) and to bring ‘closure’ and make the Identity ‘safe’ then the government must do ‘whatever it takes’ and achieve such Safety by ‘whatever means necessary’ (to use the charming if ominous Israeli phrases). I need only mention the term ‘sex offender’, for example, to demonstrate precisely what I mean here.

But Greenwald rightly observes with Adams that “political leaders possess an inherent interest in maximizing fear levels” – which no doubt explains why the Identity nightmares have received the sustained support of government at all levels, despite the monstrous threat of simultaneously an engorged government control authority and an increasingly fearful and incompetent Citizenry. The less competent and helpless you feel, the more you are going to feel the pressing need for ‘protection’ – and that old devil Government is always willing to step right up and promise it to you … and you don’t even have to sign on the dotted sulphurous line; you simply have to look the other way as this or that person or group is taken away. Ja!

Of course, all of this is hell-and-gone from Adams’s vision – but he’s only a Dead White Male anyway, so what’s the problem? He ‘just didn’t get it’.

Greenwald makes the fine assertion that “the American Founding was predicated on exactly the opposite mindset … the Constitution is grounded in the premise that there are other values and priorities more important than mere Safety” [that whole last clause underlined in GG’s text].

This is not because the Founders were chimpish males who didn’t care about anybody’s safety but their own; it’s because the Founders were well aware that the most eternal predator in human history is Government, and against its own population even before against others. And as in the best B-level horror fliks, the Founders established the strongest possible protections against the King of Vampires, the strongest and sturdiest wall to keep that monstrous Kong from breaking loose into the village.

It was the abiding fear, I think, of the Founders, that someday the door would be opened and the Thing invited in eagerly, the gate unbarred and the Thing enticed into the light of the hearth-fires. For profit, for a change, for laffs – who knows?

Better to let criminals evade capture, the Founders thought (and Greenwald observes) than to let the Thing invade home and hearth, heart and mind, exerting its baleful and inevitably violent control over the society and culture that is the true heart and health of the country.

But the Founders ‘just didn’t get it’, it was snarkily hooted, and not simply by unwashed villagers in their cups down at the local watering hole. In fact, not by the great unwashed at all but rather by the self-proclaimed elites, basking in the blinding golden beam of Government’s shrewd and shrewdly generous approbation, which made them appear – to hungry but undiscriminating cameras – as rather golden beings and creatures of light themselves.

Those who stubbornly opined that the gold was only gilt were hooted down. And the band played on.

The Founders thought the way they did “because certain values – privacy, due process, limiting the potential for abuse of government power – were more important than mere survival and safety”. You say this on Oprah or if you said it on Springer, you could quickly find yourself the object of wails and screams of offense and outrage … and never invited to make public comment again. Your insensitivity would earn you the virtual universe’s equivalent of a colored Star to be affixed to your clothing and your very soul; or the great crimson letter “I” for Insensitive (or Incorrect, perhaps – take your pick).

Princess Amidala’s wry observation that democracy ends with applause (if I recall that flik correctly) may well be updated by not-too-distant historians: it ended here with screams of ‘pain’ and vengeance and cries for Safety and Protection. And, to keep this thread going a little bit more, thus will pass Democracy, son of Constitution, screaming and wailing and afire from the fire set by himself, until he plunges from the pinnacle of the once-great City, into the hordes of enemies that his own profoundly embraced weakness lured to him and to his people (Denethor, as eulogized by Mithrandir in LOTR 3).

And when I use the word ‘weakness’ I am not implying that We should take the path of endless military conquest or ‘nation-building’. The weakness I am referring to is a national maturational and moral weakness, which even in the LOTR scenario was the deepest cause of Denethor’s awful situation.

Anyway, the military is now so ‘sensitized’ by decades of trying to remake itself (at the Beltway’s behest) as an employment opportunity for whoeverrrrr rather than an agency that must play according to the awe-full rules of Ares Ferox et Atrox that Our days of military sufficiency are sharply numbered. Unless We uncork the nukes and threaten the Mother of All Tantrums … but that way – I hope many can still see – lies madness and an end to all things.

And it is “a central calculation of the Constitution that we insist upon privacy, liberty and restraints on government power even when doing so means we live with les safety and a heightened risk of danger and death” [italics GG’s]. Can you picture what would happen now to anybody who suggested in a telegenic venue that this country needs less safety and more courage? Let me propose this scenario to you: such a person would get as much of a verbal thrashing as a person in 1973 suggesting to an Identity Politics sobfest that all of you should “ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country”.

How’s them apples? Teddy Kennedy managed to do all his favorite constituencies a world-historical favor by hiding behind his portentous bulk the truly shocking fact that to the causes and ‘dreams’ he was supporting his late brother’s most fundamental vision was gall and wormwood.

And you wonder how the country of MLK and JFK, let alone the Founders and Lincoln, so quickly wound up swilling Chardonnay at the Mad Hatter’s Tea Party, sandwiched in between the Easter Bunny and a passel of Tooth Fairies?

As Greenwald notes, nowadays it’s “only Government-provided Safety, not the Constitution, [that] matters”.

Indeed, he quotes certain Government types: Michael Chertoff “demanding that we stop listening to ‘privacy ideologues’” – so if you cling to the Constitutional vision you are some sort of whacko “ideologue” now; but haven’t the ‘governance feminists’ been saying the same thing for decades? After all, ‘men’ can hide their ‘violence’ behind Constitutional privacy protections, especially in home and hearth and – not to put too fine a point on it – bedroom. (Not even Adams could have had so gruesome a nightmare as to imagine that, I bet.)

Face it, the Constitution and the Constitutional ethos were undermined the minute that the most important identity in this country was not that you were American (itself a many-faceted, chiaroscuro potentiality) but rather that you were a this or a that, a male or a female, a victim or a perp, good or evil. There’s no getting around that stark, lethal reality. Whether such a consequence was unintended, intended as an acceptable loss, or ignored in light of the 'good intentions' of the Identity Politics crowd ... now you're just quibbling about where the deck chairs go on the Titanic.

Worse, Greenwald concludes with the probably accurate advice that “talking to one’s friends and co-workers is not a reliable way of gauging public opinion on an issue”. Especially if you or your co-workers are under the age of 55 or 60. Because the kids in all the birth cohorts that reached even a modicum of consciousness since 1965 or so have been brought up to accept as ‘the new normal’ the proposition that the greatest enemies are those who cause (fill in the blank) ‘pain’ and those monsters are among us, masquerading as ‘normal’ and ‘good’ folks, but are really – no, not Communists, but rather – (fill in the blank). And those cohorts have grown up accordingly in a civic polity fractured in theory (Identity Politics) as well as in practice.

So that now the only thing that remains to unite ‘Americans’ is fear, threat, and war.

And if you sow that wind, you will reap the whirlwind – Churchill saw that, watching the German people look the other way (or applaud and cheer deliriously) as the little whackjob with the mustache promised them Primacy and Security, and that if they followed him they would get just what they deserved.

And so it came to pass.

So Greenwald has accomplished much in this piece. And I commend him for it.

But those of a genuinely liberal, or American bent, cannot simply reduce all of Our present frakkulous condition to “the past ten years”. I am saying that you have to go back forty years just to have a reasonable grounding in the causes of this mess.

And for a solution, I am going to repeat what I said in the immediately previous Post: the first step would be for Americans to realize that the greatest being in God’s Creation is not The Child but rather the mature, competent, fully human Adult.

After all, you don’t go for a sunny walk in a big field full of acorns and saplings; you go for a walk in the forest, where there are trees (which are much better examples of Treehood and Treeness than are the seedlings, nuts, acorns, and so forth).

And it is utterly and urgently essential that We see that.

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.

MILITARY JAGS AND THEIR SCHEMES

JAGGED SCHEMES

Glenn Greenwald is conducting an extended and informative exploration of Obama’s sort-of embrace of ‘military commissions’.

A military commission is some form of tribunal (let’s not dignify it with the term ‘court’) run by the military which will theoretically provide an adequate instrument by which detainees can be adjudged to be ‘terrorists’ or not.

Nobody seems to be able to figure out why on earth Obama would embrace them. After all, there are the federal courts, there are courts-martial as conducted by JAGs under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), and there is some thought of an international tribunal. Yet Obama has embraced the Bushist military commissions.

I have a thought: he has embraced them because noooooo-body in the Beltway universe wants to be exposed in an open court. The government, claiming ‘national security’ and state-secrets, doesn’t want to publicly air its bloody laundry for the world to see. Large numbers of Beltway biggies ditto, since their active or passive collaboration with the whole torture mess cannot be explained away without looking like a duplicitous – if not indeed treacherous – clown. Even, I’m thinking, the Israeli friends (can no one remember the Mob’s ‘Friends of the Italian Opera’ society in the old films about the 1920s?) are not overly excited about letting Us see exactly how similar to the Israeli ‘war society’ and ‘permanent war culture’ this nation has become, especially since 9-11.

And the JAGs … ah, the JAGs do not want courts-martial because they don’t want a) to have their own core racket – the administration of military ‘justice’ – exposed for all to see, nor b) do they want to be ‘seen’ as associated with the torture mess, nor c) do they want their own complicity (despite their seeming to stand-tall after the cat was undeniably out of the bag) exposed.

Actually, the whole ‘military’ route is rife with troubles. The core difference between ‘commissions’ and ‘courts-martial’ is merely one of degree; both of them are run by an organization that is hierarchical, and that maintains its efficiency and ethos precisely by ensuring that all uniformed folks do what their told. JAGs, as you recall, whether acting this week as ‘judges’, ‘prosecutors’, or ‘defense counsel’, are all uniformed military officers. So are the members of the ‘jury’ and most of the witnesses. The military investigators are not, but their pay, promotions, and bounteous perks all come out of the Pentagon budget.

And while Americans seem somewhat content to assume that ‘military justice’ – at least here – is just Perry Mason in uniform, few other citizens of the world are laboring under such delusions. Indeed, the Pentagon itself is eager to prevent US troops from ever coming into the custody of any government’s military courts (or any other courts) – the Pentagoons know full well how their game is played, and they don’t want to wind up on the business-end of it, don’t want to wind up ‘down-range’ – as they say – of what is and has to be by its very nature a rigged scheme.

Interestingly, there are a couple of JAG-gy pawprints on Obama’s comments. “Military commissions have a long tradition in America”: Well, this is the same long-past-its-sell-by-date baloney that the JAGs use to make it appear that their military justice system ain’t but a thang, nothing but a codification of long-standing American and Western practice.

Not hardly. Yes, the practice of court-martial – a military trial run by the military – has been around for a long long time. But only for specifically military offenses.

The idea of allowing a military court to prosecute the entire national criminal Code, exposing uniformed citizens to the full weight of the government’s criminal-justice authority without a credible, substantive provision of Constitutional rights and protections … this is not something that would have occurred to George Washington. Indeed, the Framers were soooo mistrustful of military justice that the Fifth Amendment specifically prohibited it even among the military unless the nation was actually at war. (This reality was one of the first to be obliterated with the connivance of the Supreme Court, very early in the 19th century, though as recently as Thurgood Marshall’s tenure the point was raised that the text of Fifth Amendment was rather clear on the subject and that consequently the present military-justice arrangements are in violation of the Amendment and have been for quite some time.*)

It was only in Wilson’s time that the military was given the right to prosecute service-members not only for military offenses at any time (already a violation of the Fifth Amendment) but that it could prosecute the entire Criminal Code. This was in 1916. In 1913 Wilson had pushed Congress into ‘delegating’ its power over the currency to the Federal Reserve (which later Wilson, and perhaps We here and now) came to regret.

In 1916 Congress ‘delegated’ the power to conduct criminal prosecutions to the Executive Branch – an act so contrary to the spirit of the Framer’s vision (think: Court of Star Chamber and Cromwell’s Protectorate) that most folks cannot imagine that Congress could do such a thing. Hence Obama’s and some commentators’ reference to “Article II courts”: genuine Constitutional courts are under the authority of Article III of the Constitution, the Judiciary Article. Article II, of course, deals with the Executive. Can you say ‘divine right monarchy’?

Indeed, the recent economic catastrophe has raised some question as to whether Congress even had – or has – the power to ‘delegate’ such a fundamental responsibility to any other person or office or entity or Branch. With the Federal Reserve Congress ‘delegated’ its currency power to the financial moguls (formerly known as the Robber Barons). In its 1916 gambit Congress delegated its authority to conduct Constitutional criminal process to the Executive, and to the military as a sub-branch of the Executive.

The Supreme Court played along, as it always has, by embracing the Alice-in-Wonderland position that a hierarchical organization can own all the ‘players’, and simultaneously play the role of ‘victim’ and ‘judge’, and yet maintain an impartial, fair, and robustly Constitutional competence to try, convict, and imprison. On that thinking, why not let Ford or Microsoft conduct company-justice on their employees?

Surely, the pious assertion that the military officers involved are all ‘honorable’ and would never think to break the law or their Oath (Oaths, plural, in the case of JAGs who are both sworn attorneys and sworn military officers) is nowadays clearly visible as the fairy-tale that it has always been.

And with Joe Biden’s son a JAG, and one influential serving US Senator as a JAG Reserve general officer and former military judge, one has to imagine that if the JAGs wanted to court-martial the detainees, it would happen forthwith.

But Obama, himself a professor of Constitutional law, goes and imperils his absolutely essential credibility by resurrecting the Bushist ‘military commissions’. Let Us assume that he does not have a political death-wish. Why then would he do it? Who would benefit from this frakkery of a change-in-position?

The JAGs, I am saying. They don’t want to risk exposure of their whole racket. After all, a lot of lawyers make a very nice living, and garner lots of status and bennies, administering ‘military justice’. And they don’t want that all to go away. Nor do they care to get any closer to the looming, volatile ‘war crimes’ thing. They are not very interested in being ‘down-range’ of their own system, nor seeing their system exposed for what it has always been: a rigged game, a fraudulent kabuki imitation of actual Constitutionally-protected criminal process, dressed in a uniform and wrapped up in the Flag.

They are presently deep into the strategy of presenting themselves as ‘the good guys’ in the script.

But this power that’s pushing Obama into such an erratic and dangerous orbit is coming from somewhere. And the JAGs and their system are a black-hole presently invisible to media scrutiny (for whatever misch of reasons). Once again, the Beltway’s ‘behind the scenes’ universe is exerting ominous pull on the visible universe of profound public affairs.

Yeah, fix the Hubble telescope. But let Us look at black-holes a lot closer to home. Let Us look verrrry closely and carefully.

NOTES

*For a deeper look at all this, see inter alia my Posts here and here from December of 2006.

ISRAEL RULES

Over on the Salon site Gary Kamiya has much worthwhile to say about the US government’s support of the Gaza attacks. I specifically don’t say “Our” support, because as Glenn Greenwald has also pointed out on that site recently, the majority of the American people don’t support the utter and unquestioning support that the US government and its pols have given to the long history of Israeli doings.

I recall reading recently that a very large percentage – perhaps the majority – of abortion-supporters are under the impression that ‘abortion’ in this country is only available in the first or second trimester, and only if the life or health of the mother is genuinely and grievously endangered. What they would think if they were correctly informed that such is not at all the case, that the endangered ‘health’ could include the mother’s irritation or distress at having to carry the birth to term at all … is a question begging to be answered. I don’t know where such truth would lead, but that’s the thing about democracy – you have to give The People the truth and take your chances as to what The aforesaid People will decide. It’s not a recipe for ensuring that you get what you want all the time. Which is gall and wormwood to various Advocacies.

I mention it because there seems to be a connection between the dots.

“The Israeli rules” – to use Kamiya’s acute phrase – recall to me my thought that the playbook developed by the Israeli realm in the days of LBJ were quickly taken up by the then-nascent Advocacies of the then-nascent Identities.

And since the playbook was pretty much taken from Goebbels’s brilliant modus operandi for the manipulation and coercion of public opinion … well, you can imagine what effect it would have on a democratic politics and the Branches that were designed to serve it.

Having by LBJ’s day already established itself through the armed amphibious invasion of Palestine by non-state actors , preceded by a regime of terrorist bombings that even targeted the then-protectors of the peace, the British, the Israeli government set out in the later 1960s not simply to ‘change’ American public policy and public opinion, but to manipulate it.

And the manner of it – as best I can make out – was on this wise: a) the outrageous (and it truly was) extermination of six million members of the Jewish religion by the Third Reich was given a more user-friendly name – The Holocaust; b) that Holocaust created a ‘moral emergency’ that justified ‘all means necessary’ to prevent its ever happening again – in effect, a ‘007’ license to ‘do whatever it takes’ (the Bond movies were in full swing by the late 1960s); c) anybody who disagreed with the ‘whatever it took’ must be ‘anti-Semitic’, which is the first step to being in favor of another Holocaust; d) thus you were either ‘with’ the Israeli government’s every action or you were ‘against’ it – which made you an anti-Semite and probably a closet Nazi, and – mirroring American concerns at the time – a racist; e) by virtue of its status as ‘victim’ – or at least as representative or ‘survivor’ of the six million victim – the Israeli realm could claim a moral status that justified whatever it had to do, and if you opposed or even doubted the realm or the status or the actions then you were a victimizer; f) victims, by definition, could not go on to victimize anybody else and to suggest that such was not the case was to ‘disrespect’ the victims’ pain and victimize the victims all over again. Thus the playbook.

We recall that the excuse given for going into Czechoslovakia was to rescue and avenge the victimized Sudeten Germans; for invading Poland, to prevent and avenge the victimization of German nationals – women and children, nicely filmed – by the monstrous, ape-like Poles; for invading Russia, to provide the ever-victimized German Volk with room-to-live, Lebensraum, denied them by the Slavic Untermenschen who dwelt in lumpish sloth and primitive waste on the rich and fertile lands of the Ukraine. And, to recall T.H. White’s marvelous encapsulation in the war of the ants in ‘The Once and Future King’: “they are attacking us by defending themselves”.

It cannot be coincidence that Our domestic politics, bethumpt by the agitations and alarums of the later 1960s and the 1970s, began to demonstrate many of the very same characteristic tropes – minus, thankfully, the many, many deaths … except for fetuses – but they weren’t human anyway; such is the genius of the plan, as Goebbels saw in his fetid acuity. Or, if human, then ‘Unlebensvurdigeslebens’ – lives unworthy of life. All the bases covered. Say what you will of the conceptual incongruities and haphazard execution of many aspects of Hitler’s Reich, but Goebby knew his business and he had it down to a ‘T’. Had he lived, he might have wound up being brought over here, like Werner von Braun – who had ‘rockets!’; but in the event, his ‘product’ was taken as spoils of war, along with the rockets, the military strategies and doctrine, and the shape of the helmets. And it has proven even more useful and durable than the hardware. To Our great damage and detriment. And the world’s peoples’.

Now We are engaged in a great global war, Our polity deeply weakened through political fragmentation and a pervasive inability to recognize truth or respect life. We have much ‘hope’, nice and vague, but no serious ability to actual change Our ways. Them Kathliks would say that no amount of telling-the-beads would effect forgiveness or redemption, lacking that changing-of-the-ways. But what do they know of the sovereign patriotism of King Jesus? The application of a bit more violence, all the more vigorous for being in so righteous a cause, is what must be sustained. “Wohlt ihr denn totallen Krieg?” (Hint: the answer given to Goebby that bleak late-winter day at the Sportpalast in 1943 was a resounding ‘Ja!’. Stalingrad had fallen the month before and the handwriting was, so to speak, on the wall.)

But as Greenwald and others have noted, it is not the will of The People. It is the imposed will of Our political class and a sizable chunk of Our so-called ‘elites’, those who presume – Fundamentalist or Progressive – to know what is ‘real’ and ‘right’ and best for Us.

Or for themselves, anyway. I still can’t figure out: given how vote-grubby modern pols are, so eager to keep folks ‘happy’, then why are they – Democrats even more so than Republicans – continuing on a course which is not only so morally repugnant and geostrategically counterproductive but – more to the Beltway point – unpopular with the voters?

What comes to mind first is the Roman Senate under the later Empire and the Weimar-era Reichstag. In both cases there were so many troubles besetting their respective nations that one problem could not be solved without aggravating half a dozen others. Not even Solomon – you should pardon the expression – could have pulled the later Empire or Weimar out of the death spiral.

But that’s not enough. The pols aren’t decent legislators faced with an impossible multitude of undeserved challenges. No. The Beltway at this point reminds me more of the Renaissance Papal Curia, just before Luther’s final break: they could see, if they wanted to, what was wrong and what they had to do, but they couldn’t bring themselves to do it … they were too addicted, too compromised, by a long and deep indulgence in debaucheries that had increased their power and wealth and status – and having over the long course of time brought into their midst other like unto themselves, there were no real souls of integrity and strength among them. You can almost watch them throw away one opportunity after another to change their ways, to reform. But the reform would first have to be of themselves, and that they were not at all prepared to do. Surely, they must have thought, God would see them through -they were, after all, his special favorites.

And the Reformation came.

Having taken so much money from the Israel-indentured PACs, how can they stop now, there in the Beltway? By now, you could almost wonder if some low-grade treason isn’t lurking around; the ‘realm’ is still, technically anyway, a ‘foreign power’, even if it’s US money and equipment and bombs that keep it that way. Oy.

Worse, I wonder again if the Israelis didn’t take a page from the malicious, freakish mastermind, J. Edgar Hoover (after all, they took the whole book from Goebbels)? Suppose that for the past half-century they have been keeping a Hoovery ‘file’ on every pol – one that, they assure the jittery pol , they will see ‘comes to light’ unless fealty is pledged to the Israeli realm … ?

American pols not being as a group that much more morally evolved than Renaissance cardinals, one can only imagine that there must be one frakking hell of a file cabinet somewhere in the ‘realm’.

We as The People have a steep learning curve ahead, and all this on top of the heart-gnawing anxieties about personal and familial economic survival.

It’s deep-end-of-the-pool-time. Time to show what We got. Time to let the Greatest Generation see that they weren’t the last of the American kind. Or not.

BIPARTISAN BALONEY

Over on Salon Glenn Greenwald is on about ‘bipartisanship’ as exemplified in the excuses given by the Senate for re-re-embracing the execrable Joe Lieberman. Good for Glenn. (‘Has there been too much bipartisanship or too little?’, http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/11/18/bipartisanship/print.html )

You have to read “Liberty Under Siege”, Walter Karp’s jaw-dropping history of the early Reagan years to understand to what rotten purposes ‘bipartisanship’ has been put. Tip O’Neill, hating what the late Sixties had done to his Party machine, and terrified of what the early Sixties had done to his Party’s electoral viability, had stymied Carter’s presidency while simultaneously selling Congress to the corporations by inventing and selling PACs (subsequently blessed by the Supreme Court as ‘free speech’).

In this way he ensured the income of Members by effectively legalizing bribery, hiding it in plain sight. (Whether, with the development of other-national PACs such as AIPAC, this became not simply a matter of Members being bribed but Members engaging in treacherous – perhaps treasonous – collusion with a foreign government, is a question that has not received the recognition it so richly deserves.)

Aware that some of the demands of the various Identities had now almost-permanently fractured the citizenry, and perhaps aware that the economy of the postwar United States was now losing ground to foreign economic developments, O’Neill decreed – under the table – that the Democrats would ‘work with’ the Reagan Administration. There would be ‘bipartisanship’, which became in practice a code-word for abolishing an effective opposition Party and doing ‘whatever it takes’ (in the candid Israeli phrase) to keep ‘things’ rolling.

Perhaps the Tipster feared for the very existence of the Democratic Party itself; if so, it is a dark testament indeed to the damage wrought by Identity Politics and ‘revolutionary’ politics. As if anybody with an ounce of sense couldn’t have seen that outcome just by putting it up on a drawing board beforehand: Leninist tactics, Goebbelsian propaganda, and deconstructionist Theory did not promise easy fraternity (or sorority) with the Constitutional concepts of the Founders. They had been designed, as a matter of fact, with an eye to destroying those concepts. This is news?

Those partial to Democrats who cawn’t think why the Democrats have been ‘duped’ and ‘bamboozled’ all these years and decades need look no further than Tip O’Neill’s ‘bipartisanship’. The Democrats have been Republicans for more than a quarter of a century.

There is no opposition Party.

This country, thus, doesn’t stand in need of a third political Party; it stands in dire and grievous need of a second one. And very very soon. President-elect Obama has to start moving the Democrats along toward recovering their ground and principles and - for that matter - the Constitutional principles on which the country was Founded. Being 'bipartisan' with the Republicans as they are presently constituted is akin to entering into marriage with a corpse, and a plague-ridden one at that.

But the Democrats have allowed themselves to become infected with some hugely plaguey stuff themselves, brought over by carriers from failed tyrannies and revolutionary visions.

ALSO:

I’d like to go out on a limb with this thought: In addition to all of the other reasons for ‘bipartisanship’, I can’t help but wondering if the wily Israeli realm didn’t take a page from that cunning, treacherous freak J. Edgar Hoover and compile its own ‘files’ on high-ranking pols and government officials. Of course, if the Honorable Members have been collecting cash all these years, that may itself constitute enough of a ‘file’ , but it wouldn't hurt to keep a file with anything that might induce a Member to be 'friendly' rather than risk exposure.

KARPING

The always worthwhile Glenn Greenwald is just one of many today to comment on the bailout situation. In “The simultaneous rejection of the bailout and a corrupt ruling class” posted on Sept. 30 on Salon he notes that the Democrats seem to have had – as they did for a few months in the Spring of this year – a bit of the old spirit. But, he continues, the “corporate donor class and political establishment … own and control the political battlefield”. (http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/).

I just finished a book that speaks to that, and fleshes out a point I’d been working with for quite some time now: that the Democrats somewhere along the line abandoned the New Deal and the ‘little people’ and got in bed with the rich.

The book, published in 1988, is Walter Karp’s “Liberty under Siege”. It’s a collection of essays, one for each year, from 1976 through 1988, covering the Presidencies of Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan. This, of course, means that Karp is not giving Us history of ‘then’ as seen through the lenses of ‘now’, but rather is giving Us contemporaneous observations and reports. And an acute Washington reporter he is.

The gist of his insight is this, and it stunned me. When the Democratic Party radically altered its nominating structures following 1968, it resulted in a formal, structural lurch away from the control of the ‘Establishment’ insiders – the ‘smoke-filled room folks – and toward ‘the people’, thus toward a more ‘democratic’ operating base.

We recall here – as prelude – that the Founders were torn between two conflicting anxieties: on the one hand they wanted to avoid ‘tyranny’ through monarchy or an all-powerful Executive; on the other hand they wanted to avoid ‘mobocracy’, the direct rule of the citizenry, many of whom would be – they felt – too uninformed and too politically undeveloped to choose wisely. This double-anxiety has not survived in the ‘classic’ telling of the Constitutional Convention, but it’s built into the Constitution, most clearly in the bicameral Legislature: a House made up of those elected more or less directly by ‘the people’ (or at least those who were white and male) and a Senate – fixed at two per State – composed of more substantial and presumably more serious and responsible gentlemen selected (until 1913) by the governing elements in each State.

Further, We recall that with the foundation of the National Security State laid in 1948 by the document known as “NSC 68”, the complexity of the government as it had evolved to meet the challenges of a large military and war establishment (We would now call it a ‘security’ and ‘defense’ establishment) was enshrined as national policy. This was for the purpose – ostensibly and to a lesser extent actually – to wage what had become ‘the Cold War’ against a nasty, but more cogently, expansionist foe: the USSR, presumed to be bent on ‘world domination’ as had the Nazi and Imperial Japanese regimes so recently defeated.

Over time, the Washington ‘establishment’ came to shape itself comprehensively around this ‘military-industrial complex’, as Eisenhower noted – sadly so late – in his farewell remarks as President in 1961. This ‘complex’ had come to serve as a trellis around and upon and toward which all else in the Beltway began to shape and orient itself.

Then came 1968, when that Washington ‘establishment’ had mired itself in Vietnam which by then was a demonstrably losing game. In that year, under the impetus of the Boomers and the old 1930s radicals still full of steam, the Democratic Party was put under sufficient pressure so as to conform itself back toward ‘the people’ and away from its now entrenched Party bosses and ‘elites’.

Back to Karp: Jimmy Carter, a Democrat, was the first President nominated and then elected under the auspices of this ‘democratic’ process. This – and here is his stunning take on matters – enraged the Party elites and its ruling establishment, the ‘professional’ politicians, embodied in the ostensible, shaggy-headed mountain of ‘the people’, Thomas ‘Tip’ O’Neill, condign Speaker of the House, who presided over a ‘Dailey-Dixie’, ‘Boston-Austin’ axis of Democratic pols who, though from the Northeast and the South, were allies in the defense of their prerogatives and influence. Carter, a Democrat, came into his Presidency in the face of Tip O’Neill’s implacable opposition to what Carter stood for. And for the next four years – in a battle that raged over the heads and mostly out of sight of the electorate – O’Neill worked with the Republicans to gut Carter’s every initiative.

As the Republicans – looking to their own political possibilities – began to merge their traditional affection for the rich and the propertied with a sudden burning concern for national security and military prowess (supplied lavishly at taxpayer expense by that ‘military-industrial complex’), O’Neill refused to endanger his frontal campaign against the President of his own Party by risking any conflict with his ‘right flank’; Carter, thus, was stymied in divers ways by a Congress (and certain of his own Cabinet) that sought to block him , especially in his concern about Our dependence on ‘foreign oil’ and in his foreign policy efforts (SALT II, the Panama Canal, a nascent ‘détente’). Time and again, Democratic legislators who still thought everything was on the level were dismayed as O’Neill blocked their efforts .

And – in my schematic – as the various revolutions of the various Identities began to cast their vivid and confusing miasms across the domestic political landscape – O’Neill, realizing that there wasn’t going to be enough reliable cash to be raised from so disparate and agitated a conglomeration of ‘voters’, hit upon the idea of PACs; he actually had to send out emissaries to convince the reluctant corporations to sign on. They eventually did, and with a gusto. What prompted them to make such large investments in the uncertainties of politics? The Democratic assurance that the corporations would get what they paid for. And the floodgates were opened, long before any levees were ever breached or over-topped.

When Reagan came along – masking the Republican fondness for the rich and for the ‘business’ elites (not, as so often piously declaimed, ‘business’ and free enterprise itself) – O’Neill (and many of the Democrats in Congress) then found himself in the position of being dependent upon the corporations as much as the Republicans. Better that, though, than to submit to a ‘populist’ control of his Party. And so ‘bipartisanship’ became the watchword, and Reagan – even as his awefull policies began to bear their poisonous fruit – rarely found himself confronted resolutely and substantively by a hostile Congress, controlled by Democrats though it was.

And for those who would imagine that Bush and Cheney invented Our present Unitary Executive out of their own fetid imaginations, Karp shows us the beginnings of government secrecy (the watering down of the Freedom of Information Act, among other things), enhanced and more intrusive police powers of warrantless and even un-grounded investigation, the relaxing of regulatory requirements that had been put into place in the prior decades, and the de facto independence of government bureaucrats – and especially of the Executive branch – from public scrutiny. Oh, and the deliberately increased ‘deficits’.

And all accepted in a spirit of ‘bipartisanship’ by Tip O’Neill and the Democratic bosses.

If you think about it, it was a corporate boss’s dampdream: undo the regulatory requirements of both the New Deal and – yes – the Nixon years, undo the financial basis for the New Deal’s ‘welfare state’, enhance the military-corporate complex. And all of it in the guise of a ‘patriotism’ that had been apparently – and, alas too often actually – flung in the mud by America-hating radicals, hippies (then starting to get their first gray hairs), and the entire menagerie of Identities, each of which loudly trumpeted its outrage and victimization and demanded the widest and most immediate change. And all of it under the cover of a concern for ‘morality’ and ‘virtue’ that – alas, all too really – was being flung aside by Identities that accepted no higher dimension than their own political visions and agendas.

And so – I would say – the Democrats spent the Reagan years playing a double-game: indulging the Identities, while hewing to the military-corporate complex that quietly infused them richly with funds through PACs. In the same bed as the Republicans. You wanna worry about sex-offenses?

Even the media gave up, after a while.

Good frakking grief.

Meanwhile, the economy and the entire national posture relative to the rest of the world’s economies (Japan and West Germany had recovered and started to steam along by the mid-‘60s) was ignored. Reagan continually expected that money would somehow ‘appear’ (you know, the way it did for good guys in the movies), and if it didn’t – well, how could that happen, with all these honchos who knew ‘business’ calling the shots? How indeed?

So it goes back beyond Bush & Co., to Reagan. But it goes back even further, to the Democratic Congressional leadership in the ‘70s. And a monstrous, sustained treachery it was – that course chosen by Tip O’Neill. Treachery to his President, his Party, and all the citizens who assumed that the craggy old mountain was in their corner, a regular guy for the little guy. Not hardly.
And it explains a bit more about how the hell We have come to the present situation. And how with all the warning signs, a Congress could roll over – not only for corporate money (at least there was precedent for that in the First Gilded Age) but in the face of increasing assault on civil liberties and the checks-and-balances and oversight intended by the Founders. A treachery, thus, to the Constitution and to The People.

No wonder there’s so much sleazy and even cocky cynicism in the Beltway. They know, as they knew then, that no opposition party would hold anybody responsible for anything; nobody would be brought to account. Even when the Reagan era’s most floridly baaad things came (with decreasing frequency) to light, nobody was held to account. That – in addition to the average person’s skepticism as to the noxiousness of identity-politics – was why Reagan was ‘teflon’; even when citizens finally realized what he and his well-heeled posse was up to, the bhoys in the backroom knew that no Sheriff ‘Tip’ was going to be coming after them. ‘Tip’ was an ally; bipartisan was his cover. Or, I would say, ‘Tip’ participated in the Beltway ‘Blutbund’: the old SS term for ‘I killed somebody and you know it; you killed somebody and I know it – let’s do lunch!’ The meal prepared for them in the Upper Room of this or that corporate headquarters was not one for angels. History – if not some other High Power Who shall remain as yet unnamed – may now be preparing something else for them and all their cohorts.

But that won’t necessarily do Us any good right here and right now. I hold no brief for any Republican victory in the upcoming election. There is not enough of the old center of that Party. But I also realize that almost all of the Democratic ‘players’ currently roaming the halls of Congress have been part of this decades-long racket. Mr. Obama, to the extent that he has not been corrupted by it all, will still have to work with a Party that pretty much has. He will need all the help he can get. And I mean Us. And not just leading up to the election, but after it. Especially after it. Carter’s ruin – almost from day one of his Administration – must stand as a bloody warning to Us all.

That’s why I see some ray of hope – hardly unalloyed – in the rejection of the bailout as originally proposed. But one ray does not a sunny day make.

It seems to me, as well, that a huge opportunity was lost in 1968. There was indeed a ‘democratizing’ of the Party; and in light of the incursions of incumbent entrenchment and the baleful influences of the ‘military industrial complex’ and the National Security State even in their relatively infant forms of that era … then ’68 was to that extent a ‘Moment’ of no small possibility.

But the ‘democratizing’ thread was quickly lost. The Identities and their ‘politics’ provided a handy cover for the forces of “Reaction” (Karp’s term and capital) to seek to re-impose a rule of the elites that over the course of time became, under Reagan, a genuine “Oligarchy” (again, Karp’s term and capital). Because at least in the Founders’ time the ‘responsible men of substance’ were still in touch with the vast body of The People; there was some proportion to their roles and substance relative to the citizens in general. No more. And certainly not in the past 25 years.

It stuns to realize that whereas forty years ago ‘elitism’ would refer to entrenched political forces threatening democracy from within, nowadays it refers to knowledge and checking with folks who might know something to advise on matters of huge – perhaps ultimate – public import. This is not your grandfather’s ‘America’ – and that’s not meant as consolation, much less as indicative of achievement.

Nor can We simply say that identity-politics was itself ‘democratizing’. In method and content it was not; it was simultaneously much less than that and much more than that – and it knew that, and thus sought to short-circuit a democratic politics in order to establish itself and propagate, and cut away a place at the table so as to get a piece of the pie. And the dusty miasm raised by that Long March choked vision and new growth, and the energies We should have been investing in a common effort to realign Ourselves and Our nation to the changing realities of the post-postwar world … those energies were dissipated on other things.

And We have come to this. But then here We must stand. And make Our stand. Stand tall.

BUCK-STOPPING

Over on Salon, Glenn Greenwald reports that the Army is permanently assigning a Brigade Combat Team to “NorthCom”, the new military command responsible for deploying troops domestically, i.e. inside the United States itself. (http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/09/24/army/index.html).

The troops will be using suppression equipment recently developed to subdue ‘persons’ non-lethally. Of course, they would presumably also be available to help out in floods and fires, but somehow I don’t see them fighting brush-fires in Southern California or rowing boats in floods or standing around guarding property after a particularly big hurricane.

Among senators who voted for this enhanced degradation of the already-gutted Posse Comitatus statute – the military cannot deploy forces against the citizenry, an idea We got after having put up with King George III sending redcoats and Hessians (think Blackwater with pointy hats) among Us back in the 18th century – was Ted Kennedy. Not to single the gentleman out, but it strikes me that his vote is symbolic of the danger posed to Us by the so-called Left, by the (no-longer) ‘liberal’ elements in the national government, and by their recently constructed National Nanny State.

There has been a traditional fear of an authoritarian take-over of the United States from within. Historically, it was imagined that it would either come from the American communists and socialists or from the ‘rich’ who feared the ‘rule of the mob’ and – more specifically – having to share the wealth that they had amassed (not often through prayer, good works, and a life of exemplary Christian virtue). In the late 19th century, troops of the National Guard (as it was then constituted) or federal troops were sent to put down labor agitation and protect the property of corporations and of the great magnates of the First Gilded Age.

The construction of the National Security State starting in the late 1940s raised the theoretical possibility that the national government would actually deploy the military domestically in order to prevent ‘communist’ agitation among traditionally disaffected groups (workers, ‘negroes’).

Ironically, it was a Republican president, and former five-star general, Dwight Eisenhower, who sent the Army back into the South during the civil-rights struggles of the 1950s, in order to protect the ‘negroes’ from the official depredations of Southern law enforcement bent on maintaining Jim Crow. Cocky Southron cops suddenly lost their swagger and choked on their chaw when faced with armed combat columns deployed in assorted military vehicles that had last seen similar service advancing down the highways and byways of Hitler’s crumbling Germany less than 15 years before. And there in the South those columns were moving down roads that had last seen military action when General Sherman’s army – among others – came marching through, singing their Republic’s battle-hymn.

But Eisenhower’s deployment was made only after it became brutally and consistently clear that local Southern government was – to put it charitably – not up to the task of enforcing the laws that were passed to protect the rights of ‘negroes’ almost a century before, following the South’s not-winning the Civil War. It wasn’t as if the South had been blind-sided by any new-fangled laws suddenly and slyly passed without public attention. A very concrete federal promise to the nation’s black citizens, made 90-plus years before, was finally being fulfilled – and nobody (except perhaps the long-suffering Southern blacks themselves) had any claim to being surprised.

But that was then.

Nowadays, We have some claim – but only some – to being surprised. And not by local government, but by the federal government. As part of its long surrender of its fundamental prerogatives as the core Branch of government, Congress now permits the deployment of troops – although, of course, We shouldn’t worry and should Just Trust Them – or Just Trust the President. That’s worked so well for Us recently. The invasion and occupation of Iraq, the economy, 9/11 itself, the Military Commissions and military law … mah mah mah, a stunnin’ record of resoundin’ success indeed. Lawdy, lawdy.

Now the Southerners have pretty much taken over the military, abetted by their fundamentalist chaplains whose essential theological illumination is that if there’s an American-flag patch on the shoulder than whatever is done is God’s will, and whoever disagrees is an agent of Satan. As if the Divinity spoke His mind as clearly as Goring when he took over the German police: “Henceforth, a bullet fired from a police revolver is to be considered my bullet”. Ach, let us to pray, ja?

Maybe there was nobody else. After 30 or 40 years of the Identities deconstructing any ‘traditional American’ identity common to all of Us, it was only the Southerners who kept any sort of palpable tradition of American identity alive. Of course, that tradition came heavily larded with classic Southern characteristics of small-town small-souledness, Romantic militarism, a tribalistic sentimentality so thick as to mask the violence lurking just beneath, and a fundamentalist religion that urges obedience to the powers that be and that finds a ‘patriotism’ thus encumbered to be its only sacrament. We so need more better options.

But Southern ‘patriotism’ is not the only kind there is. And while We can’t wait another couple-three decades for whatever new ‘patriotism’ was going to eventually be cooked up out of the deconstructed left-overs of Identity-politics, there are models left Us by the Founders, by Mr. Lincoln, by Martin Luther King, among others. And Mr. Eisenhower certainly gave it his best shot, though nothing is perfect. Surely there’s enough there to at least re-start the fire in Our common hearth. When We are cold, We don’t function so well. And even if We are now so poor that We don’t have more than two sticks to rub together, well – the laws of nature holding steady, that should be enough. And “Inshallah” (to respectfully quote a recent public statement of a U.S. military judge) We might experience a communal drawing-together against the darkness such as inspired the earliest generations of Our people.

But getting back to Mr. Kennedy’s support for undoing Posse Comitatus. I worry very much that it betokens more than an instance of political horse-trading or a fit of absence of mind (or character). Rather, it indicates an ominous strategic decision among not a few Democrats (the party that’s supposed to be for ‘democracy’, sorta like the name says): Let the Republicans take the heat now, and then when we’re in the White House and in control of Congress, and people finally wake up to see just how much we’ve screwed up over the decades (because it’s all gonna come out, especially if we can’t fix everything we’ve broke now), and take to the streets, then we can ‘legally’ send in the Marines to save our swag and our seats and somehow keep the party going. Neat. Certainly the type of shrewd two-fer for which Mr. Kennedy is noted. Not much on the Big Picture, or consequences, but then he’s had so little experience with such things. Shrewd tactics have served him well enough all this time.

The National Nanny State, a creature of the ‘left’, although cloaked in ‘sensitivity’ and concern for ‘pain’ is every bit as capable of violence as the National Security State. A bomb dropped in a “humanitarian intervention” kills just as surely as a bomb dropped for the sake of imperial ambitions and “oil”. The children at Waco died just as surely in the flames even though Janet Reno (later) intoned her concern that they were being ‘abused’ and thus she wanted to help; all that can be said about that assertion is that in terms of absolute numbers her ‘rescue’ didn’t kill as many children as a rescue run by the Russians – not exactly setting a high bar.

And back here at home, just how hard is it to imagine that the troops at some point in the not-too-distant future will be deployed against assumed criminals – easy targets like, oh, say, sex offenders. There – who can argue with that? And then with political demonstrators whose ideas are ‘inappropriate’ and perhaps scaring ‘the children’? After all, if soccer-parents these days approve of ‘correct’ teachers gutting fairy-tales to remove evil step-mothers, witches, abandonment, abuse, and death – well, you wouldn’t want ‘the children’ exposed to Thomas Paine on the evening news, would you? Eugene Debs? The Bill of Rights? Why expose them to all that? Better to let the troops take those ‘agitators’ and malcontents away to where the nice folks at KBR have built a special camp for them. It’s being done for the children. After all, we’re decent folk here.

And somehow thus We are back to the troops marching into the South down deceptively sunny roads all those decades ago. Funny how History moves.

They will come for a lot of Us, one fine day. Unless things are stopped now. Unless We stop them. Senator Leahy – and there are others like him – is doing his bit. And fulfilling his sworn responsibility. A ray of light in a gathering gloom from which no ‘New World’ shall come to Our rescue.

We are the New World. The buck stops here. But not the Constitution. Unless We fail.

BIDDEN AND FORBIDDEN

Glenn Greenwald takes on an ancient foe in “Rendering Public Opinion Irrelevant” over on the Salon site. (http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/).

I had forgotten how much can be hidden in plain sight, simply because the MSM refuse to notice it. Thus, that – prescinding from the tremendous preponderance of world opinion in the matter – a stupefying 71% of Americans believe that America should take an even-handed approach in the sempiternal Israeli-Palestinian mess.

I had forgotten. And to hear Congresspersons and pols and government apparatchiks tell it, you’d think that We were all for being the ‘bodyguard’ for the Israeli realm (for which, I think, the German word would be ‘Reich’).

Historians will have a field day with this. 22nd-century academic careers will be made writing about how for so long so many Americans wanted to take a balanced approach, and yet the American government – for votes and cash and an excuse to grab oil and keep at a seat at the Eurasian table – took a stupendously one-sided approach.

Greenwald recalls the stunningly bad experience of Howard Dean – whose ‘even-handed’ comment got him into irretrievable difficulties with AIPAC and the other usual suspects, including just about the entire roster of Democratic Party biggies including Reid and Pelosi.
America must support Israel’s right to exist and to be free from terror, bleats the chorus of pandering frogs whose only remaining virtue is that they are bipartisan.

A couple of things come to me:

This was a sorta preventable problem 60 years ago. The Jewish Zionist movement for almost a century had envisioned a ‘safe home’ for Jewish folk. It was a very understandable desire, given the uncertainty of the status of Jewish folk in Europe and European Russia. There would be a problem with finding a patch of real-estate, since most of it was taken up. Some shrewd negotiating with various governments might have yielded benefits. But the ‘solution’ that the Zionists latched onto almost immediately was to equate the ‘safe home’ with a ‘return’ to the real-estate once known as ancient Israel, until in the time of the early Roman Empire that particular property was taken from them after their unsuccessful revolt. But, of course, if the Bible is used as a Registry of Deeds sort of book, then the Jewish ownership of ‘biblical’ Israel is pretty much eternal (Jewish thought on the religious validity of this usage has not been unanimous.).

And once, at least in theory, the very real concern about the permanent safety of the Jewish folk was indissolubly linked to a piece of real estate no longer in their possession and indeed ‘possessed’ – to the extent any land is ever possessed – by others, and for a period of many centuries … well, even in theory and on paper the almost-total intractability of the problem was clear.

But then came the Third Reich and World War Two. Western revulsion at the monstrousness of Hitler’s demonic vision and the inconceivable efficiency of its execution was complete.

Surfing the complicated but not unfavorable wave patterns, the Zionist elements within surviving world Jewry began to make serious noises about ‘going home’, and that they were ‘owed’. That something had to be done to ensure no such massacre would ever happen again seemed clear to any reasonable adult. That the surviving members of world Jewry needed a place to go to call their own was not quite so clear, but certainly a matter for consideration. That world Jewry, represented by a Zionist vanguard, should be permitted to go and re-occupy its old biblical homestead, erect a sovereign state, and to hell with world opinion or the objections of anybody – such as the present inhabitants of the place – did not seem a clearly logical or wise course of action at all.

Harry Truman, as he noted at the time, had no Arab voters and a lot of Jewish ones – and being in charge simultaneously of the world’s new superpower and a Democratic Party that was not sure of its own voter-base – figured that numerous birds could be killed with the one stone. And he cast it. The Pope advised against it; and while he famously had no divisions, he did draw upon almost two millennia worth of highly professional Vatican insight and diplomacy; Harry ignored him. The United Nations and others expressed objections with varying degrees of circumspection – Harry was the new superkid on the block, after all – but to no avail. And by then Zionist-connected militant groups such as Irgun were already over there, setting off car bombs and killing troops (British, even) to let the world know that business was meant and that No as an answer was not on the table.

In a part of the world where memories go back centuries and are never repressed, and in which his nation had no abiding interest (in 1948 the US was pumping its own oil from domestic sources), Harry stretched forth his arm and the people returned ‘home’.

Straightaway, the foreseen intractables began to manifest themselves. The inhabitants resisted to the point where the newly-established Jewish State had to deploy methods not quite so different from the Wehrmacht’s a half-decade before.

And the perky Israeli solution to that inconvenient reality was to insist that a) there were no people there to be militarily eliminated, b) and anyway they were not resistance-fighters but terrorists, c) the horror of the Holocaust has created its own kind of emergency that justifies ‘whatever it takes’ to prevent its repetition, and d) to mention this whole inconvenient reality is to be anti-Semitic and perhaps even Nazi yourself. Behind this queasy cloud of unknowing the Israeli plan was to create itself as a Fact on the Ground that nobody could make ‘go away’; hewed to tenaciously, in season and out of season, this strategy would simply use the West’s famous distractibility as a tool: the West’s attention would be worn down until Israel would appear to be as natural a part of the regional furniture as the mountains and the sand.

And in that plan was the basis of an indenturing of vote-desperate and newly ‘sensitive’ Democrats, a thoroughgoing Political Correctness, a comprehensive media manipulation of public opinion, and a fundamental disconnection between accurate perceptions of reality and repeated official versions of reality that would eventually poison the American polity, ‘host’ and benefactor of the Israeli state, and then would be taken up by the Advocacies of the Identities in the late ‘60s and corrode the very foundations of American democratic politics and the ability of its citizens to People their government.

But to think about it all – except in the way that the Israeli state found useful and convenient – was Forbidden, by parties unknown - or at least who don't care to acknowledge their role in this treacherous mess.

For quite some time it was useful to de-emphasize ‘religion’ in American society. Hence for years there was an unstinting support of the ‘secularization’ of American society. After all, since the country was mostly ‘Christian’ (although not necessarily Fundamentalist, back then) it stood to reason that the less ‘Christianity’ was loose, the less danger of a repeat of the Holocaust happening. And – a happy two-fer – this dovetailed nicely with the feministic emphasis on de-emphasizing ‘religion’ in American society not only because the feminists of that Wave wanted to destabilize the white, male-dominated ‘rape culture’ of American society, but also because ‘religious’ arguments were the greatest conceptual obstruction to the ramming home of pro-abortion laws.

And yet then when it became clear that the Democrats were no longer as useful as they once had been, rapport was established with a Republican Party whose conceptual and emotional base was in the whackery of American Protestant Fundamentalism, an early-20th century phenomenon that believed in the literal truth of every single word of the Bible except wherever it said ‘wine’ (which, according to the most authoritative preacherly exegesis, really meant ‘grape juice’). Not historically averse to the virtues of the grape themselves, the Israelis tactfully overlooked the oenophobia and embraced those particular elements of Fundamentalism that would surreptitiously spackle up the notoriously flaccid American citizenry with a respect for authority and efficiency (ja!) and with a sense of how urgent it was to win the unavoidable battle for Armageddon that would establish the Israeli state in total peace and security by flattening all its enemies.

Ominously, the tidal wave generated by 9/11 provided the vehicle by which a now energy-and-economy-challenged US government could simultaneously make its bid for fresh supplies of energy, a place at the evolving Eurasian table, a refreshed stature for its dangerously ungrounded currency, and a securing of the Israeli state’s regional position (and thus of the American Jewish voters’ undying gratitude) … so many nice birds with just the one stone.

The current US government need to spackle up the American citizenry for 'resource wars' and national-interest preventive wars and other assorted overseas adventures dovetails nicely with the Israeli government's need to keep the US involved 'over there'. After all, it wasn't rocket science to see - even in 1948 - that if the Israelis for all practical purposes invaded Palestine, and then had to resort to Wehrmacht-tactics in order to establish their beach-head, then in that never-forget part of the world a lot of the locals would be mickle displeased with the Israeli state for the forseeable future. The Israeli governments of that era could be forgiven for thinking that such hostility - generated not by a conceptual anti-Semitism but rather by an abiding outrage over the invasion and 'pacification' of Palestine - would in itself be useful, creating an ongoing 'emergency' that would justify any further harsh measures of military repression and also sustaining an ongoing 'emergency' sure to snag American voters and politicians. And so it has.

And - also not rocket science - the Arab states accurately perceive - also not rocket science, given US pols' statements - that the US is the strength propping up this whole Israeli gambit. And do they hate 'us' for who we are? Or for what the US government has done and continues to do? Funny how Bush hit on that point, in exactly that odd way of putting it, immediately after 9/11. And answered his own question - what did We expect? - that it wasn't anything that We 'did', but rather that 'those' folks were simply hating-on Us for who We are. Which, also, in a marvelous but no doubt innocent coincidence, is precisely how the Israeli government likes to present itself, thus blotting out the original invasion, that ironic original-sin upon which the entire enterprise is built. My my my. Yah.

It also occurs to me: if Congressfolk are opposing so large a majority of the public, and – as we’ve seen in matters sex-offensive and Patriot-ic – aren’t even bothering to read the laws that they then vote for, just how legitimate are the laws? Issues of ‘legitimacy’ – profoundly ominous – arise, politically even if not (for the moment) legally. There is a 71% majority of Us who wish to see a more 'balanced' - face it, a more intelligent - approach to the Israel-Palestine problem, and Our pols ignore that?

Many of those 22nd-century careers will also be made tracing the debacle of the US government’s gradual self-indenture to the interests of the Israeli state – a state with which no official alliance exists or has ever existed, one of the very few states which had attacked US forces, killing and injuring many, in repeated attacks in the broad light of a terribly long day … an achievement in infamy not even effected by the USSR in all its long, dark tenure.

And then those 22nd-century scholars will start looking at Us: what the frak had gone wrong with Us that We could have let things – Our government included – get so far out of hand?

What indeed? Inquiring minds will want to know.

NOW WE KNOW

Over on Salon again, Glenn Greenwald opens up to me an entirely new vista, and a dark one. “The motivation for blocking investigations into Bush lawbreaking”
(http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2008/07/15/complicity/print.html).

Up til now I had pretty much been concentrating on the conceptual affinities (not to say complicities) between the Democrats with their National Nanny State and the Republicans with their National Security State. The Democrats in their do-whatever-it-takes teeth-gritting to keep ‘the women’s vote’ and be thought of as ‘sensitive’ and ‘enlightened’, and the Republicans in their do-whatever-it-takes chest-thumping to ‘be patriotic’ and ‘keep people safe’ … neither of them have any use for The People, that stubbornly unpredictable variable that could obstruct whatever stampede whichever Party wants to start in the service of its ‘ultimate emergencies’ and its goals.

Thus one of the intermediate goals of both Parties has been to neutralize that stubborn variable by distracting It or corrupting Its ability to operate properly or to intimidate It with surveillance and registries and all the other weaponry that the ultra modern nation-state can deploy in order to get its way.

In any case, neither Party is conceptually hospitable to or even genuinely respectful of ‘The People’ as envisioned by the Framers and by Lincoln (all of whom, I suspect, are already considered ‘quaint’ in the inner cocktail parties of the Democratic as well as the Republican Parties). Consequently, civil liberties are not really safe with either Party. For the moment, We’re back to the third and almost final line of defense: the Third Branch, the Judiciary. If that goes, then as the Marines say: ‘everybody’s a rifleman’ so cooks, clerks, musicians, and the IT nerds will be expected to go into the field; it will remain for The People to save their own game. Then indeed will the school-days drone of the Gettysburg words bethump Us: “It is for us, the living, rather, to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us …” Will the generations of our era be able to wage such a struggle for the soul and the structure of the Republic?

So far so bad.

Now Glenn Greenwald adds an ominous new angle. The explanation for the recent Democratic Congressional give-aways in re telecom immunity (and, I think, going all the way back to the infamous Military Commissions Act and its precedent-setting ex-post-facto legalization of illegal and even treacherous behavior on the part of military and civilian government officials in the matter of torture) is not only a matter of abstract conceptions and Party – you should pardon the expression – philosophy.

No. It’s that the Democrats have been as treacherous as the Republicans and have been so deeply complicit in all this illegality that by this point, they themselves will be in danger of prosecution. Not only for war-crimes, but for the violation of established and applicable American laws. (The S.S., as so often, had a pithy description for this kind of relationship: “Blutbund”, the blood-bond: i.e., I’ve killed whom I’ve been told to kill and you know it, you’ve killed whom you were told to kill and I know it – let’s do lunch! Ach! Zoze verr ze happy times!)

This is one of those problems you get in catastrophic situations. Not only the obvious initial problem is causing grief, but then secondary problems take on a life and stature of their own. As in a monster California brush-fire, where the very speed with which the flames engorge on brush and homes means that good-sized chunks of burning but not fully-consumed material are sucked up in the fire’s increasing air currents, then carried forward in the smoke plume driven by the wind that is pushing the fire itself along, until they eventually fall out of the stream and drop out of the sky into perfectly untouched areas farther ahead, and thereby start fires of their own, sometimes worse than the first one.

Sort of: “and thus the last condition will be worse than the first”, as Scripture saith, about letting one devil set up permanent shop and then that one goes and invites all its in-laws and ‘respected colleagues’ and you get … the Beltway. We, brethren and sistern, are in a heepa trubble: We got a house full of devils and no God to call on, and the angels all overseas smitin' the unbelievers, obedient to Our word. Lordy. It’s enough to make a grown man take up organized religion … but what do ‘men’ know?

Of all the obstructions to pulling back from an ill-chosen course of action, and their name is legion, perhaps the most powerfully insidious is the opposition – however hidden in the shadows – of folks theoretically on your own side who have betrayed their trust and stand to be exposed if the truth comes out. Thus, in addition to all the conceptual reasons why neither Party is particularly hospitable to truth, there is the very pragmatic reason that the perpetrators of treachery will do whatever it takes to avoid exposure and prosecution. Like vampires caught between your holy-water and a broad shaft of sunlight, they will harrumph, snarl, bray, cry, smile, wheedle, cajole, whine, recite the pledge of allegiance, and warn you that a leering sex-offender is right behind you planning unspeakable things. I hope it is not news to you when I suggest that you must stay focused, advance steadily, shpritz your holy-water resolutely, and wait for the barbecue to finish.

And of course when they are not only on your own side but are also possessed of the resources available – under the table as well as on it – to incumbent Congresspersons, well then … We got Us a convoy … to hell.

RULES TAKE A PEOPLE

Over on Salon, in his Post "Torture and the Rule of Law" Glenn Greenwald makes the excellent point that We (my capital letter) are a nation of laws. Or at least that We should be, although the FISA cave-in on telecom immunity (ontop of all the rest of the stuff in the record of this feculent Administration) now demonstrates that the rule of law can no longer be taken for granted and is no longer robust, nor can We rely on the commitment of either Party to achieve its rehabilitation.

But who can be surprised, really? Forty years of corroding The People’s capacity to think and deliberate, forty years of The People being made to feel that kicking the tires of any Identity is 'insensitive' and 'oppressive' and then - who the frak can be surprised? - of being made to feel that looking to kick the government's tires is unpatriotic and downright un-American ... what else could any mature, reasonable adult possibly expect?

We could kick none of the tires of any of the Revolutions of the Identities; when the many exotic flowers of their programmes were introduced into the cultural ecosystem, when the Advocacies for each of them screamed that doubt was backlash and deliberation was a ploy of oppression … was it possible that nobody inside the Beltway saw what such a sustained and thorough degrading of The People would ultimately lead to? Were they that witless?

Or did they realize it, however dimly, and figure they could ‘build on that’, ‘work with it’? Surely, the nation and the citizenry over whom this Administration was raised up did not subvert it in the miniscule space of time between Inauguration Day 2001 and 9/11? We had been going downhill for a long time.

We have taken too much for granted: the integrity of the rule of law depends on the integrity of the Branches and the integrity of the Branches depends on the integrity of The People. Not the purity of the individual citizens – if that is the criterion, who then can stand? And for too long the Identities have nurtured themselves by declaring this or that group of citizens their ‘oppressors’, refusing to tolerate any dissent or discussion, declaring as well that ‘perspective’ and ‘proportion’ and ‘balance’ are merely the verbal iron of oppressionand that the only appropriate role of a citizenry is to accept and say nothing.

This has proven to be a recipe for disaster for too many peoples in the not so distant past.
The People cannot be treated like children. They cannot allow Themselves to be treated like children. Yet We have.

The People cannot function at the level of children. The People cannot treat Themselves like children. Yet we have.

We must achieve a new level of Mastery – over Ourselves and then over this government that is of Us, by Us , and for Us.

Mastery is a concept that has become unfashionable. But a People that has lost the capacity for Mastery of Itself, citizens that have lost the capacity for Mastery of themselves, cannot then Master the government, and the government – as all governments do by their very nature – will attempt to fill the vacuum by exerting its mastery over the citizens and The People. And that is precisely the situation that the Founders sought to avoid.

It’s strange that things have gotten so bad that anyone now who tries to speak up is – as Greenwald accurately observes – labeled as a “shrill Leftist hysteric”. Yes, it’s ironic that the government that found a way to turn Political Correctness to its purposes now uses such an ‘insensitive stereotype’ as “hysteric”. But name-calling has become one of the major gambits in political discourse nowadays, and what was once confined to the school-yard has now become the level of discourse of a nation. But that’s been going on – in a big way – for decades. Doubters and skeptics of any group’s insistent demand for large and immediate change were called ‘backlashers’ and ‘oppressors’ and ‘haters’.

And after the Democrats abetted it for their purposes and for ‘ideals’ that had too little substance and too little purchase on American ground for the extent of the change that was demanded immediately … after that the Republicans took it up in the service of a government that was all too real and all too ‘American’. A childish level of discourse, that reduced the depth and width and height and breadth of the field of perception, until it was a childish mentality at the levers of great power.

And the empires of children can never last for long in the real world.