LIND, JIM WEBB, AND AFFIRMATIVE ACTION


Michael Lind has a fresh and important article out about the difference between traditional (my term) American concern for economic and class concerns and the past 40 years’ worth of ‘culture’ (race and gender and affirmative action on those bases) concerns. (The above link will take you to the Salon page, and you will see the Lind article (I hope) on your upper left; click on that.)

He had done some remarkably acute work in the past; his 1995 book on the dangers inherent in Multiculturalism was especially impressive to me. But more recently, as my Posts about some of his pieces indicate, he had become more conventionally ‘liberal-progressive’, in my view.

Now, discussing a Senator Jim Webb address that he attended a while back, he has – I would say – recovered a hefty chunk of his old mojo.

Webb said in the address that “the greatest threat that this country faces is the class system”. Which sounds much like a recent James Petras article (I Posted about it here) in which Petras observes that Marx had gotten one thing right: it IS all about ‘class’. (In a hell-hot irony, that was precisely the one element in Marx that the radical-feminists ignored when they adopted his attitude and method of analysis – and Lenin’s follow-on methods of imposition by ‘vanguard elites’ – in order to make their point that it was all about ‘culture’ and, more specifically, ‘gender’ (the patriarchy, the oppression, the all-sex-is-rape, and so forth and so on).

Then, recently, Webb made some follow-up comments in a ‘Wall Street Journal’ piece (linked-to in the Lind article) in which he critiqued race-based (not so much gender-based) “preferences” in numerous areas of government policy.

This gets Lind to recall – marvelously and in a sense shockingly – that “from the 1970s until the mid-1990s, there was a lively debate over race-based affirmative action between INTEGRATIONIST OR COLOR-BLIND LIBERALS and LIBERALS OF THE IDENTITY-POLITICS SCHOOL” (caps mine).

I find it tremendously heartening to be reminded that ‘liberals’ retained for so long a grip on the core dynamics essential to a working society (although I don’t recall as much indication of that “lively debate” during the early 1990s, at least in the general reportage). While the New Deal electoral coalition of Industrial North-Northeast and Jim Crow South was shattered by the civil-rights era’s (very legitimate) assault upon the Jim Crow system, the Dems apparently hadn’t lost sight of the underlying vital validity of the economic issues which were the gravamen of the New Deal.

“Most of the liberal critics of race-based policy were pro-labor liberals and social democrats, while many of its defenders were found among neo-liberals, who favored inexpensive symbols of racial progress even as they sought to deregulate the economy, slash welfare, and shrink the government.”

I point out that this discussion of ‘race-based’ affirmative action legitimately focuses on the dynamics of that original site of affirmative action. But that there is also the cumulative effect of extending affirmative action starting in the 1970s to include various other ‘minorities’, including most significantly the gender-based intensification and expansion of affirmative-action – a development soon joined by the multicultural, diversity-based affirmative-action skewed toward immigration in one form or another.

That being said, Lind’s points are hugely well-taken and well-made.

Lind’s claim is that it was in the late-1990s, Clinton’s second term, that the frakkulent combination of widespread pandering to the Left and ruthless indulgence of corporate out-sourcing of the nation’s industrial base combined in the conflagration of neo-liberalism. In the course of that conflagration, perhaps under the dizzy infatuation of the dot-com revolution (d’ye remember that?) the Knowledge-and-Service Society was raised up as the newest incarnation of Utopia and NAFTA pretty much guaranteed the impoverishment of Mexican farmers (who would come North and be pawns in the dampdreamed Dilution of White, Male, Industrial, Working Class culture … what was not to like?).

You may recall that adult American jobs suddenly included telemarketer, telephone debt collector, barrista and hash-slinger, ‘greeter’ in big-box cut-rate department stores, and such - grown-ups were now collecting carts in supermarket lots and bagging stuff, the jobs kids used to get for summer pocket money; while those with enough Knowledge not to have to Serve built McMansions and furnished them with credit card purchases and filled their garages with bought or leased high-performance autos. The ‘ordinary people’ of 1980's “Ordinary People” – well-paid architect, reeely nice house, a computer (At home! On your desk!) – had become something hell-and-gone from the little folks of the 1930s.

So, to do their bit and keep up their creds as and A-list dinner eligibility, the mainstream media and ‘elite opinion’ simply dropped any mention of the Integrationist Liberal approach and solidified the spin to create the real blob of a fake 'unanimous Identity-Politics Liberalism'.

Nicely, Lind notes that Bayard Rustin, a homosexual black civil-rights activist of the old school and “social democrat”, opposed race-based affirmative action, thus exposing as agitprop whackery “the claim that only conservative white males oppose race-based public policies”.

And Lind acknowledges the arrival of ‘diversity’ as a concept to replace the clanky and increasingly questionable race-based affirmative action itself. It was taken as axiomatic – though never proven, or subjected to discussion – that institutions such as universities “must MIRROR, in their internal composition, the ever-changing racial and ethnic composition of society as a whole” (caps mine).

I would add ‘gender’ to the composition element.

The sly monte-scam in this formulation is that the composition of American society did not at all organically ‘change’ – it was force-fed from a pipeline specifically designed to rapidly Deconstruct and Dilute American society, while simultaneously undermining the traditionally held fundaments that were the bedrock of the American vision, ethos, and culture. “Ever-changing” is wayyyyyy too nice a term for what has happened here; the ‘change’ was not incremental but imposed with all the force that the Beltway could bring to bear.

I would also point out that this Diversity gambit was a shrewd one: it would sidestep the entire requirement for achievement (including, intentionally or not, any personal responsibility for self-mastery and competence) and simply award ‘status’ to a selected population who would become ‘clients’ of those political patrons who gave them such bounty. It was a ‘kinder and gentler’ and more ‘enlightened’ version of the raw and dirty ‘spoils system’ of the 19th century – although hardly cleaned-up.

But, of course, Wealth and the corporations saw just how phantasmagoric such dampdreams were – and promptly pressured the Beltway indentures to permit them to out-source with abandon, finding places on the planet where there were cheaper labor pools but also more capable ones.*

But Lind notes just how selective this theoretically capacious Diversity concept really is: at this point, universities are putting their well-manicured thumbs onto the scales in order to reduce the number of “over-represented” Asians in order to inflate the numbers of “under-represented” categories. As if the Knowledge-and-Service economy could conceivably employ the current crops of graduates to the manner which – by watching ‘Gossip Girl’ – they have already accustomed themselves.

Yet, as one slightly alarmed university-employed commentator recently noted (sorry, clear recollection of the content, but I can’t recall who said it): she was jolted to find a young female student (and this is certainly not limited to females, I expect) who quit a college-course because ‘the Asians have an unfair advantage: they study too hard’. I submit to you that in that one little ‘story’ is contained the key to the decline of a mature and productive civilization.

But again nicely, Lind notes that if Diversity were really a workable policy, then the Supreme Court – almost all Catholic at this point – would have to be re-jiggered to make room for more Protestants (and Buddhists and Wiccans and new-model atheists and what-have-you). And, I suppose, women would have to be allowed onto pro football teams where – through the workings of some mysterious and dark and no doubt sinister backlashy forces – they are not.

Lind then turns his considerable powers on LBJ’s speech at Howard University in June, 1965 – a speech frequently trumpeted by race-conscious Identity Politics ‘liberals’ as proof positive that theirs is the Way that had always been intended. (There is a link in Lind’s piece to the text of that speech and it’s well worth a couple of minutes to read.)

Lind sets the tone by saying that he intends to look at the speech in order to shed truthful light on “the rather Orwellian argument that the sequel to the anti-racist civil rights revolution had to be a temporary or permanent era of benevolent racial discrimination”. (Again, I note that ‘race’ long ago ceased to be the only basis of all this government discrimination.)

Lind shares from his own wide and insightful experience: he had once talked to Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who in 1965 was a key mover behind the speech that LBJ gave on that June 4th almost half a century ago. “We were not talking about affirmative action. We were talking about jobs. Safe streets. Good schools. The safety net. Healthcare. Strong families."

Alas that was not to be. The urban riots of the Northeastern and West-Coast cities undermined LBJ’s moral authority to twist Congressional arms; the feminists (soon to take over the Revolution business) were dead-set against ‘the Family’ (it was Auschwitz or Dachau, take your pick); and the post-King Black Power types didn’t intend to take any lessons or advice from Honky; any government benefits put in their service were purely owed, didn’t need to be earned, and that was all there was to it.

LBJ went on to enumerate what he saw as required beyond the essential but insufficient facts of Civil and Voting rights: jobs, decent homes in decent surroundings, a chance for a decent education, welfare and social programs designed to hold families together, and care for the sick. (I am going to imagine that in regard to this last, LBJ imagined the government helping families take care of their sick, not some form of the mass warehousing of the elderly and the hyper-hospitalization and medication-nation stuff that has come to pass.)

But as I said, neither the now-authoritative Black Power interests nor the up-and-coming feministicals were going to be happy with a program like this. Let me quote – as Lind does – the full sentence LBJ used about ‘jobs’: “They bring the income which permits a man to provide for his family”. (italics mine) You can see here, from today’s vantage point, precisely how doomed LBJ’s vision was, and how much American developments have subsequently diverged from that sober and constructive path.

Let me quote here an entire paragraph of Lind’s: “In his Howard University speech, Johnson proposed that the formerly abused athlete be rehabilitated and trained so that he could later compete and win in a fair race without help. Race-based preferences, however, are the equivalent of taking the bondage-crippled athlete and, without allotting sufficient time for rehabilitation and training, permitting him to start several laps ahead of the other competitors”.

Imagine how this would play out – and cumulatively – in American society as not only race, but gender, ethnic background, citizenship status (or the lack of it), disability of any kind and widely-defined, and even sexual orientation … all came to add their own specific layers of government-selectivity.

Imagine how all that accumulated load would make an impact upon anyone simply trying to get out on the field, practice, and play as good a game as possible: ‘fairness’ was no longer guaranteed.

And then, recall, in the early 1970s John Rawls began tossing around his concept of “moral luck” – that if you happen to be born with a skill or be disciplined enough to pursue study, this was not a sign of achievement or maturity because you just happened to have benefitted from “moral luck”. (Thus the Asian who studied too much in the story mentioned above was mostly just “lucky” and had no right to expect the government to sit idly by while s/he reaped the advantages of sustained and focused effort; by the same token, the young female student who quit her course was merely the victim of some bad “moral luck” and shouldn’t be stigmatized for it AND should actually be helped by having the government put its fat thumbs on the scales of Life.)

“Moral luck” was Rawls’s effort to factor in what previously had been known as Divine Providence. But a) there is a huge price to pay when conceptually you Flatten the dimensions of human existence and claim that this world of appearances is self-sustaining and self-contained and there is no Beyond worth mentioning; b) Divine Providence is a dynamic concept: it doesn’t just start you off like a soccer player kicks a ball and sends it on its way for better or worse – rather, it (or God, if you wish) stays with you throughout the trip; c) Divine Providence is relational (God, in the old religious view, being a Person) and humans get not only Assistance but Accompaniment.

Rawls offers none of this. His concept simply provides benefit-of-philosophy to a frakkulent government intrusiveness that resembles nothing so much as refs and coaches actually getting into the game and directing the outcomes according to their own illuminations.

(And imagine how “moral luck” would play out, as I never tire of pointing out, in a military setting where EVERYTHING depends on Achieved Competence Applied In Timely Fashion against Actual Threatening Realities, for which Actions there will be Consequences that cannot be Wished or Spun Away. What happens to the motivation to pursue and achieve Competence, Skill, and Excellence? What, for that matter, happens to the motivation to pursue and achieve any Maturity at all?)

Thus, Lind goes on, once the CASTE-based system of Jim Crow was delegitimized – as it was by July, 1965 – then “the second phase of the civil rights movement had to be race-neutral and CLASS-based” (caps mine) What he means, he explains, is that blacks and whites together would now need to apply themselves to both producing and – as Citizens – to guiding the just distribution of the fruits of that labor.

But that’s not what happened.

Not hardly.

In fact, first the Black Power separationism and in-your-face attitude alienated blacks from much if not most of the white goodwill that had provided indispensable support for the actual work King and his colleagues accomplished on the streets of Southern cities.

And then second, the follow-on Revolutions, spear-headed by the eerily gimlet-eyed cadres of the feministical Revolution, embraced Identity Politics as well, but added French Theory to Marx’s methodology and Marx’s eternal suspicion of decent motives; and they did so not in order to achieve a wider public consensus but to forge an Identity that could be used as a weapon against the public by intimidating or seducing the pols into going along with the dampdreams of the Movement and of the Revolution.

LBJ and MLK, divided in the end by the war in Vietnam, both remained firmly convinced that the next phase of civil rights had to be “race-neutral economic reform”.

But Identity Politics was to derail all that, drowning out all sober thinking with the mantras of Multiculturalism and Diversity.

Meanwhile, the country’s economic condition was allowed to careen on down the track, the pols pandering to the Identities by formally enacting their short-sighted agendas into law and policy, while collecting cash (through the ingenious PAC system) from Wealth and corporations to permit them to go abroad in search of more profitable workers.

And as the gap in national wealth widened on several axes, Reagan borrowed, Clinton allowed a huge asset sell-off and outsourcing, and Bush allowed the Bubbles to flow like champagne.

But that was then. And now the party’s over.

Lind wants to see that long-postponed and evaded “next phase” of civil rights implemented now. It would be the best way to address the national Mess and it would provide a more comprehensive and politically attractive (to mature and thoughtful voters) platform than the tired and (literally) bankrupt agitprop panderings of Identity Politics.

It is a consummation devoutly to be wished.

But as I have been saying, a lot more toxic water has flowed under the bridge in the past four decades: the country is not simply standing once again at the cross-roads of late 1965 at this point. It is a different country, the competence and political maturity of the Citizenry is alarmingly compromised, American economic primacy has gone and will most likely not return in any way approaching prior levels, and there really isn’t much money around anymore. (Bill Gates’s entire fortune could not dig California out of the hole for a year).

There exists no small possibility that the opportunity of that “second phase”, missed in 1965, is gone for good and won’t return.

Surely, Lind is on solid ground when he observes that “Rustin was right to warn that race-based affirmative action would make a social democratic coalition of black Americans and the white working class even more difficult than it would have been otherwise”. That in itself was a huge negative consequence, realized – alas – all too well. But again, at this point We must factor in the cumulative consequences of the follow-on Identity Politics ‘revolutions’, each of which have – along their respective axes of division – done quite the same type of damage. The American polity now resembles not so much a piece of fabric with one big hole rip torn in it, but rather a piece of fabric peppered with holes large and small, like a Swiss cheese (sorry to mix the metaphors there).

But I certainly think that some way of applying the LBJ-MLK approach now, if given a decent hearing by the Beltway pols (I doubt the ‘elites’ would be enthusiastic, having been raised to the purple under the aegis of Identity Politics), there might be some real progress to be made.

Lind is on solid ground reminding Us of the 11 points of the ‘Freedom Budget’ proposed in October of 1967 by A. Philip Randolph and others: "the abolition of poverty; guaranteed full employment; full production and high economic growth; adequate minimum wages; income parity for farmers; guaranteed incomes for those unable to work; a decent home for every family; healthcare for all; educational opportunity for all; reforms of Social Security and welfare; and equitable tax policies".

This is a tall order. It was then but it’s even more so now: the industrial base is gone; the dampdreams of the assorted Identity revolutions have turned the apparently solid conceptual ground of the points into a mine-field of coded agendas and objectives many of which are themselves misconceived and lethal; the entire sitting political class and its elites have made their careers doing exactly the opposite; and the Citizenry that in 1967 might still have been able to Ground the whole thing has been grievously diluted and weakened along many crucial axes.

But at least it would get the country back on the right track. Although We would then still have a long hard way to go.

And it would get the country ‘back to work again’, if I may put it that way. I don’t mean in terms of productive and life-sustaining useful jobs, but rather in the deeper sense of allowing the Citizens to again engage in the reality-based challenge of building a responsible and mature life as individuals and as a commonwealth, as a society and as a polity, as a culture and a civilization (hey hey, ho ho), as a complex but deeply united association of committed adults.

Now THERE is a Vision.

NOTES

*As I so often point out, even the military had to bend to the wind. But even more than industry, the military must operate in a world where Competence in the face of Hard Realities and the inescapable and unspinnable power of Consequences do not yield to the clever manipulations of appearances. But still, huge numbers of ‘contractors’ started to appear to bolster the Diversity-riddled forces.

FURTHER ON LIND


A Commenter asked about the immediately previous Post: what can be done?

Let me offer what I can using the image of the Titanic that I used in the Post itself. So take a quick look at that image towards the end of the immediately previous Post if you need to.

Right off the bat at this point there are now three huge and interlocked problems: 1) the ship has indeed hit the iceberg and grievously ripped herself open; 2) the command staff (the Beltway – pols, staffs, ‘advocates’, lobbyists, experts, the media pundits, and don’t rule out the White House) has indeed been degraded into a butt-covering nomenklatura; 3) the passengers – especially in 2nd and 3rd class – are indeed now drunk and have been for quite some time. (First-class are merely enjoying the champagne, in the sure and certain knowledge that they already have a lock on what lifeboats there are – and their pandering Beltway lap-dogs no doubt also figure that when worse comes to worst, they too will have a reserved seat for themselves, their loved ones, and their valuables.)

So what can be done?

I think that first (and last, and always) the passengers must sober up as quickly as they can. That is to say, The People must find within themselves individually and as a collectivity the strength to ACKNOWLEDGE THEIR CATASTROPHIC PREDICAMENT: before you even think about the frakkulent frakkery of the past 40 years in terms of Cultural Wars and the Revolutions of the Identities and all their pomps and all their works, you have to accept that the U.S. is at this point teetering at the abyss of Insolvency and there is no more real ‘money’ – it’s all rather notional and those who print it 24/7 and then talk as if it’s still 1960 around here are treacherously delusional.

Once the passengers do that – shaking off the stupor of decades’ worth of the cheap and fake ‘high’ that comes from cheap and fake money – then they must exercise what role the Founders’ Vision and the Constitution has bestowed upon them (and not on any actual ship’s passengers in human history): The People is the governor of its governors and must let those employed personnel know in no uncertain terms that a) they will be held to account for their behavior (past, present, and the immediate future) and b) they had best come up with some serious and effective solutions.

That won’t be easy. It’s hard enough for any individual to break an addiction habit (even where one has been unintentionally and criminally addicted by somebody else). So The People has to come up to speed with lots of strong black coffee without a moment’s delay.

And the Beltway is not simply ‘addicted’ to pandering: most of the entire sitting political class and the assorted remora-like ‘elites’ that surround them have committed by this time so many treacheries large and small* that they not only have to give up their swag-habit but also have to face the possibility of prosecution or at least public obloquy. And the public, newly alert to just how much has been frakked up, is going to be mighty worked up indeed.

If and when they can ‘sober up’ – and the National Situation is certainly a sobering prospect – then they can, as Andrew Bacevich puts it in his latest book, start to “ask first-order questions”. A “first-order” principle” is an utterly fundamental principle that underlies everything built on top of it and is indispensable to the integrity of everything built on top of it.


In this case, We The People – individually and as that vital collective – should conduct Our own careful and deliberate re-consideration of just what it is that America is all about, should be all about, and can be all about (and those are 3 separate categories).

What do We want the country to become while still retaining the vitally constitutive and defining characteristics of ‘America’?

What, then, ARE the vitally defining characteristics of America?

In what ways can such visions be achieved or are they not-achievable? (So, for example, no matter how hi-tech your ambulance, how fast can it be realistically be driven en route to a call without causing more trouble than existed in the first place?)

And more apropos to the present Situation: If We recall the plight of Camus’s lone Doctor in a city stricken by the plague, then just what can be done and for whom, given the very limited resources remaining?

Nor can We indulge the simple and childlike urge to simply ask Our national ‘parents’, the Beltway elites and pols or even the President.** That entire bunch has pretty much gotten Us into this mess over the course of 40 Biblical years, so the older ones are hugely compromised and the younger ones don’t really have the clout or the vision to be able to answer. And anyway, the Question is Ours to ask and to answer. ‘Leadership’ is one thing; but some whacky simulacrum of parental authority exercised by the Beltway or the White House is something else altogether.

And at this point, barring a Lincoln or a Washington or a Roosevelt (either one) – and none of them seem to be available and realistically within electoral reach – then I can’t see that anybody coming into the Presidency is going to be able to accomplish much in terms of cleaning out the Augean Stable and restoring some sober and mature presence to the process.

So s/he will need some firm guidance from The People. Which means We are going to have to get back into the deliberating-the-American-Experiment job, which in the past century has sort of faded away under the heat of intensifying national complexity and the hell-hot pressure of being at war and the incessant pressures of dedicated cadres advocating this and that ‘revolution’ (even if soft-pedaled as ‘reform’ or ‘change’ or ‘rights’).

None of this will be easy because for the past 40 Biblical years it has been PRECISELY the strategy of the assorted cadres, and their Beltway enablers, to PREVENT any public deliberation of “first-order principles”.


And THAT was because for all practical purposes so much of the many agendas embraced by the Beltway profoundly rejected the Founding Vision. Either their Content dismissed core American principles as traditionally embodied or their Method of Implementation required a complete side-stepping or overriding of a wide and well-informed democratic deliberation in order to reach a consensus. Or, not infrequently, both.

Robert Reich, in a recent ‘Nation’ article, lists some solutions (he was in Clinton’s Cabinet and saw a lot of stuff happening, and probably supported a bunch of it). One of his suggestions is that the U.S. government requires all US-chartered corporations to produce in America and employ Americans. Which you would think would have always been the policy, but the Beltway has made a bundle allowing Big Money to take itself overseas (not that the radical-feminists were unhappy to see the White, Macho, Industrial productivity base be Deconstructed while their new dampdream of a ‘Knowledge and Service’ society trickled in to replace that mighty engine.

In the meantime, leaving specific policy proposals for a moment, I would suggest urgently that the citizens have to come up to speed in the matter of personal maturity and thus civic and political competence. It had always been the hallmark of Liberalism that the Individual was presumed to be a mature adult (or aspiring mightily there-toward); and on the basis of that presumption government needed only to keep a clear playing-field and – like any good ref – stay out of the players’ way.

But the 20th century has seen the corrosion of the Mature and Competent Individual, not only as a reality but – in radical-feminist dogma – even as an Ideal toward which all should be aspiring.

Instead, citizens are now seen as ‘victims’ and ‘victimized Identities’, who must and should rely on the National Nanny State government for just about everything. Which is not a recipe for a Citizenry capable of functioning as The People.

And in THAT case, it would only be ‘the next logical step’ that if you don’t have The People, then you don’t need a Constitutional Republic in any sense envisioned by the Framers. And clearly the National Nanny State, when you consider it without the rose-colored glasses of radical-feminism and Identity Politics and Multiculturalism and Victimism, is not at all a Constitutional Republic. (Nor am I here making an ulterior plump for a National Security State, which is the same thing, but from the Right, and on the pretext of National Security and/or National Greatness.)

Rather, the country would become, as Titanic was, a hierarchically controlled collectivity with the command staff, the first-class wealthy and elite dwelling in luxury close by with their many servants housed conveniently close by, and in the increasingly darker depths of the vessel, scads of cattle-like passengers and the engine-room help laboring like trogolodytes.

The ship was not set up as a ‘democracy’ so what was not to like?

I would like to think that We wouldn’t like this arrangement at all – especially since it casts the vast majority of Us as nothing more than cattle in the scenic background of some old Western flik, docile and self-absorbed in munching whatever is around, ready to be stampeded on cue. Phooey.

NOTES

*Consider LBJ: as early as 1965 he allowed a nuclear-processing company in Pennsylvania, run by a fellow with deep and long connection to Our Staunch Ally Sans Treaty (SAST) to ‘lose’ almost half a ton of nuclear material, and then the White House quashed the investigation into the disappearance. Thus, effectively, LBJ not only allowed a non-allied and foreign power to acquire nuclear material, but was indispensable in allowing nuclear weapons to be introduced into the Middle East (which is precisely what Our SAST did with the material). You can start informing yourself here and here, and the now declassified 1978 GAO Report is here.

And this was all two years before he called off Navy jets going to the rescue of a US Navy ship attacked by the SAST with the greatest loss of life in U.S. sailors since Imperial Japan had been doing its thing in the Pacific. Some ‘ally’. (You can inform yourself here and here.)

LBJ’s behavior – although perhaps motivated by a desperate need to raise up new reliable electoral blocs for Democrats who had just ( through the Civil Rights legislation) shattered the old New Deal Democratic electoral coalition (that included the Jim Crow South) – rose in the first instance at least to treachery, but surely in the second instance approached – and I do not use this term lightly or sensationalistically – treason.

So many treacheries and treasons - large and small - over the course of the past Biblical 40 years.

**Many may yet recall the 1992 presidential debate, when a gentleman with a pony-tail, a social worker whose métier was domestic mediation, addressed Bush the Elder, Clinton, and Ross Perot with this question: “And I ask the three of you, how can we, as symbolically the children of the future president, expect the three of you to meet our needs”.


I hope it isn’t too much of a leap to see how frakkulently out of sync this question is with the entire Constitutional schematic designed by the Framers. In their view the nation was a nation of adults – of varying abilities and levels of competence – but all adults trying to (or expected to be trying to) hold up their individual role with the society and as a member of The People. It was this collective of individual adults who would form the gravamen of the nation, the Ground of the government, the ballast and the ultimate repository of governing authority.

The social worker’s (Walthall, if memory serves) approach exemplifies precisely what happens when this or that occupational-identity overrides what I will call the “sovereign identity of The People”: I am a social worker and all Citizens (like all my clients) are children and troubled souls and the President is their Parent; I am a soldier and all Citizens (like all my troops) are soldiers and the President is their Commander-in-Chief.

And this pushes the country toward a National Nanny State, which, along with a National Security State, is hell-and-gone from what We and this country are all about.

Forget “symbolically” – this literary gambit has been the infection-pathway of a host of plague-strength mischief in the past 40 years. Let Us face the reality: We are The People, the government and the nation are in parlous shape because Our role has not been fulfilled recently, and We are desperately needed back on the job.

ISRAEL AND THE USS LIBERTY

NEVVVVER MIND

A substantive article over on Consortium News: there is a significant possibility that the Palestinian inhabitants of the territory now claimed by the State of Israel are actually the closest genetic descendants of the Jewish inhabitants of the Israel of the Roman era.

Many of the Hebrew inhabitants of the Roman era – perhaps with much less Roman pressure than has usually been presumed – spread out all over Europe and elsewhere in what came to be known as the Diaspora. In the process, they mingled and lost the actual ‘bloodlines’. The folks who stayed behind after the time of Titus retained more of their genetic integrity.

“There is also now the modern irony that modern Israel was established by Jews of European origin, many of whom may be ethnically unconnected to Palestine.”

I know that We have lost wayyy too much of Our capacity for being taken aback. Flannery O’Connor once responded to a criticism about the violent bizarreness of her stories by pointing out that ‘Southerners’ (this was in the 1950s) write so much more about “freaks” than writers from other parts of the county “because we can still recognize one when we see one”.

Things have changed. Under unremitting elite pressure from academics and politicians and even the media, We have lost Our sense of the “freakish” in the orgy of “non-judgmentalism” that overtook the country in the 1970s. In the effort to become a ‘kinder, gentler’ place, and – on a slightly more ulterior level – to crowbar open social and political ‘space’ for alternative lifestyles and conceptions of the self and the universe that humans inhabit, and to weaken the hold of patriarchal, categorical, and abstract ‘thinking’, it has become quite bad form to share out loud your assessment of this or that ‘development’, ‘progress’, or – surely – the ‘revolutions’ themselves.

America, of course, doesn’t permit Stalin’s solution: round up anybody who disagrees and shoot them. And round up anybody who may at some point disagree … and shoot them. Over here, the Goebbelsian approach was more workable: manipulate public opinion and induce the ‘press’ to go along. In this battle, at least, the Nazis have beaten Stalin. All that’s left of his approach is the sudden erection of ‘evil enemy’ classes against whom the surplus emotions of the populace might usefully be diverted and deployed. Although, in a bit of conceptual hubris that not even Goebby would have indulged, Our own ‘suspect’ class includes, in one way or another, 49 percent or so of the population … which may yet prove to have been all along a bridge too far.

But the concept migrated, into foreign affairs, and here We are now, confronted with a rather thickish straw in the wind to the effect that for the past half-century and ten, and especially the past 40 years, We have been supporting the takeover of a land in the admittedly well-intentioned purpose of providing a home for “the Jews”*, even to the extent of abetting the expulsion or destruction of the people – and “Arabs” at that, it was said, who had been long-established on the land.

And all along, it turns out that the actual genetic descendants of the Hebrews of yore are not the invading “Jews” nor their nationalist descendants the Israelis, but rather the very folk – farmers and villagers – who had been termed the enemy and the obstructive elements that had to be cleaned out.

If you run this around in your mind for a minute or two, is it possible not to feel a stunning symphony of emotions, none of them ‘happy’? And none of them flattering to America as a nation, and surely not to its governing elites.

All these decades of treasure, blood, and – oy – moral integrity, deployed in ever-astronomical amounts, spewed, sprayed, shot and dropped all over the place, all the feral panoply of ‘doing whatever it takes’, and all along We have been supporting – you should pardon the expression – ‘the bad guys’?

So that the next time you might chance to view those newsreels of the Allied liberation of the camps, the actual role of the current generations of Americans is not as the Allied liberation troops, but rather the German townsfolk filing by the piles of corpses and all that human wrack and ruin?

We didn’t know. We had been assured by the government that only the right things were being done. We had our own problems. It was war. Life is tough. Surely you can’t blame us for this? It’s over now, so why drag it all up? You must hate us to even show us all this, and remind us. We thought the fine ash was snow – this isn’t your fairy-tale Florida, you know.

Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Ach. Oy.

Well, History – or God acting through History – has already started handing out sentences. Our democracy corrodes toward a ‘permanent war state’, the better to ‘support’ the Israeli ‘ally’. Our troops now walk the streets in their combat-field uniforms, where in an earlier era but not so long ago, they wore the uniforms of the day out among the civilians and left field-uniforms for field-operations.

In just over a week, on June 8, there will occur the 42nd anniversary of the sustained Israeli assault on the American naval vessel, USS Liberty: bombed, machine-gunned, torpedoed, dozens of Our ‘boys’ killed or wounded, life-rafts machine-gunned, and in its vote-desperate effort to pander, LBJ’s government refused to send rescue missions to drive off the attackers.

And it sat there – that government – eagerly ‘accepting’ ridiculously obvious faked Israeli ‘evidence’ that the whole thing had been (after the ship refused to sink and the crew refused to go conveniently to the bottom) a ‘mistake’.

The Israeli’s claimed they couldn’t see the flag in all the smoke, though there are photos from the ship of its planes coming in for leisurely bomb-runs in perfect sunlight; doctored photos of Israeli ‘gunsight’ cameras that include brushed out globs where the tugboats easing the ship into dock were depicted in the actual un-doctored photo; purportedly seasoned Israeli pilots and naval officers claiming that they mistook the massive Liberty ship, with its big white Navy letter-and-number markings on both sides, bow and stern, to be an Egyptian tramp steamer half its size and speed.

And LBJ himself, who said that he didn’t care if the ship and all its sailors sank to the bottom of the sea – he wasn’t going to embarrass his Israel “friends”. Could Biden put it any better? **

The hot ironies. The hot, hellish, demonic ironies. How much blood cries from the ground and the sea? The blood not only of the grievously afflicted ‘Palestinians’, but of Our own sailors.

Assuming that JFK didn’t meet his end because he opposed the then-current Israeli efforts to illegally acquire their own Bomb, then I place the moment of Blutbund – of the forging of the bond of shared treachery of spilled innocent blood – right there on June 8, 1967, between the US government (under Democratic control, although the Republicans allowed themselves to be dealt in later on) and the government of Israel (the one that has never signed a treaty of alliance with Us).

Johnson’s Historical punishment was swift. Though he sacrificed integrity and committed vile treachery for the sake of securing ‘the Jewish vote’ for the 1968 election, he would not win that election, and indeed preemptively removed himself, rather than face the voters. He lived only a few more years.

But Our own payment is being extracted more slowly. When History deals with large groups, it often takes its time. The fact that human memories, especially nowadays, don’t seem to go back very far doesn’t seem to bother History in the least. Unlike ‘victims’, History doesn’t mind if its retribution isn’t even recognized for what it is. If folks want to keep mulishly believing that History doesn’t exist and that stuff just happens, well that’s not History’s problem. We, after all, are not History’s ‘consumer’s – let alone its ‘creators’ – and History owes no fiduciary sensitivity to human beings.

And that’s just the secular take on it.

If one accepts the existence of Jefferson’s “just God”, then you can see how much drama and seriousness is still left in the affairs of human beings – nor do We need to manufacture ‘drama’ and pretend to ‘seriousness’ … those two elemental aspects of the human experience are alive and well and verrrry busy, thank you very much.

The German townsfolk, finally brought to bay and forced to see what had been done in their name – for the sake of their great Volk, suddenly realized that not only had History come to town, but that it was looking for them. Nor would it listen to polite, snarky, plaintive or angry suggestions that it move on to Berlin and take it up with the frazzled ogre in his Bunker. There was more than enough History to go around; the ogre and his Volk would be dealt with.

With all respect to hard-working Hollywood, who needs to go to a movie on Memorial Day? We’re in one. A big one. A block-buster. A people-buster.

Some sackcloth and ashes might be better than hot dogs and beer this day.

NOTES

*I have said and say again that I don’t like the phrases “Jews” or “the Jews” and I do not use them to express my own thought. I use the term here because it’s the common-coin of terminology in the public discourse (such as it has been).

**You can go to http://www.ussliberty.org/ and review the whole incredible collection.

NO ISRAELIS NEED FEAR

It is reported that the government will drop charges against two lobbyists for the insidious AIPAC, who had been charged, after extensive and expensive FBI investigation, with taking information that they had received in conversation with members of Congress and passing it along to “their colleagues, journalists, and Israeli diplomats”.

‘The New York Times’, which makes the report, notes slyly that the two were charged under “the World War One-era Espionage Act”, as if the Act were, perhaps, ‘quaint’ in Our thoroughly modern and enlightened, and ‘complex’ (and perhaps also ‘dark’, and frakkingly dark) era.

I am no lover of the Espionage Act of that World-War-One era. Broad and blunt, it was designed for ‘wartime’, meaning that truth, accuracy, and dissent were to take a backseat to the all-consuming need of modern corporatist governments to regiment their mass societies by enforcing conformity of opinion and expression and suppressing any dissent as ‘obstructive of the war effort’. The Act, in spirit as well as in letter, is a lethal gas to be loose in a Constitutional, democratic atmosphere.

It is, however, a somewhat inert gas. It’s only really dangerous if a) the government for its own dark purposes comes and releases a canister of it in your immediate vicinity. Or b) if you actually go and do precisely what the law, in its most specific intent, was designed to prevent: give national secrets to foreign governments.

Which apparently is exactly what the two accused have been doing.

No surprise there.

The amazing thing is that the government has gone to court to prevent a public trial – thus any trial at all – even though the FBI is very much anxious to see these two go to trial, and very confident in what its investigation has revealed. It’s not often that the government goes against the FBI – at least nowadays.

Back in J. Edgar Hoover’s day very few pols would risk dissing the FBI – Hoover didn’t have a little list; he had a bulging set of file cabinets, each file folder on a different pol or his family or friends, each of their foibles, weaknesses, and treacheries, domestic as well as professional. Nope, only Bobby Kennedy really risked Hoover’s wrath.

Not even Jack Kennedy did that. Although, come to think of it, he did oppose Israel’s then-top-secret efforts to violate international law and ‘get the Bomb’.

Well, that’s old news, surely.

Nowadays, the government has battened on ‘getting tough on crime’. It’s a policy that Democrats and Republicans can love, bipartisanly beautiful. Democrats get to assuage the ‘fears’ of its Identities, all of whom are – to hear their ‘advocates’ tell it – living in fear of this or of that, especially of ‘men’. While Republicans get to engorge the police power of the government, the better to enforce a corporate discipline on a too-undisciplined post-Sixties rabble and far more pliable immigrants. What’s not to like?

So what’s the problem? Why would the government go against its own marquis investigative service?

Well, ‘espionage’ starts to shade uncomfortably close to “treachery” (in the still not-quaint Framers’ phrase), and to treason. And while any just about any American is now liable to – oh, say – sex-offender or domestic violence conviction, or the type of ‘domestic terrorism’ that comes from saying things the government doesn’t want to hear in public, yet only a very few Americans are downrange for ‘espionage’ and ‘treason’.

And-But they are the self-styled Beltway ‘elites’.

Much like the Imperial-era Japanese thought that bombing was only something that happened to other people, law-and-order is all well and good – for other people. But the Beltway elites – like their Japanese counterparts of that bygone era – consider themselves to be something special. When, after all, you ‘get it’, and you are doing whatever it takes, but in a good cause … well, then, you deserve a certain amount of respect – don’t you? – for going to all that unpleasant trouble.

Much as a local police chief in Massachusetts not long ago was defended by one upstanding individual: the chief had set up a gun show from which he himself profited, during which a father allowed his boy-child to handle a loaded automatic machine-weapon, as a result of which the boy accidentally shot himself to death. The law was designed to prosecute criminals, said the erstwhile upstanding individual – and police chiefs, by definition, are not criminals. Ergo, they should not be prosecuted.

I can’t help but get the feeling that there are a lot of law schools today where this type of thinking, in one form or another, is ‘taught’ as solid and very cutting-edge ‘legal thinking’. Something like a right-wing variant of ‘oppressed people by definition cannot oppress’ … that sort of thing.

So, getting back to the present matter, there are the Beltway ‘elites’, which now include just about the entire political class, which means just about the entire Congress, much of the present Executive Branch, the hierarchs of both Parties, and vast numbers of high-ranking functionaries, past, present, and aspiring (the charming Russian for this whole bunch is nomenklatura, and hardly irrelevant here). These honorable folk most certainly do not want to have a public trial about espionage or treason, let alone about that even far more capacious Constitutional evil, the aforesaid Framers’ conception of “treachery”.

After all, in addition to pandering to the demands of the gender-feminists and their ‘revolution’ and their ‘war’ on male-hood, the ‘elites’ also welded themselves to the state/realm of Israel.

For which they have been receiving their reward, regularly.

I haven’t seen the government filing withdrawing the charges (over the objections of the FBI, who begged last week to let the case go to trial as scheduled on June 2).

The government attorneys in the U.S. Attorney’s office and at the Justice Department “agonized” over the decision, if that’s any consolation.

But apparently they didn’t “agonize” enough. Maybe it was just “imprudent’ behavior, but not actually criminal, muses the government.

Surely, especially in such a significant matter, a jury of American citizens could be trusted to know the difference between genuine imprudence and genuine crime. Apparently, thinketh the government, not. Or then again, perhaps thinketh the government that an American jury would indeed see through to a genuine crime, and forthwith. Oy!

And in seeing through to the crime, might also see beyond to the engorged matrix that has enwebbed the entire Beltway and the political class, and to their great personal profit.

Because, as the article admits, “the case raised delicate political issues about the role played by American Jewish supporters of Israel and their close, behind-the-scenes relationships with top government officials”. Ah. So ‘delicacy’, and the ‘sensitivity’ to ‘delicacy’ overrides any concern for espionage, treason, or Constitutional treachery. I’m not seeing the progress here.

And I’m not seeing the Constitutional seriousness and gravitas one would expect from a nomenklatura that in the name of the most serious concern for ‘democracy’ did deliberately and preventively assault, invade, occupy, and otherwise wage war on not one but two sovereign nations, killing in the process hundreds of thousands of men, women and children.

But, amazingly, “civil liberties and open-government advocates asserted that the defendants were being singled out for activities that were part of the accepted and routine way that American policy on Israel and the Middle East has been formulated for years, with people exchanging information”.

So Washington, then, has been operating not so much as the grave and serious capitol of a world-class democracy in a grievously bethump’t world, but instead has been operating like Vienna or Prague or Trieste in the Edwardian era, or some Ruritanian, late-Habsburg sieve of serio-comic intrigue, with spies, champagne, grand balls, and everybody rawther the best of friends actually.

Ach. Oy. Oy gevalt. Frak.

Washington City has not had a marshal for far too long. But, hey, unlike Gary Cooper, The People have sort of ridden out to the mall. Time to dig out the badge and get back to town, People.

But then, reading with the eyes of the Soviet citizen, why would the FBI go after these guys at all, if it were just a case of ‘imprudence’? Why would the FBI – bereft of Hoover’s protective files – take it upon itself to commit institutional suicide and go after these guys for the equivalent of something less than a misdemeanor? It’s not as if everybody in the Beltway world doesn’t know that you can’t bring up the Israeli elephant in the middle of the room unless you intend to professionally finish your days in some Washington equivalent of Siberia.

After all, the State of Israel is not the 51st State of the Union. In fact, it isn’t even an ally. There is no treaty of alliance; the Israeli government has refused to sign one. Why? Because to sign such a treaty, you first have to describe precisely the actual geographic boundaries of your nation, so that your partner will know clearly when your sovereignty has been violated and the ‘defense’ part kicks in.

But of course, the purpose and intent of the Israeli government and its predecessor founding organization has been, since long before the Holocaust, to get the entire Biblical land of Israel. And, in the depth of LBJ’s and the Democrats’ political desperation of the late Sixties, to use the United States as its eager-to-please pitbull for the purpose of enforcing the ‘deed’ registered in the Scriptures.

And the Israeli government can’t very well claim to be an innocent, weak, victimized, well-intentioned David if it officially declares itself to have the appetite of (no, not Goliath, but rather) a Pharaoh.

So no treaty of alliance.

And in fact, since the end of World War Two, the State of Israel has been the only nation on the planet to deliberately, repeatedly, attack and kill US sailors on a US naval vessel flying a huge American flag in international waters on a bright, breezy day. In June of 1967, the USS Liberty.

They said it was an accident, which if it actually was meant that they should have had all their shooting toys taken away from them forthwith. And if it wasn’t, then LBJ and the desperate-Dems and then the neocon Republicans should be considered prime candidates for a type of sustained treachery that I doubt even the Framers could envision with equanimity.

Robert McNamara, who with LBJ personally ordered the rescue fighter-jets to turn back to their carrier, and who has the most remarkable memory (at the age of ninety-plus) for chit-chats he has had with beautiful and important people, compliments paid to him, and what was served at some of his favorite dinner parties long decades ago, claims to have utterly no memory of the day on which that ship was repeatedly attacked and those sailors died. No memory of the only time in US history that a President and a Secretary of Defense purposely prevented the rescue of US sailors attacked in peacetime; he put LBJ on the radio-telephone, sat there and listened while LBJ yelled at the admiral on the carrier, even while the ship and those sailors were being blown away, and McNamara can’t recall the day at all. Maybe the dinner party that night was so parfait that it drove that day’s activities out of his mind. Or maybe he got to sit next to some really hot, diamond-bedizened babe. Such world-class maturity.

No wonder these people think We are attention-challenged imbeciles and treat Us (and Our Constitution) accordingly. Or do We think that the Constitution is not Ours but theirs?

But the show just keeps getting better.

“The decision to drop the case comes just days before AIPAC is scheduled to begin its annual policy conference in Washington, which has often served as an advertisement of its influence.” So now, with their paymasters and the ‘big boys’ in town, the indentured pols can go biddy-biddy-boom with them and will be able to demonstrate just what the big-boys are getting for their money. Like some enwhored Chicago aldermen going to Al Capone’s annual dinner party having pulled the cops off yet another of Al’s rackets. Feh. The pols can now prove that they’re not ho’s; they’re ho’s who can deliver. And that makes all the difference, in their world. Feh and frak and frakking feh.

The usual claptrap to the effect that the US Attorney’s office in Alexandria made the decision all on its own, and Obama just “approved the recommendation”. Yah. Like military judges, lawyers, and juries just do their thing in complete independence of any thought of their professional future, their kids’ college tuition, their car payments … yah. And the Chicago aldermen in Capone’s pocket were acting in complete independence, with nary a thought to the wads of cash – or what would happen if they ever tried to back out of the deal.

Enough of babbling about what the pols should do. It’s time to start figuring what We should do.

The Beltway is an Augean stable. And there’s no Hercules around. And in a democracy there shouldn’t be. There should be The People.

That’s Us. We are in History. We were written into it in 1787 by a very capable bunch of folks, reminded of Our role in no uncertain terms by Mr. Lincoln in 1863 at Gettysburg and 1865 on the steps of the Capitol, and it’s time to ‘man up* and do – as the Beltway likes to say – ‘whatever it takes’.

NOTE

*I use the term ‘man up not in any genderist sense but as a shorthand for ‘human’; thus ‘human up’, and I mean ‘human’ in the best sense of the word, humans as mature, active, engaged Citizens, engaged in the oversight of their own governance. Let Us therefore brace Ourselves to Our duties … and all that. All of it.

LBJ AND HIS DAY

Robert Dallek has a piece in ‘The New York Times’, entitled "How Not to End Another Preisdent's War (LBJ Edition)". He’ talking about the “fears” that drove LBJ into Vietnam.

LBJ was afraid of looking ‘weak’. After all, the Democrats 15 years before had ‘lost’ China to Mao (did America ever ‘own’ China?); and LBJ didn’t want the Democrats to ‘lose’ again. Nor did he want to look weaker than the recently-assassinated JFK, especially with RFK (arguably the last competent Kennedy) waiting grumpily in the wings.

Nor did LBJ want the Commies to get the idea that if they ‘won’ in Vietnam they could presume to continue subverting other nations, especially those that had in the past 20 years been ‘liberated’ from their assorted European colonial governors; such a sustained and broad-front subversion would not only spell unending trouble for the United States, but would intensify the risk of nuclear war with the Soviets and the Chinese (who had just ‘gotten’ their own Bomb in 1964).

And lastly, Dallek notes, LBJ didn’t want his great domestic reform program to get sidetracked by all that foreign-affairs skullduggery. He wanted to be known as a great reforming President, “one who changed the domestic life of the nation”.

Dallek leaves that last point rather delicately hanging.

I’d add a bit to it.

LBJ did what neither JFK nor Ike had managed to do: in July of 1965 he institutionalized on a federal and national level the end of racial discrimination against American blacks, an objective that had not been fully grounded after the Civil War ended a century before.

But he was completely taken aback, and his effectiveness hugely undermined, by what happened immediately afterwards. The great, genuinely patriotic and spiritual program shaped by Martin Luther King, was undermined almost instantly, and LBJ with it, as the focus of ‘civil rights’ shifted to the urbanized Northeastern and Upper Midwestern cities (and the equally urbanized Southern California cities, especially Los Angeles). ‘Revolution’, black ‘separatism’, ‘rage’, and ‘victimization’ suddenly replaced the politically and morally unifying trajectory and content of the ‘first’ civil-rights movement; the second ‘phase’ was hell and gone from that.

Not only LBJ but the Democratic leadership were stunned. And terrified for their very existence as a politically viable Party.

And not only ‘blacks’ seemed to ‘turn against’ them. Northern industrial workers, frightened by the sudden eruption of ‘second-phase’ black agitation, but also starting to feel a little queasy about the economic security of their jobs (America was just starting to lose its unchallenged economic and industrial dominance that had been honed and perfected in World War 2).

The Democratic ‘solution’ was to find new voting-blocs.

I’ve mentioned all this before, but I’d like to just limn that ‘new voting-blocs’ a bit more.
The Party, still pretty much the only political Party in the country, still riding the huge crest of FDR’s New Deal, used its immense ‘soft’ power to raise-up and ‘support’ a large passel of such voting-blocs, which I will call Identities.

First, the American blacks*. Latching onto the intellectual argument that what had been achieved in the Voting Rights and Civil Rights Acts was only a ‘beginning’, the Party governmentalized ‘racial discrimination’. In essence, it rejected ‘fairness’ in any palpable sense in order to favor blacks in various ways, using the regulatory and legislative authority of the government, supported by the still-powerful media, and draping it all in the unquestionable moral stature and popularity of the New Deal.

The wisdom of involving the government in such a massive and ‘deep’ effort not only to change laws but to change ‘minds and hearts’ (as American forces were occasionally trying to do in the hamlets of South Vietnam) was not the most ominous problem, though huge and ominous a problem it was.

Even greater was the problem created when the clear preferences and plans of the nation’s largest and most powerful political Party were telegraphed to large numbers of more or less well-intentioned Americans of an activist bent (nothing wrong with that) who were still wondering how all the awesome political efficiency of the Maoist and Nazi era might be usefully deployed ‘over here’. After all, King’s great moral crusade, when looked at through a Marxist or Leninist or Maoist lens, could easily be seen, and – it was thought – more ‘relevantly’, as a great moral and political ‘emergency’ (the Dems wouldn’t argue with that last bit) for which the techniques of ‘revolution’ – suitably ‘baptized’ – would be a more efficient and effective response, producing a greater ‘good’ a hell of a lot faster than the clunky mechanisms of a Constitutional and democratic politics. And anyway , the bright young things of the late-Sixties figured, ‘democracy’ and ‘capitalism’ had resulted by 1968 in a conformist, spiritless, and truly boring bunch of citizens, and adults … and there had to be a better way to go about being ‘America’ than that.

The institutionalization of government racial discrimination – albeit in what the times saw as a ‘good’ cause – came back before it ever really went away. Worse, the enculturation of it: any citizen even doubting the wisdom of this huge change (or non-change, if you want to look at it that way) was shouted down in the media and preemptively made to stifle himself (or herself), and to either ‘get it’ or shut up. ‘Go along to get along’ – that lethal infection of the Soviet citizenry – or frenzied, unthinking, and even violent support of the latest government initiative – that lethal infection of the Maoist citizenry – did not seep in; they were poured in.

Second, the Party (and willy-nilly, the government) turned its generous light on feminism.** The demographic the Party was going for was ‘women’ (and in 1972 McGovern even burbled that the Party was now “the Party of women”) but when push came to shove that meant the feminists – and particularly, their ideological ‘base’, the radical (and far too often anti-male) feminists that I’ll call Ideological Feminists (or IFs).

Many of the early feminists were the late-Sixties radical SDS members who were repelled by the chauvinism of the mostly male-dominated ‘movements’ of the era, and went off to form new groups and to do it around a new cause, feminism. They were shrewd enough to take – whther they knew it or not – a page from Hitler, and realized that the way to succeed in their ‘revolution’ was not to have a ‘revolution’ at all, in the sense of guns and bombs and riots in the streets. Rather, they – like him – would ‘grab power legally’; in this they also took a page – probably intentionally – from Mao and his “Little Red Book”: they would start a ‘Long March through the institutions’, as Mao advised.

But where Mao faced a hostile and entrenched government authority, the feminists and the IFs faced a Democratic Party desperately eager to please (including a Teddy Kennedy rather desperately in need of re-establishing his political viability after his stunning and repugnant problems stemming from Chappaquiddick). Imagine Mao facing a Chiang Kai-Shek (sorry, I haven’t mastered the memos on the new forms of writing Chinese proper nouns and names) who invited him to the capital and eagerly placed the government at his disposal.

The media were happy to help; Democrats and ‘good’ causes were a lot more fun than simply ‘reporting’ those stupid old facts; once again, Citizens were not required and the media started to lose interest in providing the public service of factual reporting to them.

(Of course, History being hugely complex and dynamic, the Republicans were actively watching all this, looking for an opening; the unease, even wider than the purposeful objections, catalyzed in much of the citizenry by all this created the initial ‘opening’ which throughout the 1970s the Republicans were to build upon, until Atwater brought Reagan and … you may know the rest.)

By 1972, the philosopher John Rawls had used his Harvard perch to provide a suitably ‘baptized’ version of the revolutionary concept that in a ‘good’ cause, no existing ‘government’ or Constitution must be allowed to stand in the way. He also improved upon the Hitler-Mao game-plan by specifically urging that those who ‘believed’ should seek to effect change through the courts and the law rather than through legislation. By the Clinton era, two decades later, the legislatures had proven themselves sufficiently corrupted so as to be as reliable as, or even more reliable than, the courts.

The price paid was huge and not completely obvious. Most notoriously, the ‘abortion’ issue – jump-started by the Supreme Court in Roe v Wade, became not a marvelous shock-and-awe, lightning-quick decisive strategic victory but rather the catalyst of a decades-long, bitter, divisive public argument that has lasted to this day, despite the massed authority of the Branches and the ‘elites’ and much of the media to suppress and otherwise ‘make go away’ the deep public unease that it has caused. For the purposes of this Post, let it simply be noted as a striking irony that the same sort of thing happened in the invasion of Iraq 30 years later. For those who ‘hope’ that Our misadventures in the Middle East and Southwest Asia will be over any time soon, let it be noted that in four years Roe will be forty years old.

More deeply and even more lethally, law was now construed as ‘fungible’, such that no long-standing hallmark elements of Western law and justice were to be allowed to stand in the way of ‘addressing’ needs and bringing ‘closure’. But of course, even Western Civilization was considered an enemy of the revolution and, as Jesse Jackson sagely opined, “Ho, Ho, Western Civ has got to go” – which it indeed may.

Most lethally, the Democrats, and by the mid-1980s the Republicans as well, had gotten used to the fact that the government in all its Branches had allowed itself to be co-opted into a ‘war’ of one gender against another, effectively taking sides in a vision that cast half the population as a ‘class’ enemy of the revolution. I am not here saying that all ‘feminism’ is anti-male, but that the Ideological Feminism which does indeed hold that position was the ‘wing’ or ‘base’ of feminist thinking and doing that most clearly effected the initial breakthroughs into government policy and behavior. It is hardly improbable that had not the economy so brutally and egregiously failed in the Fall of 2008, then the profoundly disturbing McCain-Palin ticket would have been elected, so deep and pervasive is the powerful subterranean public displeasure and unease with the consequences of the ‘revolution’. Our politics, even more than Our law, is now profoundly deranged. In addition to the economy, by what cannot be a coincidence.

Thirdly, the opening to the Israeli government, originally embraced by LBJ both for foreign policy (a bulwark in the Middle East against the Soviets) and desperate domestic political (the need for voting-blocs among American Jewish voters) reasons. Not only does this country now find itself voluntarily welded to a government whose very existence from the beginning was a guarantee of incredibly sustained political and military strife. But as well, this country finds itself infected by the very worst elements of the Israeli mindset and heartset that ‘justifies’ its behavior: we are the ‘victims’ and thus cannot be aggressors; we cannot be ‘wrong’ because our cause is so ‘good’; those who doubt that must be our ‘enemies’; and as to any who oppose us in our efforts to get what we feel we need then (in T. H. White’s marvelous phrasing) ‘they’ are attacking us by defending themselves. It cannot be a coincidence that much the same line of ‘justification’ was used by the Bushist Imperium in spinning its own invasion into the Middle East.

The Israeli adoption of Goebbelsian propaganda techniques, especially in conjunction with the ideological Feminist adoption of the same sinister play-book, has vitally deranged Our public discourse and even Our consciousness.

Fourthly, the desperate Democrats raised up ‘Youth’ as a new demographic. Anybody who watched TV during the later 1950s and the 1960s could sense how a skewing toward ‘youth’ was deranging a serious, adult-centered American attitude, dragging the national mind and heart down into the molten and un-solid rhythms and content of those parts of the human brain that, in youth, dominate in a brain whose most advanced and human elements – the prefrontal lobes and cortices – are not yet fully formed.

If anything, the voting age – especially in national elections – should have been raised to 25. Instead, national political discourse was set on the course already taken by TV, and in 1972 the voting age was lowered to 18. You couldn’t be trusted with alcohol, but you could be trusted with the power to help determine who would be elected to Executive and Legislative Branches of a hugely complex nation bethump’t by grave and vast challenges, foreign and domestic.

But precisely those undeveloped brain-parts that render ‘youth’ simultaneously so emotional and so impatient and so unable to conduct sustained critical reflection were actually – as Hitler had seen – hugely useful to a government that no longer sought for its Citizens to understand, but rather needed merely a reliably pliant herd that would settle into its own distractions unless needed to stampede in the service of this or that ‘good’ thing.

I'd add a fifth as well: immigration on a massive scale. This would serve two darker purposes not usually discussed. From the Left, the massive influx would help 'water down' the 'white, male, industrial' culture of the country, in the service of a multicultural and deconstructive 'change'. From the Right, the massive influx of workers willing to work for lower wages and grateful for the chance would undermine the American unions; it's almost like 'outsourcing' without the 'out'.

Draped in the legitimate American openness to immigration, this massive influx would actually hugely expand the demand for jobs (on top of the theoretical 'doubling' of the worker-pool created by the feminist agenda) precisely at a time when the economy was shedding the jobs that were available to begin with. An adult flipping burgers or gardening is not going to be making the money that a unionized industrial worker would make, of course; the solution to that was to wildly expand credit so that even those adults stuck flipping burgers could buy lots of stuff and 'feel' good about it all - which was a non-solution that the short-sighted Beltway biggies figured was good enough for government work.

But We see now what happens when government plans like a teenager, simply kicking the can down the road for a later day and living 'for the moment' - there hasn't been a lot of adult supervision, or much of the mature and serious discharge of their sworn duty to deliberate in the common interest, from the Branches in quite some time.

The economy now has to provide a decent living for over 300 million people, when it has less decent jobs than it did when there were 175 million people. Do the math.

Nor will the reigning Rawlsian approach work for much longer: if there isn't much money to 'redistribute' (for purposes of his idea of 'justice' or for any other reason) then We will face a situation where a whole lot of folks are going to be without the means of support.*** And that is going to make them verrrrry unhappy.

So the ‘bases’ developed, several of them. And in consequence not only a centrist politics, but even an adult and truly ‘human’ politics, grounded in truly ‘mature’ adults – adults, that is, effectively committed both to an awareness of their limitations and to their potentials and to their responsibilities – became ‘quaint’. Like a huge armored vehicle with an impaired driver, the nation began lurching down History’s highway, careening from side to side and smashing over anything not nimble enough to escape its awful trajectory. This ain’t pretty. And it will not end well.

Given the monstrousness of the economic catastrophe, it could be said that all of this is, even if relevant, a bit abstract. But I say that the economic catastrophe is directly a result of the failure of Our politics and Our failures as a Citizenry, as a collective of Citizens empowered in ways ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ by the Constitution to ground this government.

NOTES

*As always, when I refer to any matters referring to any Identity, I am not looking to turn back the clock nor am I 'against' the improved life of any members of the citizenry. In all of this I'm simply trying to point out the consequences - unrecognized or ignored, somewhat unintended - of policy developments that have had and continue to have a very serious affectr on Our life, polity, and common weal. We will have to recognize those consequences and then consider whether something must - or can - be done to counter the negative effects.

**When I say ‘feminism’ I am not speaking of all females, or all ‘women’, or all conceptual and political efforts to improve the life of women within American life and society. I am specifically referring to ‘ideological feminism’, a loose but broad synergy of dogmatic assertions about women (and about the evil of ‘men’ and ‘males’), deeply shaped by the revolutionary and propaganda praxis of Soviet and Maoist examples and also by the adoption of Goebbelsian propaganda techniques, all of which was marshaled to do an end-run around an inefficient democratic politics in the heady emergency of imposing the ‘good’ result of whatever it was that ideological feminism determined was ‘good for’ and ‘owed to’ the ‘women’ it claimed to represent.

***If the world's nations decide, as they are contemplating even now, to abandon the US dollar as the world's 'reserve currency', then We are going to be in profound financial trouble almost overnight. We can never pay off the amount of debt the country and government now owes. We could inflate the dollar - print money - but then no other nation is going to trust Us enough to buy Our Treasury bonds. We could default on the debts, but that would reduce Us to a third-world economy in a heartbeat.

"HOW THE REPUBLICANS WIN"

ONCE IT WAS

Robert Parry has a piece on Truthout (originally on Consortium News) entitled “How the Republicans Win”.

It struck me very hard because of a by-the-by historical vignette. In order to ensure that he would not be ‘cheated’ out of the Presidency in ’68 as he thought he had been in ’60, in the autumn of ’68 Nixon actually sent secret messages to the South Vietnamese delegates to the Paris Peace Talks, wheedling and threatening so that they would not come to an accord with the North Vietnamese before the elections in November. And they didn’t, pulling out precipitously and thus depriving LBJ and the Democrats of a desperately-needed platinum opportunity to bring the war to some sort of respectable conclusion in time for the elections.

But what hit me was LBJ’s and the Democrats’ response to Nixon’s treachery (which itself rises, possibly, to the treasonous): quoting from Anthony Summers’s book ‘The Arrogance of Power’, Parry reports that “Both Johnson and Humphrey believed the information – if released to the public – could assure Nixon’s defeat”. Quite possibly so.

He goes on: “In the end though, Johnson’s advisers decided that it was too late and too potentially damaging to U.S. interests to uncover what had been going on” and that “If Nixon should emerge as the victor [of the ’68 election] what would [this secret messaging] do to his viability as an incoming president?”

To all of the citizenry who have joined Us somewhat after ’68, this may come as a shock – and understandably so. That it was once part of the major priorities of a senior elected official in these United States to give serious thought as to the national common weal and to the integrity of the office that he holds, regardless of who wins in an upcoming election. Say what you will of LBJ, and I am not seeking to canonize him here, but they don’t do things like that anymore; they don’t make’em like that anymore.

Well – no. We do still make’em like that – but those folks don’t get very far up the ladder in the Beltway as it operates nowadays.

And to top it all off, “Johnson and Humphrey went into retirement – and to their graves – keeping silent about Nixon’s treachery”. Nah – things have reely reely changed around here.

And not for the better.

I’ve been toying with this in previous Posts but let me say it here: We have lost ground in the last 40 years, in a most fundamental and essential and vital way; in fact, along an entire spectrum of characteristics and capacities indispensable to the sustaining of a democratic politics and of a democratic polity and so of the Republic.

Cognitively, We no longer process information in a reasonable and adult fashion. Simplistic thinking, slogans and clichés, substitute for patience and insight and a true engagement with the substance of the challenges that face Us.

Emotionally, We no longer possess Ourselves in dignity and patience, conserving Our energies until We are more or less arrived at a conclusion of substantive analysis and deliberation. A quick ‘decision’ is considered a day’s work.

Societally, We no longer respect each other and trust each other. I’m not just talking here about the overriding acrimonies that have blotted out any effective sense of a common identity as ‘American’; I’m also talking about the dynamic downward spiral into fear and mistrust that must flow naturally from an increasingly wide descent into cognitive and emotional regression and immaturity.

Morally, there is no longer a common basis for mutual trust and respect. Postmodern and deconstructionist thought, in the service of vigorously destructive and destabilizing agendas has – willy or nilly – blotted out any over-arching or underlying mutuality of dignity that would call for a primary and undeniable respect for each other and for Ourselves.

And spiritually – well , there is not even a common official sense that there is any Beyond, any Meta (the Greek word) dimension, that exists ‘for real’. It may exist as a personal choice, but such a choice is considered purely idiosyncratic – if not indicative of psychopathy – and cannot be introduced into or allowed to have any effect upon public deliberation of large issues. Nor are individuals thereby Grounded in some larger, enfolding, sustaining reality that would balance them in this chancy voyage through Time.

And given that set of absolutely fundamental regressions, We can see secondary regressions in areas vital to Our common weal.

Politically, We have lost the ability to reason together and come to an arrangements respectful of human dignity and acceptable to all parties concerned. Indeed, few politicians now sitting have any experience of such a way of fulfilling their duties, so long ago were these priorities and guideposts deconstructed.

Legally, We have lost the ability to pass reasonable laws proportionate to the issues they are designed to address and simultaneously respectful of both human dignity and the most fundamental operating requirements of the Constitution and the Republic with which We have all, as The People, been entrusted for the duration of our respective ‘tours’ on this earth.

Internationally, We have wound up embracing and thus continuing some of the worst practices of Our former Cold War foe and rival, the USSR. In fact, rather than being a ‘foe’, it almost could be imagined that the USSR was a rival doppelganger, and that such a conception is evidenced by the fact that as soon as it disappeared, We instantly began to expand (and regress) to take its place, dreaming its dark dreams and stealing pages and entire chapters from its dark playbook.

The Hobbesian state of life – danger leading to vulnerability leading to insecurity leading to fear leading to self-destroying paranoia – has been replicated in the Victimist vision of life – danger leading to vulnerability leading to insecurity leading to fear leading to self-destroying paranoia. In an effort to meet this and that outraging emergency of each Identity, We have wound up making the same mistake by which the New York City Fire Department sank the powerful, modern, and majestic liner ‘Normandie’: in the frenzied efforts to put out the fire aboard her, they filled her with water (precisely not the way ships conceptually exist) and cut holes here there and everywhere in her to get at the flames and vent the smoke. And they sank her one day at a pier in Manhattan.

But they meant well. And they had been warned. But – hey – it was an emergency.

That ship never sailed again.