THE SOTOMAYOR NOMINATION

EMPATHY

What’s up with ‘empathy’ in regard to the Sotomayor nomination to the Supreme Court? (See here, and here, and here.)

I’ll take a competent, mature, adult as a Justice on the Court – gender and ethnic background don’t matter.

I don’t feel comfortable with any Identity-lobbies pushing for one of ‘us’, one of ‘our’ agents on the Court. But then, such lobbies don’t actually care for the American ‘identity’; what I capitalize as We and Our is not something they think actually exists, or deserves to exist. And that makes me nervous as all hell.

Now comes the ‘empathy’ brouhaha.

I need to kick this tire.

My concern is not with ‘empathy’ itself. Actually, the ability to empathize is one of the hallmarks of a mature adult. The ability to put oneself into another’s place imaginatively is very much a frontal-lobe skill; as is the ability to then assess the matter at hand from that ‘other’s’ point of view, carefully and critically. And then see how such assessment fits with the overall commonweal and the requirements of the fundaments of the American polity and ethos. And then decide.

But of course, far too many lobbies within the Beltway are now firmly convinced that the American ethos itself, and even its Constitution, are so thoroughly shot through with – you name it – problems that they are incapable of serving as constitutive blueprints or operating instructions. And don’t deserve to continue receiving any respect.

They are simply ‘texts’ – as the literature-department cadres claim – and as such not even their authors’ intentions really matter; it’s all about what any particular reader or bunch of readers decide to take away from such ‘texts’ today, nothing more. You might legitimately wonder whether the blueprints and operating instructions that come with a 747 are such ‘texts’, and what the elite literature-department honchos and honchesses would say if they got onto a plane to go to some conference and found that the pilot and the airline treat the manufacturer’s operating instructions merely as ‘texts’.

O brave new world!

Of course, Geordie – marquis Chief Engineer on Picard’s oh-so-1990s starship Enterprise – was constantly tinkering with that marvelous vessel’s systems, making improvements that even the designers and builders hadn’t thought of. But then, Geordie knew the difference between making an improvement and ripping away a crucial system or structural member altogether. I don’t think Picard, even if Geordie’s plan got support from the ship’s busty ‘empath’ adviser, would say Make It So if Geordie opined that the whole ship was too rigid and needed to lose a lot of basic stuff that was ‘oppressing’ its potential. There’s ‘improving’, there’s ‘deconstructing’, and there’s deliberate suicide – and the boundaries require some careful discernment.

One of the great fault-lines in the past four decades or so has developed in the area of ‘feelings’ as opposed to ‘thought’, ‘feeling’ as opposed to ‘thinking’.

Hardly a coincidence when a revolution is seeking to overthrow an established system, the big hoo-hah has been for ‘feeling’; don’t think, just ‘feel’ – and then just do it. The details can be worked out later. (And can you say War In Iraq?) ‘Thinking’ is really only a mask, a tool in the service of ongoing ‘oppression’ – and as such must be swept away, as the cadres’ assertion goes.

But genuine thinking – so profoundly human a capacity, and so crucially necessary – takes all aspects into account, and carefully assesses. It is serious, deliberative, and necessarily deliberate. (And yes, that “with all deliberate speed”* might be read as a code for obstructionist stubbornness, but it also might be an indicator that somebody realized just how frakkingly complex and fraught a situation was, and how carefully it had to be dealt with, to avoid causing even greater damage).

And genuine feeling – so profoundly human a capacity, and so crucially necessary – complements thinking, adding a humanizing element to the assessment, accepting that purely rational and logical schematics cannot do justice to the complex, dynamic, often unquantifiable dreams, aspirations, desires, and assorted emotions present in every human being and in every human society.

The purported either-or opposition of ‘thinking’ and ‘feeling’ is a cartoonish non-problem, similar to the cartoonish assertion that ‘we goooood, they baaaaad’ – which has wrought so much catastrophic damage domestically and overseas of late.

So I agree with Obama that ‘empathy’ is an essential element in a Supreme Court Justice.
But I am verrrry concerned that ‘empathy’ is yet another secretly-redefined code word to cover up the old revolutionary ploy of stampeding everybody by getting them to forego ‘thinking’ and instead to rely solely on ‘feeling’ – at least as long as what a Justice ‘feels’ happens to conform to the revolutionary agenda.

The ‘rule of law’ is a phrase with a huge history. The Framers knew very well what they wanted to avoid: being on the receiving end of the King getting up in a bad mood one morning and ‘feeling’ like he wanted the following list of persons arrested, their property confiscated, and the persons and even their families imprisoned or beheaded. In a cruel irony, the Russians disposed of the Tsar – who did such things only rarely – and instead wound up with Stalin doing such things on an industrial scale, by the millions.

To demand that the ‘rule of law’ is just part of the toolbox of ‘oppression’ and thus is an infamy to be erased forthwith, is a very uninformed assertion.

To have judges who serve ‘feeling’ and not the rule of law is a recipe for utter disaster. For a regression to Stalin and to the French Revolution’s Terror before that, and to thrice-a-thousand autocrats and divine-right crowned heads before that, into the Dark Ages and all the way back to the Roman emperors and beyond them. Because ‘feeling’ doesn’t exist as a free-standing entity; it will serve something or someone, whomever the ‘feeler’ serves. And whatever ‘values’ the ‘feeler’ holds.

This is, I’m thinking, one of the great problems in American law schools now. They’re teaching this sort of thing as a Plan, as a good Plan, as the only Plan. It cannot end well – certainly not for the Framers’ vision of Constitutional democracy and a Republic.

I don’t know where the nominee stands on all of this. She’ll have to say things publicly, but you can’t always trust those ‘confirmation hearing’ assurances and declarations, really. Didn’t I just read in the past week that in 1999 Bush confided to some local Texas reporter that if elected he would invade Iraq?

The media didn’t pick up on it. Oh well. Stuff happens.

NOTES

*The Supreme Court’s instructions as to de-segregating schools in Brown v. Board of Education.

OBAMA IN AFGHANISTAN

Why would We keep this up? The whole thing begins to look like what Gladstone called the British occupation of Cyprus in 1878: “this insane covenant” (which might also describe Our welding Ourselves to the State of Israel, but that’s for another Post).

Some thoughts come to mind, as to why Obama might have to keep this up.

One, the American position in the world: We have made a hash of Iraq. And on top of that, We will be staying there because the plan now is to simply rename the ‘combat’ troops ‘training and administrative units’. This is a perfect example of how the verrry bad and crazy-making habits of postmodern academic ‘discourse’ can ‘creep’ into areas beyond the ivy walls into the ‘real world’ where very serious consequences must be dealt with effectively. The old Political Correctness approach was grounded in the idea that ‘nothing is really ‘real’; it’s all a matter of how you ‘think’ or ‘feel’ about it'; this bit of pop psychology bumper-sticker stuff may work for the occasional person having a bad day, but it’s no basis for a system of national policy, foreign and domestic.

And you have to ask yourself from a military point of view: if you re-title ‘Brigade Combat Teams’ as ‘training and administrative teams’ then you are going to do serious damage to your military capability. Either you actually are going to force those units to get used to pencils and PowerPoint presentations, or you are going to ‘keep a secret’ from the American people: namely, that the troops are actually combat troops and they’re still there doing what they do best. Of course, as the Beltway is starting to find out, you can hide something from the American people through ‘secrecy’ or ‘spin’, especially with the help of an indentured media, but you can’t hide it from the rest of the world’s governments, militaries, and peoples … and you can’t hide it from the troops themselves.

But I digress.

If Obama pulls out now, the rest of the world – it may be imagined – is going to see the US as what Mao always said it was, a “paper tiger”. But then, this was part of the ‘reasoning’ that led LBJ and Us into Vietnam bigtime. Oh my.

And if the rest of the world starts to see that We no longer have any clothes on, then We are going to have a lot more trouble. Militarily, but also in terms of everything else. The days of the 1950s and 1960s, when an American could go to Japan or any of the defeated Axis countries of Western Europe and be treated with a certain awe because of the ‘superiority of American culture’ … those days are gone, baby, gone. Those countries have been getting stronger while We have been declining: relatively, in the sense that those other countries are now ‘catching up’. But also absolutely, in the sense that a) We have no more industrial chops and We have no more financial chops, and b) the ‘deconstruction’ that has been the main thrust of ideological feminism and its cohorts has served to announce to the world that American culture is (fill in the blank) but in any case baaaad and eeeeevilll.

So if We pull out of Southwest Asia now, then We look weak and that will invite more ‘assaults’, on Our pride if not also on Our ‘national interests’ – however those might be defined.
But that brings Us to the second consideration: We need the chance to stay in the Game and recoup Our losses. I had previously Posted that the whole Bush scheme of invasions (there were to be five countries earmarked, if memory serves, with Iraq being the first) was to get Us a ‘land-based aircraft carrier’ right smack in the middle of, even on top of, the last and largest oilfields on the planet, which happen to be situated in the heart of the Eurasian landmass. Iraq, you might say, would be another ‘Israel’, Our ‘faithful ally’ in the middle of a huge and important piece of real estate. Hell, instead of Israel pulling Us around by the shorthairs, We would ‘own’ Iraq for all practical purposes. What was not to like?

And We needed the oil, but also the cash value that the oil would represent – it was one of America’s ‘last’ and ‘final’ assets (so much having been ‘offshored and outsourced’ since Clinton’s first Administration). And it would give Us that ‘seat’ at the ‘Table of the Great Game’. The world’s new economic honchos weren’t going to leave Us behind, by jingo! Our troops would be all over the center of the board.

Without that ‘asset’, folks might get to thinking that the US had spent itself flat and was – Mao again – that ‘paper tiger’.

And if you think it’s embarrassing being an emperor seen to have no clothes on, imagine what it’s like to be that emperor after you’ve gone and made a whole bunch of enemies for yourself while everybody thought you were dressed in Cloth of Gold. They’d soon graduate or escalate from laughing at you to tossing stuff at you – and maybe worse.

And thirdly, the military adventuring is one of the last things American still ‘has’. The Pentagon is the funnel for huge amounts of tax dollars to corporations, the corporations of that military-industrial complex that is one of the last functioning elements of the ‘economy’ (as it were). And the military provides employment opportunities for bunches of young folks, as well as being ideological feminism’s showpiece ‘victory’ for its extraordinary insistence that ‘women’ are ‘just the same as men’ when it comes to combat and military stuff. And for decades now the pols on both sides of the Beltway Party divide have been holding things together by pandering to the ideological feminists while also collecting cash from the military-industrial corporate PACs. Not many ‘Honorables’ in the Beltway are going to have the chops to let go of all that.

But also, fourthly, America is not a Western movie: Obama can’t just ride into town and on the strength of his own personal power and his skill with a gun make all the town honchos do what he wants them to do, even if he wanted to. JFK’s untimely end can’t be far from his thoughts. And since – with some genuine shrewdness – he’s surrounded himself with the ‘old boy’ (no genderism intended) network, then if he were suddenly ‘no longer around’ the business-as-usual Beltway could move right in and continue doing all the stuff that has gotten Us into this present catastrophic train-wreck of a mess in the first place. It will be as if the command staff of the Titanic decided that the best thing to do would be to turn around and ram that iceberg a few more times; and don’t ask why - because trying to think like that would be ‘abstract’ and ‘elitist’ and sooo ‘male’, and it would lack ‘optimism’. Oy. Oy gevalt.

Obama is a man on a hugely delicate and downright dangerous tight-rope now. I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt – that maybe he’s taking just the right half-step in a new direction even if he has to take a couple of full-steps in the old (and wrong) direction.

But even if that’s what he’s up to, and even if he might have the chops to pull it off given enough time, there may not be that much time left.

We are cursed with living in interesting times indeed. But it has to be admitted, and We have to admit it: We Ourselves have made the times so ‘interesting’.

So, fellow (and sister) Citizens, We are going to have to buckle down to giving some serious thought and deliberation as to what We might do to help him.

America is no longer in the position of being soooo big that no matter how the Beltway screws up, We the little folks can just get on with Our individual lives and day-to-day problems, adventures, and amusements. We, even more than Churchill’s Britons of that storied bygone era, are all in this together.

We’d better have the chops of a second ‘Greatest Generation’ (maybe ‘third’ – that Civil War generation put up with a hell of a lot).

BAD TURKEYS BREED MORE

David Fathi at Human Rights Watch notes that there are those who are now suggesting that ‘preventive detention’ might be a fine option for Obama if he wants to close Guantanamo but the government doesn’t’ ‘prefer’ to bring charges against those whom it also doesn’t want to release.

This is a classic example of a very bad thing.

Not just because the whole idea of letting the government use its vast police power to simply put people away with no submission to judicial review is profoundly - how would they have put it half a century ago? – un-American; not just because it flies in the face of the Founders’ clear and abiding concern to prevent a ‘monarchical’ or ‘tyrannical’ government power (though Darth Cheney precisely and publicly thinks that ‘monarchical’ power is exactly what the Executive should have and – when push comes to arrest – already does have; not just because it continues a government engorgement of military-type powers that took a huge step into our modern American reality when Congress ‘delegated’ to the military the power to prosecute the criminal code without the safeguards specifically placed in the Constitution.

Not just because of all that.

But because We are now bethumpt by a bad and badly flawed policy allowed to take root in domestic law now migrating into foreign policy and expanding into far broader areas of fundamental American legal practice and constitutional theory. The initial ‘bad’ policy is now being touted by the ‘preventive detention’ gang as ‘proof’ that such detention is OK and that since it’s already ‘working’ in one area of American law, then it ‘ain’t but a thang’. Not hardly.

As Fathi notes, the detainers are pointing to the – here we go again – sex offender laws, where those convicted of any of a broad spectrum of ‘sex offense’ (and not at all simply against ‘the children’) can be confined once they have finished their prison sentences.

This has been effected – and upheld by the Supreme Court, thank ya vurrry mutch – through a ‘creative’ use of the long-standing practice of ‘civil commitment’: if through some sort of mental problem one constitutes a danger to oneself or others, then one can, upon judicial finding, be confined to a secure facility for treatment until one no longer constitutes such a danger.

Of course, the civil commitment laws were for persons with clearly distinguishable mental difficulties, and in the cases of accused criminal activity such commitment would function in lieu of imprisonment.

State pols, always looking for a way to look like they’re on the job, decided that it wasn’t enough to convict (even with the deeply eroded jurispraxis safeguards now in place for ‘sex offense’ trials) and imprison an individual; they wanted to come up with a way to keep that person ‘off the streets’ more or less permanently. They hit upon the ‘civil commitment’ gambit.

There are some major problems. Contrary to civil-commitment praxis, the targeted individual is not committed in lieu of imprisonment, but on top of it. That may sound suspiciously like ‘double jeopardy’, being punished twice on the basis of the same conviction, but the Supreme Court, in a marvelously ‘creative’ moment, embraced the ‘legal fiction’ that such commitment is not ‘punitive’, but merely ‘therapeutic’ – it’s not to punish the individual, but to ‘get him (almost always a ‘him’) the help he needs’. How nice. Except that since there is no ‘sex offender’ diagnosis recognized by the national psychiatric establishments, there can be – and is – no ‘therapy’ and no ‘cure’. Somehow that clear fact escaped the Court’s attention; and such an untruth, introduced into such a grave arena as the deprivation of liberty did not seem to the Robes a matter of any consequence. It gives a whole new spin to the term ‘judicial activism’ – the judicial Branch is actively embracing illusions and untruth. This is called ‘reform’ and ‘progress’.

But anyway, a majority of the Court opines, it’s all for ‘public safety’, so even if it is, well it isn’t - as it were. Even if it’s not a validly grounded policy, it’s important for ‘public safety’, sort of a domestic version of the ‘national security’ justification that has been deployed to further torture, preventive war, and the preventive detention of numerous ‘detainees’.

And like Bush v. Gore, the Court’s majority would like Us to just accept what they say and ‘get over it’ and ‘move on’. Yah. We accepted Bush, moved on, and that was 8 stupendously bad years ago. Are you feeling the ‘good idea’ in that?

But there are more impossible things to digest before your breakfast. In order to get over the stubborn fact (in Ronald Reagan’s nicely-put phrasing) that there isn’t any medical or psychiatric diagnosis for ‘sex offense’ – in other words, it doesn’t exist as a psychiatric affliction, nor – as afore-mentioned – is there a ‘therapy’ let alone a ‘cure’, the Court opined that state legislators can say what is and isn’t a psychiatric problem, regardless of what the psychiatrists say. Although it would seem that any state legislator who opened a side-business as a psychiatric therapist would still be guilty of practicing psychiatry without a license – but no matter.

Still more: a targeted individual need not display a ‘classic’ psychiatric syndrome like – say – paranoid schizophrenia or psychotic delusions or such clear and obvious insanity. No – the individual might simply ‘have’ a ‘mental abnormality’, including – say – a Personality Disorder. Now, it’s professionally understood that any given point a majority of the population can qualify for a ‘PDO” diagnosis; in almost all cases the therapy is some mixture of ‘talk therapy’ and a mild psychiatric drug, preferably more of the former than the latter.

The chances of anybody, especially after a stint – perhaps of many years – in a state prison, having a bit of a PDO, even if they didn’t have one going into the institution, are pretty good. And if one isn’t of a criminal disposition to begin with, and doesn’t yield himself to the temptation during his sojurn in that netherworld, then the chances are even better that he’s going to pay for such integrity with a bit of personality deformity simply from the sustained stress of not allowing himself to sink into the morass of dysfunction that constitutes ‘normal’ life in the prison setting. Especially if one is labeled, as is de rigeur in these matters, as a ‘sex offender’.

So much the easier will be the task of civilly confining the gentleman when and if he survives his imprisonment. Charming.

Thus We come to the ‘preventive’ part: it’s all OK because the state is simply trying to ‘prevent’ sex-offenders from committing any more ‘sex offenses’. In other words, although there is no professionally acknowledged psychiatric disease, and although the individual has committed no new offenses (kindly do not imagine that there is no opportunity to commit ‘sex offenses’ in the prison setting), the state – saith the Court – is justified in ‘preventing’ any further offenses that the individual may commit.

Nor does a majority of the Court consider it relevant that the government’s own figures indicate that ‘sex offenders’ have one of the lowest recidivism rates among all convicts.

It would appear that having ‘created’ the ‘monster’ called the ‘sex offender’ (and recall that this category is primarily composed of individuals who have had nothing to do with ‘children’) the state pols now can’t let the so-called ‘monsters’ back out into society, to walk free in liberty. It’s an interesting question whether the pols themselves understand that they have painted themselves into a dangerous corner or whether it has occurred to them that they have created a ‘class’ of ‘evil-doers’ who can serve state purposes as well as the ‘Islamo-fascists’ serve the purposes of the national legislature and the national Executive. In either case, the pols have got themselves what Pentagon-types refer to with no small admiration as a ‘self-licking ice cream cone’ – it continually feeds upon itself and will keep on doing so, being constantly (and magically) replenished by the fears of the populace, stoked by the original ‘monsterizing’ of the original offender. Neat.

So We are not out of line by wondering if this whole thing is really a good idea; if it isn’t rather a really bad idea that has opened very crucial holes in the protective watertight walls that keep the Ship of the Republic afloat.

Which brings Us back to Mr. Fathi’s observations, since supporters of the national government’s ‘preventive detention’ plan are now pointing to the domestic sex-offender policy to justify what they want to do with all of the souls currently caged in the service of the Global War On Terror (or whatever the Beltway is calling it today). So the existence of a bad policy is now being used as a justification for the deployment of that policy in yet another arena of national concern. Since Ford made the Edsel and the things are on the road, now the Pentagon wants to make a military version of it – that sort of thing.

You could be forgiven for imagining that when this new domestic military command is finally ready for some action, the public will be told that the troops are being sent forth to assist the police in capturing the hordes of ‘sex offenders’ who are on the loose. And for imagining that far too many folks will simply say ‘Oh, well, that’s OK then’ and turn back to more pressing concerns (of which We have more than a few nowadays). Thus with an ‘OK then’ will the Republic sink.

And We will come more and more to resemble the German citizenry in ’45: can’t think how it all happened, thought it was a really good thing for the country, seemed the thing to do at the time, can’t imagine how it all went so wrong, just want to forget it. But History has a way of not letting folks ‘forget’, if by ‘forgetting’ you mean ‘walk away from the consequences’. History has its own forms of ‘backlash’, called ‘blowback’ in military circles. In Our case, the sustained breaching of Our fundamental Constitutional praxis, by a citizenry that has forgotten what it means to be The People, will result in the loss of the Constitutional ethos itself. And like MacArthur’s ‘old soldier’, it will not do Us the service of collapsing spectacularly but will rather ‘just fade away’, starved of vital support by the ‘forgetfulness’ of too many who just went with the flow and told themselves it was the right thing to do.

Like the classic emergency-room ‘train-wreck’, Our Constitutional ethos is now suffering from bad ideas that are feeding upon each other, metastasizing by using each other as ‘proof’ that ‘one more’ expansion won’t ‘hurt’ and will actually be a good thing. When you get this sort of synergy in a patient with serious injuries, then it’s time to call the chaplain or cut to a commercial – because what follows won’t be pretty for home-viewing. Except for those who are fascinated by watching somebody else die.

But what’s dying here is no ‘stranger’. It’s Our own American way of ordering and deploying governmental authority. Which is to say: carefully, and with a whole lotta serious thought.

Governments are potentially dangerous things, even when they mean well, let alone when they have – like a pit bull – gone a bit off. And un-Truth is a proven enemy of all that is best in humankind.

Put ‘government’ and ‘un-Truth’ together, take them off the leash of The People’s careful , thoughtful, and sustained scrutiny, and that’s a recipe for lethal ‘mischief’, fatal to a republic, and certainly to this Republic.

I’ve mentioned it before but I’ll say it again: the 20th century saw the West wrestle with the huge challenges of controlling industrial centralization. In this country, Teddy Roosevelt joined with the Progressives in expanding the role of government to counter the huge new industrial and corporate combinations. That alone meant that – since the government was getting wayyyyy bigger and more powerful – then The People had to become more and not less capable of grounding the great Ferris-wheel of Constitutional government.

But at just that moment the Progressives slid into a form of the old American fear that ‘people’ couldn’t be trusted to be ‘The People’ and actually needed to be ridden-herd-upon by those who knew what had to be done. The late 18th century gentlefolk who wanted to keep actual power in the hands of those who were landed and thus responsible to run the affairs of the Republic, were succeeded at the beginning of the 20th by the Progressives, who felt that it was their patriotic mission civilisatrice to raise up and educate the wracked individual souls of the urban masses. But when Wilson and his war came along, this expanded into a Progressive urge to administer the government as a scientifically educated, knowledge elite, in a far more potent replay of the late-18th century landed gentry.

And then came the New Deal, and then the postwar Cold War ‘National Security State’, where the ‘Progressive’ urge to shepherd the great unwashed masses blended without too much trouble into the National Security State’s elites who would instill a useful ‘fear’ into the population and captain the Ship of the Republic into the deep, heavy, ambiguous seas of world-power.

If We consider the vanguard elites of the assorted Advocacies and Identities of the late-Sixties and early-Seventies as blending the excited but optimistic perturbations of the Progressive elites with the revolutionary-tinged, youthfully ruthless enthusiasms of ‘we are the only ones who get it’ cadres, then it’s not so hard to see that the role of The People in this Republic has been under serious if not clearly perceived assault for a century. The recent and reprehensible Unitary Executive, while it has furthered the damage to the role of The People, was enabled by a long process of the disempowerment of The People.

Somehow, and time’s running out, We have to figure out a way to run a complex nation without extinguishing the utterly vital role of The People. So far neither the historical Progressives, nor the assorted ‘elites’ of the New Deal and then the National Security State, nor the ‘Conservatives’ (really now Nationalist-Rightists), nor the congeries of assorted Identity-Advocacy ‘elites’ who have recently re-named themselves Progressive since they have utterly bankrupted the term ‘liberal’, have gotten this task right.

Mr. Obama faces a task greater than Lincoln, and yet it’s very much similar in a way to the Great Challenge that abides always at the heart of the American Dream: to trust that ‘people’ can also constitute The People.

And if he’s going to achieve that, he’s going to need the support of a whole lotta ‘people’ who must demonstrate, individually and communally, that they can indeed be The People, and insist upon exercising that profound Calling.

Embracing ‘preventive detention’ is not going to help matters at all.

NOTES

The Supreme Court case to start with is 'Kansas v. Hendricks'.

PUBLIC TRUST AND MISTRUST

Steven Thomma of McClatchy has an article, ‘Public distrust of government could hobble Obama’. (http://www.mcclatchydc.com/homepage/story/56105.html ).

I think it was Mark Schmitt of ‘The American Prospect’ who in the most recent issue said something to the effect that if people don’t trust government, then that’s bad for democracy.
So this thread seems to be floating around. As well it should be.

The first thing that comes to me is that the Founders built a complexly counter-balanced Constitution pretty much telegraphing the fact that they didn’t trust government.

Or perhaps: they didn’t quite trust the citizenry to rise to the occasion of acting as The People (Lincoln ran further with that ball). But they also expected that the Branches would not ‘trust’ each other. What balanced the machine was that through a certain professional ‘distrust’, the Branches would keep each other honest. While none of the Branches, being composed of human beings subject to original sin or the Enlightenment equivalent of ‘natural human frailties’, would be perfect in its disinterested and honest dedication to the public and common weal, yet they would each ‘help’ the others from straying too far down the paths of a self-serving official treachery, a betrayal of the common weal and the public interest in the service of pursuing their own interests.

In this sense, nobody should ‘trust’ the government: whether for religious or philosophical reasons long-established in the West, and based on a centuries’ long or millennia’ long observation and experience, human beings no matter how highly placed – indeed especially those who are highly placed – cannot be presumed to be doing the right thing. Many tires have to be kicked, and probably not a few asses. It’s Nature’s way, and God’s will. Selah.

There is a ‘regulation’ built into the Constitution because there is a great probability that sooner or later some derangement of the machine’s human elements will occur. ‘Deregulation’ is thus in a sense contrary to the interests of democracy, and is indeed contrary to everything We might expect from human nature.

Of course, when in the interests of running their own revolution the Second Wave of Feminism (2WF) led the way in deconstructing ‘human nature’ – claiming that there was no ‘human nature’ to which anybody had to conform or the authority of which anyone had to respect or under which anyone need be ‘oppressed’ – they undercut (whether purposely or not is another question) the concept of ‘regulation’.

Blended with the Boomer-Hippie urges to tear down any speed bumps, fences, or walls that would interfere with the groovy flow of Luv and – by the by – sex … well, you can see what a powerful brew was going to be dribbling, and then pouring, out of the national still that was the late Sixties. Eager not to seem fuddy-duddies the Dems blessed it all, bestowing upon it the full faith, credit and authority of the federal government to the extent that they controlled it, telling themselves, it now appears, that the ‘liberations’ of the later Sixties were of a piece with the liberations of the civil rights legislation of the early Sixties, the concern for the ‘little people’ exemplified by the New Deal, and the general traditional American concern for ever-increasing freedom and liberation.

They were, perhaps, more than a little too generous in their assessment of things and of themselves.

So ‘regulation’ was undercut philosophically long before it was repealed and watered down and otherwise deconstructed by policy and statute. (Except – Dr. Freud to Consulting One stat! – for certain stigmatized groups of folks who, marvelously, were to be ‘totally’ regulated.)

At this point We have every reason to be very parsimonious in Our investment of ‘trust’ in the government, in each of the Branches.

But this is as it should be. As that remarkable Prime Branch of Constitutional government called The People, it is for Us rather to place Our trust in the Founders’ Constitutional vision of how things must work. It is not for Us to ‘trust’ individuals or, at this late and dangerous point, ‘government’ or the Branches.

Of course, several newer generations of Americans and many who are only recently arrived, no longer have or have never had a lively and robust appreciation of just how things have to work for a democracy under this Constitutional vision to properly work. The People need not – indeed cannot possibly – involve themselves in every single aspect of administering national affairs or ensuring that – among other things – ‘the laws be faithfully executed’. That is not the role of The People.

It is the role of The People to keep the Branches honest, as the Branches – all cozied up there inside the Beltway (formerly known, by General Sherman as “the fleshpots of Washington City”) - are supposed to keep each other honest, aware as they must be of each others’ less Constitutionally salubrious predilections. Sort of like alcoholics in AA keeping an eye on each other, familiar as each is with all the old weaknesses and the dodges that enable the slide back down into the abyss.

Of course, the Founders’ worst nightmare would be that all the Branches would become debauched, and that The People themselves would become debauched. That is a process that would take years – decades – and would require a highly concentrated and sustained effort by an astounding array of the politically powerful and the educated, and ‘the free press’ as well. Only in their worst nightmares might the Founders have imagined this country in the past forty or so years.

But so it has come to pass.

It’s hard to say what Mr. Obama is going to do. If he actually understands the tremendous rot that has already set in, and wishes to do everything possible to start the cure, and if he is yet cautious enough to realize that it can’t be done overnight or even overtly – so entrenched is the disease – then he may have to do a great deal of tacking and one-step forward/three-quarters-step back. No Hercules can clean out this stable overnight – the Augean kine are humans, after all, there in the Beltway, and quite capable of a very human demonry when they perceive themselves and their habits threatened.

It would help if The People were to find a way to keep a close eye, on them and on him.
On him, a benevolent but gimlet eye, the eye of independent souls who are used to having to hold things together in the face of misfortune and the ‘frailties and weaknesses of human nature’.
On them, at this point, as a People who have already been fooled once, twice, and a hundred times, and a People alert enough to their own survival and their own responsibilities to realize that it won’t take much more for these bloated and tax-fattened kine (and not a few swine) to knock out the last roof supports for the whole Stable. We lose the barn and We lose the farm. It’s come to that now.

1996

I’ve occasionally mentioned in recent and not-so-recent Posts that Bill Clinton’s years represented a darkness not yet fully explored (as if Reagan’s administrations weren’t dark enough). In fact, if 1968 was a huge failure to re-ignite the democratic politics of the common weal – ignited in FDR’s first two administrations, then layered over with the thick concrete of World War 2’s centralization and the Cold War’s National Security State – then the early 1990s were a huge failure to grasp the stupendous opportunity offered by the disappearance of the Soviet Union. And granted that the first years of that ‘Moment’ were under Bush the First, Clinton’s election represented an opportunity for the Democrats to grasp and wield a chance for ‘democracy’ such as the world had never seen.

Ah well. That was then.

It occurs to me that the Year of Grace 1996 was gravid with portent. We recall that with the Soviet Union gone and the Russian government not quite ready for prime time, Clinton had in 1995 actually taken to flexing American might in the Balkans; this on top of sending to Russia a gaggle of neoliberal, elite university business and economy experts whose incompetence for the task was only exceeded by their kleptomaniac efforts at self-enrichment.

We here were perhaps the only folks on the planet who didn’t notice the irony. The Russians surely did, and in their ham-handed way, took very precise notes.

But on to 1996.

Alan Nasser, in an 8/2/07 article, “The Threat of U.S. Fascism: An Historical Precedent”, at http://www.commondreams.org/, points out that in 1996 Lesley Stahl on ’60 Minutes’ asked then-Secretary of State Madeline Albright “whether she thought that the removal of Saddam from power was worth killing a half million children”. This question was prompted by the fact that under the parameters of Clinton’s bombing sanctions against Iraq, “Clinton bombed Iraq several times weekly for eight years”.

Many of Us might recall vaguely that factoid floating by back in those days, ‘in illo tempore’ as the Latin of the Gospel would put it. Nasser reports that “Defense Information Agency documents, now made available through the Freedom of Information Act, reveal that the strategy of the bombing was to extensively bomb water purification facilities and power generating facilities with the explicit intention to spread diseases that would affect children. The idea was to pressure ordinary Iraqis to overthrow Saddam, with the knowledge that if they did so, the pedicide would cease. [italics mine]” Around the table at Beltway dinner parties this sort of thing is referred to as ‘reasons of state’; in less toney and toned venues it is called a ‘war crime’ – but such are the vulgarities of the unwashed.

The British medical journal ‘The Lancet’ calculated carefully and came up with a figure of 467,000 Iraqi children dead; the number of injured, wounded, and traumatized children was beyond calculation … by any earthly means, certainly, although bible-thumping, big-haired, shiny-suited chaplains on the Beltway A-list would no doubt assert that a bullet from America’s gun is a bullet from God’s gun, as God or Goering had publicly affirmed. And as for the British … they no longer made history. Pass the grape juice, and the bourbon, please. And if you have no communion bread, why a Moon Pie’ll do jes’ fine, maam, and thank ya vurrry mutch. It says a great deal that Moon Pies are available at Beltway dinner parties now, and have been for some time. It’s what ‘the little people’ eat. And ‘little’ they are there inside the Beltway – ‘small’, actually. Very small. In very big ways.

Back to Stahl, where Albright replied – with the full weight of her statuesque, matronly, and feminine authority – “Yes, it was worth it”. Thus the fruits of the revolution that would dethrone the violence of the masculine baboon, at the price of gutting any pretense of a democratic politics. In an echo of the Vietnam-era military lunacy, a woman of high political rank shrugged out a brazen ‘we had to destroy the children in order to save them’, a grotesquerie that surpassed even the woman Janet Reno’s assertion a couple-three years earlier that – come to think of it – she had authorized the Waco massacre because she was worried that the children were being ‘abused’ – said children thereupon having been burned to death when the wooden structure in which they were sheltering was deliberately attacked by police and federal agents with military-grade explosives and weaponry. The local volunteer fire department, just a couple of decades-old apparatus some distance away (this was rural Texas) – the feds had not thought to place on standby alert. Their foresight had not improved by September 11, some eight years later.

In that very same year, nineteen-ninety-and-six, the sex-offender mania, hugely fearful that ‘the children’ were at the mercy of hordes of slavering, stranger-perverts, burst into the realm of Federal legislation, when the parents of Megan Kanka of New Jersey affirmed that if they had only known about the proclivities of the man dwelling across the street they would most certainly have taken more precautions – though their own neighbors clearly recalled to local reporters at the time that his presence and proclivities were common knowledge in the neighborhood. But in an emergency facts don’t matter, and this was surely an emergency. (And perhaps in some future the Kankas will emerge into truth as did the famous Ms. Roe of 'Roe v. Wade' who - many years after the fact - acknowledged in a by-the-by that No, she hadn't really had the problem that the Roe case was all about, and that she kinda felt bad about all the fuss that she had started; as Ms. Roe was seduced by 'facts don't matter in an emergency' (nor 'truth' in a revolution) so as to shatter the American common identity, so too the Kankas may feel a bit bad that their little bit of non-truth had helped start a wildfire that is still consuming the foundations of the American constitutional sensibility. But by then ... )

As the military had borrowed tactics and rocketry and even the shape of its helmets from Hitler’s Wehrmacht, ‘registries’ and assorted restrictions as to employment, residence, and sundry other essentials of even a minimally sustainable life were borrowed from … another agency among Hitler’s inventive bureaucracies; although, to be sure, the maniac with the little mustache had borrowed much of it from the maniac with the much larger mustache in the East, where that Wehrmacht would eventually be sent for a shock-and-awe settling of the hash that was to prove – ach! – more lethal in the recoil than in the projectile.

History is nothing if not inventive, even when it’s repetitive. Which is pretty good, for something supposedly dead. The hell-hot ironies! But Hitler knows that now; what he thought he was making turned out to have a life of its own. Almost like Dr. Frankenstein’s science project. Thus science-fiction and horror come back not as fantasy but as reality.

And in that same year, of the Independence of the United States the two-hundred-and-twentieth, the Telecommunications Act was signed into law with a cheerible smile by Mr. President Clinton. This Act allowed the ownership of the news media to be concentrated in the hands of a relatively few corporate owners. Thus the government need have no fear that spunky and irrepressible investigative reporters of yore, proud of their outsider status – think Kolchak – would be poking around to discover the ‘real’ story, or what was once known as ‘truth’. As a generation of such folk retired or died off, new hires could save their expensive suits and hair-dos by simply publishing as ‘news’ what the government flacks would provide, by fax – the wonders of modern science!

Such ‘news’ as would provide gripping photo-ops were thoughtfully provided by agitprop advocacies, unwittingly (it is to be hoped) fronting and providing cover for the real outrages being perpetrated under color of law and national security and – of course – ‘for the children’.

All three things in one year. There’s almost a symmetry to them. And they all seem to be connected.

Can it be coincidence?

I tend to think not. In matters of state and of high import, coincidences – like the old breakfast cereal – are for kids.

No, I’m not saying a ‘conspiracy’. I’m saying something much worse. That matters have reached a point among Us – and did quite a few years ago – where so much national activity is off-the-rails, rudderless, unguided and unconfined and unlimited and un-Shaped by any overriding principles, that the thick, dense, vigorous sheets of flame are now – as in the firestorms created in concentrated bombing of cities – combining in ways unpredictable except that they will be even more lethally omnivorous than any individual fire could be. But always remaining ‘fire’ – insatiable, destructive, respectful of no boundaries, tempered by no mercy or obligation or responsibility, by no virtue or fear of sin or self-abasement, by no fear of God or of any millstone being hung around its neck.

Fire does answer to ‘the sea’. But it takes a lot of water to make a ‘sea’. If there were a million rains as there were once imagined to be a million points of light – well, that would do some good work.

That, indeed, is what is needed at this point. A People that can start to exercise a confining effect against the fire: like Southern California fire commanders, who will seek to contain and – if the opportunity arises – get to the heart of the fire.

If a patient were to come into the office of a prison psychiatrist, proudly asserting that he (or – most surely now – she) is outraged at the abuse of local children, while refusing to acknowledge the photographic evidence that he (or she) had purposely and deliberately stalked and killed huge numbers of children in a distant city … well, you can imagine that the patient would be coming into the sessions for a long, long time.

Just so, looking at the United States in 1996, the same type of verrrry disturbing symptoms seem clearly in evidence.

And if the patient then professes tearily to the psychiatrist that s/he doesn’t understand why other people avoid contact and seem to harbor ‘negative feelings’ and the patient ‘can’t think why’, except that people like to hate, and people especially like to hate those who ‘do what has to be done’ and who ‘do what is truly good’ … well, you can imagine that such a patient is already slipping the mystic cords of sanity. Prognosis: poor. At best.

And if such a patient then adds that s/he was ordered by God to do it all – deputized, actually … well, there are places for that sort of thing, and the bars on the windows aren’t to keep out the occasional burglar.

And here We are.

A healthy sense of the reality of one’s self would be a good start. One’s gifts but also one’s tendencies to weakness. And above all, a sense of one’s limits – not as an ‘esteem’-smashing downer, but as the first step in developing a social self – one capable of monitoring its own behavior and feelings and expectations while carrying on a set of working relationships with others of its kind. So that one might establish a just and a lasting peace within one’s self and among all other people.

When the sense of limits goes, the sense of self does not ‘grow’, it metastasizes. And this is as true for governments and nations as it is for individual patients. And while the ‘laws’ of economics that govern an individual person may not be the same as those that govern the economies of nations (governments, apparently, can spend well beyond their income, and should), yet the rules governing behavior toward other human beings apply universally. Yes, Hitler said that when a war is won, nobody will ask if you told the truth in the beginning – but did that work out for him?

I suspect more than a few governments around today – and what is a government but a collection of human beings exercising power over and for other human beings? – have fallen into the trap of thinking exactly as he did, except that they wouldn’t make the same mistakes he made. Yet they did. Yet they have.

And here We are.

If Obama wins the election – and what else can one rationally hope for? – let Us not allow Ourselves more than the briefest moment of rejoicing. He goes to the White House with a challenge facing him as great as that which faced Lincoln. The country has lost its integrity – although not in so obvious a way as in 1861.

Worse, there are far too many citizens who are not willing or not able to discharge the office of Citizen, as a member of The People. We are not rubber-stamps to be dragged out once every few years to stand in lines and cast a vote and then go back to the mall or the second job. While Ours is not a plebiscitary democracy where everybody has to vote on the specifics of every law that has passed, yet the tasks of the Citizen know no season: We must inform Ourselves, and then make Ourselves known to each other and to those elected (and damned well sworn) to represent Our interests.

We must educate Mr. Obama (and most surely Mr. Biden) into the tasks of ‘presiding’ over a true and actual People, and to do that We must become a People.

So many never understood what it means to be a Citizen: they did not come here to assume the burdens of a functioning democracy, or were born here so recently that the assorted debaucheries of several decades seem natural to them. And far too many were born here long enough ago to know, but have given themselves up to the apathy and distraction that is precisely desired by those who would make Us serfs, peasants and donkeys.

And collaborators in dark and bloody deeds. Did the German citizenry think in that Spring of 1945 that by sticking a freshly laundered white bedsheet out the second-floor window they would escape the price to be paid for what was done in their name? And not just ‘in their name’: as Maria Doria Russell points out acutely in the last line of “A Thread of Grace”, Hitler never personally fired a weapon in all the years of his monstrous, demonic Reich; “all the harm he ever did was done for him by others”.

This is no note to go out on, if go We must.

So let me borrow a little more of Churchill: for all the troubles that beset Us and infect Us, this election is not the end, it is not even the beginning of the end, but if We brace Ourselves to Our duties, it may be the end of the beginning.

And that is a start. And a good one.
_________________________

Addendum:

I’ve just come across an article printed on Truthout, but originally from ‘The Women’s Media Center’ by one Lorelei Kelly. I don’t go trolling in these shallow, murky waters of advocacy where actuality and calculated fantasy are deliberately confused, but it comes via the Truthout site and is relevant to the Post above. The article by Kelly is dated 23 October and is entitled ‘National Security: Women Must Define the Priorities Debate’; http://www.truthout.org/102308WA

Ms. Kelly asserts that “What were once considered women’s issues are now squarely in the middle of domestic and international debates”. Well, women’s issues have always been begging to be in the midst of domestic debate, but that didn’t happen anywhere near enough, and – I’ve been saying – that as a consequence, large numbers of voters of both sexes (the memos seem to indicate that ‘gender’ means something else and one does try to stay abreast) who may have been rabidly misogynist, or simply doubtful or skeptical or uncertain or just didn’t like having an end-run done on them, simply started voting Republican (nor am I suggesting that they were well-served by their new hosts). That was a hardly unforeseeable consequence of trying to pull the old Leninist end-run-by-the-vanguard-elite play.

Continuing, she asserts that “the old guns versus butter line is obsolete … the U.S. Army now considers girls’ education a vital link to achieving long-term stability”. Well, if it’s true – and what is too ludicrous to dismiss outright these days? – then part of the reason We may be in such deep doodoo on the Eastern Front is that ‘the Army’ is detailing resources to school-teaching duties. Of course, given the overall playbook that’s governed this 2WF advocacy for decades, it may well be that the Army is putting x-amount of dollars aside into such a category in order to assure xxx-amount of dollars for actual war-fighting, from Congresspersons who are still trying to pander to Identities while demonstrating how much they support the troops. A two-fer where only the frontline loses; ‘collateral damage’ of the Revolution, comrade sisters – some eggs must be broken to make any great omelette – though we may be thankful that it’s mostly sperm that are being broken … but let us keep that among ourselves, because only the vanguard is strong enough to hear the truth.

“A global legacy of women’s priorities already informs policy debates about a new strategy for U.S. security. For decades, women the world over have championed the safety of people through positive social change.” The usual glorious, self-serving boilerplate. And men’s priorities have been to champion the non-safety of people? Or is it that ‘women’ simply are doing what ‘men’ are also doing? Or ‘men’ simply doing what ‘women’ are doing? Or is this thinking too much?
And just where in all this ‘safety’ does Janet Reno fit in? Madeline Albright? Nancy Pelosi? Condoleeza Rice? The rest of Bush’s bobby-sox and roadie squad, whether wielding pom-poms or bomb-bombs? Hilary Clinton who apparently didn’t mind what hubby was doing to Iraqi children with his bombing strategy? The (female) Army Major-General who didn’t think wounded troops at Walter Reed were getting bad treatment? Or are these just a few feminist bad apples? Or am I being too harsh because really women are no better than men and shouldn’t be held to a higher standard of morality – even if they claim to be operating by such higher levels of principle … ?

But … if that’s the situation, and women are no better than men, then what have We been going through for the past thirty frakking years? And: why? Was Jesse Jackson right that when all is said and done it just comes done to slicing the pie?

DIVINING THINGS

In a New Republic piece dated July 18, Michael Sean Winters observes that “Obama has a Catholic problem”. I’ll pass over the tactics and numerics of voting demographics. Winters takes things a little deeper than what has been the disappointing norm for coverage, especially from a once-mature magazine such as TNR (about which Alas, but there’s little time to linger any longer; citizens who read are now doctors in a plague city). http://tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=f1c95dd6-6569-461e-a372-4b4e7f960dd3

He notes that during a proclaimed “values week” in early July Obama began tossing out Scriptural quotes and even went so far as to allow that “war, poverty, joblessness and homelessness, violent streets and crumbling schools – are not simply technical problems … they are moral problems”. Winters notes that there is a whiff of boilerplate in all of it.

I agree, and not because of any deep familiarity with the ins and outs of campaign dynamics. Rather, I note that nowadays – and for some decades past – no Democrat could deploy “moral” in any serious sense at all. To do so would be politically inadvisable, like pulling the pin out of a grenade and then sitting on it would be inadvisable.

There is no room for ‘morality’ because the political philosophy – so called – that the Identities embraced in the formative days of the ‘70s did not accept ‘morality’ as relevant to political power; indeed, ‘morality’ was considered to be a fantasy, and a nasty, oppressive one at that. For Nietzsche morality was simply a matter of what you yourself willed to happen, and the only great immorality was to stifle your will in deference to any ‘outside’ influence. For Foucault there was no ‘truth’ (let alone ‘Truth’) existing in some pure form ‘outside’ of the human dimension; ‘truth’ was merely an abstraction, a word to be used as a weapon by whomever wielded political power and authority. Truth was ‘constructed’, thus, by those in power (who always ‘oppressed’) and so the game plan of liberation had to be a ‘deconstructing’ of ‘truth’ and thereby of the oppressive authority of those who wielded political power.

Foucault left it at that, and didn’t pursue his line of thought through to its obvious consequences. For when deployed successfully, then the deconstructionist former oppressed would in short order become the wielders of political power and authority, and thereby ex officio become oppressors themselves. Of course, he couldn’t let himself follow through with that because his ‘philosophy’ would thereby have come full circle, back to its starting point, cutting the rug out from under itself before the creative destruction was fairly begun. How can you get anybody to risk all and undertake a revolution if all you’re promising them is that they’ll wind up being the very oppressors against whom you’re trying to get them to revolt? It’s not very catchy as a slogan – except to the type of persons who just like to be in power no matter what it takes. But to any sober mind it offers profound and meaty pause.

But then, when you’re up to things revolutionary, you’re not looking for sober minds. Except to get them out of your way. Siberia is an option – if you’re Russia. Shooting, otherwise, if you can get away with it. Keeping them away from microphones and cameras always. And the fewer of the oppressed who can think – or, better, read – then the better things will work out for your revolution. And as your almost ultimate gambit, you promise them that what you’re bringing will be soooo good, so purely and naturally and fantastically good, that there won’t need to be another revolution for a thousand years, and that as a token of your bona fides you’ll be happy to stay on top to make sure that there isn’t. Or – in a gambit whose very brilliance proves the existence of a demonic dimension in human affairs – you tell them all that your revolution, which should have happened a million yesterdays ago, will probably take a thousand years to complete, at which time you’ll be happy to step down, if folks want you to. Until then …

But on a deeper level Foucault also couldn’t escape from the stabbingly obvious point that if the only source of political authority is the fact that it is being held onto and wielded, then there’s no way to judge it. There’s nothing ‘outside’ the system to check it and balance it (so to speak). There’s no authority beyond the system, let alone – ummm, say – above the system, under which the system would stand to be judged. The system sort of justifies itself just by having power; no courts or judges (or Judge) necessary, thank ya vurrry mutch (although Foucault, being French, did not speak like Elvis or any Texan). It was all kinda self-regulating, like free market czars and commissars are today in the Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate sector – or, charmingly, F.I.R.E. (which is almost big enough now for one to be able to shout it in a crowded public space). That’s the nice thing about political power: it can be deconstructed, if enough folks have the chops, but it can never ever be ‘judged’.

So Obama can only go so far down the ‘Catholic’ road before he runs into a huge problem. The Catholic ‘genius’ was to insist that there was indeed a dimension above the dimension of human affairs, and that its principles could be incompletely but sufficiently grasped by mortals, and that those principles – coming as they did from Above and Beyond this vale of fog and tears – were the blueprints of human existence, individual and societal. And that any laws or plans or schemes or visions hatched on the human level had somehow to conform to those general but universal principles. Otherwise they wouldn’t be legitimate. Or – what the hey? – Legitimate, capital ‘L’.

So, for example, as Winters points out, the two biggies: “the inalienable dignity of the human person and the common good”. The former flows from the latter: if each individual human being is possessed of (or, say, “endowed by his creator with”) inalienable dignity, then any community of human persons would also possess an inalienable dignity. So far so philosophical. And genuinely American.

But now, once you are into the realm of universal principles (call them ‘the Verities’, for short) and the dignity of individuals, then while making some marvelous and genuinely Catholic noises, you are heading straight for the rocks of the Identities, those engines of an almost- Greek tragedy now besmashing the Democratic Party’s project. For if you admit that there are such principles that can stand in judgment over any merely ‘political’ or ‘earthly’ authority, then you’ve trumped the very authority that the revolutions of those assorted Identities claimed almost 40 years ago, when they themselves waved Foucault around like the hammers of Lenin and the scythes of Mao to deconstruct anything oppressive standing in the way of their liberation (like – say – ‘men’ or ‘Western civilization’ or any ‘constructed’ abstractions beginning with a capital letter like Truth or Justice or … how to put this delicately? … God).

So Obama, and his Party, in one of the hell-hottest ironies in American history, finds himself trying to rally and regroup his Party and the American people at a dire moment by reaching out for a matrix of ideas of proven cohesive value, that had been flung away precisely to appease and enable a welter of Identities now at the pinnacle of the Party’s public identity, whose very (and historically un-American) position requires that no such matrix exists.

Obama cannot now enlist the classic Verities without enraging, outraging, and de-staging his Party’s long-embraced Identities. The Confederates – and people say there isn’t a God and that He has no sense of humor! – towards the end when they needed all the troops they could enlist, sought to enlist – wait for it – slaves. To which one Southern general instantly observed, with lethal simplicity: “if slaves make good soldiers, then our whole theory of slavery is wrong”.

So too: if the Verities are indeed true, then the Identities’ long and vastly corrosive march through American society and culture has been … not so true. In which case the tires – if not other parts – of the Identities will be kicked. And, as Foucault and Lenin and just about any other taker-over of worlds knew, ‘you don’t let them be kicking your tires with their minds or the whole thing is going to get stopped and you yourself are going to get stood up in front of a judge or the nearest wall’. Or words to that effect.

Oddly, while when it comes to getting some new thing that they claim is theirs, the Identities are more than willing to talk about building a new ‘boat’ because this one is starting to capsize, , yet they do not at all want any discussion of their prior ‘gains’ because the election is too important to start looking back at … stuff … or, really, to be doing any thinking at all. Can’t we all just vote Democratic and then we’ll get everything sorted out later? You can trust usssssss, can’t you?

I sort of wonder: is it possible that the Dems let things get so bad for so long because they knew – deep down in their inner cocktail parties – that they would never be able to explain to the whole People just how they let the common weal get so whacked over the past 40 years, and so the best thing to do would be to make a virtue of necessity, let the Republicans really really run wild with their hairless neocons and the Robber Baronets of the F.I.R.E. sector, until they got things so awesomely frakked up that the voters would welcome Dems back with no questions asked. About anything.

We are well-advised to watch more late-night tv movies: specifically, those B-horror movies of the pre-'70s where any half-pint, sugar-addled kid who’d been drinking out of a garden hose after falling off a bike he’d been riding without a helmet in the dark through the woods without a headlight, knew that if kindly Grandfather – call him FDR – returned to his Transylvanian farmhouse even one second after midnight, then he was no longer kindly old Grandfather no matter what he said, and should be staked or garlicked or holy-watered forthwith. Or get a crucifix shoved in his kisser. Now those be Kathlik noises!

But this is precisely what Obama cannot do. He cannot truly reach out to his Catholic demographic without making his revolutionary demographic verrrrry skittish. Like vampires around holy water just before sun-up.

Winters notes – ominously – that when questioned about healthcare, “Obama reverted to legalese, claiming healthcare was ‘a right’ instead of invoking the moral obligations Americans owe to one another as citizens and fellow human beings”. We didn’t get those ‘moral obligations’ as war booty from any country beaten in war; they came from a Western tradition that was strongly Christian (which is not at all the same as saying Fundamentalist; Fundoozies are to Christianity what SS troopers are to decent local traffic cops).

But what else can he do? Once ‘moral obligations’ are back on the national civic table then the Identities and the Robber Baronets and the preventive-war cheerleaders are all liable to judgment. And while the cheerleaders can’t be made to give all those frakked-up lives back, the Baronets might be made to give all the money back … so you can see what a job of work this is going to be.

Nor will the Identities go gently into that good night reserved for stupendously dubious ideas and shrewdly-spun card tricks. Of course, they might horse-trade in a kinda mature, democratic way, but that would be to betray the revolution – though they’d never put it quite like that. And they’d hafta give some stuff back – like maybe God. Eeeeeeeyyyyyyyyyew!

In fact, any nation that ever existed has always been liable to sins as awful as its lack of scruples would let it get away with, but vice always paid to virtue the compliment of hiding itself and even – on the off chance that there really is a God – restraining itself. But with the Identities’ embrace of Foucault ‘Virtue’ was deconstructed and with Reagan’s sweet nostalgia for MGM's America Greed was pronounced Good.

America became no place for a morally obligated People. And We did not remain one very long.

What now then?

CAN THE UNSOUND BE HEARD?

Truthout carries an AP article by Glenn Johnson. “Obama Says US Strategy in Iraq Is Unsound” (http://www.truthout.org/article/obama-says-us-strategy-iraq-is-unsound).

The article – and Obama – quotes George C. Marshall, author of the famous Plan (who at the time was attacked as un-American and maybe ‘pinko’ by a number of braying folk, many of whom had not seen combat in the late war nor proven themselves fitted for bearing great responsibility and fulfilling great and unforgiving tasks, but who had found national politics congenial enough for their purposes).

“The whole world of the future hangs on a proper judgment”. Wellllllllllll, that rules out a lot of folks who’ve joined us only in the past 40 years. Indeed, it also rules out far too many of the Greatest Generation still around who seem only to recall the sodas and the shooting, or at least that’s all the media pick up on.

“Judgment” … ? Oh, I would never presume to judge anybody. Oh that would be judgmental, and we’re Vatican 2 Catholics, you know. You can’t judge … Jesus or Buddha – one of them anyway – said it’s bad. Judging is divisive; we are uniters, not dividers. Sigh. It seems like nobody gets judged anymore. Except sex-offenders. And nobody judges anybody else. Except if those anybodies are sex-offenders. And it all makes sense. (We don’t want to be around when the historians of the future – if our own mis-mal-and-non-feasances don’t lead to a new Dark Ages somewhat before then – start trying to make sense of these times.)

It’s a wonder any child born in this country since 1969 has survived, being taught from the get-go not to ‘judge’, s/he would have kept putting that pudgy little paw on the hot stove until the little nervous system went into shock.

But judging is precisely what grown-ups have to do.

And – the even harder part – in a grown-up way.

We have to inform ourselves, decide, and take all the action appropriate to our role. We study and learn from others, we think and deliberate with others, and all of us make our thoughts known to our representatives.

So, holy hambones, folks! If enough of Us were doing the job, who’d have a lot of time for boredom, emptiness, and all the demonics that rush in to occupy vacuous lives … ?

Yes, I know, ‘vacuous’ is a judgment … but I applied it in the abstract, in general, conceptually, and not for the purposes of disrespecting or hating-on anyone. Was that not clear? I’m sorry, but I won’t apologize.

Obama raises a second question: “Imagine for a moment what we could have done in those days, and months, and years after 9/11.” Yes.

But I imagine what We could have done in those days, and months, and years after 1991 and the fall of the Soviet Union. Instead, Hahvahd sent over a shiny prize gelding that merely provided a hoofs-on-the-ground example of how persons of high social status in a capitalist system can turn a buck for themselves no matter how wide and deep and broad the moral urgency and history-laden significance of their task. Future, hell, son – get into futures plural!

Strange, how once the Soviets were gone, the Americans were – like the wizard of Oz – revealed to have no solid grasp at all on the priceless gift of Liberty, nor on Truth or Justice or – surely – Love and Charity, nor – increasingly – even on their own affairs or their own government. Hence the monstrous thing now lumbers drunkenly through the world-park, loose from its handlers, causing great carnage, still a noisy and burly thing, trumpeting and stamping, fuelling itself without thought for limits – it will not be oppressed by limits nor contained by boundaries … once that was the great genius of its youth.

We are its handlers. What have We to say for Ourselves. Inquiring minds want to know. Angry hearts. Saddened souls. All are wondering … where is The People?

TACKS AND TRACKS

Glenn Greenwald, always worthwhile, directs us via link to Digby, blogging on the Hullabaloo site. (http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/lurch-by-digby-commenting-on-obamas.html)
Digby is assessing Obama’s current tack to the right and what might be up with all that.
But in the process she has illuminated some remarkable material.

The Obama/Democratic strategy appears to be to rely on personality and not on issues. This is wise. Let’s face it: nobody is ever going to be able to look good trying to explain the coherence between the myriad revolutions, each with its own political, legislative, and cultural consequences, that the Party loosed upon American society like the fire-bomb-laden balloons that the Japanese – famously – had loosed upon the West Coast early in the war. But where the Japanese managed only a couple of the things, the Dems sent out clouds of them.

And now, 40 years later, it would probably be wiser to hope that enough citizens can’t remember or weren’t around for the times before the Time of Flowers Blooming; and it’s certainly shrewd to avoid creating any option or possibility for public discussion. The Facts-on-the-Ground playbook would advise focusing on something else. Anything but kicking the tires or checking under the hood. Once that gets started, folks might not like what they see, might start wanting to hold other folks responsible; the whole thing could become a frakfest, as democratic politics can become when The People have been bamboozled, and the Democrats can’t afford that.

And so they’re focusing on Personality. Ain’t he grand? Ain’t he dreamy? As boys could become enamored of the Fuhrer in his long, gleaming Mercedes parade-limo, so girls go for the eyes: they look into those eyes and … well, we’ve all seen vampire movies. “He looked at me … “ … this is no way to run a railroad. You cannot run a democratic politics like this. Romeo and Juliet were free to get it on because no prince in his right mind would allow youth to pass the time running the affairs of the city. So give ‘the kids’ a chance to run the city so they keep out of trouble? No. Fair Verona would have buried a hell of a lot more folks if ‘the kids’ had been in charge.

And with enamorment (which may not be a word, but you get the idea) goes ‘loyalty’. Not allegiance, which requires that the individual consider carefully, decide to commit, and then sustain that commitment through good times and bad. No. ‘Loyalty’ here, in our modern American reality, is the loyalty of the marketplace: the individual is defined simply by what he or she chooses to have in his or her (thank you, Democratic Party) paw. It’s brand loyalty. Not new: we’re Ford people, they’re GM people, those dopes over there are Chrysler people … it’s been going on a long time. In merchandising. But this is an election, for frak’s sake. And a Presidential election. ‘Loyal’ folks don’t ask questions; don’t try to kick tires or look under hoods; don’t look a gift horse in the mouth – and that’s what the Nanny State as well as the Security State want our ‘leader’ to be: a magic horse, sort of a unicorn, a mystical, marvelous creature in whose presence we should only feel gratitude and obey and vote the right way and then shut up and shovel the mystical plop as it falls to the ground. Kinda medieval, in a greasy, buttery way – like Newt Gingrich under klieg lights.

This ‘loyalty’ is not a commitment; it’s a ‘feeling’. Which is a view of the world proper to the profound though natural limitations of childhood and adolescence. But is not so encouraging when exhibited by persons who chronologically qualify for description as adults. ‘Sensitivity’ has become a matter of ‘feeling’ and of not-thinking; that’s what’s gone wrong and has now had 40 years to dig in. That’s what Political Correctness, that Leninist stratagem, was designed to aid and abet: not-thinking. Out of fear of being isolated from the group, of getting your name in the papers, getting your name put in a registry, of losing your job, being investigated, going to the camps or worse.

When the government throws its weight behind it, it works very well , but not in a democracy. Either it goes or the democracy goes. And is that a history We want to repeat?

Thus too, the Democratic strategy is not to talk about issues but rather to tell stories. Sorta like all those daytime TV shows that started up a few decades back. Not the soaps of the ‘50s and ‘60s, but the I’ll-be-fulfilled-if-I-tell-you-my-story shows. You know the type. It would be impolite to note the coincidence in time, that the feminist ascendancy and these kind of shows sort of – well – coincided. Impolite, but hey, this is the fate of a Presidential election in the Republic we’re talking about here.

And funny too is the fact that telling-stories is also the stock in trade of the Fundamentalist approach to religion. You’re not supposed to think or question … just tell your story. And honor the powers that be, for they are of God. Ja. Yah. There’s a great way to conduct a democratic politics.

And in that way the Democratic strategists hope to reclaim ‘family values’ – not to reclaim democratic politics, but to reclaim ‘family values’. As Petain’s Vichy defined ‘family values’: a way for the French to keep themselves busy while the thousand-year Reich ran their lives and ran their country like an ant-farm. Full of busy, loyal ants. Ja!

But values are not ‘feelings’. Yes, they are felt, they must be felt – that lets you know that they have become a structural part of your identity as a human being. But while they spark feelings, they are not themselves feelings. They are the ideals which you accept as worth structuring life around. They are the trellis that the vital but wild vine can embrace in order not to waste itself in aimless spreading over the ground, but to rise up toward the light.

And they want folks “to place their faith in Obama”. No. We the People may repose our trust and confidence in him to discharge the office of President, but that’s not “faith”, because he’s only a man; and no man (or woman) and no man (or woman) in high office can ever be completely trusted. If human beings could be so totally trusted, then there would be no need for a democracy at all, as the Founders sagely saw. No. We will repose our trust and confidence … if We decide to and only after We have kicked the tires and looked under the hood. Until then, no deal.

“This is a conservative country” the typical Democratic strategists think. Well, when ‘conservative’ is stretched in its definition to include folks who aren’t certain that the Democrats know what they’re doing, who’d like to ask and kick tire and talk about things, who’d like to move carefully – since this ship of democracy is, after all, a fragile kind of vessel on a wide, darkling sea of failings and sins and tyranny and crime… when you stretch the definition of ‘conservative’ to include all of those folks (and there’s been a lot of stretching definitions to keep up the numbers up these past few decades) then maybe there are a lot of ‘conservatives’. Of course, that’s why the Identities needed a revolution in the first place; they had no time to persuade and they really didn’t think much of folks who just didn’t ‘get it’ anyway.

Revolutionaries don’t persuade; they act, and the populace follows them. Karl Rove didn’t think that up himself. He may not have even gotten it from studying Lenin. He could have simply observed with his native shrewdness the goings-on around him here these past 40 years.
Revolutionaries make history, they don’t follow it. Alas, whether they repeat history … that’s something most revolutionaries seem constitutionally (you should pardon the expression) unable to do.

A HOPELESS RIOT

Barack Obama gave an address at the Hampton University Annual Ministers’ Conference on June 5.

I’m not going to go into it exhaustively but one thing caught my attention. He speaks of the 15th anniversary of the Los Angles riots and reports that he remembers “the sense of despair and powerlessness” that fueled it. That same sense of hopelessness surrounds many communities today, he goes on to say.

It occurred to me that the most significant riot, then and now, was the Watts rioting of 1965. It took place – as mentioned in recent Posts – within days of the triumph of LBJ signing the Civil Rights Act of 1965 into law. The long and arduous struggle to fulfill the promises made to America’s blacks finally bore fruit a century later. In that stupendous Moment of July 1965 the country (minus the Southrons) experienced the successful conclusion of a refreshed struggle for black civil rights that had been building throughout World War Two (then less than two decades before) and most vividly in the decade of TV coverage between Rosa Parks’s refusal to go to the back of the bus and LBJ’s signing of the Act.

That ‘Moment’ in 1965 had to be – both in the short term and the long term perspective – one of the most hopeful in American history. All Americans could rejoice in the Act and black Americans could now contemplate a future far richer than any previous generation of blacks in the country. And yet within days Watts erupted in the most violent and sustained riots in modern American history. And that outbreak was followed a series of urban riots (distinct from antiwar protests) that surpassed in duration and intensity anything ever seen here, lasting through the ‘long, hot summers’ of ’65, ’66, ’67, and (arguably) into ’68.

The LA riots of 1992 failed to surpass the Watts riots in the sense that Americans had seen this type of thing before. But the two (sets of) riots were similar in that each took place at what was a Moment of great hope: in ’65 for ‘the negro’ and for America, and in ’92 for America and the world. When we look at that Moment in 1992 it seems weirdly counterintuitive: decades and dozens of billions had been spent in special programs and practices domestically, and just months before the riots the USSR itself had fallen without war – yielding a horizon of almost inconceivable progress and prosperity for America and world.

The L.A. police of the day certainly behaved in an unlovely fashion, and on national TV, but then Rodney King was – in the event – a rather unlovely gent himself, although nothing justifies lusty police indulgence in sidewalk ‘justice’.

I don’t pretend to have any or ‘the’ answer as to what caused any of these riots. But the list of causes most surely has to involve something(s) besides ‘hopelessness’. Or instead of it.

Certainly, the timing of the Watts riots not only raises large questions as to causation but also generated its own consequences that extended far beyond matters of ‘race relations’ and ‘black issues’. Coming as they did almost instantly after the passage of the Act – such a huge risk for the Democrats as a Party – the riots had at least two vast effects.

First, politically, they frightened the Democrats so terribly that the Party desperately sought votes en bloc. This led to the Party’s addle-headed embrace of any and every ‘Identity-revolution’’ that appeared; and since the PR elements of each Identity’s Advocacy began to deploy the Israeli schematic outlined in the previous Post, then the Democrats effectively welcomed the vampire of a very un-democratic, indeed anti-democratic, process and praxis in through the door, over and over again (contributing hugely to what Al Gore now terms “the strangeness of our national discourse”). And also politically, the Democrats embraced Israel as much as an enticement to domestic votes as to counter Soviet influence in the oil-rich Middle East.

Second, the Democrats accepted the utterly unshakable but also utterly unsayable commitment not only to the State of Israel (and without a Treaty to publicly formalize things) but to the unspoken proposition that ANYthing that State did in the pursuit of its interests was both justifiable and good. This seemed innocuous and ‘symbolic’ enough for a short while at the beginning, especially since Israel was at the time both ‘powerless’ and a ‘victim’ (or heir to the Victimery) of the Holocaust. But by the time of the USS Liberty incident and into the inevitable Palestinian push-back and Israeli counter-push-back of the early 1970s this stance had pretty much married the U.S. to … not a corpse certainly, but to a rather rambunctious, self-willed and not-altogether nice Israeli tomboy.

And in 1991, with the long dreamed-of and hoped-for dissolution of the USSR, with the half-century-long threat of atomic war thus dissolved, the USA was constrained to see itself through the eyes of its ‘ally’: as a nation ‘surrounded’ by the probability of ‘immediate destruction’, the only response to which would be the assertive cultivation of its role as Sole Hyperpower in foreign affairs and as a wary, suspicious potential victim of obstructive, distracting treasonous dissent in its domestic affairs. And perhaps as the pre-emptive aggressor who would secure the best assets of a dwindling world resource, and protect its smaller ‘allies’, and ‘make the world safe for democracy’ all in one slam-dunk, bravura performance.

It is certainly curious to go back to the 1960s and review the laudable, hallmark American Jewish concern for minorities and its concomitant and understandable support for a reduction in the ‘Christian’ presence in the public sphere (not only in Christianity’s acidly queasy fundamentalist mutation but even the mainline-church variant). And then to observe the Israeli lobby’s robust but theologically illogical embrace of the Neocons’ Fundamentalist allies in the 1990s. Politics makes strange religion.

Was the Democratic Party in LBJ’s time so thoroughly rattled by the almost unthinking and certainly unpredicted violence of the Watts riots that it desperately forged (unofficially) a pact of steel with the State of Israel that has locked it (and Us) into the Middle East even unto the toils and turmoils of the present day?

Did Watts play a role in that?

In order to understand our present foreign policy, and in order to understand how Our politics and society ‘work’ nowadays, as well as to grasp the dynamics of the black community with the larger national society, We need to look carefully and think things through. These matters are too important to be left to self-serving platitudes.

Which is not in any way to minimize the ongoing development of the African-American community within the national community. But Accuracy and Truth – as We have learned in Iraq – is utterly essential to success in the affairs of this world. It was not lost on the French that the famous ‘Theory’ of the 1950s, quickly expatriated until adopted by the Advocacies over here, was a creature of literature departments, not of science departments and not of the ‘real world’. The presumption that there is nothing that cannot be ‘changed’ by changing the perceiver’s perception – that everything important and vital in an individual’s and a nation’s existence can be changed because it’s all in our head and we can change that – has been hugely oversold.

Imposing upon Us a crash-immersion in Theory was a second powerful source of the Political Correctness that has rendered Us now so immature as a People. It had to be a ‘crash course’ because the Democrats were desperate for votes, revolutions are always impatient (as a matter of self-preservation), and nobody was really sure if the ‘solutions’ being implemented were really rationally and logically connected to the probability of a successful outcome. No kicking of tires could be permitted. If they told you that on a car lot you’d walk away forthwith. But it works differently, they would like Us to believe, on a ‘national’ level; everything’s on the level … if you just hold your head the right way. Yes, and didn’t all those Five-Year Tractor Plans and Seven-Year Cement Plans work gloriously?

But thirdly, Watts gripped the freshly-beating heart of America and almost stopped it. If something that had been so good and so long brooded into existence, at great cost in sweat and tears and blood, could evince so instantaneous and violent a reaction, then what had We done wrong or failed to take into account?

We didn’t ask that question then; We didn’t ask it on that afternoon of the Mission-Accomplished soap opera, when the first ‘post combat’ American deaths were reported – as if by inadvertence – on the inside pages. We ignored Reality and thus passed up Our chance to influence it; and now it’s mutated under the power of other forces acting upon it unchecked, and We must face what We would rather not.

This is a Moment of Truth. Let Us enter into it with at least the same amount of energy that We sent our soldiers to enter into Iraq. We and the world shall be the better for it.

DEMOCRATIC BARRACKS FLAT

Over on TNR-Online Casey Blake has an entry entitled “Obama and Niebhur” (www.tnr.com/blog/openuniversity?pid=104944). Obama has been quoting Reinhold Niebuhr to spackle up himself and the overall Democratic position.

His heart’s in the right place, certainly. And he’s heading in the right direction. But, given the limitations imposed by the current Democratic ‘base’, he’s not gonna be able to go far enough along the runway to achieve liftoff.

Asked (by the histrionic David Brooks) what he thought of Reinhold Niebuhr, Obama replied “I love him. He’s one of my favorite philosophers.” Now of course, since Darth Bush also had a favorite philosopher, back in the days when he was still the jug-eared, folksy moderate who was looking to take government off everybody’s back in a humble and compassionate sorta way, then maybe by this point a lot of folks will have sworn off philosophy and maybe even Jesus, but surely off any aspiring candidates verbally hugging busts of this or that cerebral Dead White European Male guy.

But Obama had done some homework. What Obama “takes away” from Niebuhr is “the compelling idea that there’s serious evil in the world and hardship and pain. And we should be humble and modest in our belief we can eliminate these things. But we shouldn’t use that as an excuse for cynicism and inaction. I take away … the sense we have to make these efforts knowing they are hard, and not swinging from naïve idealism to bitter cynicism.” Woof! Woof-Woooooooof! Most impressive – Obi Wan has taught you well (to borrow a phrase). At this point in a college class in ’68, more than sufficient material would have been generated to justify the prof leading everybody outside onto the lawn under a tree to groove on the high of such concentrated stuff, such radically good stuff. Today, one imagines, students would be urged to circle their desks and share their most painful and outrageous experience of being victimized by bitterness and cynicism. God writes straight with crooked lines.

You can only applaud the Dems’ efforts to head back to the high ground, so hastily abandoned three decades ago. It has to be embarrassing when the only grounds for opposing the catastrophe in Iraq is that we’re losing, leaving unspoken the malodorously bloody implication that if this premeditated, mendacious, invasive gambit had worked, the Dems would have no objection or at least no grounds upon which to make an objection.

And they – and Obama – have culled Niebuhr for precisely those issues and prescriptions which recall the Dems’ Progressive and New Deal heritage: a clear-eyed acknowledgement that there is evil and hardship and pain in the world; the requirement that We be modest and humble in our efforts to eliminate those things (may the colloquial ‘totally’ and the more sinister official ‘zero tolerance’ finally be put up on blocks in a locked garage?); the necessity to relinquish the naivete that resulted in the whole-hog embrace of “utopian schemes” and “social engineering”; a sober abandonment of the “sentimental approach” (at least “to international affairs”).

But while it’s a lot, it’s not going to fly. There is no Meta, no sense of the Beyond that was the very fount and origin and sustaining energy of Niebuhr’s en-Visioned world: of the evil that cannot simply be reduced to misfiring neurons or human greed (individual or ‘institutionalized’) or ignorance or self-interest; of the Promise of Grace that fortifies and sustains the children of light far beyond the power of their own merely human motivation; of the workings of Grace that complement the inevitably imprecise and incomplete efforts of humans and upon the faith in which believing humans foreswear more ‘thorough’ and ‘efficient’ means of bringing about Good ‘by whatever means necessary’. Without that truly High Ground, without the Higher Belief – I guess we’d have to call it nowadays – then the simple recitation of Niebuhr’s derived observations and prescriptions are free-floating and unanchored, un-trellised and ungrounded.

The Dems, of course, can’t easily or quickly retake the High Ground without admitting that their previous decades’ of effort – and all the wrack and ruin caused thereby – were a colossal miscalculation, and – not to put too fine a point on it – fundamentally wrong-headed and wrong-spirited. It’s a dangerous thing to come about during a sea race or a sea chase: if you lose the wind, if she misses her stays, everything could be lost. And this is the run-up to a presidential election.

But on the course they’re headed, the Dems will have no real alternative to the spirit-proclaiming (albeit actually shallow and mendacious) Republican call to ‘prayer’, prayer preferably flag-wrapped. The Rove-ian Republicans are still the only folks talking ‘spirit’, however swinishly they manipulate God-talk to their own treacherous, reptilian ends.

And if the Dems are simply trying to talk-the-talk, then they really still don’t ‘get it’: there is most surely a Meta, and most of the citizenry sense that, and most of the citizenry will not rest easy with a Party that cannot carry that precious cargo for them; indeed, they may entrust their passage to the Party that assures them that it will carry that precious cargo regardless of that Party’s unpleasant baggage. And it may be a truly demonic temptation for the Democrats that in order to avoid biting the bullet of doing what it takes to reclaim the High Ground of the Meta they simply hope that the Republicans will have sooooo much unpleasant baggage that the Dems win by – for all practical purposes – default. And that We will then be subjected to years of government by the Party of Default (i.e. ‘At least we’re not Bush and the Rove-ian Republicans’). And if the Republican Party as it once was manages to exorcise the Rove-ian demons, and still possesses its lease on the High Ground, then the Dems will be knocked away again.

So, no Meta, no real Niebuhr, and efforts to embrace his derived prescriptions and observations will be no more substantive than sitting up the corpse of a dead king on the throne and claiming that the governance of the realm is in good hands.

Worse than that: Obama quotes from a Niebuhr of the early 1930s when – under the influence of the New Deal but also of the ‘revolutionary’ organizing that had been floating around in American labor (and understandably so) for decades: entrenched wealth and power would yield its privileges only to organized force; appeals to morality and progressive education would not suffice. Now this makes sense (and it implies that entrenched wealth and power constitute one of the great evils bethumping this world). But that ‘organized’ and that ‘force’ start to move us – and move Us – beyond the realm of democratic process, no matter how Good the cause, the intention, the desired outcome.

And Niebuhr’s exhortation to “non-violent coercion” moves Us further down that dangerous path. For while the Gandhian ‘non-violent’ is a refreshing and stimulating note, especially against the free-wheeling violence (official as well as unofficial) of those times, the ‘coercion’ once again moves Us dangerously beyond the ‘persuasion’ that is at the heart of democracy’s civic process. And this is precisely the point of fatal divergence where in the later 1960s and in the 1970s the Democrats – in Good causes – enabled the ferocious corrosion of democratic process and the very spirit of democracy, under a glowing parti-colored conceptual umbrella of Theory’s revolutionary process and the reflected glow of Martin Luther King’s Gandhian praxis (without, as always in America, the askesis).

So, Leon Wieseltier is right when the article notes that he calls Obama’s offerings “just uplift”. To really achieve take-off velocity, and to sustain flight, the Dems are going to need a fuel more substantial than hot air. And while Obama’s position is “thoughtful”, it perforce smells too much of the lamp: a shrewdly culled list of sound-bite ready phrases ungrounded by any quintessential core moral commitment to the Meta, to the High Ground.

As Christopher Sarandon’s vampire sneered to Roddy McDowall’s posturing cross-carrier in 1985’s “Fright Night”: “you have to have faith for that thing to work on me.” The Democrats are figuring to kill the vampire without having to go through the long Journey and Climb of Faith (the descent down from Faith was, after all, such kewl creative destruction). In seeking to avoid the hard spiritual work, this makes them as quintessentially American as the Bible Bhagwans. But it also ensures that the Party will remain only a wraith-like shade, without a true soul, and merely a shadow of those days now long ago when great Democratic souls walked the earth.