BAAAD MOVIE, BAAAD FANTASY

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

Coupla things come to me.

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

Second, Kamiya quotes McCain from recent comments:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is it?

RELIGION ISN’T JUST LONG

Over on Salon, the author James Carse is interviewed about his new book, “The Religious Case Against Belief”. (See, ‘Religion is poetry’, by Steve Paulson, (http://www.salon.com/books/atoms_eden/2008/07/21/james_carse/).

Carse’s thought is that the crucial element in any religion is it’s “longevity”; i.e., if it’s been around a long time then it sorta carries more weight and is more impressive, hence more attractive as a repository for your belief. This is an effort to locate the core of the value of religion within this dimension. The ‘value’ is that believers will feel better with a religion that has been around a long time, since it has somehow proved itself.

Nah. Won’t work. Can’t work. You wind up reducing belief to ‘feelings’, and belief is more than that. To assert, as Carse does, that religion is simply ‘a belief system’ – that’s like asserting that a human being is simply ‘a set of interlocking physical systems’ – but a human being is more than that by a long shot.

This is yet another effort to ‘keep’ religion without getting too mixed up with the actual existence of ‘God’ (in whom, by the by, Carse cheerily and cordially does not believe). More specifically, this is an effort to cage religion into the Flatness of this-world; it reflects and proposes a hugely constricted – and I say inaccurate – view of the life-space.

To adopt it is to enter the 1941-1945 war in the Pacific with a knowledge and vision of things naval not updated since the Age of Fighting Sail during the Napoleonic era. The naval Battle-Space since the mid-20th century is multidimensional (threats to your vessel can come from above and below as well as simply across the water) and much larger (shells can come from 25 or more miles away, and aircraft from hundreds of miles away), and is amplified by radio and radar and sonar (as the war progressed), such that time to identify and respond to threats is greatly compressed, even as ships themselves can travel against the wind and sustain higher speeds. The state of the art naval knowledge of the Napoleonic era assumed a much smaller, less complex, more leisurely space in which one conducted one’s operations.

So too with Carse and so many others. Their’s is a Flat view of the Life-space. There are no angels ascending and descending, no demons arising and prowling about, no ‘clouds of witnesses’ surrounding and supporting one, no communion of the saints (them Kathliks!) interlocked across the Void and through the Veil. None of that. Just ‘us’, trapped here in this small, flat dimension, hoping to make our way to nowhere across its surfaces, with religion enabling us to do it with a little more confidence and dignity. Although for what purpose one would need to preserve one’s dignity on such a flat surface surrounded by nothingness and heading toward more of the same … Carse doesn’t say. Perhaps simply to keep the illusion of propriety and to preserve the graces (small-g)). How soul-frakkingly banal. But then, have you been to a university faculty cocktail party recently?

Not that we need to embrace the emotional agitations of the Fundamentalistics, mind you. One can entertain a clear-eyed view of the Space (Life or Battle, as you prefer) without yelling and hopping loudly to relieve one’s fears. In fact, they sorta look for that (or did, anyway) in naval and military officers: the ability to possess oneself no matter how clearly disturbing the situation that confronted one. Get a clear picture of the situation, don’t distract yourself with emotions, figure out the best way to proceed, pass along the relevant orders, and be ready for the next round – and don’t scare your subordinates by crying or fainting. Of course, not distracting oneself with emotions in order to perform the mission – well, that’s sorta such a ‘man’ thing, and soooo ‘insensitive’. Which is probably why they don’t train them much for that any longer. But we digress.

Longevity is too Horizontal; it’s just another aspect of a Flat, single-dimension vision of Life, and it’s precisely that trapped sense of Flatness and of being Alone bigtime, especially when things go wrong for one, that prompted people for millennia to heed the inner prompting from Beyond. During those long ages, several persons, indeed, found Christianity to be of no small use in this regard, and even Catholicism.

The attraction of – let’s just say – Catholic Christianity was not simply the fact that it had been around a long time, nor that it had such great cathedrals and tapestries and stuff, nor that it enabled one to get into the better clubs (indeed, for so long being Catholic did precisely the opposite). The attraction was that one felt connected to, and supported by, and actually anchored in some level and quality of Being beyond the confines of this Flat and too mortal coil. And more than ‘feeling’ that one was thus fortified and Accompanied, one ‘knew’ it – faith being not so much a ‘feeling’ but a mode of knowing. A mode of knowing that penetrated the perennial cloud of un-knowing whose dense and senseless surface baffled, terrified, and drove mad so many human beings since human eyes first looked up at the stars (or at the dinosaurs, if our Fundamentalisic siblings be possessed of a firm grasp on reality – about which, however, let us say no more).

The channel that penetrated the Veil did not (except for a very few) include a video or audio cable, but it transmitted a palpable stream – not so much of ‘information’ as of a Sense (capital S intended) beyond mere ‘feeling’ that spoke, whispered, to the very core of oneself. God whispering in the awesome silence directly to your very deepest self.

There developed, after a while, “an abundance of Jesuses” – as Carse deftly limns a history of Christianity from Aquinas through the Reformers and up to Hegel, and then on to the mega-churches of the present day. But this ‘abundance’ does not prove that there is no actual Jesus nor that faith can only be a thing of this Flat-Space because there can’t be a dozen Jesuses in some other Beyond-Space. The fact that the several blind men famously formed images of several different ‘elephants’ doesn’t mean that there can be no actual ‘elephant’; it simply means that men are kinda blind and none gets the entire big picture right. But the elephant is still there, even though incompletely perceived by the men, but complete in him-(it, her) self. And very much alive.

The ability to perceive the Beyond, like the ability to see the stars at night, has diminished as societies became more immersed in the material world. As the noise of the factories increased to a roar, the whisper from Beyond became harder to hear; as the lights of streets and screens intensified, the tiny beam from Beyond became harder to see.

Worse, as the things of this world and its surfaces became more insistent in their demands, those marvelous and ancient receivers – soul and spirit – fell into neglect. So that now, in this postmodern age we humans have regressed to a strategic and tactical and professionally human competence suitable only to a far less ‘capable’ knowledge of the Space – within and without – where our lives – individually and communally – are playing out. As bad as bringing the proverbial knife to the gunfight, we now approach the modern Life-space without the knowledge-base we once possessed, purchased at so great a price by long generations before us. We bring a Sailing Age appreciation of naval operations to a Steel-and-Oil Age naval situation. We shall not last long without embracing a very steep learning curve.

Between the Fundamentalistic hysteria in the face of the Awesome, and the flat-souled Materialist/revolutionary denial that anything beyond the surfaces of this world exists – between these two hopelessly inadequate options a true appreciation of our Space must be formulated. Or … recovered.

THE MEANING OF LIFE

Terry Eagleton has written a short but meaty book entitled “The Meaning of Life”; Laura Miller has reviewed it over on Salon (“What is the meaning of life?”, www.salon.com/books/review/2007/06/14/eagleton.print.html).

One of his key points is that life – most especially human life – is ‘contingent’: we don’t have to be here and – as if that’s not enough – our being here is the result of random forces. This fear (I’m not going to call it an ‘insight’) can be seen clearly by the end of the 19th century in – say – a piece of literature like the American short story “The Open Boat” and in the famously-put exchange where ‘man’ says to the universe ‘I exist’ and the universe ho-hums the reply that ‘the fact however does not evoke in me a sense of obligation’.

Such contingency is a triple-whammy: a) it leaves human beings alone in the universe; b) it leaves human beings functionally helpless in the universe; c) it leaves human beings in a universe that is indifferent to them, if not itself downright hostile, and the universe might also thereby leave humans prey to powerful and dangerous and even hostile sub-forces over which the universe has no control or refuses to exercise control. Any human being who gets up in the morning embracing that ‘modernism’ is going to become deranged or deformed by sheer terror and anxiety almost immediately, and will then become further deranged and deformed by whatever response s/he attempts to muster (withdrawal from ‘reality’; existentialist in-your-face or rock-jawed pseudo-adult posturing; a retreat from the more mature forms of being where one is required to ‘know’ and to ‘act’ and a simultaneous retreat to less mature forms of being where one simply floats more or less vigorously on the surface of events and of one’s own being). It’s not a pretty picture.

And ‘post modernism’ is no improvement because it denies that there is any solid ‘reality’ at all. And while this relieves us of the nightmare of a hostile or indifferent universe, it leaves us with no solid ground to stand on, and no solid landmarks to get our bearings whatsoever. One thinks of Kirk’s original “Enterprise” suddenly going beyond the bounds of ‘this galaxy’ and into another one so different that none of the ship’s instruments – or that main computer with the old telephone operator’s voice – can fix its position. Or plot a course out of there.

As has been noted in recent Posts in regard to the Israeli state (or “realm” as it apparently prefers to call itself), such a monstrous and awefull experience can throw humans – and especially those who govern states and peoples – seriously out of whack. We might propose that the Holocaust was the ultimate ‘modernist’ experience: suddenly a people ‘discovered’ that it was utterly alone in a very hostile world without the power to resist. To avoid ever having to go through that again folks and their government would be willing to … do whatever it takes. (And since their first major step in the direction of securing their future against a repeat was to set themselves up on a piece of real estate by ejecting its inhabitants, then they set themselves up for endless threats and deformations at the very outset of their quest for security … )

Anxiety and terror – especially if sustained – deform us humans. They cause our behaviors and our thought patterns and our emotions to revert to the most primitive, least evolved and least matured parts of our brains and selves and they mutate us into sinister forms of life similar to Tolkien’s ‘Orcs’ – those monstrous results of the effort to reduplicate the marvelous Elves – or his ‘wraiths’ – those former humans who served Evil so deeply that it has now consumed them and they exist without hope and full of purposeful hatred in a shadow world that borders our own, whence they enter into our reality possessing no power to create but great power to destroy.

Any quest for the ‘meaning’ of ‘life’ starting out from the precincts of terror and anxiety is going to be similarly burdened from the outset, and its ‘discoveries’ similarly dark, dubious, suspect and dangerous.

It is a huge insight of Eagleton’s that he realizes that both the ‘liberal’ and ‘left’ postmodernists and the ‘fundamentalist’ and ‘right’ conservatives (so-called) are radically similar in their philosophical presumptions, as unexamined as those are these days.

Both ‘sides’ are, for different reasons, philosophical “Nominalists”. Nominalism is the philosophical position that all entities and beings are ‘named’ purely as constructs of human convenience and that there are no guiding essences in some other dimension to which these entities in ‘this life’ would have to conform (and to which, in consequence, our thoughts about those entities would also have to conform).

Early Protestants embraced a form of Nominalism in order to lever some conceptual and political space for themselves against the huge weight of the organized Roman Catholic Church. Very much accepting that there was another governing dimension (God in His heaven and in His glory) beyond this one, they yet insisted that God alone had power over the shapes and forms of our ‘earthly’ dimension and that no this-dimensional, ‘earthly’ power such as the Church and Popes and bishops’ and ‘priests’ and sacraments and ‘human’ rules and the rest of the Catholic panoply of belief and practice could adequately or even legitimately constrain the workings of that Divine Will. And whatever that Will at any particular moment said was good, was good – and whatever that Will at any particular moment said was otherwise, was otherwise. The human world and human life itself was not sustained by ‘laws’ but by the ever-present, directly-intentioned Will of God, and that Will would abide no ‘middleman’, no Church taking upon itself the ‘authority’ to apportion God’s gifts or to speak and act in His name.

Clearly, that illumination - such as it is - allows for no substantive mediation between the fierce-hot direct contact with God's Will and the leaden, sluggish matter of this earthly existence and its affairs. Further, following it out, one comes to a pretty dark and demanding role for humans in such a set-up: participating, collaborating, mired in and enwhored to the dreck-sludge of material existence, humans have no choice but to throw themselves onto God's hell-hot mercy and hope for the best while trying to keep their noses clean and close to the grindstone. Thus John Calvin.

American 'fundamentalism' was and is - well - American. So you have to have a happy ending. And you have to have the Lebensraum (oops, I borrowed that from a different messianism) to do what you have to d0, to do whatever it takes, and still stay in the Divine Will. The solution that the Fundies evolved (oops, again) was to get 'saved', or rather, to declare oneself 'saved'. Thus burnished, one could do whatever one felt it was going to take to do whatever one felt was the 'best' way to go, while still enjoying God's delight and - wheeee! - His authority. What was not to like?

Post-modern nominalism grew out of a similar need to lever some Lebensraum. Given the oppressive control exercised by the established 'have' powers of the world, and by conformity to those powers' concept of order and identity and right and wrong, the post-modern Theorists - with the most noble intentions - figured that the quickest way to proceed was to pull the conceptual rug out from under the whole edifice. Thus, there was no Right and no Wrong, and no authority to tell others what to do or how to do it and so the whole thing was up for grabs and may the best grabber win. Everything was wide open and totally fluid and life was just a bowl of cherries except shapeless and without-essence and waiting for those human hands that 'got it' to stretch forth and do the creating thing previously ascribed to that ultimate Dead White European Male, the artist formerly known as 'God', and His (male) minions. Grrrowwff!

Probably, the deeper-thinking post-modernists and advocates (the ones who did not deceive themselves as to the essentially calculating political nature of their glorious revolutions) figured that once they had actually come to power then they would need to sober up and start acknowledging that the Highway of Being indeed needed - and had - some very clear lines painted on it. But, like the Great Yellowstone Fire of 1988, things sorta got away from them, and the controlled but groovily creative destructions so gleefully begun began to create their own outcomes, and all those outcomes began to change the whole ballgame and define a new 'reality' altogether. Had one not been constrained by the already-entrenched Political Correctness, one might profitably have exclaimed with Albert the Alligator: "Gack!". But no such warning alerts were permitted, since a revolution in Theory brings no dangerous downside (except to the former oppressors who deserve whatever they would get). The sorcery mastered the apprentices. It could happen to anybody.

So we are now to conduct our individual lives, and We are now to conduct the life of the Republic, while existing on or in a sea of Ultimate Mush. The Fundies have solved that problem by pretending that they are standing on the solid rock of God's Authority and Power. The assorted revolutionaries have solved that problem by avoiding it, presuming - but not daring to say - that there really is nothing else but this-world, Mush though it may conceptually be; and that everybody can still feel good enough if they just focus on achieving 'milestones' and 'goals', however symbolic.

And so here We are, in the Year of Former Grace 2007: the Fundies are making war on Evil (them 'libbuls') and Sin as national domestic and foreign policy; the assorted revolutions are making war on crime (certain types) and men (generally, but with a few graciously-declared exceptions). We no longer produce much of anything tangible; We are in hock to the nation identified as America's most probable rival; Our currency is starting to become rather 'symbolic' itself; We have zero tolerance for pain or frustration, We have the attention-span of a three-year old, and We consider the ability to present oneself as a Victim to be the summation of maturity; We can no longer tell Right from Wrong, especially if it looks like We might be up to Our necks in Wrong.

Meanwhile the Executive has authorized torture and child-abuse (for 'enemy' children) and pre-emptive nuclear war on non-nuclear nations and has now given itself the right to run the country if it feels there's an 'emergency'; the Congress can barely recover its ability to influence events after Twelve Years of an orgy that can most charitably be referred to - as Scripture would have it - as a "whoredom of whoredoms"; and the Supreme Court considers that torture makes a great organizing theme for a dinner party and that it is itself the great giver of Order to the shapeless mass of the citizenry - if only the citizenry would stop yapping and listen up. We are losing a war and an army in Iraq and the Executive seems ready to throw the Navy and the Air Force at Iran. We appear oblivious to what the rest of the governments and peoples of the earth are thinking about Us.

We are desperately in need of some grown-up to burst through the door and demand "What is the meaning of all this?".

ONLY CONNECT

Over on the Revealer site there’s an article by Alexandra Boutros about a new Creationism museum … in Canada (“Creationism in Canada”, www.therevealer.org/archives/feature_print.php?printid=2859). Sigh. One had sorta hoped that the Canadians were immune to this type of thing. Ah well.

There is fear that the public will be duped into thinking that the whole world was indeed created in 6 days 6000 years ago and that dinosaurs did indeed cohabit the newly-Created earth with Adam and Eve and were even taken – in their dyads – aboard the ark by Noah (which must have made for a mighty big ark indeed … far larger than the Navy’s largest nuclear aircraft carriers … all of them … put together).

You have to ask yourself: is it conceivable that a nation that commands (for the present, anyway) the military destructive power that this nation commands … is it possible that a nation thus armed could be so clueless – so intellectually deranged – as to depart from any semblance of seriousness and thought so as to believe that dinosaurs were on the ark with Noah and that it all happened less than two thousand years before the rise of the First Dynasty?

And if it is fearful enough that such persons do exist in organized groups (called ‘the base’), it is even more fearful to think that their intense concentration on their ‘truth’ will overwhelm large numbers of mind-flat, gum-chewing, cell-phone tapping ‘moderates’ who are so enswamped in the Flat but frazzled ‘life’ of American culture that they cannot muster the mental energy, let alone skill, to evaluate the possibility.

The question arises: How can such people be The People? Because if no People, then no Republic.

Or is there indeed a ‘silent majority’ for this age: neither balkanized into hating and fearing all who do not think like them, nor living merely out of fear and hate, nor relying on the least-developed parts of their brain to comprehend events and shape a self and a life, nor seeking false security in phantasmagoria and caricatures of the unfamiliar, nor so fecklessly surface-bound as to be sail-less and rudderless on the sea of events and meanings.

Was Lincoln’s insistence on The People a result of what he had experienced, proven to him by those he had encountered in his life? Or was it a gamble that at least enough folks were willing and able to rise up to take a place among The People? Or was it a hope that had little basis in observed experience but appeared essential if the American Experiment were to continue? And if it was only such a hope, then wasn’t it a species of the Hitlerian insight that LBJ quoted to MLK in 1965: that if you tell folks something long enough and consistently enough and confidently enough, why then they’ll come to believe it – whether its’ true or not … ?

Or is it – somewhat in the best Catholic mode – simply to be accepted as an article of faith that this Vessel of Ours is what God has given Us and We go with it as very best We can until we die or It sinks or the world ends … ?

We need to answer this question, each of Us and all of Us. Because We are reaching a hugely dangerous point in Our national existence where We appear to have ‘options’: a Unitary Executive, a private mercenary Executive Army, a Congress enwhored to the continued personal success of each of its Members and nothing else, a more ‘efficient’ and ‘responsive’ police state benevolently destroying strangeness and otherness and unfamiliarity along with Evil and evil and crime.

Few of Us recall the siren allure of the middle-‘30s: here We were over here shuffling around, scuttling to get out of the way of the shiny box-like limos while searching for a way to keep bread on the table … the great American Promise betrayed. Meanwhile, over there in Germany, legions of sharp, fresh young faces put themselves to the task of implementing their Leader’s vigorous and demanding Order, busily constructing authobahns and steel and houses and looking like a million bucks. Hell, even the Italians – the Italians! – were looking pretty sharp with their Leader and on-time trains and their army of seven million bayonets. Maybe, the voice whispered in Our ear, there needs to be a change around here.

The question is being put to Us again … and – this is the great treason of Our age – it is being put to Us by Our own government. There are now real dungeons and almost-real dragons … no need to find them in games.

Can folks who think there were dinosaurs on the ark muster the skill to preserve the Republic by preserving themselves as The People?

Nor are We only at risk from the dinosaur-base. Over on Salon Patrick Smith in his regular “Ask the Pilot” column raises a thought-provoking point as he discusses airplane/airport security (www.salon.com/tech/col/smith/2007/06/08/askthepilot235/print.html).

He refers to the craze of three summers ago where some woman, uncomfortable at the presence of a group of 12 sorta Middle-Eastern-looking males having a good time on an aircraft, got it into her head that they were a terrorist special-ops team on a dry run to repeat the outrage of 9-11.

Now this site has gone on at length about the confounding obliviousness with which this country enthusiastically slid into the slough of the very obviously over-hyped sex-offender mania. At least the Communists of the 1950s actually existed as a world-wide, or world-aspiring, organization, and they had those rockets. The sex-offenders were manufactured out of whole cloth … overnight as it were, like the proverbial Biblical dinosaurs.

But where the actual unfolding pattern of the sex-offender lunacy was spread over so wide a swath of events that it was hard for the average citizen to keep a close lock on the alpha-stream, on the key dynamics and significance of the thing, yet in the confines of an aircraft fuselage, over a short and clearly delineated period of time, it’s easier to observe the dynamics of the syndrome.

Reason could not help stop her anxiety: why would a covert special-ops group collect itself and proceed enmasse to create a situation where its presence would be clearly revealed to its ‘enemies’ or its potential targets and its mission compromised? No no no no no. There were terrorists somewhere, these men agitate me, ergo they must be terrorists – call the captain! Don’t argue with me because my agitation is dispositive proof of their guilt! Or are you one of them yourself … ? And of course at this point, even St. Peter had to say No. Three times. Thus is Truth betrayed in the face of frenzy.

And when Truth is betrayed, then reality is also betrayed. And then consequences will flow to the betrayer(s) in a Flood.

In today’s “sensitive” world a plane-full of balanced and quiet folks cannot hold a candle to the influence that a fear-addled singleton must be allowed to wield. In today’s “responsive” world an attempt to calm the screaming rather than grant the demand is taken as form of outrage and crime itself. It’s as if the two-year-olds were able to write the handbook for how to handle tantrums. But then again, ‘adulthood’ is merely an oppressive construct; and anyway, it’s those whom society deems unwell who are really well. Or so some book said.

On such grounds, indeed, a ‘sensitive and responsive’ Unitary Executive did feel Our pain and stretch forth its hand to smite somebody so as to alleviate Our pain. If in the process far greater pain has been caused, well … We are to appreciate its good intentions; and anyway the pain it caused was somebody else’s. If We flinch from the pain now irrevocably caused on Our behalf, then – as another world Leader once said as things went south – “if the people cannot muster the will to follow my vision then they are not worthy of me … and should disappear from the face of the earth”. Ach ja! He would have done for them himself, except that his own nemesis was approaching him at the speed of a T-34, steady and relentless. But they wouldn’t soon forget him; the whole world wouldn’t be able to forget him.

And how did We come to this? How have We lost so much capability over the past decades? Another piece in the puzzle of causation is occasioned by the ending of “The Sopranos”. In his blog at Buffalo Report (www.buffaloreport.com/2007/070610.jackson.shrink.html), Bruce Jackson discusses a book he reviewed when it was first written 30 years ago: Yochelson’s and Samenow’s “The Criminal Personality”.

These two ‘experts’ asserted that there is a thing called a “criminal personality”; that it is the ‘criminal personality’ that taints everything an individual does with the stain of criminality and indeed constitutes an essence (getting kinda medieval here); that such criminality is a choice and it is a willful choice made at a very early age (before puberty); and that very few ‘criminals’ can be talked out of their choice; because by the time they’re first caught they’ve been committing crimes for years, and will continue to commit crimes unless they are forcibly and effectively stopped; and a criminal who commits any type of crime is capable of committing any other type of crime and probably will, so that a bank-robber will easily rape and a car-thief will easily burgle and no matter what the crime the same ‘criminal personality’ underlies them all, and cannot be reformed.

The diagnostic symptoms of the inner criminal (interchangeably called the ‘psychopath’ and the ‘sociopath’) include children who expect their parents to meet their needs. Such insight. There’s not much actual scientific fact in the book (a pair of volumes, actually), but lots and lots of anecdotes – remembered stories told by clinicians about this or that patient.

But there is a unique thought process that is the core of their ‘criminal’. The ‘criminal mind’ doesn’t want to take responsibility for his actions and tries to distance himself from them; he practices deception to avoid detection; he says what he has to say to law enforcement and therapy personnel in order to get free; he is incapable of thinking correctly. So far this sounds like the unique markers said to apply to sex-offenders; and surely describes the behavior of recently deposed CEOs and … come to think of it, is pretty much the Standard Operation Procedure for the Executive and Legislative branches of the government. And the authors assert – remember – that this type of person is not reformable.

As to ‘numbers’, the authors have figured (in ways they don’t quite explain) that the average ‘criminal mind’ commits 187 crimes in a year. Now a) you have to ask how the hell they came up with a number like that and b) how does that compare to the number of crimes the average person commits … but then, of course, if you’re not convicted or caught then you don’t qualify as having that ‘criminal mind’. If you can follow that.

And what about the ‘criminal mind’ in a CEO or a politician or somebody in the Justice Department? How many crimes do they commit compared to the average person? But of course the ‘average’ person is by definition not ‘criminal’. And We must accept that this goes for the average CEO and politician. That still leaves us a couple-three more things that We might choose to believe before breakfast.

But to end on an upbeat note: this all means that if you incarcerate 2 million folks (roughly what our prison population is now) then you’ve – presto! – prevented 374 million crimes each year. No wonder they like this inside the Beltway. And – surprise! – in short order Samenow was appointed to Reagan’s task force on crime victims (because each of those crimes had to have a victim, and each victim can vote … presuming the crimes and thus the victims exist in the real world).

Worse, it is ‘the criminal personality’ that pre-exists any particular ‘crime’. Once a person is convicted of a crime, then it must be assumed that he is – and always has been – a criminal personality; thus one can go back through his prior life secure in the assurance that everything bad he did proves that he will irreformably continue to do bad, and every good he appears to have done was merely a proof that he has always been shrewd enough to cover his evil and nefarious tracks (until, of course, our glorious security forces shrewdly exposed him). Conversely, if you haven’t been convicted of a crime then you don’t not have – nor have you ever had – a criminal personality.

But of course, that can change, can’t it? In the twinkling of an eye. One could be convicted of anything, and suddenly find that one is now guilty of everything, past as well as present, potential and future as well as actual. And thus once convicted, one may be added to a list of those exposed and ‘tagged’, like cattle branded. Added to a list? Added to a Registry? Ah … that’s logical.

As Jackson notes, they think “the only adequate program for habilitating (you can’t “re-“ what was never there in the first place) the criminal to noncriminal life … requires 3 hours of group therapy every day, sexual abstinence, unquestioning acceptance of Yochelson’s and Samenow’s definitions of criminal attitudes, desires, needs, and behaviors, thorough self-disgust, and abandonment of criminal thought and work.” This may be a set of objectives (and dubious ones at that) but such a wish-list does not constitute a coherent set of methods and steps to achieve those objectives. And it wouldn’t take a college-degree for some potential therapee to entertain a few doubts – which of course would reveal him as ‘in denial’ and refusing therapy. All in all, a standard toxic brew of everything that distinguished Mao’s re-education camps as cutting-edge educational praxis. Packaged now as trew-blew American ‘science’. Yah.

It stuns. But the ballet of ideas-and-events that followed is exquisite in its symmetries and evolutions. 1978: the gender revolution has been waging its war on “masculine culture” (and – it would consequently have to be admitted – “men”), but it hasn’t yet figured out a way to harness the vast police power of the government in its cause. Rules of evidence, statutes of limitation, and other oppressive tools of masculinist ‘reason’ are impeding progress, perpetrating further outrage, revictimizing the victims. “Men” are inherently rapists, claims the vanguard thought of the revolution, but how exactly get the government to accept that assertion and deploy the police power and the criminal law in the service of your vision and your agenda? As it stands in 1978, the revolution appears to have bogged down in ersatz psychologizing and panglossian self-help and plaintive whining in sympathetic media outlets. What then is to be done?

Meanwhile, on the exactly opposite end of the ranch, the Fundies are trying to figure out how to distinguish the marks of Good and of Evil, so that Evil ones can be identified and exposed and fought and conquered by those who are clearly and permanently Saved and – thereby and therefore – Good both now and forever. And is it possible to actually stretch forth the collective Fundamentalist hand and wrest control of the wildly careening Culture of this country from the whackjob ‘libbuls’ who want to change all that is American and Good into Evil?

Along come Samenow and Yochelson with a theory that essentially creates something for everyone: an objective class – the criminal class – that is permanently dangerous and permanently evil and easily distinguished and can be permanently tagged; and against which permament and irreformable and willfully chosen Evilness anything may be done by those who are permanently and by nature Good because no matter what the Good have to do in order to do what it takes, that action that is taken is always and ineffably Good.

These two re-created at a stroke both a form of the old revolutionary “objective class of enemy” and an easily recognized and perfectly hate-able Manichean ‘Other’ against whom the purely Good might lustily wage ceaseless and no-holds-barred war.

The feminists get a justification for the bending of the criminal law against “men”; the Fundies get a justification for the marshalling of the criminal law in the service of enforcing their vision of the Pure and Perfect America; the law enforcement and criminal justice systems get a huge dose of respect and the justification and authority to do things the way they want to … and a budget to make it work. And they all are suddenly provided with an added, but from a PR standpoint indispensable, element: a class of Victims, who can be displayed (perhaps even prepared) for the cameras.

And so, as at Santa Anita, they were off.

Neither Communist revolutionary thought nor Old Testament war were ever going to be compatible with the American ethos and the fabric of the Constitution; indeed, they are positively toxic to it. And yet the Democrats needed voters and the Republicans needed voters. And politics were descending into “issues” upon which one must hold ‘the’ correct opinion regardless of anything else. And what the Democrats perfected the Republicans took and re-badged and put in a more powerful engine than the Democrats had ever managed and fueled it with a far less refined crude than the Democrats had ever dared. And here We are. Or, as Lincoln said that Spring day in 1865, with abyssal, ineffable sadness: “And the war came.” The Democrat would erode the Constitution to punish (male) perpetrators and the Republican would erode the Constitution to restore morality. The hope of neither could be answered fully; the consequences of each have been answered far too fully.

And the awesome police power of the government, carefully caged by the Founders, was set loose in the service of both ‘bases’ as 1980 saw an entrenched Democratic Congress and a wildly popular Republican Presidency. ‘Victims’ – of men, of crime, of evil, of Evil – could feel comfortable in either Party.

And within a year there were the pre-school dragon-sex-with-children cases. And then the drug-lords and the superpredator kids and then the abusive husbands and then the child molesters and then the sex-offenders and then the terrorists and then the Iraqis and now the Iranians. Democrats kept their feminist base happy criminalizing ‘men’ and Republicans kept their law-and-order base happy turning the police power loose on sex and drugs (rock and roll having gone away on its own).

Nobody needed to ‘think’, nobody was advised to ‘doubt’.

Of course, the huge dangers within the conceptual core of the Samenow-Yochelson universe have been ignored: anybody might be convicted at any time, thereby negating everything he had ever done and – the horror! – tainting everyone who had ever been close to him (and this was precisely the defining nightmare of every Soviet apparatchik).

For the unspoken beneficiary of the Yochelson-Samenow universe was the government power: if anyone can have his life utterly reversed simply by a ‘finding’ by the government power, and if that reversal might be occasioned by anything at any time, then the government became the all-powerful Source of success or failure, doled out in measure modest or immense, to be placated, obeyed, feared. And its police agents as well.

And Jackson notes that those police agents not only got to have their own Grand Unified Theory to justify their status as trustworthy professionals, but also got a theory that “reduced a great deal of complexity to a very trivial set of assumptions … that renders all punishment justified.” Which, come to think of it, is a pretty good description of the ‘thinking’ that led us to Iraq, our eastern front. The hell-hot ironies of how the Beltway hothouse takes a trendy idiocy from one area of activity and spreads it around to other even more significant areas. “And the war came.”

It was all well and good that this or that interest or coalition of interests rode high on the back of the tiger now; at any time any of those interests might itself be displaced and cast into the outer darkness, discovered to have a “criminal personality”. It set this nation on a course that was positively French in its potential for revolutionary, governmental Terror.

So much of what passes for ‘science’ in the assorted cries of the Advocacies is derived from this Yochelson-Samenow template. From 1980 through the still-erupting pockets of the sex-offense mania. And beyond – to the ‘terrorists’ who simply ‘choose’ to hate us, and are consequently evil in their very essence and thus against whom no perpetration can be deemed ‘excessive’.

As Yochelson-Samenow refused to consider structural factors as playing a causative role, so too the Imperium quickly spun matters such that the structures of historical events or geographical imperatives or even America’s own record of activities were considered irrelevant: as the feminists presumed “men” were rapists and the Fundies presumed that Evil is a choice that disqualifies the chooser from any further communion with the Pure and the Good, so too the ‘terrorists’, the inconvenient life-forms impeding American control of dwindling oil supplies … well, one can go on.

Yochelson-Samenow are no longer widely accepted as ‘cutting edge’, or even accurate. But their ‘bases’ are secure – especially in a law enforcement community that has waited far too long for its day to let go so soon. When ‘testilying’ and ‘framing the guilty’ are justified by two whole thick books (!) … you don’t just walk away from that.

Yochelson-Samenow have re-infected this nation with a primitive and simplistic conceptual scheme that has regressed Us back into the pre-Constitutional murk and slime. The philosophy of Muldoon of the Strong-Arm Squad, itself an importation from an older, darker world, was reintroduced: if a crime needs a guilty criminal, find one you figure is guilty of anything, frame him, and everybody’s happy and can get home to supper at a reasonable time. The dinosaurs walk among Us.

But that’s what the Fundies have been saying all along.

THERE IS NO DIFFERENCE

Over on Salon Gary Kamiya raises a huge point in his article “Why Bush hasn’t been impeached”, http://www.salon.com/opinion/kamiya/2007/05/22/impeachment/).

He opines that Bush hasn’t been impeached because too many of Us can’t face the bankruptcy of the fantasies and dark urges that were the basis of support for him. Thus even though the Dems have been in for almost half a year there is no impeachment on the horizon, despite all the now-coming-to-light illegalities that leave Nixon’s malfeasances in the dustbin of History; the Dems don’t calculate that there’s enough citizen support for impeachment.

This is a complementary explanation to the theory that the Dems don’t want to weaken the power of the government, or even re-cage it within constitutional parameters; they simply want to take it over for themselves. Their revolutionist Identities – now equaled in dangerousness by the soft fascism of the security-crazed soccer-moms – will not, probably cannot, dilute the font of that political power the grasp of whose levers has been their only meaning, calling and purpose in life (God, Virtue, and the Beyond having been Flattened to make room for their agendas).

Both explanations speak deeply to Our present danger.

We have become increasingly emotion-driven in the past few decades (almost as if the whole citizenry had become as ‘hysterical’ as now-quaint Dead White European Males once said ‘women’ were). We have become increasingly techy about our virtue and our ‘security’ – “offensensibility” as Opus the Penguin named it in the ‘80s. We have become increasingly Fundamentalist religiously (Freud would have a field day with this in light of current complaints about Islam): impatient, perfectionist, emotional, credulous, incapable of respect, cognitively immature in our either-or thinking, grandiose in the presumption that God has not only uniquely chosen us but has empowered us to lord it over others; queasily hypocritical in the double-standard by which actions we condemn in others are seamlessly accepted as virtuous when we do them.

And what We have become has cost its opposite virtues: patient, reasonable, modest, virtuous, mature cognitively and morally, displaying an integrity that extends from the characterological to the conceptual and the emotional.

This country – its citizenry and its government – has been displaying the characteristics of deep and pervasive immaturity overlayed by grandiosity of almost delusional intensity and complicated dangerously by its hyper-readiness to use its physical powers to extend its ‘issues’ out into the ‘real’ world and to impose them by force on others. That begins to sound a lot like Virginia Tech’s Cho. In fact, it sounds a lot like Bush himself. But it is also Us, or far too many of Us.

Meanwhile, the Town of Marlborough in ‘liberal’ Massachusetts has just passed a residence-activity restriction ordinance that bars registered sex-offenders from walking in its parks, eating in its restaurants, and residing in pretty much most of the town. And no doubt feels it has done a good night’s work. The point isn’t that the ordinance is unconstitutional; it’s that the townsfolk think that it’s a good job. And that the Supreme Court, where the matter may well end up, is almost bound to opine that if torture and the loss of Habeas is OK, then Soviet-level residency and activity restrictions must surely be OK. After all, if the greater evil is OK, then the lesser must be OK by the simple operation of logic. Or such ‘logic’ as obtains in our modern American reality.

This “violent self-righteousness” as Kamiya accurately calls it is a characteristic now of the ‘base’ in both the Democratic and the Republican Parties as presently constituted. And for far too many who would not consider themselves as active members of either Party’s ‘base’, such violent self-righteousness is still a perfectly acceptable, perhaps the only, Way to go.

This country now comes to resemble a monstrously powerful warship sailing through crowded waters with weapons-free. But those crowded waters are also now rather constricted by rocks and shoals and the ship is also running out of fuel. And those who command are uncertain of their continued authority and of their course. This is not a comforting scenario. And it isn’t Hollywood; the Ship of State is the very Republic bequeathed to Us by the Framers, preserved – however taintedly – by Lincoln, and preserved at all points by the sometimes dubiously-justified but so often generously-shed blood of its soldiery.

So between the forces of Revolution and of Reaction, this country’s citizenry comes to seem as volatile and unstable as France of the early 19th century. And between the Right that seeks Purity (its own brand) and the Left that seeks Perfection (its own brand) and both willing to see the country go to hell rather than ‘yield’ to the other, this country’s citizenry begins to resemble France in the 1930s, where the Left would have preferred Stalin’s governance, and the Right very much preferred Hitler’s governance, to that of the Third Republic. No wonder this country makes so much fun of France.

Meanwhile, the option of sobering up, facing reality about oneself, and getting the national act back together, seeking “a just and a lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations”, is ignored in the increasingly hyper-manic attempts to escape the national demons and – far more fundamentally – the imperfection and sinfulness that is as Original with America as it is with all Americans as it is with all human beings. To stop running all over the shop like an axe-murderer on steroids … you won’t see it from a Hollywood that no longer makes films for the ‘mature’ demographic, but while there is still a working awareness and conception of ‘adulthood’ in the classic sense among Us, then We really need to exert Ourselves here.

The revolutionists know that if We put the government back into the corral built for it by the Founders then they will lose their unboundaried power to play out their fantasies; they might even have their actions, as well as their visions, investigated more closely by a skeptical citizenry - the public that they've stampeded all these years. The fundamentalists know that if We put the government back into the corral built for it by the Founders then they will lose their unboundaried power to turn this nation and the rest of the world into a theme park Disneyfied according to the blueprints in the Book of Revelation.

And I think that the corporations have already come to the very quiet conclusion that – even more than the Mob Families figured about Cuba as Batista’s sun set – this country is no longer a reliably seaworthy vessel for their interests or their funds. They’ll be flown-off before the deck tilts too much for chopper operations, although too much for the rest of Us to launch the lifeboats. (But where would We go, I wonder?)

So, according to the theory that the Democrats don’t want to really preserve The Republic any more than the Republicans, then simply sweetening Our dreams with “the fall of the house of Bush” really isn’t going to solve the problems. Not any more than simply appointing a ‘woman’ to the presidency of Harvard is going to do much to recover the stunningly parlous condition of American education or putting all sex-offenders on reservations is going to ‘solve’ incest or save – in Michigan anyway – the sheep from violation.

The Republic – ‘Liberal’ in the classical sense that (as Thomas Nagel put it) certain aspects of the life of the individual are immune from the police power of the state – will find no support from the Left any more than from the Right. Indeed, with the effort to pre-identify and pre-empt selected crime-doers American law enforcement is set to take the path of the old Imperial Japanese ‘thought-police’. The simplest scan of the term limns the final result: ‘Imperial’.

Al Gore puts his finger right on it in “The Assault on Reason”: he calls it “the strangeness of our public discourse”. Even more than anything about the environment and global warming, what he is saying about Our “strangeness” must receive the full attention of every one of Us who can still muster the maturity to do so.

"We cannot escape history", Lincoln said. That includes ‘reality’, and that further includes ‘reality’ about Ourselves. The now florid ‘strangeness’ of American discourse and action, in the personal as well as the public realm, in foreign policy as well as domestic affairs, is the most serious danger The Republic faces.

Yes, the environment is changing (for whatever reasons) in ways that will gravely impact the physical world that We are used to; yes, the world has recovered from World War Two and there are now many potential competitors to American business; yes, the world is becoming even more tightly inter-connected, whether intentionally or not; yes, the oil is becoming finite just as many nations are now developed to the point where they want and need a lot of it.

But even as all these problems require Our best attention and efforts, The Republic itself – and We as its People – is becoming weirdly ‘strange’. As this site has always held, this problem has been building for decades. It has now reached the stage of efflorescence where serious measures must be taken, and quickly.

But this is a Republic and We are its People. No ‘Strong Man’ can be sought; no ‘Queen’ or ‘King’ (even Jeeeeezuzzzzzzzz). We cannot afford the magical and pagan idolatry of the Fundamentalist Perfect/Pure Hero. We cannot afford the idolatry of the magical and pagan Revolutionistic Perfect/Pure Idea. We cannot see Ourselves as Heroes; We cannot see Ourselves as Victims. As We cannot indulge a fierce idolatry, so We cannot indulge a sentimental idolatry. Idolatry is escape, and We are called very much to be ‘present’, here and now, to Who We are and to What We are and to the situation that is actually confronting Us now.

We are The People. Each human, each imperfect, each with powers latent or clouded, but Given. But each capable of taking the narrow high path of Maturity, of Respect for Self, for Others, and of living a mindful, respectful life in unremitting stewardship of this marvelous engine – clanky as it may be – of the Constitutional Republic.

This is Our ‘rendezvous with destiny’. Yet, if this be not a ‘common era’ but a ‘Year of Grace’, then We stand at this point not unaided.

If this be Grace, let Us make the most of it.

ALL WELL FOR FALWELL?

Over on Salon Alan Wolfe has an article about the demise of Jerry Falwell (“The stone is cast”, www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2007/05/15/jerryfalwell/print/html). Enough to say that if We haven’t figured out that his treacherous antics were not Christianity and that he set the cause and quality of American Christianity back centuries, then We really have come onto the world scene bringing the proverbial knife to a gunfight.

But Wolfe asks an excellent question: How did this man ever become a public figure in the first place? Just as the South was considered so profoundly warped that the rest of the country politely avoided it, or averted their gaze when such virulent whackjobs as Theodore Bilbo held forth, so the Fundamentalists were held at arm’s length by mainstream Christianity – if we can use the phrase.

We know that politically the virulence of the Revolutions of the Identities opened the hell-gate. They were not just figurative ‘revolutions’ in the mid-60s’ Boomer, pot-whacked, adolescent, self-flattering and self-hyping sense, their content being so ‘cool’ and ‘right’ that embracing them was a sign of vast enlightenment. Rather, they were revolutions in the sense of actual praxis ala Russe: truly Soviet-style revolutionary methods, whereby in the name of abstract ‘downtrodden masses’ and in the service of abstract Perfections, anything and everything must be done away with that would oppose or hinder the quickest possible establishment of the regime and prevent any further questioning of it. And this method is hell-and-gone from American democratic process.

We know that the Democratic Party itself was terrified that the loss of Southern voters consequent upon the Voting Rights Act of 1964 and the Civil Rights Act of 1965, and that the impending decline of the mostly male Northeast industrial-worker demographic, would utterly undo the New Deal coalition forged by FDR 30 years before. The Party was desperate to raise up new reliable voting blocs.

We know that the media – high as a kite on the heady wine of forsaking boring and stodgy ‘objectivity’ and deploying their powerful strength ‘in a good cause’ – did not want to go back to the corral after the civil-rights struggle reached its democratic zenith in 1965.

We know that French “Theory” was looking for a home, bringing in the luggage its insistence that there was no Truth, no Objectivity, no Tradition, no Common Sense, no Virtue(s), no ‘higher’ dimension to existence, and surely no real and actual “God”: there was only Oppression and there were only Oppressor-classes or -nations, who deployed such capital-letter abstractions for the purpose of keeping the oppressed, their ‘victims’, down. And that the high-road of life was to wage a perpetual struggle against Oppression and Oppressors, including the struggle against the malicious illusion that there was any other dimension except this one or that there was any other path (or content) to human fulfillment except the achieving of sufficient political power to avoid being oppressed. (Theory never really got around to the massive irony that a nation or a group that had achieved ‘un-oppressability’ was – human nature being what it is – ripe for going over to the dark side and becoming an oppressor itself. But then, for Theory there was no such thing as ‘human nature’).

In the previous Post, “Bad Therapy” I adverted to another crucial element back there in the cauldron of the later-1960s that led to the witches’s brew that precipitated out in the 1990s: “… a ‘valorization’ of ‘victimization’ that had just recently been professionally amplified in a public relations spin blitzed over here by the newly assertive Israeli state: we’ve been most awfully and uniquely victimized and therefore we can never be doubted and to doubt us is to join the victimizers and by being thus victimized we are owed whatever we feel we need to get over it and by being victimized we can do whatever we feel we have to in order to ease our fears of it ever happening again.”

This was the lethal approach: the Outraged Victim Whose Unique Pain Permitted ‘All’ For Assuagement, for Vengeance, and for Future Protection; and the corollary that to doubt or even discuss the validity or applicability of the Victim’s demands (or in the Israeli praxis, the acts already committed to create ‘facts on the ground’) was to endorse and even collaborate with new Oppression and Victimization.

It would not take more than a moment’s reflection to realize that such a position was utterly incompatible with deliberative and democratic political process. And not only in the field of international relations but also in the realm of American domestic politics.

But in the event the nascent but richly-supported Advocacies, springing up to professionally advance the assorted Identities that were to comprise the new voting blocs the Democrats desperately sought, embraced both Theory and the Victimiste conceptual web now vigorously spun on behalf of the Israeli state.

‘Oppression’ and ‘outrages’ were duly discovered here, there, and everywhere in American society and culture, each demanding and permitting only the response of ‘outrage’ and utter and total sympathy for, and acquiescence to, the demands of Victims; a built-in bias toward emotionality and away from skeptical or even critical evaluative thought. The toxicity of this brew for the health of the American body politic cannot be fully comprehended, but conceptually it should have been clear from the earliest manifestations. And it was, but a newly deployed ‘political correctness’ prevented rational or even reasonable critical evaluation, or even deliberation and discussion.

The effort began to succeed: Trying to induce a link in the minds of the citizenry between ‘Slavery’ and the Holocaust with each new ‘outrage’ specific to each new Advocacy. And that constituted not only an embrace of substantive inaccuracy but also a symptom of increasing corrosion of the citizenry’s capacity – or even willingness – to assess, deliberate, and evaluate. The People were diminishing; ‘failing’ even.

It is a persistent – we might even say perennial – question whether any other historical phenomena can be ‘equated with’ the Holocaust, even metaphorically. That the government of a reputedly civilized nation, enjoying the plenum of power and capability accruing to a modern industrialized state, would decide to exterminate an entire group of human beings as a matter of official policy and to also cast this programme as a positive and absolute Good … has not happened more than once in history, to my knowledge. Pogroms and razzias extend back as far as can be seen, and the enslavement of militarily defeated tribes and peoples as well. But they are not the same thing.

And the ‘politics’ deduced by the Israeli state from that unique and monstrous event – as described above – are equally unique. They cannot be introduced into a democracy on the basis of a shrewdly-obfuscated and metaphorical ‘link’ that justifies such an introduction.

Indeed, one might say that the Holocaust has created an ‘anti-politics’ as one of its most lasting (and lethal) consequences.

And this lethal anti-politics, variously dressed-up as ‘revolutionary progress’, as just another New Deal coalition, vastly and deeply corroded Our polity. And when extended to foreign policy, it has led to Iraq (and perhaps to Iran).

It took less than five years for the vigorous efforts of the Advocacies to bear poisoned fruit. Having watched the Emotional and the anti-Rational and the anti-Reasonable do so much for the Democrats’ new cadres – and thus morphing into what is now called the ‘Left’, the Republicans began to embrace this apparently winning formula. But where the Democrats historic ‘far left’ had been pretty well squashed by the anti-Socialism and anti-Communism of the previous 40 years, the Republican ‘far right’ – paranoid, irrational, unreasonable, undereducated, intensely religious, and overlorded by a still-breathing Southron elitism and militarism that had survived the hard century since 1865 – was more or less ready, willing, and able.

It was Falwell and his ilk who saw the way not simply to harness modern technology such as television to raise larger wads of cash from larger ‘congregations’ but to harness the power and passion aroused in the already predisposed ‘far right’ masses in the service of politics. Falwell and his ilk shrewdly aroused the outrage of those masses at the true-enough anti-religious assertions and consequences (intended or not) now flooding into American society at the hands of the assorted ‘revolutions’ and demands of the Identities over which the Democrats had now – haplessly – lost any semblance of modulating control and in whose behalf the Democrats now – perforce – had to take their stand.

Harnessing irrationality and emotionalism on the right as the revolutionary praxis of the left had already exalted them, Falwell did not seek to improve the consciousness or souls of his followers or further the Gospel of the Christianity he overtly flaunted. Instead he raised them up as an army of pawns to counter the equally anti-rational equally anti-political ‘bra-burners’ and aborters and the ‘godless’ (fill-in-the-blank).

Having already abandoned objectivity, the media increasingly lost its way, and the egregious Rupert Murdoch simply erected that drift into a business plan, putting media in the service of the Right (as it exists now) just as the mainstream media had, starting in the late-1960s, put themselves in peonage to the Left.

It seems to me that Congress realized early on that they had created a monster. In 1976 or so they allowed Political Action Committees to make campaign contributions, as if they realized that they had so fractured the American polity that they weren’t ever going to be able to reliably raise cash any other way, including the ‘old-fashioned’ way of individual voter’s contributions. The lobbyists arrived in town shortly after, and in Reagan’s Administration the 1980s became a vampires’ feast. In 1996 Congress, by then debauched, allowed corporate mass-holding of media, although by this time there was precious little objectivity to be had in journalism, and – the citizenry having lost a lot of its civic capacity to assess, deliberate, and debate – the pols and their corporate johns saw little need for an objective media anyway. Outrage and Fear and Emotion and Non-reason already ran the show.

And if Falwell and his spawn were to believed, it was all in the name of Jeezuzzz (whose angels, it was to be inferred, wore American flag-patches on the shoulders of their robes).

If those angels wear any flag-patches at all, I’m foursquare in the conclusion that it is a patch of the Cross. This opens up a vast unexplored – or at least presently unexplicated - abyss between American and Divine praxis. If the Fundies are right about anything, they are right that such an abyss is never a good thing. But they are profoundly incapable of mustering the moral imagination to envision that God and American praxis might not e on the same sheet of music. Now them Kathliks had a lot of ideas about this sorta thing happening. But the country is not disposed to think about such ‘depressing’ stuff and the bishops have other things on their collective mind.

If We are all Americans (no exceptions: bra-burners, sex-offenders, fill-in-the-blank) then We all need to look to Our polity. The Ship of State is hugely holed and taking on water, while now engaged in a hot-lead slugging match that cannot be won. Prayer and some very wise and good works are in order. And sackcloth, and ashes – and let the dust that was Falwell return to its Creator for appropriate disposition.

ENOUGH TO GAG A JAG

This morning’s reading brings a curious sequence of straws in the wind.

Alex Koppelman over on Salon reports that Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC, ex-JAG, reserve JAG, JAG appellate judge, senior JAG) boasted to a Marine who had gotten birthday wishes from the governor of SC (they certainly do like to be seen with uniforms, those Southrons; perhaps they’re attracted to them, as other demographics also are) that he Graham was going over to Ramadi in July and would “walk down the streets where the insurgents had a parade”.

Feh. As Churchill opined “In victory, magnanimity”. But of course, that presumes an adult mind and spirit sufficiently evolved and capacious to platform the virtue of magnanimity. Graham hasn’t got those kind of chops. Indeed, as has been discussed on this site, the JAGs are looking for a few morally mediocre folks (and given the challenge of getting up in the morning as a JAG, that’s both shrewd and prudent; see below). The banality of immaturity – especially of the American Southron macho type – comprises American’s unique corollary to Arendt’s ‘banality of evil’. Immaturity – maturational mediocrity and unripeness, psychologically, mentally, spiritually, morally – as the grease that speeds the path of evil. Yeeeeeee-hawwwwwwwwwww! The road to hell paved not with good intentions, but with the spent casings of .45 slugs fired into the air in bumptious assertion of a deformed efficacity. In yer face!

But of course: we aren’t winning. It would in a way be of some consolation to know that the JAGs were only deploying Churchill’s adult spirit in the alternative: “In defeat, defiance”. But that presumes that one is mature enough to see and ‘process’ the fact of one’s defeat. And the defiance would be of a distinctly Churchillian kind: sober, serious, resolute, efficacious; possessed, in short, of a gravitas emanating from the very spirit and soul of the soldier. Splendid. But it is not Graham, nor any of his ilk.

Graham’s is a macho, fratboy defiance only modestly better than the darkly-grooved and stained ‘stubborn’ and oppositional you-can’t-make-me defiance of the Unitary Deciderer himself. It is the queasy assertiveness of the semi-solid, underdone personality that senses the imminent danger of its own guilt and weakness being exposed and must seek to escape the truth about itself. Not so much whistling by the graveyard then, as it is in-yer-facing by the graveyard. The graveyard of actuality and consequences and one’s own weaknesses and failures … and if those be ghosts, then they do indeed walk.

And they made him a lawyer. And an officer. And a judge. And elected him to Congress. To the Senate. No wonder the 109th Congress did everything except make Bush’s horse a god.

Meanwhile, on another part of the ranch, Andrew Sullivan reports that the junior JAGs who did what they could to defend the Gunatanamo detainees have – by the by – been passed over for promotion (http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2007/05/punishing_the_l.html. Gee. What a coincidence. The colonel JAG in charge of the ‘defense’ team opined that four of the six on the team who were up for promotion were ‘passed over’ because they had been warned that actually defending the accused “could be detrimental” to their careers. Thus military justice. Thus JAGgery.

Thus I say again that while Bush may have perverted the generals, he did not pervert the JAGs. That organization is already, in its very essence, perverse. Bush – and Darth Cheney – simply realized that the JAG way was perfectly suited to the subversion of the rule of Law in pursuit of quietly predetermined objectives. And the JAGs had perfected this vicious kabuki over 50 years of piously administering military justice under the ‘reformed’ Uniform Code of Military Justice. The JAG way was utterly congenial to the unripe character of an addictive personality and the machinations of a treacherous power-mad subverter of the Republic.

I think that being ‘passed over’ may be a blessing of Biblical proportions for these young JAGs, if they are able to rise to the opportunity Grace and Heaven have provided. In being cast forth into the desert of civilian life they will cease to be implicated in the Pharaonic stubbornness that is dooming the current regime. And perhaps they might even find themselves – personally and professionally – experiencing a new birth of freedom. There is precedent, and substantial precedent. It will require a certain ripeness, a ripening – more specifically – but any mature adult knows that such is always the Journey that must be undertaken. Nor is there any shortcut. Nor is there any substitute: uniforms, rank, medals, status, role, or place. There is only the willingness to follow the Pillar of Fire into the darkness, hoping and seeking to be equal to the day. And should their determination flag, they have monstrously clear examples of moral and maturational failure among their seniors to refresh their resolve. May they respond to this Call, and prosper. We need all the wise and honest lawyers We can get; We appear to be suffering a surfeit of the other kind.

In that regard, Heather Havrilevsky, Salon’s TV commenter, observes (http://www.salon.com/ent/tv/review/2007/05/14/sopranos/) “just how many layers of self-deceit it takes for the man [Tony Soprano] to get up in the morning, given all of the brutal acts he’s committed”. Naturally, one thinks of JAGs. But We have to prepare for this reality: everybody connected with furthering this Iraq debacle is – for the purposes of moral and psychological consequence – going to be experiencing this particular type of Post Perpetration Stress. Whether the individual admits it or not, and no matter how the individual handles it and deals with it, there are going to be invisible deformations even where there are no physical wounds; psychological, characterological, moral, spiritual. We have to understand this, because even more than the German people, We allowed this to happen to them, We allowed this monstrous situation to develop, We have allowed it to go on.

And to Us they will return. Hugely insightful, the ancient Christian Church required all soldiers returning from war to undergo a ritual period and ritual ceremony of ‘cleansing’, based on the profoundly sage insight that war – whether you win or lose and no matter how good your intention – is a viciously and insidiously infectious thing, and will wreak damage on the spirit and the soul even if it foregoes wounding the body.

If We must go shopping, let it be for the wherewithal to meet the needs of those who return.

And, finally, Glenn Greenwald, again on Salon (www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2007/05/14/thompson/print.html), reports on Fred Thompson’s latest sermon on the value of the Rule of Law and how only the Republicans (as presently constituted) can be trusted to uphold it. It can be said that at least in the time of Nixon nobody really imagined that things could get so bad, but We cannot make that excuse now. Nor can Thompson, for this reprehensible performance.

Perhaps he is merely posturing in order to play to the current Republican base; perhaps – as one of the former Nazi judges asserted in “Judgment At Nuremberg” – he stayed on the bench precisely and purely to modulate the horror and the evil. But if it is Thompson’s vision to retain the current base and still restore the Rule of Law, then his vision is flawed, if not witlessly execrable, to begin with.

And if he is truly planning to restore the Rule of Law, then he cannot in the same speech demand the pardon of Scooter Libby (see “Libby No Baddy?” on this site). Accountability is going to have to be accepted, with all the consequences. In that regard, Mr. Justice Scalia is not setting a good example. He has developed a stock response when interlocutors question him about his and the Court’s egregious intervention in the election of 2000 (now separated from us by an aching abyss of might-have-beens): we should just get over it and move on, opines Scalia – a defense which no doubt many of the defendants that have appeared before him in his career would surely have loved to have made. Should Mr. Thompson be sincere – and there is no reason to presume that he is – then his restoration of the Rule of Law will not be able to rely totally on the Supreme Court. Although, if torture might help, Mr. Justice Thomas will be glad to concur.

We here must highly resolve …

THE DEMOCRATIC WAY

Joe Conason has an article over on Salon (“Poor, poor Gonzales”, www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2007/05/11/gonzales_hearing/print.html).

He’s reporting on the mind-bashing dumbness with which House Republicans strewed Quaint Al’s path with consolation during The Quaintster’s recent hearing in front of the House Judiciary Committee hearing (which ran an impressive six hours).

Several ancillary thoughts occurred to me. It is refreshing to observe democracy at work, seeing the stupidity (real or feigned) among the Republicans that can get itself elected to Congress. I’m glad that there is no ‘authority’ in this country with powers sufficiently plenary so as to ensure that only intelligent people can get sent to Congress.

Nor – in the decades of their vigorous pandering to the Identities – did the Democrats accomplish anything less than strike down long-standing firewalls of Truth and maturity and critical, skeptical intelligence; indeed, the Dems made it positively incorrect to kick certain favored tires. Seeking to dilute any intelligence that might criticize urgent favoritisms, the Dems opened the screen-door of Our civilization, through which gigantic stupidities of pre-historic proportions flew or waddled back in. Think: opening the gate in the forest wall not to King Kong but to a herd of omnivorous dinosaurs with brains the size of a walnut. Bad judgment. Bad juju.

And we wonder why nobody could “connect the dots” in re the tortured singleton Cho at Virginia Tech? Of course it was clear that he was seriously unwell and in great and emergent need of psychiatric help. But what administrator in this Year of Sensitivity the Thirty-Sixth (more or less; I’m counting from don’t-blame-the-victim in 1971) would dare risk job and career to a) ‘label’ b) an ethnic minority by c) ‘judging’ him to be d) seriously whacked out. Nor am I trying to smuggle in a nostalgic vote for uninformed, yahoo, macho, bulldog decisiveness (look where that has gotten us in Iraq).

But in the revolutionary arrogance and impatience to totally transform everything immediately, abetted by the Democrats’ and the media’s full panoplium of power and influence, a lot of key American content and process was swept away. To be labeled ‘insensitive’ was (up until the invention of the ‘sex offender’ two decades later) the most awful and lethal opprobrium that might be heaped on a bureaucratic head. Who wanted to risk his/her career to exercise discrimination and authority and act decisively to either make this tortured soul get help or get him off the campus? Suppose some other ‘professional’ further along the chain didn’t back you up and declared him ‘well enough’? Suppose the parents went and got a lawyer? Suppose some pol with a political need to look compassionate got involved on the kid’s side? Suppose – the horror! – a bunch of sensitive and pained students showed up under your office window with ribbons and bunches of flowers and news-cameras? Oy. Better to be ‘sensitive’ and keep your mouth shut.

As Conason notes, the Republicans at the hearing seemed utterly unable to grasp the lethality of the challenge that Gonzales and all that he stands for poses to The Republic, to the rule of Law, to fundamental democratic process, and to the role of The People in the American scheme of things. Or, if they did grasp it, their need to remain in the odour of sanctity within their Party reduced such concerns to irrelevance.

So it came to me: here is the way that the Democrats can make their way back up to the High Ground while simultaneously coming to efficacious grips with the most dangerous threat to The Republic that We now face. Let the Democrats stand four-square for democratic process. Forget, for the moment, the ‘content’ – in the past decades the desire for liberation has led to speech-codes and sex-offender registration and the love of liberty has led to pre-emptive, invasive war. Let Us start off gently and simply restore democratic process. And if the Democrats have the right stuff to stand tall, then let Us have the stuff to exercise Our authority to support them.

Now, this is not a put-down of Republicanism. It is a recoil from the monstrous Frankenstein of Rove-ian Republicanism – that stitched-together medley of dead things Neocon, Fundamentalist, and Jingoist. When the more mature Republicans can get ahold of their Party again, then – to borrow an image of Abe Lincoln’s – Our trip will be made smoother, having a pumpkin in each saddlebag. For now, We’ll have to go to the job with the Party We’ve got: the Democrats. If they’re up to it. Who stands for The Republic?