ARTpiece 3
TODAY's WORD is C-I-V-I-L-I-T-Y
Elections are nice; a distraction really. The hard questions are not on the ballot. `Our problems remain the same and we have the same personnel in charge of solving them.
In order to discuss what "we the people" can do to affect the future of our planet, we all must digest the same kind of information available to our leaders. At the moment, with one-party power in the USA, we have no other oversight.
The opaque nature of our RepubliCon government means that we have to guess at the reasons why our government takes the positions that it does. Let us pause here for a moment. Why would anyone say, for instance, that Al Qaeda destroyed the World Trade Towers because,"...they are jealous of our freedoms." I may be being generous, but I have always assumed that at the inner core of our defense establishment someone
actually knows what is happening. It is only the fear of sounding politically incorrect" that prevents these notions from ever being discussed publicly. So, the public has to guess what its own government is really doing. Funny?Huh?
Well, all good empires that are run by autocrats behave similarly. The Third Reich never explained the final solution to the German volk, because Uncle Adolf thought they were too sensitive and would probably oppose his plan, if they knew. Instead, the world got Goebbels, the Godfather of the Great Lie.
Let us not, then, rely on "official" reasons in order to understand our Nation's actions. Usually, these "official" reasons are themselves part of these actions. But, when you are working on the 27th reason for doing something,you can not help but sound like a moron, or a felon.
So, what to do? Easy. Stop listening and just watch. If you can just plug up your ears, and concentrate, then what is happening is fairly obvious.
We are a big nation. We feed a great deal of people. We use a lot of stuff. Some of it comes from far away. For a long time we have gathered our resources abroad through trade, i.e., "peaceful exploitation", but we have now run into problems. Among these are the smartening up of our trade partners,and the mutual awareness that there is not enough resources (water, food,energy etc.) for everyone who would want some.
(For factoid nerds: I have gotten almost through this entire analysis without using the words thermodynamics, entropy or Malthusian. You have to know I love you. But let me give you some Math that suggests, well, that the magma dome is about to blow: 1. We are using renewable resources today at a rate 20% greater than they can be regenerated. Try doing that for the next 10 years! 2. The max. population of Earth = 9 billion. The max. pop.at American level of consumption = 2.1 billion. The current pop. of Earth= 6.1 billion. 3. Permuting our profligate energy using culture into an Earthsaving culture or the destruction of life and order on our planet is "immanent".4, The pop. of the Earth has doubled in the past thirty years. Since I promised not to use any big words, for those who care, stir all the above facts together in one brain and see what you come up with. Whatever you come up with, your response should contain the warning: FOR IMMEDIATE ACTION!
Remember that what is tarnished, may be polished, but first you have to get your hands on it. As for our chief executive, I do not know how many times you may have to underline these problems with a bold red marker before a memo, possibly titled, "The World is About To Catastrophically Implode.Something Must Be Done!!! NOW!!", is actually read. Much less, thought about.)
Whether anyone in our government can actually understand this crap, all governments have their advisers and think tanks full of smart people who play with these ideas. Our civilization, as currently constituted, requires air, water, food, fuel and the means to gather, store, protect and move around these things. As our Empire insists not only that it get its share, but that it gets all it wants (while lifting its middle finger to the rest of the world), (and winks at the White Christian men who constitute over 72% of the RepubliCon base), it increasingly isolates us and causes us to consider the entire non-American world (both within and without America) as our enemy: They want to eat and we want to eat; therefore, we take what we want and are willing to kill anyone who opposes us! Yes, we are planting our army wherever it is geo-politically necessary to control our energy supply and trade routes. Osama bin Laden just as surely hopes that if only one side gets to eat then it should be his side. Standard imperial problems given standard imperial solutions.
Like Mr. Hitler, Mr. Bush believes that we are doing what we have to do...or, we will die. This is why we were planning to invade Iraq since 1998, at least, but the Bush administration was waiting for a fig leaf to cover what history will only show to be naked aggression born of imperial pretensions. They hoped Saddam would shoot down one of our planes, or restart his banned weapons programs. But he was slick enough not to do these things. We then got blitzed by Osama bin Laden and a whole lot of stupid people thought,"Let's say Saddam and Osama were in cahoots. By the time anyone figures out they hated one another, we will already have our replacement for the Prince SULTAN base in Saudi Arabia, in the western Iraq desert." There are many reasons that this did not work out quite the way the neocons imagined (seeARTpiece 2 at ARTpieces.blogspot.com). For openers, the threat of war is a lot more powerful than actually fighting on the ground which is messy and hurts both sides.
Other than that, our defense department's assumptions were quite loopy. Most egregiously, too few troops on the ground. Let us think this one through for a minute. If there were "overwhelming" troop strength as our generals proposed, there would have been a fortified gun emplacement on every corner of Baghdad, Basra and Mosul. There would be few assaults on police stations and few roadside bombs or rocket attacks on the Green Zone. There would be no place to assemble such weapons or safely gather for an attack. They may wish to attack the invading army but there would be no place for them to have a meeting or pick up armaments. They would be under constant surveillance.This would have severely hampered the ability of unhappy Iraqis to resist our occupation. If our soldiers were then nice to everyone (even though with overwhelming troop superiority we would not have had to be) and we indicated by our actions that we did not want to just steal their oil (which is exactly how we acted), then, this invasion might have gone better; maybe, even well.But instead, our civilian rulers trumped our own specialists and Rumsfeld wanted to go into Iraq with only 40,000 troops, i.e., about 5,000 fighting folk and their support groups! If this does not tell you that we cared more for the Iraqi oil (and land) than for the Iraqi people, then you are hopelessly deluded.
Everything Old Rummy has said since this war unfolded has shown his contempt for the Iraqi people. The American incursion, if left to Rumsfeld to explain, rather than Powell, might have come out like, "Hello, Iraq. We are here to steal your oil and park a rapid deployment force in your western desert.You can stay if you want to, but you will have to behave yourselves." This,of course, would have been politically incorrect to say. It is not nice,and you see it takes a lot of words to explain. It is not short and catchy like the phrases: WMD or Saddam=Osama. But it is what we intended to do;that is, if you are a neocon.
But what if you are not? For a democracy to work, the facts must be all out on the table, and all options for a solution should be considered by the people and their representatives and their smart people. But our government has morphed into a one-party autocracy. There are no longer any meetings between Republicrats and Democans: It is the RepubliCon way or the highway. Their way, unenlightened by the brisk exchange of ideas, is the only guidance our country will have before it must act in our honor. Without serious checks and balances, a senile cabinet officer can trump the inherited wisdom of West Point and Sandhurst, and lead us all into destruction. . .and he may get to do it over and over again until he gets it right, because they believe that we believe, God has given them a mandate.
If instead, we are engaged as a country and are presented with the facts, we get to decide: Should we send our sons and daughters out to get what our government tells us we need, or should we try to make over our energy profligate country into a more survival friendly place? Should we kill everyone else in the world and steal their booty or cooperate with everyone else in order to save our planet? Our government is not letting us in on making these important decisions.
End of lesson. I am beginning to sound bitter. I am angry that I lived my whole life hoping to be successful enough to become a Republican. Now,I am old but there is no longer a Republican party. I believed all that crap they lay on you in the 5th grade social studies class. That summer our family drove to D.C. and I remember walking through the Archives and feeling "wow!". To me the Declaration of Independence could have been a rock star. I believed in America. Later on, in High School, they let you in on some of the early in-fighting between Jefferson and Hamilton about how a constitution can be made to work. Jefferson, the pie-in-the-
sky idealist, thought everyone should vote and the idiots will cancel each other out. (This past election should easily disprove that notion.) Hamilton thought that only those with a stake in the system should vote on the board. (These can easily become entrenched parties, i.e., unions of oligarchs who have more in common with each other than the rest of us. Kind of like Nader's rap.)
So our country became a whole bunch of checks and balances. Legislation had to fly with both locally elected populist representatives and state-wide elected Patrician senators. It had to pass muster with nine (eventually)non-partisan old wise men. (I love stories like Douglas was appointed to the High Court because of his reliable conservative bent.) It would be managed by an independent executive, sort of. It was the worst system of government imaginable, except for all others. It was a way to determine public policy without needing to resort to arms. Which brings us all to the present moment.
America now has a RepubliCon President, a RepubliCon House and Senate and a RepubliCon Judiciary. There is the appearance of a RepubliCon conspiracy to manipulate elections which festers because our dominant oligarchy is secretive and nasty. I always wondered how one-party governments, like the old Soviet Union, used our constitution as a model. Well, we have just become a one-party state and we still have our constitution. Sort of.
It should rapidly assume all of the natural ills which accrue to such a government unless it learns the basic lesson of democracy: It survivesas to the civility of its actors.
In other words, when one party can arrest or hang the other side, it does not. One agrees to compromise or put it to a vote. . .and abide by the result of that vote. One plays by the rules because one has agreed to play by the rules and one knows that the game quickly falls apart if one does not play fair. (If you try to cheat too many calls in the playground, the other guy just takes his ball and goes home.) Therefore, Andrew Johnson was not convicted of his impeachment because his main opponent in the Senate thought better of it. If the Congress, he had reasoned, could get rid of any President because they did not like his politics, we would never have a strong executive. So, he voted against his cause (more carpetbaggers/ politically incorrect) and voted for the American people. This was the civil thing to do. It was a principle that seemed to stick; at least, till that Clinton thing.
For what happens when civility breaks down, I give you the example of Colombia. After WWII, they got together a nice little government with two primary political parties, the Conservatives and the Liberals. They quickly discovered that their country was evenly split between between them. So they agreed that every five years the parties would alternate choosing the President. It worked till 1974. In that year, the Conservatives thought they could keep the Presidency in an election and they cancelled the agreement. Since then,the Liberals retreated into the South of their country and have been fighting a Civil War for their true representation in a truly democratic national government. (Rapprochement has been difficult with the USA on both sides of the "drug war" trying to secure its oil drilling operations.)
The word of the day must needs be C-I-V-I-L-I-T-Y. It is the mortar which keeps democracy structurally strong. It is why it is called civil society and why we have civilizations. It is why road rage is so undesirable.
But if an American President wants to squander our capital on his own personal agenda, and Senators threaten to marginalize their opposition if they will not simply roll over for them and promising no job for you in America if you have ever worked for someone they do not like or who refuses to sign a loyalty oath. . .
Everyone should take a deep breath. The breakdown of Civil Society is how one trips over into Civil War. No one, I believe plots their own Civil War; but it is just what happens when the plan to avoid one stops working.
Elections are nice; a distraction really. The hard questions are not on the ballot. `Our problems remain the same and we have the same personnel in charge of solving them.
In order to discuss what "we the people" can do to affect the future of our planet, we all must digest the same kind of information available to our leaders. At the moment, with one-party power in the USA, we have no other oversight.
The opaque nature of our RepubliCon government means that we have to guess at the reasons why our government takes the positions that it does. Let us pause here for a moment. Why would anyone say, for instance, that Al Qaeda destroyed the World Trade Towers because,"...they are jealous of our freedoms." I may be being generous, but I have always assumed that at the inner core of our defense establishment someone
actually knows what is happening. It is only the fear of sounding politically incorrect" that prevents these notions from ever being discussed publicly. So, the public has to guess what its own government is really doing. Funny?Huh?
Well, all good empires that are run by autocrats behave similarly. The Third Reich never explained the final solution to the German volk, because Uncle Adolf thought they were too sensitive and would probably oppose his plan, if they knew. Instead, the world got Goebbels, the Godfather of the Great Lie.
Let us not, then, rely on "official" reasons in order to understand our Nation's actions. Usually, these "official" reasons are themselves part of these actions. But, when you are working on the 27th reason for doing something,you can not help but sound like a moron, or a felon.
So, what to do? Easy. Stop listening and just watch. If you can just plug up your ears, and concentrate, then what is happening is fairly obvious.
We are a big nation. We feed a great deal of people. We use a lot of stuff. Some of it comes from far away. For a long time we have gathered our resources abroad through trade, i.e., "peaceful exploitation", but we have now run into problems. Among these are the smartening up of our trade partners,and the mutual awareness that there is not enough resources (water, food,energy etc.) for everyone who would want some.
(For factoid nerds: I have gotten almost through this entire analysis without using the words thermodynamics, entropy or Malthusian. You have to know I love you. But let me give you some Math that suggests, well, that the magma dome is about to blow: 1. We are using renewable resources today at a rate 20% greater than they can be regenerated. Try doing that for the next 10 years! 2. The max. population of Earth = 9 billion. The max. pop.at American level of consumption = 2.1 billion. The current pop. of Earth= 6.1 billion. 3. Permuting our profligate energy using culture into an Earthsaving culture or the destruction of life and order on our planet is "immanent".4, The pop. of the Earth has doubled in the past thirty years. Since I promised not to use any big words, for those who care, stir all the above facts together in one brain and see what you come up with. Whatever you come up with, your response should contain the warning: FOR IMMEDIATE ACTION!
Remember that what is tarnished, may be polished, but first you have to get your hands on it. As for our chief executive, I do not know how many times you may have to underline these problems with a bold red marker before a memo, possibly titled, "The World is About To Catastrophically Implode.Something Must Be Done!!! NOW!!", is actually read. Much less, thought about.)
Whether anyone in our government can actually understand this crap, all governments have their advisers and think tanks full of smart people who play with these ideas. Our civilization, as currently constituted, requires air, water, food, fuel and the means to gather, store, protect and move around these things. As our Empire insists not only that it get its share, but that it gets all it wants (while lifting its middle finger to the rest of the world), (and winks at the White Christian men who constitute over 72% of the RepubliCon base), it increasingly isolates us and causes us to consider the entire non-American world (both within and without America) as our enemy: They want to eat and we want to eat; therefore, we take what we want and are willing to kill anyone who opposes us! Yes, we are planting our army wherever it is geo-politically necessary to control our energy supply and trade routes. Osama bin Laden just as surely hopes that if only one side gets to eat then it should be his side. Standard imperial problems given standard imperial solutions.
Like Mr. Hitler, Mr. Bush believes that we are doing what we have to do...or, we will die. This is why we were planning to invade Iraq since 1998, at least, but the Bush administration was waiting for a fig leaf to cover what history will only show to be naked aggression born of imperial pretensions. They hoped Saddam would shoot down one of our planes, or restart his banned weapons programs. But he was slick enough not to do these things. We then got blitzed by Osama bin Laden and a whole lot of stupid people thought,"Let's say Saddam and Osama were in cahoots. By the time anyone figures out they hated one another, we will already have our replacement for the Prince SULTAN base in Saudi Arabia, in the western Iraq desert." There are many reasons that this did not work out quite the way the neocons imagined (seeARTpiece 2 at ARTpieces.blogspot.com). For openers, the threat of war is a lot more powerful than actually fighting on the ground which is messy and hurts both sides.
Other than that, our defense department's assumptions were quite loopy. Most egregiously, too few troops on the ground. Let us think this one through for a minute. If there were "overwhelming" troop strength as our generals proposed, there would have been a fortified gun emplacement on every corner of Baghdad, Basra and Mosul. There would be few assaults on police stations and few roadside bombs or rocket attacks on the Green Zone. There would be no place to assemble such weapons or safely gather for an attack. They may wish to attack the invading army but there would be no place for them to have a meeting or pick up armaments. They would be under constant surveillance.This would have severely hampered the ability of unhappy Iraqis to resist our occupation. If our soldiers were then nice to everyone (even though with overwhelming troop superiority we would not have had to be) and we indicated by our actions that we did not want to just steal their oil (which is exactly how we acted), then, this invasion might have gone better; maybe, even well.But instead, our civilian rulers trumped our own specialists and Rumsfeld wanted to go into Iraq with only 40,000 troops, i.e., about 5,000 fighting folk and their support groups! If this does not tell you that we cared more for the Iraqi oil (and land) than for the Iraqi people, then you are hopelessly deluded.
Everything Old Rummy has said since this war unfolded has shown his contempt for the Iraqi people. The American incursion, if left to Rumsfeld to explain, rather than Powell, might have come out like, "Hello, Iraq. We are here to steal your oil and park a rapid deployment force in your western desert.You can stay if you want to, but you will have to behave yourselves." This,of course, would have been politically incorrect to say. It is not nice,and you see it takes a lot of words to explain. It is not short and catchy like the phrases: WMD or Saddam=Osama. But it is what we intended to do;that is, if you are a neocon.
But what if you are not? For a democracy to work, the facts must be all out on the table, and all options for a solution should be considered by the people and their representatives and their smart people. But our government has morphed into a one-party autocracy. There are no longer any meetings between Republicrats and Democans: It is the RepubliCon way or the highway. Their way, unenlightened by the brisk exchange of ideas, is the only guidance our country will have before it must act in our honor. Without serious checks and balances, a senile cabinet officer can trump the inherited wisdom of West Point and Sandhurst, and lead us all into destruction. . .and he may get to do it over and over again until he gets it right, because they believe that we believe, God has given them a mandate.
If instead, we are engaged as a country and are presented with the facts, we get to decide: Should we send our sons and daughters out to get what our government tells us we need, or should we try to make over our energy profligate country into a more survival friendly place? Should we kill everyone else in the world and steal their booty or cooperate with everyone else in order to save our planet? Our government is not letting us in on making these important decisions.
End of lesson. I am beginning to sound bitter. I am angry that I lived my whole life hoping to be successful enough to become a Republican. Now,I am old but there is no longer a Republican party. I believed all that crap they lay on you in the 5th grade social studies class. That summer our family drove to D.C. and I remember walking through the Archives and feeling "wow!". To me the Declaration of Independence could have been a rock star. I believed in America. Later on, in High School, they let you in on some of the early in-fighting between Jefferson and Hamilton about how a constitution can be made to work. Jefferson, the pie-in-the-
sky idealist, thought everyone should vote and the idiots will cancel each other out. (This past election should easily disprove that notion.) Hamilton thought that only those with a stake in the system should vote on the board. (These can easily become entrenched parties, i.e., unions of oligarchs who have more in common with each other than the rest of us. Kind of like Nader's rap.)
So our country became a whole bunch of checks and balances. Legislation had to fly with both locally elected populist representatives and state-wide elected Patrician senators. It had to pass muster with nine (eventually)non-partisan old wise men. (I love stories like Douglas was appointed to the High Court because of his reliable conservative bent.) It would be managed by an independent executive, sort of. It was the worst system of government imaginable, except for all others. It was a way to determine public policy without needing to resort to arms. Which brings us all to the present moment.
America now has a RepubliCon President, a RepubliCon House and Senate and a RepubliCon Judiciary. There is the appearance of a RepubliCon conspiracy to manipulate elections which festers because our dominant oligarchy is secretive and nasty. I always wondered how one-party governments, like the old Soviet Union, used our constitution as a model. Well, we have just become a one-party state and we still have our constitution. Sort of.
It should rapidly assume all of the natural ills which accrue to such a government unless it learns the basic lesson of democracy: It survivesas to the civility of its actors.
In other words, when one party can arrest or hang the other side, it does not. One agrees to compromise or put it to a vote. . .and abide by the result of that vote. One plays by the rules because one has agreed to play by the rules and one knows that the game quickly falls apart if one does not play fair. (If you try to cheat too many calls in the playground, the other guy just takes his ball and goes home.) Therefore, Andrew Johnson was not convicted of his impeachment because his main opponent in the Senate thought better of it. If the Congress, he had reasoned, could get rid of any President because they did not like his politics, we would never have a strong executive. So, he voted against his cause (more carpetbaggers/ politically incorrect) and voted for the American people. This was the civil thing to do. It was a principle that seemed to stick; at least, till that Clinton thing.
For what happens when civility breaks down, I give you the example of Colombia. After WWII, they got together a nice little government with two primary political parties, the Conservatives and the Liberals. They quickly discovered that their country was evenly split between between them. So they agreed that every five years the parties would alternate choosing the President. It worked till 1974. In that year, the Conservatives thought they could keep the Presidency in an election and they cancelled the agreement. Since then,the Liberals retreated into the South of their country and have been fighting a Civil War for their true representation in a truly democratic national government. (Rapprochement has been difficult with the USA on both sides of the "drug war" trying to secure its oil drilling operations.)
The word of the day must needs be C-I-V-I-L-I-T-Y. It is the mortar which keeps democracy structurally strong. It is why it is called civil society and why we have civilizations. It is why road rage is so undesirable.
But if an American President wants to squander our capital on his own personal agenda, and Senators threaten to marginalize their opposition if they will not simply roll over for them and promising no job for you in America if you have ever worked for someone they do not like or who refuses to sign a loyalty oath. . .
Everyone should take a deep breath. The breakdown of Civil Society is how one trips over into Civil War. No one, I believe plots their own Civil War; but it is just what happens when the plan to avoid one stops working.
ss
Let us pray,
Brother Artemis
P.S. By the way, John Lindsay is the only Republican I actually voted for.
s
Let us pray,
Brother Artemis
P.S. By the way, John Lindsay is the only Republican I actually voted for.
posted by Brother Artemis at 1:39 PM
2 Comments:
When is your next installment? Courteously waiting . . .
commie pinko faggot!
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