"In 2010, the voters, in their infinite wisdom, visited upon the country the biggest bunch of fantasts, paranoids, and general whackaloons since the last time Glenn Beck dined alone."Like the man or hate him, you just can't be indifferent to the quality of the man's invective.
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Showing posts with label politics. Show all posts
Saturday, March 24, 2012
Wish I'd said it first...
I try not to go to the same well too often, but this was too lovely to pass up; more from Chas. Pierce, in this case on the House of Representatives as currently constituted:
Sunday, March 11, 2012
Crucifer
This is one of my former CC students as she looked the last Ash Wednesday.
What I find interesting about this is that when she posted this picture she commented how it would be a test to see how people around her reacted to a public display of faith.
Here was my first thought; I wonder how many people were just confused?
I grew up a suburban Presbyterian in the Sixties. Suburban Sixties Presbyterians didn't do none of this forehead/ash/cross stuff. If I had seen someone wearing this symbol I'd have thought that they had been cleaning their chimney and missed a spot washing up afterwards.
And my second thought was; this woman is a genuine Christian; she is a devout, hard-working, compassionate young woman whose faith makes extraordinary demands on her. She is one of the few people I know who really tries to live her faith, with all the personal difficulties and hardships that represents. So I find it almost viciously ironic that she believed that she might be scorned for publicly proclaiming her faith in a gentle way, one that silently testifies to her beliefs without getting all up in your grille, without hectoring, without accusing, without confrontation, without finger-wagging of any sort at all...in a time when it seems like you cannot turn on a piece of electronic media without being confronted by some sanctimonious jackhole wagging his finger about some damn thing.
And this is supposed to be what a peaceful carpenter's son laid down his life for.
Sometimes I wonder about humans. Really, I do.
What I find interesting about this is that when she posted this picture she commented how it would be a test to see how people around her reacted to a public display of faith.Here was my first thought; I wonder how many people were just confused?
I grew up a suburban Presbyterian in the Sixties. Suburban Sixties Presbyterians didn't do none of this forehead/ash/cross stuff. If I had seen someone wearing this symbol I'd have thought that they had been cleaning their chimney and missed a spot washing up afterwards.
And my second thought was; this woman is a genuine Christian; she is a devout, hard-working, compassionate young woman whose faith makes extraordinary demands on her. She is one of the few people I know who really tries to live her faith, with all the personal difficulties and hardships that represents. So I find it almost viciously ironic that she believed that she might be scorned for publicly proclaiming her faith in a gentle way, one that silently testifies to her beliefs without getting all up in your grille, without hectoring, without accusing, without confrontation, without finger-wagging of any sort at all...in a time when it seems like you cannot turn on a piece of electronic media without being confronted by some sanctimonious jackhole wagging his finger about some damn thing.
And this is supposed to be what a peaceful carpenter's son laid down his life for.Sometimes I wonder about humans. Really, I do.
Friday, November 18, 2011
Face of the Tiger
"There was a young lady from Niger"
My hip is aching tonight, so when the little cat jumped up on my chest (she likes to climb on me in the night and sleep, and she's so small that usually I give her a pat or two and go back to sleep myself. But not tonight.) I got up, shuffled into the kitchen to drop some kibbles in her bowl, then to the bathroom, and then here, where we left the laptop on all night because it is developing some sort of boot-issues and Mojo needs to use it for work tomorrow.
And I spent an hour or so visiting some electronic friends.
Isn't that odd?
I am a great believer that we are really fairly consistent monkeys; I honestly believe that human behavior hasn't changed all THAT much since Sumer. So our hopes and hates, our dreams and nightmares, the way of a man with a maid or a mother with a child have more commonality than difference whether we live in little brick houses or in temple-cities.
But electronics really have made a difference in scope.
So whilst jim and Lisa are in Florida a continent away I can drop in on Ranger Against War, or Lisa's posts at Big Brass Blog, and see what they've been doing. Or e-mail Lisa and chat (always a worthwhile thing, since she is as wise as she is lovely). And Labrys, whose ferocity and intelligence are as great as the goddess she bear, lives almost in my pocket here in the Northwest and I feel like she's a neighbor although we have never met. And there's a whole damn digital bar full of cronies; basil, Andy, Al, Publius, Ael as well as the welcome random visitors over at MilPub.
And then there's the whole Facebook deal. I wish I could hang with Britt and talk about her photography, or enjoy Carrie being serious amid her twinados, or kid India about her roller-derby hip (which is something like "keeper's-hip" which is what woke me tonight...) or hear Linda read her poems or fuss over Emme. But they live in New York or Texas or Arizona or California.
The thing is that with Al Gore's great invention we can visit whilst never moving from out of our chairs so far apart.
And that's a pretty terrific thing.
It doesn't replace going to the Thirsty Lion with my pals Brent and Julie to cheer the Timbers and hang out, or going biking with Devora and Ed, or playing D&D with Will (I swear, we will, soon, I promise!) and talking Portlandia with Meghan...but I value my Internet friends in their own way; not more, not less, just in another key, a blue note - because I wish we COULD be physically nearby. But their songs are part of the complex music that is my life.
And - as much as I worry about what seems to be my problem with keeping close to people I like - it's a pretty damn good life, a rich, strange, and varied piece of music.
"Who smiled as she rode on a tiger"
Which sometimes delights me. But which also sometimes amazes me - how did I get here? How did I deserve this brilliant, lovely woman and these smart, funny kids? - and sometimes confounds me.
And sometimes disturbs me.
Because for all that I love my life; my family, my friends, my work, my home and the place I have found to live and, I hope, to die, here in Portland and the Northwest I adore...when I look at my country I feel positively feverish; a hot flush of anger followed by a shiver of despair.
I think everyone feels that they are living in turbulent times. Peace and rest are for the dead; living people are always troubled. But I look around me and what I see is very ominous.
I think my nation, as a nation and as a people, is not socially, economically, or politically sound. For most of my generation (I entered the Army the year that Ronnie Reagan was elected) we have been dismantling the America I grew up in.
I know that America was not a perfect thing. I know it had many flaws, although as a son of a relatively wealthy white couple I wasn't forced to confront most of them. But it had a lot of strengths, too.
For one thing, it was much more coherent that it is now. We had our wealthy, and they pretty much ran the place (after all, those well-to-do planters, merchants, and attorneys didn't meet in Philadelphia to create some sort of paradise for layabout and yahoos, right?) then as now. But they were less distant, and you could still make a pretty decent way in the world even if your parents weren't in the yacht club.
A college education was affordable, much more so than it is now (I just talked to a Facebook friend from college whose child is looking into attending the small private school we payed something like $40,000 - pretty big money in 1975 - to attend and is looking at something like a quarter of a million over four years) and with a much better chance of leading to a decent job.
And the notion that taxes were the price of civilization was much more widely accepted. I've watched that - beginning with Measure 5 here in Oregon in 1990 - entire concept fray as a third of my compatriots take on the Leona Helmsley Philosophy of Life, that taxes are for the Little People.
And, of course, there's the Lesser Depression.
I know a woman, one of my former community college students. Brilliant woman; bright, energetic, persistent, decent. She's done everything "right", played by all the rules. Worked her way through community college, cared for her parents, took on tons of student debt to get her bachelor's degree...and she's got nothing. No job, not a hint of a job, and she's running out of time, and hope.
There's a lot of others like her, and that's just not fucking right.
In a better country her problem, and the problems of the others like her, would be a firebell in the night. We'd be frantic to figure out why all these people couldn't work, weren't working. And we'd be doing something to change that.
But we're not.
At least our so-called "leaders" are not. Instead they're nattering about deficits and fretting about taxing the "job-creators"
"Job-creators". So where's Suzanne's job? Where are ALL the jobs we're so tenderly shielding your wallets from, plutocrats? Why are so many of the young people I know working at Burgerville? Why are so many of the storefronts I drive past vacant?
Are you seeing what's wrong with this picture, you puling fucktards, you entitled bastards, there in your legislative offices from Portland to Salem to Washington D.C.?
No. I don't get the sense they do.
"They returned from the ride with the lady inside"
The news of the police reduction of the various Occupy encampments has struck me harder than I thought it would.
For all that I think the Occupiers have failed, I had hoped that their presence would have done something to change the way we in this country are talking. I had hoped that it would have shown that the populists of the Left had some kind of common ground with the supposed populists - the "Tea Party" - of the Right. That between them there would be a hope of swinging the national consensus back towards the People.
From history I understand that the United States has always been a contest between Those Who Have and Those Who Want. From the Framer's ideal of the rule of the deserving through Jacksonians-versus-Jeffersonians through the Great Schism over slavery, the labor-against-robber-baron struggles of the late Victorian times, the Gilded Age that ended with the smashup of '29 and the rise of the New Deal my country has always been the battlefield of those who believe that the nation is ruled best when it rules for the humbler sort against those who believe that those who have deserve to rule over those who have-not.
And being emotionally as well as politically a sort of have-not I know which side I favor.
So as much as the Rise of Reaganism has been personally and politically painful for me I understand that it's just the latest veer of the political wind.
But lately that wind seems to bring me a wintery loss of hope.
Because it seems too much like first icy gust of the perfectly terrible storm. An economy that has been sustained for decades by bubbles has burst. Our tax and tariff policies - enacted by thirty years of politicians trained to believe that getting cheap plastic crap into the country was worth letting jobs flee the country - don't encourage domestic manufacture. The last "recoveries" have been largely without rebuilding the lost jobs. There are now too many Suzannes out there, desperate for work, burdened with debt.
And our politics has become perfectly toxic. Where once "conservatives" believed in things like low taxes and small government as philosophy they now believe in them as religion. There is no compromise in them; they want it all, and are willing to go to literally insane lengths to get it. And "liberals" who once believed in the ideals of this country as expressed in the great words of its birth certificates have lost their willingness to fight for those ideals.
We were seduced by our long post-WW2 domestic tranquility into thinking we'd outgrown the dirty deeds we did dirt cheap back in our younger days. But those ways were still there, and when the vermin we elected eleven years ago reintroduced us to them we turned out to be all to willing to accept them.
We aren't horrified by the idea of torturing our captives; we're debating it. We no longer retch at the idea of assassinating unwitting opponents in lands not our enemy; we ignore it. We don't recoil at the notion that we should be a land where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
Or, at least, "we" - the bulk of us - don't do anything about it.
So it seems to me that we're sliding down into perilously bad economic times, times that have the potential to be bad for years, at the same time that our politics has become impotent to do so much as agree that those bad times are upon us, much less do anything to arrest the slide.
"And the smile on the face of the tiger".
So. Here I sit. Warm, at peace, well-fed, content. Surrounded by a houseful of peaceful sleepers (other than the little cat, who has climbed into my lap as I type this and is making it very difficult to write) in a silent, dark neighborhood that I love, in a city and a part of the world I cherish. Enmeshed by a web of friendships with good people; fine, decent, lovely people who make the world a better place merely by breathing in it. In a country richer, more powerful, grander than any that has risen glittering from the Earth since the mud-walls of Sumer and the marble columns of Rome.
And yet tonight I look out into the night and I feel the hope for my children, for my nation, for the next ten years fading away like the stars before the coming dawn.
My hip is aching tonight, so when the little cat jumped up on my chest (she likes to climb on me in the night and sleep, and she's so small that usually I give her a pat or two and go back to sleep myself. But not tonight.) I got up, shuffled into the kitchen to drop some kibbles in her bowl, then to the bathroom, and then here, where we left the laptop on all night because it is developing some sort of boot-issues and Mojo needs to use it for work tomorrow.
And I spent an hour or so visiting some electronic friends.
Isn't that odd?
I am a great believer that we are really fairly consistent monkeys; I honestly believe that human behavior hasn't changed all THAT much since Sumer. So our hopes and hates, our dreams and nightmares, the way of a man with a maid or a mother with a child have more commonality than difference whether we live in little brick houses or in temple-cities.
But electronics really have made a difference in scope.
So whilst jim and Lisa are in Florida a continent away I can drop in on Ranger Against War, or Lisa's posts at Big Brass Blog, and see what they've been doing. Or e-mail Lisa and chat (always a worthwhile thing, since she is as wise as she is lovely). And Labrys, whose ferocity and intelligence are as great as the goddess she bear, lives almost in my pocket here in the Northwest and I feel like she's a neighbor although we have never met. And there's a whole damn digital bar full of cronies; basil, Andy, Al, Publius, Ael as well as the welcome random visitors over at MilPub.
And then there's the whole Facebook deal. I wish I could hang with Britt and talk about her photography, or enjoy Carrie being serious amid her twinados, or kid India about her roller-derby hip (which is something like "keeper's-hip" which is what woke me tonight...) or hear Linda read her poems or fuss over Emme. But they live in New York or Texas or Arizona or California.
The thing is that with Al Gore's great invention we can visit whilst never moving from out of our chairs so far apart.
And that's a pretty terrific thing.
It doesn't replace going to the Thirsty Lion with my pals Brent and Julie to cheer the Timbers and hang out, or going biking with Devora and Ed, or playing D&D with Will (I swear, we will, soon, I promise!) and talking Portlandia with Meghan...but I value my Internet friends in their own way; not more, not less, just in another key, a blue note - because I wish we COULD be physically nearby. But their songs are part of the complex music that is my life.
And - as much as I worry about what seems to be my problem with keeping close to people I like - it's a pretty damn good life, a rich, strange, and varied piece of music.
"Who smiled as she rode on a tiger"
Which sometimes delights me. But which also sometimes amazes me - how did I get here? How did I deserve this brilliant, lovely woman and these smart, funny kids? - and sometimes confounds me.
And sometimes disturbs me.
Because for all that I love my life; my family, my friends, my work, my home and the place I have found to live and, I hope, to die, here in Portland and the Northwest I adore...when I look at my country I feel positively feverish; a hot flush of anger followed by a shiver of despair.
I think everyone feels that they are living in turbulent times. Peace and rest are for the dead; living people are always troubled. But I look around me and what I see is very ominous.
I think my nation, as a nation and as a people, is not socially, economically, or politically sound. For most of my generation (I entered the Army the year that Ronnie Reagan was elected) we have been dismantling the America I grew up in.
I know that America was not a perfect thing. I know it had many flaws, although as a son of a relatively wealthy white couple I wasn't forced to confront most of them. But it had a lot of strengths, too.
For one thing, it was much more coherent that it is now. We had our wealthy, and they pretty much ran the place (after all, those well-to-do planters, merchants, and attorneys didn't meet in Philadelphia to create some sort of paradise for layabout and yahoos, right?) then as now. But they were less distant, and you could still make a pretty decent way in the world even if your parents weren't in the yacht club.
A college education was affordable, much more so than it is now (I just talked to a Facebook friend from college whose child is looking into attending the small private school we payed something like $40,000 - pretty big money in 1975 - to attend and is looking at something like a quarter of a million over four years) and with a much better chance of leading to a decent job.
And the notion that taxes were the price of civilization was much more widely accepted. I've watched that - beginning with Measure 5 here in Oregon in 1990 - entire concept fray as a third of my compatriots take on the Leona Helmsley Philosophy of Life, that taxes are for the Little People.
And, of course, there's the Lesser Depression.
I know a woman, one of my former community college students. Brilliant woman; bright, energetic, persistent, decent. She's done everything "right", played by all the rules. Worked her way through community college, cared for her parents, took on tons of student debt to get her bachelor's degree...and she's got nothing. No job, not a hint of a job, and she's running out of time, and hope.
There's a lot of others like her, and that's just not fucking right.
In a better country her problem, and the problems of the others like her, would be a firebell in the night. We'd be frantic to figure out why all these people couldn't work, weren't working. And we'd be doing something to change that.
But we're not.
At least our so-called "leaders" are not. Instead they're nattering about deficits and fretting about taxing the "job-creators"
"Job-creators". So where's Suzanne's job? Where are ALL the jobs we're so tenderly shielding your wallets from, plutocrats? Why are so many of the young people I know working at Burgerville? Why are so many of the storefronts I drive past vacant?
Are you seeing what's wrong with this picture, you puling fucktards, you entitled bastards, there in your legislative offices from Portland to Salem to Washington D.C.?
No. I don't get the sense they do.
"They returned from the ride with the lady inside"
The news of the police reduction of the various Occupy encampments has struck me harder than I thought it would.
For all that I think the Occupiers have failed, I had hoped that their presence would have done something to change the way we in this country are talking. I had hoped that it would have shown that the populists of the Left had some kind of common ground with the supposed populists - the "Tea Party" - of the Right. That between them there would be a hope of swinging the national consensus back towards the People.
From history I understand that the United States has always been a contest between Those Who Have and Those Who Want. From the Framer's ideal of the rule of the deserving through Jacksonians-versus-Jeffersonians through the Great Schism over slavery, the labor-against-robber-baron struggles of the late Victorian times, the Gilded Age that ended with the smashup of '29 and the rise of the New Deal my country has always been the battlefield of those who believe that the nation is ruled best when it rules for the humbler sort against those who believe that those who have deserve to rule over those who have-not.
And being emotionally as well as politically a sort of have-not I know which side I favor.
So as much as the Rise of Reaganism has been personally and politically painful for me I understand that it's just the latest veer of the political wind.
But lately that wind seems to bring me a wintery loss of hope.
Because it seems too much like first icy gust of the perfectly terrible storm. An economy that has been sustained for decades by bubbles has burst. Our tax and tariff policies - enacted by thirty years of politicians trained to believe that getting cheap plastic crap into the country was worth letting jobs flee the country - don't encourage domestic manufacture. The last "recoveries" have been largely without rebuilding the lost jobs. There are now too many Suzannes out there, desperate for work, burdened with debt.
And our politics has become perfectly toxic. Where once "conservatives" believed in things like low taxes and small government as philosophy they now believe in them as religion. There is no compromise in them; they want it all, and are willing to go to literally insane lengths to get it. And "liberals" who once believed in the ideals of this country as expressed in the great words of its birth certificates have lost their willingness to fight for those ideals.
We were seduced by our long post-WW2 domestic tranquility into thinking we'd outgrown the dirty deeds we did dirt cheap back in our younger days. But those ways were still there, and when the vermin we elected eleven years ago reintroduced us to them we turned out to be all to willing to accept them.
We aren't horrified by the idea of torturing our captives; we're debating it. We no longer retch at the idea of assassinating unwitting opponents in lands not our enemy; we ignore it. We don't recoil at the notion that we should be a land where the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
Or, at least, "we" - the bulk of us - don't do anything about it.
So it seems to me that we're sliding down into perilously bad economic times, times that have the potential to be bad for years, at the same time that our politics has become impotent to do so much as agree that those bad times are upon us, much less do anything to arrest the slide.
"And the smile on the face of the tiger".
So. Here I sit. Warm, at peace, well-fed, content. Surrounded by a houseful of peaceful sleepers (other than the little cat, who has climbed into my lap as I type this and is making it very difficult to write) in a silent, dark neighborhood that I love, in a city and a part of the world I cherish. Enmeshed by a web of friendships with good people; fine, decent, lovely people who make the world a better place merely by breathing in it. In a country richer, more powerful, grander than any that has risen glittering from the Earth since the mud-walls of Sumer and the marble columns of Rome.
And yet tonight I look out into the night and I feel the hope for my children, for my nation, for the next ten years fading away like the stars before the coming dawn.
Sunday, September 18, 2011
שמע ישראל
In case you don't read Hebrew, the title above translates as something like "Listen up, Israel".
It is the first line from the fundamental Jewish profession of faith, the words of Moses as written in Deuteronomy Chapter 6, Verse 4: שמע ישראל יהוה אלהינו יהוה אחד which can be translated as some version or other as "Listen, Israel: The LORD is our God. The LORD is the only God."
Speaking of Deuteronomy, it's been a while since I looked at the "Israel Rules" books of the Bible (Leviticus, Numbers, and The Deut) and I had almost forgotten how truly odd some of the contents are.
Here's a good example, from Chapter 25, Verses 11 and 12 (from the King James version, just because I like the Jacobean English):
Hunh. Love to know the history of the actual incident that cause the patriarchs of ancient Israel to throw THAT little gem into Holy Scripture. Had to be a good story there.
There's lots more stuff like that, too. The Deut is where you come across the still-kinda-skeevy notion that a widow becomes the property of her dead husband's brother, who gets in all sort of theological trouble if he has reservations about shtupping his dead brother's bride.
Plus building a wall around your roof so people don't fall off it and raising animals fallen in the road. The Deut is a real page-turner.
Why bring this up now?
Because we just went to a bar mitzvah.
It was one of the better - maybe the best - I've ever attended. The service was endless for five- and eight-years-old, so there was some difficulty there, and it was mostly in Hebrew, so I had a lot of time to kill skimming the juicier parts of the Torah readings.
But I like the rabbi at our friends' temple; he's the very embodiment of the rabbinical traditions of humanity and learning, the cantor there has a rich, full voice, and - since this wasn't just any service, the most important bit - the bar mitzvah himself did a terrific job.
The trickiest part of these is where the new adult has to make a brief statement to the congregation. I've been to several where the young man (or woman) tries to be very Talmudic, or mistakes the day for a middle school speech assignment, or just mumbles through some perfunctory semi-religious boilerplate.
But last weekend's bar mitzvah had a very witty little speech that managed to talk about the week's Torah reading and incorporated it into his life - he's a broth of a boy, and hasn't been the most dutiful of sons, and he talked about how disobedient sons are discussed in the scripture versus how they were, and are, typically dealt with in history - and he did terrific work with the readings. And the kiddush afterwards was good, as always (what's the point in being Jewish if you don't lay out a good spread?) as was the unusual but entertaining party at the local archery store and indoor bow-and-arrow range.
It was mostly just fun, but it got me thinking about religion in general and Judaism in particular.
And reminded me again why, of all the three big monotheistic religions I tend to have more respect for the god (and the adherents) of the Torah relative to the Bible or the Koran.
Most of this is because of the three Judaism is perhaps the most reflective, the most scholarly, and the most self-critical.
This isn't to say that there are no religious scholars in Islam, or Christianity. But, frankly, I tend to judge a religion more by its average schmoe than by its leaders. Leaders can posture and prate all they want, but it's the way that the average Jew, the typical Muslim, or the rank-and-file Christian lives that determines the nature of the religion and its effects on everything around it.
And I find many more Jews willing to look hard at their religion, to examine its foundations, and to apply its tenets in ways that are inconvenient and even hardships in their lives than I do the other two. Perhaps because for many centuries Judaism was so divorced from political power and the expedient, self-justifying, self-deluding nonsense that because of the demands of overlordship has permeated the others.
A Christian or a Muslim has to either explain how an Islamic or a Christian state must do things that Islam or Christ forbade them, things like taking innocent lives, punishing the weak, or ignoring the helpless.
A Jew hasn't had that impossible task until recently; his or her struggle was within, with their own conscience, and while that is the toughest thing in the world it is less corrupting to the soul than trying to justify a massive defense budget with commandments to live a poor and humble life, or using might and force to beat down the defenseless civilians of an enemy nation.
The second reason is that unlike Christianity, the Jews have never pretended that their God is anything but what he was from the days of Abraham; a desert patriarch. Loving dispenser of largesse to those who revere and obey him, merciless enemy of anyone or anything who looks at his family sideways...the God of Israel is a stone killer, a real bad-ass, both to the stranger as well as to those in his own tribe who have problems with his rules.
The God of the Koran is a similar guy - which may go a long way towards explaining the recent animosity between the adherents of the two faiths in the Levant
It's the Jesus-sweetened God of Christianity that has real personality problems. He wants it both ways - turn the other cheek, but beware Divine Wrath - and that's the same problem as it always is when you want two incompatible things.
The God of the Torah is a less conflicted guy, and it shows.
The thing is...this brings me back to the modern State of Israel, and the problem it both faces and represents.
Several people here have observed that I seem to have a problem with Israel, when in fact I have no real problem with Israel that it doesn't have with itself. Because it seems to me - as well as to many people, including many Israelis - that you can either be a democratic state, or a religious state, but not both. And you can have peace as a egalitarian monoreligious state (where everyone is equal in the state faith) or you have to be an elitist multireligious theocracy where one religion is more equal than all the others, but you can't have both.
Because a state is defined in large part by it's institutions, laws, and rules. And in a democracy those are defined by the people as in "We, the People"; they must, or the state is not really a democracy - mere elections don't make a genuine democracy any more than good looks make a good actor.
But religion is not an opinion poll. It doesn't matter if a popular vote says that women are the civic equals of men, or that blacks are the civic equals of whites; if the Holy Writ tells the uppity Negroes or ladies their place, and that place is not in the public square...well...how do you change that? Does God want you to vote on it?
Or is he more likely to cut your damn hand off?
So it seems that a nation can be a secular democracy...or a theocracy. But not both.
The original Israel, the one founded in the Forties by the largely-European Zionists, elided the issue by making its Jewishness official rather than sectarian. An Israeli was a Hebrew-speaking secularist rather than a Talmudic scholar, and Israel was a secular nation that made special place for Jews in its borders but not in its laws.
Then.
But much has changed since then, and Israel has been riven, as its ancient predecessor was, with tribal divisions largely driven by the incompatibility of religion and democracy. Seculars versus orthodox Ashkenazim versus orthodox Sephardim versus Russians versus non-orthodox religious versus Arabs (both secular and devout), all fighting for control of the state, its laws and rules, and its largesse. And it has absorbed the lands of many people who are not Jewish, and must deal with the problem that these people must either be treated equally (and thus eliding the point of a "jewish state") or not and thus eliding the point of sound government.
It's a hell of a problem.
And through all of that, Israel, like Napoleon's France, has had to deal with the physical reality of being surrounded by enemies. Her response has been, as his was, to fight, and, again like the First Empire, while she has never lost a battle she has never conclusively won the war, either.
One of the most significant results has been to discredit the old secular Arab regimes and empower the Islamists - surely not a result that any Israeli (or American) would have wanted. The great Arab and, now, Islamic, Coalition that surrounds them still remains, waiting, hostile, unblinking. Neither the Israelis nor their enemies have ever found a way to solve this political dilemma. Perhaps because there is nothing TO find.
And on the way Judaism has finally been presented with the conqueror's dilemma; can a polity that is founded on a creed rule others outside that creed - or, indeed, rule at all - without bending the tenets of that creed to that breaking point. Fortunately for Israel the God of Abraham was a pretty tough guy. But even He might blench at what is being done to maintain the country's hold on the eastern edge of the Levant.
Now generally speaking I like Israel. It's a nice little country, very Western, and I like the no-nonsense toughness of the secular and non-orthodox Israelis I've met. The orthodox? Enh, not so much. But then, they feel the same way about me, the damned meshugana goy.
I've always felt that the best solution Harry Truman had was to offer the European Jews a state right here in 1945. Utah is kind of deserty and not very populous. We might have avoided a pack of troubles right there. Okay, the Mormons might have had some issues. But, still...
But right now it seems to me that we've dealt ourselves an ugly hand and lots of nice kids, like the bar mitzvah who sat grinning and eating pizza with his cronies the shabbas before last, are going to be the ones who have to make the change for the money we're putting down on that particular yarborough.
And that just makes me feel old, tired, and sad.
Because a faith is supposed to bring us closer to God and ourselves, and - as, I think, was the case for the young man whose coming of age we just celebrated - a religion can bring maturity and a deeper, more farseeing understanding.
Therefore it shall be, when the LORD thy God hath given thee rest from all thine enemies round about, in the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee for an inheritance to possess it, that thou shalt blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven; thou shalt not forget it.
Or not.
It is the first line from the fundamental Jewish profession of faith, the words of Moses as written in Deuteronomy Chapter 6, Verse 4: שמע ישראל יהוה אלהינו יהוה אחד which can be translated as some version or other as "Listen, Israel: The LORD is our God. The LORD is the only God."Speaking of Deuteronomy, it's been a while since I looked at the "Israel Rules" books of the Bible (Leviticus, Numbers, and The Deut) and I had almost forgotten how truly odd some of the contents are.
Here's a good example, from Chapter 25, Verses 11 and 12 (from the King James version, just because I like the Jacobean English):11: When men strive together one with another, and the wife of the one draweth near for to deliver her husband out of the hand of him that smiteth him, and putteth forth her hand, and taketh him by the secrets:For those of you who don't speak Jacobean, "secrets" means the guy's package; wedding tackle, junk, manbits, y'know, his genitals. So if you're a-fightin' down at the Jug and the Little Woman tries to help out by giving the other fella's...secrets...a li'l twist, it's off to the chopping block for the soon-to-be-nicknamed-Lefty.
12: Then thou shalt cut off her hand, thine eye shall not pity her.
Hunh. Love to know the history of the actual incident that cause the patriarchs of ancient Israel to throw THAT little gem into Holy Scripture. Had to be a good story there.
There's lots more stuff like that, too. The Deut is where you come across the still-kinda-skeevy notion that a widow becomes the property of her dead husband's brother, who gets in all sort of theological trouble if he has reservations about shtupping his dead brother's bride. Plus building a wall around your roof so people don't fall off it and raising animals fallen in the road. The Deut is a real page-turner.
Why bring this up now?
Because we just went to a bar mitzvah.
It was one of the better - maybe the best - I've ever attended. The service was endless for five- and eight-years-old, so there was some difficulty there, and it was mostly in Hebrew, so I had a lot of time to kill skimming the juicier parts of the Torah readings. But I like the rabbi at our friends' temple; he's the very embodiment of the rabbinical traditions of humanity and learning, the cantor there has a rich, full voice, and - since this wasn't just any service, the most important bit - the bar mitzvah himself did a terrific job.
The trickiest part of these is where the new adult has to make a brief statement to the congregation. I've been to several where the young man (or woman) tries to be very Talmudic, or mistakes the day for a middle school speech assignment, or just mumbles through some perfunctory semi-religious boilerplate.
But last weekend's bar mitzvah had a very witty little speech that managed to talk about the week's Torah reading and incorporated it into his life - he's a broth of a boy, and hasn't been the most dutiful of sons, and he talked about how disobedient sons are discussed in the scripture versus how they were, and are, typically dealt with in history - and he did terrific work with the readings. And the kiddush afterwards was good, as always (what's the point in being Jewish if you don't lay out a good spread?) as was the unusual but entertaining party at the local archery store and indoor bow-and-arrow range.
It was mostly just fun, but it got me thinking about religion in general and Judaism in particular.And reminded me again why, of all the three big monotheistic religions I tend to have more respect for the god (and the adherents) of the Torah relative to the Bible or the Koran.
Most of this is because of the three Judaism is perhaps the most reflective, the most scholarly, and the most self-critical.This isn't to say that there are no religious scholars in Islam, or Christianity. But, frankly, I tend to judge a religion more by its average schmoe than by its leaders. Leaders can posture and prate all they want, but it's the way that the average Jew, the typical Muslim, or the rank-and-file Christian lives that determines the nature of the religion and its effects on everything around it.
And I find many more Jews willing to look hard at their religion, to examine its foundations, and to apply its tenets in ways that are inconvenient and even hardships in their lives than I do the other two. Perhaps because for many centuries Judaism was so divorced from political power and the expedient, self-justifying, self-deluding nonsense that because of the demands of overlordship has permeated the others. A Christian or a Muslim has to either explain how an Islamic or a Christian state must do things that Islam or Christ forbade them, things like taking innocent lives, punishing the weak, or ignoring the helpless.
A Jew hasn't had that impossible task until recently; his or her struggle was within, with their own conscience, and while that is the toughest thing in the world it is less corrupting to the soul than trying to justify a massive defense budget with commandments to live a poor and humble life, or using might and force to beat down the defenseless civilians of an enemy nation.
The second reason is that unlike Christianity, the Jews have never pretended that their God is anything but what he was from the days of Abraham; a desert patriarch. Loving dispenser of largesse to those who revere and obey him, merciless enemy of anyone or anything who looks at his family sideways...the God of Israel is a stone killer, a real bad-ass, both to the stranger as well as to those in his own tribe who have problems with his rules. The God of the Koran is a similar guy - which may go a long way towards explaining the recent animosity between the adherents of the two faiths in the Levant
It's the Jesus-sweetened God of Christianity that has real personality problems. He wants it both ways - turn the other cheek, but beware Divine Wrath - and that's the same problem as it always is when you want two incompatible things.
The God of the Torah is a less conflicted guy, and it shows.
The thing is...this brings me back to the modern State of Israel, and the problem it both faces and represents.Several people here have observed that I seem to have a problem with Israel, when in fact I have no real problem with Israel that it doesn't have with itself. Because it seems to me - as well as to many people, including many Israelis - that you can either be a democratic state, or a religious state, but not both. And you can have peace as a egalitarian monoreligious state (where everyone is equal in the state faith) or you have to be an elitist multireligious theocracy where one religion is more equal than all the others, but you can't have both.
Because a state is defined in large part by it's institutions, laws, and rules. And in a democracy those are defined by the people as in "We, the People"; they must, or the state is not really a democracy - mere elections don't make a genuine democracy any more than good looks make a good actor.
But religion is not an opinion poll. It doesn't matter if a popular vote says that women are the civic equals of men, or that blacks are the civic equals of whites; if the Holy Writ tells the uppity Negroes or ladies their place, and that place is not in the public square...well...how do you change that? Does God want you to vote on it?Or is he more likely to cut your damn hand off?
So it seems that a nation can be a secular democracy...or a theocracy. But not both.
The original Israel, the one founded in the Forties by the largely-European Zionists, elided the issue by making its Jewishness official rather than sectarian. An Israeli was a Hebrew-speaking secularist rather than a Talmudic scholar, and Israel was a secular nation that made special place for Jews in its borders but not in its laws.
Then.But much has changed since then, and Israel has been riven, as its ancient predecessor was, with tribal divisions largely driven by the incompatibility of religion and democracy. Seculars versus orthodox Ashkenazim versus orthodox Sephardim versus Russians versus non-orthodox religious versus Arabs (both secular and devout), all fighting for control of the state, its laws and rules, and its largesse. And it has absorbed the lands of many people who are not Jewish, and must deal with the problem that these people must either be treated equally (and thus eliding the point of a "jewish state") or not and thus eliding the point of sound government.
It's a hell of a problem.
And through all of that, Israel, like Napoleon's France, has had to deal with the physical reality of being surrounded by enemies. Her response has been, as his was, to fight, and, again like the First Empire, while she has never lost a battle she has never conclusively won the war, either.
One of the most significant results has been to discredit the old secular Arab regimes and empower the Islamists - surely not a result that any Israeli (or American) would have wanted. The great Arab and, now, Islamic, Coalition that surrounds them still remains, waiting, hostile, unblinking. Neither the Israelis nor their enemies have ever found a way to solve this political dilemma. Perhaps because there is nothing TO find.
And on the way Judaism has finally been presented with the conqueror's dilemma; can a polity that is founded on a creed rule others outside that creed - or, indeed, rule at all - without bending the tenets of that creed to that breaking point. Fortunately for Israel the God of Abraham was a pretty tough guy. But even He might blench at what is being done to maintain the country's hold on the eastern edge of the Levant.
Now generally speaking I like Israel. It's a nice little country, very Western, and I like the no-nonsense toughness of the secular and non-orthodox Israelis I've met. The orthodox? Enh, not so much. But then, they feel the same way about me, the damned meshugana goy.I've always felt that the best solution Harry Truman had was to offer the European Jews a state right here in 1945. Utah is kind of deserty and not very populous. We might have avoided a pack of troubles right there. Okay, the Mormons might have had some issues. But, still...
But right now it seems to me that we've dealt ourselves an ugly hand and lots of nice kids, like the bar mitzvah who sat grinning and eating pizza with his cronies the shabbas before last, are going to be the ones who have to make the change for the money we're putting down on that particular yarborough.
And that just makes me feel old, tired, and sad.
Because a faith is supposed to bring us closer to God and ourselves, and - as, I think, was the case for the young man whose coming of age we just celebrated - a religion can bring maturity and a deeper, more farseeing understanding.
Therefore it shall be, when the LORD thy God hath given thee rest from all thine enemies round about, in the land which the LORD thy God giveth thee for an inheritance to possess it, that thou shalt blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven; thou shalt not forget it.Or not.
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
September 12th
So.
My last post was a straight-up rant, and one that those who know me have learned to dread. By late August they are avoiding meeting with me, or attending any sort of event where politics or recent history may be discussed, but as early as the First of September they are even dodging my phone calls and deleting my text messages before reading them, knowing that my vitriolic bile will be reaching explosively toxic levels.
The actual detonation is usually reserved for the collision of some innoffensively idiotic television 9/11 retrospective and my forebrain which leaves me flecking the innocent phosphor screen with spittle shouting about 1948, Lebanon, Charlie Wilson's War, Rumsfeld/McFarlane, the cake and the Bible, and the House of Saud.
After that things return rather quickly to normal, and by 13 SEPT I can even hold normal conversations with friends without more than an occasional mutter about "the fucking moron-grade American public..."
All very entertaining, but...now that the ranting is done, what now?
Over at MilPub one of the commentors brought up a post on the blog "Zenpundit" that he considered the best observation of 9/11 he had read that day. I went over and read it and found a generic "The Day History Changed" (because, of course, the Soviet Union never fell in 1989...) sort of thing, with the usual mild "perhaps we should re-examine some of the choices we made that day" caveat at the end.
And that got me thinking. Okay, so, first; what things DID change that day?
Well, remember on 11 SEPT 2001 the U.S. was snakebit by one of the snakes we'd been handling since 1948, and not in a good way (our snake made the other snakes play mean, and we had done some snake-slapping ourselves) so while it shouldn't have been a surprise the sheer effectiveness of it was a nasty shock. We'd gotten used to the idea that those Allah-pesterers were pretty much hopeless fuckups, so the notion that they could kill large groups of Americans (that is, large groups of Americans not dispatched on pointless show-the-flag-missions in the Levant by Saint Ronald of Hollywood) using boxcutters and lead pipes was a novel one.
So overseas we did what we do; we went and fucked us up some wogs. First in Afghanistan (where, in justice, the tricksy bastards who smote us were lurking and, besides, it was a wretched hive of scum and villainy, anyway) but then in Iraq (which had nothing the fuck to do with 9/11 but, hell, Saddam was a right git and his sons had stupid names (Uday? Who the fuck is named "Uday"?) and we'd been itching to pimpslap him since back in '92) and then pretty much all over the Arab world, with drone aircraft, anyway. Busy, busy little Yankees!
But at home we were even busier! We did some things we hadn't done - much - before; we set up secret ways to spy on people (who were supposed to be Evul Terrists but, hey - it was SECRET. So who the fuck knows?), we started files on everyone who was different and scary; Muslim clerics, peace activists, chicks with hairy pits, Mormons (oh, wait, no...Mormons were only scary to teabaggers. Oh, wait - most of the people we spied on were scary to teabaggers. Carry on).
We passed something called the "USA PATRIOT Act" which let cops and spies do all sorts of cool stuff they'd been forbidden to do for years because, well, the last time they did it they railroaded a bunch of people for stuff they didn't do and spied on domestic political "enemies"...and that was just the part we KNOW about - supposedly there's this "Secret" PATRIOT Act that lets the door-kickers and snoopers do a lot MORE stuff, except, y'know, it's fucking SECRET, so we have no fucking idea what it involves.
We jammed a bunch of different agencies - the Coast Guard, the DEA, the guys who inspect poultry - into this monster superagency, called in the "Department of Homeland Security", tossed an assload of money at it and told it to go and...do stuff to scary brown people. Or something. We opened secret prisons and put secret prisoners in them because...well, it's SECRET, dummy, so we didn't know exactly why they were there except our Leaders told us they were bad, scary people, the "worst of the worst".
Except the ones we let go because, well, they turned out to be goatherders, or innocent Canadians, or carpet beaters ratted out by the guy who was sleeping with their wives.
Yeah, that.
But, anyway, I think we've pretty much pegged the stuff that Zenpundit's guy said we should "re-examine"; a bunch of wars abroad and a bunch of domestic snooping and spying at home.
So let's "re-examine" them. Let's. Let's put on our Yankee Thinking Caps and try to figure out whether there was anything different we could have done about all that crap.
Wars and Rumors of Wars
Believe it or not, I don't actually think that the original, 2002, 114th Afghan War (surely they must be up in at least the low three figures by now, right?) was all that bad a move. Probably could have been done a little slicker with some cunning diplomacy, an assassination and a bribe or three, but, really - they're Afghans; feud, revenge, making an affray, putting in fear...that's cake and ice cream to them. Even the Taliban probably expected the hiding they got. It's the Afghan Way, the central Asian version of a chicken in every pot; a cluster bomb in every Islamic Center.
Now, having done the traditional punitive expedition, the notion of hanging around trying to kill enough Pashtuns to turn the place into Waterbury with more goats was simply stupid. But that was eclipsed by the Really Big Stupid; Iraq.
And, frankly, there is only one way to "re-examine" Iraq. Aggressive war is a crime under the Nuremburg verdicts.
We hung people like Jodl and Ribbentrop and Tojo for it.
Until Dubya and Dick and Wolfie and the rest are hanging alongside them we will never be able to "re-examine" Iraq in any sane fashion. Admitting that we - that members of our elected government, with our tacit approval - committed a war crime (that lead to the useless, meaningless deaths of thousands) and many subsequent crimes is the only possible first step to "re-examining" that lunacy and preventing its repetition.
And that, we will never do.
And the other thing we will never do is "re-examine" the two main pillars of our treatment of the Middle East; the Israel First, and the Your Gas Is Really Our Gas policies.
We made a conscious decision to put Israel's welfare before our own selfish interests back in 1948. All the old State Department hands - the guys who had made their bones in the Middle East, the guys who (mostly) were defenestrated by the Red witch-hunters after State "lost China" in the late Forties and early Fifties - warned Truman about that. But we made our bed, and we choose to continue to lie in it.
You know how I feel about Israel our "ally". But I am a very small minority, and I accept that so long as we have Israel's back - with all that entails, such as supporting pro-Israeli/anti-Islamist dictators like the Mubaraks and the Sauds - we put ourselves at odds with the bulk of the Middle Eastern Arab and Muslim populations.
So, too, our incessant need for petroleum, which means our need for pliant bobos or buyable clowns on the gaddis of the petroleum states. So we prop up the Shah in Iran, or the Gaddafi's in Libya, or the Malikis in Iraq, regardless of the enmity...and until the wrath...of their own peoples becomes too great.
But in the process we ensure ourselves of a constant, running, low-grade warfare with certain elements in the Islamic world. There is no element of the foolish "Islamofascism" or "hating our freedoms" so beloved of the GOP's wingnut brigade. Rather, they hate our Israel, or they hate our porn, or our bare-legged women, or our greed for their petroleum, or their disregard for their lives.
This makes them no better (and no worse) that we. They are acting selfishly, their selfish interests will always collide with ours if we persist in the policies we have pursued - and we show little or no interest in or willingness to change them - and so we are fated to encounter these Islamic characters until either we change or they do. There is no real other option.
We simply cannot have Israel, cheap Arab petroleum, and peace with the hard-core Islamists and Arab nationalists.
So that "re-examination" leads to the grim conclusions that we are in for a long, long century.
The Laughing Policeman
On the Home Front, however, what holds us back is not inevitable collision but moral and political cowardice.
We have erected, brick by brick, a monstrous edifice of surveillance and secret machination. Little in U.S. history since the Alien and Sedition Acts, or perhaps some of the most extreme lawlessness enacted in actual wars (such as Lincoln's violation of habeas corpus or Roosevelt's Japanese internment) can equal the sheer grandiosity of this vast and secretive erection. We have granted, out of our fear and anger, immense powers to our most uncontrolled servants and trusted them to remain servile.
Why, I do not know.
And, by and large, these powers have gone unneeded and unused for the demolition of actual "terrorist" plots and plans. Most of the domestic acts of "terror" have been foiled by simple citizens, or random customs agents, or street cops snitched on to someone. Several of the most "nefarious" plots appear to have been largely the work of government agents, who have tracked down various disgruntled and unhinged individuals, coaxed them, coached them, made their weapons for them, even driven them to the "terror" site before arresting them.
And many of these powers are even less comprehensible than that, like the 21st Century equivalent of the lettre de cachet, the "national security letter", that cannot even be mentioned under pain of imprisonment. We cannot know if the lettre de...excuse me, the "national security letter" has been misused...because those against whom it has been used cannot speak of their misuse, and if they attempt to do so they will find themselves in another modernization of Bourbon justice, the Chateau d'If of the "secret prison".
Can you imagine a United States with "secret prisons"? With nameless prisoners, latter-day Monte Cristos but in their orange jumpsuits and hoods? With secret letters demanding secret interrogations, carried on in secret and then buried below further layers of secrecy, lowered into a well a midnight, never to be known?
Is this the United States we pledged to as children? And if not, why not?
Because of some raggedy Islamic fantasists plotting in some dumpy motel in Lahore?
In a sane world we would shake our heads like a dog shaking off water, and immediately eighty-six about 99 percent of the ridiculous security rigamarole we've invented since 9/11, starting with the "PATRIOT" Act, the AUMF, and continuing from there. We'd relegate "terrorism" to the nuisance status it deserves and making in the province of our State Department and our spy agencies, who could make the appropriate recommendations to Congress and the President when they spotted another bin Laden lurking behind the arras.
Because, as I said, he will come. When you fight an old enemy long enough he will throw out the occasional Mosby, or bin Ladin, or Francis Marion.
But sending out troops to beat the hustings where he may be born...or sending in police to snoop and sneak on Americans guilty of nothing more than disliking WalMart or protesting foreign policy...is worse than a crime. It is a mistake, and one that we have been paying for this long decade.
But...
Again, to undo all of this harm would be to admit that we were sniveling, mewling cowards to begin with. To admit that we fucked up dozens of people's lives for no better reason than our own bed-wetting fears. And to accept the calumny due us for being frightened little weasels too small to deserve the freedoms we so boldly lay claim to, and yet so quickly piss away rather than face any potential for harm.
And we would rather give up ALL those freedoms than accept that.
So, in brief; abroad we cannot have peace with a segment of Islam - unless we radically change our goals and interests in the Middle East, which we have and continue to show no interest in doing - while at home we will not have liberty - unless we radically accept responsibility for our own panicked fuckups as well as the risk inherent in living in an open society.
So in that sense the dead of 9/11 really DID die in vain, or worse - their deaths have made their nation a smaller, meaner, more secretive, less dynamic place.
We were given a chance of greatness and instead we went shopping - on credit - whilst fools and knaves led us into dark places.
"It is by our own feathers, and not by others' shafts, are we now stricken"
My last post was a straight-up rant, and one that those who know me have learned to dread. By late August they are avoiding meeting with me, or attending any sort of event where politics or recent history may be discussed, but as early as the First of September they are even dodging my phone calls and deleting my text messages before reading them, knowing that my vitriolic bile will be reaching explosively toxic levels.
The actual detonation is usually reserved for the collision of some innoffensively idiotic television 9/11 retrospective and my forebrain which leaves me flecking the innocent phosphor screen with spittle shouting about 1948, Lebanon, Charlie Wilson's War, Rumsfeld/McFarlane, the cake and the Bible, and the House of Saud.
After that things return rather quickly to normal, and by 13 SEPT I can even hold normal conversations with friends without more than an occasional mutter about "the fucking moron-grade American public..."
All very entertaining, but...now that the ranting is done, what now?
Over at MilPub one of the commentors brought up a post on the blog "Zenpundit" that he considered the best observation of 9/11 he had read that day. I went over and read it and found a generic "The Day History Changed" (because, of course, the Soviet Union never fell in 1989...) sort of thing, with the usual mild "perhaps we should re-examine some of the choices we made that day" caveat at the end.
And that got me thinking. Okay, so, first; what things DID change that day?
Well, remember on 11 SEPT 2001 the U.S. was snakebit by one of the snakes we'd been handling since 1948, and not in a good way (our snake made the other snakes play mean, and we had done some snake-slapping ourselves) so while it shouldn't have been a surprise the sheer effectiveness of it was a nasty shock. We'd gotten used to the idea that those Allah-pesterers were pretty much hopeless fuckups, so the notion that they could kill large groups of Americans (that is, large groups of Americans not dispatched on pointless show-the-flag-missions in the Levant by Saint Ronald of Hollywood) using boxcutters and lead pipes was a novel one.
So overseas we did what we do; we went and fucked us up some wogs. First in Afghanistan (where, in justice, the tricksy bastards who smote us were lurking and, besides, it was a wretched hive of scum and villainy, anyway) but then in Iraq (which had nothing the fuck to do with 9/11 but, hell, Saddam was a right git and his sons had stupid names (Uday? Who the fuck is named "Uday"?) and we'd been itching to pimpslap him since back in '92) and then pretty much all over the Arab world, with drone aircraft, anyway. Busy, busy little Yankees!
But at home we were even busier! We did some things we hadn't done - much - before; we set up secret ways to spy on people (who were supposed to be Evul Terrists but, hey - it was SECRET. So who the fuck knows?), we started files on everyone who was different and scary; Muslim clerics, peace activists, chicks with hairy pits, Mormons (oh, wait, no...Mormons were only scary to teabaggers. Oh, wait - most of the people we spied on were scary to teabaggers. Carry on).
We passed something called the "USA PATRIOT Act" which let cops and spies do all sorts of cool stuff they'd been forbidden to do for years because, well, the last time they did it they railroaded a bunch of people for stuff they didn't do and spied on domestic political "enemies"...and that was just the part we KNOW about - supposedly there's this "Secret" PATRIOT Act that lets the door-kickers and snoopers do a lot MORE stuff, except, y'know, it's fucking SECRET, so we have no fucking idea what it involves.
We jammed a bunch of different agencies - the Coast Guard, the DEA, the guys who inspect poultry - into this monster superagency, called in the "Department of Homeland Security", tossed an assload of money at it and told it to go and...do stuff to scary brown people. Or something. We opened secret prisons and put secret prisoners in them because...well, it's SECRET, dummy, so we didn't know exactly why they were there except our Leaders told us they were bad, scary people, the "worst of the worst".
Except the ones we let go because, well, they turned out to be goatherders, or innocent Canadians, or carpet beaters ratted out by the guy who was sleeping with their wives.
Yeah, that.
But, anyway, I think we've pretty much pegged the stuff that Zenpundit's guy said we should "re-examine"; a bunch of wars abroad and a bunch of domestic snooping and spying at home.
So let's "re-examine" them. Let's. Let's put on our Yankee Thinking Caps and try to figure out whether there was anything different we could have done about all that crap.
Wars and Rumors of Wars
Believe it or not, I don't actually think that the original, 2002, 114th Afghan War (surely they must be up in at least the low three figures by now, right?) was all that bad a move. Probably could have been done a little slicker with some cunning diplomacy, an assassination and a bribe or three, but, really - they're Afghans; feud, revenge, making an affray, putting in fear...that's cake and ice cream to them. Even the Taliban probably expected the hiding they got. It's the Afghan Way, the central Asian version of a chicken in every pot; a cluster bomb in every Islamic Center.
Now, having done the traditional punitive expedition, the notion of hanging around trying to kill enough Pashtuns to turn the place into Waterbury with more goats was simply stupid. But that was eclipsed by the Really Big Stupid; Iraq.
And, frankly, there is only one way to "re-examine" Iraq. Aggressive war is a crime under the Nuremburg verdicts.
We hung people like Jodl and Ribbentrop and Tojo for it.
Until Dubya and Dick and Wolfie and the rest are hanging alongside them we will never be able to "re-examine" Iraq in any sane fashion. Admitting that we - that members of our elected government, with our tacit approval - committed a war crime (that lead to the useless, meaningless deaths of thousands) and many subsequent crimes is the only possible first step to "re-examining" that lunacy and preventing its repetition.
And that, we will never do.
And the other thing we will never do is "re-examine" the two main pillars of our treatment of the Middle East; the Israel First, and the Your Gas Is Really Our Gas policies.
We made a conscious decision to put Israel's welfare before our own selfish interests back in 1948. All the old State Department hands - the guys who had made their bones in the Middle East, the guys who (mostly) were defenestrated by the Red witch-hunters after State "lost China" in the late Forties and early Fifties - warned Truman about that. But we made our bed, and we choose to continue to lie in it.
You know how I feel about Israel our "ally". But I am a very small minority, and I accept that so long as we have Israel's back - with all that entails, such as supporting pro-Israeli/anti-Islamist dictators like the Mubaraks and the Sauds - we put ourselves at odds with the bulk of the Middle Eastern Arab and Muslim populations.
So, too, our incessant need for petroleum, which means our need for pliant bobos or buyable clowns on the gaddis of the petroleum states. So we prop up the Shah in Iran, or the Gaddafi's in Libya, or the Malikis in Iraq, regardless of the enmity...and until the wrath...of their own peoples becomes too great.
But in the process we ensure ourselves of a constant, running, low-grade warfare with certain elements in the Islamic world. There is no element of the foolish "Islamofascism" or "hating our freedoms" so beloved of the GOP's wingnut brigade. Rather, they hate our Israel, or they hate our porn, or our bare-legged women, or our greed for their petroleum, or their disregard for their lives.
This makes them no better (and no worse) that we. They are acting selfishly, their selfish interests will always collide with ours if we persist in the policies we have pursued - and we show little or no interest in or willingness to change them - and so we are fated to encounter these Islamic characters until either we change or they do. There is no real other option.
We simply cannot have Israel, cheap Arab petroleum, and peace with the hard-core Islamists and Arab nationalists.
So that "re-examination" leads to the grim conclusions that we are in for a long, long century.
The Laughing Policeman
On the Home Front, however, what holds us back is not inevitable collision but moral and political cowardice.
We have erected, brick by brick, a monstrous edifice of surveillance and secret machination. Little in U.S. history since the Alien and Sedition Acts, or perhaps some of the most extreme lawlessness enacted in actual wars (such as Lincoln's violation of habeas corpus or Roosevelt's Japanese internment) can equal the sheer grandiosity of this vast and secretive erection. We have granted, out of our fear and anger, immense powers to our most uncontrolled servants and trusted them to remain servile.
Why, I do not know.
And, by and large, these powers have gone unneeded and unused for the demolition of actual "terrorist" plots and plans. Most of the domestic acts of "terror" have been foiled by simple citizens, or random customs agents, or street cops snitched on to someone. Several of the most "nefarious" plots appear to have been largely the work of government agents, who have tracked down various disgruntled and unhinged individuals, coaxed them, coached them, made their weapons for them, even driven them to the "terror" site before arresting them.
And many of these powers are even less comprehensible than that, like the 21st Century equivalent of the lettre de cachet, the "national security letter", that cannot even be mentioned under pain of imprisonment. We cannot know if the lettre de...excuse me, the "national security letter" has been misused...because those against whom it has been used cannot speak of their misuse, and if they attempt to do so they will find themselves in another modernization of Bourbon justice, the Chateau d'If of the "secret prison".
Can you imagine a United States with "secret prisons"? With nameless prisoners, latter-day Monte Cristos but in their orange jumpsuits and hoods? With secret letters demanding secret interrogations, carried on in secret and then buried below further layers of secrecy, lowered into a well a midnight, never to be known?
Is this the United States we pledged to as children? And if not, why not?
Because of some raggedy Islamic fantasists plotting in some dumpy motel in Lahore?
In a sane world we would shake our heads like a dog shaking off water, and immediately eighty-six about 99 percent of the ridiculous security rigamarole we've invented since 9/11, starting with the "PATRIOT" Act, the AUMF, and continuing from there. We'd relegate "terrorism" to the nuisance status it deserves and making in the province of our State Department and our spy agencies, who could make the appropriate recommendations to Congress and the President when they spotted another bin Laden lurking behind the arras.
Because, as I said, he will come. When you fight an old enemy long enough he will throw out the occasional Mosby, or bin Ladin, or Francis Marion.
But sending out troops to beat the hustings where he may be born...or sending in police to snoop and sneak on Americans guilty of nothing more than disliking WalMart or protesting foreign policy...is worse than a crime. It is a mistake, and one that we have been paying for this long decade.
But...
Again, to undo all of this harm would be to admit that we were sniveling, mewling cowards to begin with. To admit that we fucked up dozens of people's lives for no better reason than our own bed-wetting fears. And to accept the calumny due us for being frightened little weasels too small to deserve the freedoms we so boldly lay claim to, and yet so quickly piss away rather than face any potential for harm.
And we would rather give up ALL those freedoms than accept that.
So, in brief; abroad we cannot have peace with a segment of Islam - unless we radically change our goals and interests in the Middle East, which we have and continue to show no interest in doing - while at home we will not have liberty - unless we radically accept responsibility for our own panicked fuckups as well as the risk inherent in living in an open society.
So in that sense the dead of 9/11 really DID die in vain, or worse - their deaths have made their nation a smaller, meaner, more secretive, less dynamic place.
We were given a chance of greatness and instead we went shopping - on credit - whilst fools and knaves led us into dark places.
"It is by our own feathers, and not by others' shafts, are we now stricken"
Thursday, April 28, 2011
μὴ μου τοὺς κύκλους τάραττε: The Inner Circle
This spring I have been slowly realizing that I am well on my way to losing my faith in the ability of my country as a nation, and my fellow Americans as citizens, to act intelligently, decently, with honesty, and with humanity.
I am developing the attitude that my government and the classes that run it are thoroughly mortgaged to the wealthy and powerful, that it cannot be relied upon to act in any interests but theirs. That they are addicted to the adrenaline of foreign wars. That they are blinded by their own hubris and self-love into willful blindness to their own cruelty, venality, and mendacity. That they are becoming baleful actors abroad, and a vile, moronic - wait! Did you hear that? Someone just praised Donald Fucking Trump as a potential Presidential candidate! Fuck me sideways! - pottage of scum and villany at home. That We the People, the putative rulers of this decrepit state, have become so inured to the toxic combination of elite malfeasance, public indifference, corporate greed, the idiocy of the Cheney Right, and the mewling, puking unwillingness of all and sundry to stand up and question where we're going and what we're doing in the handbasket that the chances of changing direction or destination at this point is somewhere between unlikely and impossible.
In other words, we're well and truly fucked.
But...here's the thing. I don't think we here in the U.S. are actively worse than any other nation in the world. And better than some; we're certainly no North Korea or Zimbabwe. And we are certainly better off than the two other Great Powers, kleptocratic Russia and gerontocratic China. We're not actively evil; we don't intend to do wrong.
But if there is somewhere an Eternal Verity, a commandment lit up in baby spotlights and neon it is this; intentions don't matter. Acts, and results, do.
My country is and has been behaving foolishly, and oftimes badly. And it has made itself so oligarchic that a private citizen such as myself without access to wealth, influence, or power, without favors to give or bribes to bestow cannot budge the tiller of the ship of state so much as a millimeter. I thought that I had helped, two years ago this autumn, in electing a so-called Democrat.
But the system has clearly been so damaged that the most "liberal" person electable cannot change the heading of the ship of state from its heading towards increasing oligarchy and overstretch.
And this small loudspeaker of a blog...well, doesn't speak very loud. Because otherwise why do people like Krauthammer and Brooks and the loathsome Limbaugh continue to pollute the air years after I wrote:
We know the problems are out there.
We either don't want to hear about them. Or we don't want to deal with them. Or we lack the power to change them.
So I while don't think we're falling into some bottomless well of wrongdoing like Stalin's Soviet or Mao's China or Hitler's Germany and I don't fear that we will reap a whirlwind of revenge from other nations, I am less and less inclined to involve myself in or sacrifice myself and my own for them.
It seems to me that we're going the way of 18th Century Spain, or Great Britain in the last century; a slow, steady slide into desuetude. Inconsequence for our grandees, relative poverty for peasants like me and mine. Ever more encounters with the niggling irritants of decline; things that don't work, business undone, carelessness, problems that might be mistakes or that might be deliberate. The top and bottom will continue to drift apart; the top spume will float off in frivolous excess, the heavy bottom mass subside into whipped indifference.
All set to the blaring inanities of advertising jingles.
This is how our world ends; not with a bang, but with a Levitra commercial.
So, you ask; what now?
Well, as luck would have it, I currently live in a good part of the world. The Pacific Northwest has long been blessed by a mild climate and a spectacular coincidence of land and water. Our soils - when we stop paving them over - are marvelously fertile, our forests - when we can resist clearcutting them - wellsprings of life.
Oregon is a verdant mixture of city and farm, forest and desert, mountain and valley.
Although we have backcountry full of goobers, birthers, and inbreds, we have a surprisingly communal pack of freebooters and innovators here.
If there is anyplace in the U.S. I have hope for it is here. We need to club our Teatards, and yes, we have them, like the rabid weasels they are. We need to quit sucking up to our malefactors of great wealth. But here, at least, is a place I have hope that I can make a difference.
And within this circle are even smaller ones that I can hope to keep the good and effect to change the wrong; my community of St. Johns, my children's school, my city of Portland.
I don't pretend that I can shelter all of these inner circles from the storms that rage outside. We have more than our share of fools that are raptured by the foolery on the Big Stage; we cannot cut off the television or the radio and still the voices of the infotainment buffoonery that we've embraced as a nation.
But we can reply with our own brand of commonsense. We - I - can hope to make here some sort of sane alternative to the ignorance and fatuity of the nation at large. In my children I can hope to instill some degree of sense as well, enough, I hope, that they will see the world and its lunacies with the eyes of compassion...but of clarity, as well, and of unsparing honesty.
So while I have the wisdom to know what I cannot change, I hope I have the strength to change what I can, here, within the shadow of my own fir tree and the sun that shines down upon my home.
I am developing the attitude that my government and the classes that run it are thoroughly mortgaged to the wealthy and powerful, that it cannot be relied upon to act in any interests but theirs. That they are addicted to the adrenaline of foreign wars. That they are blinded by their own hubris and self-love into willful blindness to their own cruelty, venality, and mendacity. That they are becoming baleful actors abroad, and a vile, moronic - wait! Did you hear that? Someone just praised Donald Fucking Trump as a potential Presidential candidate! Fuck me sideways! - pottage of scum and villany at home. That We the People, the putative rulers of this decrepit state, have become so inured to the toxic combination of elite malfeasance, public indifference, corporate greed, the idiocy of the Cheney Right, and the mewling, puking unwillingness of all and sundry to stand up and question where we're going and what we're doing in the handbasket that the chances of changing direction or destination at this point is somewhere between unlikely and impossible.
In other words, we're well and truly fucked.
But...here's the thing. I don't think we here in the U.S. are actively worse than any other nation in the world. And better than some; we're certainly no North Korea or Zimbabwe. And we are certainly better off than the two other Great Powers, kleptocratic Russia and gerontocratic China. We're not actively evil; we don't intend to do wrong.
But if there is somewhere an Eternal Verity, a commandment lit up in baby spotlights and neon it is this; intentions don't matter. Acts, and results, do.
My country is and has been behaving foolishly, and oftimes badly. And it has made itself so oligarchic that a private citizen such as myself without access to wealth, influence, or power, without favors to give or bribes to bestow cannot budge the tiller of the ship of state so much as a millimeter. I thought that I had helped, two years ago this autumn, in electing a so-called Democrat.
But the system has clearly been so damaged that the most "liberal" person electable cannot change the heading of the ship of state from its heading towards increasing oligarchy and overstretch.
And this small loudspeaker of a blog...well, doesn't speak very loud. Because otherwise why do people like Krauthammer and Brooks and the loathsome Limbaugh continue to pollute the air years after I wrote:
"I get the feeling that we're all talked out here.That was written about Iraq. But it could have been written about the levees of New Orleans or the bridges over the Mississippi. Written about the S&L bubble or the dot-com bubble or the mortgage bubble. Written about the Deepwater Horizon or, hell, about any number of goddamn obviously fucked up incompetences that we've watched over the past twenty years or so.
We all know what’s happening: we can see the iceberg. It's huge, it's gouging its way deep into the hull, and we've spent the last two to three years pounding the helmsman on the back of the skull, shouting "Turn, you idiot! You're ramming a fucking iceberg!" only to have him slew around and stare at us with that skeevy grin and babble some inanity about "staying the course" and "no substitute for victory".
We know that the water is going to be cold, and the bottom is a freezing blackness that we will never feel at the end of that long, spiraling drop into the abyss.
And we know, because we can hear the clink of glasses and the bray of the band that on the saloon deck that many of our fellow passengers are still gobbling their meals and charging their glasses to the soothing sound of the stagefront crooner. Nothing we've said has touched them. No scolding, no pleading, no explaining will make them tear the lunatic helmsman from the wheel. The fear may be hidden in their hearts, but they won't stand up and act, won't admit that the damage is already done, that the black water is already pouring in, the ship is already doomed, and that whatever illusions of "victory" they have will end when the icy sea closes over our heads."
We know the problems are out there.
We either don't want to hear about them. Or we don't want to deal with them. Or we lack the power to change them.
So I while don't think we're falling into some bottomless well of wrongdoing like Stalin's Soviet or Mao's China or Hitler's Germany and I don't fear that we will reap a whirlwind of revenge from other nations, I am less and less inclined to involve myself in or sacrifice myself and my own for them.
It seems to me that we're going the way of 18th Century Spain, or Great Britain in the last century; a slow, steady slide into desuetude. Inconsequence for our grandees, relative poverty for peasants like me and mine. Ever more encounters with the niggling irritants of decline; things that don't work, business undone, carelessness, problems that might be mistakes or that might be deliberate. The top and bottom will continue to drift apart; the top spume will float off in frivolous excess, the heavy bottom mass subside into whipped indifference.
All set to the blaring inanities of advertising jingles.
This is how our world ends; not with a bang, but with a Levitra commercial.
So, you ask; what now?
Well, as luck would have it, I currently live in a good part of the world. The Pacific Northwest has long been blessed by a mild climate and a spectacular coincidence of land and water. Our soils - when we stop paving them over - are marvelously fertile, our forests - when we can resist clearcutting them - wellsprings of life.
Oregon is a verdant mixture of city and farm, forest and desert, mountain and valley.
Although we have backcountry full of goobers, birthers, and inbreds, we have a surprisingly communal pack of freebooters and innovators here.
If there is anyplace in the U.S. I have hope for it is here. We need to club our Teatards, and yes, we have them, like the rabid weasels they are. We need to quit sucking up to our malefactors of great wealth. But here, at least, is a place I have hope that I can make a difference.
And within this circle are even smaller ones that I can hope to keep the good and effect to change the wrong; my community of St. Johns, my children's school, my city of Portland.
I don't pretend that I can shelter all of these inner circles from the storms that rage outside. We have more than our share of fools that are raptured by the foolery on the Big Stage; we cannot cut off the television or the radio and still the voices of the infotainment buffoonery that we've embraced as a nation.
But we can reply with our own brand of commonsense. We - I - can hope to make here some sort of sane alternative to the ignorance and fatuity of the nation at large. In my children I can hope to instill some degree of sense as well, enough, I hope, that they will see the world and its lunacies with the eyes of compassion...but of clarity, as well, and of unsparing honesty.
So while I have the wisdom to know what I cannot change, I hope I have the strength to change what I can, here, within the shadow of my own fir tree and the sun that shines down upon my home.
Friday, April 22, 2011
μὴ μου τοὺς κύκλους τάραττε: The Outer Circle
I've been silent here for a long time, or so it seems to me.
Here it is almost the end of April and I've posted, what, five times?
I realized just this week that I have lost...something...some critical passion or fire that kept bringing me here.
One thing, I think, is the realization that this place is now so empty, that so many friends and readers have gone.
I enjoy writing for its own sake, but one of the main reasons I write here is to try and get my ideas heard and hear back from those who read my writing. And while I love talking to Lisa, mike, Ael, Pluto, the folks who come for the "battles" posts like Leon and Don Francisco, well...it seems like such a small circle. Much as I enjoy our little community, blogging means time, thought, and work, and I had once hoped that work would enable me to reach out much further.
Realizing that it's just the few of us in this little room, frankly, makes me think that the Facebook contingent might have something. At least all they have to work on is 520 characters. (He snorts...)
And MilPub, too, absorbs a lot of energy; my military and political writing that once came here ends up there being discussed in ways that make the sad idleness of the cross-posts here all the more frustrating.
But I think it's broader, and deeper than that.
Way back in probably 2007ish or so I wrote a post here called "Don't Disturb My Circles".
In it I talked about the Grand Illusion of parenting; that we, we parents, could somehow, through will, or effort, or just hope, divert the the terror by night and the arrow that flieth by day.
That we could
And when I say "control", I mean only that we could protect our children from physical harm.
Mojo and I know, in a way I hope few parents know, and will ever know, that the harm is always there. We can never forget that. And if we ever do, the fine gray skiff of ash inside the wooden matryoshka doll on the shelf in our bedroom is there to remind us that though
And to that pain the only options are to surrender, or endure it and continue. We chose to risk the dark seas of Fortune and have there continued our journey as parents.
But I didn't really want to talk about parenting again.
I wanted to talk about my country.
Because in the earlier post, I talked about how part of parenting is a deliberate decision to ignore the statistical facts that a certain number of children will die or be maimed by auto accidents, falls, poisons, disease, violent acts...and that in the most incisive parsing of persons and circumstances there is no way of ensuring that your - our - own children are protected from harm. Instead we live our lives as if those awful fates were not possible, as if we could spend the remainder of our lives tracing our children's hopes and dreams in the dust and that the shadow was just the plane tree from across the garden and not a Roman soldier with his sword red in his hand.
Right now I think more and more about that because of what I see in my country.
First, let me just say that making a democracy work seems to require some fairly simple things.
Yes, I know that there many, many difficult things within those "simple things" - a googleplexmillion, as my son would say, of complicated individual choices and decisions. The devil is, as always, in the details.
But it seems to me that the overarching principles seem pretty commonsensical:
Involve everyone in the life of the nation to the extent possible.
Try to keep the citizens "citizens", and not rulers and ruled. That means that extreme wealth and extreme poverty, extreme partisanship and extreme homogeneity, extreme power and extreme weakness are all inimical to making a country work. The critical mass in the middle exists not as a lump unable to choose a pole but as an active force of median values; practicality, sense, compassion, bravery, honesty, fidelity.
Make the place as equitable and fair as possible; let those who can exceed do so, but not by letting those who can't fall below the level of "citizen".
Help for the sick, the weak, the old; callousness makes a nation vicious, not strong.
Be strong, but not swaggering, powerful, but not rapacious. Don't go looking for fights; enough trouble will come your way without seeking it.
Spend within one's means, but recognize that polities have common goods with spending on. Accept that taxes are the price we pay for civilization, and that those who reap the most benefits pay the highest price, and should do so gladly and graciously.
Aim for self-sufficiency. It's one thing to trade, another to be dependent on things like minerals and petroleum that we as a nation can't produce for ourselves. It presents the ugly choice between a hostage to, or a thief of, the things - such as petroleum - that the nation lacks.
...
I know that my country never really lived up to those ideals. But I look around now and it seems that I can barely recognize the nation I grew up in, I can't ignore the ignorance, greed, short-sightedness and general fucktardry.
My country seems determined to tear apart the structures that helped form it as I knew it for no better fucking reason that because our wealthy seem to object to paying taxes and our "leaders" seem addicted to foreign war.
Instead of possibilities like a Manhattan Project to solve our dependence on the petroleum we must buy or take from others, our energy seems to be invested in arguing about aborting pregnancies and similar nonsense.
Instead of asking why we seem to insist on giving up our liberties for some illusion of safety from scary Terrorists, and our broad base of economic power for a narrowing and precarious - but taller - pyramid of lucre, we worry about idols and silly street crime.
I would never, never in my life have imagined "Busted" magazine as little as two years ago. But there seems to depth to the folly we delight in, and not simple, harmless foolery that we hairless monkeys have always delighted in but the sort of bone-deep stupid that begins to warp and twist the very structure of our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.
And I feel powerless to stop any of this.
I have tried conventional politics, and helped replace our senior Oregon senator with a man who seems to believe in the ideas I mentioned above. I voted - not gleefully and with a dull resignation - for the current president and his party. In hopes that they would fight for the nation I grew up in.
And, instead, watched them and their entire organization cower from, and truckle to, the people who seem to think it would be good if my country returned to the time when power, and wealth, were reserved for a small elite - assuming, I suspect, they they will be in that elite. I have watched the people I thought would fight for the sort of America I grew up in; the America of the living wage, of the GI Bill, where old people and sick people could, at least, have some hope of evading a Dickensian casting off...I have watched them squirm to evade being called "liberal" and flinch under the invective of liars, buffoons, idiots, and lunatics.
And I look around and just don't see a hope of changing this. The alternatives appear to be either the new Oligarchs...or those who run before the oligarchs.
My country is being commodified, privatized, outsourced, downsized, monetized, saturated with advertisements, war porn, greed, and foolishness. It is getting "leaders" like...Donald Trump.
While I recognize that much of the history of humanity has always been thus, it is painful for me to watch it happen again, to my own land, and know that anything I can do is less than a grain of sand in this vasty deep of clusterfuckery.
...
So, as with parenting, I can't keep the Romans outside the walls. I can't prevent the terrors, avert the bad choices, make decisions for the governing of my Syracuse in hopes that it will avoid the siege and sack. All I can do is try and keep them from disturbing MY circles. The circles I have some hope of control over and feeling for.
It hurts my heart to admit that I no longer feel that I can make any real positive change for my country, but my country seems to me to have mortgaged itself to its wealthiest citizens and industries, and I haven't the power or the riches to compete with them.
All I can do is look to my family, my home, my neighborhood, my city. My little circles in the dust.
And in the next post, I want to talk about that.
Here it is almost the end of April and I've posted, what, five times?
I realized just this week that I have lost...something...some critical passion or fire that kept bringing me here.
One thing, I think, is the realization that this place is now so empty, that so many friends and readers have gone.
I enjoy writing for its own sake, but one of the main reasons I write here is to try and get my ideas heard and hear back from those who read my writing. And while I love talking to Lisa, mike, Ael, Pluto, the folks who come for the "battles" posts like Leon and Don Francisco, well...it seems like such a small circle. Much as I enjoy our little community, blogging means time, thought, and work, and I had once hoped that work would enable me to reach out much further.
Realizing that it's just the few of us in this little room, frankly, makes me think that the Facebook contingent might have something. At least all they have to work on is 520 characters. (He snorts...)
And MilPub, too, absorbs a lot of energy; my military and political writing that once came here ends up there being discussed in ways that make the sad idleness of the cross-posts here all the more frustrating.
But I think it's broader, and deeper than that.
Way back in probably 2007ish or so I wrote a post here called "Don't Disturb My Circles".
In it I talked about the Grand Illusion of parenting; that we, we parents, could somehow, through will, or effort, or just hope, divert the the terror by night and the arrow that flieth by day.
That we could
"...manage our little piece of the world while the Heavens fall around us. We teach, we warn, we clutch, hold and pull away. We hide the scissors and cap the poisons and pad the corners and close our eyes at the daredeviltry and hope that the fates are kind and the ground soft. We compare car seats for impact performance, choose bike helmets for impact resistance, make healthy lunches, watch uplifting programs, read good books and teach good manners and confide good choices until it seems that we’re ready to fall over exhausted from so much care."And that somehow, by all these good choices, all this care, that we could control our world.
And when I say "control", I mean only that we could protect our children from physical harm.
Mojo and I know, in a way I hope few parents know, and will ever know, that the harm is always there. We can never forget that. And if we ever do, the fine gray skiff of ash inside the wooden matryoshka doll on the shelf in our bedroom is there to remind us that though
"...we may tell ourselves that anything that wants to hurt or kill our children will have to tear us apart before it does, as we do we realize that all our love and all our strength are helpless against a kinked umbilical cord, a flu germ, a moment’s inattention on the part of another driver."We live with that pain, and the fear of that pain, every day.
And to that pain the only options are to surrender, or endure it and continue. We chose to risk the dark seas of Fortune and have there continued our journey as parents.
But I didn't really want to talk about parenting again.
I wanted to talk about my country.
Because in the earlier post, I talked about how part of parenting is a deliberate decision to ignore the statistical facts that a certain number of children will die or be maimed by auto accidents, falls, poisons, disease, violent acts...and that in the most incisive parsing of persons and circumstances there is no way of ensuring that your - our - own children are protected from harm. Instead we live our lives as if those awful fates were not possible, as if we could spend the remainder of our lives tracing our children's hopes and dreams in the dust and that the shadow was just the plane tree from across the garden and not a Roman soldier with his sword red in his hand.
Right now I think more and more about that because of what I see in my country.
First, let me just say that making a democracy work seems to require some fairly simple things.
Yes, I know that there many, many difficult things within those "simple things" - a googleplexmillion, as my son would say, of complicated individual choices and decisions. The devil is, as always, in the details.
But it seems to me that the overarching principles seem pretty commonsensical:
Involve everyone in the life of the nation to the extent possible.
Try to keep the citizens "citizens", and not rulers and ruled. That means that extreme wealth and extreme poverty, extreme partisanship and extreme homogeneity, extreme power and extreme weakness are all inimical to making a country work. The critical mass in the middle exists not as a lump unable to choose a pole but as an active force of median values; practicality, sense, compassion, bravery, honesty, fidelity.
Make the place as equitable and fair as possible; let those who can exceed do so, but not by letting those who can't fall below the level of "citizen".
Help for the sick, the weak, the old; callousness makes a nation vicious, not strong.
Be strong, but not swaggering, powerful, but not rapacious. Don't go looking for fights; enough trouble will come your way without seeking it.
Spend within one's means, but recognize that polities have common goods with spending on. Accept that taxes are the price we pay for civilization, and that those who reap the most benefits pay the highest price, and should do so gladly and graciously.
Aim for self-sufficiency. It's one thing to trade, another to be dependent on things like minerals and petroleum that we as a nation can't produce for ourselves. It presents the ugly choice between a hostage to, or a thief of, the things - such as petroleum - that the nation lacks.
...
I know that my country never really lived up to those ideals. But I look around now and it seems that I can barely recognize the nation I grew up in, I can't ignore the ignorance, greed, short-sightedness and general fucktardry.
My country seems determined to tear apart the structures that helped form it as I knew it for no better fucking reason that because our wealthy seem to object to paying taxes and our "leaders" seem addicted to foreign war.
Instead of possibilities like a Manhattan Project to solve our dependence on the petroleum we must buy or take from others, our energy seems to be invested in arguing about aborting pregnancies and similar nonsense.
Instead of asking why we seem to insist on giving up our liberties for some illusion of safety from scary Terrorists, and our broad base of economic power for a narrowing and precarious - but taller - pyramid of lucre, we worry about idols and silly street crime.
I would never, never in my life have imagined "Busted" magazine as little as two years ago. But there seems to depth to the folly we delight in, and not simple, harmless foolery that we hairless monkeys have always delighted in but the sort of bone-deep stupid that begins to warp and twist the very structure of our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor.
And I feel powerless to stop any of this.
I have tried conventional politics, and helped replace our senior Oregon senator with a man who seems to believe in the ideas I mentioned above. I voted - not gleefully and with a dull resignation - for the current president and his party. In hopes that they would fight for the nation I grew up in.
And, instead, watched them and their entire organization cower from, and truckle to, the people who seem to think it would be good if my country returned to the time when power, and wealth, were reserved for a small elite - assuming, I suspect, they they will be in that elite. I have watched the people I thought would fight for the sort of America I grew up in; the America of the living wage, of the GI Bill, where old people and sick people could, at least, have some hope of evading a Dickensian casting off...I have watched them squirm to evade being called "liberal" and flinch under the invective of liars, buffoons, idiots, and lunatics.
And I look around and just don't see a hope of changing this. The alternatives appear to be either the new Oligarchs...or those who run before the oligarchs.
My country is being commodified, privatized, outsourced, downsized, monetized, saturated with advertisements, war porn, greed, and foolishness. It is getting "leaders" like...Donald Trump.
While I recognize that much of the history of humanity has always been thus, it is painful for me to watch it happen again, to my own land, and know that anything I can do is less than a grain of sand in this vasty deep of clusterfuckery.
...
So, as with parenting, I can't keep the Romans outside the walls. I can't prevent the terrors, avert the bad choices, make decisions for the governing of my Syracuse in hopes that it will avoid the siege and sack. All I can do is try and keep them from disturbing MY circles. The circles I have some hope of control over and feeling for.
It hurts my heart to admit that I no longer feel that I can make any real positive change for my country, but my country seems to me to have mortgaged itself to its wealthiest citizens and industries, and I haven't the power or the riches to compete with them.
All I can do is look to my family, my home, my neighborhood, my city. My little circles in the dust.
And in the next post, I want to talk about that.
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
Solstice
It seemed appropriate, on the longest night of the year, to ruminate a little on something that has been troubling me about my country.
First, let me start by saying that I have no silly illusions about what a certain strain of Americans like to refer to as our "exceptionalism". We're often a nice big ol' country. We have our moments of greatness, but we have our moments of great shame, as well. And I can't imagine where anyone gets the ridiculous notion that the United States has EVER been about "liberty and justice for all".
Something like a fraction of one percent of the residents of the U.S. in 1790 could vote at all. And throughout our history our politics has been influenced, and occasionally overwhelmed, by the wealthy and powerful. That's not a bug; that's a feature. The Founders distrusted the rabble, and intended that men (and they WERE men; they'd sooner have given the franchise to an anthropoid ape as a woman) of stability and property were the best choice to guide the nation, and so it has been.
So most Americans were left to shift as best they could. And, for the most part, that best wasn't all that bad, provided you were white, and lacked some disabling handicap like Irishness (for much of the early 19th Century) or Catholicism (until the latter part of the 20th) or too much zeal for the "rights" of people like blacks or women or gays or workers or...
But the U.S. didn't suck compared to, say, the Belgian Congo. You were free to say what you liked (provided you didn't care whether you had a job) and free to go where you wished and do what you wanted. This also meant you were free to starve: the law, as Victor Hugo said, in its impartial majesty forbid rich and poor alike to steal bread and sleep under bridges. You had a certain limited social mobility, which was more than you had as a serf in Russia or a peasant in Japan, say.
But you were still pretty much at the mercy of the Great and the Powerful. If the banksters fucked up and crashed the economy - which they did with great regularity in the 19th Century, only they were called "panics" then, and nobody but the little people who lost their farms or shops thought they were anything but business as usual - well, that was too bad for you if you got hosed. It was a red-meat society, and the bloody end of the bone usually got shoved in your face if you were a farmer, or a laborer. Get old? No kids to take you in? Well, gee, there's always poverty and death. Get sick? No money for medicine? Well, gee, there's always the neighbors' soup. Oh, and death. Get broke? Well, gee...
That was life and that was all there was to it.
For a brief time in the late 19th and early 20th Century a group of people tried to do something about this. These "Progressives" and "Good Government" types were an oddly disparate bunch, ranging from social reformers like Jane Addams and Upton Sinclair, radical Reds, muckraking journalists, and some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the U.S., people like Theodore Roosevelt and Andrew Carmody. It looked like the strange concatenation of "reformers" might push the U.S. into some sort of less-oligarchic society - not some sort of communal kumbaya-singing egalitarian utopia, but at least a little less brutally devil-take-the-hindmost.
But first WW1 came along, and then the "return to normalcy" of the Twenties helped sort of push things sideways a bit.
Until in 1929 the wealthy and the banksters shit the bed.
A worldwide Depression, like love and a cough, can't be hid. Even the dimmest American prole pretty much knew they were hosed, and who hosed them. And worse, for the oligarchs, now there was the horrible example of Soviet Russia, where the rope and the lamppost loomed for those white-spatted gentlemen and their delicately scented ladies. FDR, that cunning aristocratic hegemon, rammed through enough reforms to make the country a little less harshly Darwinian, convinced that the elites had to give up a soupçon of their power in order to keep the rabble happily at work.
And y'know what?
It worked.
For twenty years the Republicans, the bought-and-paid-for party of the wealthy and the financiers, was driven into the hustings. For the first time there was a sort of national pension in the form of Social Security; getting old and sick didn't have to mean getting poor, too. And, mind you, in the Thirties and Forties, and even into the Fifties and Sixties, American poor really meant poor; Third World poor, hookworm-and-pellagra poor, living in a tarpaper shack poor. Don;t let the GOP tell you that the "antipoverty" programs failed. Until the Sixties about a quarter of Americans lived in this real shithole poverty. Since then the number has been about 12-13 percent. Food stamps, AFDC - that stuff worked.
Mid you, it ain't life at the country club. But it beats starving.
For forty-some years, from the late Forties into the late Eighties we managed to get as close to a real robust middle class as we've ever had. And a hell of a lot of that was done by raising working people, people who had been paid jack shit by the people who made millions from them, into that middle class. This was done through a whole combination of industrial and tax policy, by technical, commercial, and educational advances, by the realization on the part of smart companies that better-paid workers bought more stuff...
Of course, it didn't hurt that after WW2 we were the last man standing. And that we had a hell of a lot of spare cash and a hell of a lot of Third World places right in our own country that we could pave, electrify, Green-Revolution, and industrialize.
But you have to think that it couldn't last, and it didn't.
First the country split over whether black people should be people first or black first. A lot of the old racist genes burst out, North and South, and drove people who should have been thinking of their own well-being into the arms of people who had no interest in that well-being but were perfectly willing to use the hatred to shove the dumbass crackers back into the poverty hole - where they would be happy to go provided the nigras went there first.
Then we were told that Greed was Good, that we needed to let the people who could do card tricks with money, who could spin tales into gold, do that tricking and spinning and make piles of cash. Because a stray dollar or two would blow off those piles and hoo-baby, might land in your lap.
So for the past thirty years we've been walking back the Great Change. Back to where we started, the Gilded Age, where the Rich were Different than You and I. Back to a time when the big decisions were made for you by the people who Knew Better because their daddy had made pots of money. Back to a time when the Golden Rule was Who Has the Gold Makes the Rules.
Again; our country has always been that way. But for a bunch of decades we managed to paper it over, a little. We padded the sharp corners of the coffee tables and baby-gated the economy so the little people didn't tumble down the stairs and break their brains.
Well, that's done and dusted.
I've been watching my country change over that time. And it seems to me that we haven't gotten any smarter, or stupider. Any kinder or meaner. Any better, or worse. We're just people, same as we always were.
But for a moment, a couple of decades, it seemed like we had a chance to move ourselves to a place where wealth and power meant a little less than they had, where more people got to have a piece of the nation than before, where the oligarchy was a very small bit less...oligarchical. Not much, not a lot, but a little.
And that moment seems to me to have passed.
Just two years ago the same malefactors, the same spinners and tricksters, managed to do as much damage to our national welfare as anyone had since that day in 1929. But this time...where was the outcry? Where was the change? Where were the consequences. We thought we'd rearranged the "system" to prevent another President from fighting secret wars. We were wrong. We thought that we would never see Americans torturing helpless captives. We were wrong. We thought that you couldn't play lotto with bank's money and skate away from the wreckage when your little scheme crashed.
Boy howdy, were we fucking wrong.
So on this, the darkest day of the year, it seems to me that our country seems a little darker as well.
What do you think?
First, let me start by saying that I have no silly illusions about what a certain strain of Americans like to refer to as our "exceptionalism". We're often a nice big ol' country. We have our moments of greatness, but we have our moments of great shame, as well. And I can't imagine where anyone gets the ridiculous notion that the United States has EVER been about "liberty and justice for all".
Something like a fraction of one percent of the residents of the U.S. in 1790 could vote at all. And throughout our history our politics has been influenced, and occasionally overwhelmed, by the wealthy and powerful. That's not a bug; that's a feature. The Founders distrusted the rabble, and intended that men (and they WERE men; they'd sooner have given the franchise to an anthropoid ape as a woman) of stability and property were the best choice to guide the nation, and so it has been.
So most Americans were left to shift as best they could. And, for the most part, that best wasn't all that bad, provided you were white, and lacked some disabling handicap like Irishness (for much of the early 19th Century) or Catholicism (until the latter part of the 20th) or too much zeal for the "rights" of people like blacks or women or gays or workers or...
But the U.S. didn't suck compared to, say, the Belgian Congo. You were free to say what you liked (provided you didn't care whether you had a job) and free to go where you wished and do what you wanted. This also meant you were free to starve: the law, as Victor Hugo said, in its impartial majesty forbid rich and poor alike to steal bread and sleep under bridges. You had a certain limited social mobility, which was more than you had as a serf in Russia or a peasant in Japan, say.
But you were still pretty much at the mercy of the Great and the Powerful. If the banksters fucked up and crashed the economy - which they did with great regularity in the 19th Century, only they were called "panics" then, and nobody but the little people who lost their farms or shops thought they were anything but business as usual - well, that was too bad for you if you got hosed. It was a red-meat society, and the bloody end of the bone usually got shoved in your face if you were a farmer, or a laborer. Get old? No kids to take you in? Well, gee, there's always poverty and death. Get sick? No money for medicine? Well, gee, there's always the neighbors' soup. Oh, and death. Get broke? Well, gee...
That was life and that was all there was to it.
For a brief time in the late 19th and early 20th Century a group of people tried to do something about this. These "Progressives" and "Good Government" types were an oddly disparate bunch, ranging from social reformers like Jane Addams and Upton Sinclair, radical Reds, muckraking journalists, and some of the wealthiest and most powerful people in the U.S., people like Theodore Roosevelt and Andrew Carmody. It looked like the strange concatenation of "reformers" might push the U.S. into some sort of less-oligarchic society - not some sort of communal kumbaya-singing egalitarian utopia, but at least a little less brutally devil-take-the-hindmost.
But first WW1 came along, and then the "return to normalcy" of the Twenties helped sort of push things sideways a bit.
Until in 1929 the wealthy and the banksters shit the bed.
A worldwide Depression, like love and a cough, can't be hid. Even the dimmest American prole pretty much knew they were hosed, and who hosed them. And worse, for the oligarchs, now there was the horrible example of Soviet Russia, where the rope and the lamppost loomed for those white-spatted gentlemen and their delicately scented ladies. FDR, that cunning aristocratic hegemon, rammed through enough reforms to make the country a little less harshly Darwinian, convinced that the elites had to give up a soupçon of their power in order to keep the rabble happily at work.
And y'know what?
It worked.
For twenty years the Republicans, the bought-and-paid-for party of the wealthy and the financiers, was driven into the hustings. For the first time there was a sort of national pension in the form of Social Security; getting old and sick didn't have to mean getting poor, too. And, mind you, in the Thirties and Forties, and even into the Fifties and Sixties, American poor really meant poor; Third World poor, hookworm-and-pellagra poor, living in a tarpaper shack poor. Don;t let the GOP tell you that the "antipoverty" programs failed. Until the Sixties about a quarter of Americans lived in this real shithole poverty. Since then the number has been about 12-13 percent. Food stamps, AFDC - that stuff worked.
Mid you, it ain't life at the country club. But it beats starving.
For forty-some years, from the late Forties into the late Eighties we managed to get as close to a real robust middle class as we've ever had. And a hell of a lot of that was done by raising working people, people who had been paid jack shit by the people who made millions from them, into that middle class. This was done through a whole combination of industrial and tax policy, by technical, commercial, and educational advances, by the realization on the part of smart companies that better-paid workers bought more stuff...
Of course, it didn't hurt that after WW2 we were the last man standing. And that we had a hell of a lot of spare cash and a hell of a lot of Third World places right in our own country that we could pave, electrify, Green-Revolution, and industrialize.
But you have to think that it couldn't last, and it didn't.
First the country split over whether black people should be people first or black first. A lot of the old racist genes burst out, North and South, and drove people who should have been thinking of their own well-being into the arms of people who had no interest in that well-being but were perfectly willing to use the hatred to shove the dumbass crackers back into the poverty hole - where they would be happy to go provided the nigras went there first.
Then we were told that Greed was Good, that we needed to let the people who could do card tricks with money, who could spin tales into gold, do that tricking and spinning and make piles of cash. Because a stray dollar or two would blow off those piles and hoo-baby, might land in your lap.
So for the past thirty years we've been walking back the Great Change. Back to where we started, the Gilded Age, where the Rich were Different than You and I. Back to a time when the big decisions were made for you by the people who Knew Better because their daddy had made pots of money. Back to a time when the Golden Rule was Who Has the Gold Makes the Rules.
Again; our country has always been that way. But for a bunch of decades we managed to paper it over, a little. We padded the sharp corners of the coffee tables and baby-gated the economy so the little people didn't tumble down the stairs and break their brains.
Well, that's done and dusted.
I've been watching my country change over that time. And it seems to me that we haven't gotten any smarter, or stupider. Any kinder or meaner. Any better, or worse. We're just people, same as we always were.
But for a moment, a couple of decades, it seemed like we had a chance to move ourselves to a place where wealth and power meant a little less than they had, where more people got to have a piece of the nation than before, where the oligarchy was a very small bit less...oligarchical. Not much, not a lot, but a little.
And that moment seems to me to have passed.
Just two years ago the same malefactors, the same spinners and tricksters, managed to do as much damage to our national welfare as anyone had since that day in 1929. But this time...where was the outcry? Where was the change? Where were the consequences. We thought we'd rearranged the "system" to prevent another President from fighting secret wars. We were wrong. We thought that we would never see Americans torturing helpless captives. We were wrong. We thought that you couldn't play lotto with bank's money and skate away from the wreckage when your little scheme crashed.
Boy howdy, were we fucking wrong.
So on this, the darkest day of the year, it seems to me that our country seems a little darker as well.
What do you think?
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