"For dogs have encompassed me; a company of evil-doers have inclosed me; like a lion, they are at my hands and my feet."
On August 28, 1963, a year short of 50 years ago, Dr. Martin Luther King told us he had a dream. I wonder if anyone still does.
Watching and listening to the madness growling and the lies howling across the country, I have mostly nightmares. If "America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned" it's now intent on defaulting on any promise it has ever made to anyone but the corporate robber barons, the rabid Christianist insurgents and the anarchists.
We have a self described Anarchist group of US military personnel, a militia plotting to overthrow the government by violence, some members of which are now on trial for murder. We have the most popular cable news network inventing calumnies against our elected government and some of our wealthiest citizens and businesses spending billions on so distorting the truth that we can't remember how we got here and are eager to repeat everything we did to cause the two largest economic catastrophes in the last hundred years. We have widespread attempts at voter suppression.
No, you can't get to the truth easily these days, but you can bet that if the Republicans are screaming about all the things the demon Democrats and the Beast Obama have done, are doing and are about to do at any minute, you can be sure the truth is that the Republicans have done the same or are engaged in doing it or plotting it. Yesterday I received a thick envelope in the mail, ostensibly from John McCain but certainly written by others. Designed in every way to generate a sense of emergency, it insisted that I take the opportunity and use the express mail envelope (postage not included) to mail $2000, or maybe a little less if I want to risk an accusation of Marxism, as AN EMERGENCY DONATION to "stop the billion dollar Obama fundraising Juggernaut."
Whether or not Jesus cares enough to weep any more, I do. I do at least when the growing rage allows it. Yes, yes, I know. You poor victims of truth, justice and common decency will tell me as you've been doing since you turned the most prosperous nation on earth into the largest debtor with a cynical smile on your face -- you'll tell me I'm simply wrong and generally stupid because I'm angry at the "legitimate rape of America."
It's the logic of liars, the argument of the evil and if God has forsaken us, or left us behind, which may be a better translation, we're still too stupid to know it. We're legitimately stupid enough to see God's will in our own evil that we nod together like hollow bobble heads and agree with the Robertsonians that God saved the Republican convention from getting wet but if an asteroid fails to fall on the Democratic convention, it will mean nothing.
But in a way, that's true. This is America and meaning is in the eye of the idiot.
Today's quiz:
ReplyDelete"Stealth and guile ..."
John Milton's description of Satan? Or Captain Fogg's description of Republicans?
Indistinguishable in my book.
Fine post from Capt. Fogg, as usual. Am watching the GOP convention here, and I'm sure my dear brother dino Baggasaurus Tex is fixing to speak any minute now, possibly following Ann Romney. He will no doubt give "them libs" a piece of his mind, even though his mind isn't very large. You go, Baggasaurus!
ReplyDeleteBut of course, the goal of the Grand Old Party, building a bridge to the Middle Ages is pretty much their agenda: neo-feudalism. Down with science and its methodologies, down with facts, down with everything except the ancient principles of hierarchy and privilege.
What the truth is, and few wish to admit it these days is this... Both parties have failed in their responsibility to govern effectively. The New Neo Fascist rEpublican pARty has failed miserably in many ways, and RommeySkull HS taken it to new lows.
ReplyDeleteIt is time for the Libertarian Party to rise and ascend above the political BS of both major parties.
I think the scaly one hath hit the toe nail on the head indeed. (I like my metaphors shaken and stirred and mixed) Feudalism is very much the natural state of our kind of social ape when assembled in any numbers -- and nature is persistent.
ReplyDeleteAs to both parties having failed, I find the depth of failure to be so very much more on the Republican side that the comparison suggests some rhetorical game is at hand here. It's a fact that during my lifetime, the Dems have produced a somewhat higher level of prosperity and indeed the highest level was under a Democratic administration and that freedom for all has advanced at a dramatically higher rate under Liberal administrations.
Traditional Libertarian conservatives like Mr. Goldwater were happy to stay away from attempts to end traditional ways of stealing the right to freedom from anyone the powerful and populous could steal it from. Black people and other ethnic minorities and the otherwise disadvantaged were perfectly free to suffer in the name of "principle" and why should we, the favored of God lift a goddamn penny to help? A perfect case of killing freedom in the name of freedom.
Adherents of such philosophies seem unwilling to discuss the instability of systems lacking checks and balances and the flexibility needed to deal with inevitable change.
The Obama Democrats have faced such an obscene level of obfuscation under such a well financed, dishonest and ruthless opposition that the principles of Democracy have of themselves forbidden any progress away from our steady regression toward Feudalism and oligarchy. I think it's very wrong to attribute his failures to him or to his principles. It's a bit like saying Jesus died because he didn't have firearms, not because the Romans nailed him to a post.
I fear Libertarianism (capital L Libertarianism, that is) if achieved to any significant level would be destined to the same kind of failure to prevent abusive government and government capable of a necessary level of governing as history has shown us in the failure of Communism -- a system equally as appealing on paper as the propositions of Marx, Rand or Mao.
Less being more becomes hard to argue as we approach anarchy. That old saw about the least government being the best misstates the question of how little is possible and how much is necessary under which circumstances and more importantly, how much is needed to keep all principles from being consumed by the greed of individual entities. Does a minimalist government stand a chance against the massed power and money of quasi-feudal entities? How much power do we need to keep the Jerry Falwells, the Popes, pastors and priests out of our lives? Has the castrated government the power to maintain any degree of justice beyond Lex Talonis? It takes much more than less is more to make a government.
The age old failure mode of all failed systems is of course despotism: the despotism of the mob, the despotism of individuals as promoted by a misled mob, or by the kind of incorporated despotism we call feudalism. We can't lower the power of government below the point at which the power of an entity and its money begins to increase beyond anyone's ability to retard it and we return to the horrors of the distant and indeed the immediate past.
That said, I do find "small l" libertarian principles attractive -- the idea that we don't need to govern the private, consensual behavior we spend so much time and money blathering about. I think as much power as possible should be allowed the people in the pursuit of happiness and that questions of morality where harm to others and to the public are not concerned need to be separated from government and left to preachers and philosophers to lecture on -- but not to legislate or to dictate.
Condensing the above into something nearly readable: while I see the need to streamline government, to make it less restrictive where we can and less morally repressive, I think the kind of Libertarianism advocated by the loudest proponents thereof is about increasing the power of the powerful and as such stands the same chance of preserving a level of freedom and prosperity, health and safety for all comparable or higher than we now enjoy, is about what statisticians refer to as zipidee do-da.
ReplyDeleteI find little to tale issue with on the final paragraph of your post just prior to this one Capt.
ReplyDeleteI understand your concern with bog L libertariana. I suppose I'm somewhere in netweem. I sure as hell know I have had it with the damn New Neo Facist rEPublican pArty of America. I also do not trust the "other" major party either.
I frequently disagree with the Democrats and sometimes very strongly, yet I don't see them as quite the destructive force that Republicans have become -- or the liars for that matter. The nerve of claiming that all the lying and corruption is a Democratic thing or any of the other claims they make!
ReplyDeleteI do wonder, seeing how good the science and technology of deluding and enraging the public and persuading them that helping those who mean them harm is their salvation has become, whether democracy really has a chance. What was that Orwell said of the future -- a boot on the human face, forever?
I have to vote for someone who can beat Rombo and all the people he's a sock puppet for and who else is there but Obama at the moment? The worst the Dems have to offer don't seem to be the sort who will start rounding up and deporting "Commies" as Allen West suggests and by the way, what about a party that tolerates animals like him and too many others? What about a party that's still selling everything that gave us the Recession -- a party that has re-cast Obama as the author of every single thing Bush did?
Remember Bush? I don't think the GOP strategists want us to. I don't think they want us to think about what or who will replace that too - big government they want to strangle.
Stealth and guile
A man can smile
And smile
And smile
And be a villain.