America, the Poisoned: Hold These Truths to Be Self-Inflicted
by Charles P. Pierce
<http://www.esquire.com/archives/blogs/politics/by_author/68/15;1>
"James Madison thought corporations as inimical to
self-government as organized religion, and Tom Paine
hated them as much as he hated George III.
"Instead, we channel what outrage we have into
sub-comic spectacles idiots in tricornered hats,
spouting off about the founders, the crackpot
Glenn Beck's pretending to be Paine, who would've
eaten his liver and asked for sauce."
The truths are supposed to be self-evident, even though they
weren't at the time, and seem even less so today, as we arrive upon the
234th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, a
document more criminally misappropriated down through time by
intellectual grifters and political mountebanks even than the Book of
Revelations.
Thomas Jefferson said he wrote it "to place before mankind the common
sense of the subject, in terms so plain and firm as to command their
assent," which it certainly did not, at least not immediately. And in
rousing the spirit that would produce the document, Thomas Paine titled
his pamphlet Common Sense, which was more aspirational than it was
anything else.
This weekend we celebrate, among other things, the ultimate triumph of
hope over experience. It is a triumph that currently shows all the signs
of being both fragile, which it always was, and temporary, which it
always was not.
There's a poison in the public bloodstream these days, and it's
affecting the mind, as poisons will. One entire political party has lost
its mind, and well may succeed for having done so.
A congressional candidate in Alabama is running commercials equating
progressive taxation with slavery and the Holocaust.
A candidate for the Senate in Nevada seems to deny any role for a
central government short of raising an army, and perhaps not even that,
since she seems to suggest that, if the election doesn't go her way, her
several followers may go to guns in response.
The members of that party in the national legislature have utterly
abandoned their duties to the public good for unalloyed obstructionism.
On Wednesday, the Senate again failed to pass an extension of
unemployment benefits for the first time since the 1950's, and this in a
time of 9.5-percent unemployment.
The government is unwilling to bring the criminals of the previous
administration to justice, and seemingly unable to bring the corporate
criminals of the previous decade to justice, either.
Some 20,000 barrels of oil are spilling daily into the Gulf of Mexico,
where now huge columns of smoke are beginning to rise from the surface
of the sea.
And maybe it is time to read Revelations with a fresh eye, after all,
except for the fact that the horsemen are not unleashed upon us. We
invite them in to ride.
The poison dulls the mind and enervates the body. It leaches away the
critical faculties and leaves in their place a kind of dull-eyed
acceptance that borders on chronic lassitude. We accept what we cannot
change and then decide we can't really change anything, and thereupon,
we accept anything.
A political party that embraces public lunacy in its candidates, and
public dereliction in its elected officials, should pay a political
price for that. It will not, because the only people motivated at the
moment are the people who are motivated in support of the lunacy and, in
fact, who would like to see more of it. And they may well do so.
Instead, we study the lunacy as if it were a phenomenon detached from
our daily lives, the way that we have detached ourselves from the
discipline and responsibilities of self-government, congratulating
ourselves on how fair-minded we are for giving the lunatics a hearing
and then becoming mystified when we realize that, if they are empowered
in the government, they mean to do what they say.
An unemployment rate that nudges 10 percent should occasion societal
upheaval. Instead, we give a polite hearing to responsible "moderates"
who argue that it's pretty much the way it's going to be for a while,
and to conservative voices telling us that the unemployed are simply
entitled parasites, drowning in indulgence and flat-screen TV's. And we
congratulate ourselves for being broad-minded enough not to call an
obscenity what it is out loud.
In a properly functioning, self-governing republic, the corporate
criminality that nearly brought down the economies of the world, and the
corporate criminality that has turned the Gulf of Mexico into flaming
toxic stew, would demand a vigorous political response. But, generally,
we accept the notion that the latter would be impractical, that it
essentially would be requiring one conjoined twin to beat the other one
over the head.
That this is a mortal sin against what we are supposed to be, a primary
heresy against the American faith, is lost on us. (James Madison thought
corporations as inimical to self-government as organized religion, and
Tom Paine hated them as much as he hated George III.)
Instead, we channel what outrage we have into sub-comic spectacles
idiots in tricornered hats, spouting off about the founders, the
crackpot Glenn Beck's pretending to be Paine, who would've eaten his
liver and asked for sauce.
Comfortable with oligarchy and comforted that we are We and not They, we
bestir ourselves only to be mean and vengeful. We bestir ourselves, when
we bestir ourselves, to be proud of our ignorance, vain in our rootless
delusions, and vaunting in our sad pretensions.
But that is not the poison. The poison is the wars.
War was not theoretical for the founders. War was fifty miles away from
them, and closing in fast. War had been made upon them in New England
long before they got around to making war back again. War was why they
distrusted standing armies, and why, when they got around to writing a
Constitution, they placed the power of declaring it in the diffuse
institution of the legislature rather than concentrating it in the
executive. This is another principle that we've fairly well abandoned.
We have two of them ongoing, their purposes now more vague than ever,
and their outcomes increasingly ill-defined. They alternate weirdly in
the public mind.
Afghanistan seems to be the primary concern again, what with
loose-tongued generals and all. But, while we have two wars going, we
are not a nation at war. We ceded that responsibility in 2001, when we
were told that all we really had to do was go to the mall.
If we took our responsibilities seriously, we would have been insulted
by that, and someone would have paid a political price. Instead, we
found ourselves lied into a second war, which really should have shaken
up the politics, and we responded by reelecting the liars, because that
was the course of least resistance.
Now, Iraq is said to be more stable, but Afghanistan is going to be the
long, bloody slog, which was the reverse of what we were being told five
years ago.
This should occasion some general soul-searching as to just what in the
hell we are trying to accomplish in either place a Fulbright
committee for the new millennium but our political participation
in our wars is just the same as our political participation in
everything else: empty, exhausted, and vicarious.
If we can be at war this way, how much easier is it for us to walk away
from our responsibilities as regards the economy, the environment, and
other things that are harder to understand?
If we can accept Afghanistan as a semi-permanent drain on our resources
and our souls, it's easy to accept a 10-percent unemployment rate as the
dismal status quo, as the way things ought to be.
The truths are no longer self-evident. We've done too good a job of
hiding them from ourselves, and ourselves from them. But their terms are
still plain, and they are still firm. After 234 years, if we ever truly
engaged our heritage and its full implications, we'd scare ourselves to
death.
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/state-of-the-union-essay-070210
<http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/state-of-the-union-essay-070210>
