McDemocracy

Commentary by Lightning Rod - RIP 2/6/2013
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Lightning Rod
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McDemocracy

Post by Lightning Rod » January 24th, 2005, 11:34 am

http://www.studioeight.tv/Poetseye012405.html

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Welcome to McDemocracy

The high-flown words in Gdub's inaugural address gave me the creeps when I heard them and then again when I read them.

They were the pastel painted words of a liar and a hypocrite, and like many of the assertions and policies of this government, they had almost nothing to do with the real world.

This is a government dedicated not to the will of the people, but to the will of its corporate sponsors. The FDA is being turned over to the industry that it is supposed to regulate, the EPA is a passing joke, Interior wants to give away our remaining wild lands to big timber and oil and the insurance and drug companies are running our healthcare programs. The foxes are guarding the hen house and we are told it is an 'ownership society.' That's right. And they own it.

How many times have you heard George Bush preface a statement with the phrase, "What the American people need to understand is....such and such." He also seems to assume that just because words issue from his royal lips, that makes them true.

Saith the Bush:
"So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world."
Now isn't that nice? Translation: If we want your resources, we will invade your country and enforce McDonald's Democracy at the point of an American gun.

These sound like words that William McKinley or Teddy Roosevelt might have said. The Spanish American War was the first and most prominent example of American imperialism before our present incursion into the Middle East. The neo-con wizards of strategy thought that an invasion of Iraq would be similar to our waltzes into Grenada and Panama. With their characteristic malassessment of culture, terrain and resources, they forged ahead under false colors into the folly of this war. But this is not a 'Splendid little war." This is a big ugly war. Every day the death toll clicks upward. And there was not a word in the President's inaugural speech about it. Why? Because the Iraq war is a debacle and they don't want to talk about it.

I am not under the illusion that Gdub had anything to do with the composition of his inaugural speech. It was very well written. Gdub can't put two sentences together end to end on his own. He is just a game-show host for the Corporacracy. A Pat Sejack for Big Biz. A mouthpiece.

I was born in 1948, the year George Orwell published his novel 1984. The title was conceived by inverting the last two digits of the year of publication intended to indicate that it was a vision of the near future. In 1984 I went to prison. That is circular karma and therefore politically correct. So, I can speak with a mandate on the subject of police states. In his classic novel, Orwell describes how a monolithic political party uses high technology to monitor its populace and guarantee blind obedience through surveillance and propaganda. One of the government's tactics was to deconstruct the language itself. They invented Newspeak--the language of the Party. If you can change the meaning of words, then you can change the way people think. Without the vocabulary of insurrection there can be no revolution, Unless you are a Thought Criminal. That means you actually think instead of blindly accepting what you are fed by the organs of propaganda.

This is why I found the President's inauguration speech so chilling. When I heard him say,
"The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world, "
I would have totally accepted the statement if it had come from the lips of Jimmy Carter or Nelson Mandela. But from the lips of George Bush Junior, it rang hollow. This is from a guy who thinks that liberty means that you are free to work twelve hours a day with no overtime and have no health insurance and can't determine or express your own sexuality. This is from a guy who calls invasion 'liberation' and talks of freedom and liberty when he's running a chain of concentration camps and is holding prisoners without charge or counsel or trial.

So The Poet's Eye is squinting in skepticism. It's one of the symptoms of being a Thought Criminal. But there was something about the whole ambience of the inaugural ceremony that was cold and phony. From the giant repeated American flags draped on the capitol and making it resemble the Nuremburg rally of 1938, to the cheesy quasi-religious music, to the excessive security, to the lavish parties, it was a crass statement about our pomposity and greed and our rapid decline into a vulgar imperial theocracy.
"These words don't make me a poet, these Eyes make me a poet."

The Poet's Eye

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Zlatko Waterman
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Post by Zlatko Waterman » January 26th, 2005, 11:26 am

Well said, and a cleverly articulated invective, LR.


I strongly recommend Robert Heinlein's "Friday" if you haven't read it yet.

I just finished it, reading some RAH as an old man on a whim.

RAH wrote it around 1981 and very clearly predicted all that transpires today-- especially in California while RAH lived out his last years in Santa Cruz and Carmel.

It has all the classic RAH ingredients: The Old Man ( who knows everything, who is tough, cynical and warm) the oozy super-sexy woman, this time a "bionic woman" with engineered genes, who narrates; marvelous nightmarish visions of divisions among humans.

I loved it, having not read any Bob for years. Your library will probably have it, or you can buy the mass market paperback for about seven bucks, which I did for a friend.

Very strong column of yours. You are improving dramatically in each essay.

Feel free to e-mail me if you like.



Zlatko

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Zlatko Waterman
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Post by Zlatko Waterman » January 26th, 2005, 12:01 pm

( another strong commentary by Ilana Mercer, also on Bush's rhetoric. Thought you might enjoy this one . . .

--Z)





His Rhetoric, Our Reality

by Ilana Mercer
Beyond Buzzwords

In his second inaugural address, George W. Bush preached that freedom (mentioned 27 times) and liberty (15 times) are powerful medicines – they "break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant." And he warned that unless we prescribe freedom and liberty globally, through peaceful conversion or combat, America will never be secure. "The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands."

Yet the "Author of Liberty," as the president surreptitiously alluded to himself, having pronounced that voting will set us free, did not instruct a shocked and awed nation as to how they were to determine how free they really are.

I'll take a bash.

For a start, let's keep it concrete; don't equate freedom with symbols, and rhetoric with reality.

Freedom will have arrived when elections don't matter. I'll consider myself free when I no longer must fret about who wins my state's endless election for governor, Christine Gregoire or Dino Rossi. Or when I can sleep through a federal election, because, Kerry or Bush, Democrat or Republican – in a free society neither will be able to unjustly tamper with me or take what is rightfully mine.

Freedom will have arrived when there is no need to celebrate Tax Freedom Day. And when the government ceases its stalemated War on Drugs.

In a free society, the "vision thing" is left to private individuals; civil servants are kept on a tight leash, because free people understand that a "visionary" bureaucrat is a voracious one and that the grander the government ("great purposes" in Bush Babble), the poorer and less free the people.

Free people grasp that our "great institutions" – Bush's words – are not the "Homestead Act, the Social Security Act, and the G.I. Bill of Rights," but rather the institutions of private property, freedom of expression and worship, and the right to defend hearth and home.

A Friend to Liberty Everywhere, Not Its Guarantor

Bush also paid lip service to "reaffirming all that is good and true that came before – ideals of justice and conduct that are the same yesterday, today, and forever." Evidently those no longer include the ideals of our Founding Fathers. An all-powerful, globe-girdling government is inimical to republicanism and limited government. Or so Pat Buchanan reminded Joe Scarborough, Andrew Sullivan, and Larry Kudlow. He was rudely informed that he was imprisoned in a pre-9/11 mindset.

If appeals to the Founders and the Constitution are no longer valid in post-9/11 America, let's try a tack our internationalists ought to find less disagreeable.

Bush is certainly correct in his assertion that every person has the natural right to be free. And that, "Every man and woman on this earth has rights ... because no one is fit to be a master, and no one deserves to be a slave."

We must, however, distinguish between the right of people to be free and the obligation of others to free them. We have a solemn duty not to violate the rights of foreigners everywhere to life, liberty, and property. But we have no duty to protect them from dying, being raped, robbed, or falsely incarcerated.

What then of Bush's claim that, although difficult to fulfill, "Our country has accepted obligations that … would be dishonorable to abandon." As philosopher David Conway has pointed out, "People can have no duty severally or collectively to do what is impossible for them to do." Since it's clear we are losing in Iraq (although it is entirely possible Iraqis may win without us), one might add that persisting in what is impossible to achieve constitutes a transgression against our sacrificed soldiers and suffering taxpayers.

Those with messianic complexes should reconsider what is meant by tikkun olam. Starting with the barefaced Thomas Friedman, Jews and non-Jews alike have bastardized this beautiful, but modest, Jewish obligation. In an attempt to lend spiritual credibility to hubristic insolence, Friedman has praised Tony Blair for "always [leaving] you with the impression that for him the Iraq war is just one hammer and one nail in an effort to do tikkun olam, to repair the world."

Developed by the scholars and sages of a dispersed people, tikkun olam was intended as a humble and modest thing – it is the duty of the Jewish individual to help, bit-by-bit, to bring about a better world in unassuming, day-to-day righteous acts.

The People's Voice Is Not God's Voice

If we don't "support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture," and if we don't aim to end "tyranny in our world," we're in big trouble, Bush declares. Why? Because tyranny is the root cause of the terror campaign against us.

"For as long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny – prone to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder – violence will gather, and multiply in destructive power, and cross the most defended borders, and raise a mortal threat."

Bush argues that tyranny abroad gives rise to the resentment against us. The resentful say our meddling does. Who is right?

It seems irrational and exceedingly authoritarian to foist on others one's own interpretation of their motivation. After all, they ought to know why they do what they do. Furthermore, understanding the reasons for our enemies' hatred, however unjustified we believe these are, is not tantamount to excusing their aggression.

But what is the excuse for our failure to translate real-life observations into precautions that will protect American lives? Border protection and immigration reform, for starters. These our politicians and their intellectual enablers refuse to discuss. Instead, they prefer to blather on about root causes: the old favorites poverty and ignorance, plus a new contender, lack of democracy. Such explanations lend themselves conveniently to governmental intervention: carrot or stick, foreign aid or foreign bombs.

Liberal root-causes thinking is clearly compatible with neoconservative philosophy. Why wouldn't it be? Being both therapeutic and authoritarian, it offers countless possibilities. We can patronize and pulverize.

Most important, root-causes thinking allows us to dismiss reason.

Our Demagogue-in-Chief insists that democracy will both empower and pacify Muslims. He seems to have forgotten that democracy means majority rule. Democratic elections across the Muslim world would see the pan-Islamists take power everywhere; then elections would cease. It is impossible to see what democracy in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, or Algeria (the last democratic vote there gave a majority to the Islamic Salvation Front), for example, will do other than bolster the reign of hatred and resentment.

Be careful what you wish for, Mr. President.

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