Remembering Rights

                                                                                                                                                      
 

     Somehow, like a hormonal pimple on the nose of naivete, the convenient emergence and imminence of our security establishment’s discovery of “the most credible terrorist threat in years”,  is more predictable than surprising, coming as it does on the heels of the troubling revelation of the NSA’s steadily mounting litany of abrogation of our Constitutional Rights. Their typical defense is they were only dutifully acting to save us from freedom’s unintended mischief to “security”. Even if one is inclined to put the best possible spin on this bureaucratic malfeasance, it is required of mature citizens to remember that manufactured fear has historically been the bulwark justifying fascist conveniences, which always include revised premises of unalienable rights. And history also shows that when clever, industrial-scale propaganda, in service of war (real or illusory), induces the trance in which civil rights are inimical to victory, you can in the end, only have victory that is inimical to civil rights.

    It may be the transference of cultural hegemony to the Millennials who in utero psychologically ingested technological intrusion into formally private and sacrosanct realms beginning with ultrasound examinations that revealed them even before ‘legal’ personhood, and who have subsequently even relinquished interior privacy by way of vacuous “Tweets” and “Selfies”, which informs the government of a new, faux sophistication among the populace that devalues and diminishes the ancient temenos of privacy. But, even if the lascivious temptations of technology loosen restraints individuals should impose upon themselves, the proper, official, legal use of technology is the duty, responsibility and vicarious liability of a constitutionally constrained government.

   Being an unreconstructed 9/11 Truther and a Warren Report/Vietnam era American, my impelled conception of intellectual honesty and self-respect prevents me from denying blatant anomalies in the fabric of physical and moral reality our government often weaves to advance its agenda or quell controversy; even to the point of the “big lie”. The “big lie”, Hitler noted, is a scenario that is beyond the capacity of “the simple minds of the people to believe in the possibility of such monstrous effrontery and infamous misrepresentation… yes, even when enlightened on the subject”.  For example, no amount of reference to the laws of physics, the Conservation of Energy, basic engineering and architecture etc. will sway our supposedly educated population from acceptance of the ludicrous “official” explanation of building collapses on 9/11. The Fuehrer’s observation is seemingly further reinforced when the mere prophesy of events, rather than concrete occurrences, is enough to cause pliant, unquestioning surrender of percentages of personal freedom, thought, and privacy that would make modern America so distinctly unrecognizable to previous generations, that those infected with the psychosis of power have no compelling incentive to re-burden the unopposed exercise of Orwellian authority with the sheepishly abandoned whimsy of unalienable constitutional rights.

      The newly received cultural narrative is that owing to some bizarre metaphysical equation, the citizens of the most powerful nation on earth cannot be simultaneously ‘free’ and ‘safe’. We’re given to believe the existence of some nebulous über-threat necessitates both a large, magnificently equipped standing military force AND a supplemental ‘domestic army’, Homeland Security, which recently supplied itself with 1.5 billion rounds of ammunition. Nonetheless, behind this bristling armed barrier whose raison d’être is protection of our 

freedom, we are obliged us to reposit our still insecure and inconvenient freedoms with a paternal government until some future decade or century when the apparatus of “security”, all its technologies and processes, including such constitutionally dubious applications as  “Parallel Construction”, will be dismantled and our manifestly ‘alienable’ civil rights will then supposedly revert to their Constitutional defaults.  Considering the statistic that terrorism has endangered ordinary Americans to the same degree as one may be prey to furniture falling from high rise buildings, it may be questioned if such a prophylactic abrogation of the people’s protections in the Bill of Rights, together with the establishment of the Praetorian Guard of Homeland Security, indicates that the government, for some reason, fears its citizens as much or more than offshore enemies, and has come to consider the protection of itself and imperial policies, and not the freedom of the people, as its primary duty.

    Government, in the course of its public duties assumes, no, takes an absolute entitlement to secrecy. But, when one of those secrets is the abridging of supposedly unalienable rights, THAT illegal behavior offers validation of the primordial fear that for entities of government, even ours, “rights” are only aleatory analects, and will ever be treated as such unless given incontrovertible substance by perpetual vigorous attention and forceful, and if necessary violent demand of the people.

    If it becomes acceptable in a society experiencing largely unrent day to day normalcy that unalienable rights are in fact provisional, and statutory parameters may be redefined and/or disrespected by government ‘in secret’, then it must be concluded that the people tacitly authorize the dismantling of even the façade of freedom and government by the people. Then it may be expected that tyranny will ascend the throne as it most often does – by way of demotic acquiescence or indifference to the “gradual and silent usurpation” of once believed indefeasible civil rights.

    Where once I would have considered this opinion I now possess ’fantastic’, the litany of illegal wars, The Patriot Act, the NDAA, torture, rendition, the drone killings of American citizens without any publicly scrutinized ‘due process’, indefinite imprisonment of un-indicted individuals, Congressional rubber stamping of every call to war, and of course the massive warrantless spying on the citizenry, forces me into a sort of paranoia regarding the true nature of the society I inhabit. Too many things, once propagandized as the provinces of autocratic foreign despots and fascist dictators, are practices now justified domestically under the old reliable rubrics of ‘safety and security’, where the 'more' valuable product ‘security’ can only be purchased with the deflated coin of ‘freedom’.

    I only hope my fear is wanton and this communication is just the excess of an uninhibited and ludicrous keyboard operated by too small an understanding of the complexities of the modern geo-political world.  And I hope to be argued back to a more comfortable sensibility by those who expect to be ‘more free’ in the coming decades.

   

 

"It is personal injustice to withhold from anyone, unless for the prevention of greater evil, the ordinary privilege of having his voice reckoned in the disposition of affairs in which he has the same interest as other people" - John Stuart Mill
The sudden and undocumented "greater evil" which was called to our attention as lurking in the massive turnout of people wanting their voices reckoned in 2008 certainly calls for an exorcism of the demons that rose up and infested our democracy.
If only our lawmakers were as scrupulous about the demons' pets - the Dogs of War

Rommerica

While I was working and handling family responsibilities I didn’t have time to do a lot of “thinking”. Now that I have more time I can, if not think, remember. This morning my mind wandered back to elementary school. I recall the bookmobile that made a weekly stop and set up a table outside the principal’s office and for a nickel or a dime we could buy a Dr. Suess, or Tom Swift, or Hardy Boys book. And in the economy of the time even a child could finance his own library, or movie tickets, or ball games by taking soda bottles back to the store to collect to the two cents or nickel return “deposit”. But there was also an additional weekly visitor to the school – a bank. All of us students were encouraged to open saving accounts and we were handed little cards where quarters, dimes, and nickels could be inserted and the bank representative would receive our bounty and update our accounts accordingly. I mention all this not just to bore you with my reminiscences but because, if my memory is accurate, we received five percent interest on our savings accounts. Now that I have more time to ponder the capitalism of my youth and contrast it to that which is extant today the more alien Mitt Romney seems to me. It isn’t an ideological detachment, or material jealousy I feel, but a gut feeling of “difference”. To me he represents the capitalism where the interest rate on savings accounts are now preceded by a decimal point two zeros and the first prime number while bank CEO’s are paid millions, tens of millions, or maybe even hundreds of millions. His coiffed typecast “presidential” bearing and difficult logic on onerous taxes and regulations, which didn’t prevent him from acquiring a two hundred and fifty million dollar “got it like that” permanent political campaign lifestyle, just rubs me the wrong way. For our children, in a non-unionized work environment, the simple expectation of a lifestyle that was once considered “middle-class” now requires they borrow a couple of hundred thousand “education” dollars and lifetime debt from a bank in which Mitt owns shares and sits on the Board of Directors and is “unapologetic” about his success. It just doesn’t seem like the America I remember; now where the unabashed and accentuated difference from the struggling masses is the prime recommendation to be our First Citizen. For a muggle like me it seems that a new unsavory mutant capitalism has supplanted the Constitution and common decency as the valuator of societal correctness. And the image of Mitt Romney, to me, seems to be its poster face. Who could have imagined an American politician running on the platform of “several mansions for me and austerity for you” and millions of cash-strapped Americans fawningly calling it “competence”? The historically cantankerous “common man” has been replaced by the Citizens United Stepford American; a capitalist Frankenstein, mobile but soulless. I awoke this morning with some insight on why the conservative message doesn’t appeal to me. I may be betraying politically incorrect “class” identification, but conservatives and their presumptive champion never seem to be talking “to” me. They always seem to be talking “about” me. The genesis of all the wrong in the world is founded in the unwashed and un-rich. If only I was rich, then I’d understand. Well succinctly –I’m not and I don’t.

Partisan God?

I am increasingly perturbed by politicalized religion. This past weekend, on a site I frequent, someone linked to a video where the orator advanced the proposition that “The GOP protects God-given rights… Dems protect government”. I’m sure this was accepted and applauded by many conditioned to unquestioningly believe our statutory rights are God-given. But upon reflection it may be as justified to say that our rights, if by “rights” we mean the notions in The Bill of Rights, are more a product of the Enlightenment and a philosophical consideration of Man by men, than the Bible.

When in The Declaration of Independence it said, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness”, they made the determination a priori that men are endowed with these rights, because nowhere in either the Old or New Testaments are any such assertions made. Conversely, the God of the Old Testament is as dictatorial as any Earthly potentate in demanding obedience and prescribing allowable behavior. There was absolutely no suggestion of unalienable rights that could be contemplated by man, and no implication in word or action that all men are created equal. There was no right to freedom of speech, right of assembly, right to bear arms, and of course no separation of church and state. And in the eighteen hundred years of Christianity before Jefferson set pen to paper there can’t be found any theological instruction or civil manifestation indicating acquaintance with any Biblical proviso positing unalienable rights (personal or political), or right of Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness, or political equality. These concepts were distilled from the writings of Locke, Hobbes, Montesquieu and others, and signify a rather rebellious secular divergence from the existing church/state theology. So quintessentially, God is being endowed with these thoughts and intentions by Man, rather than man acquiescing to any expressed aspiration or mandate of God.

So when this video says “the GOP is protecting God-given rights”, the most charitable assessment is that it is just inappropriate rhetoric founded in the voluntary ignorance that many feel they must undertake when the words God or religion are broached. Or less charitably, it may be a sordid political calculation based on the well established phenomena that people seldom challenge long-standing orthodoxy or reflect on the things they have been led to believe by rote.

Afghanistan and Anal Fixation

Why are we in Afghanistan? We must begin, not on 9/11, but in 1992 with the “Defense Planning Guidance” which proposed that the new political and military mission of the United States, (with the demise of the Soviet Union) was to assure that no rival or group of rivals could emerge to challenge our primacy as the hegemonic world super power. This was the first time American intent to dominate the entire world was explicitly stated. This required the establishment of military bases across the globe, now numbering 1100, creating in geo-political jargon “strategic depth” in every region of the world.

Though formulated at the end of the first Bush administration, the plan observed that Taliban control of Afghanistan would serve to hand its neighbor, Pakistan, additional muscle vis- à- vis India, thereby upsetting the balance of our “strategic depth” scenario in the region. When George W. Bush became President in 2000, the brain trust that produced the Defense Planning Guidance, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perl et al, took leading roles in the new administration and proceeded to implement the strategy - patriotically renamed The Project for the New American Century. Although the Taliban was strictly nationalist and had exhibited no prosecutable designs outside Afghanistan, strange good fortune presented a new enemy, Al Qaeda, which conveniently headquartered itself in that benighted country.

Although we know, if the 9/11 Commission Report is to be believed, that the alleged nineteen perpetrators of the attack of Sept. 11th lived and trained in this country for years, and received communications and funding ($500,000) telephonically and electronically, from a command structure dispersed in different locations around the world, and that the total number of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan never numbered more than a few score at most; our considered response to the attack was to send 120,000 troops and spend a trillion dollars to invade the third poorest country on earth, to deny Al Qaeda a locale to plan operations that could have as easily been planned in a rented conference room of any Marriot Hotel.

So, if you have ever wondered why we are in still in Afghanistan long after the few Al Qaeda have departed, and how we smoothly transitioned from Al Qaeda to the Taliban as the targeted enemy, read the Defense Planning Guidance of 1992. The Guidance, combined with the mutable rationalizations for our subsequent invasion of Iraq, may clarify the pretext for the murky “War on Terror”, a phrase so tactically vague it is synonymous with a “War on Possibly Dangerous People with Ten Fingers”, and expose the opportune license it has granted our world-wide military expansion that all too perfectly dovetails with the prerequisites of the fundamental stratagem. It may not be a false polemic to speculate our children are not dying and killing to advance freedom or to secure the homeland, but rather to advance the empire project of megalomaniacs.

Some may disagree with my harsh assessment of our government’s actions and motives. Others may prefer to believe in the innate goodness imbued in our ethical soil that wouldn’t allow or condone such sordid maneuvers. But even if cast in the best possible light, and the prospect of world hegemony might bring some consonance to worldly affairs, we must still deal with the stubborn fact that after ten years the most powerful and technologically advanced military machine in the world is unable to defeat the ragtag Taliban. That crystallizing reality would seem to undermine the whole arrogant thesis of The New American Century, and might challenge the decent sensibilities of the most patriotic muggle. It may also alert the wise to abandon such foolishness, with the first step in the return to sanity being withdrawal from the quagmire of Afghanistan.

Politics and Morality

This year’s political campaign has re-ignited the church/state issue, and has as usual established a synchronistic orbit around sex and the highest and best use of genitalia. It is strange that in our political corpus the larger field of morality is pristine grass and only the hectare of sexuality is trampled and muddy.

There are many bloggers I am familiar with who have indicated they have attended law school. They will tell you our jurisprudence is not centered on what is “moral” but rather what is “legal”. Nowhere in our body of secular laws does it say it is immoral to commit homicide, but it instead lays out when it is and is not legal to do so. Nowhere in the Bible does it say it is immoral to drive above the speed limit, but it is nonetheless illegal to do so. So, as a practical matter, since Sept. 17, 1787 there has been an effective separation of church and state – and it is as the Founders intended it to be. If you want to conflate church and state, and religious and legal morality then you simply can’t limit the process to the realm of sexuality. The Biblical prohibitions against usury would force the closing of banks. But of course capitalism overrules mere religion - and I’m not just being facetious. It is a legitimate example of the acceptance of the separation of church and civil society which has never been seriously questioned by our most Bible-thumping political panderers. And there are other examples that demonstrate the hypocrisy of our political clowns who imitate Jesus on the campaign trail but govern as Caesar once elected.

If you ask an ordinary American what would be their duty as a juror on a murder trial, they would say they would require proof beyond a reasonable doubt to convict and take the freedom or life of the accused. Most would think this is a culturally mandated and legitimate commingling of religious and legal doctrine. They would be wrong. It can be easily demonstrated that the State has absolutely no interest in religious morality being the directing influence in various duties of citizenship. If the standard of reasonable doubt is not just a legal standard but a moral standard that must be met before the State kills, many actions of our nation would be immoral, and citizens preached-up to justify the rejection of contraceptives being funded via insurance policies purchased by religiously affiliated institutions would be equally justified, nee, required to refuse to participate in many actions initiated by the State.

In the case of Iraq for instance, given that there were no weapons of mass destruction or affiliation of the leadership of that nation with Al Qaeda or its alleged action on 9/11, and since there are ample publically available records documenting not only reasonable doubt of either of these allegations, but convincingly showing that the rationale presented to our nation and the world to justify our attack and occupation of Iraq was a blatant lie, then the deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis would under civil legal and theoretically coterminous religious standards constitute both illegal and immoral murder. But the secular empire of the United States indubitably exempts itself from religious standards of morality, and like every empire preceding it unabashedly subordinates all legality or basic fairness to the greater imperative of geo-political advantage. If this is not separation of church and state, I don’t know what is. And self-identified “religious” (and volunteer) soldiers who kill in the service of a known lie are patriotically acknowledging their belief in the separation of Heaven and Earth, and are further choosing to lobotomize themselves from the awareness that the justifications for war and taking up arms peddled to them weren’t convincing enough to cause the children of the born-again Commander-in-Chief to do the same. Did they hear a different truth or a different lie? I suspect it is morally proper we don’t ask and don’t tell. After all, that has nothing to do with sex.

Santorum's End Run

In the ongoing primary process a faction of the GOP camp has initiated a misguided witch hunt for religious heresy. This is an unfortunate political tactic to stimulate the nether regions of the brain where the neural neutrality providing accommodation for the illogic and irrationality, the special reserved space for the compartmentalization of belief unsupported by evidence or tangibility, the serene silence where notions of science can be suspended, is situated. It is the place where the conduct of human beings is dictated by a non-human entity, or possibly entities, and is monitored by the loudest and most vociferous acolytes of any particular permutation of supernatural themes. This is the region purposefully avoided by the authors of the Constitution when constructing a secular mechanism of civil earthly governance. Any cursory perusal of the Federalist Papers, or any half-hearted study of the on-goings at the original Constitutional Convention or subsequent ratification of the Bill of Rights, or any consideration of the academic resumes of the participants, must support the conclusion that they deliberately chose to confine their considerations to the arena of rationality common to all men. If, as Mr. Santorum has speculated, they intended for government and religion to be melded, I believe they had the intellectual fortitude and the literary ability to state such, if it were their intention to so do.

The first clause of the First Amendment, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”, has been dissected and debated linguistically and legally for over two hundred and fifty years, and it has been politically and culturally accepted by successive generations, from agrarian to post-industrial, to infer “separation of church and state”, with government being a strictly secular compact between the state and the people, and religion being a personal compact between so-inclined individuals and spiritual and/or moral informants of personal conscience. If religion now wants to blend with government it must accept the foibles and vicissitudes of ever changing political dynamics and demographics, and subject itself and its practice to the legislative process and be held accountable to the requirements of Constitutional compatibility. I wonder if Mr. Santorum would really wish religion to devolve into the jetsam of the political hurly-burly.

Mr. Santorum’s calculated speciousness is unfortunate, insulting, and is nothing more than the meretricious piety of a venal professional politician with an anti-American agenda. I will defend this thesis by suggesting that Mr. Santorum seeks to advance not a Christian agenda, but a Papal agenda. The fallacious and tired argument that the Founders intended this nation to have some theocratic identity is belied by the text of the original document ratified Sept. 17, 1787, which lacks any theological theme in the design or process of state establishment or political procedure. If this omission together with the first ten words in the First Amendment of the subsequent Bill of Rights is not, for some, sufficient evidence of intent (and to Mr. Santorum they are not), we may still proceed by another route. If, for the sake of argument we concede to him the most favorable possible interpretation, and we accept the oft-made contention that the minds of the Founders were undergirded by deep Christian belief that was so central to any public or private casuistry it would present an ineluctable estoppels that needn’t be articulated or written, Mr. Santorum would still have a problem. If under his calculus we were founded as a Christian nation, then it will have to certainly be acknowledged that we were founded as a Protestant nation – since the Founding Fathers were Protestants. So if Mr. Santorum’s Catholicism is as he says it is, and he is as dedicated and subservient to the tenets and teachings of the Catholic Church as he purports and confesses to be, then we must assume as President he will give priority to the direction of the Pope over that of the Constitution since that is his unabashed stance as a candidate. More unfortunate for Mr. Santorum’s dialectic, if this nation can be legally declared a theocratic Christian domain, it is equally appropriate to declare it a Protestant domain. And wasn’t the Protestant Reformation about eliminating both the polluted Papal nexus interposed between God and man and the amalgamation of religious and civil authority? So if it is tolerable in our political contest to advance the dubious argument that President Obama is waging a war on religion, it may then be legitimate to question if Mr. Santorum, a brother of Opus Dei, is waging war on the Reformation. And if in his Papist consciousness he is waging a war on the Reformation and seeking to overturn the Protestant consciousness which prefers the separation of religious and civil authority, then it would be Mr. Santorum, the Republican and conservative, who is actually arguing against our American culture and tradition.

Mr. Santorum, in my mind, is a mediocre one-issue candidate who cynically knows that because of the increasing dullness of the American mind simply waving the Christian flag will cause a certain number of people to automatically salute without thinking about anything else they’re hearing. And of course if you convert from an ‘issue’ to a ‘religious issue’, the answers precede the questions, and the least complicated candidate conveniently excuses us from the effort of individual deliberation, and by guise lures us to indenture as the wards of theocracy and alienates us from the heritage of personal and intellectual freedom bestowed by the Constitution.