Revisiting Unthinkable Presumptions

A Glimpse at Re-Birth Instead of Melt-Down

Are we “man-enough” to turn around and walk away? 74

George Bush (GWB) (Oh hell, why not both of them...?) has always done his very best “work” when he paints his pitch with the direst urgency. Texas style, hair on fire, save America urgency. Recalling what may be the most calamitous deceptions he has “sold” to the American public, we are impressed with the sinister alacrity always present.

A breathless pharmaceutical bill passed a 3 AM half by exhausted, threatened senators and half by others wildly drunk on avarice, a panicked Patriot Act recklessly perched on choreographed “facts,” an emergency $300 billion dollar Christmas present to an unnamed “black hole” filled with “special bankers,” the only ones who could be trusted to save the country from “special bankers” who had just finished looting it -- all these are but a few of the more public outrages.

“Gee whiz, they all seemed to make sense for a little while!” Is anyone else getting tired of listening to this endless toothache of, well, emergency emergencies?

Now it’s hangover time. There’s simply nothing to do but have another drink.

We don't even know who got our money. We don't even know what who ever got it, did with it! Sure, we asked, but those in charge told us to "Shut up." They told us we didn't know enough about such things to even ask questions like that one, let alone expect that we could understand the answers. "Just keep paying." "Otherwise, melt down! Whatever we decide that is, it will be lots worse than this!" "Just keep paying."

Sorry, maybe not. What exactly happens if we bravely turn our backs on this whole collection of vipers? What exactly happens if we just lean back, relax and let the whole financial “whatever it actually is” demolish itself? It’s pretty clear that the hardest part of fixing things is finding anyone to trust long enough to do the work.

Maybe these fun loving opportunists need a stake through the heart. Yeah, their movie making machine is running full steam with yet another saga of precisely how awful things would get if we don’t keep paying. Yeah, they’ve managed to recruit some otherwise credible voices to join their well paid choir of impending disaster. The economic charts and graphs are flowing like a river at flood stage, every one of them portraying something akin to a Biblical disaster.

There is even a short hesitation generously injected to attempt to educate us about the difference between “financial” and “economic” disaster. The “financial” disaster is the one to be suffered by our road weary billionaires if the bail out should so much as pause in its progress. You know, billionaires. The people who make campaign contributions because they love our country so much that it hurts.

The “economic” disaster, I suppose, is the one we will be feeling. The story line says that the billionaires must always be considered first. Something like the instructions to the mother on the air line. “Put the oxygen mask on yourself before the baby.” We have been artfully convinced that the billionaires are the ones who will need to keep breathing if the rest of us are going to make it. An interesting coincidence when, not long ago, they were the ones in favor of "drowning the government in a bath tub."

Owning the media, lock, stock and barrel, comes in handy for stuff like that.

Well, if these old banks fall apart, isn’t it the American way to expect new banks to rise up out of the ashes? If the stock brokers take the hit they are always claiming to be ready to take, why not let them take it? If the dottering bigots in the Congress cut loose with their practiced screams about “good Southern ideology” and “American ideals” and “founding fathers” and the like, what happens if we don’t dance?

Wouldn’t honest, hard working Americans recreate the stock market if it turned out to be something we needed? Wouldn’t American voters realize what kind of crooks we had been electing if we saw, first hand, the damage they had inflicted all these years while they were convincing us they were actually doing something else? Something honest? Something American?

Could the United States somehow just dump all this crud and start over? We started from scratch more than once before. The wealth of the country remains. The old owners are such toothless whiners we start to suspect they never really owned everything anyway. We start to suspect that our indebted servitude to them doesn’t actually amount to much more than hot air, the rancid stench of something dead in their over burdened digestive tracts.

These "old owners” have now perfected their endless ranting about the sanctity of capitalism, at least capitalism as they have always promoted it. Leaving them on a street corner with their fancy paper and their shrill voices doesn’t really seem like such a bad idea.

Time for a realization. They aren’t capitalists. These unquestionably elite "Captains of Industry" haven’t “competed” or "invented" for decades. This sacred economy that we are being told that we must save -- for them -- is about as capitalistic as a bunch of over weight oligarchic pigs with trust funds squawking with screams of desperate urgency in a belching contest. They bought all these politicians, judges, media corporations. They dreamed up all the “financial doo dads" that they lost their shirts selling to each other.

So? Let’s honor our traditional ideas about “private property” and let these clowns keep all these expensive folks they’ve bought. We can elect new politicians. If it turns out that we need to, we can create a new stock market based on capital that actually exists. We’ve already started the replacement of their crooked, worthless media machines. (You’re reading this blog right now! Ain’t it great? No newsprint!)

Oh gee. What about all those honest foreigners who lent us all that money? They shouldn’t have to take a bath just because they tried to help us out with a few trillion. They only had our best interests at heart. They only wanted to take a small, honest advantage of our great capitalist system. Right. None of us has ever even seen anything that money bought! It certainly doesn’t seem to have bought anything for us. We don't even know where in hell it went.

If we walk away, we will be standing there without any hope that these hard working billionaires and their honest, compassionate "foreign friend" billionaires are going to “help” us any longer. We would just have to look after ourselves.

We could start looking after ourselves with whatever is left in the treasury.

I think we could make it.

One of our founders said that democracy needed to be covered with the blood of patriots every decade or so. He was close. Our democracy needs to be covered with the blood of crooks and cheats, their professional liars and their private collection of “bought and paid for" politicians.

Time to clean house, take our lumps and get this thing back on the tracks.

Gosh. Did I tip my hand?

For more insight concerning the"Extra, extra complicated" melt down picture, the following explores the question, "How many different directions can a room full of bankers point their fingers?"
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/editorials/la-ed-cra25-2008oct25,0,394443.story

The Kalashnikov Paradox and the Gaza Solution

Enlightened Export of 2nd Amendment Democracy? 72

After being in “school” for half a century, we have learned a great deal about the Kalashnikov automatic rifle. At least we have learned all sorts of technical things. Along with other ambitious colonial powers and decades of rather sordid schemes and other adventures, our own American forces have met this weapon all around the world, and our diplomats have met the unexpectedly determined men and women who carried it.

We certainly haven’t missed many details about the machine itself. What we have missed is the essence of precisely what it meant to be one of those carrying one. The United States has consistently tried to frame the motivation of those we have confronted in our own frame. They were not in our frame of reference at all. Our insistence that these adversaries were, somehow, just like us aside from some ideological differences allowed us to make them incomprehensible.

Portrayed in our press as it ignored this “frame” problem, we simply could not understand these enemies of ours very well at all. It turns out that our awkward mystery had less to do with the Kalashnikovs than with the minds and bodies pulling their triggers. Now, at the start of 2009, we find ourselves, once again, paying an uncomfortably heavy wage for our lack of perception.

Kalashnikov imposed interesting requirements on his design. One was the extreme durability of the weapon. Did he think that “wars of liberation” could never finally succeed? His weapon design was so durable that it almost always remained quite serviceable at the moment when victory finally prevailed in these conflicts. That led to a new, revolutionary government inheriting a population of well armed former insurgents. In these historically dynamic moments, an experienced and well armed revolutionary force of irregulars could turn on the new government as quickly as it had risen up against the previous one.

Our lingering view of war

Thanks largely to the “incomprehensible motivation” of these adversaries mentioned before, we have gradually mutated our most fundamental concepts about war, not to necessarily make them more realistic or accurate, but at least to make them more comfortable, that is, more comfortable than “incomprehensible motivation.”

We have made all these variations within what we call insurgencies, vacuously homogenous. We have formalized, for ourselves, a blanket condemnation of war, devoid of details. We have repeatedly sought what we called “ceasefires,” regardless of the substance of the issues of combat, claiming that our position was “high ground.”

Worst of all, we have wandered into this unusable wasteland with the perspective of a colonial power, a “super power,” although we deny it. Naturally, that approach strands our considerations of the reality of such matters back in the frame problem. Again.

At the moment we are confronted with folks, most carrying, of course, Mr. Kalashnikov’s rifles, in eastern Congo, Zimbabwe, Afghanistan, Sri Lanka and, most recently, in Gaza among other places. If all these conflicts ended tomorrow, another list of other conflicts is already prepared to replace them. In every case our insistence on what we call “negotiations” or our proposals for “disarmament” seem to be strange songs played out in alien notes. When we speak of limiting proliferation of conventional weapons, our song becomes even less interesting.

“Gosh,” we think, “if only we could get them to stop fighting. They just seem to prefer the mayhem of war.”

Three quick visits to the war zones

Consider Darfur. The problem seems to be that only one side of the conflict is doing all the shooting. If you are a refugee woman who needs to gather firewood, you face the prospects of being raped. You are effectively helpless. The bad guys have all the guns (What else? Kalashnikovs, of course), and you’ve seen them in action. You are trapped without any particular protection or alternatives.

Consider Zimbabwe. The government and the army seem intent on wrecking everything. There is no work. There is no food. There is no help allowed. You have seen everyone who has raised his voice disappear. Usually for good. Sure, there’s probably politics involved somewhere, but at the moment it is a problem of food for your family, cholera and desperate, hopeless violence. You are trapped without any particular protection or alternatives.

Consider Gaza. Your home and family know that the “crazies” are in your backyard shooting rockets at Israel. You know that, inevitably, an Israeli jet fighter will come and bomb them. And you. And your house. And your family. Yet, there is nothing you can do. Even if you have a bit of ideological sympathy for the situation, they have all the guns and you’ve seen them in action. You are trapped without any particular protection or alternatives beyond abandoning your house. With your family.

An unlikely proposal

All these unfortunate situations have reached their present grave states based on a firepower problem. The reasonable folks caught up in them have no weapons. The unreasonable folks who seem to be in charge have plenty of weapons.

The solution? Arm everybody, except arm them in a special way.

Of course, pouring modern firepower into these already troubled regions seems outrageously stupid. We know that arming people has a bad habit of coming back at us, especially when we are arming them with our normal ambitions of exploiting them later, when they’ve run off the current crop of bad guys who won't let us exploit them.

We need to consider a different approach to arming them. We need to reinvent the Kalashnikov. We need a new weapon, and it needs to be a “Temporary Rifle.”
Please consider the following design specifications before you quit reading.

1. Temporary: It lasts no longer than one year. It can’t be repaired or refurbished. It can’t be stored away for later. One year is it. Replacement parts won’t help. It can’t be modified to last longer than one year. After that, it’s useless. Perhaps it can only fire two hundred shells before it’s, of course, useless.

2. Durable: It’s tough enough, not for longevity, but for rough delivery. A single rifle and its ammunition needs to be tough enough for an air drop. We won’t be making ambitious little stinky agreements with warlords. We will be arming everyone who can pick up a rifle that has been air dropped. The provision of these weapons will be what diplomats call “unilateral.” No strings attached.

3. Caliber: These rifles use ammunition of such a bizarre caliber that absolutely nothing else will fit or fire in them. If things move in a positive direction, we can drop more ammunition the same way we dropped the rifles. Should we adopt this plan, we can change the ammunition every year or for every conflict. Black market ammunition production won’t look so appealing if the only rifles it will fit are all going to be gone in a year.

4. Range: A 100 yard maximum range should be plenty. Any more, and our rifles suddenly become useful for invasions. That’s not the plan. These are strictly home (and possibly village, possibly neighborhood) defense weapons. No rockets launched in our back yards. No women raped gathering firewood. No “disappearances” at the heavy hands of the police. At least not here and not now.

5. Simple: These rifles have to be easy to use, easy to fire, easy to clean and easy to learn. No one gets any training. Everyone who has one understands the nature of the weapon and its limits. The caliber needs to be small enough for old people, women, and, yes, children to successfully aim and fire.

Is the old frame of reference beginning to slip a little?

If you are that family man in Gaza with the rockets firing from his back yard, and you are armed, you are no longer helpless. Especially if your neighbors have a similar position. If you stop the rockets, you are no longer a civilian. If you don't stop the rockets, you are also no longer a civilian. At least there will be no invasion.

A new picture of strategic success

When all these rifles have done their duty for a year, does it mean that our American businessmen will have complete access to the place where we dropped them? No. The rifles will simply be gone. The results on the ground will be the results accomplished by the people with the rifles.

Hopefully, the people who gathered them up after the air drop have made some progress for themselves, for their situation. Hopefully, the bad guys have mellowed a little once all their old victims started shooting back.

Maybe a popular government is hatching out of the chaos. Maybe the new “man in charge” will remember how quickly his entire population can be armed, for a year, before he starts getting as outrageous as the last government he's replaced.

So, perhaps a good shipment of our new “Temporary Rifles” brings about a “little more war.” Maybe a “little more war” is what was needed all the time, especially when, in this “little more war,” everyone has a gun. At least, everyone has a gun for a year.

Do we have to land troops? Do we have to sit back and bemoan the cruelty that we just can’t stop? Do we have to fire up an endless hot bed of one crazy autocrat murdering the last crazy autocrat? Do we have to attempt “ceasefires” one after another while every opportunist in the play maneuvers for another tidbit, oblivious to the hardship he is imposing on all the people and the rest of the world giggles?

Our 2nd Ammendment has served us well for two hundred years. There have probably been some who would have launched usurpations but abandoned their plans because everyone was armed. Maybe we should share a good idea.

Think about it.

Not up to date with the details of Gaza's conflict? Juan Cole is a fairly good choice:
http://www.juancole.com/2009/01/gaza-war-hunh-what-was-it-good-for.html

and a pretty good, "bigger picture" link:
http://www.nipissingu.ca/department/history/MUHLBERGER/2009/01/gaza-war-in-wider-context.htm

Obama's "Frightening" Nominations

First, a recap of recent market gains in fear futures... 71

Reflecting, not on the passing government, but on ourselves and our own part in the dismal events of the Bush years, we arrive at some unavoidable conclusions. As citizens we had become so softened by years of prosperous security before his terms that we were vulnerable to manipulation by most of his shallow, fabricated new fears.

We were officially frightened by Osama bin Laden after 911, and his imaginary accomplice, Sadam Hussein shortly after that. We were not frightened by Indian and Pakistani H-bomb tests. Perhaps that fright was reserved for later, that is, for some inevitable future moment when it could be exploited with greater results.

We were frightened by North Korea’s H-bomb test. It enjoyed the serendipity of being at just the right moment, maybe a moment when our fear was subsiding to levels no longer blindly supporting some scheme made politically possible only by our manipulation.

We responded well to Iran’s understandable ambition to arm itself. At any time that fear faltered, we increased our not so subtle threats, making some fiery response a virtual certainty, a reaffirmed asset for domestic consumption here and, of course, a good investment of hate.

We weren’t particularly frightened by Katrina, a deadly but largely unusable source of fear due to its lack of a “bomb-able” adversary. The Russians presented a reliable threat, but they apparently frightened our government in return. They were somewhat less usable, perhaps because they could actually “bite back.”

The point? We, unaccustomed to being threatened after such a long hegemony -- real or imagined, were gradually groomed to be frightened on demand. The neo-cons accurately and successfully managed to convince us that leadership required a threat. In the more rational examination of such leadership, that is, when it was examined without the convenient hysteria of the latest calamity, its appearance might become dangerously lack luster.

The "new frighteners."

Now, these weary “old frighteners” are on their way out of town. Troubling "new frighteners” have arrived with the ambition of taking over the franchise. These "new frighteners” are not neo-cons at all. This new batch is from the other end of the spectrum. We seem to be entering into a period of being frightened by the left.

What are the threats being employed? After all, the left has demonstrated an irritable kind of allergic avoidance to the use of foreign machinations to frighten us. The newest, post election tool is, instead, an interesting innuendo indicting the “progressive purity” of Obama's nominations for places of power in the new government.

There was the momentary mention of the “testing” of the new President, but that was no more than a sickening remnant of the old scheme of threats, one based on the same tired ideology of being hopelessly terrified by foreign adversaries, that is, a tiresome repeat of the one used before. These more contemporary “frighteners” are intent on revealing threats to us about cabinet appointments and the possibilities that our accomplishments in the last election would be undercut with a result of reverting the government back to the numbing failure of its predecessor. They seem to have developed an appetite for questioning the new President’s character even after supporting him only a few weeks or months ago.

The threat they endeavor to manufacture now is one of deception and conspiracy. They imply that the changes we sought have not turned out to be changes at all. These folks would like to take up the mantle of being the "new threateners" with their endless assertion that we, as voters, have been deceived. Again.

Clearly, they consider any fear and fright of this sort that they can incite in us to be a valuable asset to prop up their languishing authority as critics and pundits. They believe that these unexamined doubts they might cause will become very useful foundations for later tirades and tantrums which might have, otherwise, been too obviously shallow to provide the impact they crave. Their future dream is to say, credibly, of course, “I told you so.” “I was the one who cried out the early warning, so believe me now!”

If you’re waiting for the next form of being scared, you may be disappointed. You may have to learn a new trick. The world as previously presented as one of endless, hopeless, despair is going to become one of challenges and opportunities. Instead of groveling and trying to simply survive, we will be required to stand up with our eyes forward. Rather than cowering in a sterile ideological wasteland, lamenting on how things should have been, we will now be required to begin all our thoughts with where things are and where we intend to go.

Domestically, Senatorial bigots and military throwbacks have invested heavily in sponsoring our hatred and fear of each other. Their practiced incompetence was the real conspiracy as they trotted out fabricated alternatives with every choice equally depressing and unpalatable. Their old paradigm of no choices other than dominating or surviving the world is becoming the new, brighter question of successfully living in it.

These aging knee jerkers are now exposed much like the new thought-limiting left. Neither group has earned the right to express their foolish purity. Neither group has ever been willing to pay the honest wage of embracing leadership. The wage? To follow, of course. To trust a little. To think of the country beyond one’s immediate personal ambitions.

These "new frighteners” from the left would like for us to faint before the “hodge podge” of conflicting influences in the new government. They would prefer that we were, well, more hopelessly stoic given the rather raw abilities of these nominations by Obama. These "new frighteners” would prefer that we be pessimists about whether or not he can lead with all these conflicting influences. “Who will be in charge?” they wonder.

I predict that none of us will wonder about this for long.

We have elected a leader with, I suspect, a lethal, pragmatic competence coupled with more idealism that most of us think we can afford right now. Of course we are a bit uncomfortable with what we’ve done, but we can certainly claim that we were at our bravest and our best when we did it, inebriated with new hope.

By the way, that hope isn’t all in him. The important part of that hope is in us.

Leadership, after the wasteland we’ve endured, may seem to be measured by astounding solutions to intractable problems. It isn’t. It’s much more like paint, permanently changing the hue of everything it touches.

Get used to it.

No more being directed by fear. The leader we’ve found won’t amount to much without Americans to follow him.

For a very unusual point of view, sample this link:
http://blogs.psychologytoday.com/blog/lust-in-paradise/200811/obamas-ancient-leadership-style

The Path Forward: Ideology, Philosophy or Revenge?

Taking the philosophy of America to the Revival Tent. 67

It was so nice for your wife’s uncle to offer to look after the kids for the weekend, but the scene on Sunday evening when you return is not quite what you expected. The house has been stripped of everything that could be taken. The family dog, hungry and forlorn, is loose in the alley, staring hopefully at the next door trash can. The children, also hungry and frightened, have locked themselves in the upstairs closet with their empty, terrified faces and a few suspicious bruises. Your horrified neighbors are watching your fence as they finish cleaning their shot guns.

It’s clear that Uncle Harry has already stolen everything that wasn’t bolted down. If our unhappy analogy is about George W. Bush and his government, these last few weeks will see Uncle Harry returning one last time with his wrenches to loot anything he’s missed in his previous larceny.

So, where do we go from here?

Bill Clinton decided soon after his inauguration to let “bygones be bygones” for the good of the nation. The outrages on the dock then were exponentially less then George Bush’s, that is, comfortably survivable. As the new President, Bill Clinton enjoyed many positive alternatives made possible by a damaged but recoverable economy and world image.

Our situation now is a bit different. The outrages of the last eight years have left us dazed, desperate beggars staggering out of a dismal Third World land fill. Of course, fleeting verses from the third act of Les Miserable inhabit the thoughts of those of us old enough to remember when things were not so bad. There is an unsettling appetite for something similar to the uncivilized but highly defining demise of someone such as Romania’s Ceausescu where political grievances were suddenly and violently settled with some grisly, East European style street justice.

So long as the news cameras avoided the details, no one was particularly shocked, given the autocrat’s checkered history of rule. It was an ideological correction cycle. You know, something akin to the “correction cycle” currently afoot in housing prices or something.

What choices do we have?

Ideology has been relegated to a bad definition. Nonetheless, there is an American ideology. For convenience here, let’s call it simply a fluid, cultural pragmatism. Aside from a few embarrassing incidences of Civil War, violent labor suppression and internecine combat to perpetuate the imposition of racial inequality, our national history has been a reassuring stream of “walking away” from our momentarily lapses of civility in favor of some “bright shiny object,” a promise of more prosperous and beneficial new path. Naturally, there have always been those who remained paralyzed, locked in the recently discarded “old ways,” but their numbers always dwindled as the incentives of the “new way” gradually washed clean all the injuries and insults of the “correction.”

Ideology, when expressed as this sort of pragmatic “ism,” is refreshingly less destructive than other styles where pundits are allowed to define more ideatively directed ideas. Ideas such as Stalinism, Communism, Capitalism, and the like. Pragmatism seems to be a glove that, well, fits almost any hand on any given day.

The majority of the American populous sees no particular benefit in the “Ceausescu Treatment” for George and Laura.

That dismissal leaves two further alternatives, the first of which is philosophy. If there is an American philosophy we might categorize it as something such as “The Rule of Law.” Given the historical blessings of both prosperity and our Constitution (they go together...), the “walking away” idea offers itself only as a brief anomaly. Clinton did it.

The question is, “Does pursuing The Rule of Law do more to rehabilitate our social culture than a more compassionate (and, possibly, pragmatic) letting bygones be bygones approach?” Obama has made strong commitment to “bringing us together.” Does that mean adopting the “bygones” approach?

At the counter point, are we, as a nation now divided, going to benefit more by the thorough rectifying of all these corruptions through legal action or by our historical path of simply trying to forget, at least for the moment, everything that isn’t helpful to our recovery. Will it be a domestic judicial version of “scorched earth” or some sort of “Marshall Plan?”

Our philosophy, that is, “The Rule of Law,” implies that we really will have to prosecute all these crimes. Every insult to the Constitution and the Statute of America’s philosophical fabric might have to be illuminated and adjudicated to materially resurrect the essence of our culture. Are we even passively interested in living with such a dangerous example of lawlessness for the sake of national reconciliation? Are we interested in simply embedding such a nasty thing in our history, then bravely turning our ideologically pragmatic faces toward better days?

Are we willing to let these cheap, cowardly hoodlums redefine our nation for all perpetuity? Are we willing to allow the idea that “anything goes so long as you get back to Texas before the blood starts running” become, somehow, acceptable? Will something like this ever be an honorable legacy to leave in place as a possible ambitious temptation for some future American government?

“We can win the election, then loot the treasury just like George W. Bush did in the old days. Only, this time we can do it right. We’ll be rich!”

We don’t put up with car thieves, bank robbers or child abusers running loose in our midst. If we did, we would have to be someone else than who we are if we wanted to make sense out of such a changed cultural philosophy. Simply forgiving criminals such as these and going forward is not consistent with the system we have selected for our society.

Honest, impartial, judicious, judicial, Constitutional American justice has always been the philosophical foundation of our culture. That’s what “The Rule of Law” means. President Obama, among many other things, will reinstate the Justice Department. In January, someone will become the Attorney General, take the oath. Should that person’s first order of business be to “forgive and forget?”

Finally, there is vengeance. Even if neo-con criminals don’t find themselves running cold in the dawn, trying to escape mobs of hungry, bankrupt citizens, this vengeance idea can still find its way into the legislature, military procurement contracts, base closures, new schools and the like.

Believe me, there are liberal equivalents to the outrages of Republican hubris entirely ready to exact every form of “get even” on those swayed to crime by the excesses of the past. Retribution can hardly be considered the herald of the coming good. Our work as good citizens will, indeed include suffering through the reconstruction of what’s left. After all, we will have to pay for all the rebuilding after the looting.

However, Barrack Obama has asked us to give more than money to this repair program. Our patriotism will demand more than placid coexistence with our previous tormentors. They have demonstrated little interest in reconciliation with all their childish tantrums designed to sabotage the new government, but that fact only means that we on the winning side will have to be even more determined to embrace and comfort these now forlorn, defeated fellow citizens.

This means that we will need to find the essential Americanism in ourselves rather than demanding that they find it in themselves. We will need to feed them, comfort their false, hysterical fears and slowly reassure them that we are committed to healing the wounds.

Then, we have to go to work healing them.