Clean Out The Barn
In the 1992 election, a third-party candidate named Ross Perot became the spoiler in yet another two-party election. He was famous for saying, "It's time to clean out the barn" in debates. The public loved it. He represented the yearning for a non-politician to win the election: someone who would confound the Beltway groupthink and think outside the Washington box.
As we approach the point of no confidence in this Government, more and more people may yearn for this kind of candidate again. We may look for direction from someone who isn't political. But we have enabled the politicians to get that way, and that insight is harder, and more important, than cheering for an outsider. At this juncture, We the People need that insight to lead a nation which has lost its sense of direction into a progressive future. Once so empowered, we will be ready to clean out the barn.
Point of no confidence: March 21, 2007
Point of no return: January 10, 2007 -- Bush announces the surge
Growing up on a hog farm, one of my jobs was cleaning out the barn where the sows had their pigs. When one group of hogs was moved out, the whole place had to be cleaned, as my mother demanded, "so you could eat off the floor". Otherwise, hidden pockets of disease lurked awaiting the next herd. Otherwise, chaos would rule worse than before. Cleaning out the barn doesn't end chaos, it just resets the board so the next round of chaos can't feed off chaos left from the last cleaning.
I know now my parents had to will themselves to get ready for the next herd. Each time, they risked everything on the capricious nature of animals and nature. One winter, simple stomach flu in the sows meant 750 baby pigs starved to death and we could only save a few by feeding them from a bottle. I remember piling the carcasses outside the door in the middle of winter, steam rising from their bodies. I was young and assumed it was just bad luck, but wouldn't mean we could lose the farm. I didn't even know what that meant, that it was even possible. I know now it almost ruined my parents financially, and they were scared.
We would like our politicians to hide such things from us. That's why we allow them their secrets, their having to do things on the dark side -- as long as we don't have to know about it. We want them to take care of us so we can watch football and spend time with our kids and do our jobs without being thrown out into the streets. We deserve to be protected, that's why we have a Government, right? Why should we have to know anything about any of that stuff? Fight them over there where it's just a reality TV show and don't let them come here and disturb our lives.
I didn't know how important the job I hated -- cleaning out the barn -- was to the future of the life I assumed was given to us without price.
Reagan's Curse
President Ford may have been cunning, or simply a fool, to pardon Nixon and not let us finish cleaning the barn in the 1970s. He allowed fetid patches to remain in Government. By doing so, he enabled disease and filth to stay in the cracks. Since then those patches have festered and grown and extended their tendrils throughout the Government. Now, thirty years later, our generation must finish the work we started then, for the good of our children and future generations.
Nixon and Hoover played cat and mouse with each other. Nixon wanted to put homing beacons in all the cars so the spooks could find any American citizen anywhere in real time. Now GM OnStar does that for them. Nixon kept lists of his enemies and had dossiers kept on them. Nixon used the Internal Revenue Service to punish and blackmail his enemies. Years later, Tom Delay could call up the Department of Homeland Security to track down wayward Democratic legislators who didn't want to quorum.
In the Ford Administration, Cheney and Rumsfeld tried to protect domestic spying programs from Congressional Committees, with mixed success -- but some success. Then Ford was defeated and the conservatives driven from power, for a time. Stagflation ravaged the economy. The taking of hostages by Iranian revolutionaries sapped our national spirit. The oil crisis shook our confidence. By 1980, Watergate was far behind us, and a recession was looming. We could feel it. We conserved energy. We opposed Russia in Afganistan by supporting the mujahadin. But we felt the pressure, and we grieved that sense of prosperity we had felt not so long ago.
As a student of rhetoric, I admire Peggy Noonan. The speechwriter for Ronald Reagan and the first President Bush, she wove phrases like "Thousand Points Of Light" into speeches greater than those who spoke them. Noble sentiments, stirring words -- false wisdom, which is to say, cunning. As much as I admire her mastery of the craft, I am horrified by the uses to which those words were put.
Reagan made cruelty OK. His Administration rose on the power of that pent-up fever to hate. What he did subtly, the current Bush Administration does explicitly. Without the enabling influence of Reagan's Revolutionaries, such cruelty would have been unthinkable. But over eight years, the Overton window was moved. In the years since, it has moved even more. 9-11 greased the sill so the window could move freely, and it did.
Not helping the poor is cruel. Reagan made it feel OK. Sending soldiers to war while cutting their benefits and pay is cruel, but Reagan made it seem patriotic. Tough love is cruelty enshrined as "good for you". "Just say no" reframed millions of adult citizens as The Enemies Of The State.
Cruelty is easy to take lightly at a distance. As long as you don't have to get too close to the nasty details, cruelty can be made to seem like vengence, "rough justice", "just deserts" and other words empty of meaning, sounds covering emptiness of spirit. From a distance, cruelty can even look heroic.
A saying often attributed to Mark Twain reminds us to beware the incremental growth of government power:
If you want to cook a frog, don't throw it in a pot of boiling water because it will just jump out. To cook a frog, put it in a pot of cold water and turn the heat up real slow. By the time the frog notices the heat, it's cooked.
For tyranny to overtake us, and our national spirit, cruelty must become acceptable -- so normal that we don't notice any more. Hannah Arendt called it the banality of evil. As long as our conscience can be held at bay, cruelty is easy -- even natural. Once it feels natural, we all face the temptation of using it more and more. The more we use it as a tactic in our public lives, it becomes habit in our private lives. The Hitler Youth movement perfected this "cooking of the frog". Starting with lessons in "being competitive" in "activities to build a healthy body and mind", the neophyte member gets used to subtle and minor cruelties to those who "don't measure up" to the standards of the organization. Beatings and hazing and insults flow out of the neophyte naturally, and those behaviors that are sanctioned and even encouraged by the mentors surrounding the youth are rewarded.
Then comes the price of staying on the path to leadership: narcing on those you know -- then those you loved -- then those you should honor. You see, the extended family of blood relatives and friends are the ultimate Enemy Of The State. It is in these bonds and in these closed circles that rebellion can grow until it becomes resistance and then outright opposition. Best to intervene early and often and root out unsanctioned words to get at uncontrolled ideas.
The neophyte is expected to report on any suspicious words or deeds, and rewarded for passing the test of initiation when they duely narc on their closest relationships.
Nancy Reagan, consciously or unconsciously, revived this model in the Just Say No campaign of the early 1980s. The Drug Abuse Resistance Education (DARE) program incorporated the elements of the Hitler Youth organization. Since its beginning, the "education" program has led to thousands of arrests, interventions and other disruptions of families by children thinking it was OK to reveal details from within their families to figures of authority, without a national debate on what details authorities should be allowed to even ask for. Now we can see tough love is a good way to drive your loved ones away, even to kill themselves. Like "good greed", this preverse cruelty-is-love philosophy has turned good intentions into evil actions.
Grieving
Grief unreleased becomes anger and seeks hatred. Grief unrecognized begets cruelty. I saw a documentary last year on the Battle of Jericho, led by Joshua, the leader appointed by Moses to take the people of Israel to the Land Of Milk And Honey. The documentary explored the reality of the times, given the most recent scholarship.
The archeology is mixed on whether the battle ever happened as told in the Bible, but one historian pointed out that the raids were so bloody (every man, woman, child and animal was slaughtered -- by God's command) that the fighters were not allowed to return directly to the main camp. Instead, the fighters had to camp apart for two weeks so "they could come back to themselves" after committing such a vicious and utter slaughter of human beings. This custom, they said, was a safety valve for the fighters and for the rest of the tribe.
I didn't go to Vietnam. I was in the last draft lottery in 1972. I still remember listening to the voice on the radio reading the birthdays as they were drawn. The war ended before my number came up. But I knew so many who did go. One in particular haunts me to this day. Sam (not his real name) was a hired hand on our farm, son of a family close to ours. He was a happy young man, quiet but always pulling practical jokes and always smiling like he had the greatest joke to tell you, but never told it. He was gentle and strong and loved hard work. I was many years younger than he, and I looked up to him.
Then Sam left for two years. I knew he had gone to war in Vietnam, but that didn't mean anything to me, living out in the country so far from any city and not interested in television news. It didn't mean anything to me, that is, until Sam came home. He worked for us one more summer. He was quiet before, but now there was a deep silence in him -- no smile, no practical jokes.
My younger brother pestered him for the details of the war, "How many people did you kill?". "Did you get a medal?" Sam never answered. He would look away, flex his back as if to work out a knot and go back to work. He didn't look any different, but his looks were completely different. His mood was dark. He jumped at sharp sounds. He looked tired, like he couldn't sleep.
It was my senior year in high school when a friend of mine, who worked with Sam in town, told me he had overheard him talking to some of the other vets he worked with about the war. Sam had been part of the "Wolf pack", a platoon that was known for having a pin, like a tie tack, that they stuck into the butt of their M-16s. It's head was the head of a wolf. They stamped the foreheads of the enemy dead they left in their wake.
The week before his tour was up, he was sent for a month into Cambodia. He was sure he was going to die the whole time. He got a medal for holding off a Cambodian patrol from a watch tower rigged up in a clearing, melting the barrel of his gun before he shinnied down the tower, under fire, and feld through the jungle, the enemy on his heels.
I had heard the adults talking about him over the years since he had last worked for us. He had nearly strangled his wife when she woke him from a nightmare, grabbing her throat. The adults would talk in hushed tones, thinking we kids didn't hear. There were tears in their eyes as they fell into silence.
To this day, I don't know if any of these things I heard were true. There's no reason for me to know. I do know the change I saw in him. That haunted me then, and haunts me now. When I was in high school, I tried to talk about the Korean war and World War II with the veterans in our family. My older cousin only told me he was in Italy in World War II, and "it was bad", then the same silence and turning away I had seen in Sam. No one would talk about what they had seen. The look that came over them was dark, sending chills up my spine.
When I saw Saving Private Ryan, one scene brought back these memories. The scene was after a battle with a straggler machine gun nest, one the patrol could have gone around, but which Captain Miller decided they had to take. The medic in their patrol was killed, and the one surviving German was made to dig the medic's grave. The soldiers made it clear they were going to shoot the German soldier when he was done digging, including Captain Miller.
But the Captain hid away from the others and cried, trying to marshall his feelings and deal with knowing his duty. He came back to the others and blindfolded the prisoner, then let the German soldier go, wandering blind over a ruined field. The rest of the soldiers under the Captain's command went beserk, and one decided to desert. Then came a monologue where the Captain stops them all so they can "return to themselves":
I'm a schoolteacher. I teach English composition... in this little town called Adley, Pennsylvania. The last eleven years, I've been at Thomas Alva Edison High School. I was a coach of the baseball team in the springtime. Back home, I tell people what I do for a living and they think well, now that figures. But over here, it's a big, a big mystery. So, I guess I've changed some. Sometimes I wonder if I've changed so much my wife is even going to recognize me, whenever it is that I get back to her. And how I'll ever be able to tell her about days like today. Ah, Ryan. I don't know anything about Ryan. I don't care. The man means nothing to me. It's just a name. But if... You know if going to Rumelle and finding him so that he can go home. If that earns me the right to get back to my wife, then that's my mission.
(emphasis mine)
How many soldiers have stood in such a moment, after battle? How many American soldiers have stood and wondered how they could ever say what really happened -- even if that soldier could wrap their head around what really happened? Soldiers come home from war, and life back home is nothing like where they have been. They don't want to, or don't know how to, explain days where our culture has euphrenisms like "fog of war" or "battle is a fluid situation" or, simply, "it was bad".
I have met and worked with many people who were in Vietnam over the years, some seem little affected by the experience and others deeply affected still. The one comment I have heard most often, when they talk about it at all, is how hard it was to "come back to the world and be called 'baby killer' in the airport" (be sure to read the comments in the link). They were often put on a chopper, then a plane and whisked directly home, given a steak dinner and then dropped back into their former life with no time to "return to themselves". And they wince from the pain of that still as they talk about it: both the lack of time to regroup and the anger and hatred thrown at them upon their return.
Such was the real mistake we liberals made in the Sixties: we did not help our soldiers "return to themselves" and rejoin life here. Imagine the days and weeks those same soldiers dreamed of home, of living in peace, of having clean clothes again, of walking down streets without guns. Then imagine coming home to people screaming "baby killer" and blaming you for what you had to do to stay alive, to keep your buddies alive.
Many made the transition, rough as it was. Some did not. We were cruel to them, taking out on them what should be reserved for the ones who knew what was happening and wanted it to happen. We couldn't reach those people -- we couldn't really tell who they were. So we were cruel to those we could reach.
The swiftboaters who attacked Kerry in 2004 had that wind in their sails. That grief is not assuaged in many, many veterans and those they love and who love them. I often think the real karmic error of the Sixties was not the excesses, the idealism or the hedonism: it is this scar upon the hearts of those who returned, who had nothing to do with the war beyond being immersed in it with the goal of staying alive, and keeping their buddies alive. Those I have known who would talk usually turn the conversation to wishing they didn't have to leave their buddies there. Some of them wanted to go back, feeling guilty they were back in the world: knowing so many still there so well, in that wholly other place.
Maybe soldiers in all wars have that kind of struggle. Last week, NPR reported on a class of low-income children who went to Vietnam, even over the vocal opposition of many people in the community of San Francisco -- veterans and refugees from the Vietnam war both. Some vets have gone back and have found the experience a healing one. Others believe no one from America should go there ever again.
How does a war end, really? When can it end?
Everyone who loses somebody wants revenge, on God if they can't find anyone else. But in Africa, in Matobo, the Ku believe that the only way to end grief is to save a life. If someone is murdered, a year of mourning ends with a ritual that we call the Drowning Man Trial. There's an all-night party beside a river. At dawn, the killer is put in a boat. He's taken out on the water and he's dropped. He's bound so that he can't swim. The family of the dead then has to choose. They can let him drown or they can save him. The Ku believe that if the family lets the killer drown, they'll have justice but spend the rest of their lives in mourning. But if they save him, if they admit that life isn't always just... that very act can take away their sorrow
Vengence is the lazy form of grief.
Monolouge by character Silvia Bloom in the movie The Interpreter
(emphasis mine)
We are a grieving people. Many people who lived through the Vietnam era still grieve the end of militancy against the System, others the way the war ended without clear resolution as to whether "it could have been won". In 1980, we were humiliated by a bunch of students holding our citizens hostage in Iran, and we couldn't seem to do anything about it. In the 1990s, the bombing of the World Trade Center and the retreat from Somolia angered us even more. The Guardians Of The Curse whispered, "The world was thinking we were weak, and it was only a matter of time before they just march in and the hippies and socialists just give our enemies the keys to Washington D. C.".
Such was the thinking of two ex-Nixon aides nursing their jealousy and anger since the early 1970s -- the bureaucratic ninjas Cheney & Rumsfeld. Such was the thinking of cunning, heartless opportunists who took over Congress in 1994. Such was the thinking of self-styled intellectuals in their overpaid positions in right-wing think tanks, angry the academic world still ignored them even though they had bought their way into every major university in the nation. Talk radio vented this anger from all over America, allowing people to say out loud the cruelty they felt in their heart, numbing their consciences with the sauve of "ditto-talk".
But, at some point, grieving must stop or it will consume us. Alfred Korzybski devoted most of his life to studying how people can be induced to react to words and symbols as if they were real -- the basis of propaganda. He believed these semantic reactions could be battled by learning the semantic pause -- take a breath, count to ten, shake it off, take a break, step back. If we can learn to feel an emotional reaction coming on, we can pause a moment to reflect on it before absorbing it and letting the reaction flow unfettered.
Just pausing dissipates the energy of the reaction before it can grip us. One legacy of the drug war is the saying, "drugs made me do it". But nothing outside ourselves can make us do anything. Grief can make us do things, especially cruel things. It is when we lose our conscience that bad things happen.
The Wikipedia entry for Korzybski includes this anecdote to illustrate his point:
One day, Korzybski was giving a lecture to a group of students, and he suddenly interrupted the lesson in order to retrieve a packet of biscuits, wrapped in white paper, from his briefcase. He muttered that he just had to eat something, and he asked the students on the seats in the front row, if they would also like a biscuit. A few students took a biscuit. "Nice biscuit, don't you think", said Korzybski, while he took a second one. The students were chewing vigorously. Then he tore the white paper from the biscuits, in order to reveal the original packaging. On it was a big picture of a dog's head and the words "Dog Cookies". The students looked at the package, and were shocked. Two of them wanted to throw up, put their hands in front of their mouths, and ran out of the lecture hall to the toilet. "You see, ladies and gentlemen", Korzybski remarked, "I have just demonstrated that people don't just eat food, but also words, and that the taste of the former is often outdone by the taste of the latter." Apparently his prank aimed to illustrate how human suffering originates from the confusion or conflation of linguistic representations of reality and reality itself.
(Source: R. Diekstra, Haarlemmer Dagblad, 1993, cited by L. Derks & J. Hollander, Essenties van NLP (Utrecht: Servire, 1996), p. 58).
Ideas like this, born in the thirties as Korzybski watched, horrified, at the rise of fascism and Nazism in Europe, are part of the wisdom we must attain as we draw closer to the necessary confrontation of the Government and the People. There will come a point where the whole nation will pause, together, and realize what needs to be done, without having to speak of it. It will help us if we understand the reaction we are being wired to commit on the false hope it will assuage our grief: cruelty.
Cruelty
Idealism tempered by experience yields wisdom. Cruelty tempered by experience yields cunning. As Justice Blackmun said in an interview in which he was asked why he could rule on death penalty cases, he said he had to follow the will of the People and, "it's a mean mood out there right now." That was in the 1980s.
Well, the mood has gotten meaner yet. The underlying pain and anger of losing Vietnam, of not nuking Iran for taking our citizens hostage, of not getting to nuke Russia out of existance before they fell apart from their own loss of will, of not being able to nuke The Terrorists Who Did That To Us has been building and building relentlessly. "Nuke something, already!", the VRWC slaves cry.
The Left stopped us. The Humanists stopped us. The Ungodly stopped us. We could have finished the job if only these bleeding hearts hadn't gotten in our way. Lock up the drug dealers and homosexuals. Blow up the abortion clinics. Make the feminists learn their place. Protect the children from predators, but drug them up with Ritalin if they don't behave in class. Take children away from parents and send them into an underfunded system where some get lost.
Let cops mete out justice on the streets. Three strikes you're out. Round up the foreigners and throw 'em back over the border. Not in my back yard. Not in my school.
Cruelty unleashed becomes chic; opponents suspect, evil and weak. Eventually, for many of us, however, the reality of it becomes too much to bear. The death penalty is the ultimate cruelty: execution by a State of a Citizen. Justice Blackmun writes of how he struggled with this issue:
From this day forward, I shall no longer tinker with the machinery of death. For more than 20 years I have endeavored, indeed I have struggled, along with the majority of the Court, to develop procedural and substantive rules that would lend more than the appearance of fairness to the death penalty endeavor. Rather than continue to coddle the Court's delusion that the desired level of fairness has been achieved, I feel morally and intellectually obligated to concede that the death penalty experiment has failed.
THE DEATH PENALTY DYING:
CHANGING THE WAY WE THINK ABOUT CRIME & PUNISHMENT
Mike Farrell
May 30, 2001
The reason I oppose the death penalty has nothing to do with it's effectiveness. The reason I oppose the death penalty is because once the Government is allowed to do anything in any limited way, it will naturally work constantly to do that same thing in every way it can. If we allow the Government to execute a citizen for any reason sanctioned by law, the Government will find a way to execute citizens for more and more reasons, and get those reasons sanctioned by law. The Government can't help it -- it is not a person. It has no soul. It knows no limits other than those the People place upon it. It's hunger for more power is inexorable. That fact was made clear in 1993:
Leonel Herrera was executed in Texas on May 12, 1993, after the Supreme Court refused to hear new evidence of actual innocence. In that case, Justice Antonin Scalia said: "Mere factual innocence is no reason not to carry out a death sentence properly reached." Justice Blackmun, in dissent, called the court's decision "perilously close to simple murder."
THE DEATH PENALTY DYING:
CHANGING THE WAY WE THINK ABOUT CRIME & PUNISHMENT
Mike Farrell
May 30, 2001
Innocience is no reason to stop the Government from executing a citizen? Here cruelty becomes more, it becomes the tool of tyranny; the rule by law instead of the rule of law. This crossing of the line is the legacy of Reagan's Curse. The Curse makes us forget the fundamental rules:
- One innocient citizen deprived of their liberty deprives every citizen of their liberty.
- A citizen is innocient until proven guilty.
- If a citizen is convicted but found to be innocient, they must be given back their liberty.
These simple statements reflect what we were taught in civics class. They have also become the object of relentless ridicule by pundits and "experts" on the MSM until even such characatures as Nancy Grace and Ann Coulter actually have air time, and people watch them. The guilty pleasure of being cruel to other people has been unleashed now for twenty-seven years, and American citizens have indulged this "small evil" so much many people now believe they have a right to be cruel to fellow citizens.
"After all they could be Drug Dealers, Mass Murderers, Sex Offenders and, now, Terrorists," the Guardians Of The Curse cry. A core group of these people also feel the same way about Abortionists, Defense Attorneys and Homosexuals. An even smaller, but more committed, minority still think cruelty toward various races, immigrants and the poor is their right, but their Republican message masters hold them in check, mostly, for The Good Of The Party (with the unspoken message that we'll get to be cruel to Those People later, when a Permanent Republican Majority lasting 1,000 years is firmly established -- The Final Reich).
From Cruelty To Tyranny: Anatomy Of Reagan's Curse
Did we feel good when Saddam was pulled out of the rabbit hole? When he was executed? When his half-brother's head accidentally snapped off during his hanging? Do we even care any more? The thrill of shock 'n awe is long gone.
When someone who "looks middle-eastern" get on a plane with us, do we feel fear? Do we watch them out of the corner of our eye, just in case?
Once the insidious chemistry of cruelty begins, the art of spin devolves from "fair play in a tough world" to the evil of tyranny itself. Our republican democracy was crafted to prevent this devolution from going too far. Those protections are being tested to their limits in the current Administration.
The Curse Of Reagan began this episode of devolution. Now, twenty-seven years later, we face tyranny raw and unfiltered. The Government faces the state of no confidence by the People. In the cusp of collision between these forces, the Devil is in the details. In the aftermath of that collision, our United States will be reborn or the Constitutional experiment will fail. Such are the stakes. Such is the challenge. Rebirth will require the will to clean out the barn.
Cheney and Rumsfeld used cunning and wiles to oppose the Church Committee's investigation of domestic wiretapping for political hackery. We watched as the Foreign Intelligence Surveillence Court morphed into domestic surveillence under the cunning hand of law enforcement and the Federalist elves; the onslaught of cunning outrage that the hands of law enforcement were tied to enforce RICO and to wage the Drug War. Mandatory sentencing passed at the end of a long day, forced through and voted on by weary legislators who had not read the final language. We saw Iran-Contra allowed a pass and President George H. W. Bush pardon everyone on Christmas Eve in the holiday news black hole, again letting the contagion of drugs-for-guns and the narcospooks slither back into their cracks to begin working their way out again.
We watched as April Gilespie, Bush One's Ambassador to Iraq, told Saddam Hussein he could invade Kuwait, then how the military-industrial-complex captialized on that move to have a "good war" to wash the bitterness of Vietnam out of our collective palette, readying us for the Final Reich (er, I mean, the New World Order) ahead. We saw the cunning of Newt Gingrich and Tom Delay, alternately slitting the political throats of each other and their enemies in an unbridled, cynical bid for power on the backs of talk radio and massive GOTV machines and outright lies. We saw these cunning sociopaths wage the impeachment of Clinton through the Federalist Master Elf Ken Starr as Special Prosecutor to cleanse our collective palette of Watergate and Iran-Contra -- but that one didn't work. So close to their mind-wipe of the American public, they failed at the penultimate step. No matter, the cleansing of memory was nearly done -- who would remember anyway?
Cruelty begat cruelty. Police officers were forced to seize the assets of citizens to pay their own salaries. Military officers became salesmen for weapons systems upon retirement. Narcs and spooks became consultants to their old agencies for the latest gizmos and advocates for further ripping away of Miranda rights, limits on what "probable cause" meant, sneering at having to get warrants, demanding that cops be able to mete out justice immediately. Rambo, Lethal Weapon, CSI and 24 took up the theme of fast justice, fast resolution and villified defense attorneys and the scumbags who once were considered citizens.
Evil became banal. Idealism became frivolous. Fox News combined all the fears and cruelties into one continuous feel-good therapy session for those who wanted to be cruel, all the time, and not feel guilty about it any more. The cycle of redemption for celebrities and politicians, to go to treatment and come out clean on the other side, became a mockery of itself while those who needed real treatment waited in line until they ended up homeless or dead or got on with their lives.
Selling The Government
A seductive and insidious gospel was born within the conservative movement, gaining political power with the ascension of Ronald Reagan to President in 1980. That gospel preached that government agencies can't do anything right. True believers saw a Nanny State driven by false science to replace parents as the primary anchor of morals and social order.
One of the greatest fallacies of the "Reagan Revolution" was the idea that private businesses do a better job than public agencies in every portion of our public life. In fact, private businesses cannot live up to this doctrine and we now have ample evidence of this fact. We have labored under the consequences of this massive experiment long enough to know this doctrine fails, and does so miserably.
Political leaders promote this myth to the endangerment of the People. Public service cannot be motivated by profit. Profit cannot be the object of a government agency. Those who hate government simply want to starve the beast.
Bad Government
Government can never be a business, nor run like one, for many reasons. The biggest reason is that within a business, rule-by-law is expected, while in our Government, rule-of-law is required.
No private business can be allowed to have secrets no citizen can ever see. If we allow such secrets, then the business is no longer private, but an extension of the government itself. It cannot lose government contracts because that would be a security risk. It cannot be held accountable because the accountability process would require security clearances higher than even our Representatives in the House. Most of all, when advocates working for the private businesses become public servants, the temptation and pressure to use that public position to further protect and embed the private business into the government itself are so great that such breaches are sure to happen. Those breaches of the public trust which do happen must then be protected or the exposure will "endanger the government".
This kind of Catch-22 situation now permeates the Government, after 27 years of the Curse Of Reagan. Even if public servants were no part of the original deals, they risk their own careers and, possibly, the existance of the agency for which they work if they expose those "understandings". In this Administration, whistleblowers have been increasingly suppressed. Auditors and inspectors have been stripped of their authority, not been granted security clearances high enough to audit the most important (and costly) processes under their perview and had their reports rewritten by political appointees when they have their results ready to present to the public.
Bad For Business
The businesses entangled in this web also carry greater and greater risk. They cannot insure against many of the risks they are undertaking at the behest of the Government because that would expose the risk to outside scrutiny. Businesses become more and more saddled with "black projects" and mounting sets of parallel paperwork. Management breaks down. Project directors gain power over the business itself no CEO or Board Of Directors can possibly challenge without destroying the whole business, including portions which have nothing to do with the risky or illegal activities.
Businesses are expected to contribute to political campaigns or face losing key contracts; to provide jets and perks which have nothing to do with the work to be done; and to take on tasks for which they are unsuited and from which they cannot expect to profit. These inefficiencies must be made up somewhere else, or by fake projects and contracts. The snowball grows until the business is actually less efficient at all its activities than its peers.
These situations will lead to a crash. A disaster will happen, like 9-11, and Congress will have to step in to insulate the business from lawsuits. A disaster like Katrina will happen and insurance companies are forced to take on the burden until they cannot and the Government is expected to take on the rest of the risk. A collapse like the savings and loan debacle in the late 1980s will require taxpayers to run to the rescue. We have saved so many businesses from the free market, and now we are absorbing the pension funds of businesses who got the Court to break that sacred promise to their employees. But, hey, nothing's sacred anymore, right?
Vaccines developed at Government behest and approved by the Government without testing cause unexpected, chronic conditions that the Government has to pay for. Contractors spark situations in war zones that soldiers have to undertake greater risk than normal to quell. Whole military efforts bog down because the logistics or costs balloon out of control, like happened to Germany when their tanks ran out of gasoline in World War II.
National Insecurity
Businesses are purchased by foreign nations which hold sensitive information about individual citizens in their databases. The military and critical infrastructure of the nation are increasingly dependent on multinational corporations, some of whose stakeholders are potential adversaries of our nation. Liabilities grow unseen, hidden by groupthink and contract billing schemes that fragment projects into thousands of "deniable" phantasms -- rendering the idea of cost accounting or even management control laughable.
Privatizing government processes is bad for government and bad for business. If that were the end of the matter, it might be tolerable, but this is only the beginning of the consequences of this doctrine.
The idea that anything a government agency can do a private enterprise can do better has now been pounded into our heads for thirty years. At first, the voices were seductive and gentle, "Well, you know a private business wouldn't waste money like this." Increasingly, the voices carrying that message have become desperate and strident.
As the Overton Window has moved, the voices become insistant, "Everyone knows private businesses and the free market do this better because they are efficient!". In the past six years, the voices have become downright bullying in tone, "You must be one of those Sixties liberals who want the government to do everything for you, you ungrateful, unpatriotic relic from a drug-induced haze." The evil Nanny State looms large in VRWC rhetoric.
Step by step, the conventional wisdom has been shaped, prodded, herded and now enshrined as enduring truth. Not wisdom at all, but made to sound like it, this "innovation" in government has failed and is failing the People. In fact, now any citizen who challenges these assumptions is branded as a troublemaker and could end up on a watch list somewhere.
Those who compile those lists are committing evil against our republic. The act itself proves their allegience to the Constitution false. Every name on that list is a violation of the security of the republic, for it is only our individual liberty that will keep us free in the end.
When The Ticking Stops
The ticking the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy hears is not a time bomb. It is a stopwatch. It started the day Reagan was elected and it stops when the People see the Curse for what it is: when they return to themselves.
On that day, the People will know a great truth. It is the truth the Founding Fathers came to know fighting like cats and dogs in secret session in the Constitutional Convention. At the end, they knew the only power that could forge a Government to stand all tests which lay ahead in an uncertain future was the People acting as one, believing themselves to be a nation in order to make it so.
In the silence after the ticking stops, we will finally be able to put the souls of our beloved fellow citizens killed on September 11, 2001, to rest at last. We will not tolerate taking off our shoes to fly somewhere any longer, knowing some risk is part of life, and if it is less than being struck by lightning, it is a worthy price if we retain our liberty. We will not tolerate national identity cards, biometric databases, eternal detention or Special Powers by anyone in Government. We will no longer need these props simulating safety because we will rediscover the source of our common safety: ourselves. The trust among free citizens will come again. The New Normal will be banished as the lie that it is. Vigilence to safeguard liberty is the price of freedom, and we will be willing to pay that price again.
When the ticking stops, we will not tolerate using our military to feed the military industrial complex's hunger for new markets. We will no longer tolerate public servants who are anything but. We will no longer believe the fantasy that a Government can keep us safer than We The People can make ourselves. We will reconcile with those to whom we have been cruel, knowing no price can be placed on such slights, but expecting payment which can never be enough only lets the pain eat away our souls and makes a future redeemed of our sins unattainable.
Once that truth is known again to the People, we will know what is to be done. The doors of the barn will be open. In silence, we will line up outside, rolling up our sleeves. The stench will be terrible, but we will not turn away from it any longer. We will look at each other and shake our heads in resignation, then turn together with hope and determination in our eyes to face the task ahead. Grief will be gone. Cruelty will become hope and a sense of a future to be built together. Only one obstacle will remain to that future.
This time, the cleaning will not miss any crack or crevice. No pockets of scum or filth will escape the cleansing tide. The People will know we can't afford to leave the job half-done this time, no matter how much the Washington set pleads with us to "spare the nation the pain". This time the floor must be clean enough to eat supper on it when we are done.
The filth and fetid mass awaiting -- the power mongers, the fascists, the list-makers, the false journalists and scholars -- will see the waters pulling away from the shore, exposing all that only moments before had been hidden for years. Then they will see a hazy blue-green wall on the horizon. In that moment, all that is not on higher ground is already lost. In that moment, all that is along the shore will shortly be scrubbed raw and clean. In that moment, the dwellers on that shore better grab a flight out of the country to live off slush funds hidden in secret bank accounts.
Then the People, citizens freed from fear again, with only our two hands and the will to do the work, will grab a shovel and step forward as one. In that moment, we will know what the Founding Fathers knew when they finally put pen to paper to write a Constitution; what the Greatest Generation knew when it was time to defend England and France even though they were an ocean away; what the People knew when we saw Nixon waving good-bye -- each and all will know, without saying a word...
It's time to clean out the barn.
See you again in ten days (February 9) as the countdown to no confidence continues. Our next installment will be at the halfway point in our countdown, so we will stand on the balance point between looking back and looking forward; between contemplation and action; between what we think and what we have to say to our fellow citizens when we all stand in the breach.
The Series
Introduction to the series
T-80: Inflection Points & Catastrophes
Owning the key moments of our time
T-70: False Doctrines
Centralized Authority, Pre-emptive War
T-60: The Powell Doctrines
The Powell Memo, The Powell Doctrine, They3, People7, The Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy (VRWC), Overton hypercubes
Next: T-40: Knowing The Right Way
Please feel free to use this as a common thread. Pimp your own diaries, links and ideas without shame, because I want to hear from you. Promote the words of others that our fellow citizens need to hear when the point of no confidence is reached. Identify inflection points, realized and gathering, that you see. This power is the power of the Internet, of this online community and of the People. Use it now as more and more citizens need real ideas and real debate. Prepare yourselves for the moment for which many of us have worked decades: a chance to finish the work left undone after the resignation of Nixon.