The federal government is now totally dysfunctional.
Crippled by the mediocrity of cronyism and me-first greed, it has reached a state of dysfunction that rivals the U.S.S.R.'s just before things went all to hell there.
Mao Tse Tung had this to say about the U.S. almost 50 years ago. His words were more like prophecy than a statement of fact at the time, but here we are half a century later, and look who owns whose loans now. (Forgive the translation. Maybe there is a better one somewhere else? The message is clear, though.)
"...U.S. imperialism is quite powerful, but in reality it isn't. It is very weak politically because it is divorced from the masses of the people and is disliked by everybody and by the American people too. In appearance it is very powerful but in reality it is nothing to be afraid of, it is a paper tiger. Outwardly a tiger, it is made of paper, unable to withstand the wind and the rain. I believe the United States is nothing but a paper tiger. "
Old man Mao may have been a mass murderer, but if he was, he was certainly one hell of a PERCEPTIVE mass murderer.
More:
Note well:
"... it is divorced from the masses of the people and is disliked by everybody and by the American people too."
and
"Outwardly a tiger, it is made of paper, unable to withstand the wind and the rain."
Unable to withstand the wind and the rain.
Nice.
When you think about it, we have not really done anything "right" since the end of W.W. II.
If that.
The sheer economic, military and industrial might that was left over from the war effort kept us afloat well into the '60s, but the last attempt at doing something "right" died with the youth movement at Altamont in a hail of bad drugs and gun toting gangsters disguised as revolutionaries.
Since that time...1969...it has been all downhill.
Our cars fall apart.
So do our wars.
We must borrow from our competitors to keep our vaunted "lifestyle" in place..
Our industry has been sent packing to leaner, meaner, hungrier countries that are willing and able to work more efficiently.
We cannot even run a half-honest national election.
We have COMPLETELY fucked up our position in the international world by a series of ill advised military adventures that, once the initial bull rush fueled by our superior size and weaponry is over, degenerate into a position that Mao stated right there in the same discussion.
Here's what Mao said. In 1959.
"Everything is subject to change. The big decadent forces will give way to the small new-born forces. The small forces will change into big forces because the majority of the people demand this change."
And
"The big and strong cannot win, it is always the small and weak who win out."
And we are experiencing the truth of this as we speak.
We have gotten too big, too immobile for the speed of events in the world.
We have become decadent.
Remember the words of one of Bush's "senior advisors" to Times writer Ron Suskind in 2002?
"The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''
Well, that advisor was a blindered horse's ass if he thinks that this is what is happening. What they "create" is only a PICTURE of a reality, and they cannot effectively back that picture up with action when push comes to shove because the machine that they are trying to use is simply too damned big. Too many chiefs, not enough soldiers. By the time they get there, the emergency ITSELF has created a new reality to which they once AGAIN are too slow to react.
And so it goes...spinning further and further out of their realm of possible influence.
They spin a war to get oil which only increases the oil problem; they spin reasons not to fix a crumbling infrastructure at home in order to be able to prosecute that war, and then when parts of said infrastructure crumble in the face of Mao's wind and rain it only exacerbates the oil problem that was used as a pretext to ignore the problems within the infrastructure in the first place.
They can create SPIN...but "reality"? That's in a whole 'nother league, as the events in New Orleans are so eloquently testifying to an amazed American public that has finally been shaken out of its media-induced torpor by the sheer magnitude and relative proximity of the problem.
He who lives by the spin dies by the spin. Once the disaster in New Orleans first hit the media, there was no way for the government to hide it and no way for the media to avoid it.
So it goes.
And they are left with fingerpointing as their only resort.
Te Koppel on Nightline Thursday night absolutely pinned Michael Brown, whose official title is Under Secretary of Homeland Security for Emergency Preparedness and Response but whose real gig obviously is making excuses when things don't go well for FEMA in the media...sort of a minor league Scott McLellan. Koppel gave him holy hell, network style. (The media know on which side of their bread the butter is spinning...which is the single worst piece of bad news in a week's carload full for BushCo.) Brown's only defense to the multitude of charges from credible sources on the ground that FEMA was not doing its job was to say something to the effect of "I don't want to seem to be pointing fingers here" and then proceed to point in every direction but towards Washington DC.
Spin business as usual. Painting and then REpainting that paper tiger for all they are worth, these thieves and their lackeys.
But they CANNOT CREATE A LASTING REALITY. Because the system with which they are working is too big, too unwieldy.
They are decadent. Mao had it right.
"Everything is subject to change. The big decadent forces will give way to the small new-born forces."
Yup.
And they can point their fingers all they want.
You can't finger-point a new reality.
Not when the REAL "reality" is as big as THIS one, you can't.
They done fucked up BIG TIME this time, I think.
"Calling Dr. Fitzgerald. Dr. Patrick J. Fitzgerald. The patients are ready for that surgery now. Report to Washington DC. STAT!!!"
Let us pray...
Charles