Stop me if any of this sounds familiar: Rich, evil, tyrannical rat-bastards appear to have been forced into ceding control of the most economically important office in all of civilization to a much worthier leader, but only as a ruse in a larger plan to destroy him and further cement their own power. They sabotage the infrastructure that supports the economy as they leave, planning to blame resulting declines in performance on the new administration and cause powerful allies to desert it, and also leave behind an endless series of traps within traps to hinder and destroy it. They're supported in this bastardy by powerful third parties who pretend to be neutral or loyal - corporate/industrial interests, an external military power, and likeminded private elites. And the worthy fellow who volunteered for this shit knew up front he was walking into a trap, but knew there was simply too much at stake to do otherwise. Am I talking about Dune, or the past four years in American politics?
It's an imperfect analogy, obviously: Barack Obama was never powerful enough before the Presidency that Republicans would have gone to such lengths to trap him personally - his presence in the White House is a result of his own remarkable talents, which could have become dangerous even to a strong Republican candidate. But the Wall Street interests behind the GOP are infinitely opportunistic, and saw in their immediate loss an opportunity to both write off the disasters they'd inflicted and set up a scapegoat for crimes they planned to commit later.
The whole time he has been in office, they have held the nation - and really the world - effectively hostage, threatening to inflict unnecessary mass-layoffs simply as a punishment if he dares to hold them accountable. The demotion of the US credit rating was one such retaliatory measure, which few financial professionals considered necessary or justified, but it did its job as a stern warning both to the Obama White House and other world governments considering Keynesian policies over the socialization of losses and privatization of benefits promoted by the nascent feudal order. But, of course, if actual laws could be passed that pursued a Keynesian course and rebuilt the economic infrastructure of the United States, the machinations of the elite would be insufficient to undermine it: The President would have to be stopped from passing laws or filling vacant judicial seats by returning Congress to Republican control.
Enter the five Supreme Courtesans on whom Republicans rely when elections don't go their way, eradicating the entire body of US campaign finance law in a single brazen stroke and opening the flood gates for not only unlimited domestic corporate funding of GOP campaigns but the direct participation of foreign governments friendly to their oligarchic politics - governments like China and Saudi Arabia. Naturally this action occurred just in time for the 2010 campaign season, when the inherent disadvantages of incumbency could be exacerbated by the overwhelming financial dominance of challengers. With Wall Street actively eviscerating the American economy, and the administration prevented from acting beyond the scope of Executive Orders to address it after the GOP Congress came to power, the former has wielded near-total control of the direction of the economy and blamed every iota of their own actions on him via the media they control.
It's a fine little trap: Demoralize and divide Democrats by portraying the President as ineffectual, darkly hinting through internet trolls and the willing sabotage of selfish attention-whores that his character and political loyalties are in question. Meanwhile create a paranoid fantasy of all-powerful villainy and personal malignance in the minds of groups who already mistrust the President because of his race, manipulating their bigotry, ignorance, and narcissism at every turn to make him into the Other - and by extension, make the treasonous Republican reprobates who are actively destroying the United States into "real Americans" who should be chosen over the "Kenyan invader." For everyone else, who neither knows better nor is especially driven by identity politics, they can simply pin the consequences of their own ongoing crimes on him, and continue to do so even if they defeat him.
There really is no limit to the absurd lengths they would carry it: Attempts were made to pin the 1987 stock market crash and ensuing multi-year recession on Jimmy Carter's Presidency the previous decade rather than admit Reagan's policies had caused it by inflating speculation with too much money in the private sector and not enough in the public. And, of course, we all witnessed the surreal spectacle of Republicans attempting to retroactively blame the 2008 economic crisis on Barack Obama before he had even taken office. Unfortunately, there is more plausibility to blaming him for subsequent years of sluggish growth, although no remotely legitimate argument to that effect: He rescued the US economy from total annihilation, pure and simple, but because the recovery was stopped in its tracks by the GOP Congress halfway through the term, they created their own pretext for shifting blame.
Fortunately, real human behavior even among elites is much more transparent than any plot conceived in Frank Herbert literature, and Republican criminality is no exception: Their power is more an emergent property of millions acting selfishly and, for most of them, stupidly rather than a diabolical few designing impenetrable conspiracies in a society that makes a sport out of revealing secrets. Obama saw the trap well before he walked into it, as did plenty of his supporters (myself included), so this election will still be a genuine test of our strength and competence regardless of the lengths Republicans go to lie, control information, and rig the election in various states with Jim Crow laws or more prosaic dirty tricks.
And if all else fails - if Mitt Romney manages to hostilely acquire and cash-out this country the way he does with private businesses; if his party throws enough racial minorities off the voter rolls to hand him a fraudulent victory; and if he then, as predicted, builds himself gold-plated chalets in Switzerland with the American people's treasure while the people starve and watch their nation crumble around them - then that would be the beginning of the story, not the end.
Profoundly relevant sayings, aphorisms, and epigrams from the Dune series:
A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct.
--Princess Irulan
A popular man arouses the jealousy of the powerful.
--Thufir Hawat
Humans must never submit to animals.
--First lesson of Bene Gesserit training
Muad'Dib learned rapidly because his first training was in how to learn. And the first lesson of all was the basic trust that he could learn. It's shocking to find how many people do not believe they can learn, and how many more believe learning to be difficult. Muad'Dib knew that every experience carries its lesson.
--Princess Irulan
Any road followed precisely to its end leads precisely nowhere.
--Princess Irulan
My father once told me that respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality. "Something cannot emerge from nothing," he said. This is profound thinking if you understand how unstable "the truth" can be.
--Paul Muad'Dib
The highest function of ecology is understanding consequences.
--Pardot Kynes
It's easier to be terrified by an enemy you admire.
--Thufir Hawat
When religion and politics travel in the same cart, the riders believe nothing can stand in their way. Their movement becomes headlong – faster and faster and faster. They put aside all thought of obstacles and forget that a precipice does not show itself to the man in a blind rush until it’s too late.
--Bene Gesserit proverb
How often it is that the angry man rages denial of what his inner self is telling him.
--Paul Muad'Dib
The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it.
--Paul Muad'Dib
Expect only what happens in the fight. That way you'll never be surprised.
--Duncan Idaho
Much that was called religion has carried an unconscious attitude of hostility toward life. True religion must teach that life is filled with joys pleasing to the eye of God, that knowledge without action is empty. All men must see that the teaching of religion by rules and rote is largely a hoax. The proper teaching is recognized with ease. You can know it without fail because it awakens within you that sensation which tells you this is something you’ve always known.
--Commentary on the Religion of Dune
No matter how exotic human civilization becomes, no matter the developments of life and society nor the complexity of the machine/human interface, there always come interludes of lonely power when the course of humankind, depends upon the relatively simple actions of single individuals.
--The Tleilaxu Godbuk
The convoluted wording of legalisms grew up around the necessity to hide from ourselves the violence we intend toward each other. Between depriving a man of one hour from his life and depriving him of his life there exists only a difference of degree. You have done violence to him, consumed his energy. Elaborate euphemisms may conceal your intent to kill, but behind any use of power over another the ultimate assumption remains: "I feed on your energy."
--Paul Muad'Dib
Do not be trapped by the need to achieve anything. This way, you achieve everything.
--Hayt, Duncan Idaho ghola
There exists a limit to the force even the most powerful may apply without destroying themselves. Judging this limit is the true artistry of government. Misuse of power is the fatal sin. The law cannot be a tool of vengeance, never a hostage, nor a fortification against the martyrs it has created. You cannot threaten any individual and escape the consequences.
--Paul Muad'Dib
Belief can be manipulated. Only knowledge is dangerous.
--Scytale
[Muad'Dib] taught a balanced way of life, a philosophy with which a human can meet problems arising from an ever-changing universe. He said humankind is still evolving, in a process which will never end.
--Duncan Idaho ghola
Atrocity is recognized as such by victim and predator alike, by all who learn about it at whatever remove. Atrocity has no excuses, no mitigating argument. Atrocity never balances or rectifies the past. Atrocity merely arms the future for more atrocity. It is self-perpetuating upon itself — a barbarous form of incest. Whoever commits atrocity also commits those future atrocities thus bred.
--Apocrypha of Muad'Dib
Good government never depends upon laws, but upon the personal qualities of those who govern. The machinery of government is always subordinate to the will of those who administer that machinery. The most important element of government, therefore, is the method of choosing leaders.
--The Spacing Guild Manual
This is the fallacy of power: Ultimately it is effective only in an absolute, a limited universe. But the basic lesson of our relativistic universe is that things change. Any power must always meet a greater power.
--The Preacher at Arrakeen
Governments, if they endure, always tend increasingly toward aristocratic forms. No government in history has been known to evade this pattern. And as the aristocracy develops, government tends more and more to act exclusively in the interests of the ruling class — whether that class be hereditary royalty, oligarchs of financial empires, or entrenched bureaucracy.
--Politics as Repeat Phenomenon: Bene Gesserit Training Manual
Because of the one-pointed Time awareness in which the conventional mind remains immersed, humans tend to think of everything in a sequential, word-oriented framework. This mental trap produces very short-term concepts of effectiveness and consequences, a condition of constant, unplanned response to crises.
--Liet Kynes
A fixed solution is, by definition, a dead solution. The trouble with peace is that it tends to punish mistakes instead of rewarding brilliance.
--Paul Muad'Dib
Religion is the emulation of the adult by the child. Religion is the encystment of past beliefs: Mythology, which is guesswork, the assumptions of trust in the universe, those pronouncements which men have made in search of personal power, all of it mingled with shreds of enlightenment. And always the ultimate unspoken commandment is "Thou shalt not question!" But we question. We break that commandment as a matter of course. The work to which we have set ourselves is the liberating of the imagination, the harnessing of imagination to humankind's deepest sense of creativity.
--Bene Gesserit Credo
Any path that narrows future possibilities may become a lethal trap. Humans are not threading their way through a maze; they scan a vast horizon filled with unique opportunities. The narrowing viewpoint of the maze should appeal only to creatures with their noses buried in the sand.
--The Spacing Guild Handbook
We've lost something vital, I tell you. When we lost it, we lost the ability to make good decisions. We fall upon decisions these days the way we fall upon an enemy — or wait and wait, which is a form of giving up, and we allow the decisions of others to move us. Have we forgotten that we were the ones who set this current flowing?
--Princess Irulan
What do such machines really do? They increase the number of things we can do without thinking. Things we do without thinking — there's the real danger."
--Leto II
Remember that there exists a certain malevolence about the formation of any social order. It is the struggle for existence by an artificial entity. Despotism and slavery hover at the edges. Many injuries occur and, thus, the need for laws. The law develops its own power structure, creating more wounds and new injustices. Such trauma can be healed by cooperation. The summons to cooperate identifies the healer.
--Leto II
The best prophets lead you up to the curtain and let you peer through for yourself.
--Leto II
If you must label the absolute, use its proper name: Temporary.
--Leto II
I pray, therefore, that when you have traversed my portion of the Golden Path you no longer will be innocent children dancing to music you cannot hear.
--Leto II