Atrios and several other of the haute blogmondistes have tentatively suggested that, possibly, um, could be, those Democrats who reliably split with their Dem colleagues and cleave to the Regime and its Republican handmaidens in the House and Senate -- about 70 in the House and typically 20 or so in the Senate -- actually think they are... doing... the... right... thing.
They are not being hypocrites, they are not violating their Values. They are not necessarily craven, and quite possibly they are not cowards either. They and we just don't... agree.
Well.
Why, just the other day, Atrios even suggested that, actually, the "majority" in the House and Senate is not Democratic at all, but is composed of all Republicans together with Lieberman and that reliable cohort of Democrats who routinely vote with the Republicans and almost always support the Regime.
Hm.
Taken long enough for him and others to get the idea. Some of us have been saying it for months or years.
Knowing how these radical notions fester and then filter through the blogosphere, although fiercely resisted because they defy conventional blogospheric wisdom, and somebody is bound to argue the opposite point just because they can and it is traditional, we can expect that understanding these simple facts will take at least another two, three years, and when they are understood, it will take another five or six years to do anything about it, by which time the situation will be so radically different, nobody will care any more, and these simple facts will be irrelevant.
Meanwhile, of course, Craven-Cowardly Democrats Who Have No Principles and Stand For Nothing will continue to be the widespread and innacurate conventional description of the Dems in Office, Chris Matthews will be relentlessly denounced, and calling, faxing, supporting disappointing candidates, and ranting will be the limit of any call to arms.
So it has been, so it shall be.
But welcome aboard Duncan. We'll get there yet, dude.
Jeebus. Why is this man allowed to sit on the Supreme Court? He is demented.
Cf: Merriam-Webster:
demented One entry found. demented
Main Entry: de·ment·ed Pronunciation: \di-ˈmen-təd\ Function: adjective Date: 1632 1 : mad, insane 2 : suffering from or exhibiting cognitive dementia — de·ment·ed·ly adverb — de·ment·ed·ness noun
Demented in the sense of complete and utter evil, not simply having lost his mind, but using what few wits he has about him to achieve vile and evil purposes.
There was a rather cloying BBC4 radio interview yesterday that was picked up by NPR in which Scalia explained his view of "torture," or what people call torture. Oh, well. That.
Seems that Scalia opines that "torture" -- or what people call torture -- isn't unconstitutional so long as it is performed on suspects for the purpose of extracting information, such as what Jack Bauer would be expected to do to the Great Terrorist in his captivity who knew where the nuclear bomb was that was going to destroy Los Angeles. Surely that's not illegal or unconstitutional, how could it be? On the other hand, posits Nino, "torture" -- or what people call torture, who can say what it really is in these Post Modern Times of War, I ask you? -- used as punishment for convicted criminals (and/or terrorists?) is clearly unconstitutional, illegal, what have you.
So there you have it:
Torture suspects all you want; they have information; you need it; torture is the way to get it.
Don't torture convicts; it's wrong and nasty and icky and illegal. Convicts don't have information you need; let them rot in their dungeons.
The image above is from the balcony of a house in Santa Fe, (or as I call it, "Fanta Se") New Mexico.
Santa Fe has long attracted a certain sort of independent, even rebellious type, often with a creative or artistic streak, and most helpfully with lots and lots of money. Well. Santa Fe can be one of the more expensive destinations on your itinerary, depending on what you want to do and all, and amongst whom you wish to fit in. Edit: the house from which this picture was taken is listed by Sothebys for $2,850,000 and is "under contract."
I've spent quite a lot of time in Santa Fe and New Mexico over the last 20-25 years or so, never really worried about Fitting In, though I've been welcomed in many places and under many circumstances there.
The sky has never disappointed.
Perhaps the most rewarding and exciting adventure was to the Star Party at Chaco Canyon one September night a few years back. Now, Chaco is not an easy access facility. It's sixteen miles down a corduroy dirt road from the highway, and you typically don't attempt it in any kind of weather at all. But once you're there, it's quite a sight and even more of a feeling. Star Parties go on there because the skies are so pristine and the dark can be so enveloping. Try imagining what it was like when the canyon was inhabited.
Other locales in the state have their own captivating qualities, charming people, and deep-rooted history. It's my Other Home...
[Have to run off to a seminar in a few, so this will be quick.]
Random Notes...
Obama and Amy Winehouse pick up Grammys. I picked out Winehouse's "Rehab" for the Congressional Theme Song some time back, when Nancy and Harry were throwing hissyfits about how they're the Leaders, and we're just Activists and oughta sit down and shut up. They needed (and need) "rehab" bad, but they won't go-go-go.
And it looks like we're going to stumble through the next few months with a wacked out Congress still picking at its scabs and wondering why nobody thinks they're kewl.
Pity.
It would be great if Obama or Clinton would go back to the Senate for a while and kick some major butt; it's called leadership, something former candidate Chris Dodd figured out how to do on FISA Reform. Shouldn't Obama and Clinton try it?
Just sayin.
Media ramble.
I don't get cable so what's left of my mind isn't polluted by the frenzied yowlings of the 24/7 News Cycle. I see Tweety now and then on his own show -- which is broadcast on my local channel but often preempted.
The many personalities that infect cable news barely register on my radar. Noise, little more. So the recent incidents involving Matthews and David Schuster seemed a bit overwrought in the blogosphere, to say the least. Especially given the fact that once Tweety "apologized" -- though his statement was a defense not an apology at all -- the Haute Blogmonde all "forgave" him. Hunh? And now with Schuster's suspension, he's being "forgiven" too.
What's up with that? Well, go over to Crooks and Liars, and you'll see that there are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of posts on the topic of Chris Matthews and his spittle-flecked Mouth. Not so many on Schuster, but he hasn't been around long enough. Taking Chris Matthews to task is a kind of sport, but it's also a necessary thing. Nobody in the Haute Blogmonde wants him to go away or even to stop his outrageous statements. Denouncing Chris Matthews is one of the most fulfilling aspects of blogging. What would the blogosphere do without him?
Seems that the Clintons were behind the Schuster spanking, which is interesting, because it's never been clear that the Clintons wield any influence or power over the media at all. At least nothing comparable to the stranglehold the Busheviks have on media matters. But a casual, thoughtless reference to Chelsea being "pimped out", made by Schuster, gets the Clinton "Machine" all cranked up to do battle with the forces of Evul at MSNBC and Schuster is forced into a Time Out. While the rightwing cohorts spew on, unmolested. Tweety spews relentlessly. Tim Russert continues to suck up to Rs and trounce or ignore Ds. Nothing really changes.
Which gets me to my final point of the day:
Strategy
Greenwald has been making a good case that Democrats need a New Strategy if they are going to win against McCainite Imperialism. Indeed. Conceding the ground on National Security to the Rs -- which the Dems have done since well before 9/11 -- is ruinous to the Party and its chances, as we've seen over and over and over again. ("Rehab" anyone?) And I argue that new strategies are needed all around, not just among our Democratic friends. Who are routinely called craven and cowards and the like by their Blogospheric critics. In fact, that's almost the limit of the Blogospheric critique of their behavior in office. They are Craven. They are Cowards. And they are Afraid.
I suggest there's more to it than that, and that furthermore, continuing to call them names merely reinforces their determination to fight... you.
They're called Cowards because too many of them refuse to fight the Rs. True enough, but those same Cowards are more than happy to turn around and fight against their own base of support and especially against the blogosphere all day and all night. They will fight tooth and nail, wield Power in abundance, face down their critics, and align with the Rs whenever it suits them to Get Things Done.
I argue they are Wrong, but not Cowards, and they are not necessarily Craven in their Error.
Rather than accuse them of what they are not, it seems to me to be better to state that they are Wrong, and their actions Morally Bankrupt. And show what the Right and Moral action would be.
Anthony has promised to come back this morning to finish some of the things he and Justin just weren't able to get to yesterday, like attach the filler and trim pieces around the bathtub and shower fixtures, which means breaking out some more tile since the spacing wasn't measured before the fixtures were installed. There are still some loose pipes in the walls, so they need strapping down. The water heater installation hasn't been completed yet -- though that was the appliance we started this whole adventure with (drains and straps and such are missing), and the kitchen and bathroom sink drains are leaking a bit. Oh, and the tub drain is clogged up with plaster and other debris. And apparently has sprung a major leak. I wonder how that happened? Gee.
Other than that, and a massive amount of wall hole-age and clean up still left to fix, we're doing fine. Even the cat seems to have settled in (he spent all of yesterday in the bedroom closet, buried in folded clothes under the hanging clothes. He was as contented a cat as I've ever seen him be in his hidey hole.)
We've grown to like bottled water, too. We can't really drink what's coming out of the taps yet because of who-knows-what kind of chemical contamination that's in it. It has an... interesting, piquant aroma... something like the burning and smoke generated by the plumbers as they went about their tasks inside and under the house. Apparently the residue is from the solder and flux and whatnot as the sweated the pipes together. It'll go away in a week or so, they say. OK. Fine.
The City got pissed because we turned the water off and on at their valve by the sidewalk. Apparently that's a NoNo, they're the only ones authorized to do that. Oh, really? Who'd a thunk. But their dambed valve was leaking anyway and had to be replaced, along with nearly everything else. At least they were pretty quick to come out when called. Didn't have to get all attitudinal about it, though. Excuse me. Ultimately everyone was mollified and we left as friends. Harrumph.
There's plaster dust all over everything, even though we tried to keep it confined to the areas of work by closing off the rest of the house. Apparently that wasn't enough. So prioritizing what to take care of first is the next task on the list. The holes in the walls can be temporarily covered over while we try to clean up as much of the debris and dust and stuff as possible, and then we can figure out how to keep the debris of repairs to the walls from overwhelming "living areas." Probably won't be entirely successful, but while we're doing it, we can begin to get rid of whatever we don't need anymore. Beacuse...
The floors are going to be another story.
An entirely different and more involved adventure. Repair and refinishing will lead, I'm sure, to redoing all the floors, which, realistically will mean moving out. To do that, after living here for 20 years, is going to be a somewhat more than daunting task.
Well, no, it's a toss up, and the struggle for Dem delegates goes on. The situation parallels 1968, though the mood of the country is quite different, the zeitgeist as it were, on another level altogether.
McCarthy was eclipsed when RFK got into the primary race in 1968. Nixon just plugged along. The nomination would have been RFK's -- almost by acclaimation -- if he had lived, but his victory in the California primary in June (imagine that), which sealed the nomination for him, ended with his assassination. By a Palestinian. Keep that in mind.
Humphrey, who had been the Establishment candidate all along, became the presumptive nominee, what other choice was there? McCarthy of course, but that was not to be.
The Democratic Convention disturbances (to put it mildly) were captured well in the film "Medium Cool" -- along with a strong element of general media criticism, in a highly melodramatic storyline, but what the hey? The struggles outside and inside the convention typified the struggles in the nation as a whole. The whole Progressive infrastructure was under assault, and the Powers That Be proclaimed the Perpetuity of the Status Quo. Crushing the student rebellion was only part of it. Humphrey was sincere and dull and hardly a leader. He was an apparatchik, a decent one to be sure, but less charismatic than a turnip, and determined to soldier on with Lyndon Johnson's by then more and more suspect policies, especially the war policies in Vietnam.
Nixon promised something else again. Just what, nobody knew, but it wasn't more of the same damned thing that had got so many Americans up in arms that year -- and there were many, many Americans up in arms. The riots and destruction following Martin Luther King's assassination combined with the horror of RFK's assassination, combined with the monstrousness of Vietnam, and the constant student unrest, the Dirty Fucking Hippies, the gloating and self-satisfaction of the Communist Devils, all made Nixon's promises to "change" things that much more appealing. Who wanted to stay with the Status Quo? In fact, there was no way.
So Nixon won in 1968.
And there is a real underlying fear that something like that, ie: St. McCain's ultimate Victory, will happen this year. There's plenty of worry for the Redemptionist candidate's safety, too. Given what tends to happen to such candidates in our highly charged political culture.
But is Hillary really the Status Quo? Obama says she is, and it's the widely held assumption that she is, and that comforts a lot of people, surprisingly enough. She is not so different that she threatens as many people as Obama does, and yet Obama has a huge appeal on his Platform of Redemption, one that resonates far more than Hillary's endless wonkiness.
McCain, of course, is just a loon. Dude is wack. He's always been the media's darling though, even more than his butt-buddy Holy Joe Lieberman, and in a contest between Hillary and McCain, we know who would be favored and who would be smeared by the media. In a contest between Obama and McCain, it's not so clear, because Obama too is heavily favored in media-land. Yet if the R slime machine found something to smear Obama with -- something new, that is -- we can be sure it would be highlighted and paraded around endlessly by the media, whereas nothing of the sort would be attempted with any bad info regarding McCain.
If there were an attack or an assassination after the nominees are chosen, then it's highly likely McCain -- as the Strong (Grand)Daddy -- would just be given the Presidency outright, who needs an "election" anyway?
Sometimes I get myself so worked up over it I just want to crawl under the covers.
Other times, I have a slim, wan hope that things will get better, history does not repeat, and Tomorrow is Another Day.
Today was worse than yesterday by maybe 50%, maybe more. (And I hear there are primaries under way, eh? What's the haps? Haven't been able to keep up with the numbers at all.)
Anthony and Justin arrived right on time and went right to work. Justin showed me his eye, no longer red and weepy, and said that it had been driving him nuts most of the night, that whatever he'd got in it wouldn't come out, and then all of a sudden it was gone. I felt kind of silly playing pseudoDoc to a young lunky plumber who wouldn't wear goggles -- I'm sure he didn't have any -- but hey, they were promising to get the majority of the work done by the end of the day, so why complain too much?
Eh, maybe I shoulda.
No injuries today that I know of, but they were here from 8:00a till almost dark, close to 6:00p, and we still don't have any water. There was a lot of sawing and pipe wrenching this morning -- I thought all that was done yesterday -- and a lot of galvanized pipe was piling up on the driveway, pipe-age I thought had all been removed yesterday. 'Nother guy was out digging trench for the new feed line from the street main, and had quite a challenge getting under the front walk. Anthony and Justin went under the house after finishing with their yanking and sawing inside the house, and were under there most of the rest of the day. At one point, whatever electrics they were using under the house overloaded the circuit and they were plunged into darkness (apparently the bulb blew out and that's what caused the circuit to trip). Worse, the smoke alarm kept going off as they heated the pipes for joining. Finally took the battery out just to make it stop. Of course I made them promise they really weren't trying to burn the house down.
The noises under the house, the cursing, the wrenching, the banging and carrying on were even more abundant than yesterday. And it didn't seem like they were making much progress at all. Then Justin came up for air and went into the bathroom to fuss with the piping under the sink, and I swear he was there for three solid hours. Then it was back under.
When 3:00p rolled around, and nothing at all was connected, I became, as they say, "concerned." The toilet was still in the bathtub, there were no fixures installed anywhere, the kitchen sink supply piping wasn't in on one side, because they couldn't get it seated, the waterheater was disconnected, and the main from the street was disconnected, the new pipes were laid in the trench not linked to the house or the city main. In fact, someone from the city had to come out and replace a nipple on the shut off valve or no new piping could be attached.
And the cat was missing.
He'd gone to hide behind the tub (figuring the wall was opened up just for him, you know how cats are) and when the plumbers started making real noise in there, he bolted out, scaring Justin, who literally screamed. He went chattering off into the hall, "Do you know what just happened! Do you know? A CAT came running out from behind the tub." I said, "Did you see where he went?" cool as a cucumber. "Outside?" The door wasn't open, so that was unlikely. I suspected the cat had run back behind the tub once Justin was out of the room. I didn't see him again until a half hour after they left this evening, then he emerged from under some shrubbery outside, as if he'd been there all the time, and he was ready for supper.
When the plumbers realized we'd only prepared for two days without water, and there was no sign they were going to complete the job today, they went into furious overdrive to connect the toilet, tub and sink in the bathroom and the waterheater. Also, it seemed like a good idea to reconnect to the old main line in the front yard, so as to have a flow into the house. It was a frenzy. Finally, about 5:00p enough was connected to try the system. Justin was stationed in the bathroom, Anthony at the main valve at the street, me headed to the laundry room between them.
And I heard this sound, like the sound the water heater made when it failed. Oh no. When I got to the laundry room door, a puddle of water was coming out from under the washing machine. I hollered to Anthony to turn it off. It took him a while, and the water gushed up the wall. In all the frenzy, no one had thought to cap the washer lines, and so water was fountaining up from the pipes, and we had a flood. Justin came and started sweeping the water out, Anthony came and looked crestfallen. When he realized where the water was coming from, he cursed lustily and got to work capping the pipes. That took a few minutes, while clearing out the water took considerably longer. Finally, it was time to test the mini-system again.
Leaks. Everywhere. OMG. That was it, no water tonight. They cleaned up and left. I spent another half hour sopping up the water in the laundry room. Then I left, too.
Got me a big greasy burger and fries, and a bottle of water. And another bottle of water, a big one. And another one.
Anthony and Justin said they'd be back tomorrow morning, planning to finish by early afternoon. But... We're looking at the new damage, on top of the damage when the water heater originally blew out, and it's tough to reconcile.
Did I hear somebody say we should fire them and call another company to fix and finish?
Anthony and Justin arrived about an hour late yesterday, but they got right to work opening up the walls and excising the nasty, very rusted old pipes. Actually, the cold water pipes were fine; the hot water pipes were the ones filled with rust and corrosion.
We tried to prepare by moving as much stuff out of the way as possible, but not knowing exactly where they were going to want to work, a lot of what we moved was still in the way, so rearrangement continued throughout the day. The noise was awful. Saws and hammers and grinders, torches and wrenches and everything else, including the kitchen sink went into the struggle. Plumbing fittings still litter the yard. The tub is full of tools and odd flotsam and jetsam from the job. The cat smartly hid...
One wall was cut that didn't have to be, and in cutting the right one instead, Justin managed to get some plaster chips in his eye. Oh man. Anthony was under the kitchen sink at the time, banging away, and called out, "Justin! Come here, I need some help." Nothing. The saw in the bathroom had stopped some time back. "Justin!" Nothing. Then a few minutes later, Justin showed up in the kitchen, "Anthony, I need the keys to the truck, I got something in my eye." Anthony said, "I need your help here." Uh... dude. I was about to intervene when Justin said, "Look, I can't. I can't see. Give me the keys." And Justin went out to the truck. Anthony sat there for a minute in a pile of plaster dust and rotted pipe-age. "Oh..." It was like a lightbulb went on over his head. "Oh... shit." He got up and went out to the truck.
I continued my business in the house. A few minutes later, the two of them came back and started packing up for the day. It was about 3:00p, and they'd been working pretty hard, with Justin under the house most of the time, where all the most pitiful and desperate pipe-wracking sounds had been coming from. They got their stuff out to the truck, and Justin was in the laundry room looking sort of lost. I asked him about his eye. He told me what had happened and showed me his red and weepy left eye. I told him he better get some treatment, it could be nasty. He said he would. Before they left, Anthony -- who by now you've figured out was the journeyman -- took me aside and said everything was OK, they actually got somewhat farther today than they expected to. All the old pipes are out, some of the new ones are in, and they'll have the rest in tomorrow (today), and he expected everything to finish up tomorrow (today) and the water to be back on by early afternoon.
Except...
Well, of course, there's always that, isn't there? He took me around to the front of the house and showed me the main where the water came in to the house through the line from the street. Ooops. He'd been replacing the hose bib and setting up a new shut off valve when the pipe broke. He dug around and found it was rusted where it came out of the ground. He was going to dig around some more hoping to find some solid pipe to connect to, but the whole thing could be rusted in which case, replacement time. OK. I asked if he could do it tomorrow (today) if he needed to; he thought he could. The wall mount faucet they got for the kitchen doesn't quite fit, so they're going to try to find a better one. The bathtub and shower fittings should be OK, but they haven't tried them yet. They -- so far -- haven't had to open exterior walls, so there is that.
We laid in a supply of about 40 gallons of water to get us through two days without running water (they'd told us it would only be one, but we suspected otherwise and were correct.) We've been able to do most routine water-using activities except bathe, the tub being decommissioned for the duration. The kitchen sink drain broke during the struggle with the pipes, so that is out of commission and will have to be replaced. Flushing the toilet without running water is possible, but it seems to take a lot of water to do it, four gallons to fill the tank plus another gallon to clear the bowl. That's used up a lot of our non-potable supply, though we are doing our best to limit our trips to the toidy to those only absolutely necessary. We're trying not to generate dishes to wash, and only doing minimal morning ablutions.
And then there are the holes in the walls. Ones needed and not needed. The plumbers are not going to fix them. We will. Saving some of the cost, you see, but still...
As for that plumber's eye... well, we'll see shortly, won't we? They're supposed to be back here in an hour an a half.
Francis Fukuyama (in)famously proposed an "End of History" in a 1989 essay later expanded in a 1992 book titled "The End of History and the Last Man."
His thesis was stark recognition that with the fall of the Soviet Union, the cause of Progress had come to an end in the sense we had known it. History itself had in a sense come to an end. There was no clear path forward, no comprehensive motive for further developments on the Progressive model. Some form of Western Democracy and Market Capitalism had come to dominate the political and economic life of the whole world; it would only expand its reach in the future. "Progress" on the models previously understood simply had no ideological basis any more. Modernism itself was no longer necessary or possible.
Our Future would be Post Modern, unpredictable in the short term, but consistently expanding the practice of Western Democracy and Market Capitalism over the long term.
This reading of Fukuyama's thesis may not comport with the generally held belief that he was simply being a Hegelian/Straussian NeoConman tool, advocating a Neo-Imperialist expansion of the West, particularly the United States, by force and theft. In fact, that isn't what he advocated. It is instead the consequence of the Triumph of the End-of-the-20th-Century Western World View.
That world view was until relatively recently dominated by the principles of the Progressive Operating System (as modified) that has been nearly universally applied to governments and NGOs throughout the Civilized World. Now, with the "end" of History, that Operating System seemed more and more an anachronism and an impediment.
What to do?
The answer seems to be to plow forward willy-nilly, in a strange and bloody version of Dickensian Darwinism, let the survivors rule, and that, as they say, is that. So far, we don't have a serious counter movement, an effective ideological counter.
While we have candidates claiming a Progressive mantle, the term no longer has any meaning -- except as a formless "opposition" to Bushevism that really hasn't been an effective opposition at all. In some sense, Bushevism is as Progressive as the Progressives -- who seem incapable of doing anything in any case.
One by one, government agencies are being openly purged of lingering Progressive operations, replaced with purely ignorant, crony and political hackery such as hasn't been seen in government since the end of the 19th Century. So-called Progressive legislators do little or nothing about it, some even helping to undermine what's left of Progressive operations by reflexively approving Bushevik nominees to cabinet and judicial appointments.
They are pledged to dismantle what's left of Progressivism in the Federal government, and as that happens, State and local governments must follow suit in order to coordinate their operations with those of the Federal government -- which holds enormous power of the purse (among other things) over the domestic dependent governments.
So we've seen at first a gradual and then precipitous decline of objective and rational governmental operations at all levels, replaced with a corrupt and very personalized, often irrational and arbitrary operation.
The plumbers are scheduled to come on Monday to start replacing the corroded galvanized pipes with shiny new copper.
Joy. Rapture. OMG.
They have to open up the interior walls in the bathroom and kitchen, also an exterior wall in the kitchen. They have to dig a trench in the front and have the city come out to locate the main water shut off valve -- somewhere, who knows where. They're supposed to replace the exterior water lines and hosebibs too. Replace all the faucets. And then somehow it all has to be put back together.
Just a major plumbing overhaul. Major upheaval at Casa Ché.
They are anticipating a three day job. I don't envy them trying to crawl around under the house, or wrestling with the galvanized pipes, or any of the rest of what they will be doing. These old houses were not built to be messed with afterwards.
We will attempt to continue living in the house while all of this is going on, even though we'll effectively have to half-move out to give the plumbers room to manoeuver. And periodically, I'll try to post.
Martin Luther King, Jr. precipitated Crises through his oratory, through marches and demonstrations, and through massive rallies. These Crises became Crises of Conscience for Americans. King used the lofty rhetoric of our Founders, of the Constitution, of our most honored thinkers, jurists and Presidents as catalysts to shame Americans for their willingness to oppress or allow the oppression of Americans in America, the millions of not-White Americans who had long been condemned to the margins, to the underbelly, to dispair.
Shame.
Our Enemies Abroad -- at that time, the World-Wide Communist Conspiracy -- were only too eager to exploit America's shame and hypocrisy, to play up every aspect of the Civil Rights Movement and its suppression. Every firehose, dog, and bludgeon used against peaceful Americans advocating the rights guaranteed to all in the Constitution was played up for everything it was worth in the Communist propaganda media of the day. Proof, they said, of the Fraud that was America.
J Edgar Hoover's FBI considered King and his ilk to be traitors and dupes of the Communists, spied upon them, and eventually would infiltrate and act as provocateurs within their organizations.
Racism was a fundamental tenet of American political, social and economic belief. It was at the root of the American experiment. From the beginning, it was almost impossible to imagine America without a racist core belief.
Yet King and his allies went against it directly and forcefully. And they won. Well, they won the Battle. Whether they have truly won the overall war is yet to be seen. It will depend in part on who is designated the Enemy du Jour once this Muslim business is done with. If we wind up in a permanent state of War On Terror, and The Terrorists continue to be defined as easily spotted individuals who don't join the Consensus of Autocratic Rule and openly and devoutly cheer the Leader, who speak different languages, have different religions, and don't necessarily have an approved appearance, we may well find ourselves back in the racist morass we thought we had emerged from. We are nearly there as it is given the widespread antipathy toward and fear of The Muslims.
In the context of his times, King was contending with a highly reactionary Southern culture, which could not conceive of its very survival without full-on racism, White Supremacy, segregation, and ruinous racial discrimination and exploitation of the Black underclass. Of course many white Southerners at the time had actually long since got beyond that primitive way of thinking in their individual lives. But the Southern Culture was seemingly immovable, frozen in time. Many of the racist attitudes in the South were commonplace throughout the country as well. Segregation was a way of life; racial discrimination was simply what one did, wherever one was. Law may not have enforced all these practices, but custom most certainly did. While King's struggle was mostly in the South, nowhere in the country was entirely free of the taint of racism and racial discrimination.
King was contending with Southern Culture, but he was also contending with a largely oblivious governing system, in the localities, in the States, and at the Federal level. That governing system was nearly entirely Progressive -- long since adopting the basic tenets of Progressivism.
As I attempted to point out earlier, Progressivism is not an ideology; it is an operating system for government. The adoption of Progressive operating systems in the United States got going in earnest near the turn of the 20th Century, becoming all but universal by the end of World War II. As an operating system, Progressivism had adopted many of the beliefs and customs current at the time of its first successes, including racism. There is little doubt that White Supremacy was taken as an article of faith by early Progressives, and a whole other detailed examination of that aspect of the Progressive Movement needs to be made, but for now let's just say that the way most government was organized and operated at the time of King's major efforts was deeply and intimately racist.
Changing that proved somewhat easier than changing the racial customs on which the Progressive governing systems were based. That's not to say it was easy, just easier.
Part of King's genius was to understand that if you tweak the operating system -- change the laws and the way the system works -- customs can be changed as well.
But the question is where and how...
For generations, Blacks had struggled for equality through the courts and legislatures and essentially gotten nowhere until 1954, when the Supreme Court ruled that segregated schools were not "equal" -- undermining the premise of legalized segregation and inspiring a fierce reaction. Attempts at integration did not proceed easily in many areas, not solely in the South, and progress was slow to say the least.
Government was of little help, with the exception of those few occasions when troops were sent in to cities in the South to enforce integration. Needless to say, Whites did not respond positively.
Congress had passed some Civil Rights legislation, including the Civil Rights Act of 1957, but enforcement was lacking.
It took King's precipitation of Crisis and the subsequent management of that Crisis to force a Change of Conscience (particularly but not exclusively among white Southerners) which led to the decline and near-ending of legal segregation and racial discrimination in most aspects of public life in the South and throughout the country.
And it took a Crisis of Conscience within the Progressive governing system to ensure the enforcement of Change. That was a somewhat more complicated situation. The catalysts for that Crisis and subsequent Change included Dr. King and his work, but it also included the nation's self-examination following the assassination of President Kennedy, and its subsequent rededication to become a better America, a Great Society as it were, under President Johnson.
This picture headed the front page of Huffington Post yesterday linking to the news item announcing the endorsement of Barack Obama by Caroline and her uncle Ted Kennedy, endorsements filled with evocations of John and Robert Kennedy. It gave me the willies.
We know what happened to them.
Political assassinations have a long and inglorious history in this country, and the potential for the assassination of Barack Obama has been a factor from the outset of his campaign. It's something that's rarely mentioned, but it's always there.
This picture, though, draws an explicit comparison between the three men, and unfortunately it leads the mind directly to the horrible dénouement.
There are times I wonder if Obama is deliberately daring potential assassins to try it. This is not to blame him if something does happen. There are only so many ways one can attempt to avoid the perils of American public life. It is instead linked to my understanding of Obama as a candidate who offers Redemption to a nation that has long been on the wrong path.
Redemption and Sacrifice are too intimately linked to separate.
One of the most frustrating aspects of the Post-Reagan, and especially the Bushevik Era, has been the monopolization of Crisis->Change by the right wing authoritarians. "Leftists" -- so-called -- have been essentially unable to gain any headway, make any positive changes, for decades. Many of the reforms of the Progressive Era have been undermined or rolled back, sometimes against very weak or absent opposition, and there's been relatively little enthusiasm and energy put in to advancing -- or even articulating -- a contemporary Progressive agenda in the face of the right wing onslaught.
Socially, culturally, politically Americans have been going backwards for a generation. It's one of the most remarkable reversals of the modern era.
What do we do about it, and as importantly, how do we do anything about it?
Martin Luther King and other civil rights leaders saw a congruent situation developing for Blacks in the South and elsewhere in the country (segregation and legal discrimination against Blacks extended far and wide prior to the mid-1960's) and they took radical action. As detailed earlier, Martin Luther King took the notion of Crisis leading to Change from the example of Gandhi's efforts to liberate India from the oppression of the British Empire, applied it to the South in specific, concentrated, non-violent actions, precipitating Crises, which -- suprise, suprise -- led to an end to official and lawful segregation, and at least a mitigation of racial discrimination, and a far wider extension of civil and political rights than the nation had ever known.
But the success of the Civil Rights Movement (and its ancillaries -- the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley, the campus revolts of the '60's, the Anti-War Movement, etc.) caused a reaction that is with us today. A reaction that is crystalized in Bushevism.
The Crisis King sought -- and largely achieved -- was external. He sought to precipitate conditions, in concentrated situations, which would shine a bright light on the Powers That Were, bringing shame to them; he hoped that the spotlight and the shame that occurred because of the direct actions he and the Southern Christian Leadership Council took would cause a Crisis of Conscience, which would force the Powers either to negotiate or to yield outright. His efforts did not bear immediate fruit.
Resistance in the South was very strong, despite the success he and other civil rights leaders had in bringing attention to the issues of segregation, discrimination, and voting rights. White Southerners, apparently, were willing to live with the shame of their laws, attitudes and behavior toward their dark-skinned brothers and sisters. There was a Principle to uphold, and Sacred Honor. White Supremacy was a matter of deeply held belief, of faith, and the struggle to maintain it was worth nearly any cost to the Southern Believer.
In other words, King was amply able to utilize the tools of external Crisis in his march toward liberation, but despite his best efforts -- and despite the shame of the brutal and bloody reaction to his efforts in the South -- he was only partially able to inspire an internal Crisis among Southern Whites sufficient to cause them to Change their laws, attitudes and behaviors.
He had more success in Washington, DC, where, in 1963, following his famous March and Rally at the Lincoln Memorial, he was able to convince President Kennedy to back milestone Civil Rights legislation then pending in Congress. Passage of that legislation, however, had to wait for a very different sort of Crisis, that of the assassination of President Kennedy and the extraordinary sweep of reform that occurred in Washington in 1964.
It took a combination of external and internal Crises, on a localized and a National scale, to force the Changes necessary to ensure civil and political rights to all Americans. Many Southerners still resent those changes, but many others would never go back to the way things were. For in bringing Liberation to the oppressed, the oppressor is also liberated.
Central to Martin Luther King's premise and defense of public demonstrations against segregation and racial discrimination in his "Letter From A Birmingham Jail" is the concept of Crisis providing the opportunity for Positive Change. Indeed, he sees Crisis as a necessity for Change.
King says:
You may well ask: "Why direct action, why sit ins, why marches and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word "tension." I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood.
The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.
This theory of Crisis inspiring Change may sound familiar. It is in some ways the foundational theory of those who practice the "Shock Doctrine" so well-known through the works of Naomi Klein. King, of course, is adopting the road of nonviolent resistance -> Crisis -> Change, a pathway that Mahatma Gandhi laid out in the long struggle to free India from the oppression and exploitation of the British Empire. The "Shock Doctrine", on the other hand, is often characterized by violent imposition from above, not unlike the way British India came into being in the first place. Or, in a more immediate and contemporary sense, the way the brutal Iraq invasion and occupation has transpired and continues.
King sought to create the conditions of Crisis so as to force the Powers That Be in Birmingham to negotiate modification and eventual end of Jim Crow segregation in the city, and he would seek to extend the principle broadly throughout the South and wherever else segregation and racial discrimination was the law or the custom.
He knew from Gandhi's experience that it works. It takes time and immense forbearance and patience, but it works. The oppressor eventually is so shamed by his own acts of oppression, and bystanders are so shamed by their indifference to the oppression they are immersed in, that positive Change becomes a necessity for the oppressor.
What we have to come to grips with is that the Progressive operating systems then in place -- as much in Birmingham as anywhere else in the country (Birmingham was no cracker backwater; it was a modern, thriving, industrial city, on the leading edge of what was even then called The New South) -- had failed to accommodate the growing clamor of millions of oppressed Americans for even the basics of Constitutional rights and liberties, a full century after the Emancipation Proclamation.
Civil rights activists were told to "Wait." And not only in Birmingham.
My own neighborhood in California at the time was segregated. The state legislature passed a Fair Housing Act in 1963 to address the widespread segregation in California, only to see the law overturned through the initiative process in 1964. Just as in the South, African Americans in Progressive California were told to "wait" until the times were "right" for Change.
We see some of that today, too. Activists against the Bushevik regime have long been told to "wait," to used only approved methods, only at the right time, to end the national nightmare of Bushevism. And yet, we see today, the more we wait, the worse, in fact, things become.
King advocated nonviolent direct action to precipitate Crisis conditions that would allow and require Change.
And Change, we note, is the overall theme of this year's election campaign, on all sides.
The Water Heater Saga Continues and its consequences will occupy us for some time. Repiping the house and fixing the floors has been put on temporary hold; denizens of Casa Ché are adapting to the new (but not improved) situation. And we go on.
By getting back to my topic, in this case Progressive Ideals and the Struggle of Martin Luther King, Jr. It can, perhaps, stand for much of the struggle the nation went through in the 1950's and '60's; and if we're open to it, we gain a little understanding of the mess we face now.
Just to recap: my premise is that Progressivism is primarily a governmental operating system. It is not an ideology. Starting shortly after the turn of the 20th Century, Progressivism became the Standard Operating System for all levels of government nearly everywhere in the country. That process was accelerated by the Depression and World War II. By the end of the War, there was no realistic alternative to Progressive governmental operations. That situation did not change fundamentally until the advent of the Reagan Revolt, first in California starting in 1967, then nationally with the election of Ronald Reagan to the Presidency in 1981.
Reaganism sought to overthrow and replace the Progressive operating system with another way of doing things that hearkened back to typical 19th Century inefficiency and incompetence, together with massive levels of greed, graft, and corruption. Some of what the Reaganites set out to do was accomplished, but much was not. It was left to the Busheviks to complete the transformation of government into a corrupt, incompetent Autocracy, eliminating, calling into question, or irrelevating, insofar as possible, remnants of Progressive operations at the federal level and discrediting them at the state and local level.
That's where we are now.
---------------------------------------------------------------------- 1963 was one of the many seminal years of the 1960's; Martin Luther King, Jr. went to Birmingham, AL and organized and protested against long-standing racial segregation, humiliation and violence that characterized the South. He and hundreds of others were arrested and clapped in jail. The Good Citizens of Birmingham, specifically a set of well-meaning white churchmen, wrote an open letter to King pleading with him to 1) go away; or 2) if not to go away, at least stop demonstrating against the persecution and injustice in Birmingham and engage in constructive negotiations with the... powers that be. You may read their letter here.
King, for his part, wrote back, quite publically, to scold the Good White Clergymen for their blind-foolishness, and to remind them not simply of the reasons why the Negroes of Birmingham couldn't wait, but why the Good White ClergyMen of Birmingham could STFU.
King's Letter From A Birmingham Jail is one of the most masterful slapdowns of the status quo and the Well-Meaning-Powers-That-Be ever written. Later in the year (August 28), King would deliver his famous "I Have A Dream" Speech from the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC; arguably, that event was the moment that changed forever the racial animosities and indifference that had characterized much of the nation's history, including the entire history of the Progressive Movement up till then.
Indeed Progressivism was riddled from the outset with racism. King, to his credit, recognized this internal flaw and contradiction in the Progressive Movement and chose to highlight it in order to make or force positive change. He was not anti-Progressive, he was anti-racist. Unfortunatly, Progressivism as an operating system, had built in racial biases that proved difficult to get rid of.
In this regard, the context of 1963 is important. The Civil Rights Movement had been under way in the courts, far more than in the streets, for decades, starting in earnest around the turn of the 20th Century in mostly failed efforts to turn back or prevent the imposition of Jim Crow laws. After World War II, civil rights campaigns took on renewed urgency. Brown v Board of Education (1954) undermined the premises of "separate but equal" segregated schooling, and Rosa Parks sparked rebellion against segregated public services (in her case, public transit) in Montgomery in 1955. Putting an end to legal segregation in all matters became the mission of civil rights activists, but still in 1963, segregation was widespread, not just in the South by any means, and the status quo was still fiercely protected by governments all over the country. And in 1963, throughout the South and spottily elsewhere, blacks were largely prevented from voting. Ending segregation and restoring or establishing voting rights for all Americans seem now to be self-evident Progressive ideals, but at the time they were not.
King says:
We have waited for more than three hundred and forty years for our God-given and constitutional rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward the goal of political independence, and we still creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward the gaining of a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. I guess it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say "wait." But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize, and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she cannot go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her little eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky, and see her begin to distort her little personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son asking in agonizing pathos, "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?"; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" and "colored"; when your first name becomes "nigger" and your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and when your wife and mother are never given the respected title "Mrs."; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodyness"—then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over and men are no longer willing to be plunged into an abyss of injustice where they experience the bleakness of corroding despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience ...
While his work at the time is in the South, in the center of Bull Connor's World, his words are addressed to the nation, not just to the narrow-minded GoodMen of the Birmingham Clergy.
And the reality for Blacks in America that King so eloquently describes in his letter was related to the reality far too many Americans had known throughout the nation's history, including throughout the Progressive Era.
Restricting access to rights and liberty, to peaceful enjoyment of life and family, to prosperity, to education, to opportunity was widely seen as right and proper in America. For many Americans, the Constitution and its many guarantees of equal justice, was a sick joke, perpetrated to fool the masses.
King saw opportunity to fulfill the promise of the Constitution, however, and to fulfill the long-delayed promises of Progress that seemed to come to everyone, especially after World War II, everyone except America's millions of oppressed and downtrodden.
The new water heater is in. However there is no hot water to speak of.
There is some floor damage to be considered; buckling oak flooring is crying out to be replaced, but once we start that process in the hall, we'd probably want to continue through the rest of the house, which means, of course, over-ending everything, and essentially moving out for who knows how long? In which case, hmmm...
Meanwhile, the absence of any hot water flow is due, as suspected, to the corrosion of the galvanized pipes that were put in when the house was built. When the water heater was changed out, the corrosion which had been kept from completely closing the pipes -- so that there was a minimal but serviceable flow before -- apparently felt free to constrict any future flow to the barest trickle.
So the plumber said, "We can replace your pipes for $10,000." Sticker shock. Doesn't he know house values have fallen by 30%?!! Is he mad?!! But checking around, that's the going rate for repiping one of the houses in this neighborhood, hasn't changed much for years. Most of the houses have already been done, this being one of the few remaining holdouts. It takes two days, the lath and plaster walls have to be opened up, much banging and carrying on trying to winch out the old piping, and then trying to fix all the holes and other damage, and hoping nothing leaks. Oh yes, they did it to the house next door a few months ago getting it ready for sale. It was a trial for the guys who did it. They had to come back several times to re-fix some of the fixes. As it was, the house sold for $40,000 less than the original asking price, in only six months, which the realtor thought was good, given the down market and all.
What to do?
Well, for now we boil water on the stove and contemplate our increasingly restricted options.
Dateline: Casa Ché, Yesterday -- Was just getting up, getting ready to prepare a post on MLK and the Progressive Ideal when, ay carumba, heard this strange hissing noise coming out of the laundry room. Paid little attention at first, made some coffee, was thinking about toast and jam, and a little tapping in the back of my mind kept saying, hmm, something's not right, and I went to check the hissing again and discovered a growing flood of hot water on the floor of the laundry room. Uh oh. Better turn off the water to the water heater. OK. Sure. Fine. The valve is stuck. Casa Ché is not one of your newer suburban residences, oh no, we're talking Late Depression American Home, mostly in original condition. No remodeling over the years. Even vague Moderne touches here and there.
So. What do you do? Hot water is spreading and getting deeper, the flood growing. Can't budge the valve. Start sweeping it out the door is what I did, and when it seemed like most was gone but more was still coming out, I ran around looking for the main valve, found it finally, and turned the water off to the house. Spent the next several hours mopping up the flood, which had spread to the kitchen and a little bit into the hall. Plus taking everything out of the laundry room and finding someplace to store it while repairs are made. WD-40'd the water heater valve, see if it would work. Finally got it closed (with the help of leverage provided by a 16" screwdriver). So could turn the water to the house back on. Then the whole arrangements to get a new water heater in. Not so easy. Codes have changed since 1940, and gas water heaters have to be on stands, which means all the piping currently there is in the wrong place, many intricate extensions and whatnot, a whole new chimney assembly, endless bits and pieces, takes up the rest of the day, and even then, there's something wrong with the hot water line, nothing is coming out of the faucets on a test run except rust. Uh oh. Maybe have to have new hot water pipes? Oh great.
So, that's today's project. We'll have to get back to our Topic anon, but for the moment, Casa Ché is without hot water -- except what we boil on the stove -- and except for short breaks now and then, your interlocutor will not have much opportunity to post anything.
Such is Life.
Hope the stockmarket meltdown isn't ruining your day!
The other day I wrote the first of what will probably be a series of posts on the topic of Progressivism -- both Modern and Historic.
I made the claim that Progressivism today is a governmental operating system, not an ideology. It is how you do things, principally in a governmental system. Progressivism is not necessarily what you do at all, though it can involve plenty of what in the getting of something done. But the point is to get something done, not so much what is done.
At one time, the Progressive operating system was virtually universal in American government; every level of government in the US operated on Progressive principles, and all divisions except the electeds themselves -- and sometimes the courts -- were coordinated with one another through common adherence to Progressive principles.
This was true throughout the public sector, and it extended well beyond it. The non-profit sector is largely made up of Progressive minded people and organizations, for example. Whole cadres of Progressive consultants form a class of experts on call to assist any agency or organization research, plan and develop policies and programs in the public interest.
And that last phrase is the key to what this Progressive Operating System is all about.
It starts from the premise that Government exists to Serve The Public Interest, and that Public Interest is found through a combination of Democratic Processes and reliance on Expert Analysis and Opinion.
Democratic Processes -- campaigns and elections, open sessions of elected bodies, extensive debate and discussion, decisions through voting and common consent that the losers will go along with the winners of votes -- play a role, but it is not the only role, in Progressive governmental operations. In a Progressive system Expert analysis and opinion guide the deliberations which are fundamental to Democracy, and in practice, the Experts are often delegated to not only "study" and "opine" about this or that, they are directed to carry out the very programs and policies they have developed and recommended. These Experts may be inside or outside of government. But reliance on Experts (In the Public Interest) is a hallmark of Progressive Governmental Operations.
The question is always "What is In the Public Interest?" In the early years of the Progressive movement, determining the Public Interest was relatively easy, in part because during the previous period of Gilded Age Excess, so much of the Public Good had been neglected in the interests of rampant corruption, greed, and exploitation. It's hard to imagine just what a Third World nightmare the American Experience was for half the nation or more during the period from the end of the Civil War until well after 1900, when Progressive reforms began to settle in.
Those Progressive Reforms started with Good Government, the whole point of which was to end the corruption of government so typical of the previous era. Prior to the Progressive era, Government in the United States, at all levels, was was essentially a bought-and-paid-for private preserve of well-heeled corporate interests.
California, for example, was run as the private fiefdom of the Southern Pacific Railroad until their power was curbed, if not overthrown, by the Progressive revolt of 1911. The railroad had bought state and local governments decades before, and the People were incapable of using standard democratic processes to get it back. It took a natural disasater, the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake and Fire, and the accountability trials that resulted (and exposed just how deeply and completely corrupt San Francisco municipal government and state government were) to jump-start the replacement of the broken and disastrous government-by-corporations with a Progressive alternative.
But make no mistake. The Progressive alternative was not necessarily Government By (or For) The People.
Progressive reforms allowed the People to have somewhat more of a say over some aspects of government and society, and they curbed the direct control of government by the leading corporations, but Progressive reforms were not meant to -- and did not -- remove corporations from a leading role in political, social and economic affairs. The reforms were meant to -- and did -- curb some of the more outrageous corporate activities, made the corporations and the rich pay for some of the many advantages they continued to have, and encouraged a somewhat less tilted playing field for the rest of the (white) people.
Women still couldn't vote; blacks and Asians and Brown folks of all kinds were still left out of the mix.
A widespread argument is that the Progressives were a counter to the rising Populist tide sweeping rural America at the end of the 19th century and the growing anarchist and revolutionary fervor within many of the immigrant-packed cities. This is true enough, but it doesn't quite explain why Progressivism was adopted so quickly and almost universally. There are a couple of neglected aspects of the story:
1) Theodore Roosevelt became our first Progressive president upon the assassination of William McKinley in 1901. The shock of the assassination helped to goad Americans into accepting Roosevelt's Progressivism.
2) Further, the United States had recently become an overseas imperial power with the seizure of the remnants of Spain's empire in 1898. The Philippines were proving troublesome, however, as the Natives were demanding independence and fighting for their liberty; the struggle was fierce and brutal, with American troops committing multiple atrocities in an effort to subdue the Natives. Americans in the Philippines had a hard time proving their good intentions under such circumstances, and reforming the corruption and hypocrisy at home and tempering the brutality of the unwelcome occupation of the Philippines became something of a necessity.
Well. Kinda. Seems the Former First Lady gets one fewer delegate than Senator Obama out of her Nevada Win due to the Silver State's Arcane Rules for Awarding Delegates to the Democratic National Convention in Denver.
Or maybe not. It depends. Well. Delegates from Nevada aren't really pledged to Candidate X or Y. And apparently the State Party is furiously manoeuvreing to give Clinton a lead or perhaps all of Nevada's Democratic Delegates, Rules or No Rules.
The obvious implication is that all internet traffic has been and is being monitored, without warrant and without exception, kind of like all the telephone traffic in and out of the country and much of the domestic telephone traffic is apparently being monitored, without warrants and contrary to law.
McConnell also helpfully points out that FISA is the most serious and outrageous impediment to serious surveillance "reforms."
Oh my.
And what will our dauntless Congress do? In the face of yet another fait accompli? Hm? Well, we already know, don't we? The House will go along with anything the DNI proposes. Senator Dodd will manfully stand -- almost alone -- on behalf of the Constitution and the Rule of Law. Sixty votes will be found to shut him up. And the New Homeland Security State will expand.
Lawrence Wright discusses it with Matt Dellinger: MP3
Note, Wright has been surveilled himself, knows it, and when McConnell claims Americans would not be surveilled, Wright says, "Well, I've been surveilled." His story on the podcast is chilling, though Wright tries to make light of it.
Seems like our perpetually dismal prognosticators (like Uber-Gloom-and-Doomer Bonddad) may get their wish -- or if not a wish, an expectation -- fulfilled. The United States economy may well be headed to a hard landing indeed, perhaps the hardest since 1929-32.
Ooops.
The signs, of course, have long been with us: unsustainable personal and corporate debt, combined with corruption levels not seen since the age of the Robber Barons, combined with war and defense spending that far outstrips anything known during the Cold War, every bit of it financed with borrowed money, borrowed from our friends in China for the most part, paid for with bonds, which now, with the collapse of the dollar on world markets, may be getting close to worthless. Needless to say, our Chinese friends may want some satisfaction.
You know just how serious this economic situation may be when the President Himself is moved to act -- by demanding that Congress pass a Stimulus Package Forthwith, consisting of more tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy, and some sort of check or something to the Masses to keep them from revolting outright. You know it is serious when the Presidential Stimulus Package Directive is double that of Democratic Presidential Candidate Barack Obama, and almost double that of Populist Presidential Candidate John Edwards. You know it is serious when even Avowed Socialist Candidate Hillary Clinton's Stimulus Package pales in comparison to the Presidential One.
You know it is serious when oil prices have fallen (at least temporarily), and surprisingly and highly uncharacteristically,gasoline prices have fallen somewhat as well. Yes, yes, the claim is made that January gas prices are "always the lowest," though given the way the petroleum markets are manipulated, that's quite an absurd observation. Time of year has been almost completely divorced from consumer petroleum price.
It's serious when banks figure out it is more in their interests to work with mortgage customers than to keep pulling the rug from under them and forcing them into foreclosure.
It's serious when Civil Society in this country begins the process of turning on the predators and looters and plunderers who insist that they have a right to profit no matter what, while the value of Civil Society's holdings plummets.
A 30% drop in real estate sales and values around here (mirrored in many other parts of the country) is starting to cause some sleepless nights among the remnants of the American Bourgeoisie. The report I saw yesterday said that real estate values in California are now about where they were in 2005, before the Boom took off. Those who didn't buy at the inflated prices after 2005 are still sitting relatively pretty, but millions upon millions did buy -- and they were not necessarily fools to do so -- and are now sitting on swiftly depreciating assets.
Unemployment is rising and is expected to keep rising at least through the first quarter of 2008; how convenient for electoral politics. But high unemployment means the economic slump is sent into a worsening spiral. Few people working means less consumer spending, which fuels more unemployment, and so on.
The only bright side right now is that interest rates are not expected to rise. At least not in the short term. They may fall to rates not seen for some time. But the effects of Federal Reserve rate cuts under Bernanke seems to be the opposite of the Greenspan years.
In other words, there may be deeper flaws in the economy than the Usual Actions can remedy.
All of which has long been predicted, but the upshot of the Coming Crash is still a Mystery.
Sara Robinson over at Orcinus has been blogging on the impending 2008 catastrophe since the beginning of the year. She's said quite a bit about it, and the following struck me as key:
The upshot of all this is that we're at a point where it's all up for grabs. When the center fails to hold, the right to define the new reality belongs to whoever can move in their first with a big, compelling idea, and get people to start organizing around it. It's a moment of creative chaos that's bursting with new energy and tremendous potential -- for those who are ready to jump in there and lead.
These have always been the moments when progressives throughout history were able to make their biggest gains -- to seize entire nations, and drag them off in radically new directions. The future belongs to the group that gets there first, with the best plan and the biggest vision. If we miss this one, none of us are likely to live to see another chance like it again.
But, as usual, opportunity comes with the potential for crisis. The churn of change also leads to vast economic and political dislocations that provide perfect conditions for authoritarian movements, too. Alongside all the other problems bearing down on us, that's a very real risk that we need to keep at the front of our minds. If we don't step up and fill that yawning hole with something that brings out the best in people, inspiring them toward hope and progress -- well, then, you can bet that somebody else, selling a very different future, will get there first with something that will bring out the worst, and drive them toward madness and death. Either way, our grandchildren will be living with the consequences a century hence. It's not a moment we can afford to screw up.
As some people have pointed out, the economic mess we're headed into has been predicted for years, and actions to stave off the worst of it have been proposed from the sidelines for as long, but nothing substantive has been done. Awaiting the Presidential Command?
Or is it something else? Some hesitation about getting ahead of any curve, of being out of step with the mainstream, or of not being heard?
Now that government and candidate proposals are out there, they all seem to be too little, way too late, and, unfortunately tilted to saving the rotting asses of corporations and the upper classes while throwing what amount to scraps to the Masses. All dedicated to preserving the Palace Culture and the status quo, even though all of it may be swept away in a tide of Change like we've never seen before.
It's not so much that our Rulers are clueless (which, unfortunately, they are and they demonstrate every day), it is more that they are Rulers, and most of them have no business being in that position.
A Change is [Surely] Gonna Come.
But who will lead it? Or will it come, finally, from The People themselves?
"A Change Gon' Come" is Barack Obama's theme song, and on him has been put the dreams and aspirations of millions of Americans. He speaks such a positive and hopeful message, yet his proposals have a distinctly right wing cast to them, and in that, I see echoes of John F Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt, both of whom ran to the right of their Republican rivals on many issues, won the Presidency, and governed more from the left, especially so in the case of Roosevelt.
Just a reminder: Progressivism today is functionally an Operating System for government in the United States and widely around the world.
It is not an ideology.
Until the Reagan Revolt, Progressivism was the nearly universal Governmental Operating System in the United States, practiced nearly everywhere, and at every level of Government.
Reagan's Revolt was largely against this Progressive Operating System. He and his minions sought to replace Progressive institutional operations with something vaguely remembered from a less regulated and wilder, more corrupt and supposedly more creative laissez faire past.
The Reagan Revolt was partially successful in removing regulations and exempting much of the upper class from taxation, but Progressive Operations remained the standard in most Governmental affairs until the Busheviks sought to overthrow the whole edifice of Progressive Operations and the Democratic Republic it served and replace it with an Autocracy. At the Federal Level, the Busheviks have nearly succeeded in replacing the Standard Progressive Operating System with a version of a Pre-Enlightenment Monarchy, in which Governmental Operations are a matter of the Personal Will and Direction of the Autocrat.
Progressivism still remains the Standard Operating System for most state and local governmental affairs, but something quite different has come to the fore at the Federal level. The Federal Government has for all intents and purposes become the means for the implementation of the Personal Will of the (Autocratic) President. All branches are under the direction of the Presidency, and they all yield more or less completely more or less quickly to Presidential Command.
Under Bushevik rule, the Progressive Operating System has been essentially extinguished at the Federal level with the active cooperation of the Congress and the Courts. Much of the focus of the Democratic political effort since 2004 has been the restoration of that Progressive Operating System at the Federal level (and its preservation at the state and local levels), but Democrats have been almost completely unsuccessful; in fact, typically they yield to more Autocratic usurpations rather than stage a showdown, or in some cases even a fight.
Consequently, the Restoration of Progressive Operations has to wait, we're told, until there is a Democrat in the White House and a supermajority of Democrats in both houses of Congress, and (usually unmentioned) the Courts have been realigned through resignation, retirement, and appointment of Progressive jurists.
In other words, there will be no restoration, and those of us with a Progressive set of ideals and beliefs should start thinking about something else, coming up with something new and creative.
