- At a moment in our history when attention is almost
entirely focused on a temporary external enemy, stubborn attempts to continue
rudely pointing a finger toward the permanent internal enemy are, in the
natural way of these things, immediate targets for reactionary growls
and snarls and gnashings of teeth. All over the country, knees are supposed
to be jerking in perfect rhythmic synchronization to our martial marching
orders, as minds are simultaneously dutifully emptied of rational thought
for the duration of the hostilities. And because we are now promised War
Without End, the subtext of the shrill angry noise emanating from Washington
is that we had better be prepared to remain in abject uniform obedience
to governmental dictation- forever- "Or else".
On the occasion of Independence Day, we therefore had better remember
just what it was we were originally celebrating independence from, and
to reconsider certain cogent warnings from those whose lives and thoughts
we are presumably celebrating. Because according to their own words- which
no one will hear proclaimed in public- we would be far more appropriately
holding funeral ceremonies than setting off fireworks. No politician would
dare say aloud today what earlier leading thinkers had to say about certain
vitally important and now excruciatingly touchy subjects. The following
thoughts are in effect utterly taboo, considered impossible, and shunned
in the light of day: even, or especially, in the light of Independence
Day.
"When all government ...in little as in great things... shall be
drawn to Washington as the center of all power; it will render powerless
the checks provided of one government on another, and will become as venal
and oppressive as the government from which we separated." -- Thomas
Jefferson
It is necessary adamantly to refuse the increasingly intimidating demands
from Washington for perpetual, enthusiastic, uncritical approval of their
policies. Many of us will decline to dance to this urgently throbbing
drumbeat, however much we are told that our attendance is mandatory. We
recognize our obligation at present to worry more about the everlasting
internal enemy to liberty, even while keeping watch for whatever external
variety may rise to various occasions.
"It is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties.
We hold this prudent jealousy to be the first duty of citizens and one
of the noblest characteristics of the late Revolution. The freemen of
America did not wait till usurped power had strengthened itself by exercise
and entangled the question in precedents. They saw all the consequences
in the principle, and they avoided the consequences by denying the principle.
We revere this lesson too much ... to forget it." -- James Madison
Ah, but here we are, so very far from it. We no longer revere this lesson
too much to forget it; we have forgotten it as completely as if it never
existed. We no longer even collectively understand, let alone believe
in, the fundamental principle behind the establishment of this nation.
This idea nevertheless demands continual restating, even though, or better
yet because, it echoes mournfully in a near perfect vacuum of forgetfulness.
And that astonishing idea is that all governments are always dangerous,
and that the citizenry must therefore be resolutely protected from them,
at all times and under all conditions. Ours was meant to be the first government
that had the insight to thoroughly arm itself against- itself.
"Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its
best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable
one; for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries *by a government*,
which we might expect in a country *without government*, our calamities
are heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we suffer."
-- Thomas Paine
If governments were individuals, they would all be locked up by now in
maximum-security prisons as dangerous repeat offenders. But since governments
are amorphous, and constantly spreading themselves around in multitudes
of elected and appointed particles, they are quite difficult to trap and
arrest. What,s worse, many of the more urbane governments also do the odd
morsel of good here and there, as a cost-effective way to entrench favored
particles. And as villainous as governments are by nature, the crumbs
they drop always gain them a strong measure of devoted cupboard love.
But even the occasional good they do is so inherently dubious that an
armed guard must accompany it at all times. Our particular armed guard
is called the Constitution of the United States of America. At the moment
professional thugs have overpowered it, and its original weapons are being
systematically removed, with the staunch approval of a crowd of frightened
citizens looking on.
"The Constitution is not neutral. It was designed to take the government
off the backs of the people." -- Justice William O. Douglas
All governments, at all times, are genetically predisposed to go straight
to hell. The history of the human race attempting to create and preserve
decent governments: read it and weep. In our country, in our times, the
archetypal downhill devolutionary spiral is playing out as usual, but faster
than ever before. There is nothing new or difficult to understand in this
same old pattern of good beginnings, followed by a slow steady evisceration
of the original energy, which then speeds up toward The End. This continues
until the sleepy populace wakes up one day to discover itself entirely
inside a cage, bereft of all power of any kind, and the government entirely
outside, heavily armed and roaming around on the loose. We are pretty
much there now, except that the public in general is still cheering the
government on, its short attention span being carefully directed elsewhere
at all times, as the final walls of the people,s penultimate pen are
being erected.
"Never could an increase of comfort or security be a sufficient good
to be bought at the price of liberty." -- Hillaire Belloc
"He that would make his own liberty secure must guard even his enemy
from oppression: for if he violates this duty, he establishes a precedent
that will reach unto himself." -- Thomas Paine
Whenever they meet, whether casually or by clandestine appointment, greed
and the lust for power routinely murder virtue. After all, such profoundly
opposing forces cannot occupy the same space at the same time. When entrenched
worldly authority crosses paths with the common good, the common good is
consistently left bleeding in the gutter. This is the pattern throughout
history so far, yet we nevertheless continue behaving as if it comes as
a shocking surprise.
"Government is actually the worst failure of civilized man. There
has never been a really good one, and even those that are most tolerable
are arbitrary, cruel, grasping and unintelligent." -- H. L. Mencken
The winners of our elections are normally the morally ruined victors of
a long series of expensive and ferocious ego competitions. The exceptions
to this are historically so noteworthy we practically worship them, rather
than having the good sense to demand a system that selects for wise and
honest servants in the first place.
"The American Republic will endure, until politicians realize they
can bribe the people with their own money." -- Alexis de Tocqueville
What good does it do us now that our revered Founding Fathers, for instance,
were so nobly rational and so inspired by the divine spirit of independence?
The memory of brilliant leadership in the past is only useful if such a
standard is energetically applied to the present. The very last thing
the founders of our nation had in mind was to be the nearly the first and
last of their kind. They meant to generate a very long unbroken line of
equally self-sacrificing servants of the people- not to stand frozen in
memory as the tragic monuments to lost possibilities they have in fact
become.
"Democracy is two wolves and a lamb voting on what to have for lunch.
Liberty is a well-armed lamb contesting the vote." -- Benjamin Franklin
-
- By now we have accepted a system of electing officials
that positively enforces natural selection for sheer rapacity. At the
same time, we still manage to be perennially surprised and aghast at the
inevitable results. What was called for, as the very basis of a democratic
system, was not eternal disgust, but eternal vigilance. Vigilance is a
concept no longer even remotely understood as it was originally meant.
Try to explain what it actually means and most people will become immediately
terrified at the seditious nonsense they are hearing. Such is the profound
success of the forces of materialism in slowly devouring the inner spirit
of the United States of America. They have had freedom and justice for
all on the run for a very long time.
-
- "I hope that we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy
of our moneyed corporations which have already bid defiance to the laws
of our country."---Thomas Jefferson 1812
-
- The long, slow, fatal hollowing out of our nation over
generations is the direct result of the abdication of all sense of responsibility
in maintaining the spirit of liberty by the majority of its citizens.
Liberty is by now hopelessly confused in the average mind with the economics
of unbridled greed, and with the continued unruffled rule by prevailing
vested interests. As a country, we no longer know or care about the difference
between fighting for the principles of freedom and fighting for corporate
profits. We were warned about this all the way along the incremental downhill
road, but we never once listened.
-
- "Corporations have been enthroned.... An era of
corruption in high places will follow and the money power will endeavor
to prolong its reign by working on the prejudices of the people until
wealth is aggregated in a few hands . . . and the Republic is destroyed."
--Abraham Lincoln
-
- No generation of citizens has had the spiritual courage
to rebel in any useful numbers against the insidious corrosiveness of
corporate greed, which was present from the very beginning as the seed
of our eventual destruction. Corporations continually made us an offer,
decade after decade, that we didn,t refuse. By now, the interests of multinational
profiteers have thoroughly permeated every aspect of national life, from
the military to the educational system to the actual self-image we have
of ourselves as a country. We took their product interests as a worthy
substitute for liberty, handing over the reins of government in exchange
for steady jobs and steady comforts, as if there was no other way to invent
a living for ourselves. All along we ignored what we were doing, through
endless rationalizations, by looking the other way, and by pretending
we were not really doing what we were doing.
-
- "All governments are more or less combinations
against the people. . .and as rulers have no more virtue than the ruled.
. . the power of government can only be kept within its constituted bounds
by the display of a power equal to itself, the collected sentiment of
the people." -- Benjamin Franklin Bache
-
- We have not been forced at gunpoint, against our collective
will, to give up the principles of the Constitution. The spirit of our
nation has not been stolen from us: we have ourselves willingly, and increasingly
eagerly, generation after generation, exchanged it for temporal material
comforts, a sense of security, and the freedom not to be bothered with
the difficulties and sacrifices of effective self-rule. We took the easy
way out, and now we are living with and in the inevitably degenerate results.
Throughout our history, we have been told exactly what was happening,
in plainest English, but we have never yet cared enough to renounce our
lazy materialism and fearful insecurity for the responsibilities of genuine
freedom.
-
- "We all declare for liberty; but in using the same
word we do not all mean the same thing. With some the word liberty may
mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of
his labor; while with others, the same word many mean for some men to
do as they please with other men, and the product of other men's labor.
Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the
same name - liberty. And it follows that each of the things is, by the
respective parties, called by two different and incompatible names - liberty
and tyranny." -- Abraham Lincoln
-
- Even the self-sacrifice of several generations of brave
young people along the way has not shamed us into resurrecting the dormant
principles they died hoping to preserve. We are at present not the free
citizens of a noble Republic but, by and large, merely the hypnotized
consumers of incredibly wasteful lifestyles- and these two choices never
were and never will be compatible. We have collectively severed all ties
with the original idea behind the United States of America, in favor of
the all-encompassing paradigm-parody offered by corporate government.
We have entirely failed to maintain the principles of a democratic system
in the face of the forces of greed, fear, and materialism that inevitably
oppose it. The idea of the Republic persists here and there, but the Republic
does not. We are merely carrying on in the decaying remains of the body
of principles for which it stood.
-
- "This is a government of the people, by the people
and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations,
and for corporations." - President Rutherford B. Hayes
-
- We hire to represent us the very embodiments of everything
most of us say we don,t like personally in a human being. We elect those
who are rigorously trained to hide everything they are and think, lest
we see the real person. We hire those who speak in bone-wearying platitudes
so as not to offend anyone with actual living thought. We hire those who
have been the deftest in taking sticky money, festooned with invisible
ties that bind, from the very beginning of their careers, in order to
be elected at all. Then we are told to refer to this buying-and-selling
of cheap consciences as "free and fair elections". No oxymoron
could be more moronic.
-
- "Every election is a sort of advance auction sale
of stolen goods." -- H.L. Mencken
-
- "Under democracy one party always devotes its chief
energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule--and
both commonly succeed, and are right... The United States has never developed
an aristocracy really disinterested or an intelligentsia really intelligent.
Its history is simply a record of vacillations between two gangs of frauds."
--- H. L. Mencken
-
- When finally succeeding to high office, these poor prize-winning
egotists, more often than not entirely owned and operated by the forces
of corporate greed, are forced to try to act under the terrific strain
of pretending to work for the good of the people. Yet the actual relationship
between a people and a government is almost always like the relationship
between a naïve, gullible woman and an experienced, successful rogue
with serious predation on his mind. The results are predictable, no matter
how many history books are written spelling this out for the benefit of
hapless posterity. In each new generation, the woman continually falls
for it, and the rogue continually helps himself.
-
- "The politician attempts to remedy the evil by
increasing the very thing that caused the evil in the first place: legal
plunder." -- Frederick Bastiat
-
- There are many understandable fears lurking behind this
year's celebration of independence. We all have so much more than usual
weighing on our hearts and minds. First and foremost is the safety and
security of those we love. Yet security and safety have many guises and
levels and meanings, and behind the obvious concerns that are preying
on us all, there exists a terrible underlying reality which will not be
wished away. Having an external enemy again is not a cure for what has
ailed us from the beginning. Our nation's outward enemies have come and
gone, and still we have continued to fall further and further away from
any resemblance to our original noble principles. Indeed, the very concept
that nobility in political life ever existed at all is widely disbelieved.
-
- Those citizens whose chief concern is ever-increasing
secrecy in government and the generalized corruption of the entire system
are looked upon as eccentric at best, and as traitors to the cause at
worst. To be a vocal traitor to the cause of unregulated multinational
corporate profit and secret government operations is becoming more than
an unpopular attitude: it is becoming dangerous. Those who strenuously
object to living in the deadly levels of pollution blithely accepted as
necessary for business as usual are beginning to be labeled "soft
terrorists". Those who point out the absurdly obvious yet officially
fanatically secret aerosol operations in the atmosphere, which adversely
affect us all, are not only marginalized but viciously attacked for their
troubles on behalf of their oblivious fellow beings.
-
- The list of similar accumulated governmental offences
against the citizenry of this country, and the spirit of liberty and participatory
democracy itself, is very long and still lengthening dramatically. The
angry mockery of a multitude of fear-ridden adherents to the American
Corporate Way, toward all those who have not bought into it, is steadily
worsening. As tensions in the world increase, and as the barbarism of
greed which has been funding our overweening materialism is being exposed
for what it always was, the people of America are being forced to choose
sides as never before. We must decide once and for all whether or not
we know what freedom really means, and what the difference is between runaway
materialism and the democratic process. We must decide once and for all
whether or not we trust secret military, government and corporate operations
as a reasonable form of government.
-
- Either we renounce once and for all the pretense of
being a functioning Republic, and freely embrace the Brave New World of
technological global fascism- or we don't. But let us not openly accept
the pretense that what we are celebrating at present in any way factually
resembles the original idea behind the United States of America. Because
that would be a lie so shameful that no one with the slightest understanding
of and genuine reverence for our history would ever say it, no matter
what.
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