Wednesday, September 29, 2004

MANUMISSION NOT   Originally published as a response to a column by Rob Salkowitz entitled Living in Bush's World, which appeared 9-27-04 on his blog, Emphasis Added.   Yes and Yes and Yes.   One cannot but commend you for your focus on the "larger agenda" of the Bonobo-Agogo and Crew, which intents Kerry has ignored with a blind will to date. If you haven't heard the words "sell out" chained to the name Kerry yet, you will be, for years to come.  Think of the alliteration possible with "Quisling".   You suggest however that the world you describe is in the future:   "This agenda represents the fever-dreams of ideologues"   or   " election being fought putatively on the grounds of anti-terrorism and Iraq is actually about the future of"  or  "what this will mean for the country"  etc.   I suggest that we already live in that brave "new" world, because it is the brave old world of feudalism which you describe so well.  Feudalism has been the fallback, retrograde, or default government of western societies since the fall of the Roman Empire. It is not something alien to modern government, but the sketchy foundation on which later forms of governance bear.  It has however been resilient and easily deposed any of the sweeping utopian models proposed to displace it, such as Marxism.   It has always used your noted "siege mentality" to control the masses and deprive them of civil rights. It persists because it is based on the most profound me-first instincts of the human animal.  It favors psychopaths as rulers, because it favors rash action over any other means of governance.   It means endless warfare and weak central government because it is based on the identity and ownership of individual nobles with plots of territory.  Or in today's parlance, commercial hegemonies.  Hello Bill Gates et alii.    This is the world we already live in.  Democratic institutions have proved inept of late at controlling or moderating these always extant, titanic forces.  The veneer of democracy is but a hyaline membrane, and we are beginning to see the viscera exposed which it had been sealing off.    Why do i insist on making a connection from your 2005-focused awareness to the historical situation, as i have before?  Because despite the cornucopia of novelties in our age, the patterns of governance depend ultimately on the same old same old, human psychology, Man Against Himself as K. Menninger noted.  And because the historical remedies to the feudal sociopathy are known as well.   Feudal strife increases in direct proportion to the sudden increase of wealth in controlling individuals.  A wise society, one which values peace, makes it extremely difficult then for huge fortunes and monopoly positions to be acquired not merely in one lifetime, but in the time of a decade or two, as is the case now. In other words, that deity which this America worships, instant grandiose wealth, is at the very heart of our feudal outbreak.  Cut the mega-rich down to size and the feudal infection recedes of its own accord. The sooner the better, regardless of who becomes Prez.   And if that is not done?  Well, it appears to me that the economic lords of the Orient have stolen a huge march on the wealth and hegemony of N. America as it sleep walked under the cockatrice of Bushbreath. Nor, it is clear, do they intend to be minor liege lords to 'massa whitey'.  The American plutopaths, in their attempt to carve up and control the world markets, have sold us all downriver already.  The rafts await. Gimme dat ol' time religion. 1:00:33 AM    comment []