Letters to the Editor
Baldie McEagle
Published Letters: 984 Editor's Choice: 3
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@ bob
[Read the article: The U.S. military's role in preventing the bombing of Iran]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Bob, your Oil Party conspiracy theory is convoluted, discredited, shaky, nutty, and full of holes.
And it explains the past 7 years of our national history better than anything else I have heard.
We all have looked on, mystified, as our national political discourse gets more and more disconnected from the reality we see around us. And it seems almost as though we watch our Dem congressmen and presidential candidates walk into a "secret government facility" and come out with glazed expressions, never to talk sense again.
We know we live in a corporate oligarchy, which as Aristotle said is the inevitable corruption of aristocracy. But few of us seem to know exactly how we got here. We are focused on paying for our mortgages and car loans, and so on.
And finally, you have Naomi Klein's recent theory of "disaster capitalism," which is grounded in the same kinds of observations about how carelessly, yet deliberately, the Iraq invasion was executed/botched as have been made by many posters here and at Unclaimed Territory, including even the thin-skinned LiquifiedViscera.
Putting it briefly:
(1) The military-industrial complex is the parasitic fusion of arms merchants with the liberal democratic state. It is the ultimate economic exploitation of disaster. All that is needed to explain its transformation into what we see today is to trace a switch from propping up the shared hallucination of preemptive Cold War defense needs to a posture of "rapidly" and with a "small footprint" (remember Rummie) prospectively triggering and exploiting endless small wars. What else would the defense companies do---switch to peace-exploiting industries?
(2) Little needs to be said about how much the oil industry and oil addiction permeates American society. Oil has spawned more "disruptive" technologies than anything since iron and bronze. Has OPEC simply replaced the USSR as enemy number 1?
(3) Empires end when the public part of government runs out of money---when wealth is privatized. Tell me that isn't accelerating now. Recall David Stockman's testimony to Congress that the overall Reagan plan was to break the federal government by causing it to run out of money.
In the context of these observations, it becomes clear that arguing against an "aristocratic" assassination of Kennedy---in 1963, before Nixon, long before Reagan, the year I was born, whoever the precise actors might have been---is merely an exercise in denial of the obvious.
The fact that we can't find Osama or generate a straightforward report on 9/11 pales in significance next to the fact that we still don't know who killed the Kennedys. Based on our performance in these and other events (e.g., Iran-Contra, ad nauseum), we shouldn't really expect to know anything of any importance, ever again.
In fact, given such an environment, such a conspiracy theory as Bob's is hardly even necessary.
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@shooter
[Read the article: Charlie Savage at FDL Book Salon]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Shooter, we always figured you were a "catcher." I truly admire you for coming out of the closet. It can't be easy.
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View from a distance
[Read the article: The latest revelations of lawbreaking, torture and extremism ]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Viewed objectively and from a proper if hypothetical distance (say, a half-century off), it's not surprising to see a political elite gather protectively around an extreme part of it.
Say you're a royal family, with few real obligations to the state. Under what circumstances would you serve up a cousin to be crucified?
1) Desperation. The army has deserted, the peasants are in the palaces, the king and queen are in the Bastille. Save your own skin---literally.
2) The cousin is a threat to your legitimacy. If he lives, you may lose everything---your future.
3) He's become a millstone to your political fortunes. The peasants and the nobles are about to revolt if you don't disavow him. Make it look like an accident, or frame him with treason.
Recall what happened to the Roman Senate---they allowed themselves to be executed/banished en masse by the Second Triumvirate. Why should ours revolt before a president threatens their lives, fortunes, or political futures? As long as he does things they secretly long to do themselves, thus expanding the theoretical limits of their own powers, they will remain spectators.
We've been fat and happy since the end of the Second World War. We let this happen. We let ourselves feel safe, and now we have awakened to find we have an aristocracy.