Letters to the Editor
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To kovie, et al:
Since I have to be on the road again in a few minutes, I'll post a quick response to kovie from the now closed doom and gloom thread (this one being "various" and all):
Adaptation to the Way Things Are comes more easily to some than to others. Kovie said those who object to the status quo have some moral obligation to provide alternatives. But before we can do that, we need common ground, a common understanding of our current situation (ie: a definition of the Status Quo) and clearly we aren't there yet.
A lot of people don't see our governmental/institutional situation the way I do. I assert that the Constitution has been subverted, the Republic has been hollowed out, and the government of the United States has become an partially effective Autocracy, one that is being consolidated before our eyes. To me this represents an existential crisis of governance. But others -- perhaps including kovie, I don't really know -- seem to see the current situation as more or less politics as usual, modifyable by the usual mechanisms of elections, pressure on politicians, and so forth. Our Founders established a government that can withstand it, etc.
I maintain -- based on clear evidence all around us -- that our Republic is essentially gone, regardless of how long it took to accomplish the overthrow and replacement with Autocracy -- and the institutions and mechanisms we've relied on for hundreds of years don't work. Elections have been fundamentally compromised, for example, and those elected -- as we've seen recently -- cleave to one another and the Autocracy they've enabled rather to The People.
We're at an impasse. Unless there is a common understanding of our current predicament, what to do about it will remain elusive.
Right now, most Americans don't see an existential crisis that requires action, though an overwhelming majority of Americans are opposed to the current regime and the direction it is headed. A growing minority does see that crisis, however. We're already way over that metaphorical cliff, headed for the rocks below.
There may not be a lot we can do to change things in the short term. But that doesn't mean that change can only come through a long, drawn out majesterial process. In fact, it can come very quickly as we've seen with the advent and consolidation of the Bushevik regime. All they've had to do to accomplish their aims is to set out to do it and carry through. But the essential condition they needed to do it was acquisition of power -- which they achieved with their seizure of the government with the connivance of a lawless Supreme Court and the complicity of Congress.
Could progressive forces pull off the same trick? With the objective of restoring the Constitution and its institutions and mechanisms? I don't know. It's a question worth considering. If it were possible, I believe it would be the appropriate means to rectify the errors of the Bush Regime.
One suggestion: withdraw support from complicit candidates, complicit parties, complicit corporations and media. Funnel support toward those who refuse complicity and pledge restoration of the Republic. There are only a handful. Refuse to get caught up in the Grand Pageant of the Palace. Refuseniks can have a remarkable effect on an otherwise unresponsive Autocracy. The concept of refusal to comply can take many paths. It is a traditional method of Popular resistance in this country.
Just say No.
Back to the road.
Cheers.
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GOP rigging
New York voters wishing to vote for Ron Paul in the primary must register as Republicans by October 12. The party doesn't want anti-war cross-overs.
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@ bebop-o
Thank you for the Fagle recommendation. I'll look it up. I read Homer first in some nineteenth-century translation which was awfully florid. Then, about the time I left college, as I remember, the Iliad came out in a highly touted new translation, and I read it. Night and day. I was stunned, and I remember thinking God, what must it be like in the original?
Unlike you, I don't think I'll ever actually find out. I doubt there's time to learn Greek now. Anyway, what an amazing experience -- a world so far away, and yet so strangely tangible. Shakespeare has some of that same quality, but by comparison, Shakespeare might almost be Uncle Willy, the guy who talks funny, but is really very familiar. Homer is other in a big way, like some of the translated Egyptian incantations I once read. You could stand on a rock above the ocean in Scotland somewhere, I suppose, in a thunderstorm, and get some of the flavor of it....
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ADL-Addled
I find it very interesting that someone comes in here and frames Glenn’s promised updates regarding ADL, which was one of six “Various Items” to boot, as an “obsession” (three of his first 100 words or so of his first post were that one, just before the anti-Lieberman bona fides and the first of the staccato references to anti-Semitism) and then proceeds to post about 18 pages and still counting on the subject in a day’s time. Whether or not he is projecting or is some sort of hired gun of the ADL, he came to pick a fight, which is a curious way to try to bring others to your point of view. (“How can anyone win an argument…?” he queried. Indeed.)
He was also pretty freely throwing around racist rhetoric re: African-Americans and “Mexican illegals” (his words), as if we needed a half dozen or so examples to understand the concept, all the while requiring others to walk tight rhetorical lines around Semitism. He may want to check his own house for termites before looking for them in others’.
Glenn’s regulars should give themselves a pat on the back. bebop-o covered the highlights pretty well above, but the height of hilarity for me was when, after about his hundredth reference to anti-Semitism, another commentator pointed out Glenn’s Jewish background. Instead of acknowledging that most of whatever points he had about Glenn just had the rug pulled out from under them, the arrogant little so-and-so accused Glenn of having an agenda for not wearing his religious beliefs on his sleeve. Mona’s response was classic and contained insufficient profanity imo. Maybe Glenn ought to get one of those lapel pin deals or decoder rings or whatever it is that the lockstep right-wingers now are demanding to prove one’s patriotism.
Anti-Semitism exists, but it is used all too often as a diversionary tactic in discussions re: Israel policy, neo-conservatism, Jewish political influence, and so on, in exactly the same manner and for exactly the same reasons that Bush/Cheney and the Republicans throw patriotism and support of the troops in front of honest discussions about Iraq War policy. This barrage is a prime example of the political strategy of repeating something until it becomes truth and obscuring the real issues. Such exaggerated and misleading victimization rhetoric also cheapens the case for anti-Semitism where it actually exists today or occurred in the past in the same manner as the Nazi and Hitler comparisons that so concern the ADL. A lot of us have parents and grandparents, both Jewish and non-Jewish, who put their lives where this troll’s incessant mouth is.
I would further argue that the anti-Semitism that exists today is not comparable in either scope or effect to the anti-Semitism that existed in the early to mid 1900’s and to the current experiences of African-Americans and Hispanic immigrants, in that the latter groups were and are politically much weaker than today’s Jewish community.
Obviously not all Jewish are neo-conservatives and visa versa, but certain Jewish lobbies and influences have been an integral part of the movement. I leave with this from How Neoconservatives Conquered Washington – and Launched a War written by Michael Lind in 2003 @ http://www.antiwar.com/orig/lind1.html:
… Most neoconservative defense intellectuals have their roots on the left, not the right. They are products of the influential Jewish-American sector of the Trotskyist movement of the 1930s and 1940s, which morphed into anti-communist liberalism between the 1950s and 1970s and finally into a kind of militaristic and imperial right with no precedents in American culture or political history. Their admiration for the Israeli Likud party's tactics, including preventive warfare such as Israel's 1981 raid on Iraq's Osirak nuclear reactor, is mixed with odd bursts of ideological enthusiasm for "democracy." They call their revolutionary ideology "Wilsonianism" (after President Woodrow Wilson), but it is really Trotsky's theory of the permanent revolution mingled with the far-right Likud strain of Zionism. Genuine American Wilsonians believe in self-determination for people such as the Palestinians.
The neocon defense intellectuals, as well as being in or around the actual Pentagon, are at the center of a metaphorical "pentagon" of the Israel lobby and the religious right, plus conservative think tanks, foundations and media empires. …
The major link between the conservative think tanks and the Israel lobby is the Washington-based and Likud-supporting Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (Jinsa), which co-opts many non-Jewish defense experts by sending them on trips to Israel. It flew out the retired general Jay Garner, now slated by Bush to be proconsul of occupied Iraq. In October 2000, he cosigned a Jinsa letter that began: "We ... believe that during the current upheavals in Israel, the Israel Defense Forces have exercised remarkable restraint in the face of lethal violence orchestrated by the leadership of [the] Palestinian Authority."
The Israel lobby itself is divided into Jewish and Christian wings. Wolfowitz and Feith have close ties to the Jewish-American Israel lobby. Wolfowitz, who has relatives in Israel, has served as the Bush administration's liaison to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. Feith was given an award by the Zionist Organization of America, citing him as a "pro-Israel activist." While out of power in the Clinton years, Feith collaborated with Perle to coauthor a policy paper for Likud that advised the Israeli government to end the Oslo peace process, reoccupy the territories, and crush Yasser Arafat's government.
Such experts are not typical of Jewish-Americans, who mostly voted for Gore in 2000. The most fervent supporters of Likud in the Republican electorate are Southern Protestant fundamentalists. The religious right believes that God gave all of Palestine to the Jews, and fundamentalist congregations spend millions to subsidize Jewish settlements in the occupied territories. ...