Letters to the Editor
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Tony Blair ...
You are right ... I know some people over in the UK .. they can't stand Blair .. and are horrified that America might elect someone worse than Bush(Rudy) next year ... they wonder what the hell has gone wrong here .. they are seriously concerned about America's decent into madness
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great piece..
your analysis brought to mind a couple of corollaries...first, this excerpt from Dostoevsky's "Grand Inquisitor":
"And we alone shall feed them in Thy name, declaring falsely that it is in Thy name. Oh, never, never can they feed themselves without us! No science will give them bread so long as they remain free. In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet, and say to us, "Make us your slaves, but feed us." They will understand themselves, at last, that freedom and bread enough for all are inconceivable together, for never, never will they be able to share between them! They will be convinced, too, that they can never be free, for they are weak, vicious, worthless, and rebellious. Thou didst promise them the bread of Heaven, but, I repeat again, can it compare with earthly bread in the eyes of the weak, ever sinful and ignoble race of man? "
and also the indispensible Jay Hanson, from his farewell Synopsis in 2003:
"Once I was able to understand Odum's "eMergy" metric (actually very simple, but difficult for old minds), I realized there are only three relevant principles concerning energy: the First Law of thermodynamics (no creation), the Second Law (always a loss), and the "Net eMergy" principle ("net energy" converted for "quality") http://www.dieoff.org/synopsis.htm .
Once one understands the three simple principles outlined in the paragraph above, then one understands that the only way our society could actually be "sustainable" would be to continuously reduce our aggregate energy footprint -- less consumption AND less people -- until the global population level is back to a couple-a-hundred-million people swinging through the trees. This is also Georgescu-Roegen's conclusion http://www.dieoff.org/page148.htm . That's the easy part...
With great reluctance (because it has worked so well for me), I was forced to conclude that our present system of capitalism is incompatible with energy laws and can never be sustainable. My only hope was that some new form of sustainable society might be possible. So I began studying human nature, intending to discover what kinds of sustainable societies might work..."
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For the record, the only way for the human species to be sustainable, is for us, as a species, to shrink. To grow less. Every day, for there to be fewer of us. That's the only way. There is no other. How many of us think *that's* going to happen?
all of this..and the evidence of our senses every day..suggests that them as have the lucre, will fight to the death to keep it, and get more, even if it means killing anyone and everyone necessary. Or unnecessary.
We never had a democracy in this country. It's always been a stealth-plutocracy with representative democracy as camouflage. As fundamental resources become harder and harder to procure, the *stealth* part will gradually disappear, and the true order of things will be much more obvious.
And if you think oil verging on 90 bucks a barrel, and the current zeitgeist, are not related, you've not been paying attention.
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Cue the favorite refrain from the local pea-sized-nuts:
BUT...BUT...BUT...9/11 CHANGED EVERYTHING!
Obviously it hasn't changed their essential cowardice, or the sad fact they're supporting a messianic nihlist who doesn't care one whit for them or his office.
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Good post
One aspect I would pick up on of your passionate post, and something I was excoriated for when I raised this at DKos (it appears some people are resistant to certain truths, no matter whether they are wingnuts or brand themselves as 'progressives') is that US citizens who want to keep driving big cars and living far from their workplace and heating McMansions and so on, are equally culpable, and that to be 'against the war' in your blog posts means nothing if you are, as you say, intent on 'living high on the hog'. To reduce matters to brass tacks, perhaps many 'progressives' would, if they could only be honest with themselves, find, in the final analysis, that they did indeed prefer the sacrifice of cannon-fodder, the destruction of Iraq, and so on, rather than go through the painful process of adjustment on a national basis. People need to align their lifestyles to match their rhetoric.
There are far too many on the left who want to just indulge themselves with the notion that this would not have happened were it not for Bad Men like Bush/Cheney (the picture is confused somewhat by the fact they are indeed criminal scum), but, when there's 30$ trillion to be made, I don't think any US president would stand in the way of such a corporate grab. We can already see the rhetoric from the Democratic candidates concerning a long-term presence and so on in Iraq, it is going to be more of the same.
The root problem is runaway power and influence of corporations and military spending of such levels that it distorts the global picture and has become a self-starting war machine.
This post should be tied to the massive increase in Pentagon budget announced this week.
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tony blair
is the embodiment of jim harrison's description of an english wanker..."a product of 2000 years of inner breeding and bad diet". that this guy got elected in england does show we are not the only foolish electorate out there.
we should all weep for what has become of us.
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Blair's win in 1997
@patg
It is not that simple. Blair was elected after 18 years of Conservative rule and misrule, he was young, and he rallied the country to good effect during his 97 election campaign. Iraq was not on the radar then and he won by a landslide in the midst of great optimism. I myself voted for him.
However, the Labour victories post-Iraq belong in the same category as Bush winning a second term, in some respects. However, you have to understand that the Labour party is far to the left of any of the US parties, and so, for what US people might call leftists, progressive, liberals, etc, there is literally no place to go. Just as there is a line of argument that says Bush hijacked the Republican party, in the UK, the same scenario has played out with the hijacking of the Left.
So, in conclusion, while Blair is a wanker, the populace did not demonstrate the same level of stupidity as Americans with respect of his re-election. Most people I know concluded, rightly, that the Tories would not end the war and would also cut social programs, a lose-lose.
You need to explore the UK political scene before issuing your judgments and congratulating yourself that others are as dumb as US citizens, my guess is you've never been to the UK, while I am from there and have also lived in the US and observed its political scene firsthand.