Why Things Don't Change--or Your "Vote" is Meaningless

Okay, here's something that makes sense to me...what about you?

All forms of government beyond the city level--beyond the very local--are corrupt. (Likely they are also corrupt locally, but there is a real face-to-face opportunity to call this out and make changes.) They are corrupt in any number of ways...the systems themselves have been "re-engineered" to serve a different purpose than what was likely the original intention.

Okay, no need to blame things--people seem to want to game everything they can and I don't have the ability to call chicken or egg on any of this. I tend to simply believe that the folks that find their way to the the "top" of systems are folks who want to/know how to use that system to their own best advantage. That does not make all of us intrinsically corrupt(able). We are weak though. And I think it's why we give so many fraudulent persons a pass--we know that we are weak and who knows what we might do should we be given the keys to the kingdom.

Okay, in that case, there should be "fail-safe" systems in place to help balance the drive for power and money in those who are at the top. Now, this is the idea of "checks and balances" in the system of government we have. However, those "top-feeders" have infiltrated all of these branches of government and no longer seem fit to form these "checks"--definitely there is no longer any ideological nor practical balance. Ideologues abound but their ideology tends to be centered on off-shore accounts in the caymans. So, in this very surface account, your vote is meaningless--and in our current system, you also don't care about how your government operates as long as you can find a way to keep living the way you want to and believe you might get a little more some day. It's very "self" centered in every way. We only care about other people, on the whole, as means to our own ends. I do not believe this is healthy or necessary--in other words, I believe this is learned behavior, not intrinsic to our being.

Okay, here's the idea, old as the hills, or at least the Greeks in Athens...government by lottery...like jury selection I suppose.

This creates very clear requirements for the polis as a whole. We must groom every single one of our citizens to be capable of managing whatever role might come their way by lottery.

This means REAL education for everyone...the type of education that fosters thinking and not testing ability. We need elastic, ethical minds. We will all be each others' keepers in this way.

Rules and policies MUST be simple. Why should they be complex? No good reason. Complexity serves the cabal of insiders only. Simplicity can serve us all well.

I'm out...what are your thoughts?

Give Us This Day...

Lawrence, I would admit, at least in many of the essays I've read, has a totalitarian mind; he seems to believe that humanity needs authority. This is not an odd idea of course. And in truth, the democracy of the USA is authoritarian. Perhaps only Athenian democracy--while not inclusive of the whole, no votes for women for example--really was truly a type of "lottery" government of the people (demos). Any citizen (adult male who had completed military service) could be called to serve on a council and even be "elected" (ie, name pulled out of a hat) to serve as a judge. But I think it's probably true that we all take a thankfully mindless comfort in abdicating responsibility in much of our living. This is not unproblematic as you must be aware.

Though Lawrence is suspect in many ways, he is always incisive. From his essay on Dostoevsky's "Grand Inquisitor" he says of Dostoevsky that "we have to admit...[his] profound insight into the nature of mankind. Man can but be true to his own nature. No inspiration whatsoever will ever get him permanently beyond his limits." (p 234, Selected Literary Criticism) The Grand Inquisitor, Lawrence tells us, names the three "limits" of mankind.

1. He demands bread, and not merely foodstuff, but as a miracle, given from the hand of God.
2. He demands mystery, the sense of the miraculous in life.
3. He demands somebody to bow down to, and somebody before whom all men shall bow down.

Miracle, mystery, authority--these "prevent men from being 'free'."

Now, these are easy enough to consider as true. These demands play themselves out over and again. But it seems to me that the first demand, bread from the hand of God, must be the basic fault...the error that enslaves us, and that the rest springs--confusedly from there.

The essay goes on, in Lawrence fashion, making one point in several different ways as a way to cover all the angles should you disagree...but this one point is really simply an extension of the above demands but driving home towards the totalitarian need for an authority to give you bread. Your bread, the bread you grew, that he gives back to you as miraculous...and you thank him for it. The abstracted bread. And you forget that you can provide your own damn bread.

Here is the progression in Lawrence's essay (239-40).

...seed-time and harvest have been the two great sacred periods of miracle, rebirth, rejoicing....For it is the earthly bread as a miracle, a yearly miracle.

The earthly bread is leavened with heavenly bread. The heavenly bread is life, is contact, and is consciousness. In sowing the seed man has his contact with earth, with sun and rain: and he must not break this contact. In the awareness of the springing of the corn he has his ever-renewed consciousness of miracle, wonder and mystery: the wonder of creation, procreation, and re-creation, following the mystery of death and the cold grave....man must not, must not lose this supreme state of consciousness out of himself, or he has lost the best part of him....All this is life, life, it is the heavenly bread which we eat in the course of getting the earthly bread. Work is, or should be, our heavenly bread of activity, contact and consciousness. All work that is not this is anathema. True, the work is hard; there is the sweat of the brow. But what of it? In decent proportion, this is life. The sweat of the brow is the heavenly butter.
...
Miracle and mystery run together, they merge. Then there is the third thing, authority..."that which men bow down to"...They will bow down first, the Inquisitor saw, to the one who has the power to control the bread.

The bread, the earthly bread, while it is being reaped and grown, it is life. But once it is harvested and stored, it becomes a commodity, it becomes riches. And then it becomes a danger. For men think, if they only possessed the hoard, they need not work; which means, really, they need not live...

So that ultimately men bow down to the man, or group of men, who can and dare take over the hoard, the store of bread, the riches, to distribute among the people again. The lords, the givers of bread. How profound Dostoevsky is when he says that the people will forget that it is their own bread which is being given back to them. While they keep their own bread, it is not much better than a stone to them--inert possessions. But given back to them from the great Giver, it is divine once more, it has the quality of miracle to make it taste well in the mouth and in the belly.

Men bow down to the lord of bread, first and foremost.

Lawrence goes on to make statements about democracy failing the test of "heavenly bread." No great Giver and so no heavenly savor. You can see this leading into an understanding of a "need" for Jesus and then a need for an earthly Giver as a stand-in for Jesus until he returns. The Utopian "heaven on earth".

Again, the mistake comes with the first demand listed above. To not realize the gift is Nature and needs no other agency than work (and Thoreau would tell us even that work can be minimal). Life is Sweat; Heaven is Bread. But BOTH are in your hands.

Give yourself your daily bread. Or maybe better, go find some nuts and berries.

[As an aside, it seems interesting to consider the rise of Paleo diets in light of the "error" of the abstraction of bread...storage and control...commodification. The seeds of error in our minds, our conception of where the bread comes from--not the Giver who stores and doles out bread--not the grocery store...the wal-marts, etc.--also seems to lead us down the path of poor health. The disease of "extra-governance" in human systems and "heavenly" systems springs from our learning to grow and store food.]

Why Make the US into a Third World Nation? **UPDATE

A little more bouncing off the Krugman piece. But first, perhaps you'll recall this from a piece by Simon Johnson in the Atlantic back in May of 2009 called The Quiet Coup (he was on Moyers too--worth it):

But inevitably, emerging-market oligarchs get carried away; they waste money and build massive business empires on a mountain of debt. Local banks, sometimes pressured by the government, become too willing to extend credit to the elite and to those who depend on them. Overborrowing always ends badly, whether for an individual, a company, or a country. Sooner or later, credit conditions become tighter and no one will lend you money on anything close to affordable terms.

The downward spiral that follows is remarkably steep. Enormous companies teeter on the brink of default, and the local banks that have lent to them collapse. Yesterday’s “public-private partnerships” are relabeled “crony capitalism.” With credit unavailable, economic paralysis ensues, and conditions just get worse and worse. The government is forced to draw down its foreign-currency reserves to pay for imports, service debt, and cover private losses. But these reserves will eventually run out. If the country cannot right itself before that happens, it will default on its sovereign debt and become an economic pariah. The government, in its race to stop the bleeding, will typically need to wipe out some of the national champions—now hemorrhaging cash—and usually restructure a banking system that’s gone badly out of balance. It will, in other words, need to squeeze at least some of its oligarchs.

Squeezing the oligarchs, though, is seldom the strategy of choice among emerging-market governments. Quite the contrary: at the outset of the crisis, the oligarchs are usually among the first to get extra help from the government, such as preferential access to foreign currency, or maybe a nice tax break, or—here’s a classic Kremlin bailout technique—the assumption of private debt obligations by the government. Under duress, generosity toward old friends takes many innovative forms. Meanwhile, needing to squeeze someone, most emerging-market governments look first to ordinary working folk—at least until the riots grow too large.

Now to the Krugman; it starts like this:

Last week, in the face of protest demonstrations against Wisconsin’s new union-busting governor, Scott Walker — demonstrations that continued through the weekend, with huge crowds on Saturday — Representative Paul Ryan made an unintentionally apt comparison: “It’s like Cairo has moved to Madison.”

It wasn’t the smartest thing for Mr. Ryan to say, since he probably didn’t mean to compare Mr. Walker, a fellow Republican, to Hosni Mubarak. Or maybe he did — after all, quite a few prominent conservatives, including Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and Rick Santorum, denounced the uprising in Egypt and insist that President Obama should have helped the Mubarak regime suppress it.

In any case, however, Mr. Ryan was more right than he knew. For what’s happening in Wisconsin isn’t about the state budget, despite Mr. Walker’s pretense that he’s just trying to be fiscally responsible. It is, instead, about power. What Mr. Walker and his backers are trying to do is to make Wisconsin — and eventually, America — less of a functioning democracy and more of a third-world-style oligarchy.

So, you might find Johnson persuasive now if you didn't then (and likely you do if you read Taibbi at all).

But to the eponymous point here...why? Well, why not?

Power serves power. And as we read in the earlier post...Power is godly and good--and the Lord has a plan and works in mysterious ways, and etc. Our mentality as a country (if countries have mentalities) is a mixture of Calvinist "election" and Market laissez faire and this has brought us to our current dilemma. Our demigods don't believe in free markets, rather they control the markets--and in doing so use the rhetoric of god and country to establish a market loving god.

So, with that rhetoric serving the powerful, they push. Why? Because the only that actually serves the common man is that Reaganite bugaboo--the government. And by government I don't mean President or Congress. I mean the departments that have been created to manage this vast land and help those of us without any real power. Independent agencies like the FDA, USDA, EPA and so on are there to regulate corporate greed. EPA tries to enforce protections to our air and water...corporations lobby congress to make laws to gut the power of the EPA. The Koch Bros are now the most visible and clear example of the real power and the real reason for this anti-government/pro-market mentality. They want no obstacles to their greed.

And if God the Father in His Heaven is Republican then all of this has been done for his glory...amen.

UPDATE: and now Minnesota

And Justice for All

Besides being a pretty good Al Pacino movie, the post title, as you know, comes from the "Pledge of Allegiance". Isn't it funny how you grow up with these things and have no real idea of their inculcating symbolic intention...a flag and allegiance to it. Odd, right, pledging loyalty to an abstraction.

That's not the point though: with the "democratic" challenges to ruling authority in Egypt and Tunisia some have trumpeted the call to liberty (and justice) for all. However, many are asking about the inequality of women in these societies and if that will be addressed in any meaningful way. Will there be justice?

No. To elaborate, equality is a chimera and justice is a legalism of the power structure of systems of government. Power decides what is just and just how equal things need to be in order to be called just. Melville addressed this, as shown in the previous post, with the idea of "fast-fish and loose-fish"; even if a fish is fast this tenet of "natural law" (I have caught it, and I am in possession of it) will be vitiated by the hierarchical law of "civilized" legal systems if Power wants the fish. And this vitiation, this unequal or unfair action will be called "just". And it will indeed be just in civil terms.

We have also heard calls condemning patriarchal systems...I really can't disagree here as I find the psychology of the human male to be the cause of all our ills. Yep, I'm laying at the feet of the biological male animal striving for alpha positions and all the lesser males trying to put one over on the alpha. These "stupid" biology tricks are useful in certain species and social orders do benefit from this kind of organization--but it seems to me that the wrong genes have been in the ascendancy for far too long. The female animal goes about her living in the cycle of care not in the cycle of domination.

Our human reality is dominated by masculine aggression on every level. We pray to the trinity of War, Technology and Money. All of these are masculine ideas. All of these come out of a desire to conquer our very biology--conquer each other--conquer our planet--even conquer our gods. These are our masculine abstractions.

Without a massive alteration in this particular "way" of being there is no hope.

Our only future is in the physical reality of the feminine, body, mind and soul.