Democratic Conversation

I am an artist by temperament and intellect; I look for insight in the beauty and the grotesque as beauty as ways to explore, help define, and enjoy the human comedy. This is not so difficult, as I need only look around with ears, if not eyes, open to the environment. I came to political inspection and commentary as a by-product of my literary artistic inquiry. Again, one only need read Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Joyce, Wharton, and Sun-Tsu to grasp the significance that art can have upon a people caught in desperate struggle with authority (as well as themselves). Also, I believe in democratic principles such as discussion, dissent, and freedom of speech.

It is with an immensely heavy heart that I must admit that for many years now I have thought America has been in its decline as a nation of hope for all democratic principles. It began, I think—and to agree with Gore Vidal’s oft-repeated assessment—with Harry Truman’s failure to withhold his political sentiment that the United States needed to become in nature that which it had become by default after leading the victory over worldwide despotism in the Second World War: an imperial power that could only become an example of despotic naturalism in order to uphold its banner as the modern example of a Super-power (because, let’s face it, superpowers have been with us since recorded history: see: Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Genghis Khan, Victorian England). Truman succeeded in paving this road by developing the forerunners of the CIA and NSA, two government agencies that have done everything against the precepts of rights, freedoms, and pursuits which Thomas Jefferson emoted so well in this country’s seminal document of existence.

The succession of presidents after Truman was finally bounced from office have been equal abject failures in reversing this slide toward despotism and tyranny: Eisenhower played golf behind the White House while Joe McCarthy helped to take the second and third bricks out of the foundation of the Bill of Rights—a monumental failure of Ike since he worked so desperately to insure Europe would get some of those same rights as Allied Commander in Europe during WWII; Kennedy slept his way (not literally, but by euphemism “bedded” women) through his famed “One-Thousand Days” as president, and meanwhile gave us Cuba’s failure and the beginnings of Vietnam’s uber-failure; Johnson helped domestic issues that Reconstruction and southern states did not have the moral gene to perform—much less the moral compass to navigate—but as president Johnson disguised foreign policy in the cloak of fighting communists, only to certainly and permanently create the military industrial complex that presently makes American policy (and the Congress) tick; Nixon campaigned on getting of our of the war, but only escalated Vietnam when he gave us Henry Kissinger, who gave America his German-roots version of realpolitik: dip your money, hate, hands and agents into those foreign nations whom you want to subvert for economic, military or political purposes (Kissinger is so afraid of his war crimes that he dares not set foot in a country whose honor it is to arrest criminals for trial in the World Court); Carter failed in everything politically, but has some arresting things to say himself these days; Reagan sold his soul to help big business dismantle what 80 years of grass-roots political action had achieved: workers’ rights, living-wages, political relevancy—and meanwhile he gave us radical Islamism and Osama bin Laden; George H.W. Bush continued that horrid legacy in his do-nothing presidency—until he needed a righteous war to help bring his solvency back in time for election, and so he allowed Saddam Hussein to invade Kuwait so he could play world leader (it didn’t work for his try at a second term, but it did help the USA to permanently establish military presence in the lands of a murderous religious people; the roots of 9-11 attacks grew easily in those arid sands); Bill Clinton failed the American people because he played centrist, and effectively did little for the people, did a lot for Big Business subsidies, and continually held a wetted finger in the political winds to wager decisions for 300 million people—meanwhile the conservatives of the country and in politics did everything in their limited and substantial powers to derail any legislation that actually would help the people of America; and finally, bringing up the rear in both literalism and figurative ass-dragging failure to this long list of presidential failures, is George W. Bush, criminal par-excellence for his lies to the American public against his oath of office (“to protect and defend the constitution of the United States”), his treasonous actions in orchestrating the Iraq Invasion (with incubating help from the Congress), and his war crimes/crimes against humanity for the murder of Iraq civilians in the execution of the invasion and subsequent occupation.

It has been just 60 years since the Truman-Bush continuum of American Presidential failure began. Essentially only two generations have become fully realized through this era. This time represents, however, nearly one-quarter of the history of the United States. One failure after another, for 60 years. One more nail in the coffin of Americans’ freedoms weighed against the so-called “needs of the state.”

No one can claim that we American citizens were not warned against the tyrannous nature of government. It was the establishment of “these United States” against such government that brought the world a newer form of “government by representation,” with the power of constitutional rights and rule of law set in three branches of government that held checks and balances according to such laws that could not eliminate such rights accorded to the people. No, we were warned, by Jefferson, by Benjamin Franklin, and by George Washington. Jefferson wrote in later life that government needs to be overthrown every seven years, because that is how long it takes for tyranny to get hold of the people; Franklin wrote that a constitutional convention should be held every ten years in order to discover what needed to be changed according to the needs of the people, and then implement those changes with as little compromise as possible; Washington, in his farewell address no less, after serving two terms as president, warned his colleagues to refrain from forming political parties, as parties set groups against each other. Surely the reader sees the incongruities that exist in today’s political climate with what three of the nation’s Founding Fathers gave us. Their ghosts must cry within the halls of the White House, Congress, and the Supreme Court every single day.

If their ghosts do cry, they do not cry out of what the government has done to the people, but because of what the people have allowed the government to do to them. As I said, They warned us.