23RD BIRTHDAY I S S U E , JULY 2002
PAGE 16
INALIENABLE OBLIGATIONS
The top is failing the nation through favors bought and
sold and by corruption on a scale that would be admired by the
final generations of upper class Romans; which leaves the
burden of our culture upon the shoulders of its bottom-most
members, heavier and more thankless than that borne by Atlas.
The faltering myths we were taught as children that the
wishes of citizens could turn the government around have at
least two truths; the wealth of certain citizens gives them more
equal rights to influence government; and the mass of ordinary
citizens is able to influence government only enmasse after
hard and bitter struggle, not to mention bloodshed, arrests and
considerable unfavorable publicity by the status quo media.
Perhaps the Bush gang should be allowed to rule
without protest and resistance in the interests of the nation’s
parvenu Tories and roll back the hardwon laws and principles
of two and a quarter centuries Ordinary people might realize
what they have to lose and take back what they have lost, which
should sober up the next couple of generations. But maybe no
one will be inclined to retrieve rights our forebears knew were
essential to liberty and equality Maybe democracy didn’t win
the Cold War after all. Old coarse fascism in modern populist
disguise has triumphed. Hot house capitalism exists best in
strictly controlled environments in which social classes are
rigidly defined and no one is allowed to question or reform
IN A DARK TIME
Oh Michael, Michael, Michael
You’ll never make a nickel
Giving the old "rag"away..
For hour after hour of pen to pad
Your words, your honest thought
Pour out onto a sometimes
Indifferent lot.
Once I asked you why
Your answer, a McCusker wry
Was that it was your duty
To remind
To never let us sleep the sleep
Of forgotten history.
They call you, “Old Doom & Gloom "
Because their ears are waxed
Against unpleasant, ugly things
That happened in the past
But in their freedom muffled
What if someone shuffled
Up and cut that
Freedom’s throat?
I’d rather hear from time to time
The nng of ‘Doom & Gloom’
Than close my eyes to history
And ears to possibility.
For apathy it seems to me
Could strip us from
The pair of hands
Belonging to the She
Who stands
And welcomes all who love her
-RACHEL WYNN
the arthritic incompetence and desolation such corrupt and
moribund mediocracies usually foster and perpetuate like
fetid molds.
Ionesco wrote once about living in Romania in the
1930s when the fascists had come to power. Everything was
saturated with fascist promotion: radio, movies, newspapers,
posters and billboards. It was, he wrote, impossible not to be
worn down by its ingestion of the culture. Only a small group
withstood it for long, primarily offbeat sorts who never quite
conformed to cultural assimilations or authorities — most of
them liberals and other left leaning types (“the usual suspects”)
— But even among them, if only a small concession was made
to the fascists, a thought, an agreement about something, within
a short time that person was wearing an armband, burning
books or synagogues or making accusations against former
friends who had not succumbed.
The USA is in a similar position at the start of the 21st
century. In a sense the 1950s, a period of political hysteria and
repression, are being completed after half a century of briefly
interrupted cycles. We are in a cycle described by Henry Adams
and the elder Arthur Schlessinger as one of private interest, a
result of the disillusionment and drained energy that follows a
vigorous and chaotic period of public activism, an inevitable
recoil as people become tired, confused and angry at the
demands upon their intelligence, compassion, patience and
pockets. The cycles of public activism weaken, the cycles of
power and corruption become more ruthless and compelling.
The problems of meeting the needs of ever larger
segments of disenfranchised people and ideas in an incessantly
complex and accelerating society create a paradox of hardening
hearts and desires for simpler solutions. It is when, as the late
Rolf Brown used to say, people begin looking for what he called
the Man on the White Horse' who has answers simplified into
dogma and prejudices that fault subgroups for all that appears
to have gone wrong The cultural dialogue narrows considerably,
all complex social questions are reduced to an Us or Them
snarl.The most clamorously vile demand their vengeful fables
be legislated into political veracity. In the names of freedom and
justice both are eroded Like Ionesco’s Romania, it is difficult to
resist an inversion that permeates even the pores.
Domestic politics in the USA are becoming as severe
and confrontational as during the Cold War — no mercy for the
other side’ — an intimidation into obedience with narrow and
flogging perceptions of democracy that disrupts and undermines
the majority; but that has always been the problem of majority
rule. A majority is easily bullied to bully; the laceration of deep
inferiority feelings to react with fear and loathing against minor
ities, to ethnically cleanse ‘abnormal Americans’ from society:
true Americans are cajoled to eradicate untrue Americans.
The irony is that it is usually a minority of Americans
who strive to protect the liberties and equalities for the majority
— just as it is usually other minorities who crave raw power and
will do anything to attain and keep it.
The New Federalists have sweeping and zealous
ambitions for the USA to rule space as well as Earth, creating
a space shield against any opposition, masked by the claim of
perpetual war against terrorism, which would obviously be any
act against U.S. interests. In the meantime planets, moons and
asteroids would be mined for U.S. corporate profit in direct
violation of UN agreements that no one nation may take posses
sion of any sphere of the solar system, much like international
agreements regarding Antarctica. NASA will use tax money for
R&D and then privatize its successes which leaves taxpayers
paying but receiving little or nothing, much like contemporary
research and development.
The U.S. control and domination of space will be done
through Starwars and orbiting battlestations, none of which can
be done without nuclear reactors; it will nuclearize and weapon-
ize space for the USA's benefit, and will control who gets on or
leaves Earth.
Bush complains about other nations accumulating
“weapons of mass destruction" as if the USA’s enormous
stockpiles it refuses to give up are not the most dangerous
threat to world oblivion, which it is currently using as the new
century’s jingoistic Big Stick.’ Our immense nuclear arsenal
is gently alluded to as a mother's tough love pre-emption.
We seem to regard ourselves as reasonable amidst
the unruly and vicious passions of foreign terrorists, yet our
venerated ancestors broke away from their mother country,
fought a revolution to sever the colonial umbilical because
they were passionate and never hesitated to use what is today
defined as terrorism against their empirical enemies, which after
the Revolution included England even beyond the War of 1812,
Napoleonic France which discouraged many who hoped the
French Revolution would succeed, and decrepit Spain — and
they were always ready to grab musket and warship to fight
whomever stood in the way of the USA’s 'Manifest Destiny’.
And it has to be mentioned we have passionately
squabbled among ourselves from the very beginning as to
exactly what sort of nation we are and ought to be.
There should be no doubt: the people are sovereign.
The people have basic and fundamental rights whether any
government or power allows them any. These rights are from
birth and no power has the right to take them away.
The right to think and speak openly of what one thinks,
the freedom of association, or religion — these are, as the
Declaration of Independence says, “inalienable rights,” and
the only true purpose of government is to secure, protect and
enlarge those rights. The Bill of Rights were added to the main
frame of the Constitution as its heart and to give teeth to those
inalienable rights, limiting government and majorities from
taking away liberty and freedom. The majority is not allowed to
seize or subtract the basic rights of the Bill of Rights no matter
how unpopular or incompatible minority views are.
Liberty means rights even democracy cannot take away.
Liberty is not the same as democracy and can be in as much
danger in a democracy as in an aristocracy or dictatorship.
In much the manner Francis of Assisi proclaimed the
essential message of the gospels and was considered a fool and
a halfwit by the enumerators of the powerful Church, the original
ten amendments to the Constitution — the Bill of Rights, which
are this nation’s secular and fundamental commandments —
are antiethical to those who wish the world power of the USA
to be its manifest destiny. That ambition does not liberate the
oppressed of Earth but instead insures continued poverty and
submission to the powerful monetary interests of the corporate
capitalists who intend to control world politics. The only true
gospel of the USA is freedom of humanity from tyranny, fear,
strife and poverty. Like Francis the fool and halfwit with his vow
of personal poverty, the USA without its vow of liberty, equality
and justice for all is as corrupt as the medieval Church with its
desire for earthly power, the antithesis of its very source.
YANKEE DOODLE ROYALTY
Colonel William Tyng of Falmouth (later Portland) in the
Province of Maine (then part of Massachusetts) responds
to the Alien & Sedition Acts and to the Federalist Party in
1800:
"The Constitution of the United States expressively
commands the Congress to make no law abridging freedom
of speech or of the press. In violation of this express command,
Congress passed the Sedition Law; and the Sedition Law does
exactly what the Constitution forbids. It abridges freedom of
speech and of the press Consequently this law is not constitu
tional. and is void...
“...when Massachusetts ratified the Constitution, she
plainly asserted that liberty of conscience and freedom of the
press could not be canceled, abridged, modified, or restrained
by the United States. Yet the United States, in the Sedition Law,
has abridged, modified, restrained, and canceled liberty of
conscience and freedom of the press, and the Massachusetts
Legislature has assented to it.
“ The Federalist Party and the Massachusetts Legis
lature have thus authorized and condoned the very injustices
that the authors of the Constitution sought to prevent. The
Federalist Party is at the height of its prosperity and power,
both in Massachusetts and in the nation. It controls the Senate
It controls the House Yet it is inevitable that any party which
thus uses its power and prosperity to force injustices upon the
people must perish.
“'Twaddle'? (in response to his nephew's criticism)
Twaddle’ that the Federalists of New England conceived the
Alien & Sedition Law, and enacted it, because they consider
themselves chosen by God to regulate the affairs of the nation
and the entire world? Twaddle that the Federalist Party numbers
among its members practically all New England shipowners,
manufacturers, merchants, and landowners who have grown rich
since the Revolution? Twaddle that these windbags consider
they hold a monopoly on the wisdom and goodness of America?
Twaddle that they think because they have money they are the
aristocracy of America and are trying to perpetuate themselves
by law?
“...In passing the Sedition Act, the Federalist Party had
only one object in view — to stifle all criticism of the Federalist
Party. It wished to destroy the Jacobins, the Jeffersonians, the
radicals, and the democratic foundations of the United States
with one deadly blow; and so crushing and so comprehensive
is the Sedition Act that it virtually abolishes the Bill of Rights,
those first ten amendments to the Constitution which specify
that Congress shall make no law abridging freedom of speech
or of the press, which secure the people against unreasonable
searches and seizures, which safeguard life, liberty, and prop
erty, which entitle accused persons to trial by an impartial jury.
“All over the United States men have been jailed, fined
and persecuted by Federalists for daring express their opinions
freely! If it’s permitted to continue, if Federalists are permitted
to remain in office, are permitted to destroy the principles for
which the American Revolution was fought, then republicanism
in America is dead, freedom in America is dead, and the United
States is nothing but a despotic oligarchy! That's as simple as
A-B-C, and anybody not a damned fool will admit it."
-Kenneth Roberts (‘Lydia Bailey’, 1947)