The North Coast times-eagle., March 01, 2004, Image 1

TIM E S
EA G LE
NO RTH
I C O A ST
M A R PR IL 2004
‘In a dark time the eye begins to see ’
50C E N TS
V O L25N O 6
-T H E O D O R E ROETHKE
PAUL LACHINE
THE BITTER ANGELS OF OUR NATURE
"Even in desperate situations, where everything
hangs in the balance, one goes on living as though
nothing were wrong. ”
-GEOTHE
The war in Iraq a year since its invasion by a small
shaky coalition led by the American President, is as much about
democracy as it is about oil and empire simply because the
soldiers who are fighting the war believe it is, however manip­
ulated and deceived they are into that belief.
The same can be said about any war: the U.S. Civil War
was about slavery because that was the essential reason the
soldiers on both sides fought it, for and against. World War 1
was to put an end to war because the soldiers who endured the
worst hell on earth — which they also created for themselves —
slaughtered each other by the millions for that fervent hope
(which might have been a not so subjective basis for the fierce
obliteration). World War 2 is eulogized as history's most titanic
struggle between freedom (“democracy") and totalitarianism
(“fascism"); each claimed history on its side — the Germans,
however conscripted, believed in the rightness of a 1,000 year
Reich despite their detestation of Nazidom; and the Japanese
despised colonial white rule in Asia although theirs was as
arrogantly cruel.
The wars in Korea and Vietnam were more subjective
than their predecessors, so-called “brushfire wars" to promote or
prevent the spread of Cold War ideologies and to skirt nuclear
obliteration while simultaneously risking it. As a result, both wars
were inconclusive; yet at the heart of each the combatants
fought for beliefs latently instilled in them or fiercely demanded
of them.
So Iraq. The grunts on the ground most likely cling to a
tenacious faith that they have liberated the Iraqi people from a
monstrous dictator and now defend against a resurrection of his
regime. At the very least they hope their great personal risks are
for the exalted principles that are claimed, that their leaders are
literally keeping the faith with them.Yet every day the Americans
and their allies face an equal tenacity by a hardcore resistance
determined to oust the invaders whom they regard as infidel
imperialists as pernicious as the earlier medieval Crusaders.
Soldiers have been lied to throughout history.They have
always been coerced in one manner or another to commit and
suffer humanity’s most hideous acts, generally in the names of
its most sanctified beliefs. That has not changed: the Americans
who are fighting and dying in Iraq are as deceived as to the
underlying purposes of the war as were their predecessors of
wars immemorial, and the rewards for such guileless intrepidity
are as always unequal and usually disproportionate to the fervid
sacrifice for them.
The war in Iraq was fabricated by ideological conser­
vatives currently occupying the White House whose inspired
vision is that perpetual warfare (a Christian-type jihad) is the
means to expand and protect the American neo-empire which
is being called the "New World Order," a term Hitler used for
his Nazi nightmare of world rule back in the 20th century.
The Bush administration is conspicuously flagrant in
its rapacious grab for power domestically and in the wider world.
It not only distrusts the common intelligence of the American
citizenry but generally regards it with fatuous contempt, shame­
lessly mismanaging its concerns in Orwellian doublethink —
and like oldtime Federalists the Bushies are confident that a
pompous, arrogant and self-serving elite are capable of not
only ruling the people but faith-basing them also, saturating the
populace with propaganda and theolitical obscuration while
designing Kafkaesque laws to subdue (and punish) dissent or
insurrection. Despite major resistance to the USA Patriot Act,
the Bush cadre are reorganizing the United States into a militant
corporate theocracy under its patently unconstitutional edicts.
George Bush has used 9/11 to reestablish the imperial
Presidency and has made preemptive (holy) war or its threat the
cornerstone of his administration A cabal of narrow minded men
direct American policy and seem to think it is their predestined
mandate to rule the world. “What we want as individuals doesn’t
always coincide with what’s best" for millions of other people, in
even small ways, “who have to endure living with us," Helen
Maclnnes has written The human tragedy, she wrote, is "people
who don't know what they do. and the human comedy is people
who think they know what they are doing."
Like it or not, humanity is a global civilization. Nuclear
weapons rendered the nation-state as dead as dinosaurs. If the
so-called global economy is manipulated to benefit only a few
wealthy nations and multinational corporations rather than be a
world structure meant to include everybody in equal protections
and freedoms, then the nightmare of 9/11 is merely the advent
of a dark future.
History is not important to avoid mistakes of the past
as George Santyana suggested but as a “predictor of what we
corrupt souls are likely to do to one another in the future," as
David Hoppe paraphrased Kurt Vonnegut in an interview
The radically undemocratic idea that the wealthiest pay
few taxes in America (and receive huge rebates) and the poor
make up the deficit is most likely a failure as well as an ominous
contradiction because it cannot be sustained Corporate welfare
not only depletes the public purse, it is impossible to support
with huge unemployment combined with the Walmarting of
wages and offshore elimination of middle class jobs. The greed
is not only grossly swinish — and now transparent to even the
least interested — it is a fantasy nourished by increasing the
national debt ($500 billion deficit this year) which becomes more
difficult to pay off — and by whom? The increasingly impover­
ished American taxpayers? Certainly not by making tax cuts to
the wealthy perpetual and subsidizing those cuts by diminishing
Social Security and Medicare as Alan Greenspan pontificates.
“Money has won," Dan Armstrong wrote in these pages
a few years ago, dreading the worst possible scenario for this
country. “The system could work but instead corruption has
infected it The whole art of government consists of the art of
being honest But our dream has fallen prey to the economic
system and the greatest weakness of the human character —
greed Business interest has supplanted public welfare A
military-industrial complex pulls the strings of government.
Democracy will shade into fascism. A strongarm gangster state
will rule It will be little more than a global feudal system in
another fifty years."
Benjamin Franklin said the Constitution would ultimately
fail like all constitutions because the people would eventually
become so corrupt only a despot would be able to rule them.
We have an opportunity to quell that corruption at the
top before it fatally infects all other levels, the true trickle-down
theory Rather than concentrate entirely on any candidate but
Bush this Presidential election year, it might also be suitable to
consider impeaching him before he has the opportunity to be
the despot Franklin predicted If he has indeed committed “high
crimes and misdemeanors" as President, of which there is much
evidence, the Constitution specifies that he be impeached It is
quite probable that Bush's first impeachable offense was taking
the oath of office because he was not elected. W might think
he was chosen by God to be President, but he certainly wasn’t
chosen by the people
The United States is a democracy because it is a
necessary contrast to despotic chaos. We have inherited a
few basic rights and liberties sough, by the mass of humanity
for millennia as well as a few limits on power to restrain the
predatory ambitions of many among us.The unelected President
and his hard-right administration of military-industrial Tories
are quite probably the people our ancestors warned us against
and attempted to prevent their future usurpation of power with
Constitutional government and separation of powers — as well
as with the Bill of Rights, the secular ten commandments of our
civilization.
“I know of no law tha, says a President is exempt from
duties tha, devolve upon other citizens," Senator Sam Ervin said
during Watergate “The White House people are no, nobility nor
royalty"
-MICHAEL PAUL McCUSKER
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