The Written Peace:
Open Forum of September 16, 2006
Pundits will prognosticate, then look back and explain; but the damage to the modern neo-conservative movement and its craven appendages will be the result of something not nearly as well understood as some would have us believe. Yes, of course the Republicans have caused all manner of fiasco during their six-year reign, but let us have a moment of honest, if discomforting, analysis.
Our occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan have become unmitigated disasters, but the average American would not think of using the term "unmitigated disasters" to describe the two situations. Many who would once have had no problem at all with George W. Bush, his policies, and his methods are now beginning to grasp that things are not going well, but they still get virtually all of their information from the mainstream media, which still reactively retouch and soften what their own reporters are seeing on the ground, both in those two miserable countries and in Washington. People know something is wrong, but they don't know how wrong it is.
We here in the Blogosphere know how wrong things are going, but ours is a selective group: we're news hounds, we're information consumers; we're not only interested, but we're also interested in finding out. And we're atypical.
But the tide of public sentiment in the country is shifting; and if my reading is accurate, the shift will be reflected in dramatic fashion come November. This reflects currents affected by forces much deeper than the news of the day, the week, or even the year. Public sentiment, expressed through the political process, has a life of its own. The promoters of one political view or another are only marginally responsible for the tides that ebb and flow. The psychology of the American electorate is a living, sentient beast of its own right; and it behaves by forces that are better understood in long historical retrospect than in anything approaching the currency of a movement of those tides.
Demographics are part of it: as crests and troughs form across cohort groups, different balances of public opinion come to dominate, recede, and vanish, only to re-emerge much later as if out of nowhere. Other forces are in play, too. Economic, intellectual, technological, and even environmental and ecological pressures change the way people express themselves politically. What seems impossible to imagine a society even so much as contemplating in one era becomes altogether fashionable and dominant as political preference in another.
Change is coming. For progressives, it will be welcome relief. But make no mistake: a reign of a dozen years by intelligent, effective, dedicated people will not repair what six years of Republican rule have wrought upon this land. We as a nation are diminished, and some of the harm is irreparable, both to us and to the world we were supposed to have led into the new century. And lest anyone forget, two years ago, sixty-two million American adults voted for George W. Bush, the man on whose watch a little cabal of maniacs in a matter of only a couple of hours wiped out 3,000 of our own fellow citizens and $31 billion worth of property. Whatever alliances we form with former Bush supporters, they will always be former Bush supporters.
We should keep that in mind, even as we must find ourselves gratefully climbing into bed with them to fix a badly injured nation.
That's enough of that. Agree or disagree with me in the comments. This is an open thread: you speak your peace here.
Allow me once again to treat you to a little history of the English language. The brief passage below has wonderful and straight-forward implications for our own time here in the United States. This paragraph is by a scholarly bulwark of the late 14th/early 15th Century, John of Trevisa, who was quite the colorful and opinionated gentleman from the South of England, where the "better" people lived. I shall allow you to slog through his fine southern dialect of Middle English to figure out the substance and details of his righteous rant. In the comments, once you've had a chance to take your stabs at what he's going on about, I shall offer a translation. As one helpful guide, the "thorn" character, þ, is pronounced as a thick th: so, for example, "þis" is nothing more than the Middle (and Old) English way of writing "this." Other than that, pronounce the words phonetically, and the meanings of most of them will become obvious pretty quickly.
"...Al þe longage of þe Norhumbres, and specialych at York, ys so scharp, slyttyng, and frotyng, and vnschape, þat we souþeron men may þat longage vnneþe vndurstonde. Y trowe þat þat ys bycause þat a buþ nyy to strange men and aliens, þat spekeþ strangelych..."Just delicious. And so timely, too.
Say what's on your mind. The weekend is fresh, the espresso bar is open, and we might have time for a rousing rendition of "Gimme One More Chance" by the Republicans Without Jobs brass band.
The Dark Wraith reaches for the earplugs.
Published 9/16/2006 12:29:00 PM
<< 23 Comments Total
I agree with your assertion that some, if not most of the damage inflicted on this country, its reputation, its moral standing and its prestige by the regime currently in power will not be reparable.
People who are wronged historically have the longest memories, so I can confidently expect repercussions from the Bush Administration to linger far beyond my statistical lifetime.
Good afternoon Dark Wraith:
Change? 'Tis a consequence devoutly to be wished. I have my doubts though. They rest mainly in the natural tendency of people to contemplate change, even think that change might be a good thing and when the time comes, remain the same. Even at great cost to themselves. The problem with most of the Bush supporters is that change to a progressive agenda would involve a great deal of uncomfortable admissions of being wrong. I think that even if a clear choice is presented, wholesale change and a progressive and liberal program will frighten the already timid electorate and they will seek their comfort in the waiting arms of the current masters. Unless the current regime is attacked through the courts (Congress doesn't have enough time to evolve and learn how to use that whole primate with a backbone concept) or other legal channels like the Nixon administration (and after that bloodbath they only went away for a single term) was some republican who is photogenic and savvy enough to spend a full election cycle without using a racial slur in public and manages to stay away from underage boy hookers while campaigning will probably carry the day. I hope that Wesley Clark or someone of that caliber steps up to carry the progressive banner. When there's actually a debate raging in Washington about torture. I mean, hey, are we really having to talk about Americans having torture as a policy? A treaty that has been in place for decades and served us well in several conflicts has now become vague? This is like having to explain to a teenager that disposing of unwanted puppies by throwing them out of the cab of a speeding pick up truck is not acceptable behavior. The mere fact that you must explain this stuff is somehow degrading. We shall see, because right now my normally jaundiced view has not even taken in the proven track record of republican dirty tricks and out right theft.
Sometimes sobriety sucks out loud. Watching all of this with a clear head can send you reaching for the advil.
A nicely written Peace, Wraith. A bit of relief would be most welcomed.
But the tide of public sentiment in the country is shifting; and if my reading is accurate, the shift will be reflected in dramatic fashion come November.
From your keyboard, to the powers that be.
BTW...
People who are wronged historically have the longest memories...
(and nah, nah, nah-nah, nah)
“All the language of the Northumbrians, and especially at York, is so sharp, slitting and frotting and unshaped, that we southern men can barely understand that language. I believe that is because they are near to strange men and aliens [i.e. the Scots], that speak strangely.”
You'll be needing better earplugs. ;-)
Good evening, Dark Wraith, and fellow guests.
We here in the Blogosphere know how wrong things are going, but ours is a selective group: we're news hounds, we're information consumers; we're not only interested, but we're also interested in finding out. And we're atypical.
Naw. We don't know how wrong things are going. You might say that not only are we aware that 9/10 of the iceberg is beneath the surface, we've caught some glimpses of the damn thing, but we don't know, and I'm REALLY not looking forward to finding out, even as I keep digging in the hopes of accomplishing exactly that. It's worse than we think.
As far as change... like a tiny, demented version of our planet's ecosystem, the political system responds to what is, and adapts accordingly. Rarely are things completely removed once they are introduced (this is why it's an awful idea to give government extra special powers - it tends to keep them, and find lots and lots of new uses for them). I agree with your idea of what the future holds, and I'm not sure whether the proper response is to acquire more guns, get louder as an activist, or go live on a mountain somewhere. It's getting uglier.
Especially since the frantic flailing about of the... how to put this... more conceptually challenged among us as the Grand Vision of America as an empire of the rich, by the rich, and for the rich is proving to be less wonderful in execution than it seemed to be on paper is increasing. We're not seeing brownshirts in the streets, but the attempt to do more than simply verbally shout down heretics is happening, and the change from frothing at the mouth to action that eliminationist rhetoric heralds is taking place.
The States are going continue to be an unpleasant place to live in for the reality-based among us, and it's going to get worse before it gets better.
"Sometimes sobriety sucks out loud. Watching all of this with a clear head can send you reaching for the advil." -- MinstrelBoy
"...reality is as bizarre as anything you can put in your head. Learning to cope with reality is a bigger high than getting high." -- Dennis Hopper
Quoth the Dark Wraith
So now we have this brilliant idea coming out of Iraq to curb the violence in Baghdad by digging a trench around the whole city.
The great thing about this plan is that getting the trench dug now will save a lot of time when they need a mass grave once everyone in town has been murdered in sectarian violence.
Oh, I hadn't thought of that, but it certainly makes sense. The trench will be ready for the bodies and the dozers.
Good quote, Dark Wraith!
Moody Blue, Nice translation job.
Minstrel Boy, Harry Caray said something along the lines of 'you cannot have as good a time at a party sober as ya can drunk. Entering my 3rd year of sobriety, I absotively agree.
Afternoon DW
Lots of th's in that reading. Ok, I will admit Porky Pig came to mind and I began to hear it in his voice.
Then I pictured him sputtering it to Dept of Defense General Counsel Wm Haynes, (not worthy of the title) and began laughing.
President Bush interrupted to remind us once again that Pakistan is a sovereign nation and in chimed Charles Krauthammer whispering the Middle East is on fire and "the decision is no more than a year away".
Porky got fed up and left.
What most frightens me about the clean up of the Republican mess is the cost. Inevitably the ruling party will catch the blame when the bills come due. It would be nice if the bills would arrive before 2008.
Does Bush check his mail?
Oh, and Dark Wraith,
very interesting assessment of the trench!
Good afternoon, konagod.
You are right on the money: the Democrats are walking straight into a killing box. After the November elections, the economy will be teetering on the brink of a recession. The Federal Reserve has finally realized this and is busily trying to help the economy avert a precipitous drop, just as it has done in the past over and over again when Republicans were facing elections. The Fed's actions will only marginally improve the situation.
But the real problems are going to come after 2008, when the piper starts getting paid big-time for the excesses of this Administration. Come about 2010 or so (more likely in the 2011/2012 period), a whole lot of core programs—programs that have made up the fabric of the decades-long relationship between the government and its citizens—will fall by the wayside because their rising costs simply cannot be met with the government's shrinking resources.
Here's the bad news: the Democrats won't be able to simply tax their way out of the mess. In other words, by that point, rolling tax rates back even the 1970s levels wouldn't do the trick and would just make the situation worse. The Republicans have constructed what is essentially a poison pill that is infecting the body of fiscal dynamics at the federal level. Once introduced to the system, it has a life of its own, and any corrective action simply makes the toxin that much more potent.
Raise taxes on the rich? There aren't enough rich to pay for the gap that will have built by that time.
Raise taxes on the middle class, too? That's just going to kill consumer spending, which will kill business investment, which will kill jobs, which will kill consumer spending some more, et cetera, down the spiral we go.
Cut government spending? We're doing that already, even as the Republicans pump the war industry hog trough with the public's money.
And let's talk about Social Security. The neo-cons got their dream come true. They turned a simple adjustment that had to be done into such a political mess that nothing got done. That means, when the adjustment could have been done modestly and way before its ameliorative effects would have been manifest, it didn't get done, so the fiscal crisis facing Social Security will require a much, much more violent correction now or in the future than it would have three years ago. And nothing's going to get done about it for at least another two to three years, thus ensuring that, when a correction in the Social Seucity tax structure is finally made, it's going to have to be that much more radical—and therefore that much more disruptive on the economy that can ill afford to bear it when it comes down.
And you watch the conservative Republicans squeal like a bunch stuck pigs about what the Democrats are doing to the American economy with their "tax and spend" policies. You just watch.
And watch the economy sink, just as if the Republicans are right, even though they're the ones who caused the mess when their irresponsible, nasty policies were the rule of order of the day and the decade.
I'm going to say this in a post—and I know it's going to anger some good people here on our side of the Blogosphere—but Al Gore is wrong when he says global warming is 'the single most important issue of our time'.
No, it's not. Not by a long shot and not by a mile.
And not by about 30 years, either. The major disruptions caused by global warming will start to really show up as we get somewhat closer to the middle of the century. Right now, konagod, we're looking at fiscal crises that will make it next to impossible for us to do the first thing about that looming problem out there on the horizon.
Long before we start to see Antarctic ice sheets skidding into the ocean, we'll be watching major sections of the United States government skidding into the ocean of historical curiosities. And depending upon what Democrat ends up running the country, we might very well also see a perilous continuation of the erosion of our civil rights as part of the "solution."
I can think of a couple right off the top of my head, Democrats who have worrisome records when it comes to the balance between individual rights and their visions of collective security and/or responsibility.
(One of them seems to pander to the Right at way too many unnecessary opportunities. Another has a troubling record of showing off concern for society's children by dragging rather talentless musicians before Congress to testify about their evil influence.)
I've ranted enough for the time being. This is the prelude to major rants coming in posts I'll be publishing as time goes on, but I wanted you and everyone else who reads the comments here to have a preview of where my some of my concerns are.
The Dark Wraith goes out to brew some coffee, which—what with its high caffeine content and all—will surely calm his nerves.
Good Afternoon Dark Wraith:
I disrupted a global warming thread over at Shake's place a while back by stating pretty much the same thing. That the growing gap between rich and poor between extremely rich and just about everybody else was something that was almost never a good idea for civilization. I even cited our old friend Wat Tyler as an example of what happens when people realize that the only choice they have is to starve on their knees or die on their feet fighting. The rebirth of the Fenians in Ireland was a direct consequence of the potato famine. People were starving to death on the side of the road after mass evictions. A little known bit of information about that period is that the whole time of the famine, Ireland was exporting grain, mutton, and beef to feed the British war machine. There is a conservative cynicism that I find very distressing. These are the guys that point to a failure like the government response to Katrina and say "See? That's what we've been telling you. Not only is government not able to do the job, you just can't help those people."
aside to the Wraith:
They were forced to drag rather talentless musicians before congress because the talented, like Frank Zappa, refused to follow the charts and improvised riff that lost the Congressional Band.
THIS IS FOR THE EDIFICATION AND ENJOYMENT OF ALL THE ACADEMICS WHO PERUSE THIS BLOG (as well as other interested parties)....... (Hat tip, Sully.)
:-)
- oddjob
A reserve jarhead "gets it", and in the process we have a link to share with those around us who need to read what a Marine has to say.
- oddjob
There will be no change and no respite.
The Republicans have a lock down on power through means ranging from the drude (Diebold) to the subtle (an oppositional party dominated by pseudo-Republicans).
The future of the US will look like the last 8 years.
Good evening, Moody Blue.
That was a nearly perfect translation of John of Trevisa's rant. He wasn't referring only to Scotsmen, by the way: the rustic language of the Northumbrians, themselves was an annoyance to him. Even by that time, the northern English still had that more gutteral sound (of Norse provenance), which would utlimately be influential on Early-Modern English. John would have been delighted, of course, that more than two centuries later, some scholarly English folks would imagine his form of English as somehow "authoritative," so much so that the translators of the King James Version of the Holy Bible believed that, by putting it in that old, passé form of English, they would be conveying to people some indisputably old, worthy, and proper way to speak the Word of God.
Even in their own time, those translators got hit with some criticism along the lines of, "But, no one talks that way anymore." A little more biting would have been the point that, "Even when our ancestors did talk that way, they didn't talk quite the way you think they did!"
But to this very day, millions and millions of people think that, in order to speak to or about the God of the Christians, one must say "Thou art" instead of "You are" and "He speaketh" instead "He says."
I suppose it's a good thing the translations did come along, though; otherwise, we'd have millions and millions of people stumbling over Latin, or—more to the genuine articles—Classical Greek, Aramaic, and Hebrew in their attempts to be authentic.
That would be ugly. Imagine Jerry Falwell bloviating in Classical Greek or Pat Robertson quoting Jesus in Aramaic.
Yeesh.
The Dark Wraith would probably hang around just to see Robertson trying to sell those stupid muscle-building food supplements of his while doing a gutteral ח.
[Which letter, by the way, is called "chet" or "het" and is pronounced sort of like you're opening the back of your mouth hollow and then trying to blow out a strand of hair caught in your throat.]
Ireland was exporting grain, mutton, and beef to feed the British war machine.
When confronted with this, Britain, and many in the US, claimed that economic chaos would ensue, were they to interrupt trade routes to feed those "renters". The same excuse they had been using for decades before the famine.
Elf, porky pig...hahahahaha!
hello from the nw on this gloomy monday morn.
any opinions on the possibility of war with iran before the november elections?
I'm afraid I'm not as optimistic as you are, Dark Wraith. Progressives will still be dragged through the mud, and even more so if the Dems get any power. It will be giant witch hunt a la the Clinton years. Unless the Dems do anything about regulating the media and corporations, I remain pessimistic. Impeaching the Chimp will just bring on the ire of the MSM. Ugly ugly ugly.
America needs to lose some its world standing and power; for the sake of American's and everyone else.
It is possible that you all are much deeper and had more perspective than me in 2003 (I am young), but I was gung-ho for the invasion of Iraq. I now understand that it was a mistake and I understand why it was a mistake. It was the ultimate privilege; we felt threatened, so we got to take over a whole country with the hope of eradicating that feeling. We’re fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here. Just ignore the fact that to an Iraqi it reads ‘they are fighting them over here, so they don’t have to fight them over there.” To an Irishman it reads, “We’re taking your food away so that our civilization can go on as normal.” There are some people who can be privileged and still act compassionately. Our president isn’t one of those people, and many American’s like me weren’t either. I know now. The price of the lesson was the loose of the privilege. We no longer have the influence that we used to have. That is a good thing. Our morality is not deserving of moral superiority. There are many nations out there with a stable economy, the-rule-of-law, civil liberties, brave soldiers, and the rest. Who made us captain of the planet? If you really want to know: We are economically powerful because we killed a lot of Indians who were dancing on our resources (Henry Ford didn’t do anything but show what cheap steel and oil can accomplish). And the man who put us over the top in world affairs was…ta dah!…HITLER (anybody who thinks it was Roosevelt or even Patton is confusing cause and effect). Our rise to power doesn’t give me a warm fuzzy. American’s are caring people, but we aren’t the only ones, and we do not deserve exalted status, and we no longer have it.
Before the war, I would have said, “Iraqis speak so strangely. It must be because the Middle East is still in the dark ages and they ride camels and wipe their butt with their hand.” Now I think that they spoke strangely simply because I didn’t need to understand them.
My grammar blows...
or is it, "my grammar blow's?"
I also apologize if I loose the big race..my steering was lose.
Good Morning Oh Dark One,
I too have felt the chill of the wind that precedes the coming hard times.
And I just made a comment to a friend that when the Democratic party gains the majority they will be in the horrible position of having to clean up after the feckless Republicans once again. I wonder if they'll be able to stay in power long enough to even start the job?
Joey,
I don't know about deeper, but older, most probably. I was behind going after Bin Laden and the Taliban, but when the invasion of Iraq was first floated, I had a vague, uneasy feeling that told me this was a badddd idea, long before any facts came out to contradict the lies being spread to drum up support. It was the very first military action by the US in my lifetime that I had this sixth sense warning of.(I was rather young during 'nam, and my stand there was that we needed to go in and just win the sucker, quit playing around. I still figure that once we got in, we could have won it but politics and cold feet left us with an unwinnable situation-just like Iraq in that aspect). As a youngster, feel no guilt for not having refined your bullshit detector back then. I'm sure after living in these times you have a good start on an excellent one.