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Constitution

October 04, 2008

I'm queasy about doing this but I'm going to do it anyway: quote someone else's words without their knowledge or permission. They come from a comment posted to Joe Bageant's essay "The Really Hard-to-Swallow Truth About the Bailout," which was posted to AlterNet yesterday. Most who post comments on AlterNet do so under pen names. There's no way to contact them privately to ask permission, and after a day or two most participants in a thread are no longer monitoring it. So here goes. The poster's pen name is EinMD.

The argument I got into with the bartender last night illustrates the fact that there are still some morons out there who believe that no matter what Bush did to wipe his ass on the constitution and the law he was justified because 9/11 changed everything. We'll impeach for lying about a blowjob but we won't impeach for felony violations of the Law because modern Americans are too damned cowardly to stand up for something real. All they want is the illusion that their government has their best interests at heart even when all evidence points to the contrary. Our Founders did not create this nation by sitting around on their laurels while King George was off torturing people for kicks. They stood up and unequivocally said: "No more". . . .

What disgusts me about this attitude is that we are not China. We are not Europe. We are not Russia. We do not have thousands of years of shared history and tradition to bind us together. Our country was formed of ideals and codified in two documents and if those documents have no meaning, then we are no longer a country we're just a bunch of barbarians that have not yet gotten around to killing each other over scraps of garbage.

This is 100% right, and it totally nails the reason that GWB should go down in history as the absolute worst U.S. president ever. Worse than Harding. Worse than Grant. Ronald Reagan can fight it out with Grant and Harding for second-worst honors.

I wonder a lot about what does hold this country together: what are the experiences and cultural references that most -- a significant majority -- of us have in common? Filing an income tax return on or about April 15 is one. Voting in presidential elections is another. This is a big reason that declining voter registration and voter participation is so significant. It's not that people "aren't doing their civic duty"; it's that so many USians don't consider voting important enough to go out of their way for, which is to say that we (I'm registered to vote now, but I've lived quite a few years of my adult life unregistered) aren't even paying lip service to those two documents -- the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution -- that are the underpinnings of the United States of America. We've given up doing our bit to keep those documents alive. I'm not saying, mind you, that voting is the only way to do this. Voting is like a sacrament: "an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace," as the Episcopal teachings of my youth had it. Change "an inward and spiritual grace" to something like "an inward and political commitment" -- something that gets across the idea that democracy (like the 12-step program) only works if we work it.

Here Dylan's "Masters of War" starts playing on my personal soundtrack. In the song it's the munitions makers who've "thrown the worst fear that can ever be hurled / fear to bring children into the world." Well, I've long had my doubts about that part: war, even close-by and ugly war, doesn't seem to stop people from having babies, and I'm not sure that's the "worst fear that can ever be hurled" either. But the lines "You play with my world / like it's your little toy" conjure the "masters of finance" -- not just the procreators, aiders, and abetters of the current debacle, but everyone who uses economic power to manipulate the political process for their short-term, short-sighted benefit.

Oh yeah, and everyone who uses their intellectual power to justify and increase the power of these people.

I believe that many, many of us sense the void that's being created by the loosening of the "ties that bind" -- the beliefs and commitments that make the U.S. of A. a viable nation. We articulate it in different ways, and we sure have different ideas about what's causing it and (consequently) how to fix it. It's so easy to zero in on people who don't look like us, or believe like us. But the truth is that it doesn't matter what people look like, or where they came from, or what they believe -- as long as they believe in the principles embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.

If you understand how checks and balances work, and why they're important, it's not hard to grasp why unregulated capitalism is a bad idea. The legislative, executive, and judiciary branches of government can check and balance each other; the states and the feds can check and balance each other; the citizenry can ride herd on their elected officials and check and balance them as necessary -- but if they're all dancing on strings pulled by Big Money, who's really running the show?

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