Not just the post-9/11 Americans who get spooked everytime Bush somberly warns about them “terr’rists.” You and me too: We’re habituated now to mocking Bush, Cheney, Rummy, Condi et al, and decrying the ignorant Americans who just don’t know, so ignorant are they. We howl, we snarl, we mock, we scoff. And not just against the Bush administration and its patsies. As if that weren’t enough, we howl, snarl, mock, and scoff at each other.
“Conceit, arrogance, and egotism are the essentials of patriotism. […] Patriotism assumes that our globe is divided into little spots, each one surrounded by an iron gate. Those who have had the fortune of being born on some particular spot, consider themselves better, nobler, grander, more intelligent than the living beings inhabiting any other spot. It is, therefore, the duty of everyone living on that chosen spot to fight, kill, and die in the attempt to impose his superiority upon all the others.” – Emma Goldman, Patriotism: a menace to liberty
“Conceit, arrogance, and egotism”: That also describes my attitude last night as I mocked the disgusting rhetoric of Mary Matalin and Ari Fleischer on the Sunday talk shows.
But the problem with my mocking is that it only satisfies you habitués here, who of course will agree with me. (Let me dare reveal that it was a safe story to write; nobody’ll get angry with me here for mashing Mary and Ari. Now, if I’d posted that at Free Republic, well. …)
However, my mockery does not go towards piercing the heavy veil of rapturous fear-induced stupor in which most Americans pass each day as they exhalt patriotism and never doubt that the evildoers are out to get us. They won’t be receptive to my tone, my words, my “attitude.”
So how do we reach them? How do we pierce their veil? … continued below ….
How do we level the playing field and — instead of feeling superior to them because we’re the “real patriots” who see the truth about what this country is doing to the world — reach out to these other Americans? For example, how do we put essential, serious works such as BBC’s documentary series, The Power of Nightmares, into every American home? If every American saw that documentary, they’d realize they’d been duped. (And those of you who have seen this extraordinary video know that the narrators and the producers never once mock those who don’t know the history of the Neocons and how Neocons use fear to drug the masses. No, there’s no sense of superiority; they’re simply educating whoever watches their documentary.)
And how do we (and throughout, I include myself) — how do we, instead of spending vast amount of energy on insider squabbles, that mean nothing except to a few, choose to look outward and try to transform?
How do we, instead of acting like a dysfunctional family that knows too many of each other’s past acts and mistakes – and instead of grinding each other to dust in long disputes that to any outsider would appear wholly strange and definitely make them feel shocked, and leave this site, never to return (and, most assuredly, those who witness those long fighting sessions will never to return to BT, nor would any reasonable person expect them to be attracted to such anger) – what if, instead, we concentrate all of our mighty energy on making our world better?
Emma’s words: “Conceit, arrogance, and egotism are the essentials of patriotism.’ Well, patriotism does not only refer to allegiance to the United States (or any other country). It also can refer to allegiance to one’s own instilled view of the world. Your view of the world, my view of the world, others’ views of the world: The one thing that unites every one of us is that we each think OUR view of the world is superior to the other.
We salute the flag waving in the heady wind above our own mouths.
One of the dangers of patriotism, as you all know and Emma Goldman most certainly knew, is that it serves to SEPARATE us from each other, and from all others. We each become sovereign powers — with an emphasis on the word power — desirous of holding tensely, fiercely, and unyieldingly to what WE think, and to hell with the rest.
As you all also know, we have serious work to do. Let’s start with the NSA spy scandal. It’s but one issue. However, there’s some powerful prose that’s being written about it that can motivate us — and perhaps join us, as one, putting aside for a while our own complaints about each other and everything else to which we object.
Please bear with the long-ish quotes. We’ll get to the point soon enough.
With relentless urgency, the American people are being habituated to the prospect of several interrelated upheavals — new war, new terror attacks — and the predetermined result of these events: the final, open establishment of presidential tyranny, a militarized “commander state” where executive power is beyond the law, and endless war endlessly prolongs the “emergency measures” of the authoritarian regime.
Making a virtue of necessity, the Bush administration has used the exposure of its illegal wiretap scheme to ratchet up the level of terrorist scaremongering, accelerate its drive toward a military attack on Iran and publicly proclaim its long-held covert doctrine of executive dictatorship. Of course, “commander rule” is already the de facto state of the union, as Attorney General Alberto Gonzales made clear to the Senate last week, when he refused to deny the notion that the president can contravene any law he chooses under his authority as commander-in-chief. And we have often detailed here the tyrannical powers that President George W. Bush has already bestowed upon himself without objection from the U.S. political establishment, including the power to jail anyone without charges, hold them indefinitely and have them tortured — or simply murder them in an “extrajudicial killing.” The scope of Bush’s claimed powers — arbitrary sway over the life and liberty of every person on earth — far surpasses that of the most megalomaniacal Roman emperor or totalitarian dictator.
But a militarist state must have war: to justify its draconian rule (and those $550 billion “defense” budgets), to find new fields for dominion and swag, and to seal with blood its illegitimate compact with the people, seeking to make them complicit in its crimes, which are committed in their name, for their “security.” We see the latter clearly with the transgression in Iraq, where even mainstream opponents of the illegal war can be heard to cry: “Oh, it’s all so dreadful, but we’ve gone too far to turn back now, sacrificed too many lives; we’ve got to see it through.” This is, of course, just a pale echo of militarists’ own position, that dazed and hollow moral nullity induced by greed and murder, best expressed by the ancient Scottish “Commander-in-Chief,” Macbeth: “I am in blood stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more, returning were as tedious as go o’er.”
Fortunately for the militarists, Bush has promised war in abundance. … Chris Floyd, the Moscow Times and St. Petersburg Times columnist at his blog Empire Burlesque
Is there anyone who can more eloquently spell out the crisis than Chris Floyd? But, as we know, the average American will never see Floyd’s words. After all, he’s not even published in a U.S. newspaper. He gets few visitors to his blog, a fact he lamented last year until several of us let him know how much his blog means to us, and how badly we wanted him to keep going.
Those of you still with me, please now read this from Glenn Greenwald today:
… Republicans [claim they] want this scandal to last as long as possible because it will only benefit Republicans politically and damage Democrats by highlighting their vulnerabilities.
While spouting that bravado, the Administration’s actions reveal that they fear this scandal and want more than anything for it to disappear. At every turn, they have tried to prevent a meaningful investigation … […]
But the NSA scandal continues to dominate the news. Every day brings more conflicts, more disputes, more internecine fighting among Republicans. Indeed, Republicans are all fighting with each other on virtually every aspect of this scandal – when have we ever seen that? […]
Over the weekend, both Specter and even Pat Roberts [GOP majority chair, Senate Select Intel committee] made clear that they would not accept the only solution which the White House will even consider — namely, the absurdly deferential DeWine proposal to exempt the NSA program from the requirements of FISA. Now, Linsdey Graham, too, has made unequivocally clear that he will insist upon judicial oversight for any future eavesdropping, something the White House cannot and will not ever agree to: […]
[Sen. Pat] Roberts, by preventing an up-or-down vote, succeeded in blocking the hearings only temporarily … Read all of “The dying scandal that keeps growing,” Feb. 20, 2006
Now, imagine this: We find a way — I don’t know how! It’s just an idea right now! Ideas never have to begin by being practical!
(1) We get the highly instructive, and easy-to-follow BBC documentary, “The Power of Nighmares,” aired on major television channels. (Also, I have a bootleg copy.) We get it hosted in movie theatres and on college campuses everywhere. (Some people have done this already; it was recently shown here in my little town at the public library to a packed crowd, and JPol told me he saw it at a community DFA meeting last fall, near Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
(2) We rescuscitate the now-dormant Patriot Act/ACLU groups that sprouted up in communities all over this nation during late 2001 and 2002. We meet, we decide on actions — hopsfully with a national backing — such as passing resolutions, again, that oppose the about-to-be-reenacted Patriot Act and NSA domestic spying. We get stories in all the local newspapers, on local radio and television stations.
(3) We keep doing what we’re so good at: We write. We send LTEs. We talk with our friends and relatives. We e-mail each other. We expend our precious time and energy on our blogs towards these goals. Just like we did for the Twelve Days of Alito (a brilliant endeavor if ever there was one).
Status quo: We can continue to attack each other. I can continue to censor myself by posting only the safe stories that I know you’ll love — like that Matalin story — because they are based on a mockery of Bush et al.
Consuming ourselves with family fights and accusations, and alienation through argument from the other, has a strikingly similar effect to what Professor Alfred McCoy, an expert on the CIA’s development of torture techniques, says to Amy Goodman about “the most famous of photographs from Abu Ghraib, of the Iraqi standing on the box, arms extended with a hood over his head and the fake electrical wires from his arms.” McCoy says “In that photograph you can see the entire 50-year history of C.I.A. torture. It’s very simple”:
He’s hooded for sensory disorientation, and his arms are extended for self-inflicted pain. And those are the two very simple fundamental C.I.A. techniques, developed at enormous cost.
By growing narrower and more inward through alienating arguments, we become “disoriented.” By disassociating from each other, and accusing each other, and bringing up painful issues and past mistakes, we indulge — yes, indulge — in “self-inflicted pain.”
And this all makes me very sad and occasionally ashamed. Especially when I have been a participant in group- and self-destructive attacks. What if I instead honed all of my energy to imagining — and then accomplishing — great ways to share we we’ve learned about the NSA story to more and more Americans?
What if we all did that?
Can we begin?
My caring, highly tuned-in family physician and I discussed it last week. I cried so many tears and screamed in pain, telling him how horribly I’d felt about the fall-out from my cartoon story. And I told him that I’m writing like shit. And I told him that ALL I want is for my mind to calm down — just calm down a bit — so I can write well. (And, by the way, the reasons for that, some rather horrific family events that go far beyond my mom’s death and brother’s illness, are things I’d never share here; only BooMan, my daughter, and my doctor plus a couple other people — none of whom, I’m sure, would ever breathe a word — know simply because right now I don’t feel safe reliving the pain publicly.)
And my doctor listened, laughing because I kept saying ‘Fuck” and when I admitted to him that I know I’m hypersensitive.
Then I said to him that it’s okay to type fuck on blogs. His eyes opened a bit. He said nothing. I still think it’s okay to type fuck on a blog, but — you know — he’s a cool guy. He probably says fuck himself. He’s wildly LIBERAL, and he’s heartsick especially about environmental degradation and global warming. He is an activist for saving our national parks.
Just so you know, every time I see him, my doc and I “blow” half of my patient visit time talking politics because it interests us a hell of a lot more than my various physical maladies.
But, what if he came to this blog for the first time (I don’t think he’s ever been here), and he saw a story by me in which I typed fuck in every sentence? What if he read this writing from last night: “This Mary Madgalan is no holy virgin mama when it comes to selling GOP/Neocon bullshit spin …”?
Would he read it? Oh sure. But would he print it out and mail it to his liberal mom in the Midwest? I doubt it. Would he forward it to his sibling who works in Washington, D.C. in a major government agency? No.
So am I short-circuiting a potential audience by how I write and talk? Am I more likely — more slowly, for sure, because “respectful speech” won’t ignite the habitués who already agree with me mostly — to gain a larger audience, over a longer period of time, that may spread the word?
Here’s a start: As I’m typing this, I’m listening to Amy Goodman’s daily hour-long news program, Democracy Now!. I usually watch or listen every day.
Darndest thing. I can’t recall ever hearing Amy swear. Or even bash or condemn a single Bush official. And, most certainly, she NEVER yells at, or mocks, a guest. Ever. She is unfailingly polite and cerebral.
She does it all by presenting fact after fact, story after story, guest after guest, and she always directs the conversations to a respectful atmosphere for discourse. If people interrupt each other, she enforces civility. She only allows rational, informative, equal conversation. And she creates a show in which the facts and the stories are so devastating that they can stand on their own without screaming, without yelling, without obscenities, without overt condemnation of other guests.
She’s an example.
Maybe I can become an example.
But it’ll be damn near impossible not to type “that chickenshit chickenhawk Cheney.” I’ll work on it.
Let’s see. How’s this instead?
“Vice President Cheney regaled the Wyoming legislature with stories of his days as a legislative intern, college student, and young husband during a historic period when tens of thousands of other young men who could not obtain deferments were sent to Vietnam. The young Mr. Cheney was fortunate to obtain five deferments and, when those had expired, found his young wife Lynne, an English teacher, pregnant with their first child. Her pregnancy forestalled Mr. Cheney’s having to enter the Army.”
Better?
And, as my friend Real History Lisa just wrote in an e-mail about her gratification that Sen. Dianne Feinstein, many of whose votes she’s not liked and who regularly makes her gnash her teeth, had come around on Alito, voting against cloture and Alito. Real History Lisa then wrote this:
I think too often activists want to find the perfect leader, instead
of BEING the perfect constituent…!