A day or so ago, I was discussing, in an altogether too haphazard manner,
the Bush Administration’s subversion of the Fourth Amendment, and I brought up
loyalty. Loyalty, in our form of government, flows in one direction, and that’s
towards the people. The sitting government, its officials and its policies owe
us loyalty. The other way around is something quite unlike what our nation’s
constitution stipulates. Anyone who claims otherwise, is a fool or an authoritarian
Bush cultist. I repeat myself.
Since it’s 3:43 AM on Sunday morning, and I may have a beer or ten in my system,
I’m going to indulge myself just a little here and quote something I think is
really special, even if it’s a bit old. Here’s what The
Editors (who I want to be when I grow up) had to say about loyalty.
The loyalty “owed” a President, or any government official, or any policy of
the same, by a private citizen, is this much loyalty: zero.
Let me say that again: the loyalty I, or you, or anyone “owes” to someone in
the government, or to some course of action they favor, is none whatsoever.
To think otherwise, Teddy Roosevelt might comment, is “unpatriotic and servile”.
Now, this is not to say you can’t give your loyalty to the President
or his policies – it’s a free country, and you can do any non-treasonous thing
you want with your loyalty – but that’s your decision, and nobody has to live
with it but you (and all the people who suffer from the consequences of your
stupid choice of loyalties, of course.) Personally, I think the President is
a horrible fucking stupid cunt and his policies are for shit. Your results may
vary. But if someone tells me that I “owe” it to the President or his crap policy
to act like I don’t think that, well, that person can get in the big long line
with WPE and the rest of folks who really desperately need to go fuck themselves.But Democracy gets even worse. The President and the President’s policies owe
me loyalty. The President and his policies are supposed to be working for
the good of the country and her people. That’s how the loyalty flows. The President
is required to act for my (ok, “our”) benefit; if he does not, the betrayal
is his, and the sorts of things which you’d like to call “disloyalty” become
duty. Does Gore’s speaking out against torture “undermine” the country? That’s
a tricky position to hold if you oppose torture. Does it “undermine” the policy?
I wish. No, it does this: it reminds the world that however fucked up our government
is, it isn’t us, it doesn’t speak for us, and it can never, ever make
us quiet down. And I do say God Bless America.
If I knew what was good for me, I’d print that out and paste it to my refrigerator
door so I could be see it each morning before I leave for the cubicle farm. Clean up the language a little, and those two paragraphs really belong in every high school civics text book published from here till forever. Too many people, who think they know better, just don’t get it.
We live in an extraordinary era. An era where a woefully unpopular president
commands extraordinary power. He debases our nation, with his policies, his
conduct and his lies. To make matters even worse, he is completely unhindered
by the legislative branch, which has been rendered docile by effective fear
mongering and rigid party dicipline. to say the least, this is unsustainable. The failures of
this administration either stand as a lesson about how not to govern, or our
country, as we understand it, dies. Reminding ourselves and our cohorts, that
the extraordinary idea, that is the United States of America, exists only by
our consent and only for our benefit, is worth doing every now and again.
Blah Blah Blah….
So, how do you really feel about “our” president?
Of course you are right and the republic is in a serious coma. I wish I knew what it would take to rouse the populace to do what is required, I suspect the only thing that will get them there is an economic collapse.
Wait a minute!
Didn’t we send all those middle-aged white guys to Congress so that we wouldn’t have to worry about anything? Most of them are rich so God must love them. They are going to take care of me. They will protect my pension. They will provide care for my sick mother and grandchild. They will allow me to retreat from ideas that make me uncomfortable. Best of all they will keep me safe. They know how scary the world is and they are strong and mighty and will protect me! And you are suggesting I owe them no loyalty?! Are you suggesting that I have to accept some responsibility?!
I need an alka-seltzer.
Seriously, I woke up this morning feeling that ultimately Bush is not the problem, that the wimps in Congress are not the problem. We, the people, have to accept responsibility for what is going on in our name.
My loyalty is to the ideas of the Founding Fathers, not to the ideas of Alberto Gonzales:
My loyalty used to be oriented similarly, before I decided that I shouldn’t gloss over the fact that the Founding Fathers didn’t include folks like women and blacks in their idea of Constitutional rights. Those exclusions formed a new basis for old injustices and inequalities that are tragically still very powerful in modern society, and the Fathers bear some responsibility for that. Ultimately I decided that having loyalty to their ideas was sort-of quaint and unjust, and not really effective for my own value system since no matter how much I might like a person’s other ideas, I just can’t make exceptions for things like considering other human beings to be property.
So after a lot of careful thought about it, now my loyalty is to the idea of freedom itself rather than to someone else’s limited ideas about freedom; my loyalty is tied to concepts like equality (and others) very directly, no middleman involved. My loyalty is not to my government or to its history, but I am dedicated and loyal to the notion that every citizen having a voice in their govt is a better system than those in which citizens don’t have a voice. This arrangement of loyalty has the added benefit of allowing me a vast array of allegiances without betraying my loyalties.
I don’t blame the founding fathers for failing to give the franchise to women and blacks. What they did was truly revolutionary at the time. The price for getting the constitution ratified (especially the part that allowed for two Senators from every state) was to allow the South to pad their census statistics by adding slaves to the count. This gave them more representation in the House.
They either cut that deal, or we would have been stuck with the Articles of Confederation, which clearly were not sufficient to hold the country together. The fact that they didn’t count a slave as equal to a whole human being is just part of the bargaining that took place to pass the constitution.
Given that we only banned Jim Crow laws forty years ago, I have a hard time getting indignant with the Founding Fathers for their odious construction.
The ideals laid out in the Declaration and Constitution ultimately proved deadly to the institution of slavery and led directly to women getting the vote.
My loyalty is to the ideals they laid out of limited government, seperation of powers, secular government, and an ever windening sphere of freedom and opportunity.
The fact that the Republic did not grant these things from its inception is made up for by the fact that the principles of the Revolution held the seeds for them to blossom in the future.
But, there are always reactionary forces that are hostile to liberty. Today we are in a crisis.
Yeah, I had suspected this would be where you and me would have to split the sheets in terms of political theory.
In my view, there’s never an acceptable excuse to turn entire classes of people into property for use by the State and the citizens it deems non-property, and it really doesn’t matter how many white guys are inconvenienced by that. It can’t be justified. It can’t be rationalized. It was not only wrong, it was actually also a bad move tactically, since 20-20 hindsight affords us clear proof that societies with greater social equality have massive advantages over societies with less, and that ideas about social equality can be radically changed in a single generation.
I’m not “indignant” with the FFs, btw; I just think they weren’t right about everything and that they had a few really fucked up ideas. I don’t criminalize them, but I don’t idolize them either. I respect some of what they did and think it should be emulated; I reject other things they did and think we should pay better attention such that we don’t make what amount to the same damn mistakes all over again. Panicking because we’re in a crisis just leads to more bad choices.
You & I do share ideals to an extent, but it does seem to me that you often misread where I’m coming from, and I’m not sure why. I wonder if you have some inaccurate ideas about “what feminists think” or “how feminists are” that cause you to read what I’m saying to you through a lens that doesn’t really apply to me? (I realize that you can’t answer this question since if the answer is “yes” you wouldn’t know it, so I don’t expect you to answer it, it’s just a muse.)
I doubt I am misreading you because of some preconception I have. I know you don’t consider yourself a Democrat, but that is the only preconception I have.
In this case, I am not disagreeing with you, but just stating my point of view.
People talk about the three-fifths compromise as if it were intended to diminish blacks and call them less than fully human.
But that was not the intent at all. No one seriously considered giving slaves the vote, but they were granted representation in a sense. At least in broad terms, the interests of the states in which they resided were given extra representation. That was a concession to appease opposition tothe two senator rule. Little states like Delaware and Rhode Island were felt to have too much power in the Senate.
In other words, the northern founding fathers, and even some of slave holders like Jefferson, may have wanted to abolish slavery, but they had no way of doing that while forging a nation out of rival states.
Far more important, and feasible, was their accomplishment of outlawing the religious test, so that Virginia and Massachusetts and Pennsylvania could join in a united government, despite their differing dominant sects.
They gave us the first fruits of liberty and a strong enough system to survive civil war, and over two hundred years of strife.
I am eternally grateful.
Talking about blind party motivation and what effect bad decisions have on election excitement/GOTV results, I feel further compelled to write about the mistakes going on in PA which may well alienate enough of the socially liberal base so that the critical GOTV effort will not allow the Dems to prevail in the Senate race against Santorum.
PA is a state in which the larger Dems party can win only with a great GOTV motivation because the smaller conservative Repub party has better GOTV dicipline usually. When the subject of social fairness is front and center and a good GOTV effort is made, Dems win, as they did in the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004. Now in this critical effort to unseat social conservative Santorum, the state Dem party instead of stressing the social conservativeness of Santorum, endorses an extreme (for a dem) social conservative (Casey) to the horror of much of the Dem base.
How will this, IMO, horrible choice effect the election? Well we cheer around these blogs about how great the dems chances are in every recent election only to see ourselves go down to defeat because we read the tea leaves wrong. Is that going to happen in PA’s senate race now, and if you could know it was, could things be changed in time to prevent such? Personally, I have a extremely strong, logical tea-leave reading feeling that the drain in excitement if Casey wins the primary will so hinder the GOTV effort in November that Conservative Santorum will win. If you are a social conservative, why vote for Casey?? If you are a social liberal, why vote at all?
Sorry, but if this is a logical warning to anyone in power, so be it!