Now that I (hopefully) have your attention…
Moral bankruptcy precedes the economic kind more often than not.
The United States is headed towards the latter destination, and has already pretty much arrrived at the former.
Intrepid Liberal Journal…a Boo blogger…wrote a fine diary here today named The Sun Tzu Scorecard where (s)he sketched out the wisdom of the classic “Art of War” by Sun Tzu and compared it to the failures of the United States in its response to 9/11.
I want to expand upon that idea somewhat.
The martial arts traditions of China and Japan are based on a certain kind of morality. (In their ideal form, of course.) They are largely based on the concept that if the fighter…or leaders or nation…reaches a state of relative enlightenment, (on a “moral” plane), then the battle will be won.
This contrasts with the more Machiavellian, realpolitik idea that war is simply about the numbers, the tactics and the goal.
The ends justify the means, where the “ends” are simply about winning.
We have largely surrendered our own moral goals as a nation over the past 60+ years or so, and we are now about to reap the whirlwind of that moral bankruptcy.
Read on for more, if you so desire.
After effectively illustrating some of the ways that our leadership has failed the “moral influence” part of Sun Tzu’s treatise, Intrepid wrote:
“There is no greater test of national will than war. To be prosecuted successfully requires wise, competent, and credible leadership.”
It does not need that kind of leadership, Intrepid.
It needs that kind of population.
It needs national will.
National morality.
National intelligence.
We are almost ALL all fault, here.
The United States appears to have shot its load regarding these things during W.W. II. It has not won a military war since then, nor has it won an economic one since the day that JFK was shot. Not that JFK was any paragon of virtue…although I do believe that he was trying to do the right thing, as was his brother…but when we accepted the assassination story, eyes wide shut, we surrendered our integrity as a nation to a cadre of murderers in the name of “peace and prosperity”. And from then on, the Permanent Governnment…the secret government…has essentially ruled this country.
Badly.
VERY badly.
We do not need a new government. Democrats instead of Republicans. They are two sides of the same tarnished coin.
We need instead a cultural, societal and moral reawakening. And until that happens…IF it happens…we are doomed to continue down the long winding road to defeat and dissolution.
“The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”-MLK Jr.
We have forgotten this idea…as a people…and we are now paying the price for being on the wrong side of that arc.
So it goes.
No more “United States” within 20 years at the current rate. Northeast…possibly including some of the Great Lakes cities…Southeast, Midwest, South, Southwest and West Coast. Maybe even North West Coast and South West Coast. Separate alliances with Asia, Europe, Canada and South/Central/Caribbean America.
Bet on it.
We have gotten too big, too successful, and hubris is bringing us down, down, down.
This ain’t working.
There are still elements in this society…you can see and hear them represented by such people as Howard Dean, Russ Feingold, Barbara Mikulski and John Conyers, just to name a few…who are working from a MORAL basis. But they do not have enough support among the population, nor will they ACQUIRE enough support as long as the mass media (emphasis on the word mass here) continues to be largely controlled by the corporate world.
Corporations HAVE no morality. Or rather, their “moral” system is different from those of historically successful human cultures. What is morality, really? It is the collected wisdom of millions of years of the successes and failures of various human societies.
It’s what works. Nothing more.
And what works for corporations…a relative newcomer to the morality game…is much simpler.
Quarterly profits.
No profits for a quite short period of time, and corporations do what they must to survive.
WHATEVER they must. That is their morality, and as can be plainly seen once we open our eyes (even for a quick peek), that is the “morality” of those who have been subsumed by the corporate culture as well.
On EITHER side of the political aisle.
This will eventually lead to a failure of the larger system in which those corporations exist…a GLOBAL failure if they succeed in becoming the multi-national state that is the logical extension of their continuing progress towards power…because the long-term morality that has arisen through the repeated successes and failures of billions and billions of individuals (the morality of sacrifice, of compromise for the greater good) simply does not compute within the same machine as does the short-term, bottom line “morality” of the corporate entities.
A lot of people have gotten quite angry at me here because I have repeatedly suggested that the Democratic Party is no longer a viable alternative to the Republican Party in this crisis. But they are BOTH controlled by the same corporate world, and they both operate under the same strictures, using the same tools.
Framing.
Rigged conventions.
PR-driven media bullshit.
Soundbites.
Well…so it goes.
And so it falls unless a miracle occurs.
(They do, y’know. Sometimes…)
We shall see.
Peace.
It’s what’s for supper.
AG
Power concedes nothing without a demand; it never has and it never will.-Frederick Douglass
