The Beast Slouches; Perhaps Farts – and Gets Ready To Feed….
That groaning shriek you just heard?
It’s the Ship of State, and it’s in a bad way. See, we’re about to (re)inaugurate a war
criminal; a man who by his own admission loves War by Proxy, and has a standing
Monday-morning meeting during which he helps approve targets for the day.
The little-boys-playing-grownup in their Air Force uniforms
who run the joysticks refer to the victims – the collateral damage of the
Empire’s affinity with both toys and intervention – as ‘bugsplats’. What’s not immediately understood (at least,
not by Joe and Josephine Sixpack American) is that every time Obama’s flyboys
kill another child, his/her relatives are at war with America. Permanently.
This, by the way, has Sweet Fuck All to do with Al-Qaeda,
the late Mr. BinLaden, or Islamic fundamentalism. It has to do with killing someone’s child
half a world away. Period.
We’re getting ready to (re)inaugurate a Constitutional
scholar – declared so by the academic standards of our time – who did more to
dismantle the Constitution than his much-maligned predecessor. (No – I’m not justifying the misrule of Bush
the Second. Get that through your head
right now.) He signed the National
Defense Authorization Act into law last year, complete with that nagging
Section 1021, which (in case you’ve been living under the proverbial rock)
allows the government to detain, without trial, permanently, any American
citizen deemed an ‘enemy combatant’ by either Congress, the Justice Department,
or the President, hisself.
We’re getting ready to (re)inaugurate a man who, with the
stroke of a pen, could have closed that damnable Gulag at Gitmo – but instead
reauthorized the Patriot Act, the Military Commissions Act, and turned a blind
eye to CILA (the Civilian Inmate Labor Act).
We’re getting ready to (re)inaugurate the guy who, rather
than give pause to the whole indefinite-detention thing, ordered his henchman
and Justice Department head, Eric Holder, to aggressively defend it against a
lawsuit brought by several American journalists. (I’ll go out on a small limb here – because
it doesn’t take much to connect these dots – but I’ll bet that the only reason
Obama, Holder, et. al. are defending NDAA’s Sec. 1021 so vigorously is that it’s
likely already in use somewhere – we just don’t know it.)
All, dear readers, in the name of National Security.
As to those of us who Stayed Awake in Class, all we have to
do is connect the dots – the MCA grants the authority to create the Gulags; we’ve
conveniently created at least one on leased-land, not subject to Constitutional
law or domestic legal protection; NDAA’s Section 1021 allows any of us to be
declared ‘enemy combatants’ and incarcerated forever – and, if they do get
around to a trial, the Civilian Inmate Labor Act allows them to turn us over to
the military for use as they see fit.
The Patriot Act and recent ‘authorizations’ allow the
government to use drones on American soil; to engage in warrantless wiretaps;
to read our emails and to lurk on our websites – the STASI never had it so
good; the KGB would’ve given their collective left-nuts to have the power and
the technology accorded to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Some of you younger readers might well think, “What’s he
complaining about? Only the bad guys
need to worry.” I’ll forgive you. You were raised on the pablum of ‘Social
Studies’ – you never had to study Civics, Geography, History, or to learn the
Constitution and its amendments (as I had to do at age 13). In college, things were no better (that’s why
those of you who finished college in the 80’s and beyond still can’t find the
former Soviet Union on a map.)
The older readers? We know.
See, we weren’t raised in this country - not as it exists today.
It was spun out of whole cloth some ten years ago after 9/11. We remembered a form of government where if
the depredations of the second Bush administration had been perpetrated in our
youth (the ‘60’s and ‘70’s), we’d’ve taken to the streets to demand someone’s
head.
You’ve also been told that ‘no one else has a chance’ except
the two presidential candidates of the two major parties – no one told you that
the Republican party, by example, was a ‘third party’ when Abraham Lincoln was
elected; you’ve been told that voting for any other candidates is ‘throwing
your vote away’, or ‘voting for the other guy’. You’ve been convinced that voting your fears
is the only way to keep the other half of the country at bay; at least for a
while.
No one taught you how to think. No one taught you to vote your values, no
matter what. No one taught you that informed
participation is the only thing which makes a republic work.
It’s small consolation, but you might as well not
worry. The deck is stacked; by way of
deregulating the financial system, both the government and the banks gave us a
nasty little depression in 2008, and thanks to things like the Citizens United
ruling, the big-money people can now buy the government outright, which they’ve
done at least twice; maybe more. I’m
sorry, but you haven’t a chance.
I’d apologize for being one of the guilty bystanders, but I’m
not. I’ve voted for third-party
candidates at both local and national levels for decades now (ironically, the
only time I broke with that tradition was when I drank the Kool-Aid, ate the
dog-food, and voted for Obama the first time around).
So, tomorrow, we’re going to give the keys of the Empire to
the same guy for a Second Time Around.
We’re all about to see how that hopey-changey thingamabob works when we
double-down. I don’t imagine it’s going
to be pretty, as the Guy On The Podium tomorrow is going to do what he does
best – and it’s not going to be Stand Up And Lead.
