Sisyphus hasn't budged that rock: "In one year, we will have a new administration..."

[tom_paine]

"...you can't mean that this family will continue to control the country."

ME: "It's not that simple. I am not solely speaking of the Bush Family, though they and their Inner Circle do seem to form a constant of leadership over many administration and a long period of time, like the Gambino Family, it's Inner Circle and the Mafia leadership. More like a junta or a evolutionary cabal. Were Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and HW Bush powerful members of the Nixon administration? Were they not also even more powerful members of the Reagan administration, ultimately cutting Reagan off from his support and ultimately running the treasonous Iran-Contra project out of the White House basement? That group was the core of the Arkansas project that smear Clinto and dragged us through the Phony Impeachent even though 2/3rds of us were against it. That same bunch now rules again. That's at least 25 years right there of unbroken "leadership" even when they were supposedly out of power."

HIM: "Cite all the facts you want. No way it adds up to that."

I am often ripped for being a "pessimist", but I say I am a realist. I love hope. I want hope. Hope is to me as a glass of water is to a person dying of thirst in the desert. What I do not want is false hope. It is the futile waste of energy that a person dying of thirst in the desert expends to reach that mirage of a cool blue and green oasis that isn't really there.

And so, I reject false hope, because it is counter-productive, self-defeating, and ultimately deadly for it expends energies on what is not real, when we must husband our energies for the battles to kindle the hopes that ARE real.

This man I speak of, a good man and a patriot, still cannot see through the tinted glass of the Bush False Reality Bubble. He is not a Bushie or a Fox-watching regurgitating moron. He is a man of independant thought. But he cannot see the true nature and scope of the problem we have faced and now face in it's Middle to Penultimate stages right now.

This is in itself a variant of the "False Hope Theorem", the way the Bushies keep the vast majority of us blind and confused. We cannot even begin to think of solutions if we are blind to the root problem.

I don't know what to do. I haven't known for a long time. We allowed the Bushies to cement their False Reality Bubble into place without opposition for two decades. Now it is Conventional Wisdom, lunatic as that is, and is as much a pat of our surroundings as the air we breath.

And still, seven years later, even though 51-54% of us now "strongly disapprove" of Bush, there are not 3% of us that can pierce the bubble to see and understand the true nature and scope of what we face from the Bushies, who are so much more than the Bush Family itself, but a radical, tyrannical, revolutionary cabal of America-Hating Aristocrats that have been trying to destroy us since the attempted Bushie overthrow of FDR in the 30s.

(Don't believe me? Listen, and prepare to be horrified.)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/history/document/document_20070723.shtml

What the hell do we do??? Considering in seven years, for that vast vast VAST majority of Americans are like this good man and his well-meaning cluelessness, the kind that gives tyrants their ultimate power without even realizing it.

I am welcome to suggestions. No matter how bad things get, the boulder of understanding the "Big Picture" of what we face from the Bushies for 70 years now remains unmoved. Because of that, they will always slither away, unpunished for their larger crimes, to plague us again in the future as if they never left off.

[tom_paine]

1. Man, people here always bitch that childish rants and ad hominem attacks skyrocket to the top

and the Greatest Page on DU, but it has almost never failed that when I or anyone posts something meant to encourage thoughtful, substantive debate, or useful activist-type information, that thread NEVER fails to sink like a fucking rock to the bottom!

:banghead: :argh:

Maybe I'll post some rant about how Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid suck, THEN we have a have a "substantive debate".

:banghead: :argh:

You hate all the goddamned rants and flame wars, DU? So many always bitch about how this is true and it drags DU down? Well, maybe if we actually occasionally ACTED like we preach, that wouldn't BE our defining characteristic, most of the time.

Fuck it. Now let this non-ranting, thoughtful encouragement to lively debate sink to the bottom so we can get some more rants and flamefests up to the top of the pages and stop wasting space with invitation for reasonable discourse!

:banghead: :argh: :banghead: :argh: :banghead: :argh: :banghead: :argh: :banghead: :argh: :banghead: :argh: :banghead: :argh: :banghead: :argh: :banghead: :argh: :banghead: :argh: :banghead: :argh: :banghead: :argh: :banghead: :argh: :banghead: :argh: :banghead: :argh: :banghead: :argh: :banghead: :argh: :banghead: :argh: :banghead: :argh: :banghead: :argh: :banghead: :argh: :banghead: :argh: :banghead: :argh: :banghead: :argh: :banghead: :argh: :banghead: :argh: :banghead: :argh: :banghead: :argh: :banghead: :argh: :banghead: :argh: :banghead: :argh: :banghead: :argh:

[dogishboy]

2. OK, I'll give it a shot

IMO, what you call The Big Picture (ie. the obvious (to us) hegemony of the uber-wealthy) is for me, an unchanging reality. That powerful people pull the strings and don't go away has been, IMO, a constant of history, a subject the american people are not known for being familiar with.

Yeah, that's right. I'm even more of a cynic than you are :-)

[tom_paine]

5. That's the Even Bigger Picture. I'll see you and raise you to the Biggest Picture.

:evilgrin:

(although I strongly suspect that I am not telling you the news just like your last post was not telling me the news)

That it is, at the core, the evolutionary dead-end of the mammalian genome (or at the least the Homo Sapiens branch) expressing itself in this massive upcoming shift and corner we have painted ourselves into.

Ever do any research on chimpanzees? They are some evil fuckers, as well as being our closest ape relatives. Look it up and see if I am bullshitting. They are a species of murderers and tyrants, insofar as one can say that about a group of relatively non-sentient animals.

They are us, we are them. And it is quite likely that the Neanderthals and other species were hunted to extinction by our chimp-minded ancestors long ago. And I'll bet it went down something like the capture and murder of General Toussaint, Geronimo, or Montezuma.

It's a very bad idea to give chimps guns and the internal-combustion engine. Even worse idea to give them (us) atomic bombs and the ability to alter environment globally, even if they/we don't even realize we have it.

Yet still, at this late date when all three of our Big, Bigger, and Biggest Pictures are becoming abundantly obvious, I hold out hope that maybe, just maybe, I have made a mistake and wrongly analyzed our situation.

Of course, that is a topic all on it's own, our chimp-capacity for denial of unpleasant truths. We'd rather bash in a hundred chimp skulls with rocks and eat of our victims' flesh than recognize, as Al Gore puts it, an inconvenient truth.

Hell, what to you think the Iraq Invasion was all about, on the Biggest Picture level?

Oh, and thanks for the debate, even though we are for the moment a Chorus of Agreement.

And welcome to DU dogishboy.

:toast:

[dogishboy]

21. Thank you for the warm welcome

And yes, you have torn away the detritus and exposed the bedrock of this problem - our animal nature. Evolution has trained us to seek resources, and not to avoid them. Can't say I know of any species that survived by not seeking food, shelter, and other necessities of life.

And as far as the denial goes, my mom used to say "You can only be so smart, but stupid knows no limits"

[Adsos Letter]

3. I do believe Jacques Ellul would agree with your essential premise...

...it even goes to epistemology, the study of how we "know" what we "know."

I don't have an answer as to what to do about it...the "reality" is dependant upon words to express acts, and that lies at the core of even coming to some agreement upon where the danger lies.

How do we acquire a Supreme Court with the integrity to define things against the real touchstone of the Constitution? Without that we are very much at the whim of the powerful...

[tom_paine]

9. Ultimately I think it may well be cyclic, as most if not all human and natural phenomena are

You asked: How do we acquire a Supreme Court with the integrity to define things against the real touchstone of the Constitution?

A very good question, but the answer are more questions, IMO: How do the conditions for such arise to create The Declaration, Constitution, and Bill of Rights? What conditions, usually not as intense, are required to protect those things once "The Greatest Generation" creates them and hands them down to us?

The answer may be that such things, as the Founders pointed out in our three Founding Documents, comes from below, not above.

The Founders came at the pinnacle of the Age of Enlightenment, in which they were staring at the recent end of the Dark Ages, and a mad murderous, century-long Witch Burning Craze that sort of shocked the Enlightenment into "overdrive", in revulsive response.

The cycle of evil stupidity, the cyle of the Triumph of the Medeval Bushies, as it were, had ended (relatively speaking, for us humans it never seems to fully end, just wax and wane) and the cycle of Enlightenment, that found it's highest pinnacle in the American Revolution and the revival of Liberty and Republic after a two-thousnad year absence.

I don't know the full answer, I get the feeling that even this analysis, even if correct is only nibbling around the edges of a larger picture.

In either case, it seems the Age of Enlightenment is coming to an end, like all human endeavors, not in a straight line but in fits and starts that sometimes allow hope during interrims like the Clinton Presidency when we all had the illusion that things were turning around, but the collapse had merely slowed.

I hope I am wrong. I could be wrong. But the conditions emanating up from the bottom no longer seem remotely equal to the task of maintaining what we had, in terms of Liberty and the Republic, let alone creating the next evolutionary step is what the original Tom Paine called the "necessary evil of government", whatever that might be.

At this point, I would be very satisfied with protecting what we had, but even that seems far too daunting a task for these, Our Worst Generations (I include myself among them).

[Adsos Letter]

10. Ah, but now you are nailing it down...

and it is the essential question, if I take you correctly: how do we maintain even an appreciation for what others saw as absolute necessity? And the antecedents which brought about that need to create those documents were derived from many things; a history which was closer to them, the ideas of English radicals whose ideas lent energy to our own theoreticians and thinkers, the multi-form aspirations of "out" groups (women, the lower classes, slaves, Native Americans) all who thought our own Revolution might mean something of importance to each of them.

Have you read either Nash's "The Unknown American Revolution," or Bailyn's "The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution"?

[tom_paine]

12. I've read neither of these books, but they are on my list now.

Thanks.

:hi:

And that is so true. The American Revolution did not end in 1782. It kept expanding to approach that old quote of George Washington's:

As Mankind becomes more liberal, they will be more apt to allow that all those who conduct themselves as worthy members of the community are equally entitled to the protections of civil government. I hope ever to see America among the foremost nations of justice and liberality.

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/quotes/g/georgewash135806.html

That mild ground shaking you feel is Washington spinning in his grave.

It may have only, finally terminally expired on 12/12/2000, though I pray it is not so.

[KoKo]

4. Put a few "Fuck You....I'm so sick of this shit" and then write two lines and

you'll be on the greatist page within minutes. Post some mindless rant about your candidate of choice with a zinger to get your opponents and their peeps onboard and it will be there in about the same time.

Seriously, "TP"....many here agree with you but are lurking because the pain is great and they just don't want to get back into the "to and frow" of all the angst, anger and mudslinging. I just wish the lurkers would at least do a few K&R's more often.

Anyway...I gotta go to your link to figure out who you were talking about. I only answered your angst.

Peace...and let's hope for a better "New Year in '08." Got my burned fingers crossed...that it might be better but don't have high hopes...but wishful thinking.

[NC_Nurse]

6. I wish I had a suggestion.

I am around people who are even less aware than this person. I have
had no success in waking anyone up myself. The only progress I've seen
is that those at work who were so outspokenly RW and pro-war have gotten quiet,
VERY quiet.
I find myself less and less willing to even try to change people's minds. It's depressing. :-(

[Adsos Letter]

8. I've noticed the same thing NC Nurse...

my RW coworkers are very quiet...until I try to discuss the reason which underlies their quietness...then the venom comes out, but aimed, usually, at me...

[NC_Nurse]

13. I'm too much of a chicken to even try that.

I KNOW they don't want to hear it and the chance of them being open to
changing their positions are pretty slim.

You're brave. :hi:

[monmouth]

7. I would venture to say, the fact that YOU pointed out these truths is

his biggest problem. Had he come to these conclusions on his own it would be a different scenario. Ne'er forget the ego, it's part of the DNA for "followers."

[tom_paine]

15. Like I said, this man is no RWA Follower.

Maybe it is part of all of our DNA, and it is merely our own ego which tells us that we alone can see beyond ego.

To me it is a human axiom that we can see the blind spots of others, but never our own. The corollary to that axiom is that we ALL have blind spots, but they are in different places.

[HCE SuiGeneris]

11. It is incredibly challenging to get up, go to work, pay the bills

and keep positive, knowing the underlying weave of our "great country" is but false perception. We are owned by the aristocracy and their political power-wielding potentates.

The problem with your friend, and with the majority of the citizenry, is that to admit this, is to admit that we have been fed a lifetime of lies about self-destiny and freedom and liberty. "Compared to other nations around the world..." is a frequent bluster refuting this observation. While it -- may be/may have been -- true that we are freer, it does not diminish the fact that we are captives of these rulers, and that we do not control this nation's destiny.

Your words do not fall on deaf ears Tom. They, as was stated up thread, hit home with devastating impact. More than most can admit to, or bear.

K & R

[tom_paine]

14. But I don't believe they were lies about self-destiny and liberty and freedom

That's the point. They may have been "lies" to the extent that their promise was as yet fully unfulfilled, but they were and remain as something to strive for.

The Founders owned slaves. Tom Jefferson slept with is slave-women. They were men of their times and in the context of slavery their words were hollow and hypocritical indeed.

But people believed in those words, and one day we fought a devastating war to free them, and to preserve the American Experiment.

Soon after we further evolved into the Dream of the Founders, that maybe they could not even conceive when they started at, by popularly electing Senators instead of legislatures. Then American Women fought for and earned their right to vote.

50 years later, the promise that was made to African-Americans at the end of the Civil War began to fulfilled, at least part of it, in the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts.

It was never perfect. Nothing ever is. And terrible things happened along the way of this evolution, they always do.

But those "lies" as you call them, remained fixed in our minds and our hearts, as something to strive for and keep striving for.

Anyway, I am not ripping you. We agree much more than we disagree, as we do here.

Call me a denier if you must, but I cannot dismiss the words of Paine, Jefferson, Washington, Franklin and the rest as hypocritical lies. Like the things Al Gore says, they transcend Al Gore personally, be it his monthly electric bill or whatever personal ad hominems the Bushies use to discredit him.

It may be "false perception" but only because they are laudable goals we can only approach incrementally, but never fully reach.

If I felt as you do on that score there would be nothing left to hope for, and we all might as well suck on our tailpipes.

And I do agree that, whatever one thinks of the ideals of Founders, it is immeasurably painful to watch them dragged through the mud, raped, humiliated, and destroyed by "Hitler's Little Cousins", the Bushies.

Even if what you say is correct, like the 1943 Jews who rose up in the Warsaw Ghetto, knowing they were doomed, what is important is to stand and be true.

Peace.

[HCE SuiGeneris]

16. necessary clarification

The lies I reference are not lies of liberty and freedom uttered by this nation's early visionaries and founders. I refer to politicians spouting the venerable words of our nation's fathers while securing aristocratic rule through the establishment of The Fed and the World Bank, the introduction of the IRS and non-equitable taxation, the establishment of the corporation as a legal entity with all the protections of a citizen, yet insulated from similar retributions when in defiance of the laws.

My disgust and disenchantment has its origins in studying the history of the last 150 years. We have been led astray by placing too much faith in the hands of the politicians and the moneyed interests that back them. We also own a large portion of this resultant state through complacency and inattentiveness to local government.

I apologize if my initial post was unclear... and you are right, the tail-pipe would look charming if I had no belief in the ideals of democracy.

[Octafish]

17. The powers-that-be were served notice with the Iran NIE.

The war turds know We the People are on to their treasonous gangster machinations.

If, and it's a big "if," the next administration has the guts for the job, there will be some major names in the federal super-max and on the docket at The Hague.

To reach your independent-minded friend, you might try giving him an analysis of the corporate take on existence -- "Government of the corporations, by the corporations, for the corporations." All the tax cuts of these conservative weasels have benefitted the rich at the expense of the middle class. Put it into personal terms, relating how these companies have no allegiance to the USA or our nation's workers. The companies moved the good jobs overseas. The companies sold their plants overseas and got a tax break from the Bush, er, government in the process. And the companies' owners moved their money to the Caymans and then Switzerland.

With its national security implications, a good example of the above is Magnequench:

The Saga of Magnequench: Outsourcing US Missile Technology to China

Perhaps later, long after he or she is nodding along, bring up Mussolini's quote about fascism and the corporation...

Good luck, Tom_Paine! Happy New Years to You and Yours!

[eridani]

18. Let's let Langston Hughes have the last word on this

He wrote the following when it looked like there would never be an end to Jim Crow and the Depression.

http://www.mindfully.org/Reform/Hughes-America-Again1938.htm

Let America be America Again

Let America be America again. Let it be the dream it used to be. Let it be the pioneer on the plain Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed-- Let it be that great strong land of love Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath, But opportunity is real, and life is free, Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There's never been equality for me, Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark? And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart, I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars. I am the red man driven from the land, I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek-- And finding only the same old stupid plan Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope, Tangled in that ancient endless chain Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land! Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need! Of work the men! Of take the pay! Of owning everything for one's own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil. I am the worker sold to the machine. I am the Negro, servant to you all. I am the people, humble, hungry, mean-- Hungry yet today despite the dream. Beaten yet today--O, Pioneers! I am the man who never got ahead, The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream In the Old World while still a serf of kings, Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true, That even yet its mighty daring sings In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned That's made America the land it has become. O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas In search of what I meant to be my home-- For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore, And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea, And torn from Black Africa's strand I came To build a "homeland of the free."

The free?

Who said the free? Not me? Surely not me? The millions on relief today? The millions shot down when we strike? The millions who have nothing for our pay? For all the dreams we've dreamed And all the songs we've sung And all the hopes we've held And all the flags we've hung, The millions who have nothing for our pay-- Except the dream that's almost dead today.

O, let America be America again-- The land that never has been yet-- And yet must be--the land where every man is free. The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME-- Who made America, Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain, Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain, Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose-- The steel of freedom does not stain. From those who live like leeches on the people's lives, We must take back our land again, America!

O, yes, I say it plain, America never was America to me, And yet I swear this oath-- America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death, The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies, We, the people, must redeem The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers. The mountains and the endless plain-- All, all the stretch of these great green states-- And make America again!

http://www.ericblumrich.com/pax.html

Mindfully.org note: Please view the Flash animation created by Eric Blumrich centered on Hughes' powerful poem of America

[HCE SuiGeneris]

20. That encompasses so much of what I feel.

Absolutely brilliant. Thank you for posting this.

[hootinholler]

19. First Sysphus cannot budge that rock...

Unless the ants help. We must do what the fundamentalists have done, organize locally around a coherent message. If we can do that then in 20 years we have a real shot at doing some good. The problem is that there's no central hook similar to the churches upon which we can hang a message. So the question becomes how do we obtain one?

-Hoot

[tom_paine]

22. That is a damned good question for which I have no answer.

With any luck, others out there who's speciality is action (mine tends more towards illuminating the questions that need to be asked; hey the world need all kinds, right?) are working on it right now.

Of course, no matter what our individual talents, waiting for others is what got us into this mess in the first place.

How's that for a Catch-22?

[hfojvt]

23. until this administration

I would not see the President as "rulers". As you point out, the rich can rule even when they are not in office. Right now, the pendulum seems to be swinging away from the Bushes and Republicans, except for the fact that the Democrat we are likely to nominate seems to be a corporatist.

I am not sure it is possible to get any bigger picture than Daniel Quinn, but I am still not sure what he advocates doing.

[Canuckistanian]

24. K&R

I don't have the eloquence to add to this discussion, but I agree with the sentiments and ideas expressed by the OP and others.

Thanks for posting.

[Leopolds Ghost]

25. Sympathy kick

I agree... I've been trying to get folks to care about "The Big Picture"
but too many people imagine that if THEIR favorite guy (who the media
told them was a great guy) wins, that somehow THEIR favorite policies
will become reality and things will be better in some way just by virtue
of that person being in office, even when a glass cieling prevents Dems
from caring about forcing out New Orleans public housing residents, or
forcing people to buy private health insurance, or what have you.

All of which DEMS are now apparently advocating.

The Republican secret government only cares about National Security, they
don't care about domestic economic policy, because they've already leeched
the domestic economy dry, they care about their overseas oil and imports.

They leave it up to Dem caretakers to fuck up our domestic civil rights
in the name of appeasing corporations, who are the real permanent
government that the Repubs answer to. like the Edwards health care plan
to impose private health insurance, and the Obama refusal to confront
the crimes of Bush, and the Clinton opposition to Welfare.

[tom_paine]

26. Thanks. As to Edwards' Healthcare Proposal, it's the best of the Big Three

It isn't perfect, but it seems to provide more mitigating circumstances and Edwards' will NOT mandate coverage until AFTER his plans are pushed through, with collective bargaining, financial aid, and expanded S-CHIP plus S-CHIP for adults.

I would be lying if the idea of mandated health insurance didn't make me nervous, but the fact that Edwards says he won't implement it until the required "safety netting" is in place heartens me.

http://www.johnedwards.com/issues/health-care/