A short diversion

"I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by
madness, starving hysterical naked,
dragging themselves through the negro streets at
dawn looking for an angry fix..."

The truth is, I have been completely at a loss to digest the goings on from the last month or so. It has been so inconceivably stupid and out of control that no amount of digestion, drinking or hope has made a damn bit of difference. We no longer live in a Representative Democracy.

The best background that I have found on the mortgage/banking clusterfuck is found in a stick figure montage. Seems fitting somehow.

There is so much more though. The averace which spawned the mess that we are in today is not being cleaned up. The same basic fear driven policy which has been the hallmark of the current administration is pushing forward with this sick desire, this pathological need to take every little scrap of goodness and hope and sell it to the insiders for maximum profit.

The rise of the Italian Fascist movement involved a corparitist form of government.

We are entering a new relationship between government and the people it is charged to represent. Seems like ages ago I wrote at some length about Rule of Law. Again and again and again.

Rule of Law.

We sit and wonder what new found horror will creep out of the television today. What new 'fuck you' will be unceremoniously delivered, uncommented, by the news. What new expression of privilege and contempt will fall our way. Keeping track of the ever changing and ever growing mess is becoming more complex. New cards for the pile.

When the elections were originally stolen in 2000 there was a great deal of confusion. We were pissed, but our representatives did not want to make a stink. As most effectively expressed in this usenet post:

The Republicans' use of fraud and force has been shocking. Let's go beyond that shock for the moment. What's truly troubling is that their tactics have been so blatant -- for example, the organized mob attack on the vote counting operation in Miami by a gang of out-of-state Republican operatives, including known staff members employed by highly placed officials. They didn't bother to conduct that as a covert operation. They didn't even hide the cashflow that paid for it.

Such an approach is not sustainable long-term under our present system of law and government. But there's no use in seizing power just long enough to get inaugurated if all you do is spend the next four years pinned down in a hopeless tangle of legal actions and political countermeasures. Therefore, we have to assume that they are planning to consolidate their power shortly after Bush is inaugurated.

If you're not following me: This is the equivalent of that moment in the plot where the guy who's being held captive by the bad guys realizes they're planning to kill him because they're letting him see their faces and hear their names spoken. They're not worried about the consequences.

The Republicans are not worried about the consequences of their blatant abuses. The logical conclusion is that once they've consolidated their power, things are going to get a lot worse.

Compare our tepid response to the whole sale sacking of our democracy with the Nixon era exchange:

Within two years after congressional Watergate hearings in 1973, President Richard Nixon had resigned in disgrace. Nineteen corporations and sixty-one people, including Nixon's own chief of staff, four former cabinet officials, and his personal lawyer, had been charged with crimes relating to Watergate; dozens of the president's men had already been convicted and sentenced to prison. In the next presidential election his party was driven from power.

When the DNC took the threat of impeachment off the table, then entire balance of power shifted. It had already been shown that they were willing (and perhaps even desirous) to have the Executive branch set the tone, agenda and perhaps most important, the language of debate. While arguably the notion of trilateral power (Judicial, Executive, Legislative) lost a wheel when the supreme court elected Mr. Bush, the unwillingness of the House and Senate members to do their jobs killed it dead.

I am more fearful now for the fabric of our Democracy than ever before. There is so much more to say, but so little time.

"And one day, too late, your principles, if you were ever sensible of them, all rush in upon you. The burden of self-deception has grown too heavy, and some minor incident, in my case my little boy, hardly more than a baby, saying ‘Jewish swine,’ collapses it all at once, and you see that everything, everything, has changed and changed completely under your nose. The world you live in—your nation, your people—is not the world you were born in at all. The forms are all there, all untouched, all reassuring, the houses, the shops, the jobs, the mealtimes, the visits, the concerts, the cinema, the holidays. But the spirit, which you never noticed because you made the lifelong mistake of identifying it with the forms, is changed. Now you live in a world of hate and fear, and the people who hate and fear do not even know it themselves; when everyone is transformed, no one is transformed. Now you live in a system which rules without responsibility even to God. The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.

Milton Mayer in They Thought They Were Free