Please.....

[poliphilo]

All through the 90s I was an optimist. And a bit of a New Ager. I thought we were on the brink of something- of some big leap forward in human consciousness. I wasn't sure if it was going to happen because of scientific advance or because lots of advanced souls were reincarnating to push things along or because the aliens were about to intervene but- whatever- I had great expectations of the 21st century.

And then along came Karl Rove and people like him and stomped all over the tender young shoots.

And I went from being a starchild to a grouchy misanthrope.

A pity really.

These first seven years of the century have been pretty damn awful. 

But Rove's gone and he's gone because the mix of cynical machiavellianism and crass materialism and brain-dead religious hoodoo which he stood for has been tested and found wanting.

Is it foolish to hope for change?

If I'm lucky (?) I could have another 30 years on this planet.  That's a long time.  Please let it be about something other than stupid wars for stupid oil and the icecaps melting.

Comments

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

I think change is inevitable.

We can blame Rove - and probably should - taking some heart in the fact that the junta governing Washington for the past few years is on its way out. The bad news is, the candidates shaping up to win the next presidential election are likely to be crusading interventionists as well, only promising to be more effective at maintaining world hegemony and protecting Israeli interests than Bush. The public forgets that Clinton had his own little war of choice years before Little Boots took up residence in the White House. The precedent for preemptive military strikes and deceiving Congress for the sake of remaining in power was already in place.

The good news, if one can call it that, is that the US's present role in the world is unsustainable:

Learn from the fall of Rome, US warned

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

Bush and his gang have shortened America's time at the top by alienating allies and demonstrating the limitations of American power in Iraq and Afghanistan. I'm not sure that's a good thing. If we have to have a superpower I think I'd rather it was the USA than China- but we'll see; maybe the age of superpowers is over too.

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

No, it isn't a good thing at all. I love this country. I love the land, its people, and for all its faults I still think this the best form of government.

What concerns me is that too many US politicians pay lipservice to the idea of global hegemony and the illusory benefits of projecting military force around the world. Too many on the right believe we should pick up some crappy little country every so often and throw it against the wall, just to show everyone who's boss. A core element on the left believes we really should go tear-assing around the globe fomenting law and order and prosecuting the greater good. To my mind, whichever wing of the war party wins, the result will be the same: expenditures of blood and treasure abroad and restriction of personal freedom at home.

The pro-war lobbies in this country are more powerful than President Little Boots himself. Dick Cheney is living proof. I sometimes think that if Europe, the UK, and other interested parties, really wanted to help both themselves and the US, they would fund politically independent anti-war lobbies of their own.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

As a European I have an equivocal relationship with the USA. Odi et amo. Yes, you have the most enlightened political system in the world- if only your politicians weren't so corrupt and your electorate so ill-informed.

If the USA had used its superpower status wisely- and in accordance with the ideals of the founding fathers- what a happy world this would be!

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

I would agree, were I convinced that corruption and ignorance were relatively new developments, but I don't think they are. Mark Twain famously wrote a century ago: "It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native criminal class except Congress". Two-hundred years ago, Thomas Jefferson wrote:

It is a melancholy truth, that a suppression of the press could not more compleatly deprive the nation of it's benefits, than is done by it's abandoned prostitution to falsehood. Nothing can now be believed which is seen in a newspaper. Truth itself becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle. The real extent of this state of misinformation is known only to those who are in situations to confront facts within their knolege with the lies of the day. I really look with commiseration over the great body of my fellow citizens, who, reading newspapers, live & die in the belief, that they have known something of what has been passing in the world in their time; whereas the accounts they have read in newspapers are just as true a history of any other period of the world as of the present, except that the real names of the day are affixed to their fables. ... I will add, that the man who never looks into a newspaper is better informed than he who reads them; inasmuch as he who knows nothing is nearer to truth than he whose mind is filled with falsehoods & errors. He who reads nothing will still learn the great facts, and the details are all false.

Apologies for the lengthy quote; it's a personal favorite.

So, with all due respect, I disagree. Corruption and ignorance have always been with us, bundled along with the rest of the human condition. These are problems that face every attempt at good government anywhere in the world and in any epoch. I honestly believe that once we accept the idea that the US could or should be a "superpower" and that this status could or should be used wisely, we are already well on the road to empire, whether intentionally or not. Our founding fathers for the most part would have thought such ideas anathema to the principles of a healthy and free republic. Once the US went abroad in search of monsters to slay, as Madison put it, I think we sealed our doom.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

The reason I'm not wholly hostile to the idea of an American imperium is that I'm well aware how much we owe you for intervening in WWII.

I like the passage from Jefferson. Some things never change.

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

That is a most gracious way of looking at it. If I remember my history correctly, the Nazis were essentially conceived at Versailles and nurtured on years of extreme economic hardship and dreams of revenge. Those conditions existed because of US intervention in the Great War, at least in part. I think most of the money wrung from the Weimar Republic flowed ultimately into US accounts. In modern terms, Hitler was essentially blowback from our taking sides in the previous war, a role for which we were paid handsomely.

The Nazis were an extraordinary circumstance that the nascent American imperium helped create. From that perspective, I don't see how you owe the US anything.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

That's an interesting angle on the interwar period- and one that had never occured to me before.

I'll have to think about it.

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

And do check my memory, if interested. Seems a little shorter every year.

I have been thinking on what you said about corruption among the political class here. Since Twain had his laugh at the expense of Congress, the wily critters have embraced their criminal lifestyle, sometimes without a hint of shame. That it's as bad or worse now than in any period of our history wouldn't surprise me at all.

[red-girl-42.livejournal.com]

I haven't read the article you linked yet, but....I've been saying this for years. Why do we USians think that our empire is permanent when no other empire on Earth has lasted forever? I think I'm unlucky enough to be living in a declining empire, and sometimes it fills me with fear, because I think in our hubris we're going to fall hard.

But like poliphilo I still have hope that something better will come along.

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

There's a saying in economics: a thing that cannot go on forever, won't. The problem with declining empires is how they react to the ebbing away of power. Some go quietly, some strike out agressively in all directions and at home, disappearing over history's horizon with a final blaze of glory. We might be seeing that just now in the Middle East and South Asia.

There's still time for a soft landing. It's never too late to return to our roots, the humanism that informed this government at its birth.