Submitted By: Mike Spindell, Guest Blogger
I’m an easy mark for those who want to approach me emotionally. My own life, with the normal tragedies of living seven decades has let me be attuned to others pain and to view that pain with an empathy born of my own suffering. Working out my own problems via years of therapy in my twenties and thirties, allowed me to finally let myself cry at the early death of my parent’s years before. I had put a “bottleneck” on tears since a teenager, choking sad emotions by constricting my throat and being in intellectual denial of the mourning I felt at their loss. This is not to say that I had no emotional outlets in my years prior to therapy, but they were limited to events far outside the ken of my life. Thus I could identify with wronged characters in movies and could cry at the death of Marin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy. In my personal life though, I acted out the role ascribed to me in my High School Yearbook “Mike thinks that life is just a snap of his fingers”. Therapy changed that and allowed me to let myself be aware of and be guided by my emotions.
Emotionally, I am as patriotic an American as you might find. I love this country and I love the fact that I’m a citizen of it. My tears well up at the playing of our National Anthem. The Constitution is a sacred document to me and the aspirations of our “Founding Fathers” seem noble and just. In sports I often find myself moved to tears when athletes or teams overcome adversity and triumph. My family knows this emotional side of me since I cry at movies like “The Little Mermaid”. In personal relationships I am also ruled by emotion. People who treat me with kindness are not only repaid in kind, but I find myself rooting for their happiness and sad at their sadness. It is therefore quite easy to become someone I consider to be a friend and difficult for me to note imperfections in the friendships I’ve made. However, that is on an emotional level and as all humans, I am far more than just my emotions. Intellect and experience play important roles in shaping who we are. On a personal level I have experienced betrayal by “friends” and lovers. In my career I’ve experienced betrayal by those I thought of as friends and co-workers. However, I think those “let downs” are merely a normal part of the human experience. We humans learn and grow from our social interactions, allowing them to inform our interactions with each other.
We humans co-exist though in a larger context than mere personal interactions and that is a society known as “country”. Through the norms and mores of that society we find that our emotions are stimulated by the commonality of our existence as part of a whole. We rely on that society to protect us from predators and from those from other society’s that would do us harm. We unite emotionally in times of crisis and we feel warmth and comfort from being part of the whole. The most emotionally jarring event of the past five decades was the attack on 9/11 that galvanized this country almost as one entity. We commemorated the twelfth anniversary of this overwhelmingly sad event this past week. I need not describe the effect of this event on all of us, since I know that we all have sharp personal memories of that day and the days of anger, fear and confusion that followed. The reactions politically that followed 9/11 has personally scarred those who lived through it and have done great harm to our country. People from all sides of the political spectrum feel betrayed by the events that followed 9/11. Some feel betrayed because the majority of the country no longer supports the military interventions that ensued. Others feel betrayed because there is clear evidence that our government “lied” us into a costly war against a country that had nothing to do with the 9/11 attack. We have become then a nation of cynics when it comes to our government and I will explore why this can be either good or bad for the future of our country.When President Obama spoke this week about intervention in Syria: (transcript below) http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/running-transcript-president-obamas-sept-10-speech-on-syria/2013/09/10/a8826aa6-1a2e-11e3-8685-5021e0c41964_story.html I felt myself sneering as the cleverly written propaganda came forth from his lips with the sound of great sincerity. Could he really believe this crap I thought? Is it just foistering of political propaganda used for him to save face in light of the overwhelming evidence that the people of this country don’t support his “targeted air strike” as a panacea for the use of gas in the Syrian Civil War? Does it really matter? As he explained that we Americans are war weary from more than a decade of fighting wars. These wars in the end were colossal failures and more importantly seem to have been fought for no real reason save for the enrichment of the Corporate Military Industrial Complex (CMIC) and most specifically the multinational oil industry. The President, even if obliquely, acknowledged the futility of this century’s military interventions and the cost borne by this nation’s troops and people:
“I believe our democracy is stronger when the President acts with the support of Congress. And I believe that America acts more effectively abroad when we stand together.
This is especially true after a decade that put more and more war-making power in the hands of the President, and more and more burdens on the shoulders of our troops, while sidelining the people’s representatives from the critical decisions about when we use force.
Now, I know that after the terrible toll of Iraq and Afghanistan, the idea of any military action, no matter how limited, is not going to be popular. After all, I’ve spent four and a half years working to end wars, not to start them. Our troops are out of Iraq. Our troops are coming home from Afghanistan. And I know Americans want all of us in Washington
— especially me — to concentrate on the task of building our nation here at home: putting people back to work, educating our kids, growing our middle class.”
To me there most glaring inconsistency in the President’s speech was that while making the case for intervention to stop the use of Sarin Gas, promising that no U.S. Troops would be used on the ground, describing Assad’s government as implacable, our President nevertheless contended that one “targeted air strike” would somehow make things better. The entire proposition seems nonsensical to me and I therefore distrust its sincerity, or as a fallback, the sanity of those who would pursue it.
As Professor Turley described in a blog this week 75% of the deaths in Afghanistan occurred after Obama became President: http://jonathanturley.org/2013/09/12/study-almost-75-percent-of-all-afghanistan-deaths-occurred-under-obama/ . This was of course the man who the country elected in 2008 to end the two wars. While it appears that the Iraq War has ended since most American Forces have been removed, we note that in August the Iraqi government began to plead for additional U.S. help since there has been an upsurge in violence and civilian strife. http://news.yahoo.com/iraq-seeks-help-us-amid-growing-violence-221052797.html . So perhaps the President’s claim is premature. As of January 31, 2012. 4,487 US Soldiers were Killed in Iraq and 32,223 were Seriously Wounded. This does not encompass the hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi’s who died in that war.
The rationale for the Iraq War was that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction and that he had been somehow involved in the 9/11 attack. Both of those premises have proven to be untrue. We have spent about a Trillion Dollars on Iraq as shown by the following which gives a breakdown of the human/financial costs of that war. http://usliberals.about.com/od/homelandsecurit1/a/IraqNumbers.htm Is it any wonder then that the majority of the country distrusts our government and is suspicious of any suggestion that there is yet another country where we MUST intervene? Our attack on Afghanistan was not only premised on the belief that the 9/11 attack was executed by Al Qaeda leaders within the country, but was also meant to destroy the power of the Afghani allies the Taliban. We see though that the Taliban still has great power in Afghanistan and that our “greatest 9/11 enemy” Osama Bin Laden was living in Pakistan all along. The truth is that the U.S. originally armed Al Qaeda and the Taliban to fight against the USSR in the 1980’s, as that “great power” was driven from the country, as have been all Afghanistan’s invaders from time immemorial. Both these wars have been unnecessary debacles executed by the manipulation of American emotions stemming from 9/11.
How much a debacle those wars were was highlighted by two actions (admissions) by George W. Bush who bears the responsibility for them and consequently for the horrors that ensued. The first was his skit at The National Press Club where he pretended to look for “weapons of mass destruction” in a mocking manner. He was mocking those of us who believed the lies of his administration that caused us to attack Iraq. The second action was when he was asked if the U.S. knew where Osama Bin Laden was hiding. His response was that Osama Bin Laden was no longer important to him. If this was so then why the hell did we attack Afghanistan under the pretense that we were seeking revenge against Osama Bin Laden? Despite the beliefs of those who would rule us the entire country is not at all stupid and in the light of Bush’s actions should we wonder why people are so turned off to government and so cynical about it?
The germ of this piece has been gestating for years in my mind, but it came to the foreground this week in a reprise article from Russ Baker’s http://whowhatwhy.com investigative website. The article was from 2011 and investigated the probable involvement of powers within Saudi Arabia in funding and supporting the 9/11 attack. http://whowhatwhy.com/2013/09/11/classic-why-suppressed-saudi-911-story/ The background it supplies and the premise of Saudi involvement seems credible to me and fits in with the close ties of George W. Bush and his family to the powers that be in Saudi Arabia. Our current concern with Syria mirrors the Saudi’s constant efforts to attain hegemony in the Muslim world, where they are competing with Iran. Entwined in this is of course Oil, which has been for more than a Century the greatest motivating factor in international relations.
What all of this endless warfare has done has been to unite the majority of the American people, myself included, in a cynical view of our government and its entire doings. How can we trust government if it lies us into wars and wastes trillions of dollars? This cynicism leaks over into all areas of government endeavor. It unites those on both the left and the right of the political spectrum and it could lead to the ultimate destruction of our Constitution and even our country as we know it. Yet how can we argue against this cynicism? The truth is that in the experience of my lifetime government can’t be trusted. With this concept I find myself in unison with the “Tea Party” and simultaneously with “Progressives” in distrusting just about everything government does. Most of the many guest blogs I’ve written here through the years reveal this cynicism in one form or the other. Just type “Mike Spindell” into the search function above and you will see blog after blog expressing my cynicism and distrust of what is occurring in this country that I dearly love. While I am united with many on both the Right and the Left in distrusting the government and politics in general, my analysis of the problem of government is not as uniform.
The corruption of our political system and the failure of government to do its job is not the result in the inherent flaw of any government as the Libertarians and Tea Party suspect. Government doesn’t work because it is corrupted by those seeking power and wealth. Our Constitution is ignored by those who would manipulate the rest of us for their own personal gains. The “Isms” we are presented with as solutions to the vastness of human misery are merely the tools to distract us from the real “game of thrones” being played with us as pawns. My cynicism is well-deserved, as is yours the reader because our shared experiences have proven it to be correct.
“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, But in ourselves, that we are underlings.” As Cassius laments in “Julius Caesar” this is the state of humans and humanity. It is the constant struggle for dominance engaged in by a few that disrupts and distracts government from its role as the manifestation of the ideals of our society. Whenever those who would see a different world try to change it, they must recognize that it is human flaws, rather than political systems, that distract the care and protection of the populace. Humanity, born of mutual cooperation in our pre-history, still also bears within it the residue of our predatory past. Therefore, even as we of good will who would seek to turn this world into the Utopia that is within humanity’s powers; we must use the cynicism of our intellect to distrust those who would offer simplistic solutions appealing to our emotions to get us to do their bidding. I remain a political cynic and often despair at the doings of the world around me. Yet I will not and the collective we should not, let ourselves give into that despair. In that direction lays the darkness of all the horrors of human history. We must fight on to remake ourselves and humanity into caring and compassionate beings, interacting with each other in harmony. Yet to continue that fight we must recognize the propaganda and mythology that leads us astray. We must view all calls for action through a cynical, skeptical eye, while maintaining our idealistic hope for a better future. It is a hard task, yet for those of us who were not to the manor born it is essential, or else we will continue to be pawns in the hands of the powerful that would destroy us and those we love without conscience or constraint.
Submitted By: Mike Spindell, Guest Blogger.
Tom,
Let’s look a little at your proposition. Let’s say there is no longer government and a woman gets raped in your town. Women do get raped I’m sure you’ll admit. What in your mind is to be done about the rapist and by who? Perhaps if you could clarify for us your perspective on how this we be handled in a society without government we could understand better the point you are trying to make.
Tom: It’s just what everyone else would do.
You fail to comprehend the argument, just as I predicted, and you appeal to the common man, just as I predicted.
It isn’t “everyone else,” Tom. It is the 1% that are born sociopathic. and about 10% of those are smarter than 90% of the people, enough to get away with it, and the ones that aren’t smart enough to get away with it end up in prison. But without courts, without police, without jails, none of those sociopaths go to prison, they band together into gangs out of self-interest, because it is profitable for them to join together and oppress 99% of the populace. And therefore the end result of your “anarchic state,” in a matter of a decade or so, is the 1% ruling the 99% by brutal force: A dictatorship. A government.
You are right; the typical person wants to live peacefully and cooperatively and if they can make a living working would only use violence in self defense. But the typical person would also use violence to survive. And not all people are typical, there is a very special type of birth defect that arises repeatedly in which a person feels nothing toward other people and sees them as prey to be exploited, killed, robbed, enslaved or harmed as needed to satisfy their own selfish needs.
THOSE people are the fatal flaw in your philosophy; and they are not, in principle, a fatal flaw of democracy.
By the way, progressives and reformers have been reforming politics and government for a hundred years in America. WTF?
You’d think that we’d be close to utopia by now. Instead, we live in a militarized surveillance/police state with a fascist/corporatist economic system and two authoritarian political cults that dominate our lives, all cheered on by their zombie cult members.
The voters and especially the political activists are clueless as to how the economy works, how the political system works, and how the legal system works. Yet, they cling to the belief that it is legitimate for 50.1% of those who bother to vote to use gun-toting thugs and prisons to force idiotic agendas on everyone else.
When all these all-knowing reformers can figure out how to reform human beings instead of viewing them as pawns for their political games, maybe then we can have a decent world.
Frankly, I’ve grown weary of all the idiots and shysters who want to protect me, care for me, control me and help me through government enforcers with guns. Of course, they always say no force would be necessary if I complied with their every whim that becomes enacted into law.
I’m beginning to believe that people like Tony C. who are in constant fear of what others would do to them in the absence of their precious little police state are merely projecting their own cravings to kill and destroy onto everyone else.
If there were no cops to stop you, how many women would you rape and then kill, Tony C? Oh no, you would never do that, right? It’s just what everyone else would do. Bad people who can’t be stopped without the full force of government.
Hey, that’s what governments do best, right? That’s why no women are raped and killed in America. Ever. Right?
“Anarchy just doesn’t work, it is logically flawed. You cannot keep sociopaths from being born, growing up, and ruthlessly seeking power.”
Tony, Tony, Tony. I can rebut that by just changing one word and throwing that big old non sequitur right back at ya.
Let me put it out there, Tony, so that you can argue it is wrong.
Democracy just doesn’t work, it is logically flawed. You cannot keep sociopaths from being born, growing up, and ruthlessly seeking power.
Tony C says:
“You are drinking some powerful Kool-Aid there, pardner.
We reject a stateless society because we believe, correctly, that without police and military to protect us and enforce laws and present a plausible threat to those that would commit violence, theft, fraud and rape, the baddest of the bad will enslave us.”
I’ve drank so much Krazy Flavored Kool-Aid, Tony, that I’m hallucinating. It’s got me thinking that the police and military often commit violence (and threaten it continually), theft, fraud and even rape fairly regularly. Your typical mass-murderer can’t even begin to compare to just the collateral damage of Obama’s CIA drones just last month. From where I’m having delusional Kool-Aid reactions that cause me to believe that the baddest of the bad have already enslaved many of us and in most cases the chains are in your head.
Now, if I only had some Normal All-American Myth Flavored Kool-Aid, I’m sure I would come around to your way of thinking comfortable thoughts and knowing that if only the right people are elected, government can be a wonderful force for good.
Sorry for the typos, please read through them as the hour is late, but it’s also late this evening so I’m shutting down for now.
Gene H. 1, September 14, 2013 at 9:41 pm
** campaign finance and lobbying **
Gene H,
The public owns the air waves, we should pull rank!
Make it free time for those polecats running for office.. only so much though.
Public corporations are own by shareholders, instead of management deciding which polecat to back have the shareholders tell management & separate it into the percentages of how the shareholders voted.
Or better yet just ban corps from put up money on elections.
Corporations are nothing more then Renters to me. The citizens are the owners, treat then renters like renters!
Nice article Mike S 🙂
Day in, day out, zerohedge rocks when it calls for cut through the crap.
It’s also nice dovetail I think for your piece.
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2013-09-14/guest-post-7-choices-left-military-industrial-complex
Tony,
It would also make campaign finance and lobbying easier to reform as well. Smaller campaigns cost less and the dilution effect would effectively destroy K Street’s stranglehold on lobby.
The more I think about it, the more I like it.
Gene: I think that idea would have some other ramifications. It would probably induce more natural party diversity; it is easier to convince 10,000 people to vote (Libertarian, Socialist, Green, Constitutional) than to convince 450,000. For the obvious reason that door to door politics is easier for a politician with only 10,000 constituents, and much cheaper to do in both time and money, and people are less worried about voting for somebody they literally know. For the less obvious reason (I think) that with 20,000 Congressmen, people would know their one Congressman doesn’t have a lot of power and they are more free to experiment with an alternative party (with somebody they think is a good person).
Another ramification would be to decrease marginalization of minorities and the poor. Gerrymandering would be much harder with 45 times as many districts. And minorities tend to live near each other, by choice or economic or circumstantial necessity. Since their district is small, chances are their Congressman hails from their neighborhood, and is more likely to represent their interests.
With the current district size of roughly 450,000, and expensive campaigns that require deep-pocket friends, it is far more likely the Congressman is one of the 4500 in the top 1% (and most Congressman are indeed millionaires). It is part of the reason, in my view, they dance with the guys that brought them to the party: They ARE the rich, their friends are the rich, and they represent that point of view.
http://news.yahoo.com/drudge-hates-shield-bill-defining-journalist-really-fascist
The first version of a media shield law that handily made it through the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday defined for the first time what constitutes a “real reporter” deserving of extra protection versus what Sen. Dianne Feinstein called a “17-year-old blogger” who doesn’t deserve a legal shield.
Tom says: Sadly, most people reject a stateless society as they have been indoctrinated to believe that humans are somehow helpless and unable to educate children or build roads
You are drinking some powerful Kool-Aid there, pardner.
We reject a stateless society because we believe, correctly, that without police and military to protect us and enforce laws and present a plausible threat to those that would commit violence, theft, fraud and rape, the baddest of the bad will enslave us.
All one has to do is look to the badlands in the Middle East, Africa, and elsewhere to see that without a state, warlords, psychopaths, and brutal dictators take over and form a “government” of the few, for the few, over the many.
No individual can stand against a lawless gang on their own; I don’t care how much weaponry you have, there is a biological imperative to sleep and eat and you can be starved out, ambushed, set on fire or just plain overwhelmed by a frikkin’ tank.
The minute you claim you do not intend to DO it “on your own” you are forming a collective and imposing mutual obligations which is a “government” of some form.
Anarchy just doesn’t work, it is logically flawed. You cannot keep sociopaths from being born, growing up, and ruthlessly seeking power. Saddam Hussein was an unrepentant murderer (of an adult he believed slighted him) when he was ten years old; people like Saddam are an unavoidable natural occurrence and the only way to prevent them from gaining power and taking over is by collective action defining rules of behavior and punishing or sequestering violators. That is “government,” it is an imperfect but effective cure for a spontaneously arising illness in humanity, one that is thousands of years old and still with us. It is part of humanity’s immune system, and without it we would be much sicker (and deader) than we are with it.
Tom, as a Libertarian, how do you see the power of corporations in our lives? They are now spying on us, making war on us, jailing us, giving us many of the restrictions on how we speak and think, the things that Libertarians traditionally hate about govt.
This is not a trick question. I really wondered how you see it. Also, now that USG is a giant multinational corporation, do you think people need protection from the govt./corporate nexus which exists?
Mike Spindell writes:
“The corruption of our political system and the failure of government to do its job is not the result in the inherent flaw of any government as the Libertarians and Tea Party suspect. Government doesn’t work because it is corrupted by those seeking power and wealth. Our Constitution is ignored by those who would manipulate the rest of us for their own personal gains.”
Well, I can’t speak for the Tea Party people – they can barely speak for themselves – but, as a libertarian anarchist, I also believe that government doesn’t work because it is corrupted by those seeking power and wealth, and that is the inherent flaw of any government, and it always has been and always will be. In fact, the more powerful government is, the more sociopaths are attracted to it.
Sadly, most people reject a stateless society as they have been indoctrinated to believe that humans are somehow helpless and unable to educate children or build roads without the mystical forces of government and the magical powers of politicians (assuming they belong to the correct cult). Anarchy is rejected because it does not promise utopia and would never deliver it. On the other hand, you have politicians that promise utopia but deliver something that appears to be more like dystopia.
To be a cynic is to be a realist.
What Elaine said. We have a duty to question authority.
Mike Spindell 1, September 14, 2013 at 1:39 pm
Dredd,
Sometimes Bill Maher gets things so right it is breathtaking.
=======================
Tru dat.
He has a very competent staff, and he works so well with them.
I’m not a cynic. I want the people of the US to flourish. I want people in other nations to have good lives. I want the earth and it’s many life forms to thrive. Because I am not cynical about these things I can tell when a politician and his/her followers are f*&cking them up.
People need to be truthful. Unless you personally interact with a politician on a social basis, they are not your friend. (That is a lie created by “branding”.) They are public servants. When they don’t do their job, they need to be booted out of office.
You do not “help” a mass murderer by being co-dependent and pretending you are BFFs. You are not being helpful by lying to yourself, others or any politician about what they are doing. If it is wrong, you need to stand up and speak out. Respect for others means fundamentally that you see them truthfully, not how you wish they would be.
Then, you act accordingly.
I can’t say I’m a cynic. I’m definitely a political skeptic though.