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.
Tony C. 1, September 15, 2013 at 2:55 pm
Dredd: I don’t think I’m blaming the victim, I am claiming the victim doesn’t really care that they are being victimized.
…
============================
At least we agree about who the victims are.
I hope you are correct and that the victims find a way to become free from their victimizers.
laserhaas: Whereas, here in America, we take too dang much for granted.
How do you know that?
Who determines what is the right amount to take for granted?
Besides, I don’t think we take it for granted, we pay through the nose (in taxes) for all sorts of protection from predatory humans. Income tax, property tax, sales tax, unemployment tax, retirement tax, gasoline tax, health care taxes, insurances (both mandatory and pragmatically necessary), 401Ks because the damn retirement tax isn’t going to work, and on and on.
The only thing I “take for granted” is that I deserve to see some value for my money.
laserhaas,
I am thinking of a question perhaps on an English test, something like this:
….Create a pragmatic statement.
“Power, money and might makes right;
always has – and always will.”
LOL, A-plus!! :o)
Tom Blanton,
“Yes, there are 7,391,082 of them in my imaginary world. How many are in your imaginary world? I’m guessing none.”
I assume you mean billion, as in the world population? …. other than that I would interpret that number indicates sarcasm on your part.
Seven billion people are alive on our earth today, the most ever. Seven billion independent differing perspectives, of exact and equal weight, to each individuals intrinsic, unique experience and cognitive abilities. It is only personal choice or submission, to purposefully concede self worth, to enhance higher the worth of another.
I personally allow MD.s to examine me and offer treatment for my ills. I have had some education and have allowed myself to be mentored by a superior intellect so I may learn and grow. I have learned incredible life lessons from statements by vagabonds, to watching statements on C-span by towering intellects.
We are all born between the legs of our mothers (though science has been changing that). We are all born with consciousness between our ears. No human has ever transplanted consciousness of one, to the consciousness of another. We each own our own unique conscience. …. Is this the point of your reply, and is it your intention to state, “This is what makes us all anarchists?”
PS. what is your definition of Anarchist?
From wiki:
Anarchy has more than one definition. Some use the term “anarchy” to refer to a society without a publicly enforced government.[1][2] When used in this sense, anarchy may[3] or may not[4] be intended to imply political disorder or lawlessness within a society.
Others, including most individuals who self-identify as anarchists, use the term to imply a system of governance, mostly theoretical at a jurisdiction level. There are also other forms of anarchy that attempt to avoid the use of coercion, violence, force and authority, while still producing a productive and desirable society.[5][6] Anarchy is also a technical issue of economic science, as anarchy implies lack of coercive oversight.
More close to Utopia by now?
Seriously?
Mankind has advance to unfathomable levels of greater comfort, greater liberty, greater chance for individual achievement; and – therefore – a much greater chance of complacency.
Diligent parties are more content where they are; because they suffer more and are thankful for the precious gifts of life.
Whereas, here in America, we take too dang much for granted.
That is, until those items expected to be are no longer readily avail. As Cliff Robertson said in 3 Days of the Condor to Robert Redford; what do you think they’ll want us to do then – when we run out.
inference being that Americans sense of nobleness will go right out the window if our children are starving because a cease of oil production makes U.S. go with proper food production.
We are not in a Utopian state of being;
because we are not trying to be.
Utopia comes from a general consensus care for one’s fellow man and woman where people are only men (not a black, white or yellow man) – and your Yacht would never be built as long as there is one child going hungry and/or one adult out in the cold.
Power, money and might makes right;
always has – and always will.
Dredd: I don’t think I’m blaming the victim, I am claiming the victim doesn’t really care that they are being victimized.
The typical person knows Congress is corrupt, that is why the percent that think Congress is doing a decent job is (at best) in the low teens.
Why they don’t care? I don’t know. I’m not blaming the victim at all, they have a right to their disregard. The best I can muster in reprobation is that collectively we suffer the consequences of our inattention because collectively we think other things are more worthy of our attention. Those on this blog (including me) are out of the mainstream, the mainstream is watching football, or the SyFy channel, or a DVD, or (like me) hammering away at some work problem.
Neither blame nor applause is intended, it is just my observation. People do not become politically involved until they are angry enough or distraught enough, and although some of us are angry or distraught, that is not yet the mindset of the typical American.
“Now a question, Are there any Altruistic Egalitarian Anarchists?”
Yes, there are 7,391,082 of them in my imaginary world. How many are in your imaginary world? I’m guessing none.
But then you are probably completely unaware of mutualists, voluntaryists, left-libertarians, c4ss, etc. and fundamental principles like zero-aggression.
What do you think anarchists are? Cops dressed in black chucking bricks through the window at McDonalds at anti-globalization protests?
Now a different question, Are there any Altruistic Egalitarian Politicians? In my imaginary world, I count less than 5. The rest are sociopaths although they play altruistic egalitarians on TV.
A more serious question might be, why would any actual altruistic egalitarian delegate his or her compassion for the downtrodden to politicians when there is a long record indicating complete political failure to minimize poverty. In fact, it seems the more politicians “care”, the more the wage/wealth gap widens as demonstrated dramatically in the past 50 years.
I would suggest that instead of wasting time, energy and money on trying to elect sociopathic actors to solve the problems you care so deeply about, that you put your efforts into solving these problems either as an individual or in small voluntary groups of like-minded people. (Note the word “voluntary” which is different from “mandatory” involvement in a group – that is government. Civil society and government are different things and that seems to be lost on those that cling to government in fear.)
The thing is that statists of the right or left should be free to place themselves under the control of violent and greedy sociopaths if they wish. My objection is that these statists refuse to let anyone opt out of their preferred way of life and ultimately the “caring” sociopaths they appoint to rule will kill you if you defy their system of authoritarian rule.
It is this insistence that others adhere to the preferences of the elite ruling class (and the voters who place them in power) through the use or threat of violence that makes the notions of altruism egalitarianism laughable.
Please quit caring so much about my welfare as I don’t care much for slavery, imprisonment and violence.
Tony C.
“We are expertly herded into fighting one 50/50 polarization after another, with each other, while the corporations quietly write and pass legislation that serves themselves at our expense:”
100% agree. Rove and Luntz are genius at their profession. Fox news and most all major media are co-conspirators. They have enough of Americans in the bag. Division is their tool and they are expert at it.
Dredd,
The principles and the premises are sound. The issue is that they are being co-opted due in no small part to lack of exercise. “Move it or lose it” doesn’t just apply to the gym. Like the disease model, the patient/victim’s own behavior can either positively or negatively affect the course of the illness. Causation can be but is not always blame.
Sorry, goofed up last comment. Here is corrected version.
Tony C. 1, September 15, 2013 at 1:08 pm
DavidBlueFish: “Do We the People control our Country, or does the Country (powers that be) control us.”
1) Yes we do, and
2) No we don’t.
…
So (1) we have control, and (2) we do not bother to control.
==============================
Are you sure you have not fallen prey to “Blame the victim”?
You assume a uniquely honest election system, when everything else political fails to be honest (The Elections of Pontius Pilots). You also assume that those who run for office are not puppets of “higher-ups” (Epigovernment: The New Model). Those premises you assert no longer appear to be sound.
Tony C. 1, September 15, 2013 at 1:08 pm
DavidBlueFish: “Do We the People control our Country, or does the Country (powers that be) control us.”
1) Yes we do, and
2) No we don’t.
…
So (1) we have control, and (2) we do not bother to control.
==============================
Are you sure you have not fallen prey to “Blame the victim”?
You assume a uniquely honest election system, when everything else political fails to be honest (The Elections of Pontius Pilots</a?). You also assume that those who run for office are not puppets of "higher-ups" (Epigovernment: The New Model). Those premises you assert no longer appear to be sound.
DavidBlueFish: “Do We the People control our Country, or does the Country (powers that be) control us.”
1) Yes we do, and
2) No we don’t.
(1) We the people have the ability to control our country if we want. Simple majority election exists throughout the country, if we were unified and insistent, we could change every Congressman within two years (their election cycle), we could change 2/3 of the Senate and the Presidency within four years, and every single Federal politician within six years. Also virtually every Mayor, councilman, police chief, governor, and State level Senator.
We the people possess control.
(2) But we do not exercise it, even though we could, so we have surrendered control, for no benefit or reason, to the corporations and sociopaths that see a benefit in exercising and usurping our control.
Why? I think people just don’t give a crap. They are busy with their lives, the issues do not seem to cause them any pain, and it isn’t worth disrupting their work life or entertainment to do anything about it.
In other words, there isn’t enough “pain” to motivate any but a small percent to give up several days of their leisure time every month or hundreds of their dollars every month to try to make things different. There is no unified agreement on some thing that “must be changed.” We are expertly herded into fighting one 50/50 polarization after another, with each other, while the corporations quietly write and pass legislation that serves themselves at our expense: But most of us don’t notice that because we are too angry about Global Warming or too distracted by Hollywood to notice it.
So (1) we have control, and (2) we do not bother to control.
@Tom Blanton,
“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.”
:o) That is an astute, accurate, and undeniable statement. I can’t help but to smile at its’ impact on me. …..
If the American (or world) Utopia was the rich getting richer while the 99 pay, I would say that the 1%ers are doing quite well. They are plowing planting, tending, their own worldly created Elysian fields. while using the 99 as fertilizer…. WTF?
I can interpret the above situation as the end product of true anarchy. The most powerful anarchists will join forces for their mutual benefit …… and will most likely end up with a world near exactly as it is today. ….or ten years from now!!!! :o)
Now a question, Are there any Altruistic Egalitarian Anarchists?
A dear online acquaint of mine (Horace Boothroyd III) – whom I often call Mr. III; inadvertently makes a case for me – that Democracy grows and goes. This story is about police shooting/killing a man who was rushing to bring them to a serious car wreck.
http://freakoutnation.com/2013/09/15/n-c-police-shoot-and-kill-unarmed-black-man-who-needed-help-after-a-serious-car-accident/?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=n-c-police-shoot-and-kill-unarmed-black-man-who-needed-help-after-a-serious-car-accident
Gene: Smaller campaigns cost less and the dilution effect would effectively destroy K Street’s stranglehold on lobby.
Yeah, that is another side-effect: For a given politician, their share of the available bribery dollars from lobbyists is reduced by a factor of 45. So we have seen bribes in the thousands, but every thousand becomes $20, is a politician going to risk taking a bribe for a handful of twenties?
Alternatively, would K Street be able to ramp up the bribery fund by a factor of 45?
I think not. I have seen some rough spreadsheet calculations looking at lobbying costs (for corporations) versus the ROI (return on lobbying investment) is something like 25 to 1 in tax favors. But if that is true, it stops being effective if the cost is multiplied by double digits. The bribes have to be compelling to the politicians, and that means (to me) at least in the low thousands. That might mean a half million in lobbying costs for the current Congress, but it would be in the tens of millions for a mega-Congress of 20,000 politicians.
Another issue with expansion is the Congressional payroll; currently on the order of $75M annually. That amounts to about 37.5 cents per year per adult. If we change nothing about pay and multiply the number of Congressmen by 45, the cost is $16.88 per year per adult; about 0.04% of the median income and hardly a burden for the benefits achieved.
Yet another benefit (IMO) which I alluded to earlier, would be the reduction in “respect” afforded Congressmen. A Congressman would serve about as many people as a city councilman, and I think prosecutors and police would afford them much less leeway in the law and “looking the other way” than they are afforded now; which would improve law enforcement and investigations, and would take away one of the major benefits that attract sociopaths to office.
That would feed into another proposal; under this new approach, I think that Presidential candidates should have to be chosen from Congressman that have served at least four terms. (With exceptions for the initial startup.) That would also help to thwart the sociopaths.
I would also mulitply the number of Senators per State. Similar to Turley’s proposal for a much larger Supreme Court, I would recommend 50 Senators per state.
Mike Spindell writes,
“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”
So I Thoreuishly ask, “Do We the People control our Country, or does the Country (powers that be) control us.”
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/power-principle/
This Blog – and others like it (including all beginners) – are in peril.
Be careful what they name it and how they serve it up. Shield Laws are out to get you!
Anonymously Yours;
If we don’t stop propaganda machines like Clear Channel, from assaulting the elections in 2014; and take back Congress. The only cooperation we are likely to see of Congress – is that of rubber stamping a Chris Christie or Jeb Bush.
Lasseehaas,
Sometimes life has many ironies…some funny some not… Most are antidotal….
You mean the office of president needs to work with congress….. Really, I haven’t seen it in a long time….
I’m sure most have heard of General Alexander who spent our taxpayer money to make is “war room” at the “Information Dominance Center” like the Starship Enterprise:
(Guardian, “Inside the minde of NSA Commander”). Gives new meaning to “spaced out” doesn’t it?