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: The majority rules and who are you to say they didn’t choose the correct politicians?
I can disagree with the majority, I am an equal member of society. There just is no way to organize society without rules, and there is no way to make the rules fairly other than majority rule of some form, because minority rule is a dictatorship. I can think the majority is stupid but still endorse majority rule.
As for the current state of affairs, I think it is de facto minority rule, by the rich, and therefore a dictatorship. But the majority is submitting to it because the rich make them reasonably comfortable, so that’s it.
Anarchy is not an alternative, the violent criminals I have seen in prison (I consulted for one) and the violent criminals I have seen on trial are real people, not some fevered fantasy, and without law they would kill you in your sleep for a few hundred bucks.
I presume you are just naive. Or maybe the psychopath I worry about is you. What laws do you wish to break, Tom? How, precisely, do you wish to endanger others? Or is it just some unrelenting selfishness that you feel?
Yo Tony C,
The myriad crimes that have not occurred were because of the tooth fairy. Just keep in mind that America has the largest prison population in the world and the highest incarceration rate – all to put your mind at rest for personal safety. Personally, I don’t have any fantasies about winning fights with bad guys. Unlike some people, I don’t fret over imaginary hobgoblins that might attack me.
As your beloved government leaves a trail of death, destruction and misery around the globe, I hope you feel all warm, snuggly and safe. Anyway, what are you bitching about anyway? So what if the elite are robbing you? Just think about how safe and secure they have made your wonderful life in this magical democracy. You don’t expect them to provide you with total security from womb to tomb at no cost, do you?
It’s the bed you made, sleep in it. There were votes cast, politicians elected, and the will of the people is being carried out. The majority rules and who are you to say they didn’t choose the correct politicians? Just keep telling yourself that everything has been agreed upon by the majority. It’s your country, right or wrong, right Tony boy. Also remember, it is your fantasy that requires thugs with guns and prisons and bombs. Live with it. Maybe the psychopath you worry about is the guy you see in the mirror or the clown you voted for.
Tom: If you had taken the time to click on my real name,
You mean wasted the time. I’m glad I didn’t.
Tom says: I just wish that you wouldn’t rely on the violence of government to force me to adopt your preferences.
I do not do that. I rely on government to enforce the rights of all the people, as agreed upon by the majority, even against me should I violate them. I do not want the government to enforce MY preferences, I want the government to enforce the consensus of the people.
Tom says: I know you quiver in fear that someone will hurt you,
No, not at all. I can take care of myself. My mother, not so much, my mentally disabled nephew, not at all, and I can’t be standing beside them every waking hour to protect them.
Tom says: The tooth fairy offers as much protection.
I don’t think so, the tooth fairy doesn’t keep a million psychopathic violent criminals in jail; the government does that. You can cherry pick failings of the government to protect people, but of course you are just an idiot blind to the myriad crimes that have not occurred because a million psychopathic violent criminals are in prison.
And an adolescently stalled fool for believing in the reality of your fantasy that in a fight with them you will always prevail, the conquering hero.
Tom Blanton. I thought that name rang a bell. Are you related to this
Tom Blanton?
The fantastic Tony C opines:
“Is “reading” your only option? How about “writing”? Are you incapable of independent research?”
Yo, Tony C, you don’t know me. If you had taken the time to click on my real name, you would see a little website where I simply aggregate articles continually that are geared toward destroying the legitimacy of the state. My goal is to deligitimize the state and persuade others to withdraw their consent to be governed.
When you vote, you legitimize the system and give your consent to be governed. Most statists like yourself, who are perfectly willing to shove a gun in my face to force your agenda on me, claim that one has no right to complain if one doesn’t vote.
Not true. Those that vote have no right to complain because you agreed to comply with the winner’s program when you decided to play the little game.
I don’t write so much anymore because after doing so for many years, I grew tired of saying the same damn thing over and over in different ways.
Frankly, I truly don’t care what your preferences are. I just wish that you wouldn’t rely on the violence of government to force me to adopt your preferences. After all, it’s not like I want anything from you or of you other than to simply be left alone to engage in voluntary activities that don’t hurt others.
I know you quiver in fear that someone will hurt you, so you require government to protect you form the bad people. Wake up and smell the fear mongering. As demonstrated in the Navy Yard shootings, the government’s military can’t even protect itself despite the citizen disarmament laws in DC, high security screening to enter the Navy Yard facility, and being armed to the hilt. The tooth fairy offers as much protection.
Tom Blanton 1, September 16, 2013 at 10:57 pm
“If it mattered to people, they would at least vote.” [Tony C]
Let’s see now, I can vote for a police state, a surveillance state, a warfare state, a welfare state, and a corporatist/fascist state run by a narcissistic sociopath, OR I can vote for a police state, a surveillance state, a warfare state, a welfare state, and a corporatist/fascist state run by a narcissistic sociopath.
Gosh, I better get involved, read everything I can find on who the candidates claim to be and what they claim to stand for, and vote! I surely wouldn’t want to vote for the wrong person.
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Well said.
Tony C is in deep denial, heavily conflicted, and short circuiting as a result.
He thinks idealistically that American politics is a cure, not realizing that it is the disease that is twerking his head zone:
(Science Confirms: Politics Wrecks Your Ability to Do Math). It was Joseph Stalin, who loved the election religion, who said “The voters decide nothing, those who count the votes decide everything.”
He always got elected.
Enhancement,… (I think)
“When ones soles are” firmly……..
Tom: Or get involved and run for office. Or get involved and expose corruption.
Is “reading” your only option? How about “writing”? Are you incapable of independent research? Can you seek out actual people that have worked with (or been screwed by) the candidate?
No, don’t tell me, you don’t have the time for that. Which is another way of saying, you aren’t willing to make the sacrifice of the time and money it would take, which is another way of saying you’d rather live in “a police state, a surveillance state, a warfare state, a welfare state, and a corporatist/fascist state run by a narcissistic sociopath” than be bothered getting involved in how the country is run; that sacrifice isn’t worth it to you.
But I am not condemning your choices, Tom, it has not been worth it to me either, or to the vast majority of people.
What follows here is systems analysis: The narcissistic sociopaths win because the vast majority of us will not risk the financial and job security we already have on a relatively small chance to make a relatively small difference.
This is, in the political sense, another form of market failure; because the elections are winner take all and personally expensive to win. The market fails us here because the rewards are not incremental: A little involvement does not produce a little win, a little more involvement does not produce more of a win. A job has the potential of incremental rewards; work a little harder, learn a little more, and you are a little more valuable and get rewarded. Develop skill and expertise in an area, and become even more valuable.
Politics isn’t usually like that, it is more of a personality contest, and because there is one winner and all opponents lose 100% (basically) of their investment of time and money, it doesn’t attract new contestants unless they think they have a very good chance of winning (narcissistic sociopaths can have that kind of delusional self-certainty), or really nothing to lose — like multimillionaires with time on their hands and friends that can donate five and six figures in seed funding and laugh off any losses as a fun try (people like GW Bush, Romney, Bloomberg).
One solution to that is the much smaller district I mentioned before, but I know that is unlikely to happen in my lifetime. The alternative is, unfortunately, to wait until a lot more people have nothing to lose by getting involved in politics, which isn’t going to be because they are rich, but because of our collective complacency and our collective refusal to make any significant sacrifice or risk, we are once again collectively ambushed by the narcissistic sociopaths that steal all the money and leave most of us with nothing left to lose.
When one is firmly enfirmed in the firmament there is no reason to dance, nor danger of happy feet. **
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnksquL557s
** It was an intense struggle for me, not to put a smiley there **
** or there **
** or there… … … I give up!! :o)
“If it mattered to people, they would at least vote.”
Let’s see now, I can vote for a police state, a surveillance state, a warfare state, a welfare state, and a corporatist/fascist state run by a narcissistic sociopath, OR I can vote for a police state, a surveillance state, a warfare state, a welfare state, and a corporatist/fascist state run by a narcissistic sociopath.
Gosh, I better get involved, read everything I can find on who the candidates claim to be and what they claim to stand for, and vote! I surely wouldn’t want to vote for the wrong person.
davidbluefish;
It is a shame that the reality is so full of irony.
Be that as it may – I wish it twir’nt so!
For the pain others & I’ve suffered of such;
makes it much more harder for me to grin – as ye can.
Tony C. 1, September 16, 2013 at 7:05 pm
Dredd … If it mattered to people, they would at least vote …
================================
Yep.
It.
Bow down to it. ….
…. anyway ….
Hey science guy … are votes the DNA that the Really Big Stuff is composed of? … like genes and “mike row waves” and oriental spy mistakes?
Anyway, send my love to the Queen bloke.
Dredd: And the fact that you don’t understand 99.999999% of psychology is apparently irrelevant to you.
If it mattered to people, they would at least vote. On balance, they do not. If it mattered to people, they would at least know something about the politicians that are victimizing them. On balance, they do not even know their names. I could go on, but as always with you, there is little point, you don’t care if you are right or wrong, you just want to hear yourself talk. Yammer away, dufus.
Tony C. 1, September 16, 2013 at 4:02 pm
…
I did not claim they aren’t victims, I said they don’t care.
…
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Yep.
And that you lost 99.999999% of the universe in so doing is irrelevant to you.
I get it.
Dredd: Do you have a point, or are you just being stupidly dense?
I did not claim they aren’t victims, I said they don’t care. It is like being overcharged and paying the bill because you don’t feel the difference is worth your time to make a correction.
They are victims. Politicians are letting corporations steal their money. They just don’t care enough to do anything about it. if they don’t care enough to do anything about it, because they don’t want to give up football or America Gots Talent or whatever, that includes not caring enough to bother with finding a way to free themselves from their victimization.
I am not denying victimization. I am claiming they are too apathetic about their victimization to bother ending it.
Tony C. 1, September 16, 2013 at 12:32 pm
Dredd: I can’t figure out what you mean by me being “correct,” I doubt the victimized will find anyway to become free from their victimizers if they don’t really give a crap about their victimization.
…
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Yep.
That is why there really wasn’t a holocaust, it was a who-gives-a-crap-ocaust.
“Those who made victims of them were doing it to give them a chance to not be victims.”
“We had to destroy the village in order to save it” comes to mind.
So, let’s tie this into the Mike S theme (being a political cynic) of the instant post, by looking at the dictionary as Gene H would be prone to do:
(Dictionary, emphasis added). I suppose you know, in that context, that consent (in legal terminology) is something that only competent adults can give.
In addition to that, no person can consent to be sacrificed to a god God, gods, or Gods –at least while competent secular civilization is in existence.
The same goes for animals.
I therefore question your standard or basis for indicting victims (“they don’t really give a crap”).
It does not fit in the context of “if they had really given a crap” there would have been no coup, no mass murder, no plundering of their wealth, no sinking of the Titanic, no robbing of the bank, and the like.
The ceremony which sacrifices willing
citizensvictims and their pets would piously flow something like this:To the contrary, when one of the players questions the sacrificial lamb thingy, it would go like this:
(War is the Highway 61 of the 1%). Which usually leads to:
(ibid). Either way, Sarah and her pet are going down without their “consent.”
A child cannot “consent” to being abused.
In civil societies no person can “consent” to becoming a victim.
When politicians rig a system to victimize the populace the populace cannot be blamed for the crime of those oppressors.
They may afterward suffer Stockholm Syndrome and begin to take up for/advocate for their oppressors, but, legally speaking, that is of no consequence because those who did the wrong to the victims are still culpable.
Dredd: I can’t figure out what you mean by me being “correct,” I doubt the victimized will find anyway to become free from their victimizers if they don’t really give a crap about their victimization.
The other reason I doubt it will happen is that hundreds of millions of adults for many decades since the Industrial Revolution have been victimized, and their solutions to the more extreme forms of victimization are embedded in the current culture; in the form of unions, OSHA laws, civil rights laws, sexual harassment laws, child labor laws, minimum wage laws, food and product safety laws, anti-discrimination laws and so on.
Which means the victimizations that remain standing are the tough nuts to crack, pretty much all the easy-to-stop victimizations (except perhaps equal pay for equal work) have been knocked over. If they haven’t been addressed in the last hundred years, I doubt they will be addressed anytime soon. It would take a generational crisis to pave the way for such changes, like the Civil War, or Great Depression or World War II. Some game changer, something that requires the majority of citizens to suffer significant hardship and permanently change their way of life, so I don’t think 9/11 qualifies.
A discussion of foreign policy at a D.C. costume party.
On the origin of political parties (a.k.a. secular light) and how they crossed the pond:
Gene H. 1, September 15, 2013 at 1:40 pm
Dredd,
The principles and the premises are sound.
…
=======================
Issues are joined.