allende day

"make the economy scream" richard nixon on the cia's approach to salavdor allende's presidency in chile___________________________chalmers johnson says we will debase our society with empire and the societies of all those we try to police...certainly the will to empire remains but as the means to empire ( and the philosophical double-think involved )become more complex and costly the hegemonic culture will debase both the national currency and what little remains of the national ethos to pay for it...and to what end one wonders? to deny that we all benefit form empire would be self deceit..to deny the stain it leaves is equally a function of denial...being an anthropogenic structure it will fail at some point and the old saw about bumping into the people you met on the way up while you're on the way back down is particularly appropriate for empire and its assorted "unfortunate" actions and their collateral damage...the allende coup is a case in point...the apparent "losers" never completely disappear no matter how hard the seeming "winners" wish it or try to implement it ( wolfgang shivelbush's book " the culture of defeat" is instructive in this and you can see the mechanics of it in action in the southern tier of states in this seat of empire )...the current president of chile, michelle bachelet, is the daughter of an air force general who remained loyal to allende and was killed by pinochet and his generals...she does not appear to believe in "an eye for an eye", but there are doubtlessly millions who do...joseph stalin was a tsar who said, " one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic", relying on humans' difficulty in processing large numbers as a vehicle to avoid being cast as the mass murderer he surely was...what old joe failed to realize is that statistic that equaled a million deaths also equaled a million tragedies that, once responsibility was established, human nature wasn't going to let go of ...imperial behavior is not without responsibility or harm to others and you may not always be able to divine or control their response...i would suggest a fundamental rethinking of who we are and where we would want to go is in order...but no one will listen...jihaddi is the new commie...a useful tool in leveraging fear and acquiescence in the imperium.

a matter of timing

“the sailor, officially a stenographer, had been copying nsc documents and kissinger’s memos for ten months, making an extra copy of everything that went into the Xerox machine, working at night and searching burn bags…after Kissinger returned to Islamabad, Radford, went through his room and his briefcases taking notes…” “Kissinger figured the president was drinking too much, not so unusual when rebozo was around.” President Nixon: alone in the white house. richard reeves ________________________________________________________________ ________ august 8, 1974 was a thursday as I recall…summer work in the steel mills had drawn to a close and there were several weeks left before the fall semester started so we decided to go camping…in colorado…we left hobart at about eight in the morning and drove straight through to denver, arriving there at about two a.m. on friday the ninth…this would have put us somewhere in the endless wastes of nebraska when tricky dick took to the national airwaves to bid the presidency farewell…we caught a few hours of sleep in the car after we got to denver and when the sun came up we stopped to buy a couple of cases of coors and headed southwest out of denver towards woodland park and the mountain backwoods…we pitched camp by a creek and settled back to watch mule deer and get thoroughly buzzed…high as kites on mountain air…next day we were joined by a couple of friends ( bill and frank to be specific ) who had driven out in a decrepit fiat and were delayed by numerous mechanical woes but had soldiered on to the mountains...their arrival doubled the exhilaration delivered by the alpine climate and we lazed the next few days away hiking in the mountains, swimming in icy streams, swatting horse flies, and digging out ticks…70s style camping at its very best…the weekend evolved into a new week and by Tuesday thoughts of heading home intruded ( some of us had real world jobs )…bill and I headed into woodland park to find an auto parts store to purchase parts for a desperately needed tune-up for the fiat ( the primitive automobiles we drove forty years ago had such exotic parts as distributor caps, rotors, points, and condensers…all swept into the dustbin of automotive terminology by the advent of the computer and a systems deepening so complex that I believe you’d have to take the engine out of my pick-up to change spark plugs…it was a simpler time when you listened to an engine to diagnose a problem rather than paying ninety bucks to hook it up to a diagnostic computer…complexity equates to progress in the consumerist utopia )…it was around noon when we wandered into the parts store and pissed the clerk off by interrupting his lunch…bill rattled off a list of necessities and the grumbling counterman stomped off to gather the goods…the small black and white television ( electronic media were as primitive as the autos…if you look closely enough at photos of the era you can just make out the shadows of the dinosaurs that gave us so much trouble then ) was tuned to the “news at noon” which was on hiatus for a few commercials ( some things never change )…when the local news anchor returned he led the segment off by announcing that “president ford” would be holding a “televised” news conference that evening…startled bill and I looked at one another and I asked “wasn’t Nixon president when we left?”…in some suspense we waited for the clerk to return and when he did bill and I both said at the same time, “what happened to Nixon?”…the clerk affixed us with a look of combined pity and loathing he must have used when confronted by morons or strangers who were obviously deranged and said, “that fucker quit”…this ignited ( literally ) a celebration when we returned to the car and we celebrated all the way back to camp…which induced some forgetfulness as to the cause of the celebratory binge...the amnesia was temporary however, and when we recalled and recounted the news to the others it reignited ( again , literally) the celebration…content we retired to the tent and initiated repairs on the fiat in the morning, leaving to return home by around nine…the trip home took us through nebraska in daylight with a remarkable train of events at a truck stop outside lincoln…that is another president however…and a completely different story.

charlie's got your number jim

"complaints are everywhere heard from our most considerate and virtuous citizens, equally the friends of public and private faith and of public and personal liberty, that our governments are too unstable. that the public good is is disregarded in the conflicts of rival parties, and that measures are too often decided, not according to the rules of justice and the rights of the minor party, but by the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority." federalist X (madison ) _______________________________"this maintenance of the legal basis aims at asserting minority interest as if they were the predominant interests...it aims at retaining legislators who are concerned only with their particular interests; it seeks to misuse political power in order forcibly to place the interests of a minority above the interests of the majority." karl marx from his defense speech at his 1849 trial _____________________________________ sixty-one years later and charlie provides insight into the thinking of the vanguard of the political operatives who were struggling to create a "more perfect union" because the sort of "public and personal liberty" that the jeffersoinian declaration of independence had brought into being was spawning movements that were inimical to the interests of the elite and were in serious danger of exposing those interests as anything but "predominant" in the new republic...shay's rebellion displeased madison while it scared the living shit out of hamilton and moved him into an even more reactionary stance that even abigail adams found distasteful...have a leisurely but close perusal of the federalist papers and you will find hamilton is the only one of the three authors who cites shay's rebellion by name...the others simply referred to it euphemistically as something like "the recent unpleasantness in massachucetts"...as if calling it by its popular ( and now historical ) name would lend credence to the idea that the new hegemons' interests might not be in the best interest of the public at large ( that "overbearing majority"...in 1787 madison is already putting paid to the concept of majority rule...jefferson's vision snuffed out in the cradle...much like lennin croaked it in russia in 1917...hegemons are cut from the same cloth historically speaking )...the vanguard never has much use for "the herd"...an unwashed rabble with barely a brain amongst them...only useful fools and a vast pool of consumers...readily mislead and manipulated by desire and emotional appeals...they are missing a central point i think but i am not going to try to enlighten them...the center has had a fair run since 1789...it's gone from a collection of imperial wannbes wearing their desires on their sleeves by garnishing the capitol with neo-classical kitsch architecture to an actual imperial machine that has taken what it wanted since 1945...but entropy is catching up to it...as the system becomes more and more complex to try to deflect and deter real and perceived threats ( how much money does the nsa really cost? what's the real budget..come on...you guys read this blog...give us a ballpark figure we can run with ) the law of diminishing returns is kicking in..pretty soon all that complexity is going to simply cost too much and coercive efforts to collect ever rising taxes are going to have the periphery looking for a better deal...eventual collapse into a simpler form of extortion is fairly inevitable..the cascade failure will see to that...politics in this country have grown so unbearably rank and out of touch with reality ( someone should seriously whack the tea party over their collective heads to get their limited attention and try to explain as simply as possible that you cannot have empire and small government...one or the other morons...both are impossible ) that it is not really possible to take it seriously...it's a circus and the menagerie in whoretown is only going to get more out of control..it can be entertaining at times but as a steady diet it's a lot like having yahoo as your home page...to damned busy...no room for quiet thought...which may be what they want...but who cares what they want? the object is to expose the enter as the irrelevancy it is and get to work on building a culture and a community that will help us crawl out form under the rubble of the late republic's collapse and help one another...that is as inimical to the interests of the elite as you can get.

princip day

it's one hundred years to the day that gavrilo shot franz and sophie as they rode through the streets of sarajevo...it was a sunday and th elast day of their visit to the imperial outpost...sophie went along because she could be photographed with her husband there...franz had married nobility ( sophie was a countess ) but he hadn't married a princess or a grand duchess..so when they were in vienna the rigid court protocol required sophie to stand behind the princesses and grad duchesses of the court...so no photographs of the couple in public in vienna...sophie was freer away from the imperial center and so she died with her husband...gavrilo was a bosnian serb nationalist so his memory there is somewhat clouded by more recent events...he was the catalyst, not the cause of the first world war which resulted in, among billions of other things...the french and brits drawing abstract and artificial borders in the "middle east" after the war to ease their administrative burdens while creating an ethnic and religious tragedy that still plays on today in seemingly endless conflict...the bolshevik revolution which beget stalin and a teleological bureaucracy that took on a life of its own embedded in a secular religion in which parentage was ( and still is in all secular religions ) original sin, poison gas, tanks, fighter aircraft, massive artillery...and on and on...the armistice, the treaty of versailles the "stab in the back" and, along with the poison gas business, hitler...an entry of the u s into the wider world of imperialism in which we had been mere dilettantes before the war flouncing around cuba and the phillipines ( look at us now! )...eerie to be able to pinpoint an historical catalyst so precisely...causation is non-linear...this gave it focus momentarily before it caromed off into history...but not before franz and sophie's driver turned down the wrong street and stopped to back up giving gavrilo his perfect moment.

there are elections and then there are elections

just got home from some after work events...including discharging my civic duty...yep...election day...and the most useless and patently foul abuse of "the people's will" since the federalist papers or the seventeenth communist party congress in 1934...only three delegates crossed off kirov's name on the ballot but stalin won the election and somewhere over a thousand of the delegates were arrested during the following purges and many just plain disappeared...kirov was assassinated by some stalinist patsy and that left only trotsky to clean up...stalin's boys acted quickly to cover up the embarassing defeat and the covert party revolt was ruthlessly crushed...lake county doesn't need the nkvd or yagoda or beria to keepa lid on dissent...the party has less violent methods here...in two pages of ballot in the democratic ( oh please! ) primary i believe i saw three races in which the candidate was not running unopposed ( pete visclosky for instance was the only name on the ballot for district representative...my vote...or abstention for that matter...reduced to farce )...even stalin had kirov's name on the ballot for form's sake...and i have to wonder if that damned ass hamilton would have disapproved of any of it.

guardians of the law

"people may act as they think proper in their elections, and they still will do so. lawyers and merchants are generally their choice...lawyers have a keenness and a fondness for disputation. wrangling is their business. but long practice in supporting any cause that offers has obliterated regard to right and wrong. the question only is, which is my side?...o candor and integrity ...where are ye to be found? seldom in professional men." wilian maclay's journal of the first congress. 5 june 1789__________________________of the five hundred and thirty-five voting members of the current congress one hundred and seventy-three are lawyers...that's just under a third...over half are millionaires ( one presumes this excludes campaign funds ) this explains much and maclay provides a solid line of evidence that wealth and law were bedfellows from the start..."i fear we shall follow on nor cease until we have reached ...all the frivolities, fopperies, and expense practiced in european governments. i grieve to think that many individuals among us are aiming at these objects with unceasing diligence." hamilton's vision lives on.

420

it's april twentieth...the obscure formula that pinpoints the easter holiday on the secular calendar is ignorant of human affairs and so the holy day falls on marijuana day...which, since it is a later manifestation of the linear timeline imposed by the enlightenment and historians ( and cheapjack novelists as well )that falls on hitler's birthday...so many competing religions...secular and spiritual ( although let us not lose sight of the fact that hitler was profoundly catholic )...so which do we choose? the holy carpenter? the tao of the stoned hipster? a deep draught form a cup of intolerance? none of the m have it right...and each is as limiting in its own fashion...reefer? done that and found it lacking...never a favorite of mine and abandoned with youth...slow and stupid...perhaps not as slow and stupid as i found myself with other substances...but the same general effect...i am done with them all...racism? slow , stupid, and self-limiting...a blinkered and a jaundiced view of a diverse world...hitler was wrong...all fundamentalists are wrong...all fundamentalists are teleological and intolerant of criticism of the utopia..a secular religion of evil..or a spiritual one for that matter...witch trials, heretics, inquisitions, conquistadors, settlers, divine right...the theologian and the executioner have long been bedfellows...they tolerate and support one another...no thanks...organized belief is just that ...organized...for someone's agenda...i find none of it believable...they all have it wrong...a multiplicity of theocracies to choose from...i won't abide a missionary...if you come to convert me come armed...there will be resistance.