A Danse de Corde

An Elaboration in Four Parts

Photo by Steve Weir

PART ONE

We’re having North County Red and a couple of platters of crab cakes at Tognazzini’s Dockside Too, Bill Hedda and Tom Solly and his wife, Teresa, and Tom has been saying that “voting this time is bullshit. Neither of them” he went on to say,” is gonna twitch a sphincter till the Israel Lobby says squat,”  

Taking his wallet out of his hip pocket and slapping it with a Whomp on the table, “Damn Right,” Bill agrees, “and what the fuck ever happened to the Washington consensus?”

I hadn’t thought of it before, but I realized I hadn’t heard any reference to the Washington consensus in months, maybe longer.  I’m not sure I ever knew for sure what it was, what it amounted to with any kind of clarity:  people from the State Department, life-time careerists, Pentagon officials, media people, and like that,  –“influencers.” 

…a relatively self-perpetuating group of dedicated foreign affairs professionals, a cohort whose outer fringe is always in flux, but the principals, tenured within intra-agency organizations that almost accidentally,  but eventually, came to be known as the Deep State; people like a then much younger State Department Cyber Communications Portfolio, Mike Benz, for example, who had enough personal clout to play a decisive role in the formation of US Foreign policy and, as I guessed without thinking much about it, when contingencies require, people like Benz also may act on the de facto domestic policy as well.

But I wasn’t sure. That’s always blurry. Much of that belongs to the States.

De Facto, though, because as Benz explains, the United States has no formal domestic policy.

No domestic policy means No Domestic Policy.

That’s not good news. No official domestic equivalent to a national foreign policy, goes a long way toward telling us why so many things we, the people, care about, turn out to be things that don’t get cared for.   

No abiding national guide-lines, no consistent overview of issues of domestic concern  -those issues, in other words, that are the most important to most everyone -health care, income stability, public safety, public infrastructure, the flailing irrelevance some well-meaning people still call education and, worst beyond all reasonable belief, our government’s shamelessly irresponsible denial of the infinite fragilities of our enveloping environment  -its deepening vulnerability, its multiplying threats and needless, horrifying, and heart breaking tragedy. 

As I write, Wednesday evening, Oct 2, 2024, mountain communities of Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia are being inundated, storm battered beyond devastation, many whole townships swept away by Hurricane Helena’s torrential rains, threatening hundreds of dams, destroying bridges, miles of backcountry roads and highway. rivers everywhere overflowing with twenty foot surges, massive mudslides carrying away vehicles of every size including 18 wheelers; out-buildings, homes, entire farm complexes and, most tragically at the time I write, bodies everywhere, on roadsides, river banks,  half buried in mud slides, bodies even in tree tops: hundreds dead and hundreds more separated or missing and the smallest of children wandering helplessly looking for parents who are who knows where.

And so far, at this time of writing, the only assistance seems to be privately organized Go-Fund Me campaigns; the dozens of helicopters carrying food in and survivors out are all privately owned, so too cars and trucks and buses privately owned, and volunteers are asking “Where’s FEMA?,”  “Where’s Kamala?”

No domestic Policy means No Domestic Policy. 

So it’s first into the Foreign Policy Pot, for your tax dollars and mine.. 

To you and I, that not only means 30 Billion, in compliant regularity, to pathologically homicidal Israel, a bit less to a hopelessly lost and collapsing Ukraine; Taiwan most likely, or some place in Africa and another in South East Asia and dozens more around the globe, people and places most of us have never heard of. 

For all its minor tributaries,  -call them tangents if you like-  since WWII, America’s Foreign Policy comes down to one very basic two-horned theme: Far Away Wars of Conquest and Economic Control.

For which again and again: belabored justifications, inventions and lies, but there’s one true fact every one of us knows:

Close to eighty years of blowing things up and killing people, not a single war ever won, probably all unnecessary; countries on every continent devastated, much of shocked, innocent Iraq, for example, reduced to rubble and cinders, billions needlessly spent, our kids killed and maimed, blinded, traumatized, and the things you and I value, ignored and neglected.

Their kids slaughtered like cattle, by the thousands.

And people everywhere on the planet dreaming of peace on earth and good will to all.  

They too are insulted and ignored.

So how about a real-time possibility of peace, and maybe even a gesture of good will on the part of the Leader of the Free World?   

Gideon Levy writes that in their indifference his Israeli neighbors have lost their humanity.

Some other people as well..  

Looking at the evidence  -neglect, and resigned impotence; our most generous inclination can only be to conclude that such professional parasitics as Biden and Harris and Blinken don’t give a damn about peace or good will  

-here in these sadly fissured states or anywhere..

It is absurd to believe that with all of our government’s advanced technology, ISR, Homeland Security, the keepers of the Executive Offices of our Government, and FEMA most importantly, could not have got on in and evacuated the hundreds of now needlessly dead victims of Hurricane Helena and its sprawling devastation.

It is a fool’s pastime to imagine that the leadership of Homeland Security have the creativity to think that Homeland security might actually mean "Homeland Security."

Considering the last several decades of professional performance, 

Foreign Policy comes first.

Who among us would go so far as to say that our managers care anything at all about peace or good will here in these discordant states, or anywhere else?

What they care about, what they want, is uncritical acceptance of their propaganda and blind acquiescence to their self-aggrandizement. 

What our present controllers want from you and I, is nothing less than smiling silence, unquestioned acceptance, oblivious acquiescence and compliance.

Best move for many of us is to retreat into our daily pretentions. 

But not quite everyone.

And that takes us to the root of their desperate demonization of social media, independent journalism and their clumsily inept misconstruction of the First Amendment. Why?

And why do guys like Bill say “This government doesn’t give a shit about me.” ?

What does the government give a shit about? 

Farms are drying up. Fisheries are collapsing, thousands of small businesses closing. And, mysteriously, life expectancy shrinking. Why?

Inquiries are made, public hearings held, studies done; laws passed, over the years of course; and of course, 

...modified, revised, reversed, written out, written off, rewritten; all as the latest obsession moves the administrative magistracy; and always ad hoc, because “no domestic policy” means No Domestic Policy.

Foreign Policy comes first.

“Governments,” Thomas Jefferson wrote, “are instituted among men in order to secure certain inalienable rights, among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

If that isn’t one helluva good run in the direction of a national domestic policy, what is? 

Donald Trump?  Kamala Harris?

Never Happen, G.I.

PART TWO

Coming to grips, you and I, with what Jefferson and his companions actually meant by those words. -what they understood of the possibility of life, liberty, and happiness and, moreover, thinking out what you and I should do to secure our personal, private, individual pursuit of happiness -that’s a project you and I can do well to look into.

But the Declaration isn’t the Constitution; It isn’t a body of law; It’s a declaration; we should say, a Declaration of State.

Which is to say that it’s much, much more than a policy: it’s an articulation of an essentially defining principle, -  Our raison d’état.

Jefferson’s document was written to spell out the essence of our national identity, our basic reason for being. 

Not to be confused with law, and it’s not binding. 

So, on Monday it’s an exemplum of the spirit of the Nation, those principles from which all policies flow, and on Tuesday, we ignore it.

But imagine this: imagine that a handful of sincerely honest law-makers took the Declaration seriously.

Pretend, if you dare, that they believe you and I really are those people whom the Declaration says we are.

Then you might see the paragraph below published as the amendment i’d have it  be:

“It is the policy of the United States of America, that every resident, permanent or temporary, will have or be provided, sufficient nutritious food and comfortably safe shelter for the duration of their life in these United States, and that every such resident will receive the medical assistance his or her health requires.”

Don’t spend so much on bullets and bombs -killing people who don’t want to be killed.

Most of them have done nothing to you.

Save a nickel for the folks at home.

Save another for your neighbor’s grandkids.

But of course, given a population of 340+ million, I have no doubt one can call out a few million deep thinkers to testify before god and his angelic host, that such absurdly outrageous nonsense as my imagined amendment is nothing less than the fever dream of a latter-day berzerker apostle of Lenin and Stalin and Hitler.

Maybe we should be thinking about reconsidering the aims of education.

Maybe feed-lot job-training doesn’t prepare anyone for the pursuit of happiness or a more perfect union.

Nor, even, decently humane behavior.

How many kids go to bed hungry in the US every night? 

What is the suicide rate among American veterans of our forever wars?

The United Nations, a few progressive countries, and at least a dozen public interest organizations compile “Quality of Life” indexes.  

Out of, roughly, 145 to over 190 responder nations, the United States rarely rises to the top and sometimes has been among the lower half.  

As things are now, every domestic issue  -no matter how critically urgent- must always wait upon Foreign Policy prerogatives.

No wonder why guys like Bill say “This country doesn’t give a shit about me.”

I’m suggesting that something close to the diametric opposite of how things actually are, should be what actually is. 

But as things are now- Foreign Policy comes first.

The guy across the street thinks that the threat of social turmoil that such hysterics as the McClatchy publications ascribe to Michigan Students for a Fee Palestine,  and yes, even Tree People, are of course, local matters, obviously locally rooted, which is to say-matters of genuine domestic importance.  

But hang on a moment.  For you know it’s to be expected that survivalist “home defense training platoons,” bivouacking on the sands of the San Diego Coast, do tend to elevate all of us dissenters up, over, and across the threshold of National Security significance.

Anyone who says “No” or “Maybe,” instead of “Yes Boss.” may be a threat to democracy.  a person of interest.

Or, could it be that for-profit media, mainstream news and commentary, are, a priori, dedicated professional alarmists?

Take part in a gathering celebrating the recent freedom of Julian Assange, and the LA Times will transform you too into a person of interest. 

PART THREE

But if, in order to more perfectly control the South China Sea and, needing public support for another Eisenhower Class Aircraft Carrier, (cost, $5.3 billion 1990 dollars, -and about a million bucks a day to operate), both the Global Engagement  Center and the Center for an Informed Public might be helpful. 

The Center for an Informed Public?

Like the Electronic Integrity Partnership, of whom you may have heard nothing before this, those are organizations made up of both government and public participants. 

Men and women from universities, think tanks, industry, finance and, what was once called “white shoe Law” -the legal support and persuasion system, in other words, of conspiratorial America.

They hint in the direction of what has increasingly come to be called the Deep State.

Their carefully crafted names point to Foreign Policy Persuasion.

Propaganda, by another name.        

Such ambiguously coiffed entities represent ever-shifting alliances, blurring the distinctions between what’s domestic and what’s national and, between government and for-profit enterprises.  

Largely organized under the ever more elastic umbrella of Homeland Security with play-fellows from the Departments of State, Justice, Commerce, the FBI, the CIA and, of course, the Pentagon, they too bespeak the identity of the Deep State.

The business of purchasing aircraft carriers, thought essential to the business of war fighting, is most assuredly among the Number One Foreign Policy Priorities of our national budget.

Snooping on the Proud Boys, or your neighborhood Fair Play for Cuba club, belongs, at least for starters, in the kit bags of a few specialists from Homeland Security.

Even though local Patriots may be training with live ammunition in the hills south west of Frazier Park or on the slopes above New Cuyama, China is ranked higher in national security urgency because, self-evidentially- China’s much more conceptually threatening.

However, it must also be said that it seems equally likely, because white supremacy exists in administrative corridors as well as rural convenience centers, more Black Panthers have been killed than Proud Boys.  

Where, in fact, are the demonstrably verifiable threats to our continuing democracy?

Perhaps, dare we say it, in the aspirations of those anxiety ridden democrats for whom the First Amendment is an obstacle to efficient governance.

So, at any rate, there are varieties of “relative weights value” in the quality index of perceived national security threat. 

Some threats are understood to be more threatening than others. 

Even if they’re not.

Even if they don’t really exist.

It’s intriguing, at the least, to recognize that China, a reliable trading partner, a major investor, a primary source, moreover, for precious -and otherwise virtually unavailable raw materials- is also officially considered to be an increasingly threatening financial competitor.  

Wars and Rumors of War.

Poverty and urban decay, life threatening addictions of more kinds than most of us recognize, an unimaginable increase in the distance between the Very Rich and the Very Poor and, (sorry) last again, a flaccid system of something called education -all are trumped, shelved, or shit-canned,  on the way to the conference rooms of (earlier) the Washington Consensus and (now) the Deep State. 

From the administration of President James Monroe, and of course some years before, the established leadership of the United States, -regardless of political party – has habitually interpreted serious-scale economic competition to be a clear and unambiguous warning of inevitable nation-state conflict. 

So today China, Russia, India and, Brexit are our “enemies” 

                         -even if they’re not.

And although many thoughtful observers, such as Developmental Economist, Jeffery Sachs, can persuasively show that enlightened diplomatic nation-sate negotiation and cooperation, can level the proverbial playing field, our leadership and their advisors from every slot and rank -the high-finance class, social elites, the persuaders and enablers and, a whole lot of angry people burrowed in amongst the rest of us, seem always to prefer instead, to dominate whomever and whenever they can.

To borrow from the radically astute videographer, the late John Pilger,

“Kiss our Ass or we’ll kick your teeth in.”

The key words are angry people. 

The Angry People amongst us are out front and first in class in Richard Hofstadter’s, still brilliant, still sobering, and still essential book, The Paranoid Style of American Politics.   

Hofstadter is clear that he is not using the term, paranoid, clinically, but rather as a behavioral constant, much in the way life-style is used by serious scholars, or investors, when talking about where to put serious money.

More than merely an academic construct, the paranoid style should be understood to be a way of life.

Many among prominent foreign policy scholars, conventional, progressive and conservative, agree that the American aversion to objectively negotiated cooperation is not only universally recognized to be characteristically defensive, but obsessive to the point of caricature.  

An operative and equally perverse American assumption seems to be that in a condition of nation-state anarchy, everyone is an enemy in waiting.

“Rules Based Negotiation for flag draped Americans”, a Moroccan diplomat remarked recently, “means you play by our rules and maybe we might too.”

Others argue that American corporate capitalism is the ultimate confirmation of orthodox Marxist pessimism at its very darkest. “Americans,” Nikolai Bukharin would argue, “do not see co-operation as a realistic option for very much of anything.

On September 4, 1970, much to the frenzied confusion of the highest and inner-most of officials of the US policy Executive,  a real-life, to-the-manor-born, Marxist intellectual, an out-front admirer of Fidel Castro, and openly, a radical financial reformer, Salvador Allende, was elected President of Chili.

Three years before, Austin Edwards, newspaper publisher, one of the wealthiest men in Chili, and an intimate of the directors of Anaconda Copper, ITT and Pepsi Cola, had, like others of his social circle, become increasingly frightened of an impending socialist take-over.

Nationalization of Utilities, Reallocation of Undedicated land, National Appropriation of Natural Resources. 

Though his association with John McCone, recently retired director of the US Central Intelligence Agency, and now simultaneously, a CIA advisor and ITT executive, Edwards was able to elaborate his fears in face-to-face detail to President Richard Nixon, Nixon’s national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, and shortly thereafter, to Richard Helms, newly appointed director of the CIA.  

Still today, among regime change specialists, Richard Nixon’s instruction is the punch line Madonna of coup d’etat legend, “Make their goddam economy scream,” Nixon ordered Helms.

It took three devastating, bloody, and often ham-handed years. 

The CIA, American blue chip Loan Sharks, their corporate counsels, and every conceivable kind of for-hire, back-alley sociopath, destroyed nearly everything destroyable In Santiago, and yet, to the inner circle’s shock and dismay, Salvador Allende went on to win the Presidential election. 

And then, shortly thereafter, with CIA fighter-bomber pilots in the air and leadership assistance from the School of the Americas at Fort Benning Georgia, on the 11^th of September, 1973, Allende was dead. 

He knew how they would kill him. 

With the planes circling above the Capitol Building, and suborned troops with guns in the plaza, he died by his own hand.

PART FOUR

Later that evening, talking it over with Elaine, telling her I had told Bill that as far as I could tell the deep state is basically regulatory agencies whose public rep is consolidating and coordinating in order to streamline administrative decision making and control”. 

“That’s pretty slick language” she commented, “You didn’t mention JFK?”  “Fuck no.” I said, “The way things are going, you don’t know who you’re talking to.”  

“For sure, she agreed “except a few comedians, no right thinker, will touch the Assassination”.

“Tucker”, she continued, “social media, Joe Rogan and the Independents, Everybody knows who did it, decided at the top.”

“That’s right.”  I agreed, “It was a coup.” 

November 22, 1962, was the day this country changed hands.

“The killing of John Kennedy was the official Inauguration of the Deep State,” Elaine said.

Maybe only five, or six years ago I’d been thinking, “Deep State,” was a bad-mouth term, used largely by mainstream “Content Managers,” and even today, to label anyone daring to dissent as a “conspiracy theorist,” one of the so-called “Crazies,” Patrick Laurence, Johnathan Cook  just about anyone on independent or social media.” 

Big Time Disclosure: I don’t have to like any of these guys, you understand, to respect, without reservation, their right to explain what they know or think.   

That’s why the First Amendment is essential. That’s why the managers fear and hate it.

That’s why they fear the people. 

So, this is where we are now. This is where Chris Hedges says, we get out into the streets. 

Look here:

Stanford University, an esteemed private, for-profit Institution of higher education, is also home to the Stanford Internet Observatory.  

Most of us don’t think of Universities as Spook Center Hosts, but believe it, in the time of the Deep State, at least 60 of them: that’s “our government dollars at work.”

But whatever the term, “our government,” may mean to you, 

Consider This: Our Government, and We, the people,” are two psychologically and experientially distinct entities.

Both government and people have deepening and broadening conflicting spheres of existential value.

Ever wonder what the Stanford Internet Observatory spends its time observing?

At least sixty Universities, all providentially supplying “promising young scholars.”  -Worker Bees with Ph-dees-, all honeyed up on (DARPA) Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency Grants, maximizing the efficiency quotient of Large Language Study, Attitude Moderation, Digital Forensics Research and, the latest in the fine art and craft of public opinion “Content Modification,” and Control.

Mostly, not foreign affairs at all. Mostly, you and me. It’s your content and mine they want to modify. We’re the target whose words must be moderated and whose attitudes modified. 

That’s also why, increasingly on every mainstream media news and commentary source -Newspapers, Magazines, Internet, Radio, TV and even film, the First Amendment is under overtly serious and concerted attack.

It is happening here.

That’s why Cris Hedges is as courageously adamantine as he is.  

He sees it coming. 

Chris Hedges is one of the sanest people on the planet; and he’s not encouraging violence; he’s for patience and good sense and workable reconstructive action.

Besides, I’ve got an arthritic hip and can’t walk a half a block to make my content heard even down to the corner, even for one of Frank’s Famous  Hot Dogs; but I’ve got other abilities.  So do you. So does everybody.

Everybody is just as much here as everybody else. Nobody is any more here than you and me and the rest of us are. 

We are the people and it’s up to us to secure our pursuit of happiness, our lives and our liberties.

It’s up to us, You and I, to make “We, the people” mean what it was once intended it to mean.

You and I getting out and doing it. One Hundred and two years ago last month, Elihu Root had it right: 

Get on down and learn how to establish a more perfect Union.

We don’t need endless rounds of incompetents, one election cycle after another, each a more mindless moral moron than the last.

We need to educate ourselves, to learn enough about what democracy can be and how it can work, so “We, the people can guide it,” as Madison said, to “run of itself.”