Upon Which the State of the Union Turns
SHORT TAKES
I was a child during WWII. I grew up sincerely believing that my country was the defender of the poor and helpless, a beacon of democracy and, in the years following, the leader of the free world.
Now, our country, leader of only a handful of trembling hangers-on, everything has changed. Those countries, once of the free world, are more in need of leadership than any time since he end of the cold war; the center has indeed not held, and Europe has become a place of endless uncertainties and contradictions, while Western Civilization, becomes a subject for antiquarian historians.
To many -everywhere in the world- but especially those correctly wary of dollar-dependency throughout the global south, the US is seen as a prematurely aging bully, internally in fragmented disarray, internationally in political decline, and not a democracy by any reasonable definition.
Recently a highly respected former CIA Intelligence Analyst and Presidential Briefing Officer, writes that the de-facto effective government of the United States is a few hundred people driven for total global control, with no interest whatsoever in democratic equity or, the welfare of the ordinary people of the country,
Another argues that ours is a government for the richest one and one-half percent and, a variety of scholars see us in the grip of the corporate fascism that the elders among them feared as much as thirty years ago.
But most disturbing is the judgement made just this week (12/16/24), by another Central Intelligence Foreign Affairs Analyst, a man widely respected for his energetic devotion to the principles of republican democracy, who asserted that, far from being a beacon of Freedom and Liberty, we have become a “Police State.” - whose laws, now, increasingly prohibiting Freedom of Speech, the Press, and Assembly. --what you can no longer say and with whom you can no longer say it- are ample evidence of the kind of oppressive State we have become.
Our congressional law makers have of course always been a reliable source of public ridicule: Madison and his colleagues created the Constitution in despair of ill-considered legislative “imbecilities;” and, when in need of an easy laugh, Congress was Mark Twain’s favorite target of choice; today, on a short leash to Israel, fearful of Russia and China, and in abject horror of non-existent communism, our not-so-august legislators are the continuing object of derision around the world.
The recent flurry of laws protecting students from controversial ideas is our legislator's latest exercise in anti-democratic law making, and this is nowhere more troubling than in the revelation that somewhere in the neighborhood of 80% of college and University professionals are afraid to discuss subjects of controversy in their classrooms or even openly on campus.
Years ago, during my experience as a faculty member at the University of California at Berkeley, then at San Jose State University and later at California Institute of the Arts, I was repeatedly impressed and sometimes thrilled by the number of scholars and artists from so many and diverse disciplines who were committed to encouraging young people -often from previously very carefully sheltered lives -to face up to difficult subjects and think for themselves.
It’s hard to believe that such men and women have disappeared; and I know they have not: they’re out there still.
But we all know people who live out their days with their bed covers over their heads.
Several years ago, in our coastal community of Los Osos, we had a serious water problem for which we held a series of Town Meetings for which I was one of the occasional moderators. Out of a population of about 14,000, there were never more than a hundred people at our weekly meetings. The discussions were lively, surprisingly informative and always engaging: those few people cared enough to care. And they did their homework. But consistently they were a stunning minority of those 13,900 absentees, every one of whom most certainly should have been concerned.
I later met an-up-the-street neighbor who said people who participate in such meetings are crazy.
Insofar as democracy, in order to be democracy, must begin with the people, that guy may explain everything I’ve outlined above.
My wife, Elaine, meets with a group of friends once or twice a month: they talk, she tells me, about everything. That’s what we all should do.
LATE NOTES
One: A Vote for the Apotheosis of General Igor Kirillov
One explanation for the “Ukrainian,” so-called, Moscow Assassination of the Russian General Kirillov is that those creepy Washington subversives who have transformed the upper cabinets of the Democratic Party into an extra-constitutional Oligarchy, embarrassed now by their unsustainable Ukrainian debacle and, feeling decisively repudiated by Donald Trump’s election, they are now reported to be desperate to find any ploy possible to lure Vladimir Putin into doing something rash.
Of a piece with their more than 30 year stumble-bum campaign to discredit and destroy Russia, the most immediately urgent twist to this anti-populist cabal’s conspiracy, is simply to make Donald Trump’s Presidency as tenaciously difficult -as possible.
You don’t have to like the guy, nor do you have to have voted for him, to recognize that now in office, there’s a job to be done that involves the welfare of the country.
But there’s more to Kirillov’s killing. -to oversimplify, much more than a ranking military officer, a nuclear weapons expert and something of a Russian national hero; Kirillov was also a brilliantly accomplished scientific investigator and, much to the even greater chagrin of those same American subversives, he is reliably reported to have provided the UN with the details of the internationally prohibited, Ukrainian based, illegally secret, US Government / Big Pharma, illegal Biological Warfare Laboratories, the details of equally illegally secret, US Government / Big Pharma Operation Covid 19, and, the relevant names, dates and procedures for all.
This information is reported to be publicly available in English through appropriate offices of the United Nations.
(for illegality, see also U.S. Code)
Two: Something like Irony
Confirming that Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu has chosen not attend the 80th Annual International Commemoration of the historic Liberation of Auschwitz, fearing as he must, his arrest for his role in the instigation of the War Crimes committed by the Israeli Defense Forces, his part in Israel’s Crimes against Humanity and, his additional crime of attempting to starve the entire Palestinian people, the Polish Newspaper, Rzeczpospolita, reports that Polish Deputy Foreign Minister, Wladyslaw Bortoszewski announced last week, that “We are bound to respect the decision of the International Criminal Court.”
If he sets one foot in Poland, the Poles will arrest the S.O.B., tout de suite
And well they should: Following the Wehrmacht September 1, 1939, invasion, over 1500 nazi concentration camps were built by forced labor in Poland. More than 6 million European jews were murdered in Death Camps such as Auschwitz.
