[Newspoetry] Imperial News

[Donald L Emerick]

See article below:
U.S. Envisions Blueprint on Iraq Including Big Invasion Next Year
April 28, 2002 New York Times
By THOM SHANKER and DAVID E. SANGER

Opinion on Bush Plans to Extend War

I see strange resemblances between the history of Evil Empires, as portrayed in films such as Star Wars or the Gladiator, and the incumbent Administration of the Government of the United States.

The thesis of Empire is that no other regime anywhere shall be allowed to pose itself as an alternative to the dominance of the Empire.  All roads shall lead to and from Rome.

I try to ask myself, what sort of vision of the world produces such megalomania, as an infected warrior class sees its self as the servant of that Empire, fighting its battles faithfully for it.

I try to ask myself how the world could simply accept such a world-ordering regime, where what is decided in Rome or in Washington, shall rule and overrule all local self determinations.

This is a regime that has no respect for any difference.

This is a regime that hates peace.

This a regime that makes war, casually, on peoples in any other part of the world, because the Empire needs to demonstrate, continually, that its word is absolute, final, and determinative.

This is a regime that values only what makes the regime's glory and grandeur, as self perceived, stand out.

Soon, I expect to see the House and Senate dismissed, reduced to occasional bodies, relegated to a task of considering seriously ever more trivial laws, than those that it now produces, ala a rubber stamp.  So, this is a representative parliament, that it shall spend weeks and months debating whether or not to spend $300M on a "marriage proposal" program, while it instantly "votes" to spend 1,000 times that puny sum to support the Empire's military operations.  This is a parliament that will vote by vast majorities to trample out civil liberties when the grapes of wrath are poured, like a wine cooler, into our cups to drink.  This is a parliament that will vote to reform bankruptcy laws that does not at all regulate the careless credit industry or by promoting full-and-meaningful economic growth.  Instead, this is a parliament that gladly enacts draconian collection practices, to seize and divest all of the property of anyone who owes too much money to the lords of credit.

And, what becomes of the man, the woman or the child who is turned into an economic vagrant by such laws?  They cease to exist in the eyes of the State -- which only recognizes being as having economic "rights" and that are never absolute and inalienable and universal, but rather relative, marketable and individual.  They say that all rights are relative in such an evil regime, for they think that rights are proportional to the (imagined) size of the balance of a person's net financial worth -- as best demonstrated by the size of the contributions that such a person makes to the officials and office-holding incumbents of the regime.  The greatest indignity, they say, is "poverty" -- but this "poverty," they also lyingly say, is only due to their laziness, their pursuit of happinesses that produce no marketable values.

When such pursuits of happiness produce nothing that is marketable, then those pursuits are just evil -- so they say.

The idea of life as fully a matter of balancing all things does not occur to the mind of the megalomaniac.  The idea of megalomania is to infect all others, to make all others become servants of megalomania, on the promise that some of the sick will also be allowed to become, once in awhile, winners in the megalomania sweepstakes.  Allowing an occasional plebian -- like Colin Powell -- to become a top-drawer servant of megalomania convinces everyone that the system is working, that it is possible to rise, close to the top, if not to the very top echelons of megalomania.  No amount of rational persuasion has ever been able to overcome, by lop-sided statistics, the exemplar of one or two or a few exceptions, for people think the rule is determined by its exemplar exceptions, and think that a million undistinguished cases to the contrary are not enough evidence to over-rule the ideal exemplar.  People say, "Well, all those others just were not good enough; they did not have what it takes, that holy grail of exemplarism, the right stuff."

I think that Karl Marx found it extremely frustrating, to have all of the evidence that he collected so carefully be dismissed.  His evidence was such that any rational person would have to infer, completely, the reasons why the then existing Administrative regime was best judged to be completely harmful to the interests of most living beings.  His evidence was such that one would have to say, "This regime of evil ought to go -- and, in all likelihood, it will not let itself be removed by peaceful means; radical surgery may be required."

Now, I think Marx was good at diagnostics, but wrong at prognostics -- for no one at all really knows how to transform evil empires into good regimes.  It may be that all regimes are evil, sooner or later -- and that, as the anarchists are wont to say, our best hope is a regime in which any other regime becomes impossible to establish.  But, no regimenting system could ever hope to guarantee the success of its own program, forever, either.  One can not, that is, take the eternal view seriously, but only the existential view -- that value is best defined, solely, by the very labor that the living and only the living expend in living, to enjoy the one and only life that they could know that they have.  One does not live for glory or grandeur, unless one is a megalomaniac, who feasts on such imaginary things.

If neither reasons nor facts work, to fight irrationality and to overcome its xenophobic prejudices, what shall be done?

How does one fight warped and misaligned values, except to show, by unwarped and unmisaligned values, that alternatives are credible?  One shows the credible to the incredulous by making worthy expressions of dignity and human value, to which others might aspire.  One thus shows a way of life for those values that is possible and attainable and productive of the very ends that those values, when pursued, achieve.

But, just as Marx never forgot, we must also be prepared to spread the gospels of bad tidings as well -- the ungospel of how things are presently, as to how they make for a life full of misery and unhappiness, for most people, most of the time.  For, as every gospel crier knows, one needs the gospel of bad tidings to wake people up to see the possibility of a better world, such as the one that is announced in the gospel proper (for gospel, I've heard it said mean "good news"  -- but I have found, ala deconstruction, that every gospel is actually doubly-entendered).

And, then, at last, we might see how a regime of anarchy might be a durable and self-sustaining state of affairs: one must find ways to make mandatory the writing of new gospels of the bad news, so that no regime succeeds in entrenching itself, in installing itself, iconically as the most proper, highest or best place of all possible worlds.  One must radically institutionalize the vitality of dissent, or else the regime drifts into triviality, as the banality of evil, itself.

Heretofore, though, regime design has only attempted to achieve the goals of positivism unwarranted and demonstrably problematic optimism.  Regime design must balance and check the tendencies towards those excesses that positivist flag-plantings and goal settings produce.  Indeed, the classical Founders of the American regime understood some of these ideas, although all of their classical assumptions about social structures have been vastly weakened and stretched by the ongoing transformations of the economy since their time, centuries ago.  And, perhaps Mao and Jefferson, two classical founders, understood something of this new need for regime renewal -- for one suggested that flowers should bloom while the other said that the very constitution itself needed to have a death sentence built into it, so that it would expire automatically, after a certain number of years.  For Mao and Jefferson, I would say, both recognized that once a system gets up and running, even though and even as it tends toward evil, it will tend to suppress the very dissent that an equal and coordinate negativism would produce -- for it is supposed that man, woman and child -- everywhere and all of the time -- in truth, never like to hear the bad news, first -- that they would rather be entertained and that entertainment is always good news, all of the time, ala Disney's imagineering.

So, I bring these old thoughts of news to you, as a opinion -- whining about others, and sometimes, too, myself.

Thanks for listening
Donald L Emerick
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