[Newspoetry] Looking Backwards

[DL Emerick]

If Bush sees light at the end of the tunnel, it's most certainly because
he's walking into it backwards.

Once again, Bush attempts to dictate history, believing that it is the
divine right of victors to do so.  He proims, once again, "victory is in
sight", but he does not tell us how near it is, or whether it is a place we
can reach.  The stars are in sight as well, but no one pretends that we
could reach them as they are simply too distant.

Hegel wrote of history a philosophy.  He stated the Western wisdom, that
ordinary occidental notion of history as having a direction, a natural one,
to be sure.  The Spirit of the World, ZeitGeist herself, directed history -
oh, not locally, but globally, or rather, temporally, for intelligence could
only improve itself, rise to some level of consciousness that could
comprehend itself, as distinct from all that is, and yet remember reverently
that, above Man, there is a God.  Reason made it so, so he said, though I
think his belief was more simply one of an uncommon desire, or perhaps a
common desire.  What Hegel may have desired was the common aspiration of
occidental man: to have some reason for living that promises personal hope
that it shall not be a mere vanity, an affectation of the nerves.

Perhaps I am not philosophical enough to have that desire, or perhaps I have
never met a sufficient rationale for any utopia or nirvana or heaven, beyond
this material life.  Why should finite existence give way to an eternal
state - with that state determined entirely by what is accomplished in the
finite?  It would seem to be, logically, the other way around, that the
infinite bounds and determines finites, and does not come out of any set of
finites, no matter how finitely large they happen to be.

More critically, all the mechanisms for "revelation" of such an
"after-world" have struck me as equally illogical.  Why should one life have
one and only one life after it?  Perhaps, if there is another life, why not
many more of them?  Why not an infinity, as it were, of them?  But, such a
notion seems like every argument about infinite regress: a regress is
pointless unless, as we occidentals argue, it is relative to a less
regressive regress.  In that case, perhaps analytically only, a regress will
appear under the form of a limit - the smaller infinity disappears faster
than the larger one does, because it truly was reduced to nothing, step by
step, as a matter of consistent and progressive application of the same act.
Indeed, in theory, we don't have to wait for infinitesimals to vanish (would
they ever?).  We just whisk them away.

An alternative to Hegelian direction could have taken the view that the end
of every system that survives is some form of equilibrium, homeostatic
perhaps.  The failure of a system to achieve a sustainable equilibrium
appears as a system disaster - viz., its death, in explosive disaster or
dampening atrophy.  Hence, the progress of history would be local to each
society, not global, as a process of his Idealized Intellect, seeking to
realize itself as some universal eternal vacuity.

So, Hegel seems to be vastly wrong, in his primitive conception that history
has a direction or the direction that he doubly imagines it to have.

There is no philosophy so right that millions will not wrongly die for it.
That is the most critical danger of our times and, indeed, of all notions of
history itself, as a thing (process) in itself.  And, the most common
indicia of this grave danger is the disregard for and dismissal of present
wisdom that appears in the saying "History will judge me.".  History is
there morphed into a figurative personality, one that is omniscient, or a
God, with both the right and the power to judge.

We see Bush, again, playing the History Card, in his speech to the VFW.
Bush says disaster fell upon millions when America WITHDREW from Vietnam.
As usual, Bush fails to distinguish the proximate from the causal - for he
does not ask the Sensible Question, of why, for instance, the Khmer Rouge
became powerful - or the Vital Question of what most likely will happen when
America decides, by military force, to impose a government upon the people
of some other land?  There is a sense to historical events, but it does not
lie in the simple propter hocs that Bush ever advances, as a thin cover for
his own deep historical offensives and tragic offenses.

More crucially than all this is the abandonment of accountability that
undergirds the flanks of Bush's position.  Accountability for the acts of
Khmer Rouge lies with them - we did not cause them to act as they did in
slaughtering others - even if we made more likely those slaughters, by our
acts that inflamed their passions against us.  Now, this is also true of
Iraq's future - that we presently inflame the future, by the past
circumstances and the present continuation of our forcible occupation of
Iraq.  As a nation, we serve no end other than those alleged to be our
American self interests.  Iraqis know quite well that the word "freedom" has
a funny and false ring to it when it is spelled out as meaning that she
shall be "an exemplar and an ally" of America, in the region - such a puppet
on a string will always twist in dervish desert winds.

But, Bush is selling, once again, the same tired old lines - that there is
such a thing as "victory", which means only that "they" do not seem to win,
by force of arms.  Bush collapses, in his speech, all the different warring
factions of Iraq into a nebulous unified being, "the enemy".  He suffers,
thus, from his lack of discrimination - which is a necessary and good
practice, as far as the intellect is concerned, for all objects of the
intellect.  Bush, though, having learned that, in some matters,
discrimination is wrong, presumes wrongly, by his hyper-generalization, that
all discrimination is wrong.