Friday’s near 400 point drop in the Dow despite an unprecedented (and borderline legal) series of efforts by the Federal Reserve and other central banks to keep the house of cards financial markets propped up should serve as a crack of thunder to those who had been deceived into believing that the economic storm had passed. The accompanying skyrocketing of oil prices (largely due to a dollar in freefall) and an unemployment rate that no longer can be concealed by statistical chicanery confirms the obvious – that the United States and the world itself is on the precipice of a cataclysm of historical proportions. The cowardly and utterly shameful complete abrogation of their duties and the accompanying complete moral failure of the leadership in America to hold the criminal Bush-Cheney regime to anything even resembling an illusion of accountability, Israel’s proclamation that they will soon attack Iran (knowing full well that the might of the Zionist fifth column as most visibly represented by AIPAC will provide cover in Der Homeland) and the foregone conclusion that the neocons will use that as an excuse to join the fray that in all likelihood will trigger World War III and the political instability created by the starvation of millions who are victims of a cruel globalist capitalism gone cancerous are more ominous signs that life as we all have known it is over.
That old Chinese curse goes something along the lines of may you live in interesting times but one can not truly appreciate the precient and sardonic wisdom of the contents of that particular fortune cookie unless history has clicked into position and you actually find yourself in exactly such times.
A great unraveling of American society is now occurring and very soon even the illusion of normalcy that the state so depends upon will no longer be maintainable. It was all of course inevitable given our dubious history of being so easily being suckered by the false promises of a national restoration in the aftermath of Vietnam, Watergate and the economic problems of the Seventies by a huckster named Ronald Reagan. In 1979 Americans still had a legitimate chance to come up with a rational energy policy and were capable of the sort of introspection, the critical analysis of all that had gone bad to perhaps implement policies leading anyplace reasonable but NOT where we currently are in mid 2008. Reagan, the ultimate pitchman for friendly fascism and his right-wing machine backers quashed that when secretive deals were cut with the ayatollah to delay the release of the Iranian hostages and therefore damage Jimmy Carter too badly for him to be reelected. I have long maintained that 1980 and the rise of Reaganism (from which so many of our current problems had their genesis in) was the demarcation point from reality, the wrong fork in the road chosen for all the wrong reasons. Americans could have prevented all of this but chose instead to be nothing but a pack of propagandized Pollyannas skipping blissfully down their primrose paths to perdition along white picket fence lined streets paved with gold. It was as Hannah Arendt spoke of with totalitarian movements needing to construct that parallel reality, slowly building it until the opportune time came when it could easily be swapped out and very few would even notice.
That Americans allowed themselves to be so easily duped, brainwashed and lulled into a false sense of security, phony exceptionalism, complacency and denial in which history no longer mattered is something that will be analyzed and written about in volumes upon volumes by future historians. Ours will be the greatest example of a failed society, a warning sign to all who come afterwards, the Romans will no longer be looked upon as the classic portrayal of how a mighty empire collapses due to internal rot it will be the late 20th Century and early 21st Century Homeland. America, or at least what it currently exists as and barring a renewal that while not averting the inevitable catastrophe will allow for something resembling the ideals of the past and the vision of the founders to rise from the ashes will eventually face the same sort of scrutiny as an era of mass madness, cultism and a failure to recognize the darkness that slowly enveloped a once educated society that Nazi Germany has – we will be debated, analyzed, written about and immortalized in film or whatever technological advance replaces it as a medium for far longer than anybody who reads this in the year 2008 will live. Exceptional we are indeed.
The very foundation of our modern American society, a society that is based on cheap and plentiful oil and a post-industrial economy that largely does nothing than engage in the moving around of money and financial instruments and the service industries that support it is now being exposed as the grand scale fraud and catastrophe that it was bound to be given the raw hubris and arrogant greed that allowed ideology to supercede any sort of honest analysis of historic trends. In 2008 the impossibility of being able to sustain such a house of cards style of a social and financial system is becoming more apparent with each passing day and with each piece of terrible economic news. The financial cartel looters will assuredly be once again bailed out by their bought and paid for servants who have turned the nation’s political system into nothing more than a stinking whorehouse being bled to death by piggish and unscrupulous managers and it is the common man (and woman) who will once again be forced to bear the brunt of the and to be collectively crucified for the sins of those who are politically protected and financially untouchable.
Rest assured that there will always be the bread and circuses of the ongoing theatre of the absurd that is the national corporate media with their oligarchy friendly opiate to the masses message that ensures the frogs slowly cooking in their incrementally warming pots of water that all will be ok, the ending will be happy and our God kissed nation of great destiny will be once again saved by the man riding in on the white steed at precisely the right moment but it is all an illusion concocted by highly paid control freaks and social scientists well versed at selling dreams. The television is necessary to keep the bewildered herd of lemmings in a narcotized state of denial just long enough for the fascist police state that is necessary to protect the elite or as the house shill for the oligarchy David Rothkopf fondly calls them: The Superclass so that they may be secure within their heavily guarded, gated mini-utopias and biospheres in time for the coming upheaval.
The coming upheaval of which I speak is predicted in the outstanding book by William Strauss and Neil Howe entitled The Fourth Turning which examines cycles of history which while never repeating itself in exactly the same way repeats itself nonetheless. Strauss and Howe examine history by looking at generational transformation and by breaking time down into a series of four turnings that represent each generation and the archetypes that are associated with them. The authors make the point that America is stuck on a linear view of history that always must proceed with little disregard to the cyclical view of recurring epochs and look at the saeculum (which is a length of time that is about the equal of a long human life) as the equivalent of seasons. Roughly about every 80 or so years there comes a time of cataclysm and change due to the deterioration of society and the failure of each subsequent generation to learn the lessons of the previous crisis. Think of society altering American historical events as follows and the time frames between them: The Revolutionary War period (1770s-1790s), The Civil War period (1860-1865), The Great Depression/World War II period (1929-1945) and today’s period of post 9/11 (2001 – 2020s) and you can see the progression along with the similar lengths of their saeculums. In following this our current period of existence is one in which there is going to be a massive cataclysm and a shift into a new era. I excerpt the following:
“The next Fourth Turning is due to begin shortly after the new millennium. Around the year 2005, a sudden spark will catalyze a Crisis mood. Remnants of the old social order will disintegrate. Political and economic trust will implode. Real hardship will beset the land, with severe distress that could involve questions of class, race, nation, and empire. Yet this time of trouble will bring seeds of social rebirth. Americans will share a regret about recent mistakes — and a resolute new consensus about what to do. The very survival of the nation will feel at stake. Sometime before the year 2025, America will pass through a great gate in history, commensurate with the American Revolution, Civil War, and twin emergencies of the Great Depression and World War II.
“The risk of catastrophe will be very high. The nation could erupt into insurrection or civil violence, crack up geographically, or succumb to authoritarian rule. If there is a war, it is likely to be one of maximum risk and efforts — in other words, a total war.
If there is any hope to be derived while we sit on the cusp of some very troubled times it is that now is a great period to be alive in, we are fortunate to live in an era of very great change as Dickens once wrote “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times” and when the Fourth Turning occurs we will be able to rise above the mundane, the rote, the trivial and the meaninglessness of ordinary existence to have an opportunity to participate in the making of history. Those of us who understand this should consider ourselves fortunate for we shall have the unique chance to dispense with a failed system and to replace it with a new and rejuvenated one that not only appeals to the highest of traditional American ideals but to the highest of human ideals as well. The stunning rejection of the Clinton restoration is a signal hat there is a longing for change, a renunciation of past failures and a growing recognition that the failures are not limited to a particular political party but rather the fault of the entire current failed system itself in its entirety. The rise of a new wave of activism and political participation as manifested in the Barack Obama and Ron Paul movements is an indication that the traditional phony left-right paradigm is not only under assault but is rapidly losing it’s legitimacy (of course it never had any to begin with) and giving way to the inevitable coming demand for serious social and institutional changes.
The existing establishment fears the rise of a new generation of educated and change oriented participants to a political sham system that no longer can rely on the standard tactics of divide and conquer along racial, sexual, religious and gender based lines as it has done so successfully for so long. The inevitable dying off of previous generations is a natural process and throughout history those who have held and abused power are loathe to give it away to societal changes or without coercion. Generally speaking those who hold power seek to pass it down through generations to their own offspring, America has a long and sordid history of this as is evident by those who still hold disproportionate power within the banking and energy cartels. The names Rockefeller, Mellon, Carnegie and others are descendants of the Robber Barons of the 18th century and they have spent the past hundred odd years consolidating their power and using their vast financial resources to purchase the necessary influence to ensure that they can lock in their gains.
The coalescing of the elites around John McCain and Hillary Rodham-Clinton during this current election cycle only shows that both will change nothing meaningful, choosing to instead scapegoat the loathsome Bush-Cheney junta for all of their crude and botched bloody global gallivanting and then carry on business as usual. It will however be akin to changing management in the brothel, perfuming the whores and then hanging out a new shingle but rest assured that the ownership and their interests will continue to be the same. The American political system is designed to present a false choice between two corrupt parties, one of which has only become far more overtly fascist than the other but make no mistake that both of these monolithic parties are thoroughly corrupted by money, borderline criminal interests and only the outward masks that are presented by the true power structure, what author Peter Dale Scott calls “the deep state” or “parapolitics”. The influence of the overworld and underworld on today’s political system is pervasive and the corruption has metastasized throughout the entire system. There is no intention of providing Americans with anything even remotely resembling real choices in their political system, ‘leaders’ and government and this was stated by Professor Carroll Quigley in his outstanding and largely obscure book Tragedy and Hope which revealed the way that the system really worked in regards to the financial elite and the secretive round table groups who represent the puppeteers for the easily blackmailed, controlled and greedheaded arrogant buffoons who are the political actors who are trotted out for public consumption. Quigley writes:
“The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to the doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can “throw the rascals out” at any election without leading to any profound or extreme shifts in policy.”
Professor Quigley by the way was a mentor of one William Jefferson Clinton who would make the necessary compromises in morality necessary to eventually become selected as President of the United States. Clinton and his wife Hillary Rodham-Clinton have been approved by the establishment to become the next dynastic family to succeed the Bushes as the caretakers of the system of American oligarchy but like all others who are allowed to rise to such a level there are skeletons in the family closet and a trail of mysteriously dead bodies that only when compared with the similarities of the Bush family (longtime servants to the elite and fourth generation scoundrels) can be placed in the proper context that the government is not what it presents itself as but is rather a secretive network that is in existence to protect the interests of the wealthy elite, the economic royalists and the huge now transnational financial and energy corporations.
With such deception and secrecy you also have the inevitable factional warfare which is addressed by Quigley and also by Carl Oglesby in the The Yankee and Cowboy War which chronicles the secretive machinations of rogue elements of the establishment that fractured along the lines of Eastern establishment wealth and influence and the rise of the Sunbelt power structure that was largely a manifestation of oil and other energy interests, a massive defense industry and the requisite militarism and extreme right-wing American exceptionalist imagery (to use the term of author Kevin Phillips “an apple pie authoritarianism”) which produced the John Wayne archetype that gave us Barry Goldwater, Richard M. Nixon, Ronald Reagan and eventually George W. Bush and was largely controlled power through the clever manipulation of fire and brimstone radical Christianity and the infiltration of various governmental agencies by agents of foreign governments and anti-Constitutional covert domestic elements working in concert with them in order to perpetuate a creeping militarist influence bent on controlling all elements of the state in order to feed itself and the quest for world domination that eventually is to include the conquest of space itself. But this is a long and extremely complex storyline that I will examine at another time so I digress….
The establishment sees their massively botched society of greed, shallowness and slyly enforced conformity collapsing right before them right now and they are more interested in ensuring that all of their ill gotten gains remain securely locked away in the coffers and that no serious attempt at purging the scoundrels from the nation’s courts so as to give the common man (woman) a chance for equal representation under the law. The law in this land has long ceased to be a shield and has instead been turned into a weapon by a decades long court packing scheme in which only stooges and protectors of the rigged game were allowed to ascend to positions of judicial influence – usually under the guise of ‘social conservatism’ which was easily bottled and sold as snake oil to the gullible who often were well intentioned but were cynically manipulated against the economic self-interest of themselves and their families to support corrupt political means.
The corruption of the system through the manipulation of the credulous rubes, bumpkins and simpletons taken along with the cyclical nature of history as put forth in The Fourth Turning is only hastening the inevitable cataclysm that will have been assured by the hubris and arrogance of the Reagan generation that set the course for the disastrous neoconservative foreign policy of the Bush-Cheney regime.
The looming catastrophe and the subsequent change that is coming will be largely the result of the generational changing of the guard with a newly politically active and highly motivated for the discarding of a failed system now becoming a force to be reckoned with. It is as natural as the changing of seasons that a youth saddled with the burden of the failures of their elders will inevitably rise to reject the past in favor of a new future and the near religious fervor with which Barack Obama is embraced by new participants as well as the more methodical and subtle rise of the Ron Paul movement will very soon shake this society to it’s very foundations. As President Franklin Delano Roosevelt once famously proclaimed:
“There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny”
And the cycle is now at our doorstep, it is the Fourth Turning and with much dedication, work, tenacity, perseverance, courage, honor and a new morality it shall similarly usher in a new era in America. The existing establishment knows this and is terrified, the new generation (labeled as the millennial generation) is generally more tolerant, more open to new ideas, more concerned with the environment and sustainability and less warlike than those that preceded it and through indolence, greed and a sense of entitlement have squandered their legacy. This new generation is not easily manipulated by the same bogeymen that have so successfully been invoked so as to allow for the establishment to retain and abuse power and those of us who are older must do everything in our power to give support to the new generation who will have to sacrifice much in order to gain everything that was tossed away by the previous ones, we owe it to them for it is the world and our legacy that they will inherit. We must act as mentors, set the record straight on what it means to aspire to real American ideals and reclaim our real history that has been stolen away by the looters and the blood barters, the false prophets, the charlatans and the warmongers so that it can be used as a lifeline to the past and the last generation of destiny.
As the famous poet and novelist Victor Hugo once so eloquently put it “Nothing is as powerful as an idea whose time has come” and no matter what happens in the coming months with the rise of presumptive Democratic party nominee Barack Obama as an avatar of change and renewal. Whether he is destroyed by a propaganda machine which will be loosed on him with the fury of the hounds of hell themselves or conveniently assassinated as Senator Clinton’s little Freudian slip alluded to, the spark will not be put out – the process of change has begun and nothing can stop it. As labor activist August Spies said as he was awaiting his murder by the authorities on trumped up charges “Here you will tread upon a spark, but there and there, behind you and in frontof you, and everywhere, flames blaze up. It is a subterranean fire. You cannot put it out.” And assuredly, if one thing that the coming together of youth behind Obama and Paul means it is this one very salient truth: There is now a resistance movement in this country!
Times are changing, the levels of engagement and outrage towards a system long ago gone to seed is at a high not seen in decades and the big boys are scared. David Sirota, the excellent and hugely insightful conservative writer has a new book out entitled The Uprising – with a subtitle of “An Unauthorized Tour of the Populist Revolt Scaring Wall Street and Washington” pegs it dead on again. Sirota stated in a recent Democracy Now interview that:
“Well, you look at the major social indices right now, and people are really, really angry, and you can see it in the polling, you can see it in market research. And I think what’s really interesting right now is that we’re seeing a level of anger and a level of disaffection not just with the government, but with major other institutions in society. Gallup’s poll shows that the anger in the country rivals, in terms of anti-government anger, or dissatisfaction with the government rivals that of the late 1970s. What’s different is that there is an increase in anger at corporate America, at big business, at banks, at the financial system. And I think that that means that gives us a real opportunity—progressives—a real opportunity to take this momentary uprising and explode it into a full-fledged political and social movement.
The danger is, of course, is that the anger could go into a right-wing direction. In the late 1970s, you had a moment where you had, after Watergate, Jimmy Carter came in, was elected, didn’t—his administration didn’t really go anywhere, and the uprising of that post-Watergate era really didn’t end. Instead, it intensified, and Ronald Reagan and the conservative movement came along and took advantage of it and exploded it into the conservative movement that we’re living under. And so, we’re really at a moment here where it could go in a progressive direction or it could go in a conservative direction.
Now this is a very interesting comment precisely because of his statement about the opportunity of a real movement and the concern that it could be as in the past hijacked by the right whose fueling of animosity and ability to provide scapegoats is unrivaled in our recent history, in fact you could say that it has largely been one of the primary factors in creating the looming catastrophe that we all now are facing. What is not addressed is that there is also a battle going on for the soul of the right and the meaning of conservative in which the best intellectuals are libertarians. Ron Paul’s ascension and ability to raise money and support via the internet has an appeal to the young and the libertarian message of liberty and a defense against tyranny resonates greatly. It would be extremely foolish to underestimate to the power of this growing force which already has an organized infrastructure and a manifesto (The Revolution) that against all odds made the New York Times and Amazon best seller lists and is working at the grass roots level to infiltrate the Republican party. This is a very positive thing and in some way will serve to neutralize the more extremist neocon elements of the right so barring another false flag terrorist attack, an economic catastrophe and the emergence of a charismatic demagogue waving the flag and carrying a cross it would be difficult for the fascist elements of the right to enjoy success as they have in the past. The Ron Paul movement could be the best thing to ever happen on the right as they will return to a more benign and traditional strain of conservatism along a non-interventionist, intellectual and anti-big government line that would coincide in many ways with progressives if certain differences can be worked out and the coalition of bickering identity based groups can be marginalized to where they belong.
The sheer ugliness of the recently ended Obama vs. Clinton campaign has exposed these elements as the pathetic, self-absorbed, self-defeating and unwilling to compromise relics that they are and once the left is able to shed itself once and for all of these elements they will no longer exist as vulnerabilities to the crackerjack propaganda and political machine of the modern fascist Republican party. Not being forced to defend abortion, militant feminism, gay rights and other issues that are largely unpopular with huge chunks of the country who could otherwise be allies on economic and civil liberties issues will be the greatest benefit of out of strategic necessity and pragmatism ‘throwing these elements under the bus’. Not that I am advocating discrimination, in fact I detest it and it is antithetical to true American ideals but to enslave an entire political party (despite the falsehood that it truly is an independent party of the system) to the defense of a minority only serves to fail the country as a whole. Without the current time warp of both major parties that continues to wail away like two dinosaurs in a tar pit using the same tired stereotypes we could actually see social progress and return to American ideals.
The rise of Obama represents hope but the presence of John McCain as the old guard who will invoke Vietnam as an immunity talisman (despite his admitted war criminal conduct in bombing civilians) and continue to rage against Hanoi Jane, the ‘dirty hippies’, the ‘militant Negroes’ and all of the other negative baggage that went with the New Left of that era. Perhaps a resounding landslide defeat of McCain and all that he represents along with his repudiation by independent and libertarian elements will slay that dragon once and for all, we will see. As Strauss and Howe state in The Fourth Turning: “Many despair that values that were new in the 1960’s are today so entwined with social dysfunction and cultural decay that they no longer lead anywhere positive”. The fascist American right has been able for too long been able to exploit these divisions of the Sixties and the wounds are ripped open for political benefit just as they are appearing to be healing. They must be abandoned at this point for they are a detriment and only impede change as only fuel the right and divide the left against themselves and as the axiom goes: A house divided against itself cannot stand.
Legendary organizer and activist Saul Alinsky made similar comments that predicted the rise of the extremist right as a backlash against Sixties excesses in a wonderful 1972 interview for Playboy Magazine:
In all the ways I’ve been talking about, from taxation to pollution. The middle class actually feels more defeated and lost today on a wide range of issues than the poor do. And this creates a situation that’s supercharged with both opportunity and danger. There’s a second revolution seething beneath the surface of middle-class America — the revolution of a bewildered, frightened and as-yet-inarticulate group of desperate people groping for alternatives — for hope. Their fears and their frustrations over their impotence can turn into political paranoia and demonize them, driving them to the right, making them ripe for the plucking by some guy on horseback promising a return to the vanished verities of yesterday. The right would give them scapegoats for their misery — blacks, hippies, Communists — and if it wins, this country will become the first totalitarian state with a national anthem celebrating “the land of the free and the home of the brave.” But we’re not going to abandon the field to them without a long, hard fight — a fight I think we’re going to win. Because we’ll show the middle class their real enemies: the corporate power elite that runs and ruins the country — the true beneficiaries of Nixon’s so-called economic reforms. And when they swing their sights on that target, the shit will really hit the fan.
The left would do well to return to the radical values of Alinsky and his generation of labor activists rather than the traveling freak show of the sixties for all of the damage that it has done and all that the country has had to endure as a result of the right’s ongoing manipulation of the language and imagery of that tumultuous period. It was a botched era, a failed movement and too many of those ‘radicals’ and ‘revolutionaries’ have either failed to adapt or have long ago sold their souls to the company store. As Alinsky notes in the interview “Shit, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin couldn’t organize a successful luncheon, much less a revolution. I can sympathize with the impatience and pessimism of a lot of kids, but they’ve got to remember that real revolution is a long, hard process.” The fascist right got this and they built an infrastructure of advocacy groups, think tanks, anti-labor activists as laid out in the Powell Memorandum (or as I refer to it, The Looter Capitalist Manifesto) and financed by elite backed foundations who were scared shitless by the social unrest of The Sixties and had to take coordinated action in order to preserve the status quo. .
The American fascist right had an organized game plan to build their rotten system and they used the Republican party to do it by routinely relying on race-baiting, religious divisiveness, propagandizing, fear-mongering, intimidation, libel, slander and censorship. I have no illusions whatsoever that this will not continue if the Democrats themselves corrupt and compromised fail to capitalize on harnessing the generational forces for change. A return to full out Republican iron fisted fascism could quite easily rise from the ashes of a self immolating Democratic party. I do however believe that the followers of Dr. Paul and a reinvigorated more traditional conservative movement will slow it enough and with a lot of hard work and no small amount of luck may be able to deprive if of the ability to consolidate power as it has been unable to do since the fall of Tom DeLay and others of the most reactionary elements who were able to successfully marshal the religious zealots into a lockstep army of unflinching shock troops. The Republican party post World War II and especially since the rollout of the hugely successful product Ronald Reagan has become dangerously ideological, anti-American and relentless in the pursuit of state power for the sake of wielding it as a bludgeon and it needs to be stopped once and for all and that particular cancerous element cut out as though it were an abscessed tooth. The destruction of the Republican party in its current incarnation is essential before the bulwarks of the police state, the desecration of the Constitution and the pollution of the judicial system is allowed to metastasize any further. The diehard activists of the Ron Paul movement are just the ones to do it – or at least deprive it of momentum until the left can get its act together.
The immediate problem is that both of the current change movements that are growing in opposition to this diseased system are going to eventually find some way to agree to disagree and to focus on the larger tasks at hand of dismantling the authoritarian police state that protects the oligarchy. There must be some unifying set of principles in order for there to be a merger into a much larger social movement that will be formidable enough to undertake the monumental task at hand which is replacing the tyrannical, corrupt, increasingly despotic and entrenched establishment. I would think that a shared desire for an end to war, the restoration of civil liberties and the return of some semblance of economic fairness could transcend all other philosophical differences which could be put aside until later. The menace of the power of the state of which has now been weaponized and turned against the people who in theory are supposed to enjoy liberty and democracy in return for the consent to be governed is the primary, existential crisis that must be dealt with before any other issues that are trivial by comparison. The numbers are on the side of the people despite the disengaged and dumbed-down majority for revolutions are always mounted by the passionate minority who hold the moral high ground and have the courage of their convictions to do what is necessary no matter what the sacrifice may be. True patriots and defenders of liberty are aware of the price but the rewards of restoring justice and honor outweigh the perils of losing, it is only because of the sacrifice of those who came before us what we were ever able to enjoy anything approaching freedom no matter how fleeting that it now appears to have been.
In order for there to be a change in the existing order it is going to be necessary to completely jettison the poison dynamics that have led to the ‘culture wars’ for these divisions are permanent, ruinous and easily exploited by the controllers of the corrupt establishment and these dynamics have been largely responsible for the deterioration that has led us to our current state of deterioration. The differences of race and religion are irreconcilable and any honest examination of history and human nature should make this crystal clear to even the most utopian minded. They need to be abandoned as political causes as soon as possible. Therefore in order for the existing paradigms to be shattered and therefore removed as obstacles the political left must no longer openly embrace the widespread practice of abortion, militant feminism, engage in cultural demagoguery that fuels religious divisiveness and animosity and must embrace as a necessary philosophy the full right to bear arms unconditionally and must become more acceptable and tolerant to less extreme expressions of Christianity (excluding the zealots of course) and cease the thin-skinned hectoring of those who are not politically correct. Conversely, the political right or at least the rational elements of conservatism must be more tolerant to the rights of women, gays and minorities, in the old days political correctness was known as good manners and respect for others. The right also must accept the necessity for government regulations in regards to essential services (resources, medical care) but especially the banking and energy cartels which must be broken up as the damage that they have caused is now apparent to all but the blindest among us. The concept of privatization or more appropriately corporatism must be renounced as it has nothing to do with the utopian version of a free market that fails to take into account human nature. There also must not be an embracing of advancing the practices and icons of the most extreme sects of fundamentalist religion into public life.
I know very well that the people who really get it that the mutation of the state into a tool of repression by the oligarchy will be able to set aside those things that are not imperative for the reclamation of America in order to work together against the primary threat. There will always be those on both sides of the existing bogus left-right paradigm who will vehemently resist any changes that intrude upon and threaten the rights of their own little particular identity based groups and they need to be pushed to the fringes as they long ago should have been, it is where they belong in any functional society rather than in exerting inordinate influence that corrupts the legitimate political process. It is the ability of these easily manipulated groups to empower those moneyed interests who then are able to game the system that are largely to blame for the current crisis and the looming catastrophes of war, domestic repression and financial collapse and are only nuisances that serve as impediments to the necessary changes. I am not going to single out any specific group or demographic but there is plenty of blame to be laid at the feet of all of those who aid and abet the rise of tyranny while they continue to place their own little dogmas at such a level that they supercede the rights of all other citizens of the American republic.
It is of the utmost importance to somehow unify the disparate elements coming together and to allow for the generation that will inherit the future to gain their rightful place of influence within the political system in this shell of a once great nation. I do take the prophesy of The Fourth Turning very seriously and so should all of those who need to now rise together in order to meet our historical challenge, to inherit our destiny and to force those who have sowed the seeds of discontent to reap their whirlwind. If you use a big enough hammer you can smash anything.
Fascism, tyranny and despotism must be defeated at all costs or nothing else is ultimately going to matter. I am often being accused of being a “pessimist” (a ridiculous term which I despise), a “doomsayer” and am often stigmatized as one who dares to tell the unspoken truths in a land of willfully ignorant, fearful lemmings and sheep and the rest of the disinterested doomed. This though is inaccurate. While I have little regard for American life as it exists today and may God damn us all for what has become of this place, I do believe in two things which should be among the highest aspirations of human beings: redemption and atonement. The first will be achieved by the next generation which will be successors to the ones long ago who as FDR spoke of as having a “rendevous with destiny”. The second will be obtained in our support of them as they sift through the ashes of what they are being left with in search of a better future.
I will end with these words of wisdom from Saul Alinsky
All life is warfare, and it’s the continuing fight against the status quo that revitalizes society, stimulates new values and gives man renewed hope of eventual progress. The struggle itself is the victory. History is like a relay race of revolutions; the torch of idealism is carried by one group of revolutionaries until it too becomes an establishment, and then the torch is snatched up and carried on the next leg of the race by a new generation of revolutionaries. The cycle goes on and on, and along the way the values of humanism and social justice the rebels champion take shape and change and are slowly implanted in the minds of all men even as their advocates falter and succumb to the materialistic decadence of the prevailing status quo.
Posted by Donn Marten 
Bahoowah 