Lady MacBush


Everything seems to be splitting apart with the same accuracy the country split down the middle with the election of Al Gore as Christ and Bush as Poncho the Pilot. "I wash'em to get'em clean," he says with a grin. "If somebody takes it the wrong way that's up to them." He winks. And behind scenes, Gore, with at least as good a claim on the presidency as Bush, makes the sacrifice for the good of the country. He fashions himself a cross and totes it off down the road toward Aspen.

Palestine just split apart. They had a democratically elected government we branded a terrorist organization, even though, like a lot of these terrorist organizations, they have a reputation for actually taking care of other people on the local level. That they refuse to recognize Israel's right to exist might have something to do with the history of what happened to them during periods of lawlessness, aka war.

The big problem Al Qaeda had, before we signed on as their publicity agent, was that it did not offer anybody anything except rebellion and revenge. That might appeal to a few young guys smoking utopian opium, but for most people, they would really rather have security, maybe a free swimming pool in the neighborhood, considering the climate, that sort of thing.

At the local level, the churches tend to step in and do most of the charity work, because it is around the church people tend to collect, not because they are in need of salvation or because they believe in God, but because that is where they are one with other people in the community. They do business, have love affairs, socialize, educate, around one of the old systems of community organization.

The people who tend to be attracted to run one of these social centers fall along a continuum from really good people who want to help other people, which accounts for their organizing help for the poor and so on, to those who are concentrated on the core beliefs around which the school formed, and want everybody to conform to them. At the extreme they are megalomaniacs. It's not difficult to understand why religion contains these two elements here, as well as in the Middle East and Israel. Megalomaniacs want power, and they will align themselves with a political party which gives it to them in return for their turning out the vote.

Community work may feed back into a demand that all the women wear beekeeper suits, or that only insiders get to go to Temple and they have to wear special underwear, or that everybody has to pretend to drink blood and eat flesh .. it's just an aspect of the era in which these organizations were formed and the central rituals binding them together. Even the later ones, such as the Mormons, were designed on the template of much earlier organizations. They are so common that we don't really take a close look at what they really are, the way a fish never really gets a look at the water. Most of us were born into one of them. They reflect patriarchal structures following the development of the alphabet. Before that the laws couldn't be written down and reach out to control people two thousand years in the future, even when following them has become insane in light of evolutionary shifts.

So there is good and evil in every one of these organizations, and you can point to the good they do at the community or local level, or you can point to their intolerance of other belief systems. They are all good when you are on the inside of them, and they provide your protection and services. Any one of them is bad when you are on the outside of it and especially when you become the "evil other."

This duality built into organizations built on religious law is what split our nation right down the middle. The Republicans who voted for Bush were habitual Republicans, and voted for him the way the rat pushes the bar to get the pellet (they think it is in their short term economic interest). What they define themselves in opposition to are the liberals, who want to put the wealth of the nation into organizations owned by the people themselves. Bush conservatives are always busy privatizing publicly owned wealth, here as in the Middle East.

To anyone who has not yet seen the logic behind the war in Iraq, take the trouble to find out how many no bid contracts went out, how many private military contractors are there, how much money just vanished, and how much oil is under the ground. If that oil is under our control, not directly but through a government that will play ball with us, and the infrastructure is in private hands, then there is no crisis which threatens the dominance and size of the oil industry. This war was not in response to anything except Hussein's not being a good choice for us in this respect. He could have murdered anyone he wanted if he'd been a good proxy. There is no more need to demonize him for gassing the Kurds than to demonize the Reagan administration for giving him the chemicals because of our strategic interest in supporting Iraq against Iran.

It blows me away when I hear Ron Paul say that 911 was a result of our being "over there," and the response from Guliani that he meant "we were attacking Iraq." Then I heard a few media people refer to it and they seemed to have the same idea, that Paul was some kind of idiot for what he said. But he is a smart man, and he knows the history we have is one of meddling in the affairs of all these countries. Mostly the strategy is how to keep the old European colonial economic and diplomatic structure intact.

The strategy is short term, and involves doing favors for big money, like when we supported British Petroleum by knocking off the fledgling democracy in Iran and installing the Shaw, who understood the need in giant corporations for stability above all else. There are a lot of things you can look at and say, "Why didn't we just mind our own business and let these people mind theirs," but that is not the nature of things among the immortals. British Petroleum was more important than Iranian democracy and allowing the people of Iran to control their own resources, in the short term. In the long term it was more likely a major mistake. We could use a democratic Iran in the Middle East, as opposed to a theocracy run by a bellicose, swaggering, trigger happy nut job. Who would vote for somebody like that?

Ron Paul was talking about a history of intervention in other people's affairs, I believe. He was talking about Reagan taking Hussein off the terrorist A list so that his constituents, which are corporations, the same as Bush's, could sell him chemicals. It is about the profits in corporations. What's right is an element of the public relations campaign and cannot be known until one knows what profitable actions need justifying. These justifications are elevated to moral positions, even though they did not preexist the actions they supposedly supported. An aggressive attack on a much weaker sovereign country, for example, used to be prohibited by a moral position. Now there is no moral position regarding when and who we will attack. We attack from economic interests and manufacture morel positions that justify the attack.

The trouble with short term strategy is that in the long run it can be a disaster. This is fine for those who take their profits and leave the game, or who keep playing it for profit by doubling down and loading the dice. But for those who want to extend stability, education, health care, and protection across the lines of national boundaries and religious laws, the long term strategy and the short term strategy are identical. What is good is self-evidently good, and does not need the center of religious law regarding beliefs and rituals.

And it is here that everything is splitting down the middle. Half of America appears to be inside religious law, and thus they cannot conceive of going against their protection. That seems self-evidently stupid. The other half are not inside religious law, but observe that the myriad of organizations which are built around religious law must be contained inside something bigger if they are to function as one cohesive society. This something bigger is the democracy itself. These people expect to create their own protection and social supports, and resent the elevation of an employed caretaker to the status of a godlike icon.

The centrist candidate is the one who recognizes that these polarities of society have to be worked with, and who finds a way to restrain the profit motive in favor of taking care of people's needs at the street level, while being careful to at least appear to follow the central religious laws, because he or she will be stoned like an Afghan whore for not being sufficiently pious. This is all a public show in most cases, because there is a basic disparity between someone's having the breadth to lead all the people, and someone's being too small to see outside of one particular set of religious laws.

Things have split apart because nobody can govern from inside one of these religions, not in the U.S., not in Israel, not in Iran, not in Palestine. It simply will not work, because nobody can force somebody to believe what they do not believe. I had some Iranian friends a few years ago who had to leave because of the Islamic revolution, and they said everyone still had their parties and affairs and drugs and everything, but they had to pretend they did not. They had to act pious in public.

Those who have a much larger set of parameters than does Mr. Bush cannot tolerate his smallness. They will not ever reduce themselves to fit inside of it, no matter how many laws are passed, how many enforcers are sent out, how much spying is done on their personal lives, how many similarly small minds are installed in the judiciary, or how many of their protections are overrun so that they can be directly threatened. They can only pretend, in public, to comply, as the leadership becomes increasingly paranoid as it realizes its inferiority to those it controls.

The price of what the right did following the installation of Bush by the Supreme Court was the alienation of half the country. While there was no investigation into it, most of us who were not inside the strict boundaries of the new government understood what was going on. Party loyalists were being installed and democrats or liberals were being pushed out of their jobs in favor of non professionals. This was exactly like the the origin of terrible problems in other countries in the last century. A radical party comes to power and begins to purge and install those who fit inside the narrow parameters of the party. Religious and political tests, like loyalty oaths in the McCarthy era, were suddenly necessary to insure "purity." Anyone who was not on the inside was on the outside, and not trusted.

The result of this is that there are people, like me, who do not wish Mr. Bush well and who in fact do not recognize him as the leader of the society. He is only the leader of the party and I am not in the party. What held us together as one people was that the parties were contained inside something larger, and there was no more reason to fire someone for being a democrat than for being a Methodist. The religious law was contained in something larger, which was the democracy itself, in which every person has equal protection under the law and freedom from discrimination. We also had habeus corpus and freedom from search and seizure.

Now we are split, and I will never feel the slightest wish that Mr. Bush succeed, not from spite but for aesthetic reasons. His failure is as necessary as was Lady MacBeth's and he has a similar hygiene issue. He has to fail because the play is great because it is built over one of the patterns of the collective unconscious, which plays out to its conclusion before we can escape from it. Neither he nor his followers can inflate to the level they inflated without a subsequent steep and painful deflation. And in this deflation there is a huge danger, because it requires humility and acknowledgment of the inflation, and there is always the drug of more war and more assertions of power and superiority so long as it has the cover of legitimacy through the trappings of high office.

High office for Mr. Bush and his associates is lipstick on a pig.

Posted: Mon - June 18, 2007 at 04:40 PM