Any Storm in a Port

It should be clear to anyone with a brain that severe disfunction has settled over our governance in the United States, The serial fuckups of the current administration can no longer be considered mere lapses in judgment, or bad luck, or misunderstandings made vivid (though they are all of these). Let me be the first on my block to submit that what we are witnessing is the systemic, and long overdue, breakdown of the fucking status quo.

In old Rome, as McLuhan pointed out, the fine roads that allowed the army to conquer most of the known world also allowed the so-called barbarians to find free and easy access to the center of the Empire. And they used it.

Edward Gibbon, a magnificent writer whose cadences, and even whole phrases - like ‘a decent respect for the opinion of mankind’ - can be found in our Declaration of Independence, expressed a certain admiration for the barbarians in ‘The Decline and Fall...’. After all, they had constituted a good portion of the Roman Army for quite some time, and, really, it was only the Visigoths who were the seriously weird and violent motherfuckers. The Goths and Vandals moved down with their women and children, looking for better food and a little sunshine. That they saw the world differently than the Romans, for whom they quickly lost respect, is clear from their art. But, like, So What?

But I am straying off topic here.

What we face in the Info Age is not the immanent arrival of extravagantly dressed hordes grooving on different gods (though certain right-wing ding-dongs would have you believe that is the case) but a breakdown of an old order which has followed the same assumptions concerning power and the means to hold it as those assumptions have become less and less germane to the conditions of the ground; conditions which changed because of the initial wild success of those very assumptions.

What the fuck do I mean? Here’s a shaky example:

The Wisdom of Free and Open Markets. Fine, if you are pricing strawberries at Wegman’s, or ball bearings in Seattle, it is a useful paradigm. However, for too long the notion of ‘free and open markets’ has been political semaphore for ‘I don’t have to worry about it. Someone else will figure it out.” Now set that very economic ruling-class idea into a policy that has consistently preached vigilance in the face of unknown peril and you get, well, FEMA and the Republican aparatchicks who apparently saw no security issues inherent in the managerial takeover of the Nation’s eastern and southern ports by a foreign consortium with, oh, let’s just say radical Islamist associations.

This is compartmentalization at its finest. And while compartmentalization, both bureaucratic and psychological, was a fundamental basis of the creation of this country’s insane war-machine, space-race, victory-dance economy over the last sixty odd years, the political order based upon the bureaucratic and psychological compartmentalization that allowed the building of the Interstate highway system, the Pentagon and the Internet (to name three biggies) now has no stability when the messy consequences of committee decisions, like invading Iraq, staffing FEMA and approving the sale of port management franchises come blowing back along the Media Info Highway like hurricaines and hijacked jet liners.

If nothing else we live in an age rich in metaphor, which is my main solace.

Shot

What keeps any band of macho creeps in line? What stops them from leveling their pieces at one another at the smallest insult, keeps them all moving in the same direction to-oh-kill injuns, bomb North Vietnam, invade Iraq? What gets beaten into every witless boy who thinks he wants to be a Marine, a Ranger, an officer and a gentleman?

Respect.

Now don’t get me wrong. I believe a lot of people very much need respect beaten into them because they will learn it no other way in the Candyland spectacle in which they have been born into and live.

In fact the notion of Respect, and its attendant ideas of Truth and Honor is so important to the soul’s well being that the Candyland spectacle offers up its necessary simulacrum: the Frontiersman, the Strong Silent type, the Elder Statesman; inane paradigms which hold enough of a charge so that twits, rich and poor, who have never had the backbone to stand up for anything in their lives, can internalize the appropriated form and think of themselves as something special.

Which brings us to Dick.

We all know Dick; the draft dodger willing to send others to kill and die for his designs. Dick’s main asset in the pay-for-play, kill-for-credit crowd was his mien as a modern western sage; a Louis L’Amour kind of guy, the no bullshit Daddy; tough, mean and looking after his own. A cool head and straight shooter who will get you home and deliver the supplies.

That’s all gone now, gone especially among elements of the NRA constituency with whom recklessness with a firearm and a downed companion is NOT a minor matter subject to jest. No, the sensible among us have despised Dick for years, while the weak, credulous and just plain stubborn, along with his brother connivers, remained believers.

Nope. Ol’ Dick just shot his delusional fantasy out from under himself and is now revealed, especially to those who were inclined to respect him the most, as a wanton shot, a rude fake, a walking liability.

A Notion of Addicts

I heard that squalid little man’s headline grabber about the country’s addiction to oil the other night and smiled. Carter thought Americans were depressed, the current President calls us addicts. It does not take a big imagination to see how these very few words will come back to haunt, in a big way, our addict in chief, as they open doors that he and his brain dead legion of assholes have struggled to bolt for years.

For one thing it seems that, though we are addicts, his main problem lies with the nature and qualities of our suppliers; and that reducing our consumption of madrass-muslim oil by 75 percent in a few years is a laughably small goal. Then there is the issue of his enormous personal energy use consumed jetting and motorcading around the country, which even the reliably thick-skulled New York Daily News, noted in an article this morning.