Neo-Contentions
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Neo-Contentions Including…
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INTRODUCTORY NOTE:
“Neo-Contentions” is the caption for this seminal and prototypical format, wherein Democratswrite.com contributors will share their website as a forum for debate between and among liberal and conservative minds, and minds machinating in between those politically polar opposites.
Typically the Column will begin with an article written or referred to us by either a regular contributor or outside source. Responses from any and all correspondents on line will be considered by our editorial staff, and, when feasible, printed without re-editing (save for deletion of profane, or solely “ad hominem” remarks, i.e. offensive (insulting) attacks on people as opposed to criticisms–however severe–of issues, actions, opinions or attitudes taken or expressed by those people.
This first offering obtains lift-off from B.E.A. founder, Robert (Dusty) Schoch (incidentally, our foreign-policy editor). What becomes the “Neo-Contentions” bone of contention is a brief essay by Dusty reacting to Bush’s “not guilty” response to charges of violating Constitutional privacy protections. “Repeat After Me” is followed by a curt, dismissive response penned by Steve Bryant, a Neo-Conservative columnist who writes for the High Point Enterprise (H.P., N.C.).
Steve’s response provides provocation for Schoch’s (and our) principal offering in this issue of “Neo-Contentions”, and we hope the exchange serves to encourage and/or provoke more head-buttings of the same nature on further and future issues and essays. It is the sincere consensus of all of us who contribute to Democratswrite.com that our country is in a dire state both domestically and abroad. We need some new cooks in the kitchen. Those cooks will have to know that to make a better omelette, we will have to crack some eggs. So let’s get cracking…
Repeat after me…
“Emperor Bush is Nekkid”. Garrison Keillor’s essay in today’s paper (Jan.24) on lying tells us the horrendous truth we’re not telling: It’s no longer Bush’s lies that are heading us to fiscal and foreign hell in a Halliburton handbasket woven in China- it’s our feeble refusal to call him on the crimes and calamities he continues to commit…right under our nationally nincompoopic noses.
We’ve known for two years now there were no WMD’s and no Al Quaeda connections, but our criminal occupation of-and killings in–Iraq continue.
On the domestic front, Bush has not lied to us about his felonious violation of Federal Law in tapping our phone and e-mail communications. He readily admits the Federal law requires a determination of probable cause before a Federal Judge and that he has directed the NSA to ignore the law, and then he says what he has done is “legal”.
It’s not-exactly–like the idiot in Keillor’s parable…driving his family into the afternoon sun swearing to his wife they’re headed East. Bush is telling us the truth. He’s admitting the criminal acts but denying the criminal responsibility. A wise man asks: “Who’s the greater fool, the fool or the fool who follows the fool?”
We don’t have the defense of being “forced” as were the denizens of Orwell’s 1984 fictional extrapolation of corporate American Democracy. When “Big Brother” in that prophesy declared “black” was “white”, citizens who disagreed disappeared. We don’t have that excuse. We’re just fools, sheep…and cowards.
Please keep Keillor’s essays coming- He’s the Mark Twain prophet and poet laureate of our troubled times. And by the way- For those wanting to quit being fools: Letters and calls to our Congressmen’s local offices work. Communications to D.C. (especially e-mail) are pretty much a waste of time.
Steve Bryant’s (brief) response to Dusty’s essay . . .
“Yea, Dusty our liberties are almost gone. Fortunately there are still enough of them remaining for the Left to continue the self-refuting nature of it’s portrayal of America as the base of all oppression.”\
DUSTY’S REBUTTAL. . .
The Neo-Con Corporate Frankenstein Monster
(A long liberal counterpoint to an impertinent Neo-Con Comment;
Dusty Schoch v. H.P. Enterprise columnist, Steve Bryant
Jan. 25, 2006)
What’s this “self-refuting” thing? I’m still, in the old sense, an American. In the new, Red-run U.S., I consider myself a resident alien. You neo-cons have won. You’re at the helm. The ship’s going down. I don’t simply refute the fascists who rained down hell (euphemizing it “shock and awe”) on Iraqi civilians. Killing over 20,000 of them. Without provocation. This was naked aggression. This was fascism. I don’t “refute” myself and certainly don’t’ refute Bush, Cheney and their crowd of neo-con terrorists; I absolutely condemn, renounce and deplore them. Staying on board with Bush and his stinking sinking ship of state is sort of like that guy who climbed and jumped off the Empire State building wearing a replica of Da Vinci’s man-powered flying machine. He jumps, flaps wildly and confidently and plummets toward the sidewalk like Newton’s apple. As he nears the first floor, and as the cracks in the sidewalk come into close-up focus, he’s overheard by passers by on the street to delcare: “So far so good. “
Look around you Steve. Having it “your way”, there is mayhem going into its third year in the country we invaded and stole. Multi-billions in surplus are now trillions of national debt. America has exported its soul and the meal tickets of its masses to China via their (neo-cons’) true God (Wally-Mart); One day in the near future you’re likely to have the pleasure of seeing me and others arrested and jailed for printing the truth about what’s going on. You and those of your ilk and persuasion are now in control of the destiny of our once-great nation. In under 2 terms at governing bat, the team is dying. If it weren’t for the TV-induced and seduced ignorance of the red-state voters there might be hope. But their mixture of ignorance and lock-step ditto-headed sheepishness insures that Bush and the neo-con Republicans will have what it takes to dismantle and pocket what little remains of the greatest country, the noblest , most idealistic and, when challenged, heroic democracy in the history of mankind.
But I’m through weeping. Almost through raging. If the Republicans win the next White House and Congress, with their now unchecked and unbalanced Supreme Court, I will no longer remain a resident alien.
Read “The Evolving Self” by Csikszentmihalyi. He helped coin the term “meme”. When Henry Ford conceived of his revolutionary and marvelous assembly line for the Model T, he might have–but didn’t–envision its future…in terms of its eventually covering a third of the globe with concrete and asphalt and threatening global extinction with it’s CO2 exhaust spewed by 2 billion derivative “memes”.
When conservative legislators in Delaware conceived of the “corporation”, they created unknowingly the Frankenstein monster that would one day dominate its creators. Eventually, I fear, kill them. Corporations lobbying legislators and orchestrating the messages of the “free” press (e.g. Fox network) have enabled a mental dwarf to obtain the most important office on the globe. He’s a pathetic puppet of petrochemical and military industry who’s probably blind to most of the strings pulling him this way and that. He “thinks” it was his decision to enter Afghanistan and Iraq. He never had a clue. A man with no intellect, no true ideals, no sense or knowledge of history became a tool for corporate fascists.
Acting as corporations, men become like the anonymous mob in Twain’s Huck Finn. Quantum transmogrifying quality. The whole of the corporate clan is much less in terms of humanity than the sum of its parts. Souls and consciences are lost in the conglomerate mix. Halliburton, Enron, Ford, GM—all of them have the same common denominator, the same god. The buck. The souls empowering the corporations (labor) are but intrinsic commodities in corporate trade.
The first Corporations bore some semblance of similarity to their human founders. GE once in fact brought some “good things to life”. Refrigerators, electric food mixers and stoves. Their prime products now are nuclear triggers and guiding WMD munitions…all products ultimately designed to insure corporate continuity, through intimidation and domination of as opposed to competition with international counterpart corporations. We champion and market and hence promote what we create. Corporations now own our churches by controlling their media mechanisms for garnering …the buck. Corporations (e.g. Halliburton) draft and launch their own execs into 5-th column posts in the White House and Pentagon. They manufacture… and manipulate the missiles aimed at …”foreign” bearers of …bucks.
The sad…hopeless…part of it all is there are actually no old-style villains out there in your neo-con camps. In the West, Cheney simply lost his humanity by climbing too high up, and staying too long in the belly of the petrochemical corporate beast. You become what you serve and champion. In the East, Sharon lost his humanity in the process of Zion’s nuclear incorporation- where unstable theocratic Jewish statehood was unnaturally created in the cyclotron of Christian guilt in the heart of Islamic darkness. He had two impossible masters, Zionism and Capitalism, corporate siblings incestuously wed in the nightmare Armageddon-bound mythology of god promising land to a putatively-chosen few. Though one is dying of a corporate-depleted heart, and the other a Zionist-battered brain, they will have their under-study replacements the second they succumb in their quests. The corporate kings are dead, they’ll say; Long live the corporations!
While we were growing up, Steve, we had Tom and Jerry, Donald Duck, John Wayne, Andy Griffith, Ozzie and Harriet, a president who wouldn’t use Oval Office stamps on personal mail, and our doors were unlocked at night. Sure it was a dream, but life always is. Today’s dreams (beat each other as “survivors”, get hurt and scared and …rain down shock and awe on …anyone; buy a house with 10,000 sq ft and 2 SUV’s in the drive…at any cost, including extinction of life on earth) are soulless. Today’s dreams are dictated by corporations.
We need, somehow, to take our country back from the …corporations. No, I don’t have the answers as to how. But I’m searching. My life has considerable and increasing value, because the older I become, the rarer become my memories. Memories of how things used to work and be. Days when lawyers treasured their “ethics”, Congressmen kept some of their promises, and corporations were for the most part…responsible little robots, instead of mega-autonomous and malignant monsters who’ll reflexively trade human lives (yours and mine) for increased shelf life for their cookies.
If you’re still awake, thanks for giving me a focal point at which to muster my thinking today.
One day we’ll meet and to at least one of us, it will become apparent that our essentials points of variance are superficial. But skin, too, is superficial and without it, we’d lose precious water and die. I simply think that our political skins are less integral to our lives; more mutable. I’ve done some substantial traveling in Germany in the past few years. There I encountered many folks who sat around in tolerant (at least inertial) indifference while their fascist leadership was methodically exterminating a large and innocent ethnic sector of the German population. Since the 40’s, the attitudes of most of those Christian Conservative Germans has drastically changed. If I couldn’t cling to the belief the same awakening is possible over here, I’d leave America now.
See you in the funny papers (your neo-con column).
Dusty
