untethered

If denouncing the neocons is the New Black, then warning of a coming fall line of Buchananite brownshirts never goes out of style, regardless of the fact that the jackboots perennially fail to appear on the runways of our political system.
This perpetual rite, handed down through the generations, works even now to distract many from the fact that the current (and arguably most threatening in history) challenge to what remains of the American republican project comes from the neoconservative movement, with its roots in Trotskyism, liberal intervention, globalist dogma, and anti-“isolationist” militarism.

It’s further notable that the supposedly isolationist paleoconservative impulse, if heeded, would have spared us the current Iraq morass as well as the intervention in Kosovo, and would have allowed us to proceed in Afghanistan with a more realistic strategy focused on destroying al Qaeda and eschewing impossible nation-building of the sort that is rapidly deteriorating there as it needlessly drains us of blood, resources, prestige, and influence at this very crucial moment.

Also, the restrictionist immigration policies of these imaginary fascists would have lessened murderous violence here at home, such as the ethnic cleansing of Los Angeles neighborhoods by Chicano gangs targeting African Americans and the festering war within the swelling California prison population between black and brown.

So remember, when someone starts dragging out the nineteen-thirties analogies (funny how some so-called liberals share this fixation with the neocons), and warning you to “keep your eyes open” for apostates who “hide” among us like the pod people from Invasion of the Body Snatchers, remember that all ideologies have blood on their hands. Ideology has blood on its hands. Paleoconservatism, whatever its limitations as a result, is the absence of ideology.

There are no settled questions. There are no dangerous ideas. There is only perilous human nature.

“Because I’m the conservative, whether you know it or not. You don’t know who’s out there on those wild and hungry streets. I am your prudent broker on Judgment Day. Harlem, the Bronx, and Brooklyn, they’re gonna blow my friend, and on that day, how grateful you will be for your prudent broker…your prudent broker…who can control the steam.”
—Reverend Bacon, The Bonfire of the Vanities (Tom Wolfe)

Nature secretly avenges herself for the constraint imposed upon her by the laws of man.
—Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

The Don Imus “scandal” appeared as if on cue to distract the public from the lack of any meaningful mea culpa from the major media regarding their de facto collective attempt to convict without meaningful trial a group of, all together now, privileged white male student athletes, on the basis of an accusation almost immediately recognizable as false, of sexually assaulting, once more as a group, an impoverished single black mother working as an exotic dancer to make ends meet.
The embarrassing and anticlimactic denouement of the sad affair is no doubt one rare moment that the editors of the New York Times felt some gratitude for the short attention span and general apathy of the greater portion of the American public. But it must be said plainly at least once:

The media coverage of the Duke rape hoax was an intentional attempt to prejudice against the accused the public and any jury that might be convened from it.

This was not merely shoddy reporting. Worse even, in measure of moral cowardice if not consequence, than the coverage of the Bush Administration’s case for invading Iraq. When the contraption collapsed the rickety supports of its foundational lies, what was revealed in the wreckage was not an isolated incident but a long established pattern of intentional and institutionalized bias, so revealed only because those who maintain it had grown lax, so confident in their intrigue that they had ceased treating accusations from the favored against the disfavored with even cursory skepticism. Poor quality inspection of the raw material used for narrative manufacture leading to a defective run.

Aftershocks of unintentional comedy followed the conclusion of the humorless farce, revealing that some will surrender the fictive narrative of never-ending collective noble black suffering at the hands of a boundlessly evil white majority only when it is pried from their cold, dead hands.
Witness the post-mortem offered by the now completely dissolute NAACP, showing that organization has less shame even than relevance remaining, as its spokesmen affected concern that in the future young black women sexually assaulted by gangs of young white men inebriated on alcohol and entitlement might not have the courage to come forward (perhaps because they would be at risk of being swept up in a similar nationwide campaign orchestrated by the organization and its activist and media comrades, fielding visits from the likes of Jesse Jackson bearing cash grants and agents seeking story rights, only to suffer modest, anonymous embarrassment free of any meaningful consequences if and when their charges are belatedly revealed as false—God forbid!).

That these hordes of leering white rapists obsessed with black womanhood are so hard to find that they appear to be imaginary still goes mostly unremarked upon by the media, where this occasion for self-examination has been met with the equivalent of incomprehensible mumbling and looking off to the side. And what do you know; blundering into view comes another hapless, diversionary patsy. Look, over there! He can’t get away with that, can he? That was a close one.

Indeed, decrepit Don, no great loss to the world of comedy, would have been well served by a more favorable news cycle, in which his crude and offensive but relatively tame remark (which never would have made it to the ears of the young offended if not for all the whipped-up outrage) would have submerged with the rest of the insubstantial swill.

But Imus’ explanation deserves better than the out of hand rejection it has received: that he was merely engaging in “humorous” vernacular made popular by rap. This is obviously true. Something else has happened here. The appalling misogyny, violence, and outright stupidity of rap culture can only be recognized as such when an oblivious white fool attempts to mimic it.

Those offered up for sacrifice to a prevailing tyranny need not be rebellious; they are often among its most observant adherents, blundering into the ruling caste’s view as timely targets of opportunity. When the punishment is meant for public consumption to maintain an unofficial limit on speech, precisely who is offered up is irrelevant, provided he is of the proper class. In this case, white male.

But Imus has always been only nominally “controversial.” He’s always known who fills his bowl. For all of his clumsy and glib bigotry, Imus, like most mainstream figures, would never dream of saying anything truly controversial (that is to say, controversial because it raises an unsettling question that impinges on the collective delirium). No, this is one who will cling so desperately to his remote seat at the table of privilege that there is no genuflection too humiliating, including kowtowing to Al Sharpton. Imus is the court jester, not Robin Hood.

As we endure, yet again, the gruesome spectacle of the Reverends Jackson and Sharpton jockeying for the rights to this production, the perennially recurring questions arise: What possible good can come from Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton? How is it that a nation inflicts itself with such as these?

I ask not merely rhetorically but in earnest, accepting that we would all be better off without them, but recognizing that they are fixtures in the body politic and will be for the foreseeable future. They are as aspects of the natural order, so, like fungus or decay, they play some role in the ecosystem. Their stated concerns and oft-bellowed outrage are transparently disingenuous; indeed, that which they purport to despise is their stock-in-trade. So what then, is the real “purpose”, for lack of a better term, behind the twin corrosives that are Al and Jesse?

There is no longer any use in pointing out the obvious, that these men and their ilk profit from the perpetuation and illusion of a great lie. To state it clearly one more time, the lie is simply this:
Disproportionate levels of poverty, crime, and anti-intellectualism affecting chronically under-performing minorities, and blacks in particular, are primarily the result of white racism at the institutional, collective, and personal level.

An officially sanctioned lie so at odds with reality and producing so much resentment and thwarted expectation in so many, in a democratic nation of such great wealth and with so many lawyers about–well, the profit potential is limitless. When you’re talking about this much money to be confiscated, transferred, awarded, and doled out, a professional class has to emerge to manage the vulgar transaction from government mandate to money in pocket. The question becomes, why aren’t there more Sharptons and Jacksons? I hesitate to even say it aloud, lest I jinx our uncommon good luck.

But we all know this. In the absence of honesty and rationality race relations in the United States constitute a tightly controlled market of sorts where the humiliation of racial inequality is negotiated using proxies such as these manufactured controversies and their attendant “dialogues.” Because the official mandate is an unachievable equality of results, naturally occurring inequality constitutes a continuing, compounding debt that is serviced by such as these conspicuous sacrifices; they are interest payments of a sort.

But it isn’t only the delicate pride of black America that is served; white America purchases something, albeit at an increasing premium. There exists on the part of the majority an ever present fear, sustained by the knowledge that the expectation of equality can never be met but is increasingly expected. The majority lives in a state of continual unease, as violence in the form of riots (called “uprisings” or “rebellions”) and street crime is characterized by the culture (through the romance of rap and cinema) as a legitimate means of achieving equity when all else fails (and all else is certain to fail in the end). The process of automatically granting concessions in response to black rioting has created a system of quid pro quo that essentially rewards orchestrated mayhem. This fear, and the continually reinforced sense of guilt achieved by the same cultural/political mechanism, must also be calmed; maintained at a desirable level by the managerial class but kept from growing too great and provoking a reaction. It resembles the maintenance of inflation through monetary policy. So while this market is “artificial”, it has its own logic and unspoken purpose, and reaches its own shaky equilibrium.

Thus, as the influential classes implicitly understand and acknowledge, it isn’t a question of truth, or, ironically, justice, but a question of assuaging the resentment of one group and the fear of another, thus the ceremonial and conspicuous displays of pilfered wealth, the ritual debasement of “privileged” Great White Defendants, and the reward of status for those who manage this market.

Therefore those behind these manufactured scandals will not be reasoned with; they are calculating people too clever to believe their own rhetoric and too dishonest to abstain from enriching themselves by it; they understand with greater clarity than you the nature of the game. It is not a contest of reason and truth but of fear and resentment.

Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, the NAACP, the Southern Poverty Law Center, et al; these are the traders and brokerages specializing in profiting from the disparity in this market. Some firms flourish as others fade. The behind the scenes jockeying is an entertainment we are unfortunately not allowed to spectate, as the media, normally obsessed with political handicapping, pretends that these are not financial/political hybrids but priesthoods of a sort. Alas.

Jackson was well positioned to be the first firm to take on the duties and profit from the new market in racial angst, having spent the seventies and early eighties in the unglamorous and far less profitable business of preaching the values of hard work and independence. Like many a broker in the eighties, he was lured out of his staid world by the easy credit and loosening regulations of another; fitting for the late eighties, he went to work in the political equivalent of the junk bond industry.
Work and family were already becoming the U.S. savings bonds of investment, a sucker’s play, as the maturation of the welfare state and the sexual revolution, combined with waves of new innovations in the illicit drug industry, PCP, free-basing, and, finally, Freeway Rick’s gift to black America, crack cocaine, corroded the industry from without.

Meanwhile Sharpton, a criminal figure from the start and early innovator of animus conversion products, having managed to escape any consequences for the attempted framing of four men in the Tawana Brawley hoax and various fatal incitements to riot, was perfectly positioned when deregulation came around. Michael Corleone never realized his dream of taking the family legitimate (at least I think that’s true; I never made it to the end of Part III, and I’ve never met anyone who has), but for Al, legitimacy would come around to him, delivered by the Democratic Party in its infinite capacity to visit absurdity upon itself.

A bargain was struck; Al would no longer threaten riots, but more importantly he would no longer expose the violent threat that exists at the core of the Democratic Party’s race policies. In return he would be able to take his product national, and would now be competing with, and eventually overtaking, his rival, the Reverend Jackson.
Al now plays the affable if slightly difficult buffoon at public Democratic functions, and the nervous white folks all pretend he’s funny, laughing a little too enthusiastically at his leaden one-liners. Race in America in microcosm, that.
One other reason we will not soon be rid of Al Sharpton, even as the Reverend Jackson ebbs into decrepitude and what promises to be a gruesome but entertaining public dementia, is that he serves the needs of the Democratic Party so well. Tokens nowadays are perpetually dissing their hosts and more expensive than ever, but they are tokens nonetheless.

But a market based on an increasingly obvious falsity cannot last. The fiction is becoming an industry joke. The divide between reality and the market grows, and is harder and harder to conceal. The posted prices bear no relation to real-world valuations. The market strains. How will its collapse unfold? What will take its place?

Opening a recent Foreign Affairs article, Tony Blair demonstrated an ability to imbue rank dishonesty with self-righteous arrogance that would make Douglas Feith envious:

Our response to the September 11 attacks has proved even more momentous than it seemed at the time. That is because we could have chosen security as the battleground. But we did not. We chose values.

Mr. Blair’s fellow citizens may be alarmed by this public confirmation that their Prime Minister has chosen to focus less on their defense at home than on the American neoconservative project abroad. That scheme, despite its original ambitions for knocking off two or three obstructionist regimes in a neat row on our way to permanent preeminence in the Middle East, and the increasingly shrill and alarmist rhetoric that, still, accompanies it, has been reduced to struggling to achieve the minimal level of security (seems you’ve had to concern yourself with someone’s security after all, Mr. Prime Minister) in Iraq necessary to preserve the effective de-nationalization of its oil industry while simultaneously minimizing the political fallout that comes with responsibility for leading one’s nation into humiliating defeat.

That and making threatening noises toward Iran (having had to discard, at least for the moment, plans to engage that previously non-hostile nation in Blair’s clash of “values”–by toppling its democratically elected government) and pretending that Iran somehow has the power to threaten us the way Iraq once did in the fevered, shared imagination of President Bush and the Prime Minister.

With his short but still somehow interminable essay Mr. Blair is counting on the short reach of your memory; security, after all, was invoked as necessitating the invasion of Iraq without delay. The hysterics he and President Bush engaged in prior to invading Iraq were designed to manipulate and extend rational fear following 9/11, when al Qaeda expanded its war on the U.S. by engaging us on the “battleground” of domestic security.

Blair’s government engaged in the manipulation of intelligence in a fashion similiar to the well documented orchestration that occurred in the U.S., to lead a recently terrorized public into believing that Iraq was at that very moment itself advancing as a “gathering” threat. In what was perhaps Prime Minister Blair’s most conspicuous and deliberate misconstruing of intelligence he asserted that Iraq had the capability (and—even more remarkably—was suicidally willing) to launch weapons of mass destruction against Western outposts in minutes. Security was all the rage back then. Mr. Blair would like you to forget about his fling with the now embarrassing fashion of that moment. But like an old photo revealing a middle-aged man’s youthful penchant for Angel’s Flight slacks and gold chains, documentation exists.

The lofty rhetoric about democracy and freedom was merely adjunct to the hysteria, recall; the Prime Minister, still following Bush’s lead right off the edge of the dance floor, behaves as if the reverse had been the case, even as he offers the pathetic argument that, yes, Iraq was indeed a threat because they were after all in violation of those “fourteen U.N. resolutions.” At least Blair doesn’t share the habit of some of his American counterparts of citing as a casus belli United Nations resolutions one moment and in the next cursing or ridiculing the institution as obstructionist and corrupt and international law as a moral hindrance.

But to take this argument at face value (that is, as if its source retains a modicum of credibility), Blair is still pushing the same false dichotomy that got him, and us, into this mess: that we have no choice but to engage al Qaeda and its sympathizers in a global contest of cultures, or face extinction and the withering away of human progress. No sensible person can believe that the Jihadis are going to conquer U.S. or British soil, and Blair’s own domestic and immigration policies suggest he doesn’t take seriously the threat of importing Islamic radicalism (the only conceivable way the Islamists could establish a presence in and threaten the existence of the West), so the question needs to be put to him: what would this defeat look like?

And there is the likelihood of a defeat, albeit different from that invoked by Blair, as a result of the overreaching of the Bush/Blair coalition. But what is at stake is not our very existence but our influence and dominance in the Middle East. The consequences of surrendering the Middle East might ultimately precipitate our decline; but our new imperialists cannot engage the public on such frank terms. They would then have to acknowledge that we are in effect fighting to maintain an empire of sorts, and that we are not curing the world but straddling it. It would furthermore provoke the question: what sort of world order is this that depends on our subjugation of the oil-rich Middle East, and is it worth keeping?

At points Blair’s essay reads like a variation on Sokal’s Hoax using Friedman-esque terminology, but belies an almost sinister grandiosity beneath the unintentional humor:

Globalization begets interdependence, and interdependence begets the necessity of a common value system to make it work. Idealism thus becomes realpolitik.

More questions arise. What is this “common value system”? What is its extent? How is it achieved? Who determines it? Who enforces it? Idealism thus becomes imperialism.

What is really at work here is that our governments will not, and cannot, retreat from globalization on their terms, even in the face of the repercussive blowback against Western influence and dominance of the Middle East that is the global Jihad. Anything less than the aggressive redoubling of Western penetration and influence of the Middle East is seen as retreat by Blair and Bush. Iraq reveals how arrogant expressions of might thwarted are revealed as craven acts of desperation.

But no matter how righteous our anger toward those responsible for 9/11, who had after all been identified and located even before they struck, any actions beyond their destruction still had to meet the same standard as before 9/11, as a reasonable response to a real threat.
Bush and Blair were impatient with this because they believed they were justified nonetheless and granted a historic dispensation; delusions of grandeur. What they will never admit, even to themselves, is that they couldn’t bear to see their chance at greatness pass, when it seemed that it would all be relatively easy and the reward, permanent domination of the Middle East, would carry their names into eternity. Hence the lying. This is how the vanity of small men wrecks great nations.

Blair uses the bulk of his essay to argue for global anti-poverty and pro-democracy programs as part and parcel of this imperial strategy, and, as his opening paragraph unblushingly asserts, making as if this has been the case all along. The Great Society goes global and militant, no doubt with unintended consequences that will make the domestic version’s look trivial.
As if this will make the discredited folly of attempting to forcibly reform Islam on behalf of its presumptively captive population (as if the people, society, and governance of Islam are three distinct and unrelated things and—contrary to every other example in human history—the latter two somehow descended on an unwitting populace and its culture rather than arising from it) look like just another aspect of our generosity.

The proposition is absurd on its face, and anyway rendered tragically moot by our failure in Iraq; but it is also exposed as disingenuous by the fact that the chosen primary targets are secular and Shi’ite nations that, while tyrannical and backward, oppose the global Jihad. Where the effort was truly against radical Islamists with global designs (and where we bore the responsibility of avenging the murder of 9/11), Afghanistan, resources were drawn away to engage in a war of choice against Iraq.
Iran, a natural enemy of those responsible for 9/11 and a logical ally against them, presents a challenge that is clearly not “existential” or “global”, but regional; and it is furthermore their region, which they’ve sought to dominate for centuries, long before the current manifestation of Persian governance came into being. Viewing Iran solely through the prism of the Khomeni revolution is like trying to understand the United States as a product of the Bush Administration. These movements and theories attach themselves to the larger historical forces from which they spring and into which they are eventually subsumed.

Iraq and Iran were not selected for their unique brutality and bear no relevance to the struggle against the global Jihad, and our targeting of them doesn’t represent a “global” or “universal” fight against terrorism and tyranny; indeed, we continue to align with and support petty tyrants and others who do our bidding, some of whom can even be characterized as terrorists, against nations that hold the same geostrategic importance they held before 9/11: Iraq for its oil, Iran for the challenge it presents to Israel, to the Sunni Arab states, and to American hegemony in the Middle East. It is a war about “values” after all: the value of resources and the value of a presence in the Middle East.

The Prime Minister goes on, forwarding garbled ideas with artless prose, to seek to tie in the aggressive military adventurism of the Iraq war with a sort of renewed international liberal activism, offering this bizarre tautology:

The is a danger of a division of global politics into “hard” and “soft”, with the “hard” efforts going after the terrorists, whereas the “soft” campaign focuses on poverty and injustice. That divide is dangerous because interdependence makes all these issues just that: interdependent.

I defy you to find the meaning in that. These things are interdependent because they are interdependent. My fellow Americans, we can take cold comfort in knowing that we are not alone in having elected a man incapable of sound reasoning to our highest office. No explanation is offered as to how and why this assertion is true, much less to what extent and where precisely it applies.

“Universal” and “global” are profligately employed in the article as to the scale of Blair’s “battleground of ideas”; any military action taken by the U.S./British coalition is to be seen as part and parcel of the grand liberal anti-poverty and democratization project. It is the world’s worst nightmare, liberal activism married to military power and applied on a global scale. But it gets better, continuing the same paragraph:

The answer to terrorism is the universal application of global values; the answer to poverty and injustice is the same. That is why the struggle for global values has to be applied not selectively but to the whole global agenda.

I’m reminded of being very young, and thinking that all that really stood in the way of world peace and prosperity was the requisite will and proper marshalling of resources. It’s frightening that world leaders still think in these childlike terms; rather, it’s frightening that the democratic world has come to operate on the institutionalized dishonesty that makes this sort of nonsensical talk effective.
But as for its relevance to a struggle with radical Islamists, it’s the “they hate us for our freedom” argument extrapolated to “they will love us for our beneficence”, proving that these conservative and liberal pieties exist on the same absurd continuum. The Prime Minister even engages in a bit of comedy, mentioning Live 8 and the Make Poverty History campaigns as models for remaking the world over post-9/11.

Walid Phares has a book out, with a title that seems designed to make it indistinguishable from the still swelling mass of spent wood fiber sacrificed more for the purpose of advancing the careers of various experts than uncovering the truth, The War of Ideas: Jihadism against Democracy, that I haven’t read. But the prevalence and unchallenged nature of the idea expressed by Mr. Blair’s delirium and Mr. Phares’ book title has me thinking that the one idea upon which we need to make war is the idea that we are engaged in a “war of ideas”; driving a stake through it once and for all, before dismembering the corpse and burying its parts in equidistant remote locations.

Just how little scrutiny this radical and, to me at least, nonsensical notion receives, just how much it is a point of ecumenical agreement across the spectrum of opinion, even among those who recognize the folly and mendacity of the Iraq war, that we have to refute the jihadis’ “ideas” and replace them with our own, is a marvel. Those who argue that we are engaged in a global battle of ideas have unwisely accepted the war on the jihadis’ terms. For them it is just that: a battle to the death between two opposite worldviews. It was, and is, desperation. Those who argue that we “must” defeat the Jihadis in a battle of ideas argue that we should be every bit as desperate as they are. The Jihadis have been claiming, and counting on, the existence of a “war on Islam” for decades; Bush and Blair have given it to them.

Among the reasons initially offered for this global engagement of values was the notion that 9/11 had suddenly exposed the illusory nature of our security; we had to engage the Ummah because modern transportation and communications had brought it to our shores. That we already knew. The real revelation we have not yet come to accept, the more intractable and distasteful and therefore little spoken of reality, is that the terrorists showed up here because we have for so long been engaged over there.

This is commonly discarded as the self-loathing of leftist Amerika-with-a-k types; but in reality the typical out-of-hand rejection of this obvious fact is the foreign policy equivalent of reflexively rejecting as “blaming the victim” any acknowledgement that hardships often befall people as consequences of their own actions. Perhaps this explains how an oddity like Blair, the liberal imperialist, can find himself explaining away a disastrous war of aggression four years later by chiding those who offered him better advice, all the while posturing as a moralist.

Behind every circus elephant is a man armed with a large shovel. Behind every imperial misadventure is a politician armed with high-minded rhetoric.

The Costanza Doctrine. By way of Dr. Leo Strauss.

I don’t speak your blasted language.
—Col. John Norton-Griffiths

I have to break my self-imposed deafness regarding all things political and silence regarding the blog to ask, if anyone’s left out there, regarding this renegade Obama campaign anti-Clinton ad parodying the old “1984” Apple Computer commercial: how on earth is this an “attack ad”?*
Is it merely because of the imagery, throwing the hammer at the mere representation of Hillary on the screen (it’s been a long time, but is that a Hooters girl tossing the hammer?)? Or is it enough to engage in the deliberately fanciful and humorous comparison of Hillary to Big Brother to qualify one as this season’s Lee Atwater?

I had the impression that an “attack ad” made clearly false claims or insinuations, engaged in guilt-by-association, or contained scurrilous assaults on personal behavior; I think the definition is being stretched here to include the merely irreverent (and I don’t share the disdain for attack ads myself; it’s all on the electorate in the end, and if the American public hasn’t yet attained the political sophistication to penalize the insubstantial or scandal-mongering with pointed ignorance or ridicule then we do indeed deserve the “leaders” we get–as for the rest of the world, perhaps we owe them an apology).

But is this what we can expect of the coming race, this sideshow of brittle sensibilities? It’s probably only a matter of time before Obama revels in his moment of affected outrage because someone has indulged in the temerity of questioning whether his much-hyped personal history of racial struggle isn’t just a bit disingenuous. Both campaigns already have the apparatus in place to convert to useful energy anything, such as the moment’s so-called attack ad, that can be portrayed as an unfair or bigoted assault.
Both sides are coiled to strike at the first rhetorical duck to step out of line, and with the presence and unspoken collusion of Fox News and the usual suspects of right-wing radio, they will likely have several opportunities. Our only recourse against a political campaign that dodges the glaring stage lights of real scrutiny by grappling in the mosh pit of phony outrage is through ridicule. Let’s nip this thing in the bud. Mock early, and often. I’m looking at you, Daily Show. Once more unto the breach.

As for the ad in question, it makes a powerful statement about a longtime political insider who operated ruthlessly behind the scenes before gaining the junior senate seat for the state of New York to use as nothing more than a springboard to executive power while doing absolutely nothing to turn back the assault on civil liberties of the Bush Administration and cheering on its appalling foreign policy until it became no longer politically beneficial, and who is currently joining in the enthusiasm for an attack on Iran (some sixties hippie you turned out to be!), and whose own campaign is currently stifling debate and the political process by threatening donors away from competing candidates with all the subtlety of a snarling Rottweiler defending a side of beef, as it seeks to hoard as much of the available odds- and favor-chasing campaign cash as it can before anything as disorderly as a political debate breaks out (all of this probably a tad more significant than a satirical ad getting carried away with an extreme metaphor).

Add to this the disturbing lack of scrutiny she recieves by many due to her sex and longtime service as a feminist talisman, the fact that so much establishment money has migrated so quickly to her candidacy, the cult-like reverence for her exhibited by the habitual first name only denotation by fawning abjects, and the overall sense of entitlement to power she exudes (and a pair of disembodied eyes that always seem to follow you, even from photographs, chilling every male right down to his inherently misogynistic soul), and I’d say whoever made the offending ad deftly addresses the creeping unease which many of us feel toward this woman who is propelled along on a sort of reverse groundswell of corporate and politically elitist support. Many of us, liberal and conservative alike, get the feeling that Hillary has been selected for us and is now being foisted upon us.
Furthermore, say what you will about either Obama or Clinton, they are clearly of two distinct generations, and our current ruling elders seem to have guided us to a very precarious station in the nation’s progress. I don’t know what precisely is behind all of the attention the rogue spot is getting, perhaps simply that it strikes a chord with media types who can’t help but feel a bit cowed by the Hillary Machine, but its resonant note is sounding over and over again as the piece is being repeatedly shown on television news programs. If the Clinton campaign had a hand in bringing the spot to the public’s attention by seeking to generate outrage over it they need to learn when to keep their powder dry.

It seems another common misconception we have foisted upon ourselves, that our political process is increasingly fouled by personal attacks (as many have pointed out, the personal invective has been much worse in the past), when in fact the greater problem is that the process is diluted by so much insubstantial chatter. In fact, the clip the ad’s author used of Hillary Clinton blathering about having a “conversation” with the electorate was pretty damned apt, if you ask me. This language, my God.
The feminization of our culture is a given consequence of the sexual revolution and I don’t intend to fight it other than obliquely by championing common sense and rigor over kitsch and sentiment, but Hillary Clinton’s oeuvre of platitude, euphemism, and thinly veiled female (and other group) resentment shows that a powerful and effective new language has entered the family of totalitarian tongues. Big Sister may prove much more effective than Big Brother in the end, and when she’s so very eager to please the aggressive militarism of AIPAC while increasing the size of the state at home and can be counted on to do whatever she can to accelerate our continuing slide into a racial and sexual spoils system, perhaps the 1984 analogy is as pointed as it is farcical.

Are we so afraid of intellectual strife and complexity that we just want someone to stroke our collective head and tell us she’ll be our great all-protecting Big Mother, or that he’ll flash his winning smile and “transcend” right out of existence the age-old problem of race?
Sorry, stupid question.
So if the candidates are going to waste our time pretending to be engaging the nation in kindly chats or attempting to turn the national political narrative into the equivalent of a black-white buddy movie, I say let the hammers fly.

(Now I have to go back to sharpening my survivalist skills and writing my Kaczynski-esque manifesto)

*The day after posting this I realized that I should perhaps seek out a definition of attack ad, and found this on Wikipedia:

In political campaigns, an attack ad is an advertisement whose message is meant as an attack against another candidate or political party. Attack ads often form part of negative campaigning or smear campaigns, and in large or well-financed campaigns, may be disseminated via mass media.
An attack ad will generally criticize an opponent’s political platform, usually by pointing out its faults and contrasting them against its own platform.

So the YouTube spot qualifies by this broad definition of any criticism offered of one’s political opponent, but hardly qualifies as a “smear.” Clinton supporters no doubt view it as negative, but this merely points out the problem with the whole overbroad “attack ad” concept. I’ve always thought that offering a critique of your opponent’s plan and contrasting it with your own is not only valid but a necessary part of a political campaign.

The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.
—George W. Bush, Inaugural Address, 2005

…we will not stop at this point, but will pursue the evil force into its own lands, invade its western heartland, and struggle to overcome it until all the world shouts the name of the Prophet and the teachings of Islam spread throughout the world. Only then will Muslims achieve their fundamental goal, and there will be no more “persecution” and all religion will be exclusively for Allah.
—Hasan al-Banna, quoted in To Be a Muslim (Fathi Yakan)

A world-wide socialist army of the revolutionary proletariat is alone capable of putting an end to this oppression and enslavement of the masses.
—Lenin

We want to glorify war, the only cure for the world.
—F.T. Marinetti, The Futurist Manifesto

We have met the enemy, and he is us.
—Pogo

Every revolutionary is a frustrated tyrant.

It is the light in the world’s darkness. Its absence is the very definition of tyranny and oppression. It is the sacred duty of those who possess it that they bring it to those who do not, by warfare if necessary. It cannot be fully realized until it exists everywhere; its existence everywhere is inevitable. The world is divided between those who thrive in the light of its revelation and those who wallow in the darkness of their ignorance. It is man’s only assurance of freedom from oppression, ignorance, and want; it is to be his final liberation from bondage. Every society preceding it is inferior; there is no progression beyond it. It is the end destination of humanity.
It is the fundamentalist interpretation of Islam; it is George W. Bush’s interpretation of democracy.

The similarities in rhetoric between America’s neoconservatives and Islam’s global jihadists reveal them as two recent manifestations of a constant human impulse toward such dangerously expansive and messianic movements. These movements derive from and manipulate the individual’s ineradicable need to be part of a vital and ascendant group, and his attendant fear of other such groups displacing his own, so ingrained by centuries of evolutionary pressures that we do not recognize it. Human nature has for eons expressed this aspect through kin and tribe in the struggle for survival in a hostile world. The marriage of ideology to this powerful and primordial impulse is a relatively recent and deadly development in human history.

Such movements take on the rhetoric of revolution when pursuing power and the methods of totalitarianism once they attain it. The revolution seeks out predominance; the totalitarian system defends it. They are the same phenomenon in different developmental stages. But neither can long survive stasis. For a movement to stand still is to die, and always to the benefit of mankind.
If enemies and threats do not exist abroad they must be created at home; the ideal enemy for instilling the fear and fervor necessary to fill the ranks and maintain order is a competing movement of comparable size and vitality, with a complementary opposing ideology. Moderation, legality, temperance, the rights of nations; these are the true threats to an ideological movement, the very antitheses of revolution and totalitarianism. This is why the radical Left assails liberalism and liberal institutions; this is why radical neoconservatism despises conservative “isolationism” and international law alike. The revolutionary and the totalitarian are the yin and yang of humanity’s restless, destructive, and fearful nature, of man’s innate aggression and paranoia. The impulse toward aggressive revolutionary/totalitarian movements is the dark underside of man’s creative sociability.

For any revolutionary movement ideological content is really secondary to its irrational, emotional appeal to the individual’s inborn yearning for plenty and security; its particular language is malleable over time, often fantastic and delusional. The formal similarities of the great ideological movements reveal them as merely separate instances and vehicles channeling this same primordial need. These appeal to the individual through the promise of group vitality, to be realized by expansion through conquest and conversion; to security from the domination of or absorption by foreign groups with the same needs; in the claim to moral supremacy and the primacy of individual rights as defined and ordered by the movement, in opposition to the group rights of other nations, hence the disdain for international law and concepts such as just war; in the celebration of war and the elevation of heroism to a place of god-like transcendance; finally in the promised messianic end goal of a heaven on earth, an end to history and strife, achieved and enjoyed by the true believers and their progeny.

These movements start out as revolutionary and, if successful in gaining power, invariably end in domestic repression and expansionist aggression. Having defined itself as singularly just any opposition anywhere is percieved as inherently evil; the movement becomes antinomian, authoritarian, and global. The mere existence of alternatives is deemed a threat to its existence. This finds its expression most elegantly and ironically in the disastrous formula, uttered by a fittingly anonymous provocateur: no one is free when others are oppressed. Let this be revolutionary totalitarianism’s sardonic epitaph, and soon.

What makes these movements dangerous is this need for momentum, satisfied by continual expansion; these movements are largely expansion and momentum, fundamental individual behavior aggregated to form naturally hostile groups that instinctively assault one another in a world they see as a chaotic, continual threat. They must conquer, render subservient, or assimilate all other groups until no competitors remain.
Of course, this can never be achieved, as apostate sects will always form, and as the realities of race, kin, and geography intrude and trump the false and temporary bonds of ideology. Movements are thwarted, they dissipate, they are absorbed into others. But the impulse goes on, endlessly recombining, reforming, metamorphosing. New cells form within host movements and split off; boundaries can be fuzzy; language is sometimes freely traded. The jihadist movement as currently constituted began in the thirties and flowered in the revolutionary fervor of the sixties, borrowing freely the rhetoric of the Western Left; many of the jihadist authors of that period sound positively Marxist.

Still it’s important to see the content of ideology and messianic religio-political movements as mass, self-applied delusion; as essentially group self-deceit. Witness the average neocon: he can’t see the true nature of his movement for the visceral appeal of his half-formed ideas.

But interests, largely defined by the availability of resources, are still the true determinant of war and peace.

Nations and ethnicities remain engaged in the same age-old struggle over resources and room. Take for instance the progress of Russia through the years; from the czars through Stalin and now in its post-Soviet phase, its core geostrategic interests have not changed, and its actions are determined more by its relative strength than by any ideological gloss. Likewise us. Only the slogans change.

The delusion requires the specter of a hostile and uncivilized world as a constant and imminent threat. For the Islamist the world is divided into the infidel dar-al-Harb (house of war), and the Muslim dar-al-Islam (house of submission); for the celebrants of a new American global order there is the “free”, i.e. Westernized, world, and the unwashed, benighted remainder. These world-views are now squared off against one another over the last great source of the world economy’s lifeblood, oil.

Those proposing the forcible democratization of the Middle East as the central strategy of the “global war on terror” have been allowed to advance an absurd argument: on one hand they warn of an “existential challenge” to the West, citing Islam’s well-documented doctrinal intolerance and violence, as well as its inherent hostility to modernity, and the intolerance of Muslim populations; on the other, they propose the answer to this is the forcible introduction of democratic elections. The same Muslim backwardness they chronicle reveals both the deceptiveness of their stated goals and the irrationality of their designs. But democracy is the only sanctioned evangel left to modern America, so it is in its name that our modern crusaders seek to conquer the world. The predictable result of such madness is what we are now witnessing. But notice that the delusional fervor of the hardcore isn’t lessened by these horrific results, but redoubled. For the true believing ideologue, there can be no retreat.

The ruse of democracy promotion complements global jihadism perfectly. There is no better way to lend credence to the Islamist’s talk of a “war on Islam”, than to pursue neoconservative designs of conquest and democratic reform in the Middle East, which in fact is a de facto war on Islam; many neoconservatives have chronicled the Muslim world’s inherent rigidity, intolerance and hostility to liberal democratic institutions at length, only to turn about and embrace (at least ostensibly) the forcible introduction of democracy there. The jihadists couldn’t have conjured up a more effective specter for their purposes of rallying Muslims to global jihad.

The new American imperialists are hopelessly ignorant not only of human nature but of the broader world beyond the West, and many of them likely are influenced by hostility toward Arabs, Muslims, and sympathy toward Israel, but the war in Iraq is still about the oil. All of the attendant forces that swept us up into war, understandable fear and anger following 9/11, American Likudniks looking to improve Israel’s position, anti-Saddam liberal interventionists; without the tremendous untapped oil wealth (and most of the public still doesn’t realize the size and significance of still undocumented Iraqi oil reserves, which may in the end rival Saudi Arabia’s) there, you can rest assured that Dick Cheney and his minions wouldn’t have pulled out all the stops (and pulled resources away from the pursuit of al Qaeda) to whip up the hysteria that was the buildup to the Iraq war. The cause, securing a vital resource, was older than war itself, but the call would use the heady language of the “existential threat”, the glorious crusade, and martial glory.

Oil will be the fuel of civilization for as far as we can see into the future, and it will increasingly come from lands with a defecit of creativity and liberty, and a surfeit of religious, nationalist, and ideological fervor. This is why the Iraq war was really Dick Cheney’s disastrous gambit to secure our energy future, disguised as World War III. It would have been far more wise, and cost-effective, to merely accept and adapt to the new realities of the global energy situation, and let the oil market work (yet another hypocrisy, our current leaders’ false faith in “markets”). But then, no one in the current administration has ever successfully run any commercial enterprise, Cheney and Rumsfeld’s stints selling their government contacts to the private sector notwithstanding. It should not surprise us that they haven’t learned the realities of cost, risk, and benefit while on the job in the White House.

But many still believe the rhetoric and buy into the delusion. The Soviets maintained the ruse of worldwide communist revolution until it became farce, while bankrupting themselves financing an untenable global empire (pursuing the same geostrategic goals that concerned them both before and after the rise and fall of the Soviet Union) with a more untenable economic system, and while we chase the apparition of Islamic global hegemony, we are far more likely to be surpassed by good old fashioned Asian ingenuity and industry. The future still belongs to the productive and creative, as it once belonged to us, an “isolationist” nation not yet intoxicated on the elixir of ideology and vainglory; one that another totalitarian revolutionary once derided as a “nation of merchants”, not very long before the repurcussions of his delusions came down upon his own nation’s head. Time for us to stop chasing dragons, and realize we are being overtaken by one.