On the 200th anniversary of Thomas Paine’s death, Bill Moyers sits down with Thomas Paine and the Promise of America author Harvey J. Kaye and National Review senior editor Richard Brookhiser, author of What Would The Founders Do?, as they discuss the relevance and meaning of the life and legacy of Thomas Paine.
We at USTV Media have long been making references to our nation’s declining condition as a form of de-evolution into the U.S.S.A., a descent which was expedited by the stupendously ignorant policies of the Busheviks. Here, Tom Engelhardt of TomDispatch.com brings a little more succinct clarity to this appraisal.
The USSR had been heading for the exits for quite a while, not that official Washington had a clue. At the moment it happened, Soviet “experts” like Secretary of Defense Robert Gates (then director of the CIA) still expected the Cold War to go on and on. In Washington, eyes were trained on the might of the Soviet military, which the Soviet leadership had never stopped feeding, even as its sclerotic bureaucracy was rotting, its economy (which had ceased to grow in the late 1970s) was tanking, budget deficits were soaring, indebtedness to other countries was growing, and social welfare payments were eating into what funds remained. Not even a vigorous, reformist leader like Mikhail Gorbachev could staunch the rot, especially when, in the late 1980s, the price of Russian oil fell drastically.
Looking back, the most distinctive feature of the last years of the Soviet Union may have been the way it continued to pour money into its military — and its military adventure in Afghanistan — when it was already going bankrupt and the society it had built was beginning to collapse around it. In the end, its aging leaders made a devastating miscalculation. They mistook military power for power on this planet.
————–
As the Pentagon expanded, taking on ever newer roles , the numbers would prove staggering. By the end of the Bush years, Washington was doling out almost twice what the next nine nations combined were spending on their militaries, while total U.S. military expenditures came to just under half the world’s total. Similarly, by 2008, the U.S. controlled almost 70% of the global arms market. It also had 11 aircraft carrier battle groups capable of patrolling the world’s seas and oceans at a time when no power that could faintly be considered a possible future enemy had more than one.
By then, private contractors had built for the Pentagon almost 300 military bases in Iraq, ranging from tiny combat outposts to massive ” American towns ” holding tens of thousands of troops and private contractors, with multiple bus lines, PX’s, fast-food “boardwalks,” massage parlors, water treatment and power plants, barracks, and airfields. They were in the process of doing the same in Afghanistan and, to a lesser extent, in the Persian Gulf region generally. This, too, represented a massive investment in what looked like a permanent occupation of the oil heartlands of the planet. As right-wing pundit Max Boot put it after a recent flying tour of America’s global garrisons, the U.S. possesses military bases that add up to “a virtual American empire of Wal-Mart-style PXs, fast-food restaurants, golf courses, and gyms.”
————–
It was also embroiled in two disastrous, potentially trillion-dollar wars (and various global skirmishes) — and all this at top dollar at a time when next to no money was being invested in, among other things, the bridges, tunnels, waterworks, and the like that made up an aging American infrastructure. Except when it came to victory, the military stood ever taller, while its many missions expanded exponentially, even as the domestic economy was spinning out of control, budget deficits were increasing rapidly, the governmental bureaucracy was growing ever more sclerotic, and indebtedness to other nations was rising by leaps and bounds.
In other words, in a far wealthier country, another set of leaders, having watched the Soviet Union implode, decisively embarked on the Soviet path to disaster.
————–
As in the Soviet Union before its collapse, the exaltation and feeding of the military at the expense of the rest of society and the economy had by now become the new normal; so much so that hardly a serious word could be said — lest you not “support our troops” — when it came to ending the American way of war or downsizing the global mission or ponying up the funds demanded of Congress to pursue war preparations and war-making.
————–
The first year and a half of the Obama administration has seen a continuation of what could be considered the monumental socialist-realist era of American war-making (including a decision to construct another huge, Baghdad-style “embassy” in Islamabad, Pakistan). This sort of creeping gigantism, with all its assorted cost overruns and private perks , would undoubtedly have seemed familiar to the Soviets. Certainly no less familiar will be the near decade the U.S. military has spent, increasingly disastrously, in the Afghan graveyard.
Drunk on war as Washington may be, the U.S. is still not the Soviet Union in 1991 — not yet. But it’s not the triumphant “sole superpower” anymore either. Its global power is visibly waning , its ability to win wars distinctly in question, its economic viability open to doubt. It has been transformed from a can-do into a can’t-do nation, a fact only highlighted by the ongoing BP catastrophe and “rescue” in the Gulf of Mexico. Its airports are less shiny and more Third World-like every year. Unlike France or China, it has not a mile of high-speed rail. And when it comes to the future, especially the creation and support of innovative industries in alternative energy, it’s chasing the pack . It is increasingly a low-end service economy, losing good jobs that will never return.
And if its armies come home in defeat… watch out.
In 1991, the Soviet Union suddenly evaporated. The Cold War was over. Like many wars, it seemed to have an obvious winner and an obvious loser. Nearly 20 years later, as the U.S. heads down the Soviet road to disaster — even if the world can’t imagine what a bankrupt America might mean — it’s far clearer that, in the titanic struggle of the two superpowers that we came to call the Cold War, there were actually two losers, and that, when the “second superpower” left the scene, the first was already heading for the exits, just ever so slowly and in a state of self-intoxicated self-congratulation. Nearly every decision in Washington since then, including Barack Obama’s to expand both the Afghan War and the war on terror, has only made what, in 1991, was one possible path seem like fate itself.
Call up the Politburo in Washington. We’re in trouble.
The cancerous militarism which afflicts nearly all forms of American society today is killing the American republic.
This is certainly, and most unfortunately, a quite plausible scenario, as laid out by William Astore in another of his excellent pieces. Now whether it will come to pass is for us all to decide, collectively, through our actions. His laying out of the full scope of the costs of our so-called “defense” establishment is also quite sobering.
Disillusioned veterans are unable to find decent jobs in a crumbling economy. Scarred by the physical and psychological violence of war, fed up with the happy talk of duplicitous politicians who only speak of shared sacrifices, they begin to organize. Their motto: take America back.
Meanwhile, a lame duck presidency, choking on foreign policy failures, finds itself attacked even for its putative successes. Health-care reform is now seen to have combined the inefficiency and inconsistency of government with the naked greed and exploitative talents of corporations. Medical rationing is a fact of life confronting anyone on the high side of 50. Presidential rhetoric that offered hope and change has lost all resonance. Mainstream media outlets are discredited and disintegrating, resulting in new levels of information anarchy.
————
Tapping the frustration of protesters — including a renascent and mainstreamed “tea bag” movement — the former captains and sergeants, the ex-CIA operatives and out-of-work private mercenaries of the War on Terror take action. Conflict and confrontation they seek; laws and orders they increasingly ignore. As riot police are deployed in the streets, they face a grim choice: where to point their guns? Not at veterans, they decide, not at America’s erstwhile heroes.
A dwindling middle-class, still waving the flag and determined to keep its sliver-sized portion of the American dream, throws its support to the agitators. Wages shrinking, savings exhausted, bills rising, the sober middle can no longer hold. It vents its fear and rage by calling for a decisive leader and the overthrow of a can’t-do Congress.
Savvy members of traditional Washington elites are only too happy to oblige. They too crave order and can-do decisiveness — on their terms. Where better to find that than in the ranks of America’s most respected institution: the military?
This nails a whole range of points in one concise essay.
I live much of the year in the Third World country of Belize, Central America. A nation so damned poor that our cash bounces. True, it ain’t Zimbabwe, or the Sudan — there are no dying people in the streets. But food security is easily the biggest problem, and growing by the day.
Yet, despite our meager and diminishing resources down there, and much government corruption, people are still citizens, not marketing demographics, not yet anyway.
Citizens who struggle toward a just society. They have made more progress than the United States, in some respects. For instance, we have: A level of free medical care for the poor, though we lack much equipment and facilities. Maternity pay if either you or your spouse are employed. Retirement on Social Security at age 60. Worker rights, such as mandatory accrued severance pay for workers, even temporary workers.
————
I mention these things because it’s a good example of how North Americans live in a parallel universe in which they are conditioned to see everything in terms of consumer goods and “safety,” as defined by police control, conditioned to believe they have the best lives on the planet by every measure.
So when they see our village and its veneer of “tropical grunge,” they experience fear. Anything outside of the parameters of the cultural hallucination they call “the First World” represents fear and psychological free fall.
Yet, even if we think in that sort of outdated terminology, First, Second and Third World, and most Americans do, then America is a Second World nation. We have no universal free health care (don’t kid yourself about the plan under way), no guarantee of anything really, except competitive struggle with one another for work and money and career status — if you are one of those conditioned to think of your job and feudal debt enslavement as a “career” — high infant-mortality rates, abysmal educational scores, poor diet, no national public transportation system, crumbling infrastructure, a collapsed economy. Even by our own definition we are a Second World nation.
————
Americans, regardless of income or social position, now live in a culture entirely perceived inside a self-referential media hologram of a nation and world that does not exist. Our national reality is staged and held together by media, chiefly movie and television images. We live in a “theater state.”
————
Anyway, when the media and government people in power made that selection, they were managing your consciousness. What you know and don’t know. Keeping you calmer by withholding the truth. Rather like not upsetting little children so they will continue to quietly behave the way you want.
But, like children, the American public got bored with the subject of torture long ago, so we quit seeing the victims. Plenty of new evidence has been coming out for years since Lynndie’s famous pics from Abu Ghraib. But the short American attention span, created by our rapid-fire media, says, “Move on to the next hologram please. Whoa! Stop the remote. Nice butt shot of Sarah Palin there!”
The result is that Americans cannot achieve the cathexis we need. Cathexis is the ground zero psychic and emotional attachment to the world that cannot be argued. It is “beyond ideological challenge, because it is called into existence affectively.” Americans are conditioned to reject any affective attachment that does not have a happy ending. And in that, we remain mostly a nation of children. We never get to grow up.
So, we tell ourselves the Little Golden Book fairy tales — that we are a great and compassionate people and that we are personally innocent of any of our government’s horrific crimes abroad. Guiltless as individuals. And we do remain innocent, in a sense, as long as we cannot see beyond the media hologram.
But it is a terrible kind of self-inflicted innocence that can come to no good. We are a nation of latchkey kids babysat by an electronic hallucination, the national hologram.
Yep. Right on.
This whole expropriation of the life and legacy of Thomas Paine by the ilk of Glenn Beck, for an ideological cause which runs almost totally 180 degrees counter to what Paine fought for, is a libelous slander to history.
Thom Hartmann and Harvey J. Kaye, author of the excellent book “Thomas Paine and The Promise of America” discuss this whole phenomenon and ways to counteract it.
A moral tale from Bill Moyers worth bringing back to the fore again…
Equality is impossible to achieve but necessary to fight for. A more equal society would bring us closer to the “self-evident truth” of our common humanity. I remember the early l960s, when for a season one could imagine progress among the classes and races, a nation straining to accept immigrants for their value not only to the economy but to our collective identity, a people sniffing the prospect of progress. One could look at the person who is different in some particular way—skin color, language, religion—without feeling fear. America, so long the exploiter of the black, red, brown, and yellow, was feeling its oats; we were on our way to becoming the land of opportunity, at last. Today inequality—especially between wealth and worker—has opened like a chasm of Grand Canyon-like proportions.
Ronald Reagan once described a particular man he knew who was good steward of resources in the biblical sense. “This is a man,” Reagan said, “who in his own business, before he entered politics, instituted a profit-sharing plan, before unions had ever thought of it. He put in health and medical insurance for all his employees. He took 50 percent of the profits before taxes and set up a retirement program, a pension plan for all his employees. He sent checks for life to an employee who was ill and couldn’t work. He provided nursing care for the children of mothers who worked in the stores.”
Reagan was speaking of Barry Goldwater, a businessman before he entered politics. It’s incredible how far we have deviated from even that most conservative understanding of social responsibility. For a generation now Goldwater’s political children have done everything they could to destroy the social compact between workers and employers, and to discredit, defame, and even destroy anyone who said their course was wrong.
I’m not one to normally find myself in agreement with Alexander Hamilton, but this is interesting, and telling…
The scale of the disorder in our national priorities right now is truly staggering; it approaches a moral anarchy the Right would defend as the natural order. Alexander Hamilton, the conservative genius of the financial class, warned this could happen. Speaking to the New York State legislature in 1788, he said:
As riches increase and accumulate in few hands; as luxury prevails in society; virtue will be in a greater degree considered as only a graceful appendage of wealth, and the tendency of things will be to depart from the republican standard. This is the real disposition of human nature: It is what, neither the honorable member nor myself can correct. It is common misfortune, that awaits our state constitution, as well as others.
Conservatives who revere the founding fathers tend to stress the last point—that there is nothing to be done about this “common misfortune.” It is up to the rest of us, who see the founding fathers not as gods issuing edicts but as inspired although flawed human beings—the hand that scribbled “All men are created equal” also stroked the breast and thighs of a slave woman considered to be his property—to take on “the tendency of things ” and to hold our country to its highest, and most humane, ideals.
Once again, Chris Hedges is disturbingly on point.
America is devolving into a third-world nation. And if we do not immediately halt our elite’s rapacious looting of the public treasury we will be left with trillions in debts, which can never be repaid, and widespread human misery which we will be helpless to ameliorate.
——————
This is the inevitable result of unchecked corporate capitalism. The stimulus and bailout plans are not about saving us. They are about saving them.
——————
But our universities and mass media, entranced by power and naively believing that global capitalism was an unstoppable force of nature, rarely asked the right questions or gave a prominent voice to those who did. Our elites hid their incompetence and loss of control behind an arrogant facade of specialized jargon and obscure economic theories.
——————
The Obama administration, rather than chart a new course, is intent on re-inflating the bubble. The trillions of dollars of government funds being spent to sustain these corrupt corporations could have renovated our economy. We could have saved tens of millions of Americans from poverty. The government could have, as consumer activist Ralph Nader has pointed out, started 10 new banks with $35 billion each and a 10-to-1 leverage to open credit markets. Vast, unimaginable sums are being placed into these dirty corporate hands without oversight. And they will use this money as they always have—to enrich themselves at our expense.
——————
“These are signs of hyper decay,” Nader said from his office in Washington. “You spend this kind of money and do not know if it will work.”
“Bankrupt corporate capitalism is on its way to bankrupting the socialism that is trying to save it,” Nader added. “That is the end stage. If they no longer have socialism to save them then we are into feudalism. We are into private police, gated communities and serfs with a 21st century nomenclature.”
Obama best start to come clean with the full ramifications of what we are dealing with here or else we are going to be in for one hell of a serious sh*tshow. The call for “hope” and “change” will become more a plea for hope for even a little change in the pocket. This all can be turned around, but only through radical and fearless lucidity as to what we are facing and the efforts to be engaged in order to address it.
Chris Hedges’ analysis continue to take on a more and more radical tinge as the months and years go by. This piece is no exception. Unfortunately, such critiques are also more and more warranted as time goes by. The fundamental systemic problems persist, regardless of the changes of costume taking place in the theater of our Democracyland theme park. Some of the critiques regarding the state of higher education in our country today is also pretty provocative, regardless of it’s accuracy or veracity (anyone want to hazard a perspective on it?).
In decaying societies, politics become theater. The elite, who have hollowed out the democratic system to serve the corporate state, rule through image and presentation. They express indignation at AIG bonuses and empathy with a working class they have spent the last few decades disenfranchising, and make promises to desperate families that they know will never be fulfilled. Once the spotlights go on they read their lines with appropriate emotion. Once the lights go off, they make sure Goldman Sachs and a host of other large corporations have the hundreds of billions of dollars in losses they incurred playing casino capitalism repaid with taxpayer money.
We live in an age of moral nihilism. We have trashed our universities, turning them into vocational factories that produce corporate drones and chase after defense-related grants and funding. The humanities, the discipline that forces us to stand back and ask the broad moral questions of meaning and purpose, that challenges the validity of structures, that trains us to be self-reflective and critical of all cultural assumptions, have withered. Our press, which should promote such intellectual and moral questioning, confuses bread and circus with news and refuses to give a voice to critics who challenge not this bonus payment or that bailout but the pernicious superstructure of the corporate state itself. We kneel before a cult of the self, elaborately constructed by the architects of our consumer society, which dismisses compassion, sacrifice for the less fortunate, and honesty. The methods used to attain what we want, we are told by reality television programs, business schools and self-help gurus, are irrelevant. Success, always defined in terms of money and power, is its own justification. The capacity for manipulation is what is most highly prized. And our moral collapse is as terrifying, and as dangerous, as our economic collapse.
Read this complete tour de force Here
Great to see our man Thomas Paine and his revolutionary legacy finding it’s way back into the forefront of political thought in this country, what with being so directly referenced by President Obama here in his inaugural address. There was a time, and a lengthy period of it, where this simply wasn’t done and wouldn’t be done thanks to the concerted effort to diminish Paine’s role and influence from the historical record by certain interests and ideologies within American politics. From what I understand there were even pictures of Paine on display at some of the inaugural events.
It’s also sadly telling, though not overly surprising, that even our vaunted literati of American history couldn’t even tag where these quotes came from.
“As for our common defence, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our founding fathers, faced with perils that we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience’s sake. And so to all the other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and we are ready to lead once more.”
That is as near as George W Bush has come to being impeached. It covers the legal black hole of Guantánamo Bay and its kangaroo courts, the overreaching powers of the Patriot Act, torture, warrantless wiretapping and all the other infractions of the civil liberties of Americans and foreigners alike that occurred under the outgoing administration. “We are ready to lead once more” is startlingly candid in its admission that, under Bush, the United States did not lead the world but attempted to bomb and bully it into submission.
The reference to “the rights of man” was salient. The title of Thomas Paine’s giant pamphlet prepared the way for Paine’s incognito appearance at the end of the speech, when Obama talked of Christmas night in 1776, when George Washingtonled his ragtag army across the ice-choked Delaware river to confront the British and Hessians who were encamped at Trenton, New Jersey. Obama spoke of “the timeless words” that “the father of our nation” ordered to be read to the American people: “Let it be told to the future world, that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet [it].” The oddly bracketed “it” replaced the original end of the sentence, which was “came forth to meet and to repulse it.”
Every commentator I heard - including, surprisingly, the historian Doris Kearns Goodwin - assumed that the quotation came from Washington himself, but it is from Paine’s The Crisis. “With hope and virtue, let us brave once more the icy currents,” Obama said, and, again, the commentators assumed, mistakenly I think, that he was speaking only of the recession as it deepens, with increasing speed, into depression. But Paine’s authorship of those words suggests otherwise. The “common danger”, requiring “hope” and, more pointedly, “virtue” in order to “meet [and to repulse] it”, is surely as much the spectre of a dictatorial administration, emboldened by Dick Cheney’s theory of the “unitary executive”, and its dangerous freedom to abuse the rights of man, as it is the peconomic crisis….
I’ve read - or at least skimmed - every inaugural address since George Washington’s, and none comes close to so categorically rejecting the political philosophy and legislative record of the previous occupant of the White House. Obama did it by stealth - so much stealth that most of the red meat of the speech has so far passed largely unnoticed.
This is a really good review of the nature and substance of Obama’s address.
Read the complete article from The Guardian
An interesting historical educational piece (with a little modern update doctoring, I can see) gauging where a society stands on the ‘Democracy vs. Despotism” scale. My educated guess is that America doesn’t place quite so admirably on this measuring line these days.
