What this country needs more than anything else is a draft. Call it a national service or whatever you like but we need it. Since we’ve taken all burdens off of our citizens to do something for the country, no matter how small, we’ve slowly but inexorably drifted apart. Johnny I hardly knew you can be said by most people from different parts of the country.
One of my most valuable experiences in life was going into the military. I was thrown in with strangers, learned how they thought and acted, and appreciated our differences while recognizing there was something greater that overrode all these which is the nation’s well-being. The draft brought people from all parts of the country together. We accepted we were all on the same ship and our goal was to do what was best for the whole and to put differences aside for its good.
Unfortunately because we isolate ourselves today we attack others with different opinions rather than interacting with them. We come up with lunatic theories to justify our ignorance. Each side outdoes the other.
On the left many lament that our land was taken over by white guys and the Native Americans had their land stolen from them. They place a pox on the housed of all white guys. Somehow white women who on one hand they claim had an equal role in the make up of our country escape blame.
On the right you have the Deep State idea that there is some secret group of people who really control everything in the government. I suppose that too has a good complement of white men. The absurdity of the idea is shown by the self-contradictory nature of their belief. The Deep State is all-powerful and out to undermine Trump; but if it were all-powerful Trump would never have been elected. Unless, of course, the Russians helped undermined the Deep State.
We do know that there is a correlation between those that believe in the Deep State and those that believe in Creationism. They believe evolution is a hoax. A good portion of them believe in the flat earth theory, the kidnapping by aliens, and other things that are contradicted by scientific evidence. When Christ said blessed are they who believe and do not see I guess He was referring to them.
The left in its castigating of the all white Founding Fathers who gave us the Declaration of Independence, fought the Revolution, and established the Constitution, and made it possible for them to be in this country fail to consider the alternative. What if the Native Americans were left alone and America not settled (invaded?) by white men? Where would they be if they would be at all?
Truth is most of us are here because if our ancestors stayed where they were they would have had short and brutal lives. America saved millions who otherwise would have perished under the rule of Tsars, Kings, or despots. What do they say about that?
It’s not something I haven’t said before but to see it in a national newspaper makes me stand up and take notice. It was stated: “The most salient factor, however, may be that, unlike Bernie Sanders and other self-styled resisters of U.S. imperialism, the Venezuelans know that Trump is bluffing.” You have to think if Maduros knows Trump’s a big bluff so does Kim, Vladimir and the other thugs.
One hopes Trump is bluffing and we have no more endless foreign conflicts. Obama and Hillary started the Syrian and Libyan wars eight years ago and there still raging. 2. Humphrey was in Moscow in the 50s and had a surprise meeting with Kruschev that lasted eight hours. Near the end Humphrey asked Nikita about the Chinese communes. The Soviet leader said they tried that right after the revolution and it didn’t work. He insisted that the farmers needed incentives to produce. The Senator said that sounded like capitalism. Call it what you like was the response from the Russian leader. 3. When Christ said don’t bear false witness against your neighbor. I guess he was referring to the Democrats. The Deep State exists. Call it the Establishment or the entrenched bureaucracy but the FBI, CIA and others combined to prevent Trump from winning. The fact they failed doesn’t prove their non existence. Elected officials should run the government not the apparatchiks.
NC:
Hard to put the Syrian war on Obama. If anything his timidity caused it to spring out of control. As for Libya, I thought it was Reagan who bombed that country first or was it the Marines landing on the shores of Tripoli. I was for the intervention by NATO to stop Gaddaffy’s forces from invading the eastern part of the country. In retrospect I was wrong – though the Arab Spring would bring more democracy to those areas. Did not know enough about those long term warring parties or Islam. 2. Never like Humphrey. Reminded me too much of Henry Wallace. Rather than listening to Khrushev’s bull he should have asked him about the collective farms in Russia that continued up to at least the 1940s. Humphrey was as dumb and gullible as Billy Graham who went to Russia and found there was no religious persecution back under the atheist Soviets. 3. You know I should mention that the secret trip I went on was not paid for by the Deep State. I do get upset when I think our flag only has fifty stars. It should be more like a deck of cards and have fifty two. One could be for Puerto Rico or the District of Colombia; the other could be for the Deep State. Don’t you think they should have two senators like every other state.
Matt :
Read some Camille Paglia
Brilliant, Agrees that men and particularly white men have been vilified by who she terms the Second Wave Feminists.She utterly contemns them and her mordant wit and trenchant scholarship leaves them exposed for the ideological charlatans they are .
Camille is Sicilian and reveres the rugged Sicilian female antecedents of hers who were , in all natural ease expectation and Matriarchal Authority assumed as Divine Right their role as BOSS .
Camille decrys a Feminism that deposed the rough and tumble equality of the sexes that she and likeminded Feminists fought so hard for in the Fifties and Sixties and instead set up a Victim – ology Ideology for women and thus eternally relegated them to the historically comfortable identity of those requiring protection. Men are the usual dumb brutish beast oppressors in this misandrous sexual politicking by the Radical Feminists .
BREAK BLOW BURN : Camille Paglia Reads Forty Three Of The Worlds Best Poems
Start there Matt
That is a Classic of Wit and Scholarship
* …. Who in all natural ease, expectation and Matriarchal Authority assumed as Divine Right their roles as BOSS of The Family .
John:
I have read her. She is sometimes too deep for me but there is no doubt she is worth reading. As for Sicilian women I have in my folder of memorable photos one of a young Sicilian woman who is lying on top of a grave having been gunned down by some Mafia goons because of something someone in her family did. I’m not sure how much of a boss those women were. I’m reminded of another Italian woman who I read about years ago who had the same intellect and courage as Camille. Now I’m going to spend the next few hours trying to figure out who it was.
Slainte
Matt:
Cheers. One of the mental photographs of one Sicilian woman I have in my mind is of my 78 year old landlady on East Sixth , Marie Pistone Colabelli – Five feet of hey stupid this is what Guns are for if anyone ever tried to wax her or any member of her extensive. … Family . The particular memory was of a sweltering day in August ’93 and Marie just had to visit her Mario over in the cemetery in Mattapan. We hit the florist’s greenhouse on Cummings Highway and took the next left . My eight year old Johnny and I had spent a lot of time exploring Mt. Auburn in Cambridge . We were comfortable therefore, with , after appropriate expressions of support and condolences , withdrawing to a grassy knoll, at a Mario Reverent Distance, and taking out the submarines we had brought with us as well as soda and chips ; a light repast on a brutal hot day in a cemetery with our dear landlady seemed fairly normal for us . We were into helping people out .
Dad … Where is Marie ? Marie was missing . A close area search ensued. By the time I nosed the van off the road to intercept her she was a half mile down the front wall determined to plod back to South Boston it appeared.
Got her stowed . Usual combination of love and acrimony in the pleasantries we exchanged ; She was angry about the cemetery al Mario lunchtime sitting , and I was just angry that she took off in that neighborhood like that. You could say, that if anything , my very beloved ancient crone landlady and I were … Stubborn … On each other .
We rolled along and seeing the Car Wash I figured …here’s a good idea . Gonna wash Marie Colabelli right out of my hair . It was not to be . The jerk running it stopped us halfway through . His explanation afterwards was that the Van came off the track . It was for about fifteen minutes. We heard yelling. Inside a deluged capsule like three astronauts upside down in the Atlantic . It was hot . It was steaming . Couldn’t open the windows . Claustrophobic if you wanted to indulge yourself. I looked over at Marie riding Shotgun . Sooooooo…….. Whaddya Think ?!? … I said to her . She looked at me and a proud fierce curl of lip and empathetic flaring glaring look of crazy stone bitch loyal was followed by her carefully lighting her cigarette , slow dragging , and blowing her entire exhalation of Holy Incense in my face .
AVE MARIA
I thoroughly agree. Although my service was mandated by law and I faced federal prison upon refusal, (five years in Leavenworth as explained by a captain at the Army base in Southie) I deemed the experience invaluable. Too many conflicting, paradoxical, events to explain here. Another time.
Hutch:
I’m wondering if you went to Leavenworth you would have benefited from seeing a different cross-section of Americans.
Wa-llahi! I met a guy who escaped from Leavenworth. Used a guard’s shirt to slip out of the visitors’ room. He was on the run for twenty-six years. Thanks for the memory, Uncle Sam.
According to Wittfoegeld, Russia and China foundered on the rocks of authoritarianism due to the palimpsestic reappearance of agro-despotic autocracy. Centuries, and, in the case of China, milleniums, of rule by a system that had only one free citizen, the Tsar/Emperor, inculcated abject subservience in the general population. Everyone else’s freedom was conditional to the ruler. This, more than any particular ideology, led the Soviet Union to Stalin, and, China, to the Cultural Revolution. Creeping centralization of the ruling process plagued Lenin after the 1917 October Revolution. He termed it aziatchina, and, struggled against it. Lenin’s last testament was a criticism of the one-man vertical rule that aziatchina demanded. Mao began the Cultural Revolution in response to a threat from the Chinese variant of aziatchina.
The USA, having no history of authoritarianism, can not be effected by foreign political archetypes. There’s no pattern to inform a palimpsestic return. That makes America the ideal ground for a new experiment in socialism.
American founders no good? While it’s true they were an overwhelmingly bourgeois crew, they had their merits. Marx said all the possibilities of capitalism had to be realized before the advent of the Revolution, and, due to the imagination of the Founding Fathers, the USA is one of those realized possibilities. The second revolution, a socialist one, comes next. All power to the Dialectic!
Khalid,
For your sake I would like you to experience the Marx revolution. Where do you see yourself standing in the line of supplicants? When you see how horribly things are with the “power to the people’ gang, it’ll be too late to turn back.