Is It Masquerade Time Now?

Every four years our ying-yang political parties inflict their pageantry upon us as the kings and queens of the ball pose as common people. It's sort of a fantasy that all too many indulge in: that these puppets of money-power play their roles as saviors of the commoners. Mr. Obama pledges to bring a new day to America - perhaps through incantations to the sun? - and sense and sensibility to foreign policy. He pledges to align freedom-of-religion America in support of a one-religion Jewish state and the pursuit of democracy while he supports bombing other countries, which are acts of war, not peace, and is advised by Rubin and Summers who are the ones, among others, who orchestrated the finance-dominated policy that has given us our penury and eroding lifestyles. And Obama's dance partner is McCain, who promises endless war and who concerns himself about democratic, peace-loving Georgia and those war-mongering Russkies.

And we, the commoners, get caught up in this dance and think it's the ultimate in artistic and intellectual quality or get so bored we don't even pay attention. And we can't rely on our "free press" to enlighten us as they, with all too few exceptions, are as ignorant as ourselves or as cynically dishonest as the balls' royalty. In Minneapolis, on Tuesday, August 26, police, using "homeland security" powers, stopped a group and confiscated their property: cameras, cell phones, computer hard drives. This event dribbled into the news only to be quickly absorbed in more meaningful events such as parsing Hillary's speech for the thoroughness of its Barack support. This group dedicates itself to documenting, visually, political protests and are in the Twin Cities for the Republican masquerade. The group was not carted off to jail, thus, by Supreme Court decision, not arrested. I remember growing up during this change of definition. The word arrest means stop but our courts have redefined the word to mean jailing and charging. And our Bill of Rights, in the 5th amendment, proclaims noone can be "deprived of life, liberty, or property without due process of law" but I guess "homeland security" trumps the Constitution. Those of us who care must hope this Gestapo-type incident won't stay submerged or unrectified. If it had happened in Moscow (Russia, not Idaho) it would have headlined as another example of anti-democratic authoritarianism there. In the US, protesters are, or are at least suspected to be, anarchists and a danger to the polity, while in other countries, in a sliding scale that is graduated by a country's support of US foreign policy, protesters are strivers for democracy. Democracy means people power and it seems to be problematic. By equating money with speech the Supreme Court has decided that speech is a commodity and Gates, Buffet et al. have a billion times as much free speech as the rest of us. But with the inconsistent exception of Jefferson, our Founding Fathers didn't believe in democracy and structured the Constitution to restrict its development.

Also making the Wednesday news was the Pentagon's decision not to sail into the port at Poti, Georgia, not wishing to risk confrontation with nearby Russian ships and Russian checkpoints; thus, they used a port 50 miles or so to the south. And the report said this ship is a United States Coast Guard cutter which I found astounding. What is a Coast Guard ship doing 5,000 miles away in the Black Sea? The reporter had no comment on this. This isn't really surprising since reporters seem incapable of thought and they certainly rarely do any homework. Even their continuing reference to Abkhazia and South Ossetia as breakaway regions of Georgia exposes their laziness. In the 19th and early 20th century Imperial Russia was a multi-ethnic, multi-national state and Georgia was part of Russia and when the Bolsheviks took over it became a constituent republic of the USSR. Lenin had tasked Stalin to take charge of the "nationalities" issue and that solution, which continued throughout the USSR's history was realistic and rather elegant. In any event, Ossetia and Abkhazia were autonomous regions and in the true anarchy of the USSR's demise, an illegal act of Yeltsin, Abkhazia and South Ossetia became incorporated within Georgia's borders but the people there didn't accept that nor Georgia's dedication to "Georgia for Georgians" and the Russians were required to become peacekeepers as early as 1991-2, and continued that role through Georgia's military attack on August 8 of this year.

It is almost a truism of sociological analysis that atomization produces oligarchic control: the more share holders a corporation has the fewer shares must someone own to exercise effective control over that company; the more separated and alienated people are -this is individualism- the easier it is for a small group to control a state even with "free" elections and the destruction of the union movement in the US has been a salient in that regard; the more countries are broken up into small principalities the easier it is for the "big boys" to boss them around. The lack of a national industrial policy in the US is directly tied to the groveling that states and cities engage in to attract business. And the ideological control that the US capitalist state exercises over the commoners demands that an enemy exist and Russia is certainly convenient. I heard Scott Simon on NPR a couple weeks ago say that the Russian army incursion into Georgia was akin to Nazi's takeover of the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia in 1938. Mr. Simon is a dedicated propagandist for the DC junta but I would have thought even he would have been embarassed to make that comparison. Mr. Medvedev's recent statement on the recognition of South Ossetia and Abkhazia was nuanced and wistful. Of course the Russians have much more experience with the nationlities issue than white chauvinist Americans. In the run-up to the US Civil War and the secession of South Carolina a prominent citizen of that state expressed his opposition to secession, saying "South Carolina is too small to be a country and too large to be an insane asylum." The individual vs. the group, one group vs. another, one ethnicity within a multiplicity, one nation within another: these are complex issues that develop dialectically and do not admit of simplistic solutions. But to our rulers, immersed in the Grand Ball of a quadrennial masquerade, nothing is important but their power, their control, their wealth and they'll endanger or incarcerate or destroy without remorse as many of us as they think necessary to their interests. The lunatics are running the asylum.