The Presidential Vacuum

The current search for a viable presidential candidate provides yet another demonstration of the moribund nature of the American constitutional system.  With the fall of the Soviet Union and the Financial Panic of 2008 having revealed most of the flaws in our constitution, the campaign for a new president in 2016 serves to highlight the reality that the 18th century document to which all of our leaders (in most cases, happily, if not with near-religious fervor) swear their loyalty is out of date and incapable of serving as a guide for the challenges of the 21st century.  Hammered together to protect the rights of Southern slave holders and Northern property owners against anything resembling a true democracy (rule by "the mob"), the quaint old artifact is uniquely ill-equipped to enhance the prospects for any form of progress.  Outstanding among its flaws is its precluding, due to the absence of the kind of parliamentary system present in most of the world's democracies, the expression of all but the narrowest interests and thus lending itself to the situation we have today of a near total takeover of government by corporate, plutocratic and oligarchic interests.  No Evil Empire to combat; no Evil Empire to serve as a check on our own twin evils of corporate greed and a self-proclaimed divine right to world dominion.  That a nation which spent the first century of its history waging genocidal battles against the land's aboriginal population and showed itself to be barely capable of checking its appetite to spread slavery across its newly acquired territories should deem itself "exceptional" is greeted with irony everywhere except within its own borders.  The concept of States Rights, a cornerstone of the new republic, was essentially written into every attempt at framing a constitution because what was paramount in all these attempts is that there never be a challenge to the right to hold slaves.
      After a brief experiment with actually enfranchising the freed men and women of the South during "Reconstruction," (and even this period was full of ongoing violence and terror against black Americans and their white sympathizers--carpetbaggers and scalawags all), the 13th, 14th and 15th amendments to the constitution were crassly ignored and a century long reign of terror ruled in the South.  1963, the year of M.L. King's "I have a dream" speech on the steps of the Lincoln monument marked exactly one century since emancipation.   A Protestant, apartheid plantation system parallel to the Catholic latifundia to our south only began to unravel 200 years after independence from Great Britain, and that only because of the threat of open insurrection in the 1960s and the embarrassment of presuming to export our way of life to emerging third world nations most of whom were inhabited by people of color.
       In the Democratic Party, we have as a leading candidate a deeply flawed former first lady who, in spite of her ability to articulate progressive ideals and give a good New Deal-style speech, carries more negative baggage than almost any other man or woman in our history with hopes of occupying the Oval Office.  Her most successful rival is an elderly Jewish senator from New England whose success, given his proclaimed socialist ideals, surprised media talking heads.  He is the candidate of the progressive minority in this country, the less than 50 percent of Americans who have watched in disappointment, if not horror, as their erstwhile young black hero proved to be something quite different from the product advertised in his 2008 campaign.  Not since Franklin Roosevelt took on the Great Depression had there been a greater opportunity to turn back the tide of reaction that had taken over the country since the Reagan-Thatcher Counter-Reformation and sent the economy crashing and burning out of almost entirely unfettered greed.  Progressives watched in amazement as their chosen leader, on one issue after another, proved incapable or unwilling to take on the darker forces and instead amazingly stood by and watched the so-called Tea Party faction, consisting of groups of right wing thugs, rewrite the narrative of events leading to the brink of global depression.
      There is no longer a benighted South.  States Rights and Sectionalism have been eclipsed by rust belt realities in the North, globalization, the demise of unions and the absence of a political party that can fashion together a program to deal with the new realities.  The Mason-Dixon line is now the Canadian border.  It is a benighted nation where the Scott Walkers and Chris Christies are indistinguishable from the Marco Rubios, Ted Cruzes and Jeb Bushes.  There is no two party system. In fact, there is no system at all.  There are only corporate lawyers and their rubber stamp courts, technocrats tweaking the dials for as long as they can get away with it, sometimes troubled in their sleep by the nightmare to come of mobs taking to the streets.  What will bring back the soldiers and sailors of the empire posted in a thousand bases around the world in their sleek machines will be the calls of their officers to return to the homeland to restore order.

Anthropic Silliness, the Entanglement Blues and Western Individualism (Narcissism)

Youtube is resplendent with arcane lectures from prestigious universities on the subject of the "anthropic principle," the "quest" for an explanation of why it is that the universe seemed to develop in ways that make intelligent life possible.  The theory goes so far as to use the term "fine tuning," which, as the term suggests, indicates that there are so many factors that--were they not in evidence--would have precluded life, particularly intelligent life. For example, the fact that Earth is just the right distance from the sun--a bit closer and we would burn, farther away and we would freeze--seems to some just too big a coincidence.
     Now I may be missing something here, but watching a series of physicists, cosmologists and even philosophers walk audiences through some of the most obtuse lectures on the subject frankly amazes me.  In a way, it is reminiscent of thoughts I had as a child, looking out the window of my bedroom at blue summer skies and wondering, "Why was I so lucky as to be born in New York?  I could have been born anywhere--in Terre Haute, Indiana or the African bush--but, no, as fate would have it, I was born in the greatest city in the world."  What could it possibly mean?
      All such reasoning, it seems to me, is a kind of post hoc ergo propter hoc, that is, faced with a reality, namely, that we are in some given place and time must be by design or that it is the work of some intelligent creator who put everything in place for our arrival.  Neither of these explanations is necessary nor, I feel it needless to add, even likely or possible.
     The only reason we can have such thoughts is because we exist, we are here on a small planet orbiting a rather middle-sized star.  All the necessary variables for our existence came into play here in our home galaxy.  Another analogy that springs to mind is the bogus debate between intelligent design and the theory of evolution.  So much in nature seems to defy common sense, particularly some of the more outstanding examples of symbiosis or the interdependence of various species.  How likely does it seem, for example, that some species depend for their very existence on some erratic, almost impossible to predict behavior of another?  Amazing, we conclude.  Almost, like quantum uncertainty and entanglement, impossible to predict, lest we go outside of the realms of space and time.
      Einstein once famously remarked in response to quantum uncertainty, "Does that mean that the moon is not there when I'm not looking at it?"  This notion prompted me to conclude that what all uncertainty theories depend upon is the single observer, almost compelling a solipsistic view of how humanity arrives at its images of reality.  The truth is that we never rely upon single observers. Constructs of reality are socially arrived at; they are a byproduct of communal activity.  In simple terms, when I am not looking at the moon, in that instant of time, it may or may not be there.  One really can't be absolutely sure.  But we are not alone.  On the other hand, I can be certain that whether or not I am looking at the moon, I can check up on its continued existence merely by consulting just one of what are probably countless individuals who, in that same moment, had their heads turned to the night sky and were basking in moonlight.
      One last point needs to be made.  Political conservatives, particularly those who have had as their mission the divestiture of any scientific or philosophical basis for revolutionary theory, be they priests or court scientists in the pay of the rulers, seized upon such as Heisenberg's Uncertainty and the Copenhagen Interpretation and quickly applied these principles across all manner of disciplines. Many of the less politically attuned probably missed what was happening.  In short order, however, uncertainty came to rule in just about every quarter, a godsend for opponents of materialism and objectivity, particularly needless to say, Marx's historical materialism.  This will not surprise anyone except a handful of innocents who believe that intellectual endeavors take place in a political vacuum.   The slippery slope from quantum physics to all manner of anti-materialist humbug has given us here in the U.S. millions who have been treated nightly in recent years to televised dramas with angels, vampires and telepaths or, in a related sphere, let the force be with them, blindfolded, swinging their laser swords at gravity-defying targets.
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Architects of Our Brave New World

Without the Soviet Union around to keep the capitalists in check, the world turned into a playground for the cowboy capitalists.  It took less than two decades after the fall of the USSR, however, for the party to end. These merry capitalists so abused the prerogatives of their newfound playing fields that they practically brought the whole house of cards down on themselves.  The greatest crisis the West had faced, and still faces, was brought about not by some outside force, a foreign evil empire, but by the evils that lurked within its own DNA.  If there is any one individual we have to thank for this historical turn, it is Reagan and Thatcher chum, Mikhail Gorbachev.
         The cowboy economists had their counterpart in foreign policy in U.S. neo-conservatives who saw in the demise of the USSR a unique historical moment in which they could win for the capital of the empire true global dominance.  Just as the financiers could not resist overreach, the strategic planners threw caution to the winds and began to "consolidate" the empire.  Even before the Bush cabal stole the presidency in 2000, Democrat Bill Clinton had gotten the ball rolling. Ground to dust under the thumb of Western interests was the deceased Josef Tito's Yugoslavia, a country that represented --aside from its considerable success as a socialist country--no threat to any people but its own. Then Reagan's Evil Empire morphed into Bush's Axis of Evil.  But the targets of American policy were not limited to Iran, Iraq and North Korea or even lesser regimes in Cuba, Libya and Syria.  
      Neo-conservative overreach gave us Barack Obama. As fate would have it, it was just as the American permanent government began withdrawing its support for a Bush regime that had given us two failed wars with hundreds of thousands of deaths, the tearing up of freedoms going back to the Magna Carta and the institution of techniques to get prisoners to talk going back to Torquemada, that the financial Panic of 2008 took place. Barack Obama, hand-picked to redeem a regime in disrepute at home and abroad, a man who had voted against the war in Iraq, was now tasked with virtually saving the capitalist system from itself.  The tears of joy on the cheeks of the victorious voters who had virtuously given us our first Black president had not dried before disturbing signs began to emerge.
     Gorbachev, who spent most of his tenure claiming to be saving socialism and the USSR, ultimately betrayed the forces in the USSR committed to socialism and communism and became the midwife of its demise.  Barack Obama, the chosen messiah, his advance Nobel Peace Prize in hand, groomed by the elite to bring us back into the community of normal nations by getting us out of the disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, rein in the torturers and close Gitmo, would now have to deal with an accident of history brought on by financial wizards who had written notes for an estimated half a quadrillion dollars in derivatives and credit debt obligations.  He was, to put it mildly, side-tracked by events threatening a world wide depression.  Few Democrats who had voted for him could have predicted in the fog of the financial panic that ensued that, like Gorbachev, he too would serve as a midwife for a demise, this time the demise of a liberal tradition that went back not to a revolution in 1917, but to the near revolutionary crisis brought on by the Great Depression of 1929.
      All the ingredients seemed to exist in 2008 for another New Deal.  In both foreign policy and economic policy, the poverty and dangers of conservative policies had become manifest. Here, too, Bill Clinton's policies anticipated the unbridled recklessness that the conservatives later fully unleashed.  NAFTA was a slap in the face for American workers. Risky mortgages were pushed on the poor as a substitute for affordable housing.  The tearing up of the Glass-Steagall act unleashed a Walpurgisnacht of financial wheeling and dealing.  Yet, even before entering the White House, President-elect Obama began surrounding himself with the very men who had not only stood by and watched, but had actively engineered financial policies that had garnered unheard of wealth for the few, and total disregard for the plight of ordinary citizens.  Similarly, in foreign policy, he kept on into his planned cabinet men chosen by the so-called Iraq Study Group led by none other than James Baker and Lee Hamilton, two perennial gate keepers for the permanent government.  For Americans who knew the players, it became clear how an Obama administration would operate.
       In an unparalleled performance of political backward fumbling that would have made medieval alchemists envious, Obama transformed political gold to lead.  Rather than rallying the nation to reverse failed conservative policies as FDR had in his first inaugural address, under the pretense of spearheading a government of reconciliation and compromise with the other side, he oversaw a sequence of events that amazingly allowed the forces of reaction to double down on their attack on the working classes, pretending that they were the aggrieved party.  Tea Party brown shirts began disrupting talks given by liberal legislators, state governors like demagogues Scott Walker of Wisconsin and Chris Christie of New Jersey launched attacks on already hobbled unions and began making deep cuts into state budgets already diminished by the financial crisis. Official, stated, Republican Party policy was gridlock and obstructionism.
      Still clinging to a vestige of hope for real change, American voters re-elected Obama in 2012, but both the House and the Senate fed by the anger and disappointment of many Americans at the apparent ineptitude of the Democrats to offer relief, fell to the Republicans.  With the help of a reactionary Supreme Court, the same court that had made a gift of the presidency to George Bush, the country we will inherit when Obama leaves office is now fully in the hands of large corporations that prey, unchecked, upon ordinary citizens. Union membership is at historic lows.  Attacks on voting rights and gerrymandering help insure Republican victories.  Austerity budgets prevail in state legislatures while the stock market somewhat mysteriously rebounds from its crisis low of a Dow Jones 6000 to its current level of above 18000, lining the pockets of the 1%.
   In affairs abroad, our Nobel Peace Prize winner bombed Libya into its present chaos during a bogus "Arab Spring," threatened to do the same in Syria and watched much of our "victory" in Iraq ceded to the apparently unstoppable new forces of ISIS.  With regard to Iran, "all options are still on the table" as we nervously await the outcome of negotiations over sanctions.  The world is one bombing run on Tehran away from unimaginable horrors.



Note:  For the photo of Obama as Gorbachev credit goes to: https://symonsez.wordpress.com.  I was rather amazed to find in the course of writing this post to find that I was not alone in seeing similarities between the two men.   
 

Drowning in Advertising

Here, in the land that we are told invented advertising, we have reached a state of affairs where we are absolutely drowning in the stuff.  In the brave new world where privatization has become the mantra of the regime, the incursions of advertising into heretofore untouched venues is full apace. Even on so-called public television, more and more commercials are in evidence, and, in a related matter, the time devoted to soliciting viewer contributions has gone up dramatically,  This, it appears, is the concession made by PBS's nominal defenders (against such as former presidential candidate Mitt Romney, who during one of the debates stupidly muttered something like, "I guess Big Bird will have to go," [it probably lost him millions of votes].)  In keeping with the trends in evidence since the complete takeover of government by corporate interests, the gentlemen's agreement to keep alcohol ads off the air has deteriorated, more and more booze ads have made their way onto television.  For each half hour of television broadcasting a minimum of twelve minutes of commercials seems the rule, thus giving us almost as much commercial as program time.  News broadcasts have no restraint in presenting advertising disguised as "entertainment news."  ("It's what the people want" we are told.)  Sports broadcasts regularly advertise other sporting events or clutter the screen with streaming banner ads. "Infomercials" directed at a nation whose people grow more obese chomping down on chips and the like seated--or lying down before--their 50-inch "smart" tvs convey the latest non-prescription dietary "supplements," exercise machines, dance videos, etc. particularly at times when women and the unemployed who don't need to keep regular hours are watching.  (This has been a windfall for fat, chubby and obese actors, now preferred by advertisers in an obvious attempt to show people Americans can really identify with.)
       Much of this whorehouse capitalism is the lingering aftermath of the Reagan era, a time when no union or regulatory agency was not fair game for extinction.  Republicans have since perfected the art of tasking their assigned commissioners with the destruction of the very agencies that they are supposed to supervise, although it must be said that Democrats have stood by or actually cooperated in these efforts to maximize the privileges of commerce over the interests of average citizens or any claim to having a decent, safe, lord knows, dignified, standard of living.  At the risk of seeming paranoid, even the mysterious mandate for the nation to "go digital" seemed designed to wrest any possibility of having small, independent media take to the air waves with an alternative message.  It was a windfall for Samsung, et al., however, as millions of perfectly workable analog television sets were set out with the rubbish so that we could enjoy high definition advertising on ever larger, more expensive screens.    
       Now, especially, it seems, since Obamacare, we have the new infusion of advertising for prescription drugs, "free" medical equipment and even hospitals.  The production values of the latter would probably shock Orwell himself.  Often touting their seriousness by foregoing color HD for more "serious" Black and White, one teary parent after another will praise a given hospital for saving their child's life--or the child herself will appear on screen to express the appropriate gratitude to a hospital that makes the truly scary claim that it was only through the unique care available at their venue that a child's life was saved.  So much for socialized medicine.  This tsunami of advertising by the corporate health interests defies description as merely a sop to the other side.  One can only imagine the degree to which the nature of communication between doctors and their patients has become pathological, with patients asking why a certain advertised drug has not been recommended or whether an advertised procedure is available in the hospital with which their doctor is associated. In many countries, it is illegal to advertise prescription drugs.  Not here.  Not in the land that spends more on health care to far less effect than many countries large and small around the world.
      Pick up any magazine, (those aimed at women are particularly egregious), and the ratio of ads to content is closer to 95%.  In effect, the ads have become the content.  Magazines are often deeply discounted from the newsstand price, on the same principle that has computer printers basically given away by companies like Hewlett-Packard in exchange for the consumer's commitment to buy, for the life of the machine, printer ink which, it has been observed, costs more by volume than Chanel No. 5 perfume.
       It did not take long for the internet to follow suit--in spades--with earlier electronic and print media by taking what should have been and could have been an invaluable communication tool and burying the message in advertising.   I guess we should not be surprised.  Some of a certain age can recall Newton Minow in 1961 decrying the state of the then still new television industry as "a vast wasteland."  That, in the age when Playhouse 90 and the NBC Symphony Orchestra were part of the fare offered to Americans. One need not puzzle over what Mr. Minow thinks of current media.
      What might now be called the "hard-copy" of The New York Times will currently run you about $1,100 a year to purchase.  Since only the most affluent and institutions can now afford to buy the paper, most readers access the Times on-line.  Even here, the right to respond to the paper's articles and such requires a minimum subscription of about $15 dollars per month.  What happens when you go to the paper's internet site?  Well, a banner comes up and then pop-up ads of varying size appears, and one must either scroll down or click on a barely discernible "[x]" or "close" to remove the offending item.  Through the long anticipated magic of video material being embedded along with the news, the paper is now a "mixed-media" vehicle.  Here again, however, subscriber or not, to see the video material one has to first wait through the transmission of an ad or really a television-styled commercial before getting to the content.  In the good old days of newspapers, one had a choice; one could just turn the page and skip the ads.  Some internet outlets, in an apparent expression of sympathy for the users, now allow one to watch a certain period of time and watch a count-down to the point when you can elect to SKIP the ad.  Others will invite you to assist them in their efforts to tailor their advertising to your unique interests.  Of course, they are already tracking you.  At one point, I was searching for a toy truck for one of my grandchildren.  After that, I was deluged with pop-up ads from an actual truck manufacturer for months, the company mistaking my interest in toy trucks for real ones.  Anyone who doubts that "Big Brother is Watching You" at this point has to be living in a cave.
      Of course, giving over all of American media to commerce really shouldn't surprise Americans who were once told, "What's good for General Motors is good for the country."  Now, all those jobs in the auto industry have been shipped out, over the feeble protests of hobbled unions like the once-powerful United Auto Workers, to Japan, Korea, and the benighted Southland of the country where trying to organize a union is still a dangerous proposition.  But "Engineer Charlie," former Secretary of Defense and head of General Motors, Charles Wilson was right after all, at least by the lights of corporate America; it turns out that what is good is waving goodbye to any hope of a decent job in industry.
     And the less disposable income Americans have, the harder corporations must work to separate them from their remaining dollars; squeeze they must.  The American Hershey bar gets smaller and smaller, and the smaller it gets, the more it costs.  Madison Avenue is the midwife, helping Americans give birth to a "new and improved" social order. Good to the last drop.

After reading this piece by Gregory Downs in the Times, I thought it important enough to reproduce here, in my blog, for all to read.  I find it an amazingly honest appraisal for the pages of the Times, and I also find it extremely important in beginning to understand the current political landscape.  Downs quotes the nineteenth century writer Albion Tourgee as having commented that the South “surrendered at Appomattox, and the North has been surrendering ever since.” That process is full apace in the opening years of the 21st century, 150 years after Appomattox.

SundayReview | OPINION

The Dangerous Myth of Appomattox

By GREGORY P. DOWNSAPRIL 11, 2015

ON April 9, 1865 — Palm Sunday — Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and Gen. Robert E. Lee negotiated their famous “Gentlemen’s Agreement” of surrender. In the ensuing celebration, a relieved Grant told his men, “The war is over.”

But Grant soon discovered he was wrong. Not only did fighting continue in pockets for weeks, but in other ways the United States extended the war for more than five years after Appomattox. Using its war powers to create freedom and civil rights in the South, the federal government fought against a white Southern insurgency that relied on murder and intimidation to undo the gains of the war.

And yet the “Appomattox myth” persisted, and continues today. By severing the war’s conflict from the Reconstruction that followed, it drains meaning from the Civil War and turns it into a family feud, a fight that ended with regional reconciliation. It also fosters a national amnesia about what wars are and how they end, a lacuna that has undermined American postwar efforts ever since.

Appomattox, like the Civil War more broadly, retains its hold on the American imagination. More than 330,000 people visited the site in 2013. In Steven Spielberg’s “Lincoln,” as in many other popular portrayals, the meeting between Lee and Grant suggests that, in the words of one United States general at the surrender, “We are all Americans.”

Although those words were allegedly spoken by Ely Parker, a Tonawanda Seneca Indian, and although hundreds of thousands of African-Americans fought for the nation, the “we” in the Appomattox myth all too often is limited to white Americans. In fanciful stories of Grant’s returning a ceremonial sword to Lee, or of the United States Army’s saluting its defeated foes at the laying-down-of-arms ceremony, white Americans fashioned a story of prodigal sons returning for a happy family portrait.

Grant himself recognized that he had celebrated the war’s end far too soon. Even as he met Lee, Grant rejected the rebel general’s plea for “peace” and insisted that only politicians, not officers, could end the war. Then Grant skipped the fabled laying-down-of-arms ceremony to plan the Army’s occupation of the South.

To enforce its might over a largely rural population, the Army marched across the South after Appomattox, occupying more than 750 towns and proclaiming emancipation by military order. This little-known occupation by tens of thousands of federal troops remade the South in ways that Washington proclamations alone could not.

And yet as late as 1869, President Grant’s attorney general argued that some rebel states remained in the “grasp of war.” When white Georgia politicians expelled every black member of the State Legislature and began a murderous campaign of intimidation, Congress and Grant extended military rule there until 1871.

Meanwhile, Southern soldiers continued to fight as insurgents, terrorizing blacks across the region. One congressman estimated that 50,000 African-Americans were murdered by white Southerners in the first quarter-century after emancipation. “It is a fatal mistake, nay a wicked misery to talk of peace or the institutions of peace,” a federal attorney wrote almost two years after Appomattox. “We are in the very vortex of war.”

Against this insurgency, even President Andrew Johnson, an opponent of Reconstruction, continued the state of war for a year after Appomattox. When Johnson tried to end the war in the summer of 1866, Congress seized control of his war powers; from 1867 to 1870, generals in the South regulated state officials and oversaw voter registration, ensuring that freedmen could claim the franchise they had lobbied for. With the guidance of military overseers, new biracial governments transformed the Constitution itself, passing the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments.

The military occupation created pockets of stability and moments of order. Excluded from politics before the war, black men won more than 1,500 offices during Reconstruction. By 1880, 20 percent of black families owned farms.

But the occupation that helped support these gains could not be sustained. Anxious politicians reduced the Army’s size even as they assigned it more tasks. After Grant used the military to put down the Ku Klux Klan in the Carolinas in 1871, Congress and the public lost the will to pay the human and financial costs of Reconstruction.

Once white Southern Democrats overthrew Reconstruction between the 1870s and 1890s, they utilized the Appomattox myth to erase the connection between the popular, neatly concluded Civil War and the continuing battles of Reconstruction. By the 20th century, history textbooks and popular films like “The Birth of a Nation” made the Civil War an honorable conflict among white Americans, and Reconstruction a corrupt racial tyranny of black over white (a judgment since overturned by historians like W. E. B. DuBois and Eric Foner).

Beyond the problem of historical accuracy, separating the war and the military from Reconstruction contributes to an enduring American amnesia about the Army’s role in remaking postwar societies. Many of the nation’s wars have followed the trajectory established at Appomattox: Cheers at the end of fighting are replaced by bafflement at the enduring conflict as the military struggles to fill the defeated government’s role, even as the American public moves on. After defeating Spain in the Spanish-American War, the Army undertook bloody campaigns to suppress rebellions and exert control over the Philippines, Cuba and Puerto Rico. After World War II, a state of war endured into the 1950s in the occupation of Japan and Germany. And in the recent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, the United States military’s work had barely begun when the fighting stopped — and the work continues, in the hands of American-backed locals, today.

While it is tempting to blame the George W. Bush administration for these recent wars without end, the problem lies deep within Americans’ understanding of what wars are. We wish that wars, like sports, had carefully organized rules that would steer them to a satisfying end. But wars are often political efforts to remake international or domestic orders. They create problems of governance that battles alone cannot resolve.

Years after the 1865 surrender, the novelist and veteran Albion Tourgée said that the South “surrendered at Appomattox, and the North has been surrendering ever since.” In so many wars since, the United States won the battlefield fighting but lost ground afterward.

With the benefit of hindsight, we can learn, as Grant did, the dangers of celebrating too soon. Although a nation has a right to decide what conflicts are worth fighting, it does not have the right to forget its history, and in the process to repeat it.

Gregory P. Downs is an associate professor of history at City College and the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and the author of “After Appomattox: Military Occupation and the Ends of War.”

I Long for a Golden Age

I long for a golden age
when I could be among the first Christians to enter Hagia Sophia
and stand trembling at its vastness,
sunlight glittering from each small gold tile
on its walls and arches.
Or a French peasant standing in a wheat field
watching the Chartres cathedral rising
from the distant horizon.
I am weary of the meanness, the grayness,
the dark pessimism of the current age
as we wait for the oceans to rise and
submerge our cities,
wait for the last bee or frog to become extinct,
wait for melting glaciers to send their last drop to the sea,
wait for a new feudal age bereft
of divinely appointed kings,
overseen by undiluted greed,
populated by men and women who have forgotten how to plant.
We wait.  We have lost the trick of being able to hope.
I watch young people walking through the night,
as they seemingly talk to themselves
their faces bathed in the eerie bluish glow
emanating from their cell phones,
a white wire plugged into their heads.
I long to hear for the first time the strains
of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony echoing
through a candle-lit cathedral
instead of being reduced to bits and bytes on
a revolving plastic disk.
Somewhere in hidden caches
the rich hoard their gold and silver
only employing it for private pleasures
of putting it to work to multiply
even further.
They are no longer the patrons of
cathedrals or palaces or libraries or music or art.
They no longer explore; they only exploit.
They only count.

The End of Everything?

This can't be an original thought that I had a few days ago.  Yet, for some reason, it seemed rather novel as it occurred to me, and since having it, I can't seem to shake the notion.  Here it is.  Suppose an asteroid comes out of the cosmos and, in little more than instant, destroys Earth.  Suppose further, that, contrary to what many scientists tell us, our planet has been the only home for intelligent or even conscious beings in the universe.  Two basic questions immediately arise.  First of all, without conscious beings, would the universe have any meaning? Second, more fundamentally, would the universe even exist?
       A universe without any conscious beings would, on one level, be the ultimate triumph of matter over mind or spirit.  However, if we accept the latest theories of quantum physics, matter only exists if there is a conscious observer, leading to the deeper conclusion that the destruction of a singular Earth would instantaneously dissolve both matter and mind, giving us nothing or nothingness.
      The experience also served to bring me back to an experience I had with my oldest son, Christopher, when he was about 11 years old.  Pace University hosted a wonderful science exhibit for children and adults about thirty years ago, calling it The Museum of Philosophy.  There were several hands-on exhibits that visitors could interact with, stuff like Locke's Socks.  Among them, too, a computer that presented an early trial of AI, or artifical intelligence.  The computer could both answer and ask questions.  The last question posed was, "When you leave this room, will this computer still be here?"  There was a brief pause as Christopher pondered the question, a moment of suspense for me standing behind his chair and looking over his shoulder.  What would he say?  He began to type, summarily, confidently, depressing just two keys to produce his one-word response, "No."  He then abrubtly rose from his chair and began looking for the next exhibit.
       My own reaction at the time, long before Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle had become almost a household phrase, was to marvel at the self-centeredness of children, if not of Christopher.  A strong materialistic bias I  had at the time would have led me to answer the question in the affirmative.  Anything else was, if not narcissistic, then solipsism, the belief held by thinkers since ancient times that all reality was just an individual's projected dream or illusion.  (Even solipsism requires something to exist.  The Cartesian thinker who proves his existence merely by thinking.)  By current standards, however, Christopher was ahead of his time.
       But is our Earth truly singular?  Suppose there is what is now called a "mulitiverse," an infinite number of universes, or, as one physicist posits, an infinite number of multiverses?  Would that asteroid, had it the power to destroy our universe by slamming into and atomizing Earth, simultaneously destroy all universes?  Create the ultimate Big Collapse?  The extinction of Being?  True Nihilism?
       I tried to imagine a paradoxical visit to an Earth-less universe.  In one sense, easy enough to do, I thought.  There it is, filled with stars and galaxies and lots of what we now know not-to-be-empty space, full of Higgs bosons and a lot of other stuff invisible to the naked eye, just out there like a beautiful photograph or silent movie, or better, a 3D hologram.  But could one really call it beautiful, without anyone there to experience its beauty? Or its awesomeness, or vastness, or horror?  Even if the universe "hung in there" without us, it wouldn't mean anything; it would mean nothing.
      This goes beyond nihilism or pessimism.  The glass would be neither half empty nor half full.  There would be no glass at all.  Seen another way, however, the notion that our demise would destroy all existence,  I finally conclude, should give us a sense of our incredible power, the power of mind and imagination, feelings and emotion, the frailty and therefore supremely rare preciocity of the lives we live.

       Or...do I make the same mistake the old priests made who put our unique little Earth at the center of everything, and there are other beings out there thinking how precious their lives are?

RT: A First Shoe Dropping?

      During the Israeli attack on Gaza last year, in spite of the billions the U.S. sends each year to Israel for the purchase of arms, a vote was taken in the U.S. Senate to send additional aid for arms to Israel.  In spite of widespread horror at the death of so many innocents taking place in Gaza, the measure passed unanimously.  Not one U.S. senator had the courage to oppose Israeli policy in a publicly recorded vote.  Americans would have been hard-pressed to learn of the event were it not for the fact that RT covered the vote on its internet outlet, RT.com.  The New York Times, on the other hand, ignored the vote entirely.  This is just one among many examples of why RT has acquired so large and faithful a following in the West.  For those Americans who include the Russian news outlet, RT, and its internet site, RT.com, among their sources of information, there has always been a certain tension around just how long the U.S. government would continue to tolerate a media voice that so effectively counters its own spin on events. If they are anything like me, "How long will we (that is, the U.S. government) allow this to go on?" is a thought that many faithful viewers of RT who count on it for information (that is often downplayed if not outright suppressed here) have often had.  It's been almost too good to be true. 

       Now, finally, a long feared but not surprising shot has been fired across the bow of RT in a statement by the new chief of the US Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG), Andrew Lack, in which he puts RT in the same category as such organizations as ISIS and Boko Haram.  The ham-fisted nature of the statement may be an indication of just how irksome, to put it mildly, our own propaganda machine finds it to have to coexist with any contrary point of view.  

       RT delivers news in a wide number of languages and it might be argued has as good if not better "production values" than news sources in the West.  Moreover, RT has proven itself to be, if anything, more transparent than U.S. news outlets by a long shot.  During the opening days of the crisis in the Ukraine, for example, RT allowed the broadcast of one of its journalists resigning on the air, stating that she could not lend her efforts to the support of Russian policies with which she disagreed.  I cannot recall ever seeing anything similar occurring on U.S. media even during some of our most controversial overseas adventures.  It is hard to believe that there were not ever any journalists who were chagrined to have to lend themselves to our own policies and were not tempted themselves to resign on the air.  The likelihood, however, of Fox News or even CBS or CNN giving a resignation air time seems to be negligible to zero.

      Reacting to Lack's pronouncement, RT broadcast excerpts from statements by both the current Secretary of State, John Kerry, and former secretary Hillary Clinton.  Kerry called RT "a propaganda bullhorn to promote President Putin's fantasy about what is playing out on the ground."  Clinton asserted that "we are in an information war, and we are losing that war," adding, "I'll be very blunt in my assessment."  Now, if all of this wasn't so outrageous, it would be hilarious.   During the cold war, Voice of America, Radio Free Europe and the United States Information Agency (USIA), with the assistance of the C.I.A, deluged foreign air waves with our own propaganda, and we continue to do so.  The Soviet Union, of course, had its own propaganda outlets, but now, with the internet and cable media capable of delivering high quality news coverage to wider audiences, the game has changed.  One can only imagine how history might have been different if a source like RT had been available during the height of the Cold War, how alternate coverage of events like the Tonkin Gulf incident, the "secret" bombing of Cambodia and Laos, or even, more recently, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, just to cite a very few examples, would have had been seen.

      For this American, the "jamming" of RT would be a tragic loss.  Let's hope it doesn't happen.