NAVEL-GAZING

I have been trying to figure out why I have been so dispirited lately. Things are going badly in the world, to be sure, but things have been going badly for as long as I can remember. The Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, Korea, the threat of nuclear war, the abortive invasion of Cuba, the endless overthrows of progressive leaders engineered by the CIA, stagflation, the attack on unions, Nixon, Watergate, Reagan, Bush I, Bush II, this Iraq War, that Iraq War, on and on it comes. Through it all, I have fumed, I have fulminated, I have protested, I have marched, I have written books [pretty much a waste of time, that], but I have not been dispirited in the way that I am now.

After some extended brooding, I realize that what I am experiencing is conflicted feelings, and that drains me more than simple rage ever did. For many decades now, I have kept alive the belief that an electoral triumph could make matters so significantly better that I would be able to enjoy the evening news, welcome the headlines, luxuriate in the feeling that I and my kind had finally gotten our day in the sun.

Well, last November, that finally happened. I pinned all my hopes, in the twilight of my life, on an Obama Administration, and it came to pass. But things are still awful. And yet, I cannot happily turn my anger on Obama, for two reasons, one of which is rational and the other purely emotional. The rational reason is that very little of what is wrong now is Obama's fault. We on the left have hated the Republicans for so long that we tend to forget the extent to which they really are to blame for most of what is wrong with our political life. We treat them merely as a given background condition, and focus all of our attention on relatively minor ways in which we wish Obama had acted or chosen differently. The Republicans, not Obama and his Administration, are to blame for the compromised content of a Health Care reform bill that, in the end, may not pass. The Republicans are to blame for the lack of strong climate control and alternative energy policies. The Republicans are to blame for blocking strong nominees for countless positions in the Administration. The lone major bad decision for which Obama is clearly to blame is the decision to expand the war in Afghanistan, and that, I must recall, was something he promised to do during the campaign.

The emotional reason for my inability simply to pivot into a stance of opposition to Obamais that if I turn my anger on Obama, I am left without anything at all on which to pin my hopes, and I am simply unable to live in a condition of permanant hopelessness. If we look in a clear-eyed and unillusioned way at American politics, I think we must conclude that Obama is far and away the best political leader we can hope for, given the nature and attitudes of the American people. Does anyone seriously think that someone farther to the left than Obama by any significant measure could win the Democratic nomination and then a presidential campaign? I don't. Does anyone who has watched the trainwreck of Congressional politics in the past twelve months think that Obama could have won approval for significantly more progressive legislation, no matter how he deployed his "mandate?" I don't. The Republicans are responsible fior the obstructionist use of the filibuster, not Obama. And with half a dozen or more Democratic senators prepared to block almost any sort of rational legislation -- never mind all forty-one of the Republicans -- Obama's options are so severely limited that he may be unable to accomplish anything of note.

This is, after all, a country a sizeable minority of whose residents believe that the world was created six or seven thousand years ago! It is a nation a sizeable minority of whose residents think Obama is a socialist born outside the United States. There is no credible evidence whatsoever that this country is ready for democracy. And yet all of us are stuck here, condemned to live out our lives in a country populated largely by mean-spirited ignorant bigots.

So, as I say, I am feeling somewhat dispirited. I realize that my mood is not improved by the advent of a third snowstorm in a part of the country that is, I was assured, snow free.

After another post or two in which I allow myself to give voice to my dissatisfactions, I am going to try my hand at something more interesting: a reflection on the current world-wide financial crisis and the way in which it may be leading to something with at least a distant kinship to socialism.

MSM CONFIRMATION

That is "mainstream media," for those of you not plugged into the blogosphere. No sooner did I voice my hope that Palin will secure the Republican nomination for president in 2012 than the Washington Post reports in a new poll that more than 70% of Americans consider her not fit to be president. Go Sarah! As Napoleon is reputed to have said to one of his Marshals during a battle, "When your enemy is making a mistake, do not interrupt him."

On a totally unrelated matter, I am still waiting for the folks at Marist College to post my lecture there on a server and send me the link. If, after I have reviewed it, I decide that it is not totally embarrassing, I will provide the link for my readers. Those who were once my students may then take a stroll down memory lane, and those whom I have never met can put a face and a voice to these words.

FUNERARY MUSINGS

Like many people my age, I regularly read the obituary columns, to see who has passed [which is to say, whom I have outlived.] Twenty years ago, seventy-five seemed a respectable age. Now, I view those who barely survive into their eighties to have been cut off in their prime.

This morning, I read that the wonderful English actor Ian Carmichael died at 87 [an acceptable age to me at this point in my life]. I rushed right home and ordered "I'm All Right, Jack" from NetFlix. For those of you too young to remember, that movie is a hilarious send-up of labor-management relations in post-war England, with Peter Sellars doing a priceless turn as a Communist labor leader with an absurdly nubile daughter. I strongly recommend it.

I was also reminded of an idea I have had for an on-line business, though my son, Patrick, who is a serious hedge fund manager, has been less than enthusiastic about its prospects. All of us obit readers have wondered what our own obituaries would look like, and indeed whether we would even rate an obituary not submitted to the classifieds by the grieving survivors. Unfortunately, up 'til now, it has been necessary to die in order to rate an obituary, a fact that makes reading it difficult. Large newspapers, like the NY TIMES, maintain elaborate files of prospective obituaries, of course [appropriately stored in a room called by reporters "the Morgue"], and, at least in the case of important public figures, regularly update them, so that as soon as someone pops off, the text is ready to print. But I do not think one can present oneself at 620 8th Avenue and ask to see one's obituary.

So, here is the idea: For a fee, OnLineObits.com, a subsidiary of HaveYourCakeAndEatItToo, Inc., will prepare and post a full-scale obituary, complete with capsule reviews of any publications or other creative works, a summary of academic honors [if any] and military service [if any], and a fair and balanced account of one's marriages or other significant relationships. A space will be reserved for anticipatory eulogies. For an additional fee, subscribers will receive a printed copy, suitable for framing. the service will be rigorously objective, and no self-prepared texts will be accepted. You pays your money and takes your chances.

Any takers?

I MAY REGRET THIS, BUT ...

I simply cannot help feeling that were Sarah Palin to capture the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, it would virtually guarantee a rout of historic proportions. If the American electoral system were capable of registering intensity of preference, I would worry big time. But one passionate vote by a God-fearing Tea Party Birther counts for exactly as much as one desultory vote by a languid, over-confident Obama supporter. And there are vastly more of us than there are of them.

Let me tell a story. Back in the 80's, I was invited to speak at a panel of the Socialist Scholars' Conference on my new book, Understanding Marx. I found my way down from Western Mass to Manhattan Community College, on the Lower West Side of New York. When I entered the large reception hall, absolutely packed to overflowing with socialists, I exulted. Just for a moment, I thought "My God! Look at us all! We are going to take over the world!" Then it occurred to me, "This is all of us. And we fit into one large room." We did not take over the world.

Sarah Palin can pack a room. She can, with enough planning, fill a plaza. But in a country of more than three hundred million people, that won't even get you elected to the Senate from a reasonably populous state.

If the economy has not come back big time, a Mitt Romney could pose a real threat. But the Republicans, Lord love them, will not go for Romney. They just may rush over the cliff carrying Palin banners.

From my mouth to God's ear.

FOLLOW UP

This is a further elaboration of the reply I posted to Ann's comment on my long post, "Where We Are Now." It is natural to focus one's attention on the Tea Partiers, and to decry their looniness. But it would be a very serious mistake to imagine that the fundamental shape of American foreign and domestic affairs has been importantly shaped by them and their many predecessors. If one wishes to locate the roots of our policy of permanent war, look to the Foreign Affairs Council, to the sober, respectable, moderate, thoughtful men and women of American public life, to William Fulbright and Mike Mansfield, to Joe Biden and Madeleine Albright, to Hillary Clinton and Zbigniew Brzezinski, yes even to Henry Kissinger. Look to every Senator who has ever chaired the Senate Foreign Relations Committee or Senate Armed Services Committee, to every Secretary of Defense since the post was created. I cannot think of a single major public figure since World War II who has questioned the foundations of American foreign policy [with the possible exception of Henry Wallace, but I am not sure about him --- I was only fourteen at the time.]

For a while, to be sure, American military policy was driven by the objective technological facts of the delivery of nuclear warheads. But that technology settled down forty years ago. [If anyone is actually interested in this, I would be happy to post a long explanation. At one point in my life, I was an expert on the subject, and wrote a book about it that I never succeeded in getting published.]

The crazies in American politics are dangerous, but they are not the explanation for the shape of post-World War II American foreign and military policy. Nor, needless to say, are they and their ilk the cause of economic inequality in America, any more than fever blisters are the cause of an infection.

BRAGGING

I have won 130 games of FreeCell in a row, and counting, without using the undo feature. Not bad for an old guy! And you thought I just meditated on the eternal verities.

WHERE WE ARE NOW

It is difficult, in the midst of the flood of information and commentary on public affairs, to maintain any distance from the immediate moment. As a philosopher, I am supposed, professionally, to view things sub specie aeternitatis, or at least within a time frame more extended than that of a Mayfly, but I do not have a Merlin who can change me into a mountain, as he did to Wart [the little Arthur] in The Sword in the Stone, so that the future king could see things from their perspective.


Nevertheless, in this post, I propose to step back from the moment and ask, of this country and its people, Where are we? And, perhaps more to the point, Why are we? I am now seventy-six years old, and though that does not give me the perspective of a mountain, or even of a redwood tree, it does allow me to achieve some distance from the affairs of the moment.


The first thing to recognize is that the United States has been continuously at war for close on to sixty-eight years, and there is in this country neither the will nor the interest in bringing this condition of war to an end. It might be objected that though, to be sure, there have been periods during that seven decades when we were at war, there have, after all, been as well periods of peace. But I think that is a faulty construal of the situation in which we find ourselves. Since the seventh of December, 1941 [a day, as Franklin Roosevelt said, that shall live in infamy], this nation has been on a war footing. Indeed, it has been at war. I take as my authority here the great English philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, who, in the thirteenth chapter of the First Part of his masterpiece, Leviathan, wrote these words:


"For WAR consisteth not in battle only, or the act of fighting; but in a tract of time, wherein the will to contend by battle is sufficiently known: and therefore the notion of time, is to be considered in the nature of war; as it is in the nature of weather. For as the nature of foul weather, lieth not in a shower or two of rain; but in an inclination thereto of many days together: so the nature of war, consisteth not in actual fighting; but in the known disposition thereto, during all the time there is no assurance to the contrary. All other time is PEACE."


Why have we been at war continuously for seven decades? The conventional answer is that we have been confronted first by the threat posed by the Soviet Union, and then, when that passed, by the threat [conveniently] posed by militant Islam. But neither of those claims is true. The Soviet Union was a territorially continuous empire whose rulers exhibited no interest in engaging militarily beyond the contiguous area they ruled at the end of the Second World War. Unlike the United States, which has repeatedly sent troops beyond its borders since 1945, and indeed has permanent garrisons of its troops in nations around the world, the Soviet Union ventured only once beyond its contiguous sphere of influence, and that, after all, was into a country -- Afghanistan -- that has common borders with three of what were then Soviet Socialist Republics -- viz., Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan.


The permanent war footing of the United States since World War II has wrought enormous, devastating, and irreversible changes in the politics, economics, and culture of this country. The most immediately obvious effect of the endless war is a dramatic shift in the power exercised by the three branches of government. The Constitution was written so as to severely rein in the powers of the executive. Although the President was designated as Commander in Chief, the power to declare war was reserved for the Congress, and that, together with their control of the purse strings and the power to impeach, try, convict, and remove officers of the other two branches guaranteed, the founders thought, the ascendancy of Congress in the American political system. This balance was upset during the Civil War, but then immediately reestablished itself one the war was ended. In our world today, the Presidency looms large, with unlimited power to make war, total control of the information needed to judge the wisdom of military action, and -- with the current compliant Supreme Court majority -- liberty to ignore the few restraints on presidential power that have survived three quarters of a century of war. Let us understand that this is in no way a point of contention between Democrats and Republicans. The permanent war was launched under Harry Truman, continued [though with hesitation and concern] by Dwight Eisenhower, expanded by Jack Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, and reaffirmed by every subsequent president, up to and including Barack Obama. War has long since become its own justification in America.

The economic dislocations occasioned by permanent war have distorted American society in two ways: First, unimaginable quantities of resources, over seventy years, have been diverted from socially productive uses to what is essentially waste, thereby dramatically lowering the standard of living of most Americans and all but destroying the public infrastructure of America; and Second, the processes of allocation and expenditure of these vast sums has made every state in the Union, and therefore every politician in America, dependent on the continuation of the war economy. It is not even possible, save by the sort of fantasy thinking that economists call economic modeling, to form a coherent idea of what America might look like now, had it not embarked seventy years ago on a policy of permanent war.

As for the culture of America, it is thoroughly steeped in and interpenetrated by martial imagery. America has become the Sparta of the modern world.

The second thing that stands out as we strive for perspective on the condition of America is that this country no longer has a strong, effective labor movement capable of constraining and combating the pernicious effects of unrestrained capitalism. [I am not talking about a revolutionary movement, aimed at replacing capitalism with another form of economic organization. I reserve such dreams for the night time hours.] It had such a movement at one time, of course, even though labor unions have never managed to organize the preponderance of American workers. The pyramidal distribution of wages and salaries in the United States has remained fundamentally unchanged for a century, save for a widening of the gap between the rich and everyone else in the past twenty years. But despite the frenzied and absurd right wing talk about "Obama the socialist," there is no serious energy anywhere in America for an overturning of the present structure of economic inequality.

In summary, America is a nation on an unnecessary and unjustifiable permanent war footing, with an economy characterized by large and growing inequality. It is, to state it clearly and openly, not a country I can happily call my own. My time horizon is necessarily somewhat foreshortened, since even under the best of circumstances I have only another two decades or less to live. But it is impossible for me to imagine that these two fundamental facts about America -- permanent war and deep inequality -- will change in any significant way in the lifetimes of my children, or even of their children.

What is to be done? [If I may echo Lenin.]

Despair is not a plan. It is a sentiment. Revolution is not an option. It is a fantasy. What remains is incremental action to ameliorate evils, reduce suffering, and protect the vulnerable, all the while recognizing that even many successes will not alter the framework within which we are condemned to live our lives. There is some comfort for me, but precious little, in the knowledge that I have been questioning the justifications offered for the war footing and for the economic inequality at least since the late 1950's. Were I fortunate enough to believe in God, I could comfort myself with thoughts of a heavenly reward. As it is, the most I can do is utter a loud and self-justificatory "I told you so!"