Solstice 2013
“But it’s a nice mess to have”
Now is the winter of our discontent
Made glorious summer by this son of York;
And all the clouds that low’r’d upon our house
In the deep bosom of the ocean buried.
Richard The Third Act 1, scene 1, 1–4 Shakespeare.
Translated to 21st century Eng-speak: Hey, maybe things are starting to look up.
Granted, it was hard to see them getting much worse. We’re already at the point where I believed the only way we could reverse the course we were on as through something catastrophic: a war, a revolution, a great plague. And I’ll save people the trouble of noting that Richard’s quote above refers to changes wrought by a civil war in England between the House of York -his side- and the Lancasters). For my English readers, if you’re having trouble getting the kids to swot middle ages history, just tell ’em it’s a lot like “Game of Thrones”–right down to a ‘red wedding’ in Scotland.
Between the Wikileaks revelations and the policies that Edward Snowden released to Glenn Greenwald, the pretense that the American government was anything other than a paranoid, authoritarian regime with no regard for human life, let alone human rights, was stripped away. The emperor has no clothes, and Obama is left shivering in the wind. It came at a time when the corporations tightened their inhuman grip on the government apparatus of America, slowly turning the US into their pet enforcement agency.
Randroids will tell you that a government that is controlled by “the free market” is a good thing, but the fact is, the free market wants a captive consumer market, a docile worker base, and a way to foist off all expenses onto somebody else. So if you aren’t a major corporation, it’s a bit difficult to see how you benefit from this.
Maybe, just maybe, we are starting to turn the tide a little bit. On the NSA spying, perhaps the greatest threat to America in America’s history, a White House review came out just yesterday, and while it didn’t go as far as I hoped (I wanted the NSA abolished and the Patriot Act rescinded), it wasn’t just another goddamn whitewash. It wants to ban NSA bulk collection of metadata, and make it illegal to deliberately undermine encryption on the internet. It puts Obama in an awkward position, and even DiFi, tail-wagging cheerleader of all things surveillance, has backed away from her NSA support.
When a government watches everybody, it isn’t because the government is concerned for the safety of the people it watches. That’s never the case. An such governments, if they cannot be contained, must be destroyed. Or nobody will be safe.
A few days earlier, a federal judge had a dramatic ruling on the NSA datafarming: According to CNN, U.S. District Judge Richard Leon ruled “‘I cannot imagine a more ‘indiscriminate’ and ‘arbitrary invasion’ than this systematic and high-tech collection and retention of personal data on virtually every citizen for purposes of querying and analyzing it without prior judicial approval,’ said Leon, an appointee of President George W. Bush. “Surely, such a program infringes on ‘that degree of privacy’ that the Founders enshrined in the Fourth Amendment.”‘
Flat out ruling it unconstitutional is above his pay grade, but if it goes to the Supreme Court, they are going to find it difficult to rule otherwise without coming across as a complete joke. Which probably means they’ll just punt, and deny cert. Which would uphold Leon’s ruling, the backdoor way.
On a smaller scale, AP had a story today about an Ohio judge who took a stand against traffic cameras. “Hamilton County Common Pleas Judge Robert Ruehlman cited authoritarian regimes such as Cuba and North Korea as expedient, while saying the U.S. democratic system ‘can be messy.’
“’But it’s a nice mess to have,’ Ruehlman said.”
First, his name: Ruehlman. Isn’t that a great name for a judge? And a great name for someone taking a stand against mindless authoritarianism.
The reason given for the cameras, which Judge Ruehlman had already previous described as “a rigged game” against motorists, was that they “make the community safer by allowing police to focus on violent crimes and drugs and have more presence on the streets.”
Ah, yes. “Safer.” “More secure.” “The Public Good.” The language of the Stasi mindset never changes. Only the technology changes. They watch everyone, because everyone could be the enemy. And if they view you as a potential enemy, it’s hard to see how they are watching out for your best interests. If you are a baseball coach spying on another team’s pitchers, are you doing so in order to offer them helpful tips on how to throw the ball harder?
When you have government and corporations agreeing that you must be watched 24/7 for your own good, it’s when people start seriously thinking about things like revolutions and civil wars. Usually they make things a lot worse before there’s any improvement, but in desperate times, they are inevitable.
The shutdown of the government in October may have broken the political paralysis that has afflicted American governance. Even as administration after administration got more secretive, paranoid and reckless, Congress remained locked in the icy grip of a mountain of frozen ideological bullshit. But they actually got a budget passed this week—the first time in nearly 20 years that a divided Congress has managed that. It’s a shit budget that dumps on the poor and coddles the rich, but it’s better than lurching from contrived crisis to contrived crisis, and deliberately sabotaging the country in hopes of making the White House look bad.
Ben Bernanke, Head Fed, on his way out of office, uttered the amazing phrase, “Fiscal policy is restraining economic growth.” It wasn’t quite as honest as the post-retirement admission by Alan Greenspan, Ayn Rand acolyte, that his free market philosophy simply didn’t work, but it was, once again, an admission that the free market, which can build a great economy, can only build a shit society, one in which, in the midst of great wealth, millions starve and free. Unrestrained capitalism will lead only to death camps.
Perhaps one of the greatest rays of light this year is that people are starting to realize the “free market” does not promote freedom and does not, in the end, create a viable market. Karl Marx was wrong about a lot of things, but he was dead right about the self-destructive nature of capitalism, and its inability to see to the needs of a society.
Occupy, in the end, won. For the first time since World War II, Americans felt free to question the wisdom of the market place, and wonder if alternatives might exist that create better lives for all. It’s no longer considered impolite to ask why drones like the spawn of Sam Walton pocket billions while their “associates” have to depend on food stamps in order to get by.
The Republicans are fighting Obamacare precisely because it directly challenges the myth that the privatized free market can provide for all needs. Inept and half-privatized that it is, it is a distinct improvement over the past century of chaotic health care non-coverage. Like Social Security and Medicare, it picks up what the free market cannot provide, and the free market, psychotically obsessed with delusions of greatness and a grasping need to control, cannot allow such a challenge.
So people are challenging authoritarianism, both political and economic. It’s too early to tell if they can do so well enough and fast enough to avoid more extreme and destructive remedies, but its something new in the aspect of America, and, if not ‘glorious summer’ is at least the first tentative buds of spring.
Happy Solstice.
Don’t lose hope. Never lose hope.