(I think this is is a well-written diary that could generate some really interesting responses. Well done UY! – promoted by Christian Avard)
It will be a loooong one.
One score and fourteen years ago, I was a college student, home for the summer. When I wasn’t working, I was on the floor of my parent’s living room, sprawled out watching TV, glued to the news and the Watergate hearings. The Nixon administration, despite their November 1972 mandate, was twisting in the wind; for us political junkies, it was great theater. And come that August, I was glad to see him go, a happy ending.
And I howled inside when Ford let him off. Outside too. To put it mildly, I was quite indignant. I, along with many others, wanted to see “justice done”, which is a catch-all phrase which usually – for me, I won’t speak for you – includes fantasies of revenge, public humiliation, and often enough, taking the sumbitches down to the beach and shooting them, like they did in Liberia in 1980, and leaving them for the high tide. Suffice to say, there is a part of me that wants my ‘pound of flesh’, likes the idea of ‘an eye for an eye’, (or at the very least, a pie in the eye). Hey, I’m a primate. Would I do it? No. Probably not.
George Walker Bush’s administration has left their skidmarks all over our Constitution. Bypassing the FISA courts is just one of many of those skidmarks. They are without a doubt guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors as outlined in Article II Section 4 of the Constitution they keep wiping their butts on. By and through them, monumental injustices have been perpetrated against Americans and innocents all over the world.
But, let’s face it – the injustices and lawbreaking started with the man’s very (s)election in 2000, and they have continued pretty much unabated and certainly unchecked ever since. (Since 2000, two Vermonters have been in a position to follow their oaths and defend the Constitution – Bernie Sanders (until 2006) and Peter Welch – by indicting/impeaching Bush and/or his many slimy cronies as members of the House that have that authority. Both would rather read the polls than follow their sworn oaths.)
Please note that Obama didn’t make it to Washington until 2005. By that time, the horses were long out of the barn. Bush had had a full term of trashing and shitting on the Constitution, and the American people had just asked for more. We were four-plus years into Constitutional freefall. Note that the American people were – and are – complicit in the trashing of the Constitution. These are all our duly elected (and/or selected) “leaders”, such as they are.
(This is not the first time in our history that we’ve had leadership that threw the Constitution out the window, exploiting fears and panics of the people – Red Scares in the 1950s and the 19 teens and 20s, and New England’s own John Adams come to mind. But this is where we are, in the middle of one of those periods.)
Lots more below the fold.
Obama sees his job as – first – talking us back from the ledge, the abyss. That’s his higher form of defending the Constitution and what he sees as the American Way, since the problem is not the trampling of the Constitution, but the failure of the people to do anything about it.
I take him at his word that he will revisit the FISA mess if elected. He, so far, has shown himself to be a brilliant strategist, he constantly reframes issues in a larger context of hope and opportunity.
Tellingly, he’s even tried to engage the fundamentalists in dialog – including some of our sickest most scared people, people with a fear based worldview and an an active belief in an “end of the world” eschatology. But fundamentalists are people too, and for better or worse (usually worse), our fellow Americans. He’s talking them (and us, since they can take us there) back from the edge, trying to engage not their fear and insanity, but our hopes, our common humanity.
It’s hard hard work. There remains a huge portion – perhaps the voting majority, come November we’ll see – of Americans mired in their fear, their prejudices, their thirst for blood and vengeance, their vicarious love of war. Some of them will hold on to that no matter what. But we can’t give up, because the alternative for the planet – a crazy sick people with a crazy sick leadership with crazy sick weapons capability – is not good.
Back to 1974. To Nixon. To Ford’s pardon.
I didn’t get my “pound of flesh”. Vengeance was not mine, or anyone else’s. It pissed me off, for a long time.
We must brace ourselves for the likelihood, the probability, that we will never get our “pound of flesh” from the Bush administration perpetrators.
As progressives, we are wired to be outraged by injustice, but “vengeance” is not supposed to be our thing. (In New England and the northeast, they build ‘reformatories’, and ‘penitentiaries’ and ‘corrections facilities’. Other places, they build ‘prisons’.)
Somewhere in Vermont, Michael Jacques sits alone in a cell. Some Vermonters have been exercising their revenge fantasies, some more than others. I’m sure there have been plenty of talk radio calls that have gone something like this “just give me 20 minutes with him” or “stick him in the general population, let them take care of him”.
But Michael Jacques is a sick sick man, not well wired for decency or compassion, and probably not well wired for guilt and shame. He is where he needs to be, keep him there and he is not a threat to anyone. Anything else we do to him is vengeance.
George Bush is a sick sick man, too. On many levels, his crimes are every bit as foul as Jacques’. Like Jacques, he is poorly wired for guilt and shame and dealing with reality in general. But the underlying – and much more immediate – problem is not his criminality, his sociopathy, it is the fear and vengeance in the heart of the American electorate.
There’s a gun to the head of our republic. Obama is asking us for the gun, asking us to live in a different future, one unstuck from old paradigms of right-left blue-red, etc. etc, etc, ad anauseum.
I am realizing that “yes we can” is a lifeline – a lifeline of hope. Hope.
He’s throwing it our way. But we have to swim for it, and it will probably mean dropping our desire for revenge – and finding other ways to slake our thirst for justice, at least for the short run – if we want to reach the rope of hope and the peaceful shore…