Originally Posted by
JohnMc82
Become? All that is left is a matter of opinion.
My nightmares are of a high tech surveillance state, an empire that starts wars and occupations based on fabricated and exaggerated evidence, a military that detains and tortures suspects in secretive foreign prisons. I fear that a banking cartel could become so powerful that the cost of living and doing business world-wide would be subject to its whims and greed. I fear a government so captured by said cartel that it would sacrifice the future in order to enrich those few today.
Without question that would be an America run by people no better than gangsters except they might be a bit more sophisticated than Don Vito Corleone. Powerful interests would effectively grab a bite out of every economic activity on the assumption that such is not simply necessary but even good. Once it is able to impose private taxes without having performed useful services, or without the expectation of performance of any useful services, we would effectively have an economic order that exists solely for the enrichment of the Few.
I fear that we've already gone too far, and my opinion is far outside of the mainstream. Average people see these things not as horrors that must be corrected, but rather as unfortunate side-effects of Americanism that must be tolerated or even justified. Many will flatly say they are a good thing.
There is no domestic opposition to the militaristic nightmare. None. Even where pockets of rebellion exist, ie: Occupy Wall Street, there is a concerted effort by some to separate concerns about foreign policy and civil rights from economic matters.
At least we have gone back to the sane and sober foreign policy of the elder Bush and Clinton. I have no problem with terrorist masterminds and pirates being whacked. Iraq never had any resolution, and Afghanistan is going to be much the same. Thank you, Dubya. Of course I would prefer that the Patriot Act be rescinded. All that we need for a full-blown dictatorship is for some ruling clique to decide that any dissident "pals (sic!) with terrorism" (in the parlance of Sarah Palin, a great mangler of logic and the English language). If there are no civil liberties, then the economy can be perverted into some monstrosity of a welfare state for the well-connected and a jungle for all others.
But we cannot attack the financial and political power if we refuse to address the military and police state that protects them...
We do not yet have a police state. If we did we would never see the Tea Party or Occupy Wall Street types. Someone who says that "someone ought to kill the President" while inebriated in a small-town bar legitimately draws the attention of the police. But without question -- the financial power does not yet have full control of the political system. If it ever does, then our system of Constitutional government will be as full of loopholes as was the Soviet Union under the 1936 (Stalin) Constitution -- with the equivalent of Article 6 in the Constitution enshrining a dominant-Party system in which the Party with real power has a cadre system of internal enforcement, and the Criminal Code has an Article 58 that practically turns everyone into a defined offender who operates only with the indulgence of the powerful.
Originally Posted by
me, if with a twist
[9-11] struck too hard when America was at its worst -- near but not quite at the end of the 3T. A Crisis peaking at the time in which an elderly generation of Adaptive leftovers offer piecemeal compromises that nobody wants, aging Idealists who see the world divided neatly between Good and Evil yet fail to recognize the destructiveness of their 'solutions', and Reactive young adults who see Apocalypse as opportunity and adventure instead of carnage... we have seen that before
Given the variables we have been given, I feel like we have already made the choice.
The 3T/4T cusp usually features some of the weakest or compromised leadership then possible because people then want a government that acquiesces in the greed, mindless hedonism, fanaticism, and selfishness. Dubya may prove to be the worst President in American history for his freakish combination of shallowness, corruption, and malleability. Hoover, the sort of entrepreneur who goes in vogue late in a 3T when (as his predecessor Calvin Coolidge -- another awful President -- said): The business of America is business. But even Hoover, for all his faults, was a man of principle and no militarist. James Buchanan, presiding over a rifting America, may have simply been far past prime as President.
I think that Senator John McCain would have been a disaster as President. He would be pulled at from all sides, most notably from the Tea Party types who would think of him as "not conservative enough" and from saber-rattling militarists. I don't know whether the King Lear scenario is specifically about an elderly Adaptive, but it certainly looks as if it would fit him -- especially if the Vice-President were throwing temper tantrums when she didn't get her way.
President Obama is no Idealist. His hit on Osama bin Laden is little different in style from that of a Chicago gangster even if it is for honorable purposes. He will not and cannot be the Churchillian or Lincolnesque "Gray Champion". At most he can calm things so that when things get extremely dangerous, America will be better prepared. He is a Reactive who acts much like a sixty-something John Adams, Grover Cleveland, Harry Truman, or Dwight Eisenhower. The most dangerous Reactive is a cynical operator who uses high office largely to salve old hurt feelings.
The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid "dens of crime" (or) even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see its final result. But it is conceived and ordered... in clean, carpeted, warmed and well-lighted offices, by (those) who do not need to raise their voices. Hence, naturally enough, my symbol for Hell is something like the bureaucracy of a police state or the office of a thoroughly nasty business concern."
― C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters
