May 19, 2005 by lonbud

Change Gonna Come

If you’ve ever followed the stock or commodity markets, or read the classic treatise Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, you know at significant turns in the cycles of events which characterize human existence, things get pretty wild.

Prices gyrate, structures crumble, rules and traditions are broken or ignored, and, often enough, people die.

I believe we may be approaching just such a turn in the cycles. It’s just too wild out there to believe things can keep going the way they are.

Perhaps it’s an unfortunate consequence of the development of communication technology and the resulting 24 hour news cycle, but it worries me to know about the instability and the carnage occurring daily in so many places around the globe: Iraq, Israel/Palestine, Sudan, Uzbekistan, Chechneya, Columbia, Nepal all host ongoing conflicts being fought out by factions in their midst who possess and use high-powered military ordnance, the overwhelming majority of which was produced by American arms manufacturers and contractors for the United States military.

How can anyone who once believed –or even still believes– in the necessity of our invading Iraq look at what is going on there every single day and think, “Mission Accomplished”?

Oddly, and sadly enough, the New York Time’s newest token conservative pundit, John Tierney was on to something last week when he suggested the debacle in the desert wouldn’t seem so bad if the news media didn’t report all the negative things going on there.

If you listen closely enough, however, there’s the clucking sound of chickens coming home to roost.

It’s amazing. Bill Clinton was almost summarily booted from the oval office for moistening his stogies with the vaginal fluid of a comely intern, but George W. Bush is still around trying to take credit for saving the world from terrists after running up a record trade deficit and ruining the lives of tens of thousands of American families, whose children have been killed or maimed pursuing his folly in Iraq.

Watch this clip of George Galloway, a member of the British Parliament, setting Senator Norm Coleman (R, MN) and the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations straight about the so-called Oil for Food “scandal” in Iraq. In it you will hear the strong foundation for what may one day be Mr. Bush’s impeachment, and the possible end of our long national nightmare.

Then again, maybe not, because here on the home front the nightmare is in full swing and plenty of people don’t even seem to notice the sheets getting damp.

Republicans in congress, led by Tennessee Senator Bill Frist, are in the midst of a ploy to do away with 200 plus years of precedence in the Senate by rescinding the principle of filibuster for the process of confirming judges appointed by the President to the Federal bench.

Two centuries of the vaunted “checks and balances” that –once upon a time– made our constitutional democracy the model for every society to yearn for freedom, may go down a toilet so this president can seat judges who will do his born-again, faith-based, free-market bidding –and that of his hypocritical, hubristic, wealthy, neo-con allies.

The short-sightedness of these people is astounding.

Muslims worldwide, who reacted en mass, and violently, to the factually inaccurate Newsweek story about American interrogators flushing a Koran down the toilet, clearly connect more passionately with their most revered document than do the vast number of us Americans with ours.

In a similar vein, the people of Whatevertheheckistan –where the ruling powers poisoned the challenger to the presidency, and tried to steal the election on top of that– made a more passionate defense of their right to govern themselves than have we the people in the United States.

And so then, perhaps this Popular Delusion in which we live has not yet gotten wild enough.

Perhaps the turn isn’t nigh, and many millions of us may have to mass in the streets, and stand in front of tanks, suffer beatings and dogs and bullets and gasses, and demand the Constitution be upheld, demand the people with power at every station in life take responsibility, and be held accountable for its exercise.