It’s Howdy Doody Time...

Dec 15, 2006

By Gary Corseri


"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable."

--John F. Kennedy


They’ve done it again.

They flim-flammed and bamboozled us, got us marching, got us hoping.

We manned the phones, wrote letters to editors, herded ourselves to Diebold ballot machines, held up our purple thumbs for all the world to see—all 45% of us.

We done our civil duty, paid our biennial dues, and now we can go home and watch the A-team beat the B-team on our HDTV. Spectator sports and spectator politics. An elephant never forgets. Pin the tail on the donkey!

And what’s the result? They kick out that nasty popinjay Rumsfeld. The 76-year-old sycophant-warmonger takes his millions and jockeys his Hummer into a Montana sunset. He’s replaced by a younger, less abrasive, more managerial, Bush-41-minted Robert Gates.

Boys and Girls, let’s hear it for Buffalo Bob and Clarabelle! They got to us in our Frosty Flakes years, and they’ve kept the game going ever since.

Diogenes and Zeno’s Paradoxes

Actually, I did not vote.

I didn’t vote not because I wanted to be in the majority of non-voters (!), but because of two ancient Greeks: Diogenes of Sinope and Zeno of Elea.

Diogenes lived in the world’s first democracy in Athens. He saw it rise, expand into the imperial Delian League, and he saw it fall. (Actually, by the time he arrived on the scene, after the good citizens of Athens had poisoned Socrates, it was much more a matter of falling.)

Diogenes hated pretense. He was a “street person” with attitude—and brains. He liked dogs better than people. (Hence his philosophy of “cynicism,” from the Greek kyon, for “dog.”) Dogs don’t bullshit. Dogs make lousy politicians.

There are many stories about Diogenes’ outrageousness. Or, maybe he was just clear-headed. (Asked in public how a man might avoid the temptations of the flesh, he masturbated then and there. “Would that I could as easily assuage my hunger by rubbing my belly,” he said.)

One day, Alexander the Great shows up in Athens. (Odd that we still call this barbarian “the Great.” He was off to conquer the splendid civilization of his day—Darius’s Persia, a prosperous empire that was more like a federation of equal sovereigns, living in peace with its neighbors.) Diogenes is living in an old tub at the time, and Alexander, who has heard about him from his teacher Aristotle, out of respect for philosophy, pays him a visit.

Alexander says something like this: “Dude, I’m bad … I’m the most powerful bastard in the whole wide world. Emperors piss in their Depends when they hear my name. I can make and break people like clay puppets. But just because Uncle Ari says you’re a notable dude, I’m going to grant you whatever you wish.”

Diogenes looks up from the old tub and he sees the sun glinting off the top of Alexander’s helmet. Alex casts a wide, long shadow and Dogman feels a chill in it. “Don’t stand between the sun and me,” he replies.

And that’s pretty much how I feel about the Republicrats now. I want what they can’t or won’t give me—the world’s best antiseptic. Sunshine. Warmth. And truth.

The second reason I didn’t vote has to do with Zeno’s paradoxes and the Iraq Study Group.

Zeno preceded Dogman by about a hundred years. That was during the heyday of Athenian democracy when “citizens” got to vote directly on shards and there was a shard trail, if you will. Of course, there were more than a few paradoxes in this “democracy,” including the fact that women didn’t vote and the class depended on the labor of slaves.

Zeno was one of those philosophes who saw the limitations of human thought and logic.
Eight of his “paradoxes” are extant. My favorites go something like this: A body in motion is actually a body at rest at any particular moment. (It’s only in the past 100 years or so, since Kodack, that the average person can actually see what Zeno was getting at. Think of stop-action photography capturing the moment Jack Ruby’s bullet enters Lee Harvey Oswald’s gut. In the next few moments, everything will change. No trial for Oswald, no leaks. Kaput. Finished business. A moment frozen in the amber of time. Like this one, say—like every moment, containing all possibilities within it.)

A related paradox having to do with time tells us everything we need to know about the Iraq Study Group’s 79 “recommendations.” One of those recommendations is, basically, to cut the number of U.S. troops in half, and train the Iraqis to take up the slack. This is how we’re supposed to get to a point where the Iraqis will be able to sustain a democratic society which will join us in our Global War on Terror.

But Zeno tells us it’ll never work. If you keep moving halfway to your goal, you never get there.

It’s like one of those other “recommendations.” Start up the Peace Process again, the one between Israel and Palestine.

Hello? Haven’t we been down this road a hundred times already? There was Oslo, Camp David, even a Bush 43 “roadmap.” Lots of feints and jabs and jaunts and taunts in the past 60 years, but what “Peace Process”? Did Tolstoy write a book called “War and Peace Process”?

There is either peace or no peace—i.e., war or cold war or preparations for war. We have lived with war, cold war or preparations for war for about 100 years now and the Iraq Study Group will not get us out of this imbroglio.

Managers love crises—makes them feel important. This Group of Ten is providing us a quarterly report about managing the crisis in our foreign relations. They emphasize “moving forward” because they dare not look back at how we got into this mess. Call it the No Blame Game. But if we don’t understand how we got here—the lies and complicity of Republicrats—how can we “move forward” without committing the same crimes? The Iraq Study Group’s report is a recipe for recidivism.

The Study Group earnestly requests that their recommendations not be “cherry-picked”; i.e., take all 79 as a whole. And, ah, who exactly elected these seers to tell us how to run the Superpower’s foreign policy?

And who are these seers? The Bush family’s consiglieri, Jim Baker, the guy who strong-armed the Supreme Court into appointing Bush Jr. president in 2000. Then there’s co-chair Lee Hamilton, who also co-chaired the 9/11 Commission hearings, behind closed doors, which basically whitewashed the appointed president’s responsibility for 9/11.

There’s Vernon Jordan and Leon Panetta, Clinton administration operatives, whose presence ensures that criticism will be deflected from the nearly full-fledged Democratic support for this now “Long War,” (soon to metamorphose into the “The Interminable War.”).

There’s Sandra Day O’Connor, Madam Justice, who, questioned by Margaret Warner on PBS about the “recommendation” that the U.S. engage in talks with Iran, responded: We spoke to Stalin during World War II and he was our enemy, wasn’t he? (Ms. Warner may have been overly polite in not pointing out that Stalin was one of our two principal allies in that revisionized conflagration.)

So, working in secret, these suspect characters present the nation with their fait acompli, expecting our plaudits and full compliance.

Just as surely as they have removed the citizenry from the process of their deliberations, they have attempted to remove from the citizenry the process of review and oversight—the real work of democracy.

A clever ploy which Zeno would have foreseen in the timing. Wind the reel back nine months and you’ve got a very worried Republicratic elite kavetching to itself: “Holy Shit! this war is going bad. We’ve got an idiot in the White House, scary Cheney behind him, and a lot of bloody hands in the House and Senate. And the People are waking up. They’re reading the Internet and they’re getting ideas.”

So, a Baker type comes along and he says, “Let’s move forward. Yeah, there’s going to be an election in about 8 months. We’re gonna send out the Cheerleader to do his shtick, and maybe our puppets Maliki and Talabani will hold things together in Iraq long enough to fool the schlimazels again. But, if we don’t succeed, if our Democrat allies actually move forward, we’ll boot out Rummy and put everything on hold. We tell the schlimazels we need another month for the Iraq Study Group’s report, and then we come out with 79 impossible recommendations to be take whole-cloth. More confusion. Instead of clear-cut proposals that everyone can agree on, we plow the debating ground for the 2008 election. Obama? Hillary? McCain? It doesn’t matter. So long as the schlimazels never lose faith in the process!”

Hannah Arendt put it this way: “What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably a part. Repetition, somewhat over-rated in importance because of the common belief in the masses’ inferior capacity to grasp and remember, is important because it convinces them of consistency in time.”

The show must go on.

What now?

Eighteen months ago, I wrote an article called "25 Reasons to Impeach George W. Bush." It appeared at CounterPunch and a few other sites around the world. It was posted at Representative John Conyers' website.

Eighteen months ago was the time to push for impeachment, the time for Dems to show backbone--if they've ever had any--, to make a clean break from the Republicrats.

It's not going to happen now. The Dems will concentrate on 08--pushing H.C. and Obama, diverting us with the sideshow until it becomes the main show.

I heard Representative Cynthia McKinney, Ray McGovern and Chris Hedges speak a few nights ago at a World Can't Wait meeting. I’d never heard any of them speak in person before and they and the other speakers were impressive.

I voted for McKinney in Georgia two years ago. (Yeah, I’ll actually vote if I think there’s a real choice. Most of the time, there isn’t.)

World Can't Wait is pushing for impeachment now. I think it's a waste of time, sapping the energy of the Left.

We need new paradigms.

Soon after the Cold War ended, that was the catchphrase of the day. Even Gorbachev got in on it. New paradigms.

Then King George Bush 41 came along and said, To hell with New Paradigms! What we need is a New World Order.

I respect McKinney’s call-it-like-it-is, no-holds-barred, feisty style. We don’t live in an age of niceties—not when we’re blowing up children and wreaking havoc for the sake of Big Oil and the Military Industrial Complex.

I respect Ray McGovern, who was 27 years with the C.I.A., and, basically, a year or so ago, had the guts to tell Rumsfeld he was full of shit, we weren’t winning in Iraq and weren’t going to win in spite of Rumsfeld’s obscurantism. We need to listen to insiders like Ray McGovern and Paul Craig Roberts, who have seen the light and made their 180’s. They write for some of the best sites on the Internet. They write lucidly, and they’ve got the creds.

That said, let’s understand: we’ll never get anywhere on the Left if we don’t start thinking out of the box.

Gabriel Kolko, whom CounterPunch’s editors characterize as the best historian on wars in the 20th century, posted a recent article in which he claims, “We can rule out the Left, that artifact of past history. Socialism ceased being a real option long ago, perhaps as early as 1914 … I need not say more than that it is no longer a threat to anybody.” Perhaps Mr. Kolko has been so focused on wars in the 20th century, he has missed the narrative line of socialist development in Latin America. Perhaps he has missed the story in France where Segolene Royal is set to become the next Prime Minister, and in Spain, where President Zapatero pulled Spanish troops from the Bush-Blair fiasco nearly three years ago. Perhaps he missed Prodi’s success in Italy—and much more.

This is not the time to write the Left’s epitaph, but it’s certainly time for some new thinking.

The Right are always going to outspend us. Since the Supreme Court declared (in Buckley v. Valeo), the equivalence of money and free speech, the Right have been buying the biggest megaphones and calling it democracy! Is this what the Bill of Rights means by freedom of speech? It appears that some of us have a hell of a lot more of it than others.

The media consolidation of the 90’s—let’s thank Michael Powell, Colin’s boy for overseeing that—made it still harder for the Left to be heard. The Right can outspend the Left ten bucks to one—and these are roadblocks we can’t get through.

We can’t get through, but we can go around. We go around by out-witting, out-thinking, out-imagining the Right. They have their billion-dollar think tanks, and we have people who can think for themselves and meet around the hearth of the Internet.

Old strategies must be re-examined. Voting in meaningless elections is intolerable. Rubber-stamping rubber-duck candidates lends credence to a system that is losing credence daily. (Kolko writes in that same article: “The system has become increasingly vulnerable … since about 1990, and the formal demise of ‘communism.’”)

Communism, that kind of centralized, authoritarian planning may be dead, but the Left and Socialism are not. Communism is a closed system with orders originating from the top, carried out by minions upon a disenfranchised populace. In its basic structure it’s like Fascism, which accounts for much of the confusion in the minds of Sandra Day O’Connor and “patriotic” Americans. The U.S. has had Fascistic elements from its inception. How else account for the Alien and Sedition Laws, the genocide against Native Americans, slavery, etc.? How else account for a war to seize the resources of the Middle East for the sake of Big Oil’s profits and our Defense establishment?

Socialism depends on a feedback loop. It has to be decentralized to work right. Information is fluid, transforming and transformative.

A major problem with the Left today is that it doesn’t seem to know who or what it is.
Hence, it gets lost in the Republicratic maze.

In that maze, someone suggests a demonstration—“make a lot of noise.” After I attended the 200,000-strong anti-war demonstration in D.C. in September, ’05, I asked a Leftist acquaintance, “What now?” He shrugged. So, essentially, did everybody else. Then half of them went out to vote for Republicrats.

The Republicrats have a stranglehold on this system and we’re not going to change anything unless we hit them where it hurts—in their wallets.

We can make all the noise we want, demonstrate and clamor for impeachment, but we’ll never change anything because Karl Rove and the “grown-ups” are already planning the next show-stopper for some eight months or more down the road. They understand what Zeno understood: all forward movement consists of a series of frozen moments, any one of which they can “spin” off in totally new directions.

The American Left needs to re-think its options. I don’t think we use boycotts nearly enough. O’Reilley, Limbaugh, Hannity say something stupid on their shows. Make a list of their sponsors. Disseminate that list. Refuse to buy those products.

We need to reach out to Leftist parties and organizations in other countries. They need our support and we need theirs. The Canadian health care system, one of the best examples of “socialized medicine” in the world, is under assault by the privatization junkies. That affects all of us. We need to think out of our box, beyond our borders. The French award working mothers 3 years paid maternity leave and the guarantee of a job to return to. The U.S. awards unpaid leave of 12 weeks. (But we allow the invidious Rupert Murdoch to post chicken heads on French ministers when they prudently warn us against military adventurism in Iraq! Did any Republicrat call down Murdoch for his blatant warmongering propaganda?) Mexico’s Lopez Obrador refuses to cede ground to an election swindle by Felipe Calderon. That’s our struggle, too.

How much can we sacrifice? Live in a tub like Diogenes for the sake of our principles, to make a point? Unlikely.

Can we burn up our credit cards, live more simply, create our own creative communities, turn our backs upon this gluttonous, zero-sum game culture? Why not?

Once I lived in a middle-class neighborhood of weekend lawn-cutters. Every weekend, my neighbors were out there on their 1,000-2,000-dollar tractor mowers, trimming their mowing their lawns. “Couldn’t we all just chip in and buy one mower for the block?” I once asked and got lockjawed responses.

Hit’em where it hurts. Educate people about money. We need to re-birth the counter-culture and re-establish alternative communities. We need to re-imagine the Arts. (Didn’t they used to be about people? We’ve always had a fair bit of fantasy-art in America, especially in our cinema. But wasn’t there once more than the slick and the sick?)

Frankly, in the long run, we need to call a Constitutional Convention. A Republicrat candidate in Maryland, a law professor-vanity candidate for Governor, who just wanted to show his pretty face and exude professorial style, told me that the Constitution was “deeply flawed,” but, nevertheless, we had to support it.

And I answered, the Bill of Rights, yes, and some of the amendments which advance human rights, yes, but must I really support the Electoral College and a bi-cameral system that awards citizens in Wyoming some 70 times the voting power in the Senate as citizens in California? Can we not use referenda, as they do in other countries, as is built into the new Venezuelan constitution, to re-call an unpopular president, one who has violated his oath of office repeatedly, as has Dictator/Decider George 43? Isn’t a document that defines slaves as 3/5 human—something of which to be ashamed?

We need to think in new directions, out-think, out-imagine these devious Republicrats.

Fabian and fabulist George Bernard Shaw could see the world in a grain of sand. “Nothing can save society,” he wrote, “except the clear head and the wide purpose.” And, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”


Gary Corseri edited the MANIFESTATIONS anthology. His articles, fiction and poems have appeared at/in DissidentVoice, CounterPunch, CommonDreams,AxisofLogic, the New York Times, Village Voice, Redbook and elsewhere. He has published two novels and two collections of poetry; PBS Atlanta has broadcast his dramatic work. He can be contacted at corseri@verizon.net.