Lies, Damned Lies, Glittering Generalities, and Politics in the U.S. - More Lies, i.e.

Listening last night to the media “coverage” of the presidential primaries, caucuses, related commentary, and political news, I counted the number of times the word “change” was used. Twenty-seven times. In two hours. Everyone – and that’s without exception – was agreed that “the people want change.”

I wish I had counted the number of times I’ve heard that during the dozen or so (I heard my first political speech during Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s third run for office) presidential campaigns to which I’ve listened. The word “change,” together with the phrase “the people want change” is a political mantra, the most general of all the myriad of glittering generalities inflicted on the public by these bloviating bullshitters.

Glittering generalities, parenthetically, are emotionally appealing words and phrases. The demagogue wields the glittering generality in order to avail himself of certain highly-valued, even sacred, concepts while avoiding having to say anything logical, definite, or examinable. Take an example from the smorgasbord of such, one like “support our troops.” What does “support” mean – specifically?

What does “win in Iraq” mean? How about “lose?” Samuel Johnson once noted that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, but in the lexicon of these scoundrels what does “patriotism” mean? How about “democracy?”

Glittering generality is, pure and simple (and if you wouldn’t expect this, living in this effeminate society as you are, you’re not paying attention), an appeal to emotion. Like ad hominem and name calling, it intends for the listener to accept the speaker’s statements without intelligent examination of the evidence. It is sneaky, dissimulating, and deceitful. It is an insidious lie. The person who does it is not trustworthy.

Trumpeting as it does that the speaker considers the listener to be a moron, the glittering generality is a sneering, insolent insult. This campaign, in fact, has become one, long, extended insult. The media’s uppity cadre of panty-hose pundits, metrosexual mavens, and Jubilation T. Cornpone wannabe warriors spew verbal garbage like “defeatist,” “cut-and-run,” “not supportive of the troops,” “lack of resolve,” and the sickening, sycophant, Uriah Heep, Sean Hannity like.

To “cut and run” (few of these people ever so much as wore the uniform, preferring to dodge the draft during Vietnam and elsewhere) would “embolden the enemy.” To tell the truth to the “American” (does any of these morons realize that there are thirty-four other nations in the Americas?) people is “demoralizing the troops.” To question the impossible stupidity of the invasion and tactics employed is “defeatist.” The “enemy” must not be permitted to “break the will of the American people” (no, but you birds have no problem with sending their kids to die or be maimed or with raiding their pocketbooks).

And when – as we most assuredly will – leave before “victory” has been won, the
stage has been set for laying all the blame for our “defeat” on all of us (I, and I can prove it) who before the invasion not only said the war was an incredibly stupid idea, but that the reason for invasion was a colossal, monumental lie.

So if one of these pandering prostitutes – presidential candidate, politician, or media pundit - uses the word “honor” again especially in the context of Iraq, I swear I’ll vomit.

Having said that, I’ll probably just have to stop listening. When used by a politician in the U.S. after all, honor is the most glittering generality of them all. I swear (it must be my day for swearing, I guess) I can only wonder why guys like John McCain bother to use it. He’s too old, I suppose to realize that most high school kids these days can’t so much as define it correctly, and their parents and elders when interviewed across the U.S. all but invariably associate the word with reward and fame.

The word “honor” is one of questionable value as a glittering generality because in a nation willing to condone torture by its government, obviously damned few people know what it means.

But stand in a mall and ask the crowds (as I so often have) what is meant when one speaks of country, peace, freedom, and honor. If you really are a patriot, I don’t recommend that you try it unless you have a strong stomach and iron control of your temper.

Suffice it to say that a glittering generality has two qualities: It is vague – if it describes anything clearly, it is the character of its user, and it has the most positive of connotations. And, as I am so often wont to say, if you don’t recognize the presidential campaign of 2007-2008, you’re not paying attention.

And they’re getting away with it. Even those close to me are continually taken in, continually slip into discussion of it all as though it were real. I’m reminded of years ago when, stopping to get my usual cup of coffee, I heard a clerk and customers discussing excitedly and anxiously the shooting of someone named “J.R.” Search my memory as I might, I could not come up with anyone known as “J.R.” To my astonishment when I asked, I learned that the conversation’s subject was a figure in a television soap opera. You had to be there, but to these stunned and stupefied people, “Dallas” and “J.R.” were real.

I’m also reminded of the restaurant patron who in discussing the 1980s financial crisis that cost tens of thousands of farmers their farms said he didn’t give a damn about farmers being forced our of business by soaring interest rates – he got his meat and produce from the supermarket.

There won’t be any “changes.” Not the kind being promised by the politicians, anyway. Oh, the flood of illegal aliens across the border with Mexico will grow exponentially after the election. That’s no matter who is “elected.” The corporations who own the U.S. and its government have created every kind of debt-based phony money they could, collateralizing – giving it value – every conceivable way. Now there’s only one way left, repeating an historical cycle far older than history, that of wealth derived from cheap labor, skill, and inventiveness sold at many times what it cost the profiteer.

Corporate capitalism won’t change, in other words. That the public can be distracted from the fact that the blood and lives of thousands are being sold at immense – hundreds of billions – profit by corporations like Halliburton demonstrates in a manner like no other the propagandist power of the “glittering generality.”

Blindly, “stunned and stolid, a brother to the ox,” we are trading our nation, our way of life, and our children’s future for generalities like “patriotism,” “peace,” “freedom,” and “honor” uttered by cynical politicians.

Yes, there are a lot of reasons – reasons even more than these – that we're in the sorry state we are. Of course, now that I think of it, those younger than middle age have only history and their parents from which to learn how things were, and make a comparison. Young people no longer read history; neither do they listen to their elders, even those they love. Most of what youth think is normal and part of living here in the U.S. comes to them by way of the media and others who also get what they think is real from it. Their parents and their educators have been and continue to be drowned out by the propagandists. Worse yet, those same parents and educators have also been behaviorist-indoctrinated – “brain-washed.”

The blind leading the blind has become the brain-washed indoctrinating the brain-washed. How else would you explain – how do you think historians will explain – the people of a nation otherwise stupid enough to pay for both destruction, then rebuilding, of a country, all while efforts to restore storm damage from hurricanes to its own country went wanting and its own nation’s infrastructure was crumbling around them?

THINK about that!

As I’ve noted, even my friends – people convinced by hard, incontrovertible facts and certain of what has happened and what is going on – slip repeatedly into the psychological and sociological rut nationally reflected in this cynical, meretricious and mendacious spectacle.

How can anybody observing the day-to-day actions of government here – including those I just mentioned - believe their elected representatives are in control? HOW? How can anyone believe that with a group of incorporated and colossally rich bankers controlling the nation’s money, the government controls anything, much less the economy? How can anyone believe, that with Brobdingnagian corporations controlling – the number of lobbyists alone in Washington, D.C. is approaching 60,000 – all but a few of their supposedly elected representatives, the nation is a republic? How can anyone believe that with a president defying the congress – he has the monumental arrogance to actually put his defiance and repudiation of his oath of office in writing – we remain a constitution-governed nation?

That is the very definition of the word “absurd!”

There’s more. In fact, it goes on and on. Again and again and again throughout these “campaign” speeches and so-called debates, it is implied and we are told that congress has no power to take our military out of Iraq. Perhaps no one thing characterizes this nonsense better than that one outrageous lie. The fact – just for yet another example of the surreal goings-on in the Land of the Free Nation of Laws - is that President Bush is in open defiance of the War Powers Act (read it, for crying out loud!).

Even if reading public law 93-148 doesn’t convince one, history – were the public to read any of it – should. On November 9, 1993, for instance, the House of Representatives used a section of the War Powers Resolution to force withdrawal of U.S. forces from Somalia. The Congress can not only order withdrawal from Iraq, it can withhold funds necessary to stay there. There isn’t any question about this, witness the fact that before invading Iraq, the president invoked powers given him by another law, one clarifying the War Powers Act.

He said, and I quote: "...I determine that:... [Declaring war on Iraq and] acting pursuant to the Constitution and Public Law 107-243 is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001."

Of course, he lied. There is no rational doubt or question about that; even if there were, the fact of a question as serious as this where the nation is concerned demands the trial of impeachment, anyway. If that weren’t enough there is the fact that any high school class – as intellectually pitiful as our high-schoolers have become – could successfully impeach George W. Bush on the basis of his own conduct in the form of public statements. The man’s mendacity and his repudiation of his oath – why the hell do we all believe an oath of office is given (more of the “election campaign” dumb show?) – are of such voluminous record it would take a day alone just to read aloud – even without interruption - in court.

Finally, in Flast v. Cohen, 392 U.S. 83 (1968), the U.S. Supreme court held that a taxpayer has standing to sue the government in order to prevent an unconstitutional use of taxpayer funds. There can be little doubt, especially under the circumstances and the law I’ve just mentioned, that the invasion of Iraq was an “unconstitutional use of taxpayer funds.” Flast had to do with spending tax funds on religious schools (Wilbur Cohen was the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare) but the precedent applies legally to any unconstitutional use of tax money.

This – the specious presidential campaign, the absurd conduct of government; all of it - is, in ever sense of the word, ridiculous, a mockery of our system of government and law. More, it mocks and holds in high contempt the people of the United States.

Now come we to an interesting point. In 1986, realizing that the criminal conspiracy we call “government” intended to destroy me (bullets going through your flesh is pretty convincing, in case things like illegal – that’s totally without legal process, the government acting just like a common burglar – seizure of your property, harassment of your wife and kids and more aren’t enough), I used covert operations to amass a mountain of evidence against them. During a press conference on the capitol steps in Denver and on radio talk shows, I announced my intention to make citizens arrest of anyone in government I caught in commission of crime or crimes.

The announcement so shook the government (crooks are always afraid – “scelus semper timidus est”) that then Attorney General Richard Thornburgh called me personally, offering a “compromise.” When I refused, of course, the government reverted as it always does to crime (still another example of behavior leaving no room for doubt about how our nation is really governed and what it is).

But, as I said, it’s interesting. What would happen, were I to file a suit? Now, if you don’t know how the U.S. really works, let me explain. I have already filed a number of suits. One is published on my Website, verbatim. Result? Guess. While the legal attribute of sovereignty legally frees government of civil liability for its actions, government in the Nation of Laws is never satisfied with legality or legal process. The court made no acknowledgement or response whatever.

What would happen, were I to file a suit widely publicized on the World Wide Web? One thing is certain: just like before, the government would do what it always does – violence (those photos of the leg wound were of a wound inflicted in 1986 by a federal sniper, shooting from ambush).

Were I to do it all again, it would be only to demonstrate to the people of the United States the truth about their government – the way they are ruled (“government,” in a nation as behaviorally conditioned – brainwashed – as this one, has meanings unusual in the rest of the world).

I’d settle for that: I’m seventy-one, and I’d like to assure that my grandkids won’t be the slaves the Halliburtons of the world intend.