The End of Religious Liberty?

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has advised county clerks in that state that they may, in defense of their religious liberty, refuse to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, despite the United States Supreme Court's ruling, in Obergefell v. Hodges, that the Constitution requires the several States to issue such licenses to same-sex couples, as well as recognizing marriages between same-sex couples contracted in other States. Paxton's reasoning was that public officials, including those whose official duties are ministerial in nature (i.e., the official is not at discretion to refuse to discharge their official duty - namely, the issuing of marriage licenses to qualified applicants), cannot be forced to violate their conscience, or their religious principles, by performing an official act that conflicts with such religious principles. This is "defense of religious liberty," as it is practiced in 21st-century America.


It may prove to be the ultimate irony of the "religious liberty" debate in this country, that the robust defense of public officials's religious liberty may lead, ultimately, to the erosion, even the very elimination, of religious liberty for ALL citizens, not just public officials. Paxton has set the State of Texas sliding down a slippery slope, the bottom of which, though by no means near - yet - may nonetheless be seen clearly. Such a bottom would be completely contrary to Paxton's intent, and that of others of his intellectual disposition. Nonetheless, while an unintended consequence, it would prove to be a consequence that must be accepted, if our society continues down that slope.


Defending a public official's "religious liberty" to refuse to perform an official, ministerial act is a course of action without end. If a Christian county clerk may refuse to issue a marriage license to a same-sex couple, what is to prevent a Jehovah's Witness building inspector from refusing to issue a building permit to a Catholic organization, for the construction of a new church? What is to prevent a religious homeschooling advocate from refusing to grant a permit to a private charter academy, to open and operate their school? The latter example would pit two conservative constituencies - religious conservatives, and private entities performing formerly-public functions - against each other, a delicious refinement of the principle of "beware what you wish for; you may get it."


Shall our society embrace the spectacle of a Muslim DMV official denying a Jewish - or Christian, for that matter! - applicant for a Commercial Driver License, or vice versa? Shall a Baptist, serving on a professional-licensure board, be allowed to deny a professional license to a Mormon applicant, regardless of the applicant's sexual orientation? To expand the metaphor, shall a medical, or other allied-healthcare licensing board chair, suffering from the heebie-jeebies at the prospect of a homosexual applicant performing any of the activities of a healthcare provider, be allowed to indulge their aversion by denying the license? What if the only evidence of a physician's homosexuality is the fact that he, or she, holds a marriage license authorizing marriage to another person of the same sex? What will be the scope of public officials's right to claim a "religious liberty" exemption from the exercise of their ministerial function?


Ultimately, there will be no religious liberty for anybody, if public officials are allowed to abdicate their official duty arbitrarily, if not capriciously. The only way around the loss, by all, of their religious liberty, would be the ballooning of the ranks of public officials - another conflict between conservative principles - so that Catholic officials would process Catholic applicants's applications, Jewish officials for Jewish applicant's, Muslims for Muslims, Zoroastrians for Zoroastrians, Baha'is for Baha'is, etc., etc., ad nauseam sine terminum.Our society would then, far from guaranteeing our liberties, fulfill "in our own flesh" Thomas Jefferson's complaint against King George III, in the Declaration of Independence, that "he has ... sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance."


Is this, really, what we Americans want for our society? Is this the depth to which we, in the 21st century, have been reduced?

Illinois Comptroller

[NOTE: Due to a glitch with copyediting, we missed changing the reference to Sheila Simon to note that she was the incumbent lieutenant governor of Illinois. We regret the error, and are happy to update this post to reflect the facts. - Ed.]


Illinois Lieutenant Governor Sheila Simon (D), a former Southern Illinois University-Carbondale law professor, has conceded her race for Comptroller to the incumbent Republican, Judy Baar Topinka. At the state level, the vote in the Land of Lincoln appears to have been for keeping familiar names, with one notable exception. Secretary of State Jesse White (D) has handily won re-election, but it appears that Governor Pat Quinn (D) faces an insurmountable deficit in his race against Republican challenger, Bruce Rauner.

Racing for the Statehouses

Turning our attention to various gubernatorial races, CNN.com is projecting that incumbent Governor Rick Scott (R-FL) has won re-election, against former Republican Governor Charlie Crist (D), who had campaigned first as an Independent, before embracing the Democratic Party. At almost the same time, WGN-TV is reporting that Bruce Rauner, the Republican candidate for governor of Illinois, has taken a 49%-48% lead (barely 35,000 votes) over the incumbent, Pat Quinn (D).


While the Illinois race remains too close to call, with too many votes still to be counted, the apparent outcome of the Florida race is remarkable. In a contest to determine which candidate was less obnoxious to more voters, Crist was generally regarded to have the upper hand, even if for no other reason than he was "not Scott." With both candidates laboring under clouds of suspicion from their respective terms in Tallahassee, it appears that Florida voters have declined to "change crooks in mid-stream."


In Illinois, on the other hand, the race comes down to a question of which candidate has destroyed the most jobs in the past few years. Quinn, not unjustifiably, has faced charges that his administration's tax-hiking, regulation-increasing policies - abetted by Democratic control of both houses of the General Assembly - has made Illinois inhospitable to business interests. (Full Disclosure: I have been employed full-time virtually since moving to Illinois in October 2013.) Rauner, on the other hand, has not-unjustifiably been pilloried for the job-cutting zeal, in the name of profit growth, perpetrated by the various investment-capital organizations in whose management he has been involved. Rauner has also been accused of tone-deafness for a comment made in a public forum, in which he speculated that "perhaps not every job needs to be in the U.S." Clearly, the voters of Illinois, like those of Florida, faced a less-than-appetizing choice between two obnoxious candidates, to determine which was less obnoxious.

Illinois's Revolving Congressional Door

As we go to press, Representative Brad Schneider (D-IL10) has conceded that he has lost his bid for re-election to the Republican challenger, former Representative Bob Dold (R). Schneider defeated Dold in the latter's bid for re-election in 2012, and Dold had originally won the seat by defeating Schneider in 2010.


The people have an absolute right to have the representative of their choice. One has to wonder, however, whether this revolving door in Illinois's 10th Congressional district is ideal in terms of having the district's interests effectively represented in Washington. By replacing a freshman with another freshman, and then replacing that freshman with the former freshman (who comes back to Congress having lost his seniority), IL10 remains on the bottom of the seniority - and, thus, influence - pile as the 114th Congress convenes.


Considering the number of Fortune 500 and Fortune 1000 companies that have headquarters in IL10, one would hope that stability, in term's of the district's representation in Congress, would soon come to northeast Illinois. That will have to wait for the 2016 election, and beyond. For now, the revolving door is going to take another swing 'round. What that means for the 10th district of Illinois will have to await the advent of the 114th Congress to become apparent.

Of Mitch McConnell and Wishful Media Thinking

CNN.com projected, unseemly early, that Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY) had won his re-election bid against Kentucky Secretary of State Alison Lundergan Grimes. Although, as we go to press, CNN is showing McConnell with 53% to Grimes's 42%, with 87% of the votes counted, virtually ensuring that McConnell will, in fact, win the race, one is left to wonder if CNN's projection was not, perhaps, a bit premature.


It has been clear for several months, that the mainstream media have been pursuing a course of badmouthing Democratic candidates with dogged determination. The snap coronation of McConnell as the winner in the Kentucky Senate race argues, circularly, that CNN indulged in a little self-congratulation by fiat: "We've been calling for McConnell to win throughout the campaign, so we're going to go ahead and make ourselves look good by declaring him the winner as soon as the polls close."* CNN could not afford to lose face, in case Grimes did pull out a victory, so they went ahead and gave their "little cock-a-doodle of victory," before the vote tally began to come in.


Candor demands the admission that Grimes cannot win election to the Senate, except in the unlikely event that 100% of the uncounted votes are for her. Sen. McConnell has won his campaign, against all objective evidence. CNN's indulgence in media-policy-driven self-congratulation did itself no favor, credibility-wise.


* Not an actual quote.

The Rites of Democracy

The biennial ritual of the American democracy is well underway, as Americans are given, once again, an opportunity that they too often take for granted, and which people in some parts of the world are willing to die to earn - the right to vote from among their fellow-citizens, those who would govern them.


As the evening progresses, we will be linking to mainstream media reports of vote tallies as they develop. We will also add commentary to those results.


As we go to press, WGN-TV in Chicago is reporting that Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) has won re-election. More details to come, as available.

Time's Up!

CNN reports that "Our Ted" has given up his "faux-filibuster" of the government-spending bill that defunds "Obamacare" after less than 22 hours. Given that the record for the longest filibuster in Senate history, 24 hours and 18 minutes, was delivered by Strom Thurmond when Thurmond was well into his 50s, one is left to wonder where the 42-year-old Cruz's stamina went. Perhaps too much green eggs and ham?

Winners never quit, and quitters never win. Just sayin'.

Hahahahaha!

It seems that "Our Ted" is making more friends on the Hill. Rep. Pete King (R-NY2) has called Cruz out for being "a fraud" who "will no longer have any influence in the Republican Party" following today's vote on a "must-pass" spending bill that includes a provision to defund "Obamacare."

The money quote, from CNN's article:  "The congressman has said before that he can start ignoring the senator from Texas. He reiterated Friday that he hopes that's still the case." Because, you know, ranging the representative who represents part of Long Island, a district that favors Democratic candidates for national office by wider margins than it does Republican candidates*, against you is clearly the way to prosper one's future national political ambitions. Given that the State of New York, which is third in population, favors Democrats for national office, it becomes even more clear that Ted has really picked the right guy to piss off this time.

Of course, the deafening silence from Cruz's senior, the irrepressible John Cornyn, speaks further volumes of how Cruz is managing nothing so effectively as isolating and marginalizing himself, less than a year into his first (and only?) term. Given the Tea Party/Second-Amendment Republicans's recent fetish for recall votes as a means of "sending a message," one has to wonder whether a recall may spring up in Texas to bring Ted back home. There's still plenty of time . . .

Ted Cruz is going to wind up as friendless and alone as the other Republican firebrand from the Great White North whom he so freakishly resembles? Well, Duh!

*NY2 hasn't backed the Republican candidate for President since 1992, when George H.W. Bush took the district by the convincing margin of 40% - 40%.

Of Ted and the Tea Party

It appears that Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) has been busy fighting fires, and mending fences, with the Tea Party. Is it just me, or has this guy just set a new record for beginning his re-election campaign, fully five years before Election Day 2018? Because, you know, a radical minority fringe that has - maybe - one more election cycle in which to have any relevance, much less influence, is precisely the wagon to which to hitch one's political star.

The article, from CNN, is here.

At any rate, we appear to have a new definition for "Republican":  A guy who continues to pour gasoline on the fire, in the hope that some of it will turn into flame retardant.

Ted Cruz is eventually going to be consumed by the fire with which he has heretofore played so gleefully? Well, Duh!

Request for Assistance

Due to having lost my job due to my big mouth, I am facing a serious fiscal crisis. Living expenses march on while I am between jobs; with no financial cushion available, I am looking at having serious difficulty with paying rent & utilities, and getting my cell phone turned back on.

I have posted a campaign on Indiegogo, soliciting contributions to help meet basic living expenses. The campaign goal is $2,200, which will leave me, if I meet the goal, with a net $2,046 after Indiegogo's fee. The campaign is here.

I made a video to support my campaign:

Thanks, and God Bless you!

Facebook is a Smarmy Nanny at Cross-Purposes to Itself?! Well, DUH!

My friend Kevin Hayden was recently suspended from Facebook for 12 hours, for posting a photo of what appeared to be a shemale/pre-op M2F transsexual, sans knickers, backlit in a sheer gown. Is that enough description? Is more really necessary, much less tasteful?

Just in case, the photo is here: 

This got me to thinking about Facebook, its willingness to "police" its space, and the significance, from a business standpoint, of alienating the people upon whom an entrepreneur is counting to provide the stock-in-trade that makes the entrepreneur's business model make sense, much less function. The business ramifications will be better addressed on the sister blog, The Skeptical Entrepreneur. What I'm looking for here is the social aspect of Facebook banning its data sources - which are, after all, its primary monetizable product.

The first problem presented by Facebook's (effective) censoring of Kevin's post, as it is with any banning of a Facebook member by a "suitability" team that spontaneously, unilaterally and with neither notice, nor appeal bars members from entering and participating in the FB community, is one of credibility and propriety. Who asked FB to be the thought police? Who asked FB to establish "acceptable" "standards" of behavior? Who asked FB to become the conscience of the community?

The first answer would be, Mark Zuckerberg's prudence. Zuckerberg knew that if he was going to float FB on the capital market, he was going to have to institute corporate-governance policies that would reduce the risk of exposure of Facebook, Inc. to lawsuits by (parents of underage) "victims" of anti-social behavior conducted on Facebook. Lawsuits are inherently crapshoots; the most slam-dunk claim can be dismissed, and the most specious claim can lead to a bonanza payout, depending on the jury.

This is CYA corporate governance, but it reveals a larger societal problem, one that is hindering economic growth as much as excess production capacity and a scarcity of demand for labor. CYA corporate governance effectively turns over management of the enterprise from the owners/owner-appointed managers to the prospective customers. Given the fundamental tension between the firm and its customers, who both want to maximize the benefit they receive from each other, while minimizing the benefit that they give to each other, it is clear that allowing (potential) customers to dictate corporate policy, beyond a certain minimal degree of intervention, is a recipe for the business owner to wind up working, not for himself, but for his customers.

In that case, one wonders why Zuckerberg's agents, the "community standards team" at FB (or whatever they call themselves) would have banned Kevin. It seems counterintuitive - Zuckerberg & Co. work for Kevin, yet they are acting against the wishes of their actual boss (Kevin, not Zuckerberg). For discussion of the "actual boss"'s wishes, see discussion below.

The second specious answer would be the faulty notion, that first began to crop up during the intellectual-entrepreneurship boom of the mid-1990s, that corporate policies have the force of law; the corollary to that is that corporate managers have the right, capacity, and authority to shape society according to corporately-defined norms. This has long been a problem; it's one thing for corporations to demand that the State cater to its whims, either with the State's eager participation (the military-industrial complex), or reluctant participation (the fascist corporatist state, e.g., Italy from 1922 onward, Germany from 1934 onward). It is something else entirely when corporations begin to supplant the State, especially in terms of maintaining public order (one of the ways that the State asserts its authority), or in defining standards of public decency (a role that the State inherited from the Church as a concomitant of the secularization of society during the Enlightenment).

It is clear that the corporations and the State are different entities; as Mr. Chief Justice John Marshall observed in Dartmouth College v. Woodward, (17 U.S. 624, 636) that "A corporation is an artificial being, invisible, intangible, and existing only in contemplation of law." Since the State inherited the role of the King as the fons iustitiæ, the State precedes the corporation, both temporally and precedentially.

If one accepts the argument that the State precedes the corporation, then the State must be the creator of the corporation (assuming that the corporation is created, which I do). If the State is the creator of the corporation, then it is the limitor, and definer, of the faculties, functions, and capabilities of the corporation; a point made explicit by the U.S. Supreme Court in Ohio & Mississippi Railroad Co. v. Wheeler, 66 U.S. 1 Black 286 et seq. If the State limits and defines the faculties, functions, &c., of the corporation, then the corporation is subservient to the State, not the other way around. The corporation cannot exercise any of the powers of the State - maintenance of public order, and of general health and safety, regulation of behavior of its subjects (that is to say, its employees and agents), etc., unless those powers are specifically granted to the corporation by the State. The latter, being jealous of its prerogatives and obsessed with doing the one thing that the State does - namely, assert its power - is hardly going to delegate any of its police functions to its creature.

Absent a ruling from the Supreme Court on par, travesty-wise, with the ill-considered Citizens United ruling, there is no way for a corporation to masquerade as a State, or as a state-like (state lite?) entity. When corporations attempt to "punish," either their employees/agents or customers, they make a mockery of the State that created them, and fostered their development. Corporations don't belong in the discipline business. They belong in the selling-goods-and-services-profitably business. They should stick with their proper sphere of activity.

The groggy, but dogged reader will ask, by now, "What is the point of this discussion?" The point is that Facebook, in its self-imposed eagerness to impose a police-nanny state on its own constituents, is working at cross purposes to itself. By "protecting" its corporate reputation - by eliminating, or attempting to eliminate, as far as possible, the undefinable, only-imperfectly-quantifiable risk of civil litigation - Facebook undermines its core business function; namely, the aggregation of consumer data. As noted above, aggregated consumer data is Facebook's primary monetizable product.

By exiling Kevin, even for only 12 hours, for a post that putatively violates the terms of service, Facebook has denied itself the data stream of Kevin's posts, which in turn negatively impacts Facebook's revenue stream - no data, no revenue. While it is more likely than not, that the period of suspension came while Kevin was at work - thus, not generating a data stream in the first place - it would be (have been) the height of foolhardiness for Facebook to assume that a half-day suspension would occur when the user would not be actively posting. Such a "no harm, no foul" suspension would be a futile, impotent gesture, to say the least. The ramifications of such a shadow-boxing disciplinary regime might serve as the subject of another post; they need not be explored here.

The point is, that Facebook's effort to preserve its reputation and its business viability worked at cross purposes to itself. By cutting off one of its data streams (that is, one of its sources of raw material, to stretch a metaphor) in the interests of self-defined and self-imposed morality (the image is, at worst, of questionable decency; it is certainly not pornographic), Facebook's action served to harm its corporate interests, in the service of protecting Facebook's corporate reputation.

Thus, the smarmy police-nanny state that is Facebook worked at cross purposes to itself. A 21st-century American corporation working against its own self interest in its own self-interest? Well, Duh!

 
Kevin Hayden

". . . and to the Republic for Which It Stands . . ."

[We are glad to resume our too-long-suspended meditation upon the Pledge of Allegiance with this final fragment of work already written. This is where the drafting of the essay collection ended; it is the point where that essay cycle will pick up. - Ed.]

Contemplating the problem of the modern American republic, we can see clearly the dual response of our society to the ideals that we claim to hold dear. The fundamental Athenian notion of the republic was a form of governance in which the people ruled themselves. Our society explicitly refers to the ancient Attic model of the republic, but the practical realization of that ideal in contemporary governance is entirely a different creature.

            Aaron Sorkin, creator of the television series “The West Wing,” explicitly put that idea in the mouth of one of his characters in one episode of the popular drama. America is not a republic, the character noted; it is a representative democracy. The distinction may be subtle, but it is worth noting.

            When America was a young nation, with few relatively large cities and a highly dispersed population, the ancient Greek model of the republic was not only feasible, it was a practical necessity. Slow, inefficient communication and travel between local populations required a certain level of self-reliance; decrees and policies of the central government required days or weeks to disseminate to the people. Furthermore, a much-smaller population was more manageable in size, as far as allowing each citizen to have his say and be heard. The cacophonous babble of the citizenry still allowed individual voices to ring out.

[We shall return. - Ed.]

On the Separation of Powers

From Military.com comes word that Sen. Richard Burr (R-NC), Ranking Member of the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee has threatened to block funding for the headquarters operations of the Department of Veterans Affairs unless the Department provides the Committee with "the raw metrics the VA uses to create the monthly reports [on VA's efforts to clear its backlog of claims] the lawmakers currently are getting." Per Military.com's report, "The monthly reports the VA provides to the committee are not sufficient to determine what is happening, [Burr] said."

The solution? The Committee should do its own analysis.  "'[T]he committee needs the performance metrics that you don't get on a monthly report in order to do oversight correctly,' [Burr asserted]." This is a Republican Senator, mind you. An uphold-the-Constitution sort of fellow. A respect-for-the-Founders's-intentions kind of guy.

Arguing against separation of powers.

Dear me. What should the interested observer think? Sen. Burr is proposing that the Legislature, or a part of it (indeed, only a part of a part of it) should take over administrative management of part of the Executive. The Legislature running the Executive. It has, from time to time in the United States's history, come to pass that the Legislature effectively runs the government, and the Executive has merely been the instrument of effecting the legislative will. The administrations of John Tyler, Rutherford B. Hayes, and Benjamin Harrison serve as cases in point.

Conversely, it has happened that the Legislature has been reduced, albeit willingly, to the means of enabling the executive will - FDR's First Hundred Days being the definitive example. Never, however, as far as I know, has the Legislature ever attempted so blatantly to take over an administrative function of an Executive Branch department.

Sen. Burr would do well to mind his constitutional principles. If he fails, or refuses to do so, his constituents need to hold him accountable for it in 2016.

The idea of the Legislature administering the Executive. Well, Duh!

China's Turn in the Indian Subcontinent

From the Associated Press comes word that China is poised to take control of the moribund port of Gwadar, on the Arabian Sea coast of Pakistan, as part of its ongoing campaign to expand its economic/commercial and, potentially, military influence westward.

Two thoughts:

1. It appears that the Pakistani failure, or refusal to complete the Gwadar road, and the consequent economic stifling of the port of Gwadar, provide a clue to the direction that the United States could take to deal with the potential of an obnoxiously-expansive PRC, if the situation in the Pacific/Indian ocean area comes to that. Whether the U.S. national security apparatus has eyes to see, is something that will be revealed in time.

2. It is, to my mind, an interesting throwback to the naval arms race of the end of the 19th/beginning of the 20th centuries, that a would-be imperial power is developing a string of ports along (one of) the strategic sea lanes that it proposes to dominate. One wonders if the Chinese are planning to stockpile coal . . . ?

A One-Liner

If I was going to live today like it was my last day, I'd buy a big ol' bag of firecrackers, and re-play the Battle of New Orleans. Or, at least, the soundtrack.

". . . of the United States of America . . ."

Sometimes the simplest concepts are the hardest to define.

What, exactly, is the United States of America? Is it a bold experiment in a new model of social governance, or simply a new canvas on which the same dreary formulas are plastered? Is it a land of opportunity, where any person with a strong back and a willingness to labor can succeed, or is it an oligarchy where those who have hold on to what they have while depriving those who have not of the opportunity to have by extracting as much moral, spiritual, and physical wealth from them as possible?

Is the United States of America a land of equal opportunity, or is it a land of equal opportunity for those whose skins are the right color, and who come from the right ethnic and social and religious background?* Are nonconformists welcomed in the United States of America, or has the world's melting pot so completely embraced homogenization that those who stand out do so only to become targets?

A great buzzword of the past 15 years or so in American society has been "diversity." We Americans must embrace diversity, we must encourage diversity, we must welcome diversity, and we must teach diversity. The race to diversify our society has been met, in many ways and in many places, with a reactionary push toward confirmityh and homogeneity.

This is not necessarily bad. I am no fan of the "PC police." They have so hobbled social discourse with their insistence that no one ever be offended by anything anyone else ever says that the cacophonous babble of the citizenry which I favored above has been reduced to a stilted, intermittent rivulet, proceeding in fits and starts as the participants parse their words like chess grand masters calculating moves to the nth turn, weighing consequences and alternate courses of action. Gratuitous obnoxiousness is never socially acceptable - just ask any homosexual person whom a heterosexual fornicator wielding theepithet "FAG" has ever accosted! However, when we cannot be honest or completely candid with each other, for fear that someone may interpret that candor as an act of victimization, our public discourse is not enhanced.

I am less enamored of the ravanchist America Firsters, who want to make our society back into a circumscribed, homogenized, insipid shadow of what it could, and should, be. Conformity at any cost is as obnoxious as diversity at any cost.

That said, I have to state unequivocally that I am the foe of the exclusionists, those who would eliminate any law-abiding, orderly element in our society. I will happily breathe fire and destruction on those who presume to be the arbiters of what is and is not acceptable in our society, what will or will not be allowed access to our society.

In an earlier essay, I expounded at length on the concept of allegiance. The concept that allegiance is borne or owed toward some thing renders the concept of the United States of America more complex than it may appear on its face.

This is because to pledge allegiance to the United States of America requires that allegiance be borne to an idea, a concept, an abstraction. We are, in a concrete, tangibe sense, the United States of America because the colonists ("the English men [two words]," as I never tire of telling my students) in the English colonies along the middle Atlantic seabord of North America rebelled against the British Crown 200-plus years ago - admittedly, an act of disloyalty. Sometimes, allegiance must be withdrawn.

The United States of America, the ideal espoused in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the Federalist Papers, etc., is more than simply the sum of our physical assets and attributes, although completely intangible. It is the idea that the people should be their own rulers, that power should be distributed out among a broader base than in the hierarchical model that had prevailed to that time.†

Yet ambition, as noted above‡, demands satisfaction in the degradation of one's neighbors. No matter how much humans claim to desire complete equality of all members of society, there is still the urge to dominance over one's fellow citizens. "All men are created equal; some are just created more equal than others" is an old joke, but it has a measure of truth. Even in a commune, there will always be a leaders, who gives instruction and orders to the others.

This is not a bad thing. Any group of people of differing skills and abilities require one person to provide focus and definition to the collective efforts of the gruop. As I have noted above, America is a place where all people, regardless of their abilities, have the right to take from society as much as their contribution to society entitles them. It is a plain fact that not everyone will be able to contribute alike to society, but all should be welcome to contribute as they are able.

The problem that arises in modern society is that society brings forth leaders, or would-be leaders, who are not worthy of the people they presume to lead. Sometimes these ambitious citizens press themselves forward into leadership. It is objectionable to the spirit of the American Experiment, when in the interest of embracing what are supposed to be the ideals of th eRepublic, the leadership of the Republic attempts to exclude from society those who, while capable and worthy of contributing to society, are deemed by the leaders (who are not the people) to be objectionable.

*I originally wrote this post more than five years ago, before non-Whites became a majority in the U.S. population, and before I moved to Texas, where social, economica and political life are fraught with the tensions between Anglos and Latinos. The subjective problem of "right"ness, which is universal and immemorial, takes on an extra dimension of volatility when applied to race and color. The question of "right" skin color, "right" ethnic, social and religious background, becomes more complicated with the rise of a Hispanic/Latino/Chicano plurality.

†On the difficulty of maintaining participatory democracy in a state that stretches "from sea to shining sea" (for which see the earlier essay, ". . . to the Flag . . .," in this series), I shall have more to say later.

‡See the essay, ". . . to the Flag . . .," in this series.

". . . to the Flag . . ."

When I was a student at The University of Alabama, I was an active participant on the staff of The Crimson White, "the award-winning student produced daily newspaper." In the summer of 1986, I wrote an editorial column for The CW in which I ruminated on the U.S. flag.

One point that I made was that our flag, unlike that of any other nation, encapsulates our history at a glance:  from 13 fairly small, mostly agrarian states clustered along the Atlantic seaboard of North America, we have expanded to 50 states spread across the entire continent, embracing the geographic richness of North America in a wide variety of terrain, climate, sceniery and wealth of natural resources. I opined that the flag is a symbol to be saluted whenever possible, as I did whenever I passed, in uniform or in mufti, the large flag flying over the University Quadrangle.

Our flag does not make the bald expression of power, unlike the British Union Flag, which combines the crosses of St. George, the patron of England, and of St. Andrew, the patron of Scotland, symbolizing the United Kingdom of Great Britain. Nor does it make an ideological statement, as the hammer and sickle of the former Soviet Union, the supposed workers's paradise. Rather, it is a reminder from whence we came, and a celebration of what we have achieved.

In recent years, this celebration of our stature has itself come under pernicious assault from those who hold themselves out as the most ardent defenders of the symbol of our great country. It is in their defense of the flag that these citizens betray themselves as enemies of the ideals that they profess to hold dear.

The issue is flag burning, an protected by the First Amendment. The true attack on the Flag is the movement to pass an an amendment to the Constitution* that would ban flag burning.

The most noisome support for an amendment to ban flag burning comes from veterans's groups. I respect the sacrifice made by our veterans, and I especially reverence the ultimate sacrifice of those who gave their lives that I might be free. On this issue, at least, I have to feel that their arguments are not merely self-defeating, but self-refuting.

Proponents of a flag-burning amendment claim that to burn the Flag is an act of desecration. Can the symbol be of more substance than what it symbolizes? Indeed, it cannot. To take a pre-Socratic view of reality, the only thing that actually exists is the idea of the Republic. The Flag is only a symbol of a reality that does not actually exist in any kind of substantive, or temporal way.

Our flag is the symbol of the right that we as citizens enjoy to criticize the conduct of our government. That right, as suggested by my observation above that the only thing that actually exists is the idea of the Republic, is a characteristic of the Republic as manifested on the temporal plane. Freedom to criticize the government is a mark of the Republic; that is, it is one of the distinctive features that identify the Republic for what it is.

The right of the citizen to protest an action of the government of the Republic (which is an act by which the Republic is bound - government being merely an agent of the Republic) is an essential element in understanding the nature of our Republic. In burning a Flag, a citizen expresses his opinion that the Flag was already desecrated by an action of a government that is unworthy of that symbol.

Worse, from the standpoint of social discourse, is the argument put forward by veterans's groups that flag burning is an act of ingratitude of the sacrifice of veterans, especially veterans of World War II. In fact, by making such an argument, veterans themselves denigrate their own sacrifice.

Consider two scenarios:  First, during an annual Nazi Party rally in the late 1930s, Nuremberg is festooned with swastika flags while ranks of brown- and black-shirted storm troopers parade past Adolf Hitler. Out of the crowd steps an individual, carrying a swatiska flag, which e sets alight, shouting insults and imprecations against Hitler and the myth of Aryanism. How long would such a protest have been allowed to continue before the demonstrator found himself in a Gestapo cell?

Or consider the scene in Tokyo at the same time, or during the war years. The Emperor, divinity made flesh, is reviewing Japanese military might when a demonstrator steps out of the crowd, sets a Rising Sun flag alight, and screams racial insults in the direction of the Imperial Presence. How long would this demonstrator's head have remained on his shoulders?

Dictatorships - indeed, any repressive form of government - are institutionally, viscerally unable to tolerate any form of negative criticism. This includes criticism manifested by the destruction of symbols of the State. Criticism expressed in this way indicates that the critic is taking a skeptical look at the government's claim to legitimacy. When an illegitimate government - that is, any government that does not work primarily for the good, and the advancement of the people - faces a questioning populace, with the potential to undermine the faulty logic, or specious assertions that are the foundations of that illegitimate government, the first, instinctual response of the government is to suppress the critic, thus silencing criticism.

Hence, one of the marks of totalitarianism is the institution of a secret police force, with broad power to search and seize anything, and arrest anyone anwhere, in the interest of suppressing dissenting criticism.† Hitler had the Gestapo, Stalin the KGB, Ulbricht the Stasi. The militaristic Japanese junta of the World War II period. and Saddam Hussein's régime had their enforcers who worked in the shadows to suppress criticism of the government while sowing terror among the peoplel whom the government should have meant to serve. The excesses of those evil organizations, were justification for the efforts of liberal democracies to eradicate the régimes that sponsored them.

Yet, having triumphed over repressive totalitarianism, the modern model of Western liberal democracy is poised on the verge of imitating the evil purpose for which repressive secret police organizations existed. Having stood up against suppression and repression, the heroic foes of totalitarianism now claim as their due the right to impose the same limits on constitutional freedoms that they fought to break two generations ago.

How have the defenders of liberty come to exact the restriction of liberty as the price of the defense of liberty? We must consider the fundamental cause behind this misguided embrace of disgraced ideologies, if we are to understand why well-meaning civic groups, worth of our society's respect and gratitude, have fallen into self-defeating error. To find this fundamental cause, we must look back into our nation's history, for this erroneous consecration of our Anglo-Saxon heritage has its roots in our Anglo-Saxon heritage.

Fundamental to the human psyche is the urge to self-aggrandizement, the driving urge to make oneself supreme above neighbors and competitors. We call this urge "ambition," and within its proper bounds it serves a useful, worthy purpose. In the Renaissance Englishman, this ambition broke free from the bounds of moral propriety and became the urge to project English superiority around the world. Thus English imperialism, over the course of only a couple hundred years, established an empire on which the sun never set.

The English were certainlynot the first imnperialists; they merely applied lessons taught by imperial Rome. Nor were the English the last imperialists, as we have seen in the dreadful examples of Nazism, Japanese militarism, militant Communism, to name a sufficient variety, without even addressing American adventurism in the Middle East since 2003. However, the English were the first to abandonmoral restrain on ambition, to jettison the notion of a universal concept of justice in pursuit of ambition.

The English concept of "the King's justice" found expression in the legal maxim, rex fons iustitiæ. According to this maxim, the Crown became supposedly, ideally, the fount of justice, and the judges merely the spigots by which the King's justice was dispensed. The idea of the King as the fount of justice constituted one of the underpinnings of the English judicial system, which is capable of scrupulously fair play. When, in the course of centuries of development of the absolutist state, the King's justice became subject to the King's capricious notions of what justice was, from one moment to the next, and when justs became not merely spigots dispensing justice, but valves controlling justice's flow, the judicial system of late-Renaissance England was abjectly vulnerable to corruption and perversion.

Thus there arose phenomena such as the court of Star Chamber, where secret testimony was taken from "witnesses" whom the accused had no right to confront, and convictions entered despite the absence of any credible evidence of the accused's guilt, simply because the Crown desired the conviction. Consider the fates of Anne Boleyn and Thomas More, both condemned to death and actually killed because Henry VIII wanted them dead. These cases were allowed to become blots on the history of English jurisprudence, and had a profound impact on the Founding Fathers. American jurisprudence, especially the Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights of the individual, and the notion of judicial independence, are the Constitution's eloquent, elegant answer to the perversions of English jurisprudence that arose during the late Renaissance, and continued throughout the Age of Reason.

It is said that, "possession is nine-tenths of the law." This principle was not lost on the English landowners, nor on Parliament, nor the Crown during the final decades of Britain's colonial dominance of North America. The landowners possessed the land, and they knew it; for them, that was the end of the matter. No matter how they treated their property (or so they felt) there was nothing anyone could say otherwise. The feeling was that no matter the degree to which their possession of their colonial property was perceived by common men as obnoxious, the fact of ownership was sufficient to ratify and justify whatever highhanded means the landlords chose to employ in maintaining their enjoyment of their property.

The lesson taught by the American Revolution is that an owner, regardless of how complete his possession may be, must act toward his property in a morally appropriate way. When the English possession of North America became mroe obnoxious than the patience of the colonists could bear, they dispossessed the colonial masters of their property. This was not an ungrateful, much less sinful repudiation of the dominance of the landlords.‡ Rather, it was an assertion of the fundamental rights of all men who work and contribute to the common good.

The American Experiment was effected, at least in part, in repudiation of the rupture of moral bounds by English ambition. It was an attempt to reinstitute curbs on a perfectly proper human trait, the expression of which had reached an improper degree. For the most part, for over 200 years (with the notable exceptions of the white citizens's treatment of Indians, of the Black Africans brought to this land in slavery, and the further exception of the treatment of women of all races, ethnic backgrounds, and economic status), our society lived within moral bounds while spreading across North America. Manifest Destiny had its unsavory dark side, certainly, but for the most part, the United States's subjection of North America was restrained by a  proper degree of modesty in execution.

No matter how modest the exercise of human ambition, the urge to ascendancy over one's fellow man remains a strong motivating force in human behavior. The willingness and capacity to jump the bounds of propriety remains strong, and it is this subdued, but incompletely eradicated tendency that has lead modern American society into such social quagmires as the debate over flag-burning.

The men and women who conquered tyrants, whom Tom Brokaw has rightly called "The Greatest Generation," went ot war to eradicate corrupt ideologies that could only survive by suppression of all human freedoms. They went because duty called, a fundamental summons that no member of the human family can ignore. It would be absurd to suggest that more than a handful of profound political thinkers went to war.

Knowing what and why you do something is not a prerequisite for doing the right thing. The men and women who served this country - and, in a larger sense, all of humanity - did the right thing, not necessarily because they knew what they were doing and why they were doing it, but because they knew it was right.

Suppression of human rights is a self-evident evil, which neither requires proof, nor admits of refutation. It is this sort of suppression of dissent, an essential element of the establishment and maintenance of tyranny, which our veterans went ot war to eradicate from the earth. It is this sort of suppression of dissent that our veterans have now embraced over the issue of flag burning. In doing so, our veterans, and other anti-flag burning groups, have allowed their human ambition to dominate their fellow man to jump, at least to a degree, over the bounds of propriety.

In the interest of enforcing loyalty and displays of affection toward our Union, and the symbol thereof, our veterans are willing to turn their backs on their own sacrifices, their own lost youth, their own spilled blood and that of their corades whose graves hallow the soil from Guadalcanal to Pointe du Hoc. It is not the flag burners who are disloyal and ungrateful. It is the veterans themselves who spurn their own greatness.

Respectfully, I submit that this sort of rambunctious self-immolation is as unbecoming to its proponents as it would be to the rest of an informed citizenry, if we were to allow it. The Republic owes a great, inescapable debt to the men and women who took up arms to defeat tyranny, 70 years ago. We cannot pay that debt by allowing th eultimate triumph of the ideology against which they struggled.

Why else did our heroes go forth in struggle, if not to live and enjoy the freedoms for which they fought, and leave that precious freedom as a legacy to their children?A laborer goes about his duty with a view toward posterity, even if consideration of the future is no more than an unconscious impulse. It would have been pointlessly self-defeating in 1945 to have eradicated Nazism, Fascism and militarism from the globe, only to return home to embrace those ideologies by means of rest from their labor. For this reason, our veterans returned home from their victory determined that suppression of human rights should not take root in our land, have once been exterminated in other lands.

Yet now, with the passing of decades, and the passing of most external enemies from the stage of world affairs, the memory of shared hardship in a total, national commitment to the struggle against authoritarianism has begun to fade. Yet, there remains a need for an external enemy, a focus for the heterogeneous nation's collective identity, a distraction from domestic concerns. The need for an enemy or a scapegoat on whom to place blame has turned our champions's vigilant gaze from outward to inward. In their quest for a new rallying cry, they have settled on those who enjoy the freedoms for which they fought as the next objects of their ambition to superiority.

*On the subject of (post-)Reagan Era conservatives's fetish with changing the rules - especially rules that their ideological forebears imposed - when those rules no longer suit the changed circumstances of "the present," I shall have more to say later. How can one uphold "principles," or "fundamental values," when the defense offered changes with the shifting of the political winds?

†The United States is fortunate in not having a secret police force. But when the national-security legislation passed in the wake of 9/11 does not merely allow Executive-branch agencies to circumvent  the confidential processes enshrined in pre-existing Federal law (e.g., the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act [FISA] of 1978), but actually allows Executive-branch agencies to impose legal requirements in violation of Constitutional rights on citizens without due process (e.g., prohibiting libraries from informing their patrons that the library has provided records of those patrons's use of library-supplied computers and Internet access to the Executive agency), one wonders whether designating an agency as Stasi, or NKVD, or Kempeitai would be superfluous.

‡Candor demands the admission that the independence of the United States was predicated on the crime of dispossessing the King of his property without just compensation - a practice which, if not resisted, would render the capitalist system, or indeed any mode of production, impossible. Hence, such acts are properly criminalized, and equally properly punished severely - in the case of the United States, by many of the same men who had perpetrated the theft on a grand scale. The primary difference between the theft of the United States, and any of the thefts that characterized English colonization of what became the British Empire, was that in the former case, the King of England was the victim, rather than the beneficiary, of the theft. Of the criminal independence of the United States, and the seditious process of developing the legal framework for the Republic, I will have more to say later.

Allen West Wanted to [censored] His Wife?! Well, Duh!

[The following post is an interpolation into the process of posting the essays in my proposed collection, Drifting Ever Near the Rocks, and is intended to address a matter of current ass-hattery being bandied about in the New Media. The following post is not part of the Drifting collection. - Ed.]

From the breathless folks at the Huffington Post comes late word that Rep. Allen West, LTC, USAR, Ret. (R-FL22) wanted to have sex with his wife after he got back from deployment to the sandbox.

Well, Duh! The idea that a deployed soldier would want to have sex with his wife upon his return home is hardly news. The fact that West, who is notorious for having a ramrod up his ass, would be quite so pathetically controlling in specifying how he wanted the sexual scenario to go down (so to speak), is, if anything, even less newsworthy. Granted, it may point up a question as to how much of his waking time and intellectual effort West devoted to running his command while he was deployed. What it does not do, is shock the conscience.

On this one, Well, Duh! has to call "foul" on HuffPo. Sorry, folks, the idea of a soldier wanting to have sex with anybody's wife, to say nothing of his own, after deployment, just does not register on the Scandalmeter.

Well, Duh!

"I Pledge Allegiance . . ."

Gladly. Why would I not? The United States has given me a precious, irreplaceable gift, a gift to which many of our allies among the "civilized, industrialized" nations of the world pay only lip service. That gift is the gift of freedom of speech.

As long as I do not shout "Fire!" in a crowded theatre, nor use "fighting words," nor place another person in fear of imminent threat to their safety or well-being, I can say what I like, where I like, when I like. It is a gift that I can use to pledge my undying loyalty to, and express my inexpressible love for, my country - not merely because I truly am loyal to, and love my country, but for another, equally-important purpose.

To do so pisses off people who have decided that they are going to be the civic shepherds who separate the sheep of true-blue, loyal, all-American, red-blooded citizens from the goats of hippies, pinkos, commies, faggots, fellow-travelers and other perverts and undesirables who dare befoul the great melting-pot (remember that from your high-school civics class?) of American society. The melting pot is, in the opinion of these self-appointed shepherds, properly peopled exclusively with Caucasians, preferably Anglo-Saxons, ideally professing some form of evangelical Protestant Christianity. That attitude may be the most annoying, dismaying and un-American manifestation of the decline in public discourse that has afflicted the United States for the past 25 years - the increasing tendency of certain segments of American society to attempt to suppress and silence their socipolitical conversationalists by branding them with the label "un-American."

The "Un-American" label is a useful muzzle to deploy against free, cacophonous public discourse. This would be a good place to ruminate on the virtue of cacophony, versus monophony. A humming babble of citizenry, each contributing what he or she is entitle by citizenship to contribute, is infinitely sweeter, more productive, and more reverent of the original intentions of the Framers of the Constitution than one lone voice, especially the lone voice of a sole lawgiver. The praises of justice and righteousness are best sung in choir, not as a solo.

Remember that majestic phrase, "We the People?" It was not merely a derision of the royal form, "I, the King." It was a statement that society must heed even now, 225 years later, as to who the Framers intended should wield the real power in this country. As long as the Constitution is respected and enforced in this country, the voice of the people must be the supreme and ultimate fount of civic authority. Vox populi, vox Dei. Power flows not from the Constitution to the people, but from the people to the Constitution. It was the people of the United States of America who ordained the new Constitution.

In the Tea Party's United States, I am a threat to the safety, stability and continued viability of the American Experiment, that great sea change in social governance that began with Common Sense in 1776, and which continues to this day. I am a cancer upon the body politic that must be eradicated - or at least reduced to silent impotence (or impotent silence, a redundancy).

"Forbid it, almight God!," say I, bowing in the direction of Patrick Henry's grave. The forces of suppression that seek to silence dissent would tar me with the brush of un-Americanism and lack of patriotism. They would deem me unsuitable to continue to live and work in American society, because I do not embrace the conformist mentality without skeptical examination.

They say that because I cling to an institutional, hierarchical Church, because I have developed and cultivated my intellect to take a hard, skeptical, questioning stance toward doctrine, I am not American. It is as though the circular argument that "the people elected our leaders, therefore our leaders do only what is right for the people" means that a political doctrine of separation, of classification, of stratification of society into the elect and the damned must be accepted without comment, at the price of sacrificing one's place in the society into which one was born, or into which one has been naturalized.

Nonsense. I might also say, balderdash. I am American because I demand that doctrines or propositions put forward for consideration as "the way things ought to be" should be looked at through a magnifying glass and subjected to tests of fire and acid, not despite my intellectual questioning.

Indeed, I am duty-bound, as an American, to look skeptically askance at any proposition put forth for the governance of the American nation, especially when its proponents urge that their proposition be accepted without comment. To fail, or refuse to cast a critical eye on the proposals of our leaders, would-be leaders, pseudo-leaders and non-leaders would be, in fact, the definitive abdication of my civic duty. That would be un-American.

So, where does all of this lead? To what end do I expound on civic duty and the right of place in modern American society? In answer, I submit the concept of allegiance.

A synonym for allegiance is loyalty. Someone who bears allegiance to a person, place, thing, or concept is loyal to it. The loyalist conforms her every thought and act to be in consonance with the views, aspirations and will of that to which she is loyal.

Allegiance is a universal norm; it is not situational. Unfortunately, neither is allegiance self-evident. Indeed, allegiance is a useful disguise worn by those who would betray the ideal to which they have pledged their loyalty.

This insidious treason goes forward because the rot is hidden under a veneer of soundness and "reason." Why, after all, does the wolf wear sheep's clothing, if not to lull the genuine sheep into a false sense of security that all is well, that there is no danger lurking, no threat of which they should beware? Is it not in the wolf's interest that the sheep should not be alarmed? Who is less likely to alarm the sheep than another sheep? Yet the wolf is a slavering beast, seeking only the destruction of the sheep.

Worse is the wolf who dons the shepherd's cloak, or picks up his staff. How much more readily do the sheep follow the supposed shepherd, the one whom they believe has their safety in charge! How great is their dismay when they understand, too late, that their shepherd has led them, not into safety, but to their doom.

The airwaves are full of conservative commentators who are able to muster, either from their own inspiration, or the inspiration of their staff writers, logically-sound arguments, correct in form if not in premise. "The most-listened-to talk show in the history of the world" comes most readily to mind. Rush Limbaugh's program is distributed broadcast to a yipping audience only too eager to receive a message it wants to hear, but which it cannot necessarily understand, or handle.

I give Limbaugh his due - he has sufficient grasp of the rudiments of formal logic that he is able to present an argument that does not abjectly fail as to form. The syllogism, "If my car is slipping, I must be driving on ice; my car is slipping; therefore, I am driving on ice," while formally correct, is of little comfort as my car plunges over the precipice. The parallel with the danger of Limbaugh and other conservative commentators who have discovered how to access the mass media should be clear. Formally-correct nonsense is still nonsense.*

Samuel Johnson said, "Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel." This axiom is ever more on display in political and social discourse in the United States today. The fact that we are in the midst of a presidential campaign only provides yet more opportunities for the candidates, their parties and their proxies to display this long-established truth. Reviewing the record of the Executive Branch in the 21st century, I cannot help but wonder if the United States received a wolf as their shepherd in 2001. Lest I be accused of embracing patriotism (another synonym for allegiance) as a scoundrel, I hasten to assert that my allegiance is to the republican ideals of Thomas Paine, Patrick Henry, and the Founding Fathers of the Republic.

I am no Johnny-come-lately who embraces the robust individualism of Common Sense as a licfense to indulge in antisocial behavior. I was brought up to honor Flag and Country, but the ideals that I was taught, from an early age, to revere, are the ideals that inflamed the Founders. It is to the basic, original notion of the new Republic built on the foundations of English colonialism in North America to which I first pledged my loyalty, and to which I remain committed.

On the other hand, the Militia and Christian Identity movements, to say nothing of the Tea Party (which has taken a debatable acronym and misapplied it to the historical record), as well as other testosterone-laced examples of neoconservative fringe groups, are to me prime examples of my assertion that allegiance is a disguise worn to cloak the disloyal in the habit of loyalty. By their rabid espousal of racial intolerance and segregation, by their determined efforts to excise homosexuals and sexual nonconformists from society, by their self-consciously juvenile attitudes toward male-female relationships - to say nothing of female sexuality - these ardent fundamentalist groups betray themselves as disloyal to the true ideals of the concept of the United States. By espousing a limited, warped, and bastardized vision of America, they turn their backs on the true meaning of the American Experiment as a fundamentally new social order in which there was a place for every person, regardless of identity, class, creed, social, or economic background.

The United States arose on the foundation of the radical premise that it was not where one came from (either geographically, or parentally) that mattered, but what one was capacities, both mental and physical, were, and what the individual could offer to society, for the individual's, and society's, mutual and collective benefit. Unlike the European feudal model, which called for all goods and wealth to flow upwards to the lord, the American republican model called for goods and wealth to flow back and forth through society, each person taking as much as he was entitled to have by his contribution.

Candor demands the admission that a sober review of the record of the American Experiment shows that the ideally circular flow of wealth has faced impediments, in varying degrees of crassness and egregiousness, placed by those who have wealth. Thsi is human nature; we all want more, and the more we have, the more we want. Nevertheless, the social experiment that we call America has always been founded on the notion and the promise that every person could have a canvas upon which to display his (and, much later, her) capability.

There were, supposedly, no preconceived barriers, no prior limitations, or restraints placed on the ambitious. Jew or Gentile, male or (admittedly, to a lesser degree) female, Black or White, professional or artisan, yeoman farmer or planter, America beckoned all people to come and display their talents, and to participate in democracy and the democratic debate. Thatmodel of America is a much more enticing prospect than the dim, dismal, futile model of simplistic conformity that so many latter-day wolves in sheep's clothing hope to bring about in our land.

In the literal sense, America was built with horses hitched to plows and wagons. But to what were the plows and wagons hitched? They were hitched to the human mind and the human spirit! How boring it would be to throw away all of the riches that human thought has bestowed on mankind, in the interest of intellectual conformity!

So, yes, I declare my allegiance, gratefully as well as gladly. The United States survived George W. Bush and Dick Cheney; it will survive the war on terrorism as surely as it survived and triumphed over Osama bin Laden. It has outlasted Jerry Falwell, as it outlasted Billy Sunday and Father Coughlin.

Despite her very real problems, none of which is either insurmountable, or intractable, the United States will survive herself. This can only happen if the allegiance that is pledged to her is pledged to her for her own good, rather than for the good (or the benefit, or the enhancement, or the promotion, or the profit) of those making the pledge.

*I drafted this essay long before the contretemps over Limbaugh's comments about Sandra Fluke revealed the depth of Limbaugh's cynicism. I will have more to say on that subject in a later post.

An Introduction? Well, Duh!

As I noted in the last post, it is time for this blog to begin to publish social commentary. I have, over the course of several years, been working on a series of essays on social commentary, to constitute a collection tentatively titled, Drifting Ever Near the Rocks:  Essays on 21st Century America. I kind of got away from the essay-writing as I got serious about grad school. However, as the prospects for employment after the Ph.D. (or even being able to afford to continue in the Ph.D.) wane, I realize that I've got to do something to create some buzz for my work.

The place to begin is at the beginning. Ergo, the Introduction to Drifting Ever Near the Rocks:

The first decade-plus of the new millennium - call it the first three presidential terms - has been an unsettled, and unsettle time for the United States of America. The strange career of George W. Bush, who was willing to accept the evangelical Christian agenda for America; the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001; continued unrest and open warfare in th eMiddle East; and an economy that stubbornly defies every attempt to guide, or stimulate it, have al lrendered the new century and the new millennium into a minefield of uncertainty. There are no clear guideposts as to which direction our society should go as it attempts to progress. Further, there is no clear justification for why the Republic should move in one direction, or another. It calls to mind the old Dan Fogelberg song:

It's never easy, and it's never clear
Who's to navigate and who's to steer.
So you flounder, drifting ever near
The rocks.*

The American ship of state, although it is in no serious danger of foundering any time soon, nonetheless is not firmly under control either of the political operatives who hold the levers of power, nor of the citizens who have granted those operatives the right to hold the levers of power, and who should demand accountability from their political agents.

Former Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, in his book, Like No Other Time, cogently expressed the challenge facing the democratic party after the midterm election in 2002. Daschle wrote,

How, in the wake of this loss, with the Senate now aligned with the Republican House and presidency, could we as Democrats pull together to help lead our nation through the gathering storm of forces propelling our nation toward crises of potentially unimaginable consequences?†

If I may wax bold enough to comment on Senator Daschle's conundrum, I will attempt, in the pages that follow, to define the "crises of unimaginable consequences" toward which our nation is still, a decade later, being propelled, and also attempt to provide a measurement of the forces propelling her thence.

I first applied this quote from Senator Daschle's book in 2007, before the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States. In 2012, I could just as easily have chosen Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's (R-KY) assurance, to a group of Republican voters after the 2010 midterm election, that the Republicans's chief goal for the next two years was to "make sure Barack Obama is a one-term president." McConnell's quote encapsulates the problem of a leaderless state with equal aptitude. The problem and the process of drift in the United States during this period has many symptoms, and will require multiple strategies to arrest, and to get the ship of state back on course, in safe water.

Our deeply polarized society, divided along sectarian, ethnic, regional, racial, sexual/moral, generational, and socioeconomic lines, is at risk of being sundered as each group struggles to obtain the biggest slice of the pie, and the most prominent seat at the table. If the country were made of Silly Putty™, this might not be such a bad thing - society could simply be remolded by each interest group into the configuration most pleasing to its constituents. Again, if the country were a balloon, it would simply expand, stretching obligingly to accommodate all comers.

Alas, we do not live in a plastic, nor an infinitely-expansible political space. Further, and more lamentable, we do not live in a society that tolerates any but a zero-sum game of public discourse. The price demanded from both ends of the political spectrum for their contribution to the public discourse is the abandonment of the opposite party's claim to participate in the social forum. That is, both liberal and conservative alike demand exclusive access to the public podium. Their unspoken motto is, "we want our place at the table, and we'll not be happy until you give up your place."

Note there, the use of "you" and "your." This is the invocation of the formless, generic "Other" that has been the villain of ideologues and demagogues for millennia. There always has to be a sinister "Other" available to vilify, and against whom to rally the people. The United States at the beginning of the 21st century is no different.

Americans are not, as a people, well disposed to allow other people to retain theirs while we take ours; we insist that someone give something up so that we can have more. Obviously (and understandably), those who are expecte to yield refust to surrender their values until those demanding the surrender first give up their own values.

The result is social stasis, a stagnation that can only serve to ossify (and, ultimately, to putrefy) society. Ponds go stagnant; streams never do. The warning and lesson for society should be plain. Yet, this stagnating stillness is so easily, so blithely papers over, one can only wonder if anyone actually realizes what is happening.

George W. Bush believed that the United States's fight against terrorism was an advancement of our society. "Freedom is on the march," his administration and its pundits proclaimed, while at home the hidden, unackowledtged wounds inflicted on the body politic continued to fester. As poison built up in the political system, no one dared call 9-1-1, because to do so would be to admit failure of their stewardship of the body politic.

Notwithstanding the technological wonder of the campaign waged in Iraq in the spring of 2003, the United States's taking-up of arms against an invisible for was the latter-day Phony War against terrorism. Our modern imperial Goliath will be no better able definitively to subdue a guerrilla enemy who hides in the trackless sands of its patron outlaw nations that that same Goliath was successful against the guerrillas in the trackless jungles of Vietnam forty-plus years ago.

By the simple expedients of waving the flag and talking tough and waging a well-choreographed public-relations campaign, the Bush Administration was able to make its supposed masters, the voters of the United States, sit up and salivate like obedient lapdogs. The satisfying thump of Marine One-and-a-Half landing on the deck of USS Abraham Lincoln for a premature declaration of "Mission Accomplished," echoes in the satisfied belch of a populace feasting on what it has been told it wants to consume, in terms of political accountability.

Behold the contemporary manifestation of the Roman panacea of bread and circuses! This is a form of civic Pavlovianism, whereby society ignores the fact that it is being hoodwinked while salivating as its leaders throw it the stimulus which makes it salivate in the first place.

The most potent symbol of our Republic is our flag, and no symbol has been as vilely prostituted, co-opted, denigrated, desecrated, and abused in the interest of its own defense in recent years as the Stars and Stripes. Thus, I have chosen to divide this collection of essays (at least the first part of it) according to the phrases of the Pledge of Allegiance.

I suppose I am going to anger some people, annoy others, maybe even elicit a few "Amens" (more or less heartfelt) from some. The only thing I am interested in is thought - if the reader will only think about what I have to say, then I will have achieved my object.

* "Hard to Say," words and music by Dan Fogelberg and Quincy Jones, vocals by Dan Fogelberg. New York:  PolyGram Records, 1982.

† Daschle, Tom, with Michael D'Orso, Like No Other Time:  The 107th Congress and the Two Years That Changed America Forever. (New York:  Crown Publishers, a member of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., 2003), 5.