Somewhere along the way, our great nation has lost its focus. This matter has bothered me since our invasion of Iraq. Maybe we lost focus long before that point in time, but that was the event that woke me up. My search for clarity drew me to the Internet where I fed search engines with keywords like "George Bush lied," "Rumsfeld lied," "Cheney lied," and a few other of our leaders' names followed by "lied." My searches eventually led me to the alternative news websites, the anti-war sites, and finally to Karen Kwiatkowski's amazing New Pentagon Papers which I read in great detail. It was this document that led me to the Lewrockwell.com website, where I have found hundreds of articles that point the finger of responsibility at our unfocussed government. Although my wife tells me that writing articles about our corrupted government is a waste of my time ("I can't stand to read another article about that SOB!"), here I go, yet again…
I had the good fortune of discovering the book, Paine, Collected Writings. This is a collection of many of Thomas Paine's best contributions to literature. More than just literature, his efforts were as important as those of our nation's leaders and fighters in forming our free nation. The reasoning of the Thomas Paines, along with the Ben Franklins, and the likes of George Washington, to name just a few formed the basis for America's Declaration of Independence as well as our Constitution. As I read through the Paine writings, I found that much of the impetus for America declaring independence from England was to get out from under a tyrannical monarchy that had fallen into using America as a cash cow. In the eyes of the King of England, America's purpose was to provide England with a tax base and a source of natural resources.
Paine provided sound arguments for America to break ties with the mother country. Our country eventually formed a new kind of government where one of the first provisions guaranteed we would never be ruled by a monarchy. The next basic tenet was that the government would be representative in nature. This meant that every citizen would be represented by people who were elected by those whom they represented. This new method of governing by plurality, a democracy, became a model for other developing nations. America paved the way and became a showcase experiment for the world to see. Although there were growing pains and glitches that required modifications, the essential elements of the government of the late 1770's have purportedly survived to today.
I came upon a term that unfortunately appears to be a more accurate description of democracy in today's America. That term is illiberal democracy. A couple of direct pastes from Wikipedia will do this term justice: [The term denotes] a particularly authoritarian kind of representative democracy, in which the leaders and lawmakers are elected by the people, but tend to be corrupt and often do not respect the law… [The ruler] behaves in a manner that violates the constitutional rights and liberties of the general population. Later: An illiberal democracy is marked by the tension between how a government is selected and how that government behaves. Illiberal democratic governments believe they have a mandate to act in any way they see fit, disregarding laws or the constitution if they desire, as long as they hold regular elections. They often centralize powers both between branches of the national government (violating the separation of powers) and between different levels of government and private associations.
Um…sound like any government we know today? Corrupt leaders not respecting the law might include the likes of Jack Abramoff, Katherine Harris, Randy Cunningham, Tom Delay, Michael Scanlon, Bob Ney, the list goes on… Behaving in a manner not respecting the Constitution: Well, our president declared a war on another country without proper Congressional authority. Our president also loves to violate our constitutional rights by snooping into our phone records and Internet usage without bothering to obtain the proper warrants. And he has manipulated the laws he has signed with signing statements that essentially say he intends to do as he pleases, regardless of the law. He does not need to veto anything because when he smirkingly signs with his reservations he is saying that basically the law is for everyone but him to follow. This behavior smacks of a tyrannical monarchy. Frankly, that smirk of his is the equivalent of a raised middle finger to us all.
As for tension over how the government was elected; I think the 2000 presidential election was a shining example of fraud. I am not pretending to be an Al Gore follower, but I do like to think that my vote is counted as are all of the votes in my state (Florida!). Even the 2004 election has many convinced that Ohio was stolen, which put Bush back into power, along with his change purse of political capital.
As for violating separation of powers and between different levels of government and private associations; we need to look at the sweetheart deals our government gives to Halliburton (Dick Cheney's "former" company) and Kellog, Brown & Root, and to look at the phenomenal rise in value of The Carlyle Group ("former" senior advisor and board member: Bush41). My hunch is that there are possibly many more examples of our government sleeping with private industries. These just pop up as the most blatantly obvious.
As a teacher in a public school, I have my students say the Pledge To The Flag each morning. In that pledge, the word republic stands out though I suspect that a lot of Americans just go through the recital without thinking much about what they are saying. The word deserves highlighting and a key definition of the word is: a government in which supreme power resides in a body of citizens entitled to vote and is exercised by elected officers and representatives responsible to them and governing according to law; also: a political unit (as a nation) having such a form of government.
Okay, I am willing to disclose that my educational background is primarily in engineering. In engineering school, I did not spend a lot of time studying political science but I am able to see that the government under which America is governed today can no longer be called democratic, nor may we truthfully call our nation a republic. I can also see that if one simply looks at the definitions of republic (what we say we are) and of illiberal democracy (what we really are), it is obvious that America is in a precarious position. We are not what we profess to be and we are no longer following the formula that made us great.
The nation has lost its way and is completely off track. We should not be confronted with our president telling us that he is the decider. It should be the people who decide and our tool of decision ought to be the voting booth. But many Americans are so disenchanted with the current voting procedures and so distrustful of the tallying of the votes they have given up and no longer bother to stand in line to vote. Therefore, the people who allegedly represent us were not chosen by the public, but were thieves who stole elections. Subsequently, we see that the lobbyists are the power group who truly run the country, and we get that familiar slap in the face telling us that money powers everything. The words, money, power, and corruption go together like Winkum, Blinkum, and Nodd. Those who have money are well-represented while those who have none get no attention except during election years when candidates vying for votes lie with their promises of helping the poor. The story has become a crock that fewer and fewer can accept or believe in. This crock gets raised from the dead and delivered every other November.
Our leaders exercise so much power that they begin to believe they are powerful. They forget that they are citizens who must live under the same laws as all other citizens. The result of this misdirected government is going to be the demise of our great nation. The demise I see occurring is not in some obvious or measurable category such as the stock market, or our annual output, or not even in our dependence on foreign oil. The demise is in our absolutely most valuable resource, our citizens. People are becoming completely turned off to politics, turned off to hearing daily reports of political corruption, turned off to seeing an incompetent government lead the nation into unwarranted war after unwarranted war, and turned off to the feeling of helplessness caused by the inability to change things for the better.
I apologize to my beautiful wife as I have written yet another article about "that SOB."
May 17, 2006
