The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte

The opening lines of this 1852 essay by Karl Marx return to me often: "Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce."

The high water-mark of American political idealism was the 1972 Presidential bid of George McGovern. McGovern's landslide loss to Richard Nixon, aided and abetted by the Democratic Party establishment itself, was truly a tragedy, not only for this country but for the rest of the world--as the Empire's subsequent acts bear out daily.

All of us who pitched in for Obama's "hope" and "change" movement participated in the second act of this great world-historic fact. Every day, a new farce.

Obama steps up on behalf of the First Amendment in the "Ground Zero Mosque" controversy, and then quickly distances himself in subsequent remarks. So Clintonesque.

And, like the Clintons, the Obamas can be expected to be well-rewarded for "public" services rendered.

Like they say, it takes a village to raise a child and marry her off to an investment banker.

On the one hand, our cherished ideals; on the other, Goldman Sachs.

"Money doesn't talk, it swears," sang Dylan back in 1965. On the road to the high water mark of American political idealism, that line meant something. Now all is celebrity and toxic consumerist commodification.

How can you tell when a politician is lying? His lips are moving. It is truly disgusting when even words like "hope" and "change" are reduced to hollow slogans, coins of the present realm.

Marx saw it coming. And we must live it through. Is there a third act? Marx didn't say. Unless it is the revolution of the proletariat.

Good luck with that.

Good Old American Decency and Common Sense in Every Word

Today, Keith Olbermann rocks!

A Global De-Militarized Zone

The goal to which all sane individuals left on the planet should commit themselves to, beginning today, is to convert the earth, every square inch of it, into a de-militarized zone.

The advent of the 21st century has witnessed war-mongering, war-profiteering, and rapacious capitalism shift into high gear. At the center of the maelstrom is the United States of America and its lackey-allies.

Many of our fellow citizens do not feel right about the direction in which we are headed, but they shrug and ask, "What can I do?"

What is to be done? Tolstoy posed this question at the close of the 19th century. His prescient inquiries and warnings were ignored and we are now in far deeper and more perilous waters than ever before.

This country has produced a slim tradition of native radicalism--slim but resilient. It is on the ropes today and in danger of going down for the count. Emerson is no longer remembered for his abolitionist stand or Thoreau for his pacifism. The scholars who study their works seem too often to be unmoved by them. At least, politically.

The good news is that the American tradition of native radicalism is not the property of professors, and certainly not the property of those professors who fawn after power. It is the common inheritance of the American people.

"There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious,
makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part,and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop."

– Mario Savio, Sproul Hall Steps, 2 December 1964, UC Berkeley

It has happened before; it can happen again.

Indeed, it must. We owe it to the world that is still aborning.