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paradox’s shadow box…

Posted on Saturday 23 June 2007


Well, that’s what happens when you lose your government and it’s smashed right in front of you. If there are any more self-righteous disbelievers out there who cluck their tongues at my mentally ill delusions about a smashed America blasted to the winds, please take a look at the behavior of the Vice President of the last week and truly stand there to tell me our government has not gone to total hell with berserk criminal delusory crackpots in charge. One can’t, we’re in soft fascist Cheney America with our ever-enabling “journalism” going right along again.

But again, why won’t Congress fight these felons head on with everything they have? An answer gradually trickled in, never of my own invention, of course, but in fragments Billmon wrote long ago for a Whiskey Bar post, topic forgotten, but the gist of his thinking was that the proposed Middle East solution he was writing about would never, ever happen because the scale of accomplishment to make it happen was simply far too vast for puny humans.

Middle East solutions require change in racism, nationalism, tribalism, materialism—just to start a very long list—so the solution will in fact never arrive or be attempted, it’s just too hard and too much. Any actions or concerted efforts at the issue are in fact fakes, jabs of shadow-boxing displayed to everyone in an attempt to give the appearance that something is actually being done. Some of the actors involved may even believe what they’re doing.

That’s why there are zero Senate investigations on Bush, why Waxman is glacially slow, why Anonymous Liberal thinks subpoenas will never work, why Democrats gave up on the war after only one round and why that wmd report was released on a god damn Friday afternoon: this is the shadow-box, this is the fake dance of denial for the next 18 months to wait Bush out until there’s another chance with a new President.

It’s not a direct lie to the base or the people, it gives some honest members of Congress cover for their real patriotic sincerity, but anything that comes out of Judiciary or Waxman’s committee is going to have a powder-puff ending, a toothless verdict that will ultimately only show that in our time on the planet circa 2007 the Congress we got—for whatever reasons—just didn’t have the capability and character to take on the incredibly hard problems presented to them. With 40% of the populace not voting one can fairly see why their attempts would be so flaccid, after all.

So this is the government we get, good old human self-lying half-asssedness with a pathetic ruse of actually trying to do something for 18 months. That’s really the answer to live with the next year and a half, with this fantastic hope that somehow a Democratic president can start some kind of democratic recovery for the country in 2009.

In all the time I will have with the country will we ever stop this denial, this shadow-boxing of futility against the evil forces that stole our country? Probably not. Best case scenario would be the return to sanity in small ways, an incremental, decades-long evolution of recovery as perhaps the country stops lying to itself. Maybe then a real small victory can be celebrated after a life of trying, a burst of reality and justice in a small corner of the country that made all the work worthwhile after all.

paradox of the left coaster has a relatively dark take on things in this post – dark, but accurate. It would be naive for us to hope [our wishes would come true] that the Democrats could really undo the incredible mess we’re in right now. There just isn’t enough power to simply throw the whole Administration out on its ear. To make a dent will require the full power of the executive, working with Congress, to even try to right our sinking ship. That’s just the facts. It can’t be done.

And we don’t do political coups in America. For better or worse, we do the distance with an elected Administration. So what can we do in the next 18 months?
  • Expose the extent of the DoJ infiltration and prosecute wherever possible…
  • Shut down their election influencing machine with a vengence…
  • Continue to expose the duplicity of the pre-war intelligence…
  • Continue to hammer at their secrecy, their signing statements, etc…
  • Stand firm in September and make the continuation of this war difficult, if not impossible…
  • Stop picking on the Democrats. They’re doing the best they can…
  • Actively campaign against Republicans who have perpetuated [and perpetrated] this Administration…
  • Never forget Bush’s perversion of our system, and build a bigger, better firewall to protect open government…
  • Elect Digby, Marcie Wheeler, and Josh Marshall to the Congress…
  • Help Bush and Cheney along on the road to infamy…
  • Make sure that the Karl Rove/Newt Gingrich arm of the Republican Party is amputated…

This is the "shadow box" I thought of – the one from Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat:

For in and out, above, about, below,
‘Tis nothing but a Magic Shadow-show,
Played in a Box whose Candle is the Sun,
Round which we Phantom Figures come and go.

We can lament what we can’t do, or do what we can. And think of where we were just six months ago. So lighten up, paradox. We’re all we’ve got right now. We’re dead in the water if we take ourselves too seriously and, as you say, "Maybe then a real small victory can be celebrated after a life of trying, a burst of reality and justice in a small corner of the country that made all the work worthwhile after all."

In Medicine, we can’t cure many diseases. In lots of cases, all we can do is slow their progression. We’re in a better place here. We can put an end to a lot of the sickness, and we can work very hard to get an effective organ transplant. If that’s the best we can do, it’s still pretty good. The alternative is to just let the patient die…

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