Current Invective

The founders of our country made some egregious compromises to get the Constitution ratified–the official adoption of slavery, for one–and not all of the wrongs have been righted over the 220 intervening years. One of their biggest mistakes was the United States Senate. It was meant as a buffer against public opinion, but it turned out to be a check on the public interest.

As originally conceived (and until the ratification of the 17th Amendment in 1913), the senate consisted of members elected by the legislatures of the several states. With a six-year term and a measure of insulation from the day-to-day affairs of the general public, the senate was meant as a “check and balance” against the other house, which was elected directly by the people every two years. The House of Representatives could be anticipated to turn over suddenly and traumatically with radical shifts in public opinion, but the Senate could be expected to remain largely intact, minimizing the legislative consequences of such changes.

Since no law can be passed without majority support in both houses, individual senators have considerable power to restrain Congressional action, and this was the founders’ explicit reason for establishing such a body. The founders believed that a senate would give the union a certain consistency and stability, and they’ve been proved right. What the founders didn’t anticipate was a network of mass media that would enable self-dealing interests to purchase seats in the US Senate and make it a guarantor of the status quo. That’s what it’s been for most of the 20th Century and all of the 21st, so far.

It’s not often that citizens get to see the deficiencies in their system exposed. The antidemocratic character of the Senate–we have two senators per state, regardless of population–isn’t much of an issue when the president and one or the other house of Congress are of different parties, as has often been the case over the past 50 years or so. The people don’t expect much legislative progress in such conditions. But when the president has a majority in both houses and gridlock continues, voters become restive and suspicious.

Health care–what Obama now calls health insurance reform–is a case in point. It’s pretty clear that most people favor a health care financing mechanism along the lines of Canada’s system, which delivers care to every one more effficiently and for less money per person than Americans now pay in insurance premiums. The House of Representatives voted to create the rudiments of such a system, but too many senators won’t go along. Their seats were purchased for them by high rollers in finance and insurance, and they’re obligated to preserve the status quo, regardless of what the people might want or need.

Democrats claim that Republicans are responsible for the gridlock on health care, but Democrats hold a 60-40 majority and should be able to prevail on any vote. Turns out the Democrats are facilititating the Republicans here, something Democratic senators tend to do whenever the status quo is threatened. There’s a hundred-year-old rule of Senate procedure that requires a 60-vote majority to silence any senator. It’s an antidemocratic rule, but senators of both parties love it because it increases their individual power and attracts money and other emoluments from people with an interest in the status quo. Democrats could repeal the rule with a snap of Harry Reid’s finger, but they choose not to. Senators have absolute power to impede change–a commodity of inestimable value to a corrupt politician–and they’re not about to relinquish it. That’s why the Senate ought to be dissolved.

Fact is that the 17th Amendment has been a bust. Our popularly elected senate has failed us time and time again. The members sell out so cheaply, and many if not most of them are unabashedly answerable to a cabal of rich supporters And so we citizens find ourselves ankle deep in the 21st Century with nothing but 20th Century gear. I recommend a constitutional amendment to disband this dysfunctional institution. One house of Congress is enough. Let it turn over every two years. Let it legislate real change. We’re a mature republic now, and the people have no further need for checks on their power to act in their own interest.

If you’re worried that the latest Supreme Court ruling on political expenditures will make corporations the dominant force in US politics, you’re a little late. Because of peculiarities in our constitution, corporations already reign sovereign in every sphere, and this decision won’t change that.

The case involved a movie vilifying Hillary Clinton. The producers, a corporation, wanted to show it on cable TV during the 2008 election season, but federal law makes it a felony for a corporation (or labor union) to spend money advocating the election or defeat of a candidate within a specified number of days preceding an election. The film couldn’t be shown until after the 2008 election, and so the producers sued the government. Five justices of the Supreme Court agreed with the film-makers and declared the law unconstitutional, overruling a 20-year-old precedent.

Advocates of “limits” on political expenditures are grieving hysterically over this decision. Democrats in Congress (whose main concern is the accumulation of money for re-election) are deriding the ruling as an invitation to corruption, as if they weren’t already up to their necks in corporate money from financiers, insurance companies, and war profiteers of various descriptions. Political correctness seems to demand that members defend their duly enacted laws, even illegal ones, but precious few would support a measure that actually curtailed the right of rich folks–corporate or individual–to influence public policy. Not that an act of Congress would necessarily reverse the court’s decision.

Here’s the problem: the Bill of Rights. It guarantees the rights of individuals to be secure from certain kinds of intrusions on the part of the national government. We can say what we please, print what we please, associate with whomever we please, and enjoy our lives, liberties and properties subject to due process of law. We can do these things individually or in groups. A corporation is a group of individuals, as courts have found time and again. If the provision challenged in the lawsuit were allowed to stand, the opinion tells us, the following acts would all be felonies:

• The Sierra Club runs an ad, within the crucial phase of 60 days before the general election, that exhorts the public to disapprove of a Congressman who favors logging in national forests;
• The National Rifle Association publishes a book urging the public to vote for the challenger because the incumbent U. S. Senator supports a handgun ban;
• The American Civil Liberties Union creates a Web site telling the public to vote for a Presidential candidate in light of that candidate’s defense of free speech.

The decision does not, as some are saying, allow corporations to pour money into political campaign treasuries, and it continues to require that political messages like the Clinton film disclose the names of the sponsors. Corporations that want to give money directly to political candidates have always been able to do so through political action committees, and this ruling doesn’t change that. The bribery of public officials by the “haves” at the expense of the “have-nots” will continue normally.

The court took passing notice of the obvious fact that the speech of an aggregate of people will always be louder than the speech of an individual. When a corporation (or any other association) speaks over an individual, the individual’s right to speak is curtailed. It’s an infirmity (or a strength) of our constitution, and it requires us to band together to be heard, as is our right. We also have the right to teach ourselves and our children how to resist political advertising (along with other forms of mind-control), something we’ve never even tried to do. As long as we act like livestock, we’ll be bought and sold like livestock.

Realistic legal observers like Ralph Nader understand that we need to amend our constitution if we want to rein in the corporate state and reverse this decision. Constitutional freedoms should be reserved for those who bear legal and moral responsibility for their acts and obligations–the people–and curtailed for those that accumulate vast treasuries to exploit and oppress without personal accountability. A constitutional amendment might even provide for capital punishment of felonious conduct, requiring the confiscation or dissolution and liquidation of organizations whose misdeeds cause widespread human suffering.

Don’t be conned when Barack Obama and NPR tell you that we have to keep the current system afloat at all costs. If these sophists have their way, your meager allotment of legal rights will be degraded further, consolidating the power of the tiny minority that owns this system. A class war is under way, the people are losing, and the laws are powerless to help. Only a mass movement to radical change can restore our damaged republic.

The organized acts of violence committed by the US Armed Forces in Afghanistan do not constitute a war. The accepted definition of war is armed conflict between or among states or nations. The armed conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan involves a military alliance of nations, on one side, and, on the other, an unknown number of armed individuals acting on behalf of no nation, and neither sanctioned nor sponsored by any nation.

Most of these individuals are ordinary people who have taken up arms against soldiers they see as invaders. Many are members of local militias, some pressed into service at gunpoint, and some are common criminals. The application of US armed force to restrain, capture or kill such individuals may look like war, involving, as it does, the destruction of life and property, but it fits no commonly understood definition of war, as we accept that term to justify killing. If the killing is not war and has been executed without due process of law, it cannot be justified, and it is unlawful.

In our government of laws, war is a legal term. Article One of the Constitution is clear. Congress has the authority to declare war. If there is no declaration, there is no war. Ours is a government of enumerated powers, and under such government, a common solder or a president who kills without a declaration of war is killing without legal justification. The fact that the judiciary has so far declined to intervene to curb instances of illegal killing by US forces is more a reflection of the cowardice of lawyers and judges than the state of the law. The Constitution remains the supreme law of the land, and the Constitution requires a congressional declaration for killing to be justified as warfare. The killing in Afghanistan by our armed forces is murder.

The basis for the US and NATO mobilization was a tissue of lies. There is no evidence that anyone in Afghanistan or Pakistan, certainly not any of those killed or made homeless by our bullets and missiles, had any hand whatsoever in the events of September 11, 2001, and there is no evidence—none—t hat there is an imminent threat to us from that part of the world. The men who are alleged to have hijacked the crashed airplanes were Arabs, not Afghans, and most of their training and preparation was undertaken, not in Afghanistan, but in Florida. Retribution against Afghanistan proceeded without due process of law and without reasoned debate. There never was and there is not now a risk to us from Afghanistan sufficient to justify violent armed force, the occupation of cities by our soldiers, the assassination of individuals, the installment of warlords in government posts, and the payment of bribes and blood money. If the actions undertaken by our armed forces in Afghanistan were committed against people in the USA, they would certainly be crimes. They are no less criminal for having been committed against dark-skinned, illiterate foreigners.

The conflict in Afghanistan is a racket. It fits the criteria of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, and the organizers of the effort would certainly be prosecuted under RICO if they were not US government officials. The crimes committed by our officials are patent—torture, murder, bribery, extortion, obstruction of justice—and, like most criminal enterprises, this one’s been a money-maker, for government officials and for their patrons and contractors. Some of the crimes have been altogether public—the fabrication of a coverup of Pat Tillman’s murder, for example—but most lie buried in shallow graves. That the generals and civilian authorities have used the cloak of military protocol to hide their crimes would, in a government of laws, be deemed to compound their culpability.

All law, even the rule of law itself, is undermined by government illegality. If the US government can kill without legal authority, so can any gang, any mob, any self-appointed posse or militia. Decent, loyal, law-abiding Americans would be well advised to repudiate—with extreme prejudice—the criminals that govern this nation before it collapses around us.

The Jordanian physician who blew himself to smithereens while meeting with a team of US intelligence agents in Afghanistan probably thought he was doing a good thing. As best we can determine, the dead agents were engaged in selecting targets for unmanned bombers in remote areas of Pakistan and Afghanistan, attacks that would certainly kill many innocent people, as such attacks have done time and time again. The tactic itself would be reckoned cowardly by just about anyone, since it evaporates so many noncombatants. Its victims are people who might well have survived a conventional military engagement, in which soldiers shoot at other soldiers, always trying to avoid hurting innocents. They die because we have superior technology that removes the soldier and his conscience from the field of battle, valor being the first casualty of this updated, US-brand of warfare. Unless you’re one of us, it’s got to be hard to take our side.

I’m one of us–I wore a uniform every day for four years–but when I try to put myself in the shoes of those intelligence agents, I can’t seem to manage it. In my book, their job was a war crime, and that must have taken a toll on them, too. There are videos on YouTube of people being killed by American remote-controllers, and they are chilling, stomach-turning. Being at the controls has to leave permanent scars on any normal person, and choosing targets for this sort of mayhem seems a prescription for suicide. Unless the Air Force and CIA are recruiting psychos for this campaign, they’re destroying the attackers as certainly as they’re blowing up hapless Afghans and Pakistanis.

The commander-in-chief who orders these remote-controlled raids gave two speeches in which he tried to justify the attacks–one, ironically, as he accepted the Nobel “Peace Prize.” His rationale was all but unintelligible. He babbled about amorphous dangers threatening the USA from remote parts, as if these unmanned bombing raids could possibly reduce them in any conceivable way. Fortunately for the commander-in-chief, the embedded mass media have decided not to discuss these attacks at all except to say that they are killing some bad guys. The deaths of innocents–a few foreign news services have published pictures of the little coffins with dead children in them–are covered not at all in our media.

The Jordanian may have hoped that his act would get our attention, maybe expose just what we’re doing that pissed him off so thoroughly. A vain hope, given the state of our media. Even so, the bomber probably saw his martyrdom as a win-win proposition. Unlike the Detroit underpants bomber, he would be killing people who were actually guilty of something, and he might also save some lives if he could slow down or put a stop to the aerial attacks, even temporarily. Wouldn’t it be ironic if his act led to retaliation that led to the expulsion of the foreign occupiers that led to peace for our soldiers and possible redemption for us? The suicide bomber that saved America. One brave, lethal Arab.

Suppose that the president of the United States received intelligence that a very dangerous man was hiding in a house in a foreign country. Would it be OK for the president to get in touch with the authorities in that country and ask them to drop a bomb on that house? That’s pretty much what our president did with the government of Yemen, where two attacks from the air killed dozens of people, including a number of children and possibly also including an associate of the Army psychiatrist who shot several of his comrades at Fort Hood several weeks ago. Barack Obama hasn’t admitted that he OK’d the assassinations in Yemen, but his Department of Defense congratulated that nation’s government on its boldness and initiative in the wake of the second attack.

Certainly, there’s nothing in Article 2 of our constitution that empowers the president to engage a foreign leader (or any other foreigner) to kill one or more of his countrymen for the USA. The president does have the power to command an army and navy, but our charter is meant to refer to an American army and navy and not any foreign force. If there were a declaration of war, he might make a formal alliance that involved the application of military force by a foreign government, but there’s been no such declaration, and there is no such alliance, and it would be extraordinary for a party to such an alliance to launch missiles against its own people.

If Barack Obama had no constitutional authority to order or request an attack on residents of Yemen, might he have had some moral authority to do so? He did win the Nobel peace prize, after all, an honor in which all Americans can justly bask. That prize says that all of the killing, all of the destruction, all of the displacement, all of the desecration in Iraq, Afghanistan, Panama, Yugoslavia and, yes, Vietnam, have been in the interest of peace and not motivated by hubris or arrogance or, God forbid, profit. Universally acknowleged as the world’s only superpower, America has and will always have the moral authority to kill people, even children, in the interest of peace. Because we can, acting through our president, wield this awesome power, we must.

Should we be concerned that the killings in Yemen run counter to our laws? After all, when the commander-in-chief of the US armed forces “asks” you to bomb one of your neighborhoods, you would be well advised as a head of state to take that as a threat. Threatening a person to compel him to kill somebody is a felony in every state and in most foreign countries. When a government authority does it, it’s a war crime. But not to worry. Government officials are above the law. Our president may be a war criminal, but his motives are as pure as his his smile is bright, and he deserves a medal for standing up to the constitution. That old thing, not near tough enough to deal with our terror-ridden times.

But if there’s no law for our president and for us, what law shall we use to prosecute the Detroit bomber, who claims to have been driven to his crime by the attacks in Yemen? He would probably say, if he could, that he had as much legal right to blow up that airplane as the US and Yemeni governments had to incinerate a neighborhood. An American official plots with a Yemeni official to launch missiles on civilians (in Yemen, mind you: you’d like to think they’d send a policeman with a warrant in these parts, but who knows?). In the interests of peace, they kill some bad guys, along with many other people. In reply, and to deter further attacks, a fanatic plots with a bombmaker to kill passengers on an airliner in Detroit. Is there a legal distinction between these two plots?

There is no legal distinction, The Detroit bomber and the Washington bomber should be subjected to the same legal process. In fact, the cases should probably be tried together, since they arise out of single chain of events. But there is no case against the US president. That’s because he is acting on the moral authority of the American people and not on his own account, and this places him above the law. As for the Detroit bomber, why put him on trial at all? We would just be giving him a soapbox from which to spout accusations against us, moral exemplars in a dangerous world. Why not just string him up?

Discussions in the media of a possible climate treaty emphasize, without urgency, the unlikelihood of real progress, mostly because of the gulf separating rich nations, which emit most of the pollutants, from poor ones, which are in line to suffer most of the early consequences. Less prominent in the media is any detailed discussion of the consequences of sudden climate change or of the imminence of the danger.

What we should be getting from our news media, along with the sterile discourse they now offer on the political implications of a treaty, is a systematic exploration of what we can expect 10 and 20 and 50 years from now if we continue burning fuel. Some people still think they’re going to get better weather. They’re not. Rather, the balance of nature will be upset. Predictions can’t do justice to the disaster that will come with a climate that is warmer by even two or three degrees. If the embedded mass media would only tell us, we would know that plants and animals we now take for granted–food crops, birds that eat insect pests, trees that furnish a habitat for other species, for instance–won’t be able to survive under the altered conditions of a warmer climate. And that’s not the half of it.

New-mongers would have us believe that Al Gore started this discussion a couple of years ago when he made a documentary about warming. In fact, the media have been censoring information about climate change for 30 years, and they’re still doing it. Read, watch and listen carefully for any mention of these items of bad news:

• When massive chunks of ice now covering Greenland begins to slide into the sea, possibly as soon as 50 years from now, large parts of Florida will be engulfed, along with coastal cities worldwide, and much of the world’s farmland will be ruined by salt, as the ocean backs up into every river and stream. The timeline is uncertain, but the event is a certainty if we continue doing what we’re doing for another ten years or so.
• When the forests of the world die because of pests that couldn’t survive a 20th century winter, a process that seems already to be under way in our own Pacific Northwest, birds will find nowhere to perch and nest, and the silent spring that Rachel Carson predicted 50 years ago, will finally come to pass.
• When the numbers of miscroscopic creatures that populate the coldest reaches of the oceans are so reduced by slightly warmer waters that the marine food chain is put out of balance, billions will starve. The earliest manifestations of this phemonenon are already evident, with the death of huge, ancient coral reefs in the South Pacific. And as arable lands become arid, a process that has been accelerating in this new millennium, famine will proliferate, and people will find themselves in constant conflict over food, land and water.
• With each degree of warming, vast stretches of permanently frozen land will thaw and begin emitting greenhouse gases, now trapped in the ice, causing further warming.
• For every species that becomes extinct in this process, the species that depend on it for food, shelter, hygiene, and other basic needs will be threatened, and our grandchildren will witness a cascade of extinctions, as they decide whether to bring children into a degraded, defiled and doomed world.

The press used to call this “doom-saying.” Many news-mongers still do. For all the confidence they have in the predictions of their resident weather scientists, they can spare precious little for climate predicters, and they are always happy to provide a forum for climate-change “skeptics.” The press won’t tell you that this isn’t rocket science, but common sense. Put a dog in a fenced yard for a week and see what collects on the grass. Smoke 10 cigarettes in your bedroom and have a sniff. Empty your dishwater to your well and take a gulp. Even animals have the sense not to foul their own nests. People, apparently, not so much. We’ve been blessed with the capacity to calculate with some accuracy just how much filth the earth can safely handle, and yet we continue to defile this fragile, life-giving biosphere far beyond its limit.

This is a continuing story that the media refuse to cover. In fact, there is so much to report that a cursory inquiry could fill a daily paper for years to come. Only one reporter I know of, a satirist by the name of Harry Shearer, covers climate change with any regularity, and he’s not heard beyond a few noncommercial radio stations. It may be that the future is so bleak that the rest of the media feel compelled to keep it from us, if only to stem panic. I don’t think so. I think they keep it from us because their owners are the real beneficiaries of fuel-burning. The media are owned by business. Business expands and contracts with the welfare of humanity, but business survives human catastrophe. Business exists in and for the present, and business doesn’t reckon with the long-term survival of mankind. Business, for the good of business, dictates to the media and to us news-consumers that the welfare of Americans takes precedence over the future of the planet.

The embedded mass media ought to remind people that the atmosphere doesn’t recognize national borders. When a powerplant sends carbon dioxide up a smokestack, it’s released to all the world. It joins the other carbon dioxide in the upper atmosphere and does what this gas does: keeps the heat in like a blanket. Over the entire planet. We know this, but we don’t really know it, because we’re not permitted to believe it. Maybe we’ll catch on somehow, even as all forces conspire to keep us in denial, but it could be too late by then. Maybe it’s too late already. Maybe an asteroid will hit us and render the whole discussion moot.

Life in these United States is a zero-sum game. Your gain is my loss in most transactions. People recognize this, and that awareness may be the cause of our current paralysis. Consider the resistance to national health insurance.

The people who have access to health care have been sitting pretty for a good long time. Many have grown accustomed to empty waiting rooms and prompt access to care. So-called “Cadillac” plans could continue to offer such privileges, but the health care “haves” would, with universal insurance, suddenly be forced to share medical resources with tens of millions of additional patients.

And so it’s not the high cost of national health insurance that’s scaring the insured population. It’s that the costs, paid for through premiums, would be so low that millions of new people would suddenly be allotted a share of scarce health care resources.

A just and enlightened nation would design a practical health care system and execute it. The people would enact laws to ensure a sufficient supply of medical people and materiel and the means to finance a universal system. The beneficiaries of the system being replaced would be provided for.

But not here. In the USA, we let the markets decide what sort of life we lead, and the health care markets are working adequately for a heck of a lot of people. Those people simply aren’t ready to give up their privileges. Put yourself in their place. It may be that some of the insured crowd would be willing to share with the have-nots if they believed everybody would get a fair deal, but nobody believes that, because it almost never happens in 21st Century America.

Instead of fairness, we’re forced to rely on self-interest, and it’s dog-eat-dog under that regime. If you’re not a winner, you’re a loser, and this prospect seems to have changed us. For instance, most Americans—if we can credit the political acumen of our president—are now content to sacrifice young lives in foreign combat in the superstitious belief that this will somehow preserve them and their families. And polls tell us that, for the first time in our history, most Americans now believe torture can be justified if it saves innocent life. It’s a brutal ethic that allows us to see things this way—one that works only in fiction, as history attests—but we seem ready to embrace it. Because life in these United States is a zero-sum game.

Ever the dissatisfied news-consumer, I made a short list of what we know and what we don’t know about the shootings at Fort Hood.

What we know: Twelve soldiers and one civilian are dead at Fort Hood, Texas, and an Army psychiatrist is suspected of shooting them. All were in a building in which soldiers are processed for deployment overseas. The suspect is an unmarried 39-year-old major originally from Virginia. He is a muslim who attended a local mosque and who was popular among his neighbors. A police officer shot him several times. The Army says 43 people besides the shooter sustained bullet wounds, all of them inflicted by him.

What we don’t know: Any facts about the crime itself and, especially, why the embedded mass media haven’t disclosed them. As Americans, we help support Fort Hood, along with the soldiers who got shot and the soldier who is said to have shot them. We’re entitled to know what happed there, but nobody’s telling us. What’s the layout of the crime scene? What was the major doing there? What arms did he carry? What sort of weapon or weapons did the bullets come from? Where did he get these weapons, and where did he get his ammo? How did one guy manage to shoot 43 people in a roomful of soldiers who have been carefully trained to bear any risk to protect each other from harm? Why aren’t reporters asking these questions, and why haven’t we heard accounts from the people who were there?

It may be case of DADT: “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” The reporters don’t ask what happened, and the Army doesn’t tell. The Army and the media seem to want us to maintain certain beliefs about this event–such as that it was an attack by the Muslim faith on American values–beliefs that might well conflict with actual facts. Maybe after Americans have firmed up their beliefs about Fort Hood, selected facts can be gradually introduced. We’ll never know what really happened, but, after all, “What you don’t know can’t hurt you,” or maybe, “You don’t know and you don’t want to know.”

The conspiracy nut that untangles this mystery will almost certainly be discredited before he starts.

US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton referred to a suicide bombing in Pakistan during her visit there as “cowardly.” She may be right about that, but no American diplomat should dare breathe that word while unmanned US aircraft are launching missiles on houses and farms in distant lands. In a match as uneven as that between the U. S. and what’s left of Afghanistan and Pakistan, most of the cowardliness is on our side, and it’s becoming more and more difficult, even for patriots, to sympathize with the victors. Valor is unnecessary in this contest, and none is displayed. All the carnage is done by remote control.

No nation has ever had the capacity to kill with the coldness we now are able to affect. We have weapons, guaranteed to destroy populations, that can be launched from thousands of miles away, and we can keep track of targets from space. There is no contest between soldiers, but only between people, on the one side, and machines, on the other. Uniformed American terrorists, busy at automated work stations in Nevada, see more blood after shaving than they do in a month of what is now called “combat” or “fighting.” They willingly incinerate babies without ever risking a hair of their own.

The press–as we affectionately still call the news desk of our entertainment industry–is positively buoyant over the “drone” attacks, content that we are inflicting more casualties than we are sustaining. Most public policy is now carried on to satisfy these folks’ demands, and the current military adventures are no exception. Political correctness, of which newsmen are the authors, requires that Americans be victorious in all military engagements, and so explosions in foreign cities are like music to a correspondent’s ears.

There is no legal authority for what our government is now doing. Bombing people with robots is recognized everywhere but here as a war crime, and it was only very recently that our government and the media began to advocate the assassination of foreigners. It’s against our laws, and so are our various military adventures. There is a procedure in the Constitution for war, but we have not followed it, and so all of this killing is unlawful. The nation’s founders must be spinning in their graves. The idea of a sovereign targeting and killing people without arrest, trial, or any determination of guilt was an old one by the time Jefferson and Adams came of age. Although they disagreed on much, they were united against this sort of justice.

What’s ironic is the spirit of compliance that seems to be in vogue now. You can’t get people to obey the speed limits, but they seem willing and even eager to give up basic civil rights. Almost nobody is kicking about the nation’s assassination policy, even though it should raise some questions. For instance, do I, as a citizen, have a legal right to advocate your assassination? May I advocate government death squads, in general, to terminate wrongdoers? May I advocate the assassination of named individuals, such as Osama, for instance? If I say Democratic office-holders should be lined up and shot, am I doing something wrong, or am I guilty merely of bad taste? Can I say my neighbor should be killed? My ex-spouse? Charles Manson? Jesse Jackson? Janet Jackson? If I can’t do it, then neither can Obama. The law gives neither of us a license to kill.

Honor, courage and the rule of law may simply be the price a nation must pay to bask in the luxury of superpower status. Today it’s mass murder by remote control. We can only imagine what feats of cowardice will become possible if we keep to the present course.

Hope keeps our president from confessing that his job has beaten him. If he came in with principles, they are all so much gas today. He’s at the mercy of the same forces that controlled his predecessors. Hope turns out not to be a strategy, or even a virtue. Hope is false, always and ever. It never got a job done, except to stand in the way of social progress.

What we want, what we deserve, what we demand, what we aspire to or subscribe to, what we have and what we will have are all as unconnected to what we hope for as scat is to Shinola. Hope is a state of suspended animation. Want motivates, but hope merely intoxicates. If the hoped-for object ever materializes, hope ends, and satisfaction sets in. Hope is our substitute for satisfaction, and hope yields its own satisfaction. Living on hope is living without what’s hoped for and, usually, also without what’s deserved, what’s demanded and what’s aspired to.

Consider the hope for satisfactory health care for all Americans. Millions of us have no health care, and millions more are not feeling secure about what they have, but we continue to hold out hope for some sort of improvement. While we hope, our leaders plot a course that seems intended to mislead us as citizens, exploit us as consumers, and serve their patrons a generous helping from the big pot of money that their “reform” will create. Hopeful people are frantically calling their congressmen, writing letters, forwarding emails. They have hope, and maybe that’s all they have, because the media tell them, with great regularity and considerable relish, that nobody’s listening to them. If hope could ever yield to resolve, universal health care might be possible, but hope keeps us quiet and patient, and nothing changes in that sort of atmosphere.

Lambs going to the slaughter don’t know hope, but it wouldn’t help them much if they did. Americans and their president are different from lambs only in that they have hope. Hope is something you can do instead of anything. A person doesn’t have to expend much effort to hope, as he might to deserve, demand, or expect. Hope springs eternal, because, in hoping, passively and effortlessly, we gain satisfaction without ever gaining the hoped-for object. That’s why there is no hope for peace and justice where there is only hope for peace and justice.

Frustration of social objectives seems to be the lesson of an ever-hopeful USA. We concede that our objects as a republic–liberty and justice for all–are ideals that can never be fully realized. Instead, we hope for a better future, and this allows us to maintain all sorts of unsatisfactory conditions. Hope makes us tolerant and accepting, like sheep. Expectation might make us accountable and responsible, but this prospect seems to frighten us, and so we cower hopefully.

Sometimes, people really need to do something, and now is one of those times. Hope paralyzes us even as the conditions that surround us require the utmost mobility, energy and stamina. We’re beyond hope now. What we need is determination, in ourselves and in our leader.