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By Gary Corseri

9/5/07

“Politics is the gizzard of society, full of grit and gravel, and the two political parties are its opposite halves - sometimes split into quarters - which grind on each other.”

–Henry David Thoreau

“It is better to be almost right than precisely wrong.”

–Warren Buffet

“Can we all just get along?”

–Rodney King

How well Thoreau, our best philosopher and political thinker, would have “gotten along” with Buffet, our Empire’s investor-sans pareil, is a matter for speculative fiction, but I suspect the open-minded Naturalist would have endorsed the financier’s caveat against overweening pride in one’s own judgment. Not only must we look before we leap, but, once sure-footed on the other side, we must also look behind to inspect the ground we’ve covered, and to assure ourselves we’re not about to topple backwards.

We are fast approaching one of those “benchmark” moments of back-looking which are becoming noisome, ritualistic affairs of hearty self-congratulation, vacuous critiques, and paralytic inaction. The Empire has lost its rudder in the quicksand of Iraq, and neither General Petraeus’s upcoming, indubitably rosy, assessments nor the General Accounting Office’s countervailing grade of “F” will extricate that rudder any time soon. Congress will balk, Cheney will snarl, and the “dogs of war” we unleashed nearly five years ago will continue to ravage that once-prosperous land that had the misfortune to fall for a dictator we supported.

Of gravest concern is not that our political process will “grind on”–that’s precisely what it’s supposed to do!—but that the anti-war movement will assume its characteristic postures and posturing: the energetic will march; the exasperated will sign petitions for impeachment; the committed will canvass voters for the next fraudulent election. We shall argue Marx and Bakunin, and Christ Militant and Christ the Pacific, while the war drums continue to beat and we topple into the sands of ancient Babylon and Persia.

Or, maybe, just maybe, there’s an act of divine intervention—another way of saying self-actualization!—in which we just grow up: we look around and decide, we’ve all we’ve got. Mama and Papa are not going to save us from the mess they’ve bequeathed us. The Bushes, Sarkozy, Brown and Olmert, and the latest lapdog in Ockerland are in it for themselves, and if this Titanic of a planet is going down, then they’ll be the ones secreting in every cavity of their bloated bodies the lovely, polished silver while the band plays on.

If that moment of self-actualization arrives, we may realize that the Neocon-Neoliberal meat grinder is one monster with two heads (hence Thoreau’s “sometimes split into quarters”). We may learn to “rectify the names,” as Confucius had it, and understand that our Democrats and Republicans, for all the spit, fire and fury they level at one another during their stage-managed campaigns, are all drinking at the bloody trough of war: War is their profit-motive; the threat of war, its prosecution, and the ever-spiraling costs grease the axles of their SUVs driving through the revolving door of political hackery to the penumbral light of the lobbyist’s cave.

The first step is to identify our common enemy. Most “Progressives” stare blankly when hearing “Neoliberalism”—the term by which American “free-market” imperialism is now known abroad. Progressives were so uneasy with the “L”-word with which Limbaugh and the other talk-jockstraps impastoed them in the Reagan years, they summarily changed their calling cards to the unimpastoed “P” word. Mention Eugene Debs, Joe Hill or Henry Wallace to most of them and they run a-blather for the high chaparral. So, Al Franken, when he bivouacked at Air America, regularly invited his friends from the American Enterprise Institute. And—no surprise—they regularly agreed upon the need to “support our troops”; defend Israel’s “right to exist” (but in what form? Within what boundaries?); protect our “national interests” (never defined); and then snickered about the Bush/Cheney evil cabal.

My friends on the Left tell me they despise Libertarians, whom they define as anarchists with money. Selling the delights of broad-brushing may have worked for Tom Sawyer; it should not allure post-adolescents. I have been reading the “Libertarian” website, Antiwar.com, for years and cheered their clear-headed anti-imperialist position while John Kerry waffled, Hillary back-stepped, and Congress garbled.

Now I challenge my Libertarian friends: I’ll support your Constitutional right to bear arms, so long as you abide by the parameters set forth in the Second Amendment: If you are truly concerned about tyrannical governments, challenge and worry this Empire by drilling in “well-regulated militias.” Put your weapons in armories and train your citizen-soldiers. And that means, train them in citizenship as well as soldiery. Now that you have become men, put away childish things. Many of us—on the Left, in the Center, even on the Right—suspect you because you wildly put forth “heroes” like the enfeebled Mr. Heston (brandishing his rifle like a prophet’s staff). Nobody’s threatening to take your hunting licenses away. You’ve won that battle. But what does that have to do with regulating the sale of firearms in a metropolis? Can we grow up, please? Greece is burning! The US southwest is a tinderbox. California’s energy grid will gridlock within a decade. Doesn’t the right to defend ourselves include using our brains, to see how we can row with the other oarsmen?

Likewise, I challenge my friends on the Left: I’m sick of the bickering between United for Peace and Justice and A.N.S.W.E.R. There is no anti-war party in America, and as long as that situation prevails, the Neocon/Neoliberal alliance will trash the landscape of our physical reality and run rampant through our nightmares. Get it together!

If we cannot develop new alliances, new coalitions, new understanding, we are surely a doomed species who deserve a troglodytic fate. We are pretty close to overstaying our welcome in our home. We’ve fouled our own nests and behaved like spoiled children. And those who had the most are most to blame.

How did the present world system emerge? Wasn’t it a congeries of unlikely alliances? F.D.R. joined the restive labor movement to capital and created the New Deal. The Anglo-American Empire united with the Soviet Empire to defeat the emergent empires of the Axis powers. After the war, Truman united liberal Jews and Catholics with Midwestern farmers and “Dixiecrats” for the “Fair Deal.” (Hardly fair to Blacks, Hispanics, and women!). Nixon, with his “Southern strategy”–fear of Blacks in the spreading suburbs!–broke the democratic hold on the South. That reprobate, master tactician signed an economic pact with China, broke the Communist duopoly, and extricated us from the quagmire of Vietnam. The Reaganites united the West and the South against the “liberal” Northeast of welfare and unions. Bush’s brain, Rove (now missing in action!) managed an unholy alliance of Christian fundamentalists, Zionist Jews and Wall Street. And what’s our formula for “victory in Iraq”? We’re trying to determine which coalitions of Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds can make it work. Throughout history, new coalitions emerge as different conditions manifest. The most unlikely combinations are often the strongest, as the alloy of steel trumps its constituents. Even Napoleon could not prepare for the “alliance” of Russia’s scorched earth policy and the Russian winter.

What webs can we weave now to trap our treacherous War Party? Will we learn from Einstein’s exhortation: “No problem can be solved by the same level of consciousness that created it”? We will need a revolution in consciousness to throw off the “mind-forged manacles” of fear, greed and ignorance that enslave us. It’s well past time to wake up, grow up, reach out, and clean the gizzards.

Gary Corseri, a senior contributing editor of Cyrano’s Journal Online, has published and posted his work at Thomas Paine’s Corner and over 200 other venues. He can be reached at .

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