The Library of Modern Day Hubris, or, American Exceptionalism in the Flesh

“Ultimately, the success of the nation depends on the character of its citizens.”
~ George W. Bush on the occasion of the dedication of his Presidential Library

Well I’ll be damned, the world must be turned upside down or at least sideways, when we have to hear international war criminals lecturing us on being of good character so that our nation may succeed.  It really irks me to be lectured to by such a fourth-rate politician as Bush; he isn’t even a very good painter – his work is highly derivative and banal – but add a lot of color, have network TV anchors for boosters, and, voila!, you become a modern day Monet, or at least, perhaps,  a Winston Churchill.

But I’ll admit one could say that Bush did reach new heights in the arts – the arts of duplicity, obfuscation, lying.  And of course he made ignoring domestic and international laws, our Constitution, and humane norms of action into a science.

Indirectly, I guess, his little dedication day maxim is Bush’s way of blaming all us chickens – not him the chickenhawk – for the failure of his policy in Iraq and Afghanistan, and for the lack of success in the overall real economy.

One last point, about the Bush Library itself (in fact, about any of the Presidential Libraries): George Orwell once made a trenchant observation about autobiography as follows:

“Autobiography is only to be trusted when it reveals something disgraceful.”

I believe that at least the more recently established Presidential Libraries fall under the rubric of autobiography – and thus Orwell’s observation pertains.

And from what I’ve read in various places about the contents [and lack thereof] of the Bush Library, using Orwell’s measure  the Bush Library is untrustworthy.

To sum up my little rant, let me quote Michel de Montaigne, speaking not specifically about Mr. Bush [The Decider] or his ilk, but about us all in the particular sense as well as the general:

“Can anything be imagined so ridiculous, that this miserable and wretched creature [man], who is not so much as master of himself, but subject to the injuries of all things, should call himself master and emperor of the world, of which he has not power to know the least part, much less to command the whole?”
― Michel de Montaigne, Apology for Raymond Sebond

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(c) Gregory V Driscoll 2013

The good of the people is the greatest law. ~ Marcus Tullius Cicero

President Obama Signs ‘Monsanto Protection Act’

The headline is as outrageous as the law itself, but it is also the inevitable result of what is called “corporate capitalism” or more accurately “monopoly capitalism.”

Those who think they can stop such actions or revert to a more pristine time or “make things right” without changing the present economic system are deluding themselves.

We must remember what I among others have been saying for years – There is only one party in the United States but it has two wings: the Democrats and the Republicans. The mission of this two-winged party is to protect corporate capital aka monopoly capital.

Before 1981 there were still a number of independent power centers in our society (even within government and the so-called “parties” at all levels), but since Reagan’s election in 1980, those independent power centers have been so weakened (some almost destroyed and still others suborned) that they cannot launch effective countervailing efforts against the corporate juggernaut.

Essentially we live in a morally corrupt society, that is, a society where the actual or prospective lawbreakers can pay to have the laws changed to their advantage; almost everything done by the corporate capitalists is “within the law” (after all it is their law – many times even drafted by their lawyers) but bought and paid for with workers’ / consumers’ money filtered through the government (now a corporate adjunct) as taxes, or through the corporations as profits, or since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, effectively from corporate operating funds as a ‘cost of doing business.’

Welcome to the future, which looks all too much like the past, namely the “Gilded Age” when the “robber barons” and “trusts” ran rampant; when there was a wide disparity between the resources of the majority and that of a small number of elite affluent families; and when the United States became an empire with overseas possessions. All of that was stopped or contained only by those same independent power centers and masses of people united together – all of which effectively doesn’t exist anymore in full enough measure to make a real difference.

It may take more catastrophic events of an economic or natural type for a majority in this country to forsake their illusions, and join together to sweep away what is in essence a plague upon the earth, a monkey on our collective back.

As George Orwell wrote, “During times of universal deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act.”

And we must learn still again the truth that Frederick Douglass knew all too well in his flesh and bones: “Power concedes nothing without a demand… Power concedes nothing without a struggle. Never has, never will.”

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(c) Gregory V Driscoll 2013