However, Parry's 'what should have been done' is hot air. 'Alternative narratives' are for Associate Professors of Masturbation at our universities. The Democrats have no idea what's going on, and neither does Robert Parry.
barking_iguana yesterday wrote the following:Then, as now, the problem was not with Caesar himself. Nor was it with any newly developed credulity on the part of the populace; idiotic as that credulity may be, it just isn't new. What's new here, and what developed over a few generations in Rome, is the abandonment by too large a faction of the political class of its commitment to the institutions under which it acts. It may be corny, but I'm talking about a Civic Virtue. Specifically, the devotion of some part of one's energy to supporting and educating the younger political actors regarding the benefits of limits on power.
I had comments on this yesterday, in which I simply stated some of my prior opinions on what has gone wrong in this country—opinions based mostly on Alfred Korzybski's analysis of the causes of World War I. Now, having had a sleep and a full day in which new structures could form in my brain, I can address what's basically wrong about 'Civic Virtue solution'. It is part of what's wrong with the Democratic Party.
Basically, what
barking_iguana is requesting is that the authoritarian Bushist kleptocrats go back to being Republicans. This is in essence what the Democrats in Congress also want. We are supposed to train the next generation to be virtuous and then the wickedness will subside and we can go back to the old, basically good ways of doing things. In short, the Democrats want the Bushists to change; they do not wish to change themselves. They do not even see that they should do that.This is like psychotherapy or family/marriage counseling. You have control over yourself; you cannot solve your problems by staying as you are and changing the other people. The Democratic Party must change, and it must start by ceasing to demand of the Bushists that they do the changing. Probably the Democratic should become a party of protests, a party of labor strikes, a party accepting that Capitol Hill is at the moment a broken process, as may well be the voting booth.
We cannot do the same, simply because the technology makes it infeasible, but the way the Founding Fathers responded to what they saw as unfair treatment was not by changing Parliament or King, but by changing themselves into armed insurrectionists. Once that was done and succeeded they could craft an improved government.
On the other hand, if the Democrats do take control of Congress, which on account of election fraud and Bushist dog-wagging I don't expect, I don't think that will solve our problems unless we shine a light on what's been happening in this country. We can't fire the Bushists, any more than we could fire the Iraqi army and expect that to be okay, but we would have to shine the light on everything that had been happening, including the White House records that Bush had hidden away as soon as he started squatting at 1600 Penn.
