The New Business-as-usual

When Bush I was running for president in 1988 one of the popular cries of the Republicans was that the People should elect a Republican president and a Republican Congress so that they could stop government gridlock and get business done. Of course the Republicans took Congress in 1994 during the Clinton administration, and blocked legislation and government business in a manner unseen in generations. As of 2008, because the Democratic majority of 2006 has been so slight and as to not be effective, the Republicans still keep a stranglehold on Congress and block any legislation for which the president has not requested a rubber stamp. When the Republicans held the majority they tried to ban filibusters, the last ditch minorities have to stop their oppression. Now that they’re in the minority again, the Republicans all for the filibuster. They’ve filibustered the Fair Pay Act. They filibustered legislation that would limit troop deployment cycles. They filibustered a bill that would reduce carbon emissions. As if they thought they would be the majority forever. Clearly they have no concern for any Americans but themselves.

Any notion that the inaction of the legislature on issues that matter to Americans is the fault of the Democrats seems a poorly based one. While I’d like to think it is partisanship that is the problem, the evidence in my eyes seems to point toward the Republicans, perhaps more specifically the new brand of Republicans who have a my-way-or-the-highway attitude about legislation. While I can appreciate the no-compromise-in-defense-of-whathaveyou approach to certain moral issues, that approach is not appropriate on most issues; it just seizes-up the engine of government. And, those who choose that path are decidedly un-American and un-democratic in my eyes. The new Republicans have pursued tyranny of the majority long considered an obstacle to good representative democracy, as if it was mandated by their elections--as if it was their right and their obligation to oppress those who disagree with them.

While the Republicans may have held a parliamentary majority, largely as a result of the election of many of these “new Republicans,” the new Republicans that made the parliamentary majority are actually representative of minorities (fundamentalist Xians being the major one). Christian grass roots organizations began taking over the Republican party in the 70s. They infiltrated local and state parties and displaced the old, moderate Republicans who thought of themselves as American first and Republicans second. Using anti-abortion, anti-gay, and anti-secular sentiments (it’s much easier to rally people against something than it is to rally them for something) this minority within the Republican party stirred evangelical Xians to go to the polls and vote for whomever towed the party line. Thus the Republican majority was established and the original Republican party was subverted, destroyed and replaced with a new party with an extremist agenda. They sought to replace our secular government with a religious one, and that was just the beginning. Luckily, once they got power, they failed to do much aside from rubber-stamp Dubya’s awful policies. It has seemed to me that they were just using their Xian agenda as a tool to mobilize voters in support of other hidden agendas such as free-market capitalism (economic libertarianism). Like Dubya's "Some people call you the elites; I call you my base" joke at an $800/plate charity dinner suggests, he sees himself as representing the economic elites despite his culture-based appeals to those at the other end of the economic spectrum. Surely, we'll find out who he's really fighting for about the same time as we find out why we really invaded Iraq. In the mean time, I hope those who supported Bush and the new Republicans take a closer look at who they're voting for and why.

Under the guise of freedom of religion, the new Republicans have infiltrated the government with Christian extremists and threatened to implement Christian law. They have derided populism abroad while employing it at home to build voter support for policies that actually go against the common man's own interests. They have stalled or subverted the government when it went against their values and tried to take away the ability of others to do the same. Everyone looks for reasoning that supports their opinions, but the incredible hypocrisy of the new Republicans and their failure to face up to it is unfathomable.

For Void's Sake

So, I've been practicing my Babylonian math lately. They used a base-60 (sexagesimal) system with an imbedded "10s" digit. So, for example, you count using tallies from 1 to 9 and when you get to 10 you add a different symbol representing 10. You count this way up to 60, then you start tallying sixties and tens of sixties (as opposed to ones) in the same manner till you get to sixties of sixties and so on. Its use of place value notation was a major innovation--one which we employ today with the decimal system. Mesopotamians were using this system ~2000 BC for geometry, measurement of astronomical distances, and of course in economics and trade. The Babylonians knew the Earth revolves around the Sun, they knew the Earth was round and they knew that math and science were the key to unlocking the mysteries of the world. Although their innovations were lost and had to be reinvented, few societies failed to grasp the importance of studying the physical world. Christianity (as an institution rather than a people or a philosophy) was the major exception. Certainly Christians didn't invent intolerance; the Old Testament practically prescribed intolerance as a means of preserving the tribe. But, Christianity innovated suppression of thought. Perhaps also associated with an increasingly barbarous and feudal society and with economic stratification, the control of information by the church (which was one with the government from the rise of the Roman Empire until the founding of the United States) kept the populace ignorant, fearful and subservient. The church/government managed to keep the population largely illiterate by monopolizing education, thereby avoiding the problem of free thought and maintaining cultural hegemony--hence the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages—over a thousand years of suppression of thought by those who feared what people would think if allowed to think for themselves. Why? So, the powerful could stay powerful and keep the masses at their heels.

Why am I writing about this? This is exactly what we have to look forward to if we continue to allow demagogues dominate the mass media (particularly what used to be news) and fail to reject their misinformation and thought control. Need we subject ourselves to this? Must the U.S. stagger intoxicatedly away from the Renaissance into a new Dark Age just as Europe and circa-Mediterranean societies did after the brilliant Preclassical period? I hate to compare Glen Beck or Bill O'Reilly to a pope or a king, but their effect is the same--or it may be more correct to say the effect of institutions empowering them are the same. The so-called news media obfuscate the truth and replace it with fear of an ever-present and unseen enemy. They bury the facts in emotions and charge that questioning this unseen enemy is tantamount to alliance with it. If we are to avoid a new Dark Age, infotainment must be stopped. Apparently people are all too ready to stop thinking. They don't need the help of the news which is supposed to inform and empower them. We can move forward from the Modern Era, we don’t need to digress.