Friendly Debate
Alex Symington
This might be my last contribution for a while. I’m going on a retreat, a literal and figurative dropping out. Don Quixote, I’m not. I enjoy posting my thoughts and some are well received, others, not so much. What I gather from research about government, politics, extreme climate, economy, corporate finance/banking, etc. mostly turns my stomach and I simply cannot continue looking at the big picture of our proverbial hand basket to hell, state of the state without experiencing spiritual and psychic damage. As my wife points out frequently, I am a delicate flower.
I am convinced that the majority of people in this country as well as the global community naturally want what is best for their families and their communities at large. The devil is in the details and that is where we lose sight of our commonalities and get intentionally side-tracked by those in power that want and must stay in power. An example of this loss of sight of our common interests was demonstrated by a reader’s response to my last essay on the marketing of America. My take is the current Pathocracy that is our governance is most assuredly a well financed corporatist right, in the literal sense of corporatism. Conversely the reader is convinced it is leftist caused, muttering something about collectivism, but not disagreeing with my description of the deterioration of our Republic, just the perpetrators of said deterioration. So I would conclude we are essentially on the same side in the sense we are both very unhappy with the current paradigm.
The reader’s pronouncement was as baffling to me as when I watched the Gore/Bush debates back in 2000. After one such debate, my neighbor came over and we were going on about how, “Yeah, he got his ass kicked” sort of high-fiving-chest-bumping guy behavior, but then there was that awkward moment when we realized we were rooting for opposite teams. We had a good laugh and then proceeded to have our own debate, both of us quite sure the other guy was well intentioned but nuts.
In just fourteen short years that scenario of two opposite views being tolerated with friendly debate has vanished. All moderates in the Senate and House have vanished. The noose of intolerance has tightened to such a degree that Washington DC itself has become our latest intractable quagmire. I know everyone recognizes the symptoms of decline, yet we refuse to agree on a cure, to the delight of the power elite.
So put a fork in me, I’m done. (At least for awhile) I will leave you with this poem by W. B. Yeats 1865-1939. I hold with the first stanza, but the entire poem is deliciously old school prophetic.
The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
mr symington i assume it was me you refer to and i truly am sorry to see you go for now and yes i did agree with you in all you said except for the one view of ‘right wing’. i too use the view of corporatisim meaning the same as fascism which is leftist or better understood as collectivism.
i have viewed in this 68 years of life two types of personality one being collectivist the other libertarian and a defining differance between them.
collectivism being a body of thought and action which designates the group superior to the individual and libertarianism designating the individual as superior to the group.
our founders were and our constitution is quite libertarian by thier natures of holding ‘individual rights’ in the highest of esteem while creating a ‘republic’ as in rule of law.
contarary is collectivism holding the individual inferior to the group as in corporatism or fascism a joining of state and corporation being the ruling elite as in rule of man which is so very noticable today in all details of our lives.
when i was a child there was a thousand main stream media news organisations for example and now but 6 or so. same applies to manufacturing and retail and services etc. consolidation it is called collectivising is what it is where all the power resides in a handfull of people.
the right and left paradigm is so blurred in these days and made to be so by design of the globalists. there is but a singular societal trend and that is more and more power formation at the top with less and less individual rights at the bottom. a far cry from true right wing libertarianism indeed.
again sorry to see you leaving for now and i do wish you well.
Dang, Alex, tell me it ain’t so? I have some extra Kevlar, if you want it. You can have some of my extra angel dust, too, if you wish. They seem to have way more than enough to dump on me.
Alas, it does often seem like shooting peas at a sperm whale’s head, or butt. The folks who think they are in charge, despite their ongoing in God we trust one nations under preachings, who are turning USA and t his world into an ever growing bigger mess, cannot see beyond end of their noses, and when they look in the mirror, often perhaps, all they see is they are the fairest in the land, no matter what stands there staring back at them; or for that evil queen’s mirror, which must have got grabbed by the CIA, or by some Christian group, and stuck in a vault buried under the Pentagon, sort of looks like Pentegram, or simply broken into shards to shut it the F**K up! As I recall, that’s pretty much what they did with that wonderful mirror 2000 or so years ago, which they had prayed for to come to them to deliver them from their enemies, whom they knew not were themselves. So the spinning wheel keeps turning, it all keeps getting more screwed up, and, well, darn, sometimes it’s actually fun to take pot shots at the whole mess of it, even if it don’t change anything; the perps reactions sometimes are entertaining, the more they protest, the more it’s too much. Hope you like your retirement, but I figure you will need to move to some place like, hmmm, darn if I can think of a place, perhaps the middle of a barren part of the Australian outback, nobody seems to want much to do with parts of that, you will find is still pretty much as it was before white people found Australia. Although I hear Mongolia has some real drop out getaways to offer, and there’s always northern Siberia and t he north and south poles, did you ever consider the Mariana Trench? 🙂