http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_pN2IPAw6E&eurl=http://www.americablog.com/2008/10/rep-michelle-bachmann-oozes-hatred-for.html

Matthews-Bachmann Interview

We the People are Complicit

I think there is quite a difference between the Bush #1 and Clinton leadership versus GW Bush’s last 8. Bush #2 has taken us further down the road in a direction that was beginning to worry many: unilateralism and reliance on military “solutions”. Also we are a more divided country than 8 years ago- which we did not need. Also not to forget that Bush#2 had no mandate, even after 2004 he did not have much of a mandate from “we the people”. It did not matter. So I do not think it is right to lump the three together though I agree that the end of the cold war left us with a test which we have failed first by allowing Bush office twice, the second time unforgivably.

This point I think Bacevich makes in his most recent post on TPM: “We the People” Are Complicit:

My point is simply this: the essence of our problem is as much cultural as it is political and economic. Who we chose as president-emperor certainly matters. It just doesn’t matter nearly as much as all the election-related hoopla would seem to suggest.

Will Obama be an improvement over Bush? Sure – almost anyone would. But Obama won’t save the country. He won’t even “change the way Washington works.” To believe otherwise is simply naïve.

Not wrong, not entirely right in my opinion. One man can make a start, a push, a turn-around, and a difference.

So I disagree that there is going to be little difference between an Obama presidency and a McCain presidency most especially in the areas of Bacevich’s criticisms.

Also Bacevich is not the first to fault “we the people”, nor wrong, but when a person ascends to office they hold our trust to act in accordance with long held ideals. This president, our worst many would agree, has failed miserably and he should stand out as such in any discussion.

We don’t revolt anymore. Let us hope that this means only that we are too busy to take off work, and not that we do not care. But it not good that many in this populous country do not understand the issues and how it affects them never mind the principles we were founded on.

Michelle Bachmann, a Representative running for re-election from MInnesota made it very clear that there are some in the Congress, such as herself, who do not understand either.

American exceptionalism (cf. “exceptionalism”) refers to the belief that the United States differs qualitatively from other developed nations.

I know one way we differ:

Is there another developed nation this close to having a black president? Mandela was president of South Africa but “my friends” the proof is in the pudding, American exceptionalism is real – when it’s not co-opted by the right (like patriotism and the flag has been in the past).

My playful prism is sports analogies. When I think of the great coaches and teams, I think of ones who excel at mid-game adjustments. Coach Bill Belichick of the New England Patriots is renown for this.

So my hope lies in America’s capacity to make the adjustments. Sure we slide down the same slippery slopes as so many nations before us. But we make the necessary adjustments – so as to keep our eyes on the prize.

As they say, It’s not how you fall down, but how you get up, that matters. Mr. Obama makes me want to get the hell up and unite…with gusto!

I guess he wrote this poem in prison, or right after prison.

http://www.love-poems.me.uk/wilde_the_ballad_of_reading_goal_s_d_insp.htm

-Blaise Pascal

American Exceptionalism, you ask. To me it means that this great nation has come closest to realizing Ralph Waldo Emerson’s idea:

“the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

I apply his idea to jazz and I think of that solo tonal breath, at once oppressed and liberated, stepping out of hardened gut…into sparkling brass…and out to three four. One two three four.

I suspect that many people focus on attaining the last part of Emerson’s line, “the independence of solitude.” But keeping “in the midst of the crowd” is just as important, and it is my humble feeling that that is where we have lost our way. Sure the “crowd” can mean conformity, and that is what I believe the first Americans were liberating themselves from. But! The crowd = community as well. And when we belong to a community (as Bernard Lown so eloquently explained) we serve something bigger than ourselves. When we get too far away from that community it now strikes me that we lose our capacity for shame.

The fact is I know more than one person who has stopped paying their mortgage (while still collecting rent from tenets) comfortably resigned to the fact that they will have bad credit for around five years or so. They have no shame in this. They didn’t even know who they were paying that money to, it’s not a person, it’s a derivative of a derivative…it’s paper, it’s shit. If that 250 grand was from their local bank, from the banker they see at church and their kid’s school, I bet my friends would more reluctant to stop paying their mortgage.

Many of these houses were investments for these people, they were gonna flip them and get a big payday. Just like the Wall Street sleaze that were investing in stocks with money they had freak’n borrowed – BORROWED! From retirement funds of retirees they will never see.

Now the boat rocks.

“And all the woe that moved him so

That he gave that bitter cry,

And the wild regrets, and the bloody sweats,

None knew so well as I:

For he who live more lives than one

More deaths than one must die.”

-Oscar Wilde

Where is the bottom, they cry with their pubescent countenance? I chide them from below – first come to terms with shame, and then we’ll take it from there.

http://www.poetry-online.org/wilde_the_ballad_of_reading_goal

Here we have another military guy who partially wakes up and wonders about the lies his country and his ideology were based on. One would have hoped that Vietnam was a lesson about the limitations of US military power and it’s utility. But NO.

The lack of historical perspective is really America’s greatest exception and I’m sure in 20, 30 or 40 years, we’ll have to listen to another generation search their conscience and ponder why they gave up their civil responsibility and humanity and let the masters of war unleash their universal soldiers on a foreign people who did them no harm.

Someone please tell me my thinking is not so unique.