Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

These individuals now ask how we could plumb to such depths as the Cheney-Bush nightmare with all its national and international repercussions, notably starting a war in Iraq that should never have been launched, and that stands in open defiance of international law.

"I don't think that Bush can even deliver a thoughtful, well articulated sentence," one well-informed person living in a country that has been notably friendly toward the U.S. wrote in an e-mail.  "How can he get away with all that he has?  Why hasn't he been stopped?"

The aforementioned question has perplexed many of us.  As lobbyists pay placeholders to stand in long lines leading to offices of U.S. Senators and House members, the same mentality is at work that was so reminiscent of Rome at the end of that empire's calamitous collapse.  

Emperor Nero fiddled while Bush poses as Big Brother out of George Orwell's prescient futuristic novel "1984" and appears with great frequency on television to assure us that all is well.

In the June issue of Vanity Fair an excerpt appears from a timely historical work by Cullen Murphy that is being released this month, "Are We Rome?  The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America" and it perceptively addresses striking similarities between the empires past and present.

For me the most searing and perceptive point raised of all that I read in that excerpt was the sharp contrast to be drawn from two messages from early America and the current nation collapsing under the weight of corruption and appalling ineptitude at the highest levels of power.

Cullen Murphy correctly saw "idealistic sensibility" in a letter of introduction written by Benjamin Franklin to George Washington in 1777 on a matter of public business:

"The Gentleman who will have the Honour of waiting upon you with this Letter is the Baron de Steuben ... He goes to America with a true zeal for our Cause, and a View of engaging in it and rendring it all the Service in his Power.  He is recommended to us by two of the best Judges of military Merit in this country."

The sharp contrast between early America and Benjamin Franklin's communication to George Washington is revealed in an e-mail sent by Jack Abramoff concerning the reopening of Speaking Rock Casino in Texas in return for millions of dollars in fees and political contributions.

Here is the message from Abramoff to a lobbying team member:

"Da man!  You iz da man!  Do you hear me?!  You da man!!  How much $$ coming tomorrow?  Did we get more $$ in?"

The Abramoff communication is less than a prose masterpiece, but what can we expect?  After all, the leading radio political commentator for years from the standpoint of number of listeners has been self-admitted drug addict Rush Limbaugh.  

Drug-addicted Limbaugh is so confident that his message is getting across to his audience of an estimated 30 million listeners that they are referred to as dittoheads and seem to be proud of the designation.

While some 56 Nobel Prize scientists have recognized and addressed the tragic potential consequences of global warning, Limbaugh laughs off the Greenhouse effect and tells us that a few loony left wing radicals are trying to alarm the world citizenry when there is nothing to worry about.

As Cullen Murphy points out, the dollar "democracy" is in full swing.  Privatization was in full swing in the Roman Empire and it has certainly made a strong impact in Cheney-Bush America.  

Outsourcing is the order of the day and before a war is launched the major figures of the most powerful multinational corporations, headed by Dick Cheney's own Halliburton, meet in his office, study a map of Iraq, and divide their prospective booty long before the first "shock and awe" assault was launched by Donald Rumsfeld.

We engage in self-delusion to claim that an American democracy is currently in place.  After all, when all else fails there are willing consorts such as Katherine Harris and Kenneth Blackwell to alter the real electoral results.

When asked what form of government the new nation of America had wrought following its historic constitutional convention in Philadelphia, Benjamin Franklin famously answered, "A Republic if you can keep it."

Currently the answer to that same question must be, "A Republic if you can reclaim it."