What country do you want to live in?

I’ve become convinced that we need a revolution in this country. Not necessarily a violent overthrow, but a change of Constitution, a re-framing of our social compact, and very possibly a break-up of the country into new self-determined, self-governing cantons.

Nothing less can fix the problems, or meet the need. Not because the current Constitution is bad – it’s wonderful – but because the government which is intended to manifest it has ceased to function properly, so our society has become diseased and destructive. Partly because we no longer follow our Constitution – it’s been warped and interpreted beyond recognition, with layer upon layer of complex nonsense now standing between the original framework and the way things really work. And partly because brilliant though it was, it no longer suffices to deal with our modern world, with its new and vastly different threats and realities. A fresh start; a new morning; a vigorous, current, engaged, and intelligent new model of our community and our citizenship is the only way forward.

This is a big topic, so I’m going to address it in a series of posts, not all in one blast. And over the course of these posts I may tweak my views, I may drill deep into a minor topic and then widen out into very general observations, and I will certainly tie together disparate ideas into a philosophical skein with which almost no one will agree fully. I would be very interested in commentary and argument from any readers – my experience is that dialogue is always a better way to explore an idea than monologue.

To start, I will outline a few initial observations on what is wrong, and what will lead to our collective crossing of the Rubicon of revolution. Popular sentiment still holds that things are not yet bad enough to need fundamental change – the general view is that our government, while terrible, is the lesser of the available evils, so that change would be more dangerous than stability. I sympathize with that view – who could do otherwise? change is always scary – but I disagree with it. I see clear signs that threats to our personal well-being are genuinely imminent; that things will get much worse very quickly, and that change is necessary – and realistic – very soon.

A few examples of dysfunction, not in any special order:

Taxation without representation. We are taxed to death, yet we have no real say in how our money is spent. We have an enormous Rube Goldberg system for the allocation and administration of our money which is out of control, and corrupt to the core. Our supposed legislators (really, our minor nobility) have created a spoils system that marries moneyed interests with political parties, in a system whose only function is to trade power for money, and they have gerrymandered districts and created a party-based, media-manipulated election process to ensure continued power. The upshot is that well over half of our rightful money is siphoned off into this massively corrupt, massively wasteful mess, over which we have no practical control.

The legal system. Our entire judicial process has completely broken down. It is no longer a system of justice, based on principles of fairness, accountability, and equality. It is instead a system of traps and tricks; an arbitrary and powerful contraption into which one ventures at one’s peril. It is manipulated boldfacedly by those with the power and money to wield it as a weapon or a shield, while it imposes capricious and idiotic penalties and strictures on the rest of us. From the simplest interactions between citizen and cop, on down to the horrific snakepit of bureaucratic regulations and civil litigation, and the slimy, cynical meatgrinder of our criminal due process and punishment processes, it is nothing more than a threat to our personal well-being. The law no longer protects us nearly as well as we could do ourselves. A few actual examples to make this clear:

1) Andrea Yates, and indeed, the whole concept of “innocent by reason of insanity”. Is it not immediately obvious to the stupidest among us that anyone who would kill five children is insane in any reasonable sense? Insanity does not “explain away” or “excuse” murder, nor is it one of several possible causes of murderous behavior. It is impossible to commit murder without being insane. The current system essentially says that if we’ve gotten around to LABELLING your particular cluster of indicators as “insane”, then you get treated as if you have an illness, while otherwise you get punished.

How completely idiotic and dysfunctional! Of course the poor black kid raised on gang streets is every bit as insane (or not) as stupid white-trash religious-nonsense-spewing bitch Andrea Yates, but their lawyers may not play the same intellectually and morally bankrupt, politically correct bullshit game, so their clients get to be gang-raped and beaten in prison instead of coddled in a comfy mental ward, treated and evaluated by half-witted pseudo-doctors who have worked their way through a few years of institutional ass-kissing, lobotomization, and pussification to get to the point where they have the power to claim authority over supposedly medical issues, and released with a wink and best wishes.

2) Child rape sentences. Is it any wonder that cable news propagandists and other populist rabble rousers make hay with slap-on-the-wrist sentences of probation for child rapists, by judges who harbor secret fears that there but for the grace of God go they, so they treat the rapists as pitiable victims of a syndrome, rather than holding them accountable for their actions? The whole concept of trying to plumb the inner depths of someone’s soul to determine their proper punishment is misguided. The very idea that one can explain a criminal act as an inevitable consequence of environmental forces, saying “he had no choice; his action was pre-ordained and forced because of the combination of his prior circumstances, which we may pseudo-scientifically label as a syndrome”, and then conclude that accountability is inappropriate, is so post-modernedly sadly stupid and misguided that I struggle to deal with the mental weakness that fosters it.

Can modern social theorists and administrators not understand that the basic idea of justice is that one is accountable for one’s actions – period? That a syndrome does not excuse bad behavior; that the perpetrator is every bit as bad and as accountable no matter what combination of molecular pathways may have resulted in his nature being the way it is? That the color red is no less red when one understands what physics causes it to be red? No – because they’ve been blinded and confused by the irrelevant minutia of their arcane craft; they believe that their bullshit is sophistication; they perceive their lack of clarity as depth of understanding. That is the nature of decadence, and we are indeed decadent and ripe for revolution.

3) Eminent domain. This is a relatively minor offense in the scheme of things, but is nonetheless a clear indicator that government is not operating for the welfare of its citizens, but instead for corporate interest. A legal framework that was intended to insure that individuals could not endanger the public good by refusing to allow the community to use their property for critically necessary social infrastructure has been warped into a legal means for power-crazed and stupid political bodies to steal personal property for the flimsiest of reasons.

Government entitlement programs. Oh my word, could anything be stupider than the maze of insane regulations, unaccountable administrative bureaucracies, and wasteful, demeaning doles which characterize modern government?

1) Affirmative action – what could be more unfair, or more destructive of the intended beneficiary? It punishes competence and rewards incompetence; it creates racial divides and enforces and institutionalizes racial discrimination in the name of ending both; it perpetuates poor performance; it undermines accountability and excellence.

2) Prescription drug benefits – otherwise known as Guaranteed Huge Profits For Big Pharma. What kind of insanity is it that guarantees that the entire medical care delivery infrastructure in this country will be bound to push treatments that are carefully calibrated to maximize drug company profits; that mitigate but do not cure conditions; that create long-term chronic dependence; that divert resources from solving real problems to the creation of products that will drain this bureaucratic spigot? Are people so stupid as not to see past the shell-game that takes taxes from over here and pays the money to drug companies over there, in the name of socially paid services, as if the money and the drugs just dropped free from the sky? Or the complicity of the bureaucracy in allowing drug companies to fool dumbed-down video-addled Americans with deceptive marketing that encourages their addiction to “the purple pill”, recreational sex pills, “I’m All Advil” cool-moms-pop-headache-pills-like-candy misdirection, and other baloney? Do they not see the idiocy in a government policy that guarantees that our aging, hypochondriac, incapable-of-rational-thought population can get all the useless, addictive drugs that they can be swindled into wanting to deal with their made-up syndromes (as well as the real ones that result from their unhealthy lifestyles, or from the natural consequences of aging, for which drugs are inappropriate and inefficient), and that we’ll all pay for this, at whatever monopolistic price levels Big Government and Big Pharma feel like imposing?

3) Social security – the national retirement investment scam. What in God’s name makes people think that they will be better off if the government takes one sixth of their salary and invests it for them? Does anybody ever do the math – or are people’s arithmetic skills so poor and so discouraged by our “please don’t make me think” culture that they can’t calculate that if they took that money and invested it privately in conservative vehicles – say in an insurance policy or bonds – they would do better? So now we have a scam where the government is allowed to rob me, in order to pay for whatever bullshit they want, in a Ponzi scheme which we know for certain will not be able to pay us back even the meager returns it promises – all because our government is NOT of or by or for the people, but is instead a completely corrupt, dysfunctional, and stupid enterprise that operates by and for those insiders who have the connections to use it for their own gain.

Abominable. And fortunately (and unfortunately – pain’s a comin’ soon) increasingly unstable. More next time.