Isebrand.com

The Imperial Test

So, is America an empire or not? I appreciate Jonathan Schell's candor as he wrestles with this question in his short essay, "Empire Falls." It all depends on how your define "empire." In general, I agree that humanity currently lives in a non-imperial era insofar as empires are understood to be arguably global in scope, concurrent with a nation's stated imperial aspirations, and marked by military occupation in most or all of an imperial nation's non-homeland areas of influence. (I refer to our era as non-imperial, not post-imperial, because I think "post-" evokes permanence. I don't see why it would be an impossibility that empires in the traditional sense couldn't re-emerge eventually, though I admit it's hard to imagine outside of the realm of speculative fiction.)

American might not have stated imperial ambitions (at least not stated by everyone, just a "neo-con" minority), nor might it be overtly or heavy-handedly occupying numerous foreign nations (theoretically, the U.S. does aim to occupy Iraq, and if one argues that it is doing so, one probably must admit that the occupation is partial at best), but I think it's certainly imperial even if it is not traditionally an empire, especially if we look at what "imperial" may mean in an age that is marked by
1. digital technology,
2. globalization, and
3. air power.

In the 21st-century, whole national economies--whole multi-national industries--can be appropriated directly or indirectly without military occupation, through the electronic mechanisms of markets and other economic tools. A nation can, theoretically at least, "occupy" not just land but another nation's computer networks. Also, a nation might "out-source"--formally or informally--the military or quasi-military securing of a rival's resources through surrogate entities. But, it's not only the global reach of companies and technology that gives the U.S. (and theoretically several other nations) the means of a sort of empire-building, but also the U.S. dollar, as a commentator, Sam Baker, points out.

Beyond economic influence and operations, beyond tactical forays into Iraq or attempting to influence rival nations through surrogate entities, corporate, multi-national regulatory, or military, what about the more than 700 U.S. military bases in foreign states--from Japan to Korea, Britain to Cuba, Germany to the Indian Ocean? In the 21st-century especially, empires might not need to be entities that totally dominate other nations with blanket military presense. Perhaps a network of bases suffices? Afterall, empires throughout history have been, among other things, networks of military bases. (Monthly Review, March 2002, on Robert Harkavy's Great Power Competition for Overseas.)

Each U.S. base emanates a sphere of some degree of influence--a presence--though it's not occupation of a foreign nation per se, except within the base itself. To draw lines between the bases is to compose a graphic web impressive in the regular distribution of its interconnecting points. It's not as though the vast majority of the bases are all clumped together.

What is more, as many such lines drawn between bases of the British Empire in the late 1800's would be roughly analogous to sea or overland routes that the British Empire also would utilize and often nearly completely dominate, so such lines drawn between U.S. bases are roughly analogous to a combination of sea or overland routes or flight paths. Anything on the ground or in the sea (or in the air) along a flight path is in a sense also within the influence of the U.S., at least indirectly and temporarily.

But by such standards is the American empire actually waning? The U.S. used to have roughly 1,100 foreign military bases. I would argue, however, that the 1,100-base marker is too anomalous to use for, as it were, the baseline comparison, because it represents the number of bases immediately after WWII. By 1949, at the end of what Gore Vidal terms American's "Golden Age"--basically the last half of the 1940's--the number was down to 582 bases--U.S. soldiers were graduating from college thanks to the G.I. Bill, and the nation had had a brief but important period of artistic accomplishment, social progressivism, and cultural pride. Enter the arms race, U.S. deterrence against and sometimes provocation of the U.S.S.R., the industrial-military complex, and the 1950's frenzied culture of fear,nationalism, and conformity (e.g., government loyalty oaths instituted), and by 1957 the number is back up to nearly 900. It rose during Vietnam, dipped afterward, and now Iraq and Afghanistan have occasioned opening new ones. How many bases abroad does the U.S. operate? Alas, we must ask what is meant "base?" A safe answer seems to be more than 700. See Chalmers Johnson's essay on the U.S.'s network of bases.

Whether or not it's an "empire," and whether or not it in part involves 1,000 or 700 foreign bases, it's safe to say that the United States expensively maintains an extensive global network of military bases of operation bolstering other assets economic and diplomatic. I would call such a reality a non-traditional empire. The questions then begged include: how long will it last? why will it collapse? and how is U.S. foreign policy shaping the trajectory of empire--are factors like invading and partially occupying Iraq, the U.S.'s largely self-imposed diplomatic isolation, its dependence on fossil fuels located mostly outside of its homeland borders, its staggering foreign debt, and domestic factors like the nearly completed takeover by effectively theocratic elements of the ruling party, and an increasing wealth disparity hastening or delaying an end to its quasi-empire? As America continues in the early 21st-century to strike out at our enemies--whether real or imagined, whether created by us or seemingly foisted upon us--is it also compromising the viability of the quasi-empire, of the nation itself, or of its representative democracy, or could it somehow be strengthening any or all of them?

It's hard to imagine anything for the United State's imperial adventure but an end--perhaps in my lifetime--and unless there is an extensive political progressive correction to what are probably the most socially conservative and economically nihilistic governing forces in the nation's history, it's hard to imagine that that end will not be attended by genuine social, economical, and governmental chaos.

The British Empire faded away but the United Kingdom eventually became a place of greater opportunity for more of its citizens than ever in its history; it's economy currently is strong, it's culture largely intact, it's governmental system in no significant way is threatened with collapse or radical transformation. But, Rome didn't enjoy such a fate. Neither did the U.S.S.R. or 20th-century Japan.

In general, empires have not transitioned from empire with the homeland culture, economy, and government returning to what they were before the empire, let alone becoming something better than the years before empire.

So, how will America cope during that post-imperial transition; how will its people and government handle the reality that the nation's grand narrative might yet be written as a tragedy like so many empires before it? That will be the real test--far more so than is Iraq or the "war on terror" now, more so than was the Depression, and perhaps as much as was the Civil War. Will post-imperial America eventually be seen as another chapter in a successfully continuing (and thus, overall very impressive) experiment--freedoms and liberties intact--or will it be seen as something else, not so much a phase as an end?

Circumstances that cannot be imagined now will influence how well the post-imperial test will be handled. But there is no doubt that the American electorate will be one important factor. With that electorate so generally provential, increasingly religious, and shockingly ill-informed, there is certainly cause for concern. Add to that concern the above-mentioned debt and dependence on foreign oil, and the currents coming downwind of the future seem chill and acrid, certainly more autumn than spring. But winds shift all of the time, and the nature of America's post-imperial fate is uncertain. The only thing that is certain is that it will have one, for good or ill.

Don't Mourn. Organize.

Earlier in March, the Supreme Court upheld Bill Clinton's odious "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy 8-0. In light of that, Nat Hentoff draws attention to a worthy March 8 editorial in USA Today, "Time to Repeal 'Don't Tell.'"

"There's opportunity . . . to raise awareness about the costs of 'don't ask, don't tell' and intensify efforts to overturn this wrongheaded law. Since 1993, about 10,000 otherwise qualified gay servicemembers have been forced out, including those in crucial occupations such as code-breakers, intelligence, and medical specialists, air controllers and translators.

"The U.S. ban on openly gay servicemen is an archaic and hurtful assault on people who want only to serve their country. The Supreme Court did what it had to do. Now it's Congress' turn to do what it ought to do and repeal the ban."

Hentoff:

As the legendary labor organizer Joe Hill urged—before being executed by a Utah firing squad on a murder charge based on very dubious evidence—"Don't waste any time in mourning. Organize!

VeryFancyFrist

VeryFancyFrist. Bill Frist's lavish lifestyle and financial dealings cost the citizens of The Volunteer State--and all Americans--fall less than his horrid, mealy-mouth leadership, especially on the idiotic Dubai port [in]security fiasco, only the latest Republican-led stupidity in a string of stupidities so profound they are truly criminal:
from repeated tax cuts to the wealthy during a time of war (something no society in history has ever done--never--find me one example);
to hiding evidence from Congress (our representatives) that showed Saddam was no threat and had no WMD;
to dropping the ball the global war against Al-Qaeda, a winner-takes-all, deadly contest, in order to invade Iraq--Bush's pet vendetta project--instead;
to being idiots about basic military and diplomatic concepts when invading Iraq (e.g., have enough troops, equip them well enough, don't inflame the people of Iraq you claim to "liberate" by calling your pricey adventure a "crusade");
to Katrina, to backing sleazy egomaniacs like Tom DeLay to be the face of your party, to surrounding the moral high ground on the world stage by torturing people, spying on your own citizens illegally;
to devastating the environment, yapping about energy independence and doing nothing,
gutting affordable housing programs, leaving our cities, ports, and transit unsafe against terrorism, abandoning the American consumer by fueling corporate welfare and drug and energy company gouging; and
hiding behind the flag and cheap and easy pseudo-evangelical religiosity that Jesus would find contemptible for its cynicism, arrogance, bigotry, and materialism.

The whole Republican mess needs to be thrown out from sea to shining sea.They've left America
weak,
bankrupt,
deeply in debt to foreign nations,
horribly unbalanced in wealth distribution and tax burden like never before in our history,
buried under a sick health "care" and insurance system that's the laughing stock of the civilized world, radioactive to smart Americans now fleeing to schools abroad because here they encounter Republican-based bull-roar like "Intelligent Design,"
stupid about virtually all news items and policy issues, because of a mis-information campaign in which talk radio, FOX News and CNN moronically repeat White House lies--not just spin, but often lies--like "we had no idea the levees wouldn't hold" and "no one imaged planes would be used as terrorist weapons."

It's sooooo past time to replace this nation's stupid, blinkered leadership.

Luckily, there are alternatives, even in Frist's Tennessee--a state that in 2000 took a pass on Al Gore's expertise as a government innovator, proven leader, and moderate uniter and instead voted for the most dangerous President America has had since Andrew Johnson was impeached. In Tennessee, there is Harold Ford, Jr., who embodies what America needs badly: a Democratic landslide that will return Congress to the Party of the People. It's past time. Way past time.

A dream not of happiness, but justice

This political blog's always had a "Misc" category. It has to; it reflects the unenviable personality of a perseverative dilettante. The destination port's only vaguely known, the vessel's all jib and no mainsail, and the skipper gets distracted by thoughts of geological time, the fall of empires, and his complete invisibility to good-looking athletic gay guys (especially the blond one at the West 80th Street gym on Saturday mornings).

In sailing, when you want to go nowhere--to literally stay at the same coordinate regardless of winds and currents--it's called "holding to on various courses." But what's it called when you more or less hold your position and don't want to? In my case, it's called life.

So, I was intrigued by John Lanchester's piece, "Pursuing Happiness," in a recent issue of The New Yorker.

Here's something to ponder...or not: according to the Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman's research, heavily cited in the new book by British economist Richard Layard, Happiness: Lessons from a New Science, people's top 4 favorite parts of the day feature sex, socializing after work, dinner, and relaxing. But absolute happiness in life is probably most dependent on...here's the rub: genetics.

That is: our natural level of happiness is largely inherited. Behavioral geneticist David Lykken concluded that "trying to be happier is like trying to be taller." His evidence is solid research, however much we might not like it, for he summarizes his findings thus:

It’s better to win the lottery than to break your neck, but not by as much as you’d think. . . . Within a year, lottery winners and paraplegics have both (on average) returned most of the way to their baseline levels of happiness.

Happiness is something we have some--only limited--control over.

Now, what light does that shine on the notion of the "pursuit of happiness," the right to the pursuit of happiness, which progressives often cite?

Lanchester reviews the work of Darrin McMahon, a historian at Florida State University, who notes that:

the Founding Fathers, who queried, crossed out, and haggled over every line of the Declaration, let the “pursuit of Happiness” stand unedited and unamended. But he also points out that the eighteenth-century understanding of “pursuit” was rather darker than it might seem now. Dr. Johnson’s dictionary defined it as “the act of following with hostile intention,” and McMahon adds that “if one thinks of pursuing happiness as one pursues a fugitive . . . the ‘pursuit of happiness’ takes on a somewhat different cast.”

Lanchester hits the nail right on the head: "We are pursuing happiness to this day, and it is by no means clear that it is a happy process."

I think progressives do best in their arguments for progressive laws and policies not when they stress happiness--an elusive goal that nothing from libertarian-utopian freedom to Great Society social engineering to anything in between can guarantee--but justice.

I think that the battle for, say, affirmative action or employment protection for gay Americans, isn't ultimately about the happiness of either minority, and shouldn't be. Chances are that no American's absolute happiness will be greatly affected by whether or not he or she has employment protection. The battle to open colleges' gates to Americans of color or to codify that no employer can fire someone just because the person happens to be gay concerns justice--it concerns the conviction that it is simply wrong (as well as illogical, or if one wants to argue it: even ultimately economically or spiritually unhealthy) for a democratic society to batter down entire segments of the population whose minority status is built on cosmic inconsequentials--such as skin color or sexual practice between consenting adults--and especially to do so with the blessing of the law or via the tacit blessing that comes with the absence of legal protection.

The fact that legalized bigotry or the absence of protection certainly doesn't help a minority to pursue happiness isn't irrelevant or unimportant; but, it is not the final argument a progressive should make for progressive government policies or law.

The argument is more philosophical--even more biblical if that matters--it is the argument of "liberty and justice for all," the argument of Micah 6:8 even: Hear what is good and what the LORD requires of thee: but to do justly, and to love mercy, and to walk humbly with thy God.

It's about justice, and while conservatives often don't get that, it's also often the case that progressives don't get it either, and make the argument for progressive causes sound like a plea based on a right to personal fulfillment. (Yeah, good luck with that, by the way.) It's not about making someone feel warm and fuzzy in day-to-day life--about patting them on the back with a law. ("Good, fag, good Sambo, good Jew, atta boy! We affirm you!") And consider that in light of such a reality, both conservatives and perhaps especially progressives get sidetracked by irrelevant arguments. For instance, the argument about whether people are "born gay" or not actually doesn't matter in the debates about everything from gay marriage to housing protection for gay Americans; for at the end of the day, those debates oughtn't be about self-realization, but justice.
 

Few Americans have understood this better than the great civil rights leader, Martin Luther King, Jr. When he, standing in front of the Lincoln Memorial, articulated his dream, it was not a dream of happiness for a people, but JUSTICE for a people. When he correctly understood and articulated on August 28, 1963, that what was promised by America's Founders and has not been delivered, he didn't speak of the bank of happiness but the "bank of justice," not the security of happiness, but the "security of justice."

"Now is the time," he demanded, "for a sunlit path" not of happiness but justice.  It's a time, he said, "to make justice a reality for all of God's children."  And in invoking the prophet Amos that day, and stating what should be the qualifying condition of satisfaction, he demanded a day not when happiness but "JUSTICE rolls down like waters."

NH House smashes anti-gay marriage amendment (since the state already prohibits gay marriage)

From the AP:

On March 21 The New Hampshire House voted overwhelmingly Tuesday against a proposed amendment to the state constitution to ban gay marriage.

The late afternoon vote was 207-125.

The amendment would have defined marriage as the union of one woman and one man.

State law does not permit gays and lesbians to marry in New Hampshire, nor does the state recognize marriages and civil unions performed out of state.

Bush states rely most on fed'l gov't $

From Salon.com: Next time a self-proclaimed conservative starts talking or writing "about the virtues of personal responsibility and self-reliance," tell them about this week's study by the nonpartisan Tax Foundation, which shows that "red states...rely on the largess of the federal government."

The top seven charity cases -- and 13 of the top 15 -- are states that cast their votes for Bush in 2004. First in line for handouts is New Mexico, which scores $2 for every buck it sends to Washington, The rest of the top 15: Alaska -- thanks for the bridge, guys! -- West Virginia, Mississippi, North Dakota, Alabama, Virginia, Hawaii, Montana, South Dakota, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Louisiana, Kentucky and Maryland.

Wait, it gets better:

[W]hich states are the real bastions of up-by-your-bootstraps self-reliance and compassion for the least among us? Well, the top five giving states are ones that John Kerry carried in 2004: New Jersey -- which got 55 cents for every dollar it gave to Washington -- followed by Connecticut, New Hampshire, Minnesota and Illinois.

And California and New York? "They're eighth and ninth on the most-charitable list, getting back just 79 cents of each dollar they send to Washington."

Fighting bad policies is constructive.

One of the tasks of Isebrand.com is to revisit wisdom hidden in the background noise of the blogspheric past--either recent or ancient. You might have noticed the occasional post here beginning "A week ago today" or even "it's been a year since . . . "

In that vein, here's a revisitation-by-highlights of E. J. Dionne Jr.'s Washington Post column, "The Democrats' Real Problem," which true to national character was ignored by Americans in inverse proportion to the extent to which the text was plainly correct. (I think here of people scoffing more than 40 years ago when Gore Vidal both relentlessly invoked Eisenhower's "military-industrial complex" and predicted that Ronald Reagan would be president someday. Now, we have the documentary Why We Fight--also largely ignored--and already live in a post-Reagan world. Hopefully Vidal's dark visions of Kalki and Messiah remain fictional, not prescient.)

Dionne's wisdom: "Fighting bad policies is actually constructive;" nationwide disaffection with George W. Bush is just as important (if not more so) than a yet-to-be-fully formed Democratic vision to stand against the theo-neocon-oil party that has left America bankrupt, weak, Puritanical, judgmental, ill-informed, and fearful.

It is now an ingrained journalistic habit: After a period of bad news for President Bush, media outlets invariably devote time and space to "balancing" stories that all say more or less: "Yes, the Republicans are in trouble, but the Democrats have no alternatives, no plans," etc.
.....
[But the] architects of the 1994 "Republican revolution" [tell me that] the main contribution of the ["Contract With America"] was to give inexperienced Republican candidates something to say [after] the political tide started moving the GOP's way. [They insist] that it was disaffection with Bill Clinton, not the contract, that created the Republicans' opportunity.

The Democrats' real problem is that they have failed to show how their critique of the Republican status quo is the essential first step toward the alternative program they will owe the voters in the presidential year of 2008.

The cure for an arrogant government that doesn't take critics seriously is accountability. Divided government never looked so good.
.....
moderates and liberals alike are mystified by budget policies saddling our kids with debt tomorrow to pay for tax cuts for the wealthy today.
.....
[And while]Democrats have no good answer to Iraq,...neither does Bush, who started the war and should be held accountable for where we are now.
.....
Presidents deserve to be punished for insulting our intelligence.

Thus the shortcoming of Democratic leaders is not that they don't have a program but that they have not yet convinced opinion makers that fighting bad policies is actually constructive -- and that, between presidential elections, keeping matters from getting worse is sometimes the most positive alternative on offer.

Banning birth control

The importance of this chilling Salon article is probably inversely proportional to how much opposition organizing it prompts among Americans. It seems to me that there is an increasingly well-financed but barely-more-organized and only slightly-growing progressive minority--and not a critical mass of Americans in general (i.e., a swath of the population that includes self-proclaimed moderates or otherwise [irresponsibly] apolitical citizens)--who understand that the very notion of a ban on birth control
*is insidiously antithetical to a modern, civilized culture,
*is alarming in its relative viability (that it is being discussed at all), and
*is a reflection of an already 40-years-old Religious Right/Republican Party alliance successfully turning America from a secular experiment in representative democracy inspired by Enlightenment ideals to a theocracy like the Pilgrims coveted, like the Puritans in Salem had, and which our Founding Fathers expressly rejected by dismissing outright any ideas of creeds (and thus such things as the name "Jesus"), sectarian concepts of any kind, and the very notion of theologically-based governance from the bulk of discussions, the anticipatory documents (e.g., The Declaration of Independence), and the final document--the Constitution with the Bill of Rights--upon which The United States was to stand.

It can not be stated often enough that the secular nature of America's government was that which made it most remarkable. Horribly, that is the very thing under ruthless, sustained attack today and during the last 30 to 40 years. The true American spirit is being bled dry.

We have reached a point where theology--be it that which fuels the anti-birth control movement or that which fuels Republican foreign policy--trumps liberty, science, and health. That is a disaster! And it is a disaster that smolders as darkly as 9/11, Katrina, or the bungled Iraqi invasion with its crushing financial, human, diplomatic costs, because the Christianization of the American experiment is national in scope, multi-generational in consequence, and incalculably harmful to America's identity and character.

Still, the anti-birth-control movement's efforts are making a significant political impact: Supporters have pressured insurance companies to refuse coverage of contraception, lobbied for "conscience clause" laws to protect pharmacists from having to dispense birth control, and are redefining the very meaning of pregnancy to classify certain contraceptive methods as abortion. In increasing numbers, women and men opposed to contraception are marshaling health facts and figures to bolster their convictions that sex for anything but procreation is morally wrong and potentially deadly. Although its medical arguments are really just thinly veiled moral and religious arguments, using findings that are biased and unfounded, the rising anti-contraception movement, echoed by the [Roman] Catholic Church, is making significant inroads. Leaders of the pro-choice movement know it, are worried about it, and realize they can't take it lightly, as they mount their own strategies to battle it.

"It is very hard to awaken people to the threat," says Gloria Feldt, the former president of Planned Parenthood, "because who can believe that something so accessible can be at risk? But that's what [people] said when they started attacking Roe, and now look at how close we are to losing Roe."

Bush's war vs. our security, economic future, & health

Joe Conason, Salon.com, on the Republicans' ongoing war against our nation's future:

We are about to begin the fourth year of a terrible, bloody and expensive invasion of a crippled country that posed no threat to us at all -- a foolish adventure that we supposedly undertook to protect ourselves from weapons that we ought to have known did not exist. Yet during those three years of war, the same officials in the White House and Congress who insisted on spending hundreds of billions of dollars in Iraq and on tax cuts for the wealthiest citizens in America have refused to spend far smaller amounts that might begin to protect us from real dangers.

Six months after the invasion of Iraq came the discovery of the first confirmed case of "mad cow disease" on American soil.
.....
[But] the Bush administration -- with the usual collusion of the Republican Congress -- plans to reduce testing for the disease [to] less than one-tenth of 1 percent.
.....
[The avian] pandemic...whose conceivable cost may be measured in millions of lives and trillions of dollars, has...been known for at least three years. The government's own top experts have been urging the Bush administration to invest in vaccines and improvements in the public health infrastructure since 2002.
.....
[D]uring the Clinton presidency,...federal, state and local governments started to create stockpiles of medicine and equipment and perform disaster drills.

[But now, s]aving what are literally pennies compared with what we squander every month in Iraq, Republicans have insisted on trimming funding from public health budgets every year. In 2005, for example, they cut $105 million in aid to local public health agencies.... There is still no real national plan to deal with a pandemic, and the official in charge of handling the problem -- a crony of former HHS Secretary Tommy Thompson -- has just resigned.

The World Bank estimates that the first year of a flu pandemic would cause at least $800 billion in global economic losses
.....
Lavishing billions on war (and war profiteers) while shortchanging health is right-wing idiocy at its worst and most destructive -- and we may soon pay an intolerably high price for it.

Hardball sucks

Via AMERICAblog, comes yet another invaluable confirmation from Media Matters (do the MM folks ever stop?! no, thank God!) of what commonsense already had told viewers of Hardball with Chris Matthews (aka, CHRIS MATTHEWS!!!!), which is that the show has a conservative bias, like most of the media.

CHRIS MATTHEWS!!!!, who I think is deaf, has always annoyed me because he doesn't speak, he shouts; he bellows like a wounded hippo. I watched CHRIS MATTHEWS!!!! once or twice years ago, and haven't watched him since. Did the parents of CHRIS MATTHEWS!!!! used to beat him with a megaphone, and his current vocal condition the playing out of some weird sort of repression?

Perhaps: hippo shout = small penis.