Solitaire

Not much new has happened; I'm still stuck at my old job, but I did get out of my rut yesterday and started writing some pulpy science fiction for Nanowrimo. Too late of a start, though, I doubt i'll finish the 50,000 words by the end of the month; you've really got to start with your idea on the first day if you want to make that rate. Hopefully I'll get back in the swing of writing fiction and nonfiction again soon.

I've been reconsidering going back to school for political science (again) with a minor or double major in english, and maybe this time not doing a mountain of drugs and dropping out. The main problem with that plan is the money issue, and I need to be in a non-community college to be even remotely challenged by the program i'm in. I thought I'd never want to go back to VCU, but I'm rethinking that. Also, I think I'm just going to have to put the visual arts aside for a while; for one thing, the house I live in now doesn't have any convenient studio space that I can splatter paint everywhere in, for another it's just too much on my plate. IF I can make myself stick to just writing and reading in my spare time, I should be able to get a freelancing job soon, I think. I'm really rusty, as this post will probably display, but grammar, etc., supposedly comes back fast.

I have started reading books again, which is nice; my concentration seems to be improving. Hopefully this means i'll get through the mountain of tomes I amassed over the past few years. Lately i've read the Dhammapada (sayings of the Buddha) and The Art of War (Sun Tzu), as well as "On Empire" by Eric Hobsbawm. I started reading The Gunslinger by Stephen King at the suggestion of a friend, and discovered something odd-rough prose. In a bestselling author's work. (Can't say he doesn't warn the reader in the introduction about the book's flaws, though). Not that my technique is up to par, especially not now.

I've decided to just ditch as many of my political notions as possible after reading "On Empire"; it's probably the first non-collapse/peak oil political writing i've read in years, and it caused me to see a lot of gaps and rough spots in my thinking. I intend to just get back up to date on current affairs and start reading a little more diverse range of perspectives, and maybe rebuild my political thinking from scratch if that's really doable. I'm really out of touch with the news, but I think i've gotten to where it won't drive me nuts to start reading it again (or about current affairs, for that matter).

Hopefully I'll be able to comment and catch up on posts soon, and I might be writing little essays again. For right now i'm going to sleep; my work week just ended.

Something that skips gaily under the radar, and needs more research on my part, are Think Tanks. My personal suspicion is that the majority of them are privately funded 'non-profit' propaganda organs. Wikipedia has, kindly enough, a list of all of them, as well as an article on them. They're nestled next to PACs, political action committees, and barely get more than a nod of the hat deep, deep inside of thick, monotonously written comparative politics textbooks.

What I want to say, and need to verify, is that they create the basic arguments-the garbage ones-that pass for truth in so many sectors of American society. They've often got official sounding names and folks with science degrees telling you that Global Warming's a myth, etc., kinda like those medicine ads with actors dressed up as doctors telling you about the medicine. These folks, like their actor counterparts, take home piles of cash for what they do, which is why i'm going to look into it (and you should too).

Wikipedia article on think tanks:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Think_tanks
List of think tanks in the US:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_think_tanks_in_the_United_States
List by country:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_think_tanks

There's problems with the wikipedia article. All the more reason for research. More later.

Today we're going to talk a little about a topic where again, the language is being butchered in the name of eradicating a possible system that 'doesn't work'. The term getting ditched, because it 'doesn't work', is "Confederacy". Instead it's been replaced with Federalism, and the two are, frankly, quite, quite different though similar.

The four basic types in this discussion will be the Unitary State (the simplest), the Federation, the Confederacy, and the Empire (probably the most complicated-and though it's taboo to say so and not politically correct, still alive and kicking).

Where they all differ is in how the distribution of power is set up over geographic areas. In the United States, we have domestically-that's another word for locally-a federal system with a sort of shadowy imperial foreign policy. We are effectively an empire, and at that, one that's in terrible danger of facing the fate of all the empires of the past if we don't stop BEING one. But that's a topic for another essay.

Getting back on topic, a unitary state is the simplest. There's a center of power, usually a capital city where the government is centered-the parliament, the royal palace, the emperor's palace-or in America, Washington DC, where we've got the Supreme Court, Congress, and the White House, the three branches (executive, legislative, judicial) that form our government. In a Unitary state, basically whatever is within the borders of the state answers, politically, to that center and that center alone, or if there's some local distribution of power, it's fairly negligible. The strengths of it are top down decision making without discussion; the weakness is that it's ineffective for a broad landmass (like, for instance , the USA).

Second system is federal, where several states or substate geographic areas (in the US, this is what we have, divided into federal, state, and local divisions). Basically you have multiple centers of power, with the central one dominant, but still ceding a bit of power to the substate regions (in the US, we call them states. In other states, they can be provinces, territories, districts, whatever-and to make things more complicated, the US in the past has been made up of more than just states, and still is.) It's a fairly effective system, although like all things, it needs maintenance to keep running. With it, you get a nice, effective, and efficient power structure that maintains some top down power while still being able to hand down some to the smaller subunits of the state-in a perfect world, stuff that doesn't really matter much or need to be made mandatory for the whole region.

Third, we're going to cover confederacy. It's a rare form that has existed (if memory doesn't fail me, the Iroqoius had a confederacy that worked out-the Commonwealth of Independent States is a Russia/former soviet union confederacy still around, and there's the one we all know about-the South back when it seceded in the mid 1800's). In a confederacy, you've got the same division as a federation, however-the key difference is that the local units get stuck with more power than the central power area, the capital. This is generally not favorable to people who want everyone on the same page and under the same legal setup. It allows for greater local power in decision making, however, with the substate (actually state) units making more decisions than the central government. While a weaker structure than a federation, I think it allows for greater freedom. History teachers have a funny way of saying "This doesn't work" the way they say everything but capitalism "Doesn't work" and offer little if any arguments to back up the assertion.

Finally there's empire, in which you've got domestically any of the above, but in the foreign sphere of things, there's definitely something like power centers in OTHER regions, be they state or non-state, abroad-where effectively, the empire maintains a certain amount of control, generally with military force, with the intent of strengthening the domestic state's monetary and power status. They can be totally subjugated states or willing participants, but generally speaking the trend is to take over to make the homeland's situation beneficial at the expense of the colony regions and whoever lived there historically.

I'd personally be a fan of shutting down our empire and switching to a more confederate system, frankly because there's strong regional differences in people's opinion making. Although it's not the only option, I think it'd allow for a more democratic system and get people more involved knowing they don't have to go through the standard federal process of getting people all on the same page to accomplish anything. But anyhow, look at the options and think about them.

A note-I wrote this essay a long time ago, and just found out that there's another distribution type called a Federacy. The wikipedia article is here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federacy

This one's gonna be another mini-lecture. Like the one on country, nation, and state, i'm going to try to get into the mire and extract the three from one another. The reason behind this is that while I think patriotism is a good thing, it often gets confused with nationalism and chauvinism, and used to describe an attitude better described with the latter two.

Alright, the boring part. Definitions. Patriotism: devoted love, support, and defense of one's country; Love of and devotion to one's country.; love of country and willingness to sacrifice for it. Let's look at that. I'm noticing in the dictionary, the first one was actually followed by 'national loyalty', which I think is innaccurate. I think the overriding theme of patriotism is a love of one's country-and what i'm going to be getting at, is that this is more than just simplistic flag waving, ribbons on the back of cars, and "Support our troops" type slogans and jingoism. I'll come back to that, but first we need to define Chauvinism and Nationalism.

Starting with nationalism, I think we can get to the root of some confusion. The term is usually associated with the situation in Europe prior to and during the first and second world wars. Essentially you had a bunch of independent states, some of them empires or with imperial ambitions, jockeying to be at the top of the game and rule the world-a sort of group egoism was at play, where the prevalent notion was that you take care of you and yours at whatever cost, no matter how moral or immoral. It led to two of the most devastating conflicts in history. Going back to the cultural definition of nation, we also see that nationalism can be the aspiration for national independence (as in the American Revolution, when you had two seperate cultural entities waging it out), which to me can be a good thing. But more often, the notion is-i'm using the American Heritage dictionary here-"Devotion to the interests or culture of one's nation.
The belief that nations will benefit from acting independently rather than collectively, emphasizing national rather than international goals." It's group egoism, egoism being an ethical theory treating self-interest as the foundation of morality. At, I will point this out, everyone else's expense.

Now that nationalism's been covered, we'll get to chauvinism. From wikipedia, here's a good root definition: "blind and unquestioned zealous devotion to one's country [or other group of reference]". It comes from a semi-mythological bonapartist (a loyalist to Napoleon, even after he went into exile) named Chauvin, who was legendary for, ah...the above. Despite being wounded and crippled.

Why is knowing the difference between the three at all important? Because in America, I think in power, we have a bunch of nationalists ruling the scene, and in the general population, we've got them using chauvinistic propaganda, both of which are detrimental to patriotism and the good of the country we live in. Depending on your thoughts, i'm going to go into more depth on what I think patriotism really is, and a bit about love of country and love of society.

All I'm hoping, right now, is that some gears and cogs are turning in your head, and you're thinking about the three terms now as independent of one another (and probably thinking about the new, almost dead word 'chauvinism'). Largely because I think this is a key to understanding some of the greater trends going on in the nation at the moment.

More: http://www.wisdomquotes.com/cat_patriotism.html

"Creativity likes constraints and specifics." - Bert Dodson

What I want to do is summarize the current political situation in America. Exactly where i'm supposed to start is beyond me, so I'll go with the gestalt as I see it.

Capitalism is dying the way communism did. The environment is trashed. Resources are being depleted rapidly, and we need a new type of economy that keeps all of the above in mind. Meanwhile, we're seeing increasingly petty squabbles over cultural issues-abortion, gay rights, gun rights-which replaced the economy for decades in terms of significance to voters-until recently, with the stock market showing off bipolar tendencies and the price of oil dramatically increasing. Terrorism, for its part, is being used as the ultimate distraction to domestic woes, with incredible success (it's always been a threat-my take on it is that it's being dealt with very, very poorly by incompetents, who're also taking advantage of the attacks). At the same time, a lot of issues are being totally sidelined and ignored, and mainstream media has yet to even pick up on them, such as the slow but steady slouching towards a police state and the corporate/government lines blurring to obscurity. The situation calls for some pretty radical activism and political involvement if we don't want to see ourselves stumbling blindly into a new dark age. There's more, and I can't think of it right now.

In the good news, we did have the party of dirty tricks thrown out of office just recently. So there is hope.

The above is a pretty big series of big assertions with no evidence provided (yet). I'm aware of this. I won't get to any of that in this post, but it'll come up later, as well as some of my theories as to why this is happening, what can be done, and what i'll be doing to (hopefully) help with this blog.

But back on topic-direction. Politically, anyway, this blog is going to include essays and my attempts to simplify and bring clarity to numerous issues. I'm going to discuss concepts like nationalism, patriotism, and chauvinism-their differences, particularly, and the dramatic misuse of them in contemporary talk-rebellion and conformity, to name another-basically, I'll attempt to get rid of some of the confusion that would lead people to, say, read two paragraphs above, scream their heads off about America haters without bothering to consider that the writer in question mind actually care about his country and dislike where it's headed. If you are screaming, I can recommend some breathing exercises. Bear with me for a while. On top of all that, I'm going to make an effort to same something NEW in my posts, as opposed to repetition of things already being said. This is easier said than done.

Anyway, i've been out of the essay game (been writing fiction steadily instead for about a year now) and the gears in my head are grinding together and making a lot of noise, so i'll stop and suggest anyone who wants a very accurate analysis of the current situation go to the Archdruid Report in my links to the right. If you think the idea of an archdruid is silly, I invite you to go over there and get your intellect smacked to the ground. Believe me. At least humor me. And the good Mr. Greer.