Musings

I have made various posts that bitch and moan about politics and politicians. I thought I had finally, somehow, elevated myself above the fray, but upon reading the following quotation sent to me by my older and wiser cousin, I nearly broke down and wept:

"The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance."

Cicero 55 BC

As my good Opera friend Angeliki reminded me, today is my birthday, and now I am officially a dirty old man, excused by society from all sorts of sanctionable activities, which I may or may not engage in. My new excuses include, 'I forgot', 'My glasses steam up (when I ogle the ladies) because of my high blood pressure', and the best one, ‘I’m too old to fight sonny, so I’m just going to shoot you between the eyes’.

And, I get to make one last (I hope) political rant:

The country that I have known and loved most of my life is becoming unrecognizable. It is due to the excesses of politics and politicians who seem to have an unhealthy disregard for the provisions of our Constitution and Bill of Rights. And, my fellow citizens have rushed willy-nilly to embrace the new ‘Savior-based economy’. Sadly, they are lacking the education and wisdom to deal with the issues intelligently, and largely depend on ‘Pundits’ and clergymen to do their thinking for them.

But then, this has been the case since the days that humans first formed societies out of gatherings of nuclear families. Nothing seems to change, and as time goes on, we burden ourselves with chains that exist only in our own minds. I came across a magnificent painting, rich in allegory, which seems to sum up our past and present condition:



It will surprise many to learn that the United States was not established as a ‘Democracy’. The fact is, most of our founding fathers were pagans, and went to great lengths to separate church and state, but one, James Madison, lobbied hard for it to be organized as a ‘Republic’, because he feared the results of direct voting by the citizens as is required in a participatory democracy. This was codified in the 4th article of the Constitution.

So, instead of a democracy, we have a republic in which representatives write the laws and operate the government. Now, this would be an abhorrent situation to an educated general population of patriots, but it is what we have. We are still a long ways from evolving into a participatory democracy, although with modern electronics and the free Internet, we could set up a good one tomorrow.

No, the U.S. wasn't perfect then and it is not perfect now. Democracy is a moving target, changing over time. But obviously we've done some things right. No other nation has influenced as many other nations since the days of the Roman Empire. No other nation has advanced the sciences and the arts as much as the U.S. has. And no other nation has yet moved beyond superpower status to a potential global government.

And yet, with the Savior-based economy, we are giving up much of what our fathers and forefathers achieved, and we are spilling the blood of our children in shooting wars instead of isolating and using the power of high technology, finance, and commerce to dominate and control the miscreants that have hijacked entire countries.

I’m sure that a world government, if it is ever constituted, will at first take the form of a republic, and will endure in that form until the entire population of the world is educated enough and smart enough to evolve it into the real deal. This may well take several lifetimes to accomplish, but it is a worthy goal.