political tuppence
Over the few weeks I've been back in America, I've been trying to take stock of the political situation here. When I left for Thailand things were feeling pretty stuck, like there was no real organized resistance to the military-industrial powers-that-be. I think when Obama came into office there was some hope that things would change in a positive direction, or that the rate of change in a negative direction would be slowed, or that the rate of acceleration in a negative direction would be reduced. (Someone please express this using calculus). At least two of the Western monks, including myself, at my monastery back in Thailand read Obama's bio "Dreams from my Father", and I confess, in embarrassed retrospect to having experienced some mild, tentative hopeful feelings upon reading it and knowing he was the president.
So, arriving back one of the first exciting facts I learn is that Obama can kill me at a whim, anywhere in the world, with an unmanned robotic drone! Boy, doesn't that make me feel secure in my freedom as an American citizen!
So, anyway, I am, of course, thoroughly disillusioned with Obama. There has been no change of course.
I met an old friend of mine who is from India and has been working at the World Bank, roughly for as long as I've been at the monastery. We had a good conversation about the financial crisis as he knows people who were working at Goldman-Sachs while the crisis was brewing. He is now feeling disillusioned with the global development [scene? business? industry?] and alarmed at the insane self-serving behavior of the people in the finance industry. In the course of talking with him I mentioned that "I'm rather partial to Ron Paul." He said, "me too."
So, thing one that is a sign of people waking up is the Ron Paul campaign. I found a pretty good article addressed to "progressive" Obama supporters, entitled Ron Paul and the Myth of the Lesser Evil. Here's a quote:
"It’s perfectly rational and reasonable for progressives to decide that the evils of their candidate are outweighed by the evils of the GOP candidate, whether Ron Paul or anyone else. An honest line of reasoning in this regard would go as follows:
Yes, I’m willing to continue to have Muslim children slaughtered by covert drones and cluster bombs, and America’s minorities imprisoned by the hundreds of thousands for no good reason, and the CIA able to run rampant with no checks or transparency, and privacy eroded further by the unchecked Surveillance State, and American citizens targeted by the President for assassination with no due process, and whistleblowers threatened with life imprisonment for “espionage,” and the Fed able to dole out trillions to bankers in secret, and a substantially higher risk of war with Iran (fought by the U.S. or by Israel with U.S. support) in exchange for less severe cuts to Social Security, Medicare and other entitlement programs, the preservation of the Education and Energy Departments, more stringent environmental regulations, broader health care coverage, defense of reproductive rights for women, stronger enforcement of civil rights for America’s minorities, a President with no associations with racist views in a newsletter, and a more progressive Supreme Court."
I think Ron Paul has been willing to speak the truth about how bad things are these days, and I agree with his stance on what I regard to be the most important political issues of our time.
Thing two is the Occupy movement. My father paraphrased Slavoj Žižek as saying "The taboo against saying 'We no longer live in the best of all possible worlds' has been broken by the Occupy Movement." Here is a quote from his Speech at Occupy Wall Street:
"So what are we doing here? Let me tell you a wonderful, old joke from Communist times. A guy was sent from East Germany to work in Siberia. He knew his mail would be read by censors, so he told his friends: 'Let’s establish a code. If a letter you get from me is written in blue ink, it is true what I say. If it is written in red ink, it is false.' After a month, his friends get the first letter. Everything is in blue. It says, this letter: 'Everything is wonderful here. Stores are full of good food. Movie theatres show good films from the west. Apartments are large and luxurious. The only thing you cannot buy is red ink.' This is how we live. We have all the freedoms we want. But what we are missing is red ink: the language to articulate our non-freedom. The way we are taught to speak about freedom-war on terror and so on-falsifies freedom. And this is what you are doing here. You are giving all of us red ink."
I'm not a political visionary, but I think there are legitimate questions as to what these people could be doing to be more pragmatic and organized in the effort to take power. That being said, I think the Occupy movement and the Paul campaign are signs that more people out there are waking up to what's really going on, as are the efforts on the part of the mainstream media to dismiss them.
So, arriving back one of the first exciting facts I learn is that Obama can kill me at a whim, anywhere in the world, with an unmanned robotic drone! Boy, doesn't that make me feel secure in my freedom as an American citizen!
So, anyway, I am, of course, thoroughly disillusioned with Obama. There has been no change of course.
I met an old friend of mine who is from India and has been working at the World Bank, roughly for as long as I've been at the monastery. We had a good conversation about the financial crisis as he knows people who were working at Goldman-Sachs while the crisis was brewing. He is now feeling disillusioned with the global development [scene? business? industry?] and alarmed at the insane self-serving behavior of the people in the finance industry. In the course of talking with him I mentioned that "I'm rather partial to Ron Paul." He said, "me too."
So, thing one that is a sign of people waking up is the Ron Paul campaign. I found a pretty good article addressed to "progressive" Obama supporters, entitled Ron Paul and the Myth of the Lesser Evil. Here's a quote:
"It’s perfectly rational and reasonable for progressives to decide that the evils of their candidate are outweighed by the evils of the GOP candidate, whether Ron Paul or anyone else. An honest line of reasoning in this regard would go as follows:
Yes, I’m willing to continue to have Muslim children slaughtered by covert drones and cluster bombs, and America’s minorities imprisoned by the hundreds of thousands for no good reason, and the CIA able to run rampant with no checks or transparency, and privacy eroded further by the unchecked Surveillance State, and American citizens targeted by the President for assassination with no due process, and whistleblowers threatened with life imprisonment for “espionage,” and the Fed able to dole out trillions to bankers in secret, and a substantially higher risk of war with Iran (fought by the U.S. or by Israel with U.S. support) in exchange for less severe cuts to Social Security, Medicare and other entitlement programs, the preservation of the Education and Energy Departments, more stringent environmental regulations, broader health care coverage, defense of reproductive rights for women, stronger enforcement of civil rights for America’s minorities, a President with no associations with racist views in a newsletter, and a more progressive Supreme Court."
I think Ron Paul has been willing to speak the truth about how bad things are these days, and I agree with his stance on what I regard to be the most important political issues of our time.
Thing two is the Occupy movement. My father paraphrased Slavoj Žižek as saying "The taboo against saying 'We no longer live in the best of all possible worlds' has been broken by the Occupy Movement." Here is a quote from his Speech at Occupy Wall Street:
"So what are we doing here? Let me tell you a wonderful, old joke from Communist times. A guy was sent from East Germany to work in Siberia. He knew his mail would be read by censors, so he told his friends: 'Let’s establish a code. If a letter you get from me is written in blue ink, it is true what I say. If it is written in red ink, it is false.' After a month, his friends get the first letter. Everything is in blue. It says, this letter: 'Everything is wonderful here. Stores are full of good food. Movie theatres show good films from the west. Apartments are large and luxurious. The only thing you cannot buy is red ink.' This is how we live. We have all the freedoms we want. But what we are missing is red ink: the language to articulate our non-freedom. The way we are taught to speak about freedom-war on terror and so on-falsifies freedom. And this is what you are doing here. You are giving all of us red ink."
I'm not a political visionary, but I think there are legitimate questions as to what these people could be doing to be more pragmatic and organized in the effort to take power. That being said, I think the Occupy movement and the Paul campaign are signs that more people out there are waking up to what's really going on, as are the efforts on the part of the mainstream media to dismiss them.