I was not quite 30 when George W. Bush won the Republican nomination for president of the United States of America. At the time, I told my soon to be wife that if he was elected I would ignore domestic politics for the duration of his presidency. The overwhelming urge to fight the Bush dynasty almost overcame me in the early 90s, as I became aware of things like the Council on Foreign Relations, the Tri-Lateral Commission and Skull and Bones.
I was much younger then. I'm older than that now. I don't really believe all that one world conspiracy crap that people spout off about. I still believe that America stands for freedom and justice. But sometimes I think it is all a lie and that America really stands for corporate power. I sometimes think that Hamilton succeeded in destroying democracy in this country, replacing it with de facto fascism wrapped in a nice bow for the masses to believe that when they go vote they actually influence policy.
I go back and forth a lot. Right now I'm just not sure where I stand.
I used to be real comfortable with the morals I was imbued with from my ancestors. Christianity runs strong in my family tree, mixed with some street wise marriages that left me again split against myself. Two sets of Christian leaders hang high several branches up, one on my dad's mothers side, the other on my maternal grandmother's side. But then both my grandfathers were hard drinking, hard working, hard living men, one a US Marine poised in the Solomons for the invasion of Japan that August day they dropped the first nuclear bomb. My dad’s dad was almost 30 on Dec. 7, 1941 and had a couple of kids, so he didn’t serve in WW2.
He did, however, serve up regular beatings on my grandmother and others, so I’ve been told, because he was a raging, violent alcoholic. I think that hit my dad hard, being the fifth of six children, and the first boy of the lot. By the time I came along, Papa Sykes was a mere shadow of his former self, and I remember him as a kind, gentle old man with big hands and a big heart who told me to fear the Lord, recognize a curve ball and keep my nose clean.
So that’s my understanding of morality. Love the lord. As I said, I’ve always been comfortable with the morality handed to me. I’ve gone out and questioned it and sought to explore every other type of morality I could, experiencing the ones I felt at ease with and running from that which I was unwilling to accept.
Which brings me back somewhat to George W. Bush and domestic policy and the meaning of America.
I’m still not sure what America is. Is it a great experiment in democracy? Is it a market driven release valve for the outcasts of the world to find a place to make a home and find prosperity? What moral questions and dichotomies come standard issue with the essence of America?
Is there a moral standard, or is do what thou whilst the whole of the law? Do our moral foundations have any relevance today in the face of life changing information technology, or are they as outdated as the typewriter and the telegraph?
At center, I believe America is a place where each can find his own, and I’m willing to live and let live. But I open my senses to what our culture has to offer and I take in the stench of self aggrandizement. I see the retreat of commonality. I hear the subsonic shift of centuries of western morals being pulled in a dozen different directions and I feel my feet hesitate with uncertainty about the ground I’m standing on.
It doesn’t just stop with the sex drenched media that leaves nothing to the imagination, or the push by homosexuals to redefine traditional values to fit their whim. It goes beyond corporate scandals like Enron and Tyco, past huckster preachers who scam money from the sick and the elderly, passes by con men who stop by my house to give me a story about their broke down car and a trip from South Carolina to Michigan.
It goes further, to overt decapitations of decent public servants like former Greensboro Chief of Police David Wray, a man who was within a whisker of connecting the dots of vast criminality amongst police officers, lawyers and shuck and jive politicians when a city hall power play fell into the lap of the conspiracy’s puppet masters.
It extends to double talk politicians who have a history of crossing paths with grafters looking to buy power and purchase influence to clear a path for their own interests.
It hits at the heart of our fucked up War in Iraq where we have men and women dying and being maimed in the name of giving freedom to a set of people who don’t understand the concept, don’t want the concept and will absolutely hand power to an imam or a machete wielding demagogue the first chance they get.
It reaches right into my heart and rips out hope when an ignorant, hateful redneck can use his talent and energy to lie and twist facts and spread his disease with the power of technology, while I am subjected to unyielding double jeopardy for a wrong I made right more than five years before I moved to his speck of existence.
It causes me to shudder with fear when I see a young man subjected to police brutality for asking a question and daring to resist an abuse of police power.
What are we? Why are we? Is this what the market has to offer, non-stop entertainment, surfeit of first thought action, access to anything, anytime, anywhere?
Again, I come back to square. Sept. 11, 2001 jolted me out of my somnolence. George Bush became the father of a rattled nation, well, after he reemerged from hiding and took the reins back from Guiliani. And he’s fucked it up in a bad way.
We’re at each others throats over this or that. Technology provides for non-stop conversation, with the noise level ever increasing as reason fights to stay afloat in a tidal wave of emotion. When Ashcroft covered up the statue of justice because of her bare breasts, I knew the country was in trouble. When a hero and leader like Colin Powell was run out of the administration, it was down hill from there.
See, Bush has hurt the GOP so much, that a Democrat is a shoo-in for 2008, unless of course it is Mrs. Clinton, in which case we will have a right wing paranoia field day to match the lefty gnashing of teeth we’ve seen since the tax cuts of 2001. But the Republicans currently have no candidate that can beat Clinton on merit. Guiliani-Clinton will be a Gangs of New York style bloodletting that will do nothing to move us forward.
It’s dark inside. Sometimes I need to open the door and let in some light.
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