The Conservative Brotherhood

On one of the Sunday news shows a couple of reporters explained why they felt the civil and legal actions against Goldman Sachs were questionable. Apart from various perceived technical flaws in the charges, they felt the dire and largely misunderstood “financial meltdown” unreasonably sponsored this ill- conceived, knee-jerk finger pointing, and undeserved demonization of Wall Street titans.

The defense of Goldman Sachs commenced in the argument that they (Sachs) were only “making a market”; that is, simply bringing together a seller and a buyer. Under this scenario it was submitted that Goldman Sachs neither offered nor incurred any fiduciary responsibility to either party. And, after the market was “made”, as denoted by the completed sale between seller and buyer, any of the parties to the transaction could subsequently act in their own interests and make any speculations about the future disposition of the transacted financial instrument, by way of insurance or any other method, as they saw fit. This, it was inferred, is archetypal specialized knowledge and procedure that laypersons are unlikely to be familiar with and therefore their visceral reaction to the ugly appearance of the transaction is prejudiced by ignorance of sophisticated business practices. The modus operandi that resulted in the gross enrichment of one party and the bankruptcy of the other, it is asserted, is the normal verity of risk, and are simply one capitalist guessing right and the other guessing wrong, and do not signify any legal or ethical violation that should arouse any governmental or regulatory intervention. There is a circumscribed legitimate sphere for this attitude, but as regards this exemplar, I believe the government has a necessary and activist role to play.

The big controversy today in the black political blogosphere is race. Many say the race card is being dealt from the bottom of the deck. However, everyone disagrees about who is doing the dealing. There are those accused of mind-less identification with the Democratic Party and its supposedly aberrant and racially paternalistic agenda: a destructive drug made more addictive by a black President. This is reciprocated by the accusation that others are grossly over-compensating in their display of intellectual and cultural independence by donning lenses so rosy they can’t see the difference between a skinhead and Montel Williams. Both cantankerous arguments are cloaked in the guises of Conservatism and Liberalism. Is this a division 13% of the population can afford to have?

Years ago I had a mindless job and was essentially living a mindless life. I have no credentials to give me entre into the circle of decision makers, and I, like a lot of other people, didn’t think I had the right to credit my own thoughts and opinions. At the time conservatives were selling themselves as the party of ideas, and I suppose I was looking for something. After the initial courtship and infatuation with new-ness, the veil was slowly lifted and I was confronted with reality. Just because some people feel they are expressing conservative thought doesn’t mean their thoughts arise from thinking. In fact I have discovered very few have ideas of their own. They are content to be dispensers of the party line, no matter how ludicrous the line. Both Conservatives and Liberals (at least the blogger class) say such ridiculous things about each other it sometimes makes me wonder if I am the victim of a sick joke. I often find myself shaking my head in disbelief at the stupid things supposedly intelligent and educated people say to gain an inch of political advantage. As a case in point I offer the blog immediately below this entry. It is called, “Darwin’s Racists”, and is offered by Cobb. Cobb must have gotten up on the wrong side of the bed or sipped on some tainted moonshine to choose to make this effort one of his infrequent contributions to this site. I call attention to it because in the years I have been familiar with Cobb’s writings he has displayed episodes of lucidity, which makes me wonder, on this occasion, if rationality has abandoned him, or he has abandoned rationality. What else can you make of the statement, “Democrats avoid rational thought”? Is such a pronouncement itself indicative of “rational thought”? Or is it more representative of seething anger and untutored emotions? It seems to me he has strayed into the realm of angry, irrational ideology. Scroll down and read it for yourself.

LEFT INSULTS BLACK AMERICANS
by Sharon Sebastian - Website: www.DarwinsRacists.com

Black Americans should be outraged. The affront by the liberal-left against American citizens who are black is reaching new heights. The pattern is obvious. When liberal Democrats cannot debate or win a policy argument, they play their last vestige of hope - the race-card. Today, the political stakes are so high for some Democrats that they are willing to divide us as a nation and as a people.

When there is panic in the liberal ranks, like clockwork, the ginning-up of racial dissention soon follows. In an effort to counter a growing national support for the Tea Party, Democrats are slandering patriotic Americans as "racists." Black Americans should be outraged that once again liberals are portraying them as being an easily agitated "bundle of emotions" without brains enough to see through the left's political manipulation. For decades, liberals have conveyed the message that American Blacks are driven by emotion, not intelligence and can be flicked on-and-off like a switch just by throwing around the term racist.

It may not surprise you to hear me say I think Rush Limbaugh’s dogmatism is passé. I have no personal animosity towards the man, and years ago he was my drive time radio on the way to work. But, the world has turned. It happens. He is set in his ways and beliefs, and he has established a massive audience, which like an ocean liner is hard to turn once a course has been set. He is psychologically and contractually typecast, and in his business deviation is death.

Yesterday I read an article by Mr. Limbaugh entitled, “Liberals and the Violence Card”. It was the normal and predictable tit for tat among Republicans and Democrats, with the tired major theme being that one group’s philosophy and policies are more hypocritical than the other’s. In other words, it was probably very influential, and at the same time meaningless. Turn the hour glass over and the sand runs the other way. But I won’t belabor the obvious. I will however challenge Mr. Limbaugh on a particular statement. He faults the present administration with, “treating our allies as enemies, and treating our enemies as allies”. This of course refers to the bugaboo of Israel.

Reading articles referencing Israel’s sixty-second birthday I was reminded of the continuity of foolishness that is our (U.S.) foreign policy. If ever history gives a signal to re-adjust our geo-political and diplomatic stances, now is the time. There are many reasons, but primary is the fact a modification recognizing twenty-first century reality is necessary. Decades old agreements reflecting a geo-political world rendered obsolete even by cartographic standards, should be reconsidered and renegotiated so our national interests may rest on a contemporary foundation, rather than on the shifting sands of the unrewarded desires of the past. The affective values of the objectives of forty or fifty years ago have generationally depreciated; remaining visions of remote, unattainable aspirations. We seem imprisoned and mechanically doomed to attempt to assuage the aches, anxieties, and phantasmagorical dreams of past and passing generations, to the detriment of unscarred new cohorts naturally born in innocence and the possibility of peace. The proper resolution of the priority of the past or the present, for people and nations, is the first step towards a successful future. Imprudent devotion and loyalty to flawed paradigms, and the endeavor to make a virtue of foolish consistency, have not proven to be rational or helpful policy in the pursuit of a just peace. Rather we have become hostage to the recalcitrance of both friend and foe. It is time to reconsider the past, the present, and the future.

I am not motivated by my understanding of conservatism to take up arms against government in protest of the health care bill. I would be more inclined to succumb to my fear of militarism and its industrial complex if seeking to find some danger to oppose and end. The extractions of freedom, peaceful coexistence, pursuit of happiness, and social wealth from the context of American life envisioned in our founding philosophy are more pronounced and enduring from that quarter than the imposition of universal health care. In fact, I think it is too simplistic and intellectually deceptive to debate whether health reform, as formulated, is constitutionally seditious. Just as the Bill of Rights elevated the Constitution beyond a simple contract of political organization, we must take our considerations of health care to a plane above simple statutes, regulations, and taxes. It is a question of what unalienable rights can organized and cooperative society, by its own designs, desires, and efforts, write upon the residual tabula rasa of the natural world. Is health care a civil right? That is the question society must ask and answer. The example of preceding generations should inspire insouciance rather than anger or fear of lengthening the scroll. Or so the trajectory of our history had previously suggested.

Today is the seventh anniversary of the invasion of Iraq. I had expected ebullient progress reports from the war's backers. I had expected a reaffirmation of the goals and raison d'etre for the invasion. I had expected a recital of justification from this or that book, commentary, or blog. I had expected proxy patriotism embedded in the bodybags of slain soldiers eternally divorced from absent WMD. I had expected a recapitulation of the wonders of American violence and how it remarkably engenders peace in it's round-about way. I had expected a celebration properly instructing tomorrow's troops in the propagation of democracy. I didn't expect silence. I didn't expect forgetfullness or disinterest sublimated to the other March Madness. Christian, permanent, unending warfare, understood and accepted as easily as engorged Wall Street bonuses. Martial ideology as autopilot. Patriotism as perverted reality. Massive military spending accelerating as domestic society dies, with no mathematical or intellectual accounting intruding on our fabricated insecurity.

The tumultuous silence I hear regarding the recent Supreme Court decision leads me to believe the non-response indicates agreement with its meaning and result. There hasn’t been any shyness of expression on other court decisions equally or less controversial. In fact some have generated enthusiastic dialogue reminiscent of a first year law class. But not this one, as poignant its implications for the practice of democracy may be.

When I put this together with recent questionable actions taken by the government in the affair of the bank bailout and subsequent inability to regulate or re-regulate what seems to me to be immoral capitalism and indefensible greed, I am reminded of past warnings from familiar patriots. Granted these opinions are from perpetually shrinking times when the citizenry identified its own interests as made up of important individual units rather than as the dependent collective fodder of corporations and giant institutions that by proxy subsume the interests of individual citizens to their own. But I will let the words clarify themselves.

The events in Haiti are a good laboratory to examine the notions and conceptions, which especially black Americans, hold or aspire too. On many sites I have read commentary where it seemed the primary goal was to measure, against each other, the profundity of knowledge of the esoterica of Haitian history. There is the pedantic debate on the causes of Haitian poverty; which would seem a premature and un-helpful distraction at this moment of extreme humanitarian crisis. But, this tendency is understandable from those warm and well-fed in America. A famous economist has alluded to Haiti’s “self-inflicted” poverty; as if this is a state of existence metastasized from ignorant or corrupt Haitian economic mentality, and has been idiotically chosen as their cultural identity. Others have suggested the heaven or hell of Haitian life is relative to the position of actionable principles of Haitian society evincing our particularly American number line, giving positive or negative value to “left” or “right” political ideology. What is most in evidence is the almost pathological need of black Americans to assimilate with one or the other dominant ideologies, conservative or liberal, while disregarding the unique perspective that is incumbent in, and is the real value of black American historical perspective. The historical and social evolution of the circumstances of blacks in this country makes it difficult, for me anyway, to ascertain a riflip on the political genome indicating which aforementioned ideology is the dominant or recessive gene determining black American reality.