Britannia Radio

Real Changes We Must Now Pay For

By Publius

10-23-10

There is no Twitter revolutionary vanguard if the angry populace is convulsed with stability smashing rage. There is the prospect of the patriarchal Iron Heel or the matronly man on horseback-or jet, or tank- a hero like General Honoree emerging from a Western sunset through the magic of cutting into a New Orleans bar. This is only one more poorly dubbed post-Katrina French art film from Mongolia projecting in the collective erewhon cinema of ideas. No secular trendline is screened which offers hope that a spontaneous revolutionary flowering of pristine human love will ease the descent into Dostoyevskian decay. No political solution presents itself building on the best ideas of submerged Century 20. Civilizationally we are stuck it seems in the 1300's with torture and mayhem ruling the hour. Time magazine suggests there may be grounds for an American civil war. Fraud is one of tangled nest of reasons and the present administration-like the one before it and all other governments -enables the fraud to continue: well might we think that man's fate and man's politics equate tragedy of fate. So we shop and survive trusting in the display of personal fetishes. We permit ourselves the liberty if not the character of wealthy young media Gods swelling with our self importance We celebrate the trivial. Kitsch, triviality is showered culturally on us-as news, as entertainment, as politics, even as art and as an advertising encouragement to escape from freedom and it's responsibilities and simply shop. In Greek the word for revolution was stasis. In Latin the same notion was expressed as revolvere-to go around in a complete circle. In English of course the word revolution can denote this circularity or it can depict an uprising. When Goethe, at age 60 obviously flattered by the attention of Napoleon met with him in 1808 in Erfurt at a gathering of monarchs, talk over breakfast was on tragedy and Napoleon interjects "Was will man jetzt mit dem Schicksal? Politik ist das Schicksal!" Politics is destiny. The Polish writer Alexander Wat, writing about his Lubyanka prison existence thinking of the tortured and exiled Machiavelli and power politics and Princes, has this scene as Napoleon interjecting and saying forcefully to the 60 year old Goethe "A tragedy of fate? That's part of the past now. Politik ist das Schicksal." Some commentators argue that flight to safety can be found in some hamlet existence and survival. Others commend a return to the Divine and a trust in the suburban way of life. Others still urge good public policy relies on electing Team A or Team B to rob them blind by custom and law. The next civil war will resemble Yugoslavia or Rwanda or maybe the South West and Northern Mexico during the 21st century drug wars. "Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living." Karl Marx http://www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/7084.Karl_Marx The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte) http://www.goodreads.com/work/quotes/819841