On a Steaming Hot Midsummer’s Day In the Fog Island Tavern
– Trying to make some breeze with your head wagging, Abbé Boulah? Not sure that’s very energy-efficient?
– I agree, — but your tropical ceiling fans don’t quite do the job either, Vodçek. And I can’t get myself to put ice in my Zinfandel to cool myself from the inside. But no, it’s not even the heat here that’s making me wonder about the state of things. Though it definitely has to do with hot air. Of the political kind, that is.
– Hmm. Maybe I should renew my old rule about political talk in here when it’s this hot. So what’s in that little blue book you’re studying that’s creating that strange attitude in you?
– Well, it’s the U.S. Constitution — have you ever actually read it? With all the hot air being blown around all over about it, I thought I’d take another look at it.
– You, a damn furriner? Because I don’t think you’re a citizen yet, just a green card guy, are you?
– Right, Renfroe. See, I never could get myself to assert the required degree of allegiance to that document. Allegiance expected when you voluntarily take on a new citizenship. It’s not like when you’re born here, you’re a citizen, subject to the rules and Constitution, willy-nilly. Nobody asks you as a kid, when you’re made to stand up and swear allegiance to it, if you’ve even read and understand it. What would happen if you said: “Wait, there something I don’t really understand and agree with here, so swearing allegiance would be, well, a lie…”? If you did it as an adult about to become a citizen, because would it be right to start that new life with a lie: easy, you don’t get to be a citizen. So you don’t apply, and don’t get to say things like that. But kids? Even adult citizens?
– There is a process where we can make amendments to change it, isn’t there?
– Yes, I know. But it’s a long process, takes a long time even to get to a vote. And what if it doesn’t pass? If you argued for an amendment and it lost, are you now an enemy of the constitution, of the interior sort, against whom citizens are supposed to defend it?
– Oh boy, I never thought about that. So what are the things in the Constitution you don’t agree with?
– You’re asking me, Renfroe? Me, the damn furriner, who doesn’t really understand the Constitution and isn’t allowed to join the discussion about changing it?
– Well, are you against it, then?
– No, Vodçek. On the contrary, I have always considered it a major achievement of humanity and a model for many other countries. But look at some of the weird things that are now developing! There must be some not so perfect things about this Constitution, if those things are possible and allowed under it?. So I was just curious about what all the hot-air-hubbub in the current political discourse is about, that involves the Constitution in one way or another. Wondering why people, on all sides of the political divides, don’t start talking about what could or should be changed in it to avoid some of the strange things to happen that arguably are, well…
– Unconstitutional?
– Yeah! By all the Wall Street Bull’s Excrement! That’s the word! Detrimental, dangerous in the long run, as well as powerfully ill-smelling.
– Is it just your non-belief showing, my friend? Even hate?
– Well,, you must admit some unbelievable people are getting away with unbelievable stunts.
– But they’re not getting away, looks like. They’re here to stay, at least for four more years, if not more…
– You’re shrewdly tiptoeing around the question: what makes that possible? That’s what I want to know.
– Oh, I think there’s a good explanation: If you put out many contradictory tweets, you give all the true believers the freedom — freedom, isn’t that the big constitutional thing? — the freedom to pick whichever one to believe in? And act on it? Isn’t that the great MAGAIC? That we all should be thankful for?
– Sounds great, until you’re branded and treated as a traitor, told to leave the country, if you don’t like what it’s becoming,– for believing in one the great MAGAIC master feels threatened by. Coming to think of it, the country that was stolen and cheated away from the true Americans in the first place? — So that nobody even starts to think about steps that might be taken to prevent those unconstitutional things? It seems the good citizens of the country aren’t quite awake and sufficiently worried about these things, to start some serious thinking about that.
– Well, there are plenty of groups out there clamoring for change, aren’t there? Nonbelievers, traitors, the lot of them, I say…
– Sure, Renfroe. Even more questionable things are promoted under the banner of needed change, even if the change is represented at going back to some ‘real’ or true interpretation of the Constitution. What gets me: it all boils down to campaigns to defeat this or that candidate for office, or the counter-candidate. All the ads and emails we get are just appeals to contribute money for the campaigns. About winning elections, gaining power. Very little if anything seems to get to the substantive issues that make the bad things happen, let alone making them better. Can they be fixed with just some different guys in the various offices? When the underlying structural conditions still will lead to the same bad developments that people get upset and angry about?
– Good questions. So you think the country needs to wake up to see the need for real changes?
– I do, Vodçek. I know all the unrest and the breathless media look like you’d want to calm things down rather than more ‘waking-up’. But is it making any genuine difference?
– Hmm. So let me ask you a hypothetical question. Say you were in charge of things. What would wise old y o u do to wake up the country to see the seriousness of the weaknesses in the Constitution?
– Good question. And sufficiently hypothetical to avoid violating your no-politics in the Tavern rule?
– We’ll see. Let’s just say I’m not paying close enough attention for a while.
– Okay. Let’s pin your hypothetical assumption down first — that I’d really be somehow in charge to get things done.
– That’s hyper hypothetical indeed, I agree. Hyperthetical. But why?
– Well, from what I can see, all the protesting and well-meaning commentary hasn’t been very helpful, so far. Are tings getting worse rather than better? So I think a very different tactic is needed. Actual demonstration, real action, perhaps even painful lessons.
– Hmm. All right, we’ll put you in your hyperthetical charge. So what’s your first step?
– It’s not a well-ordered step-by step sequence. Things done simultaneously. To be effective, it needs distraction, confusion. But of course, explaining it has to start somewhere, and go on in a sequence. Don’t confuse that with the actual process!
– Duly noted.
– So one thing I’d do is to refuse to make any of the usual disclosures required by law: tax returns, financial holdings and such. That’ll keep a lot of people aggravated and busy with ‘investigations’ of various kinds. It would even let me make a lot of money while that is going on. And I’d not even hide that. Let people get jealous! Meanwhile, I’d stuff the courts and important government positions with people who will do what I ask them to do. Anything. I’d keep firing and replacing them if they don’t. If there are complaints about that, invent details from their work that lets me call them traitors or criminal incompetents.
– Hear that, Renfroe? So what will those people do?
– Good question. While I’m putting out silly controversies for the headlines every day, they must make as little noise and get as little attention as possible, while they are relaxing or eliminating a lot of regulations, things like environmental protection bureaucracy rules that hamper certain industries or reduce their profits. So most people won’t realize it until the consequences become obvious — that’ll take some time, right? Obviously, those industries will support my policies and campaigns promoting ‘economic growth’. So while all those personnel changes are represented as efforts to combat corruption, they actually raise a smokescreen for intensified, let’s call it facilitated merited compensation for activities and contributions to the mission.
– Corruption, in other words. Won’t the media raise a ruckus about that?
– That’s a harsh and unfriendly word, we’d have to keep the media from using it. We reserve that for when we talk about the opposition. But yes, that’s the point. Now consider: every issue has ‘counterarguments’: small aspects that can be exaggerated into threats to national security or economy, hyped up to get my base supporters firmly convinced that I’m saving the country from disaster or evil conspiracies. But eventually seen as what they are.
– You seem quite optimistic about that?
– Yes, because the rising inequality and injustice of it will become too obvious. But until then, I’d use those issues to paint the media as part of the evil conspiracies, as traitors, tools of unpatriotic groups or parties that only seek power. Which of course greatly increases my power; especially if I can get the owners of the media to keep their journalists on a short leash. There are ways to get that done, you know. Not by me: by others. I’d have a lot of help doing that.
– Let me guess: the powers that have bought the media are holding the leash.
– You’re catching on. That’s one part the Constitution doesn’t deal with well: it didn’t anticipate that economic powers could buy both government and the media. I’d let them run with that, while getting things in place for a real power grab. I don’t even offer reasons for those things, just do them. Like killing off the post office to make voting by mail impossible: it’s just necessary to keep those extreme wing elements from taking over the country, you understand.
– You mean the extreme left wing guys?
– Let wing, right wing: did it never occur to you that right or left depends on where you’re looking from? See, when I talk to the Senate, the so-called left wing folks are sitting to my right, and I accuse them of many of the things that the right wing folks to my left are actually doing…
– I guess you’d have such a devious a game plan for the police and law enforcement too?
– Of course, glad you mention it. But those levers of power enhancement are already well in place and only need to be further cultivated to become fully aligned with my intentions. Look at the very term ‘law enforcement’! What does it tell you?
– Of course, there has to be a way to enforce the laws.
– Yes. Everybody accepts the notion that ensuring that laws are upheld and violation must be prosecuted and penalized, and that it requires force. Greater power and force than any would-be lawbreaker, of course. Naturally. By definition.
– You can’t argue with that.
– See? That kind of lack of imagination would make it easy for me. But equally inevitably, it creates escalation. For example: if you ease the hurdles for everybody — including organized and disorganized crime — to get access to more powerful weapons, doesn’t it stand to reason that the law enforcement agencies m u s t be equipped with even more powerful equipment? That’s the box people can’t think themselves out of. So I’ll provide that, and encourage them. Then, criminals as well as the second-amendment militias counter that with more effective gadgets. So give the police military-type weaponry. It needs to get used up, anyway, to maintain the economic growth of the industries producing new stuff, see? I’ll use every little confrontation or mis-step to increase the perceived need for more power, even to bend the rules if needed. Until they become so powerful — but loyal to me — that there’s no viable opposition left that could threaten my power. And no bars to the temptations of abusing the power. That’s a natural law, if history tells us anything.
– You don’t think all the folks who insist on their second amendment rights to have and carry weapons are going to start trouble about that?
– Are you kidding? Tell them it’s their right, their power! It’s even a bit ironic, isn’t it? Their very support is what ‘forces’ me to create those superior law enforcement and military forces, that ultimately will make their pathetic excuse ‘to protect them against the government’ the contradictory illusion it is. Subterfuge for selling more guns. To finally become so obvious it can’t be sustained. Admit it: people just like to shoot guns. And, at least some folks like to kill with them. Some of them like violence, destruction. Killing. So I encourage the emergence of different factions and groups — but turning them against each other, rather than the government — while assuring all of them that the government will protect t h e i r particular groups.
– Fascinatingly devious, I admit.
– Yes. The gun issue is just one of the best examples of how the Constitution can be interpreted in so many different ways as to make all kinds of devious machinations possible and apparently ‘legal’, while causing considerable trouble. There are so many different areas — of immoral enrichment, corruption, outright crimes, to break laws and constitutional provisions that one can get away with; the point is to use all those ‘loopholes’ to make the abuse obvious.
– Hmm. I don’t know. You really think that making all that so obvious will, as you say, make the people ‘wake up’ and take action? It actually scares me to think about what those actions might be. Getting a feeling it actually might be too late already, to avoid either chaotic unrest, or decline into, well —
– Don’t say it, Renfroe: It would get too seriously political: Vodçek is already breathing heavily, ready to cut us off.
– Don’t tempt me, my friend. You’re getting close. Hmm. Why does all that somehow does sound eerily familiar? Can you at least tell us what remedies you have in mind for fixing the flaws in the Constitution that allows all that?
– That’s just it: there’s not enough thinking going on about that. That’s what we need to get started! And shouldn’t you all be grateful for my opening your eyes about it?
– Ah. Yes, I can see why you’d insist on gratefulness and loyalty.
– And that’s why I’d need four more years, don’t you see?
– Good grief. You’re making my head spin.
– Don’t say it, Vodçek: revolve?
– Okay, that’s it. You’re cut off.
–o–
Abbe Boulah's Weblog 