The Efficiency of Evil

Living as an expatriate, first in France and now in Panama, gives me a better perspective on current events in the United States. It’s hard to see a city clearly when you’re standing on a streetcorner in the midst of traffic and hurrying pedestrians. But, looking down from the mountaintop, and remembering the details from that streetcorner, you can see far more clearly the overall condition and future of that city.

Furthermore, I have the ability to contrast how things are in the United States to Panama. Sometimes I’m not sure which is better – incompetent poops who barely manage to hold their country together or evil monsters who are all too coldly efficient in raping the world for their personal aggrandizement. Yes, it’s amazing Panama keeps stumbling and bumbling forward without falling flat on its face; just yesterday, merely in crossing the border into Costa Rica and back, I experienced several examples of blithering boneheadedness that could easily have been averted if officials had stopped to think for just a few moments, instead of just shuffling things along or insisting out of macho bravado on their rectitude when they’re clearly mistaken.

Still, the more I think about it, the more I’ll take the incompetent poops.

In recent days alone, we’ve seen several horror shows in the United States:

1) The Wall Street occupation (also bravely manifesting itself in several cities). The news media tried ignoring it until it got too big to ignore, at which time they started criticizing it as a “circus”; they hope in this way to denigrate it such that it will fizzle out. The New York Police Department has been breaking all sorts of laws by dragging peaceful participants by their hair, tear-gassing them, beating them with billy clubs, arresting them as much as seven hundred at a time, and yet the movement is still growing. Wall Street, built and maintained by our tax dollars (certainly not the tax-shirking rich folks!), has been blocked off by police paid with our taxes, who are only letting through people with big Wall Street firm identifications. In other cities, citizens are being denied their right to withdraw their money from their banks. Clearly, the orders have come down from the country’s ultra-rich masters that this movement is to be broken up at all costs, including the cost of trashing the Bill of Rights. It is just as clear to the protesters that this is their only chance; the movement caught those ultra-rich oligarchs flatfooted with surprise, but you can be sure that that will not happen again. And you can be sure that, sooner or later, the tanks will roll down the streets as they did in Prague and Beijing and Berlin, forcing these people to flee for their lives.

2) The State of Georgia executed a clearly innocent man, Troy Davis. Officials blithely ignored worldwide appeals for mercy, and marches demanding his release. The United States Supreme Court failed in its responsibilities in refusing to stop or even delay the – not execution, but murder of Troy Davis. Barack Obama failed in his responsibility to issue a pardon or other presidential decree releasing Troy Davis. Clearly this was to satisfy their ultra-rich masters and continue to frighten the masses into obedience. My friend Whiskey Jack, a homespun philosopher and former merchant marine whose wisdom I cherish, insists that government officials who put an innocent man to death should be tried for murder; I agree, and add that, if that were the law, you’d see those very same politicians falling over each other in their stampede to abolish the death penalty.

3) I’ve heard talk from these same these political lapdogs about building a gigantic wall between the United States and Canada, similar to the one constructed on the Mexico border. Clearly this is about a) lining the pockets of the ultra-rich when taxpayers (who are increasingly the poor and middle classes, as the political lapdogs lift all tax burdens from the shoulders of the ultra-rich) are forced to pay the private contractors; b) “proving”to the citizens who have been brainwashed by the likes of Faux News and Retch Limburger that “something is being done” about all those dang dark people sneaking into the country; and c) this wall proposal might serve to distract the citizenry from things like that pesky little problem down on Wall Street. I cannot help but compare these walls to the Great Wall of China and Hadrian's Wall, both of which were built at colossal expense in terms of both finance and labor, and which both utterly failed to keep the “barbarians” out; and the Berlin Wall, designed to keep the citizenry in. The Mexico Wall has clearly failed; drugs and refugées continue to pour into the United States, wall or no wall, prompted respectively by opportunity to feed on the wealth and drug-desire north of the border and by desperation. But I suspect that there may be something of the Berlin Wall in these Canada and Mexico walls – soon U.S. citizens will not be allowed to go abroad (unless they’re ultra-rich, of course), but kept instead chained to their grindstones in the "dark Satanic mills" envisioned by William Blake.

4) It was revealed that President Obama authorized the killing of a United States citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, on the pretext that he was more than a polemicist for alleged terrorists, but operationally involved. The known evidence for the latter, at this writing, is at best extremely flimsy – but that pales into insignificance in view of this setting aside of the United States Constitution and its Bill of Rights, the central documents to the entire rule of law in the country, by the president ordering the killing of one of his fellow citizens without due process – without a trial. Awlaki had been previously given the label “Specially Designated Global Terrorist” by the U.S. Treasury Departments Office of Foreign Asset Control, with the result that it was illegal for any legal person or entity (including the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU, which tried) to represent that individual, unless a rarely-if-ever special permission is granted – even though by the Constitution, U.S. citizens have a right to legal representation, and are innocent until proven guilty in a court of law.
Moreover, Reuters has since revealed the existence of a “secret panel” of U.S. officials who decide which vaunted enemies will be killed, citizens and non-citizens alike, and have the power to go ahead and order such killing, though the president apparently has the right to eliminate anyone on that list; again, there is no presumption of innocence or right of appeal. Why, then, Obama chose to allow this entirely unconstitutional murder of a U.S. citizen is, logically, way beyond me. If Awlaki did something illegal – fine; detain him and prove it in court. If he did not, leave him alone. But, if his constitutional rights are set aside, then the same can be done to anyone, including you and me.

I am extremely disappointed in President Obama. He has shamefully failed in his opportunity to lead the country into a new age of peace and prosperity for all people. He has catered far too often to his political opponents, the lapdogs of the ultra-rich. Two friends of mine, Buffy and Bonita, both African-American women, said to me, respectively, independently of each other: “Obama needs to go Black on their asses!” “He needs to go seriously Ghetto on these folk and open up a gigantic can of whup-azz.” Obama strikes me as a good man, an intellectually brilliant man, but one whose extreme care and lengthy consideration of alternatives eventually enervate him I still have hope that he will awaken to this imperative, but my hope is slowly sinking into despair. He needs to remember the ethical standards on which he sought this office. He needs to show emotion, to get angry, to lecture these people, and not to keep backing down. He needs to bring unity, not further division, to his fellow citizens.

Meanwhile, the ultra-rich oligarchs in control of this plutocracy – with no longer any pretense of true democracy – are absolutely thrilled to see us poor and middle-class folks divided asunder. They’re overjoyed to witness the political and cultural wars of “right”versus “left”, pro-choice versus pro-life, “family values” versus gay/lesbian rights, etc. This is why we see them sitting on their penthouse balconies high above Wall Street, sipping champagne and watching the “circus” being put on by the plebs down there on the street below. This is why we see their sign in the high window of the Chicago Board of Trade that says, “We are the 1%.” The ultra- rich intend to manipulate citizens into continuing to exhibit antipathetic rhetoric and behavior each toward the other, because, as long as the citizens fight each other, they will never unite – and thus will never build sufficient strength to “throw down the mighty from their seats” (as it is put in the Magnificat).

Given that choice between the efficient evil in the one country and the frustrating incompetence in the other, I’ll gladly take the latter. Here in Panama, at least, there’s still hope.