Emptiness Part VI at New Ruskin College
www.NewRuskinCollege.com
06-02-05, 08-09-05,08-19-05
Emptiness Part VI
In any given epoch, moment of time, there is an utter chaos and confusion of ideas. Each individual following his own confused ideas, yet, thinking no doubt that he is following some religion or philosophy, imagining that there is some system to his wild mental gyrations, unexamined prejudices, vainglory, perhaps even going to his grave in the quiet satisfaction that he has in the end “understood.” (Imagine the vanity of even daring to know.)
May this confusion be shown only later, after the evidence is sorted out, the facts carefully examined in centuries of disinterested discussion? But why only later? Perhaps because in the moment of time you will not allow yourselves to engage in disinterested discussion. Will not admit that your own thoughts and methods of analysis are twisted by greed or delusion or hate. Will see this only later. Will you see this later?
Will think, in the heat of the moment, that even the idea of being “disinterested”, the very word “disinterested”, is cold, heartless: ‘MY GOD HAVE YOU NO SOUL? YOU WANT US TO LOOK AT THE CAT SCAN? Don’t you understand that we are dealing with a woman’s life?! And you want us to look at a CAT scan? Are you inhuman?’
Or ‘“strategy?”, men are dieing out there and you want to talk about strategy? Have you no heart, no soul? What care we for strategy, kill, kill, kill them over there so we do not have to fight them here. . . .’
Or, and now looking at the same question from the opposite side, ‘I voted for the war before I voted against it.’
(For example, I was singled out for attack because my letters to the Senate supported the First Gulf War. In San Francisco this is all it took to be marked out for attack and ruin. As Alan Watts noted, there is no one so militant as a pacifist, nor as imperious as an anti-imperialist. And in the Bay Area Women are encouraged to act out against men, Blacks Whites, Gays Straights, Latinos Anglos and peaceniks against “warmongers” and so on.)
That any of these people may be said to have been acting in good faith is irrelevant. We may decide to credit good faith, but the point I wish to make here in Emptiness is that even your attribution of good or bad faith is itself beside the point. Lost in your vanity and ego, the desire to ‘get along with others’, is more important than reason or logic. There is no reason.
Dodge responsibility. For example, being against the war spares the ego from having to accept responsibility for the dead. And yet a moments reflection should reveal that responsibility is not so easily avoided. This is not “your” society? And if awareness of your own culpability still eludes you, then consider how completion of the First Gulf War would have obviated the need for the Second.
(Fifteen years later, those who singled me out for attack, who betrayed me, can now see, that the consequence of leaving Saddam Hussein in power was the Second Gulf War. Do they now say, ‘Oh, sorry, I guess you were right?’; of course not. The mind has no dignity. (Mine included, if I could go on I would.))
There are whole other systems of rationalization that are brought into consciousness. Each sees according to his lights.
And the branches swayed in the warm wind heavy with the scent of the Indian Ocean before it was called “the Indian Ocean.” The sun rose above the morning fog and shown down through the triple canopy rainforests of East Africa where today there is only desert. Our ancestors, their tails wrapped around the swaying branches warmed themselves in the sunlight, and chattered to one another. And today we are still “alive and alert in the vanished forests of the world,” (Dr. E. O. Wilson). Still chattering to one another, still telling ourselves pleasing lies.
This was 60 million years ago. After the great crater in the Yucatan 100 miles across, 30 miles deep, was formed by a meteorite, 65 million years ago. 6o million years of chattering monkeys. (Technically not monkeys but the common ancestors of both humans and modern monkeys. (Dr. Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor’s Tale))
What are your lies compared to this? What is your destruction of me compared to this? Deny the truth, go ahead, who cares? Don’t lift a finger. How very convenient for you that “a just society” seems to require nothing of you.
You have The Power! You can use technology so your chattering and screaming can be broadcast over an entire continent. Heard further, yes, but you are still the monkeys in the swaying trees, telling lies to one another.
And for all of history it has been the same. All of history is manipulated by your vanity and ego so that the story can be told with you always on the side of “the right” and “the just.” Slavery? Well of course you would have been against it. You would not have made some convenient rationalization! Are you quite sure?
Stood up to the NAZIs did you? (Funny thing is my grandfathers tried to warn the nation of the growing danger and I do not recall your grandfathers participating. Then my grandfathers stood in the minority. But now . . .)
In the story of the war which TE 194.5.4.4/1 told about Kerry, he was a hero valiantly crossing hundreds of yards of enemy fire to save a comrade, not the only skipper to take off down river when the mine went off, leaving his comrade behind, after he fell off due to the abrupt movement of that boat. Any officer might have written the report the way TE 194.5.4.4/1 wrote up the after action report, but none saw it that way, except one officer. (http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=39889 )
Springer and Franken brought it up again because they need a “war hero” not because they possess special knowledge of the events involved. It appeals to their vanity. Even as a war story it is not particularly interesting. But for them it is important, not for love of Kerry, but for love of themselves.
The entire Vietnam war can be seen as a series of false, or misconstrued reports, misunderstood, misapplied, misdirecting . . . a bureaucratized war which was administered only so that the politicians in Washington would not be accused by other politicians of having “lost Vietnam.”
In the end the politicians in Washington were not even interested in Vietnam the country, only Vietnam the political issue, did not care that a few miles further inland from the DMZ – Laos frontier whole armies were winding there way south. Did not know and did not care . . .
Sometimes one hears it said that the market is a cold uncaring thing and I suppose it is. Yet consider that it was government which had placed 500,000 men in Vietnam, 12% of that number killed, multiples of that number, (four times), of South East Asians were killed, and kept them there for a decade and the whole of the strategy can be summarized as not wanting to be accused of “losing Vietnam.”
A political cover. A pretense. A posturing. A having it both ways. And even now, the lies continue, and History is perverted to serve the ego’s need in the present.
The dishonesty continues today with Springer and Franken. The phrase “discredited Swift Boat Vets” repeated over and over because the Swift Boat Vets dared speak out against a powerful man, a leader of a political faction, who had himself, in the day, accused the vets of “war crimes”.
Springer and Franken thought that Kerry had a “right” to accuse the vets of “war crimes” but think it wrong now for the Swift Boat Vets to tell what they know, which was documented, even by Kerry’s own report.
Note that in the years since, for over thirty five years, the author, TE 194.5.4.4/1, has not come forward. Wonder why?
And if it is said who am I to judge Kerry, he was there I was not, yes, exactly, he was there I was not. I do not personally know if gunning your boat and racing off down the river is a good idea or not. But this is exactly my point. The Swift Boat Vets were there. It behooves us, those of us who were not there, to listen to them, respectfully.
Certainly it is wrong for Springer and Franken to malign them especially as it appears that Springer and Franken malign the Vets not because Springer and Franken have any personal knowledge or insight, some heretofore unspoken reverence for History, but only because Kerry is a member of the elite, to which Springer and Franken belong, and to their Party, their faction, and definitely unlike the middle and working class Swift Boat Vets.
Indeed why do Springer and Franken not also take the hint that no other skipper of a Swift Boat gunned their boats?
But then why is any of this an issue? Why are we not talking about Social Security, balancing the budget, building homes, educating the young?
Why are we being distracted again? History, far from being “settled” now, after having been scrutinized in “disinterested” discussion, becomes another tool of the “fat relentless ego” in its constant struggle for power.
One reason is that Kerry returned home to tell lies about Vietnam. It was not enough for him to simply report that we should leave Vietnam, he had to falsely charge he had witnessed war crimes, even participated in war crimes. And is this not another example of having it both ways? A war hero who committed war crimes? (No, a liar who lied about the war and his record.) What was Kerry protesting but himself: his own lying reports?
Then Springer and Franken complain about the Swift Boat Vet’s TV commercials! I admit that I do not feel this issue as intently as do the Swift Boat Vets. But then have you never noticed a vet wipe a tear from his eye while you looked coolly on? What? Did you think ‘what a cry baby”? Is that how you are? No, I never took Kerry’s charges of “war crimes” seriously, just consider the source, yet I respect the fact that the vets do take it seriously.
And which of us has the correct view? The vets or us in our cool disinterestedness?
And this is how it always has been and always will be. The subjective. See the same issue: Look at the Schiavo CAT scan? Or not? Ignore it?
Accuse the Swift Boat Vets of dishonesty and worse, while ignoring the testimony of the retired Admiral who was on the boat with Kerry and Kerry’s on contemporaneous journal entry nine days later?
Or say you are in favor of “progressive indexing,” (of the rate of INCREASE! of Social Security), before you say it is “pernicious”; why the very idea, the next week, as did Franken. Say we should not have to “bribe” the rich in order to have an old age pension then say the following week that we must pay the rich to keep it “universal” as did Franken.
There is no philosophy that can withstand these twisting demands of the ego. For example, Barbara Boxer the Marin Senator, opposed the Bush forced savings accounts because she said setting up savings accounts would be “too risky”. Just wrap your mind around that: savings is “too risky”. (Franken said he did not even understand what is meant by the words: “forced savings.” Does not understand the issue!)
There are many reasons to oppose Mr. Bush’s vague statements about Social Security reform: because he would create $3 trillion in added debt for a nation that has already fallen in to what just a generation ago would have been unimaginable debt; because the Bush accounts are “instead of” not in “addition to” Social Security; because they do not solve the short fall that Mr. Bush vaguely mentioned, (i.e. 2017 – 2047), when the burden of taxation must fall more and more heavily on the dwindling number of workers who must support the retirees; because Mr. Bush’s vague words never dealt with the fundamental unfairness of a system which draws out of the paychecks of ordinary workers, workers earning a mean average of $16 an hour, whose IQs are on average 100, and thereby forcing them to give their hard earned money to rich retirees, 20% of whom have incomes of over $75,000, whose IQs are above average, (who as a class control 50% of the national income, control over 60% of the financial wealth), and of whom many, most, perhaps 90% of whom, have voted as a class to block development even in our urban areas, forcing the middle and lower income far away by the use of exclusionary zoning, forcing them to long commutes on the highways, burning fossil fuels to get to homes whose mortgages have been raised higher and higher so that to day in California 84% can not afford the median priced home; they have blocked the exploration of oil and gas off our coasts; even blocked wind farms 12 miles from their seashore summer homes; blocked nuclear power for the last 30 years; have for no reason at all blocked progress at every turn, for example they have blocked the mass distribution of educational materials and distance learning to prevent the equitable sharing of knowledge among the people; blocked the entry into the professions with wildly ridiculous requirements such as the requirement that ordinary physicians be able to explain the atomic physics of disease and the molecular interactions of viruses with the membrane of individual cells, as a result our medical schools only can supply half, just 50%, of our new doctors each year, (Barbara Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling) thus draining off of the world the best doctors instead of sending out into the world our own doctors to help the world; blocked every attempt at reform that would lesson the control of the state over the ordinary affairs of the people, (for example, preventing the reform of the big city machines which control the payroll of city and state employees whose pay and pensions steadily rise further burdening the people, (BART train drivers earn $109k), the unfairness of which they try to conceal with claims of “progressive taxation” which is simply another of their lies by which they con the people into thinking that the cost of government can be shifted onto “the rich” instead of telling the people the truth that taxes are redistributed onto them through the price mechanism; or by maintaining state control of essential services such as our schools, or our highways and roads so that acting as a class they can use their power to direct roads to their real estate holdings to their private benefit, or directing state control over institutions and foundations whose tax free status, and state supported work, can be used to advance their interests in preference to the interests of the people; but none of this was mentioned or even hinted at by the Marin Senator Boxer. Why?
For reasons that George Orwell would have understood very well: After the revolution the revolutionary becomes the Tory (Christopher Hitchens, Why Orwell Matters). Every revolutionary is a Tory in waiting. The state now is victorious. And the supporters of the state are now the protectors of the status quo. The Democrats can not become reformers. They are what needs reforming. They must oppose reform or they will be swept away.
So, this is why the Marin Senator thinks savings accounts would be risky. The Marin Senator thinks it is safer for the people to be dependent on the state, and the state’s taxes on the wages of the workers, even though the ratio of worker to retiree, which was 16 to 1, and is now today 3 to 1, and will become 2 to 1, and will therefore force the workers to pay a larger and larger share to the very people whose mismanagement of the economy and selfishness have forced them into these reduced and dwindling circumstances. ( http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05133/504149.stm)
How can savings be called “risky” except by someone who is completely at a loss, utterly entangled in a twisted political ideology? Note that the national savings rate has declined from the lowest of any industrialized nation, at 4%, to the current level, 1.625% (as a percent on gross income for the last 12 quarters
(http://www.bea.gov/bea/dn/nipaweb/TableView.asp?SelectedTable=120&FirstYear=2002&LastYear=2004&Freq=Qtr ))
By all accounts America needs more savings yet the Marin Senator thinks not. And if you think we should give her the benefit of the doubt and think only that she was trying to “preserve” the social commitment to the retirees who are dependent on Social Security, I would ask you why then did she not say these words which you want to put in her mouth?
For example why did she not say she supports individual accounts “in addition to” the regular pension? (as did U. S. Senator Doctor Professor Daniel Patrick Moynihan). Because, staying in her role in the passion play, she does not want to “give an inch.” This is not a debate. There are no reasoned arguments. She prefers to posture.
And yet she may be credited with “good faith.” And what does it matter? There is no way to reason, and even time will not allow us to adopt a disinterested view, for history is itself twisted and used to support the ego in its self centered view. There is no religion, no philosophy, no way for us to understand. This is Emptiness.
www.NewRuskinCollege.com
06-02-05, 08-09-05,08-19-05
Emptiness Part VI
In any given epoch, moment of time, there is an utter chaos and confusion of ideas. Each individual following his own confused ideas, yet, thinking no doubt that he is following some religion or philosophy, imagining that there is some system to his wild mental gyrations, unexamined prejudices, vainglory, perhaps even going to his grave in the quiet satisfaction that he has in the end “understood.” (Imagine the vanity of even daring to know.)
May this confusion be shown only later, after the evidence is sorted out, the facts carefully examined in centuries of disinterested discussion? But why only later? Perhaps because in the moment of time you will not allow yourselves to engage in disinterested discussion. Will not admit that your own thoughts and methods of analysis are twisted by greed or delusion or hate. Will see this only later. Will you see this later?
Will think, in the heat of the moment, that even the idea of being “disinterested”, the very word “disinterested”, is cold, heartless: ‘MY GOD HAVE YOU NO SOUL? YOU WANT US TO LOOK AT THE CAT SCAN? Don’t you understand that we are dealing with a woman’s life?! And you want us to look at a CAT scan? Are you inhuman?’
Or ‘“strategy?”, men are dieing out there and you want to talk about strategy? Have you no heart, no soul? What care we for strategy, kill, kill, kill them over there so we do not have to fight them here. . . .’
Or, and now looking at the same question from the opposite side, ‘I voted for the war before I voted against it.’
(For example, I was singled out for attack because my letters to the Senate supported the First Gulf War. In San Francisco this is all it took to be marked out for attack and ruin. As Alan Watts noted, there is no one so militant as a pacifist, nor as imperious as an anti-imperialist. And in the Bay Area Women are encouraged to act out against men, Blacks Whites, Gays Straights, Latinos Anglos and peaceniks against “warmongers” and so on.)
That any of these people may be said to have been acting in good faith is irrelevant. We may decide to credit good faith, but the point I wish to make here in Emptiness is that even your attribution of good or bad faith is itself beside the point. Lost in your vanity and ego, the desire to ‘get along with others’, is more important than reason or logic. There is no reason.
Dodge responsibility. For example, being against the war spares the ego from having to accept responsibility for the dead. And yet a moments reflection should reveal that responsibility is not so easily avoided. This is not “your” society? And if awareness of your own culpability still eludes you, then consider how completion of the First Gulf War would have obviated the need for the Second.
(Fifteen years later, those who singled me out for attack, who betrayed me, can now see, that the consequence of leaving Saddam Hussein in power was the Second Gulf War. Do they now say, ‘Oh, sorry, I guess you were right?’; of course not. The mind has no dignity. (Mine included, if I could go on I would.))
There are whole other systems of rationalization that are brought into consciousness. Each sees according to his lights.
And the branches swayed in the warm wind heavy with the scent of the Indian Ocean before it was called “the Indian Ocean.” The sun rose above the morning fog and shown down through the triple canopy rainforests of East Africa where today there is only desert. Our ancestors, their tails wrapped around the swaying branches warmed themselves in the sunlight, and chattered to one another. And today we are still “alive and alert in the vanished forests of the world,” (Dr. E. O. Wilson). Still chattering to one another, still telling ourselves pleasing lies.
This was 60 million years ago. After the great crater in the Yucatan 100 miles across, 30 miles deep, was formed by a meteorite, 65 million years ago. 6o million years of chattering monkeys. (Technically not monkeys but the common ancestors of both humans and modern monkeys. (Dr. Richard Dawkins, The Ancestor’s Tale))
What are your lies compared to this? What is your destruction of me compared to this? Deny the truth, go ahead, who cares? Don’t lift a finger. How very convenient for you that “a just society” seems to require nothing of you.
You have The Power! You can use technology so your chattering and screaming can be broadcast over an entire continent. Heard further, yes, but you are still the monkeys in the swaying trees, telling lies to one another.
And for all of history it has been the same. All of history is manipulated by your vanity and ego so that the story can be told with you always on the side of “the right” and “the just.” Slavery? Well of course you would have been against it. You would not have made some convenient rationalization! Are you quite sure?
Stood up to the NAZIs did you? (Funny thing is my grandfathers tried to warn the nation of the growing danger and I do not recall your grandfathers participating. Then my grandfathers stood in the minority. But now . . .)
In the story of the war which TE 194.5.4.4/1 told about Kerry, he was a hero valiantly crossing hundreds of yards of enemy fire to save a comrade, not the only skipper to take off down river when the mine went off, leaving his comrade behind, after he fell off due to the abrupt movement of that boat. Any officer might have written the report the way TE 194.5.4.4/1 wrote up the after action report, but none saw it that way, except one officer. (http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=39889 )
Springer and Franken brought it up again because they need a “war hero” not because they possess special knowledge of the events involved. It appeals to their vanity. Even as a war story it is not particularly interesting. But for them it is important, not for love of Kerry, but for love of themselves.
The entire Vietnam war can be seen as a series of false, or misconstrued reports, misunderstood, misapplied, misdirecting . . . a bureaucratized war which was administered only so that the politicians in Washington would not be accused by other politicians of having “lost Vietnam.”
In the end the politicians in Washington were not even interested in Vietnam the country, only Vietnam the political issue, did not care that a few miles further inland from the DMZ – Laos frontier whole armies were winding there way south. Did not know and did not care . . .
Sometimes one hears it said that the market is a cold uncaring thing and I suppose it is. Yet consider that it was government which had placed 500,000 men in Vietnam, 12% of that number killed, multiples of that number, (four times), of South East Asians were killed, and kept them there for a decade and the whole of the strategy can be summarized as not wanting to be accused of “losing Vietnam.”
A political cover. A pretense. A posturing. A having it both ways. And even now, the lies continue, and History is perverted to serve the ego’s need in the present.
The dishonesty continues today with Springer and Franken. The phrase “discredited Swift Boat Vets” repeated over and over because the Swift Boat Vets dared speak out against a powerful man, a leader of a political faction, who had himself, in the day, accused the vets of “war crimes”.
Springer and Franken thought that Kerry had a “right” to accuse the vets of “war crimes” but think it wrong now for the Swift Boat Vets to tell what they know, which was documented, even by Kerry’s own report.
Note that in the years since, for over thirty five years, the author, TE 194.5.4.4/1, has not come forward. Wonder why?
And if it is said who am I to judge Kerry, he was there I was not, yes, exactly, he was there I was not. I do not personally know if gunning your boat and racing off down the river is a good idea or not. But this is exactly my point. The Swift Boat Vets were there. It behooves us, those of us who were not there, to listen to them, respectfully.
Certainly it is wrong for Springer and Franken to malign them especially as it appears that Springer and Franken malign the Vets not because Springer and Franken have any personal knowledge or insight, some heretofore unspoken reverence for History, but only because Kerry is a member of the elite, to which Springer and Franken belong, and to their Party, their faction, and definitely unlike the middle and working class Swift Boat Vets.
Indeed why do Springer and Franken not also take the hint that no other skipper of a Swift Boat gunned their boats?
But then why is any of this an issue? Why are we not talking about Social Security, balancing the budget, building homes, educating the young?
Why are we being distracted again? History, far from being “settled” now, after having been scrutinized in “disinterested” discussion, becomes another tool of the “fat relentless ego” in its constant struggle for power.
One reason is that Kerry returned home to tell lies about Vietnam. It was not enough for him to simply report that we should leave Vietnam, he had to falsely charge he had witnessed war crimes, even participated in war crimes. And is this not another example of having it both ways? A war hero who committed war crimes? (No, a liar who lied about the war and his record.) What was Kerry protesting but himself: his own lying reports?
Then Springer and Franken complain about the Swift Boat Vet’s TV commercials! I admit that I do not feel this issue as intently as do the Swift Boat Vets. But then have you never noticed a vet wipe a tear from his eye while you looked coolly on? What? Did you think ‘what a cry baby”? Is that how you are? No, I never took Kerry’s charges of “war crimes” seriously, just consider the source, yet I respect the fact that the vets do take it seriously.
And which of us has the correct view? The vets or us in our cool disinterestedness?
And this is how it always has been and always will be. The subjective. See the same issue: Look at the Schiavo CAT scan? Or not? Ignore it?
Accuse the Swift Boat Vets of dishonesty and worse, while ignoring the testimony of the retired Admiral who was on the boat with Kerry and Kerry’s on contemporaneous journal entry nine days later?
Or say you are in favor of “progressive indexing,” (of the rate of INCREASE! of Social Security), before you say it is “pernicious”; why the very idea, the next week, as did Franken. Say we should not have to “bribe” the rich in order to have an old age pension then say the following week that we must pay the rich to keep it “universal” as did Franken.
There is no philosophy that can withstand these twisting demands of the ego. For example, Barbara Boxer the Marin Senator, opposed the Bush forced savings accounts because she said setting up savings accounts would be “too risky”. Just wrap your mind around that: savings is “too risky”. (Franken said he did not even understand what is meant by the words: “forced savings.” Does not understand the issue!)
There are many reasons to oppose Mr. Bush’s vague statements about Social Security reform: because he would create $3 trillion in added debt for a nation that has already fallen in to what just a generation ago would have been unimaginable debt; because the Bush accounts are “instead of” not in “addition to” Social Security; because they do not solve the short fall that Mr. Bush vaguely mentioned, (i.e. 2017 – 2047), when the burden of taxation must fall more and more heavily on the dwindling number of workers who must support the retirees; because Mr. Bush’s vague words never dealt with the fundamental unfairness of a system which draws out of the paychecks of ordinary workers, workers earning a mean average of $16 an hour, whose IQs are on average 100, and thereby forcing them to give their hard earned money to rich retirees, 20% of whom have incomes of over $75,000, whose IQs are above average, (who as a class control 50% of the national income, control over 60% of the financial wealth), and of whom many, most, perhaps 90% of whom, have voted as a class to block development even in our urban areas, forcing the middle and lower income far away by the use of exclusionary zoning, forcing them to long commutes on the highways, burning fossil fuels to get to homes whose mortgages have been raised higher and higher so that to day in California 84% can not afford the median priced home; they have blocked the exploration of oil and gas off our coasts; even blocked wind farms 12 miles from their seashore summer homes; blocked nuclear power for the last 30 years; have for no reason at all blocked progress at every turn, for example they have blocked the mass distribution of educational materials and distance learning to prevent the equitable sharing of knowledge among the people; blocked the entry into the professions with wildly ridiculous requirements such as the requirement that ordinary physicians be able to explain the atomic physics of disease and the molecular interactions of viruses with the membrane of individual cells, as a result our medical schools only can supply half, just 50%, of our new doctors each year, (Barbara Ehrenreich, Fear of Falling) thus draining off of the world the best doctors instead of sending out into the world our own doctors to help the world; blocked every attempt at reform that would lesson the control of the state over the ordinary affairs of the people, (for example, preventing the reform of the big city machines which control the payroll of city and state employees whose pay and pensions steadily rise further burdening the people, (BART train drivers earn $109k), the unfairness of which they try to conceal with claims of “progressive taxation” which is simply another of their lies by which they con the people into thinking that the cost of government can be shifted onto “the rich” instead of telling the people the truth that taxes are redistributed onto them through the price mechanism; or by maintaining state control of essential services such as our schools, or our highways and roads so that acting as a class they can use their power to direct roads to their real estate holdings to their private benefit, or directing state control over institutions and foundations whose tax free status, and state supported work, can be used to advance their interests in preference to the interests of the people; but none of this was mentioned or even hinted at by the Marin Senator Boxer. Why?
For reasons that George Orwell would have understood very well: After the revolution the revolutionary becomes the Tory (Christopher Hitchens, Why Orwell Matters). Every revolutionary is a Tory in waiting. The state now is victorious. And the supporters of the state are now the protectors of the status quo. The Democrats can not become reformers. They are what needs reforming. They must oppose reform or they will be swept away.
So, this is why the Marin Senator thinks savings accounts would be risky. The Marin Senator thinks it is safer for the people to be dependent on the state, and the state’s taxes on the wages of the workers, even though the ratio of worker to retiree, which was 16 to 1, and is now today 3 to 1, and will become 2 to 1, and will therefore force the workers to pay a larger and larger share to the very people whose mismanagement of the economy and selfishness have forced them into these reduced and dwindling circumstances. ( http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/05133/504149.stm)
How can savings be called “risky” except by someone who is completely at a loss, utterly entangled in a twisted political ideology? Note that the national savings rate has declined from the lowest of any industrialized nation, at 4%, to the current level, 1.625% (as a percent on gross income for the last 12 quarters
(http://www.bea.gov/bea/dn/nipaweb/TableView.asp?SelectedTable=120&FirstYear=2002&LastYear=2004&Freq=Qtr ))
By all accounts America needs more savings yet the Marin Senator thinks not. And if you think we should give her the benefit of the doubt and think only that she was trying to “preserve” the social commitment to the retirees who are dependent on Social Security, I would ask you why then did she not say these words which you want to put in her mouth?
For example why did she not say she supports individual accounts “in addition to” the regular pension? (as did U. S. Senator Doctor Professor Daniel Patrick Moynihan). Because, staying in her role in the passion play, she does not want to “give an inch.” This is not a debate. There are no reasoned arguments. She prefers to posture.
And yet she may be credited with “good faith.” And what does it matter? There is no way to reason, and even time will not allow us to adopt a disinterested view, for history is itself twisted and used to support the ego in its self centered view. There is no religion, no philosophy, no way for us to understand. This is Emptiness.
www.NewRuskinCollege.com
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