Diatribes of Jay: Free Fall

For a review of how our own American acts help create our president’s claimed “invasion” of Central American migrants, click here. For brief descriptions of and links to recent posts, click here. For an inverse-chronological list with links to all posts after January 23, 2017, click here. For a subject-matter index to posts before that date, click here.

The “free” world is now in free fall. It’s broken loose from all the principles that once made it free and strong. We are all now falling freely. We have no anchor, no restraint, no safety net.

The evidence is all around us. In the US, the bad have nearly driven the good out of national Executive service. New Chief of Staff Mulvaney sets the trend. Unlike his predecessors, he doesn’t see his job as restraining an increasingly senile and erratic president. Instead, he enables the president’s worst impulses, his “gut.” Our Chief of Staff has become the king’s vizier.

Our leader treats our federal government like an instance of his old “reality” show, “The Apprentice.” Underling after underling he fires, some for refusing to break the law, others for sticking to custom, tradition and common sense, but all at his whim. Vacancies appear daily, in DHS, in our Secret Service, in our emergency services, and in our diplomatic corps, which is far below full strength. Our government is coming to resemble Swiss cheese.

The criteria for replacements are now clear. Experience, competence, training, intelligence and judgment don’t matter. What counts is slavish subservience to the whim and caprice of one man, who is increasingly senile and erratic. We Americans are now as close to the monarchy that our Founders sought to banish forever as we have ever been. With help from Republicans in Congress and in state government, our slide into monarchy is accelerating, as our voters forget what our Bill of Rights is all about.

As our 2020 presidential election approaches, our president’s mind freezes in an idea fixée: stopping immigration. Gone is any serious attempt at the infrastructure rebuilding that might have put Trump’s voters back to remunerative, self-respecting work. Gone is any semblance of coherent foreign policy—besides wistful consorting with the dictators that Trump wishes he were. All that remains is a sick obsession: we must stop brown-skinned Spanish speakers from crossing our Southern border at all costs, even if we have to cut off our third-largest source of trade.

How are things across the pond? How goes it for the original culture of constitutional monarchy from which we derived Ben Franklin’s “Republic”?

There a similar idea fixée reigns supreme. Just isolate Britain in its islands, as if no planes or ships (let alone the Chunnel!) had ever been invented. Then all will be well. Bring back the Channel’s barrier, and Britain’s greatness will magically reappear. Forget about the great thinkers—Newton, Adam Smith, Locke and Darwin. Let the common Brit awash in his or her bitters rule the land in presumed racial purity!

If the truth be told, the diseases on both sides of the Atlantic are much the same. They’re both unvarnished tribalism. They’re the notion that greatness inheres not in one’s education, one’s acts or one’s thoughts, but in one’s genes.

It’s not research, specialization and division of labor that led our species to a semblance of greatness. It’s not a culture of expertise, competence and mutual respect built up over a millennium. Just being a native Yank or a Brit is enough. At least we’re better than the ragged rabble striving at great personal risk to come live with us!

And what about our technology? What about radio, TV, and the Internet, which sprang from the womb of Anglo-American innovation? What are we using them for now?

We are using them to lie to ourselves. We are using them to propagandize ourselves, or at least the voters who fix our respective fates. We are using them to divide ourselves from each other, to delude ourselves into following simplistic nostrums as if they were the thoughts of great men.

We (and our enemies) deploy the Internet that we invented to convince the rabble that the likes of Boris Johnson, Nigel Farage, Donald Trump and Stephen Miller are made in the images of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Disraeli and Churchill. They are not.

Follow great men and women and your prospects will be healthy. Follow dismal leaders and your fate will be dismal. In the end, it’s really that simple.

The vultures are circling, waiting to see what carrion will remain after we hit the ground. Russia recently landed 100 soldiers in Venezuela, whose territory controls the world’s single biggest known oil reserves. Russia is also offering Turkey its advanced S-400 anti-aircraft missile, in order to wean Turkey from our American defense technology. China is offering its “Belt and Road” trade initiative to all and sundry, and Italy is the first European nation to accept.

If ancient Rome had fallen this far this fast, it wouldn’t have taken centuries for Alaric’s sacking of “the eternal city” to produce the Dark Ages. That dismal near-millennium of stagnation would have begun in mere decades.

As it turns out, you don’t need democracy to create strong science and technology. China has landed a spacecraft on the far side of the Moon. It’s also neck-and-neck with us in quantum science. Russia’s military technology is resurging and challenging us to a new arms race. And we use our finest technology to delude, derange and demagogue ourselves into thinking that the Trumps, Boris Johnsons and Nigel Farages of the world are going to save us and restore our greatness.

There is no shortcut to greatness. It doesn’t come from simplistic ideas fixées. It doesn’t come from retreat from logic, study and engagement with the world. It doesn’t come from the madness and cruelty of a senile old man, regardless of the power of his office. It doesn’t come from stupidity at one’s borders, or rages toward the very desperate refugees who still believe in the free world’s promise, but whom we abuse.

The free world has some time to deploy its parachutes. The EU has given Britain another six months to get its act together and produce a “Brexit” (or none!) resembling common sense. We Yanks have about a year to decide on an alternative to our senile would-be monarch, and to begin restoring our democracy.

Altogether, this single year may be the most critical in the history of Western civilization so far. Nothing in the law of life guarantees any civilization or culture survival, let alone greatness or predominance—certainly not a people’s genes. You have to earn these things by clear thinking and cogent acts, step by step and day by day.

At very least, you have to deploy some common sense. Whether Western civilization can do so now will determine whether or not our new Third Millennium will have begun, in essence, with a resounding “splat!”

Why an “Invasion” from “The Triangle”?
Our demented president is obsessed with an “invasion” from “The Triangle,” namely three impoverished, failed states in Central America: El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras. The term “invasion” is an exaggeration. Virtually none of the “invaders” is armed. More than half of them are not even the young, strong men who used to come here looking for work.

The current “invaders” are mostly mothers and children. They come desperately fleeing death threats, violence and extortion from criminal gangs rampant in their homelands. A small portion come from small agricultural regions impoverished by climate change.

All just want to live without the violence and fear that arise from extreme poverty and that their failed states cannot control. Rightly or wrongly, they see the United States as their savior, despite the ironic name (in Spanish) of the first of the three tiny countries (“The Savior”).

They come to us seeking refuge and asylum. It’s the only practical way they can conceive to save themselves. Many walk over a thousand miles, with little food and no shelter, just to get here.

Our president is not a curious man. The magnet in his moral compass pulls only toward himself. So, apparently, he has never stopped to ask the obvious questions. Why now? Why them? Why here? Let’s supplement Trump’s absent curiosity and try to find some answers.

The best way to begin is not with history, but with song. Begin by listening to the folk-rock-protest song “El Salvador,” released by the iconic Boomers’ group Peter, Paul and Mary in 1986. It tells the story of American involvement in a long Salvadoran civil war, helping a dictator suppress a series of peasant revolts with leftist overtones. It’s a tale of gross and horrific violence, waged against desperate peasants by those using American money, training, guns, planes and bombs. (The Triangle can’t manufacture these things, let alone design them.)

Why did we help incompetent and cruel rulers—with all our superior technology, wealth and military prowess—wage an horrific war against their own people? Therein lies a much longer tale, one that spans two centuries.

Our own nation, the United States of America, started off as thirteen British colonies. We had to fight for our independence and freedom. Our foe was then the most powerful Western power: Great Britain. At the time of our Revolutionary War, the British armada of some 400 ships arrayed against us (in and around New York Harbor) was the greatest armada ever assembled by any power besides Imperial China.

With grit and perseverance, and despite big mistakes (like losing New York), we won. But our leaders had a lot of work to do melding the thirteen colonies into a new nation, exploring our new continent, and dealing with American natives (the so-called “Indians”).

So we never had much appetite for colonizing. But a century of growing industrial and military might led us into conflict with a waning colonial power, Imperial Spain. We won the Spanish-American war and, in the negotiated peace, acquired the former Spanish Colonies of Cuba and the Philippines.

These were the only true colonies that the United States ever had. But during the twentieth century, we gave both up. We gave them up to indigenous political movements that we hoped would lead to independent, democratic states.

We gave them up for two reasons—one good, the other not so much. First, as a collection of freed colonies ourselves, we were against colonization on principle. We believed in freedom and self-determination.

Second, the people in Cuba and the Philippines then were mostly brown, and we didn’t want to bear what Rudyard Kipling called “the white man’s burden” of ruling them. This racist motive was explicit in Senate debate over the Treaty of Paris, which concluded the Spanish-American war and gave us the territories of Cuba and the Philippines. For the rest of the twentieth century, these two motives—anti-colonial and racist—mixed in our collective minds and often came into conflict with capitalism.

You see, The Triangle has things that we wanted. It has a good climate for growing coffee and other tropical crops. It also has minerals that can be mined. So our industrialists sent down their engineers and managers, and they hired local workers (mostly peasants) as cheap labor. With nineteenth-century thinking, their means of controlling the natives often turned toward violence.

So arose the so-called “Banana Republics.” Some say they were just colonies by another name. But from our own perspective they were more “efficient” than colonies. They required no permanent US garrisons, with constant requests for their re-manning and resupply. There was no need for US soldiers, sailors or marines to risk their lives controlling restive natives. All we needed was a small class of local, “aristocratic” business owners who would serve as our businesses’ proxies and protect our and their own property and wealth using native skill and local resources.

And so our own 1%—who later became part of our own First Gilded Age—fostered the rise of the Four Hundred Families of Latin America. And whenever those families or their jointly owned American and local property became threatened, we of the United States helped protect it, not with our own white American lives, but with American military training, guns, bullets, bombs, tanks and planes.

We Americans had made an “improvement” on colonizing, reducing its high cost, risk to ourselves, and trouble. Let native bosses rule and us just pay the tab; then split the proceeds, with the lion’s share of profits coming home.

Unfortunately, when absentee owners rule from abroad by force, a lot can go wrong. There were various indigenous rebellions and revolutions. These ran rampant during the Cold War, when Soviet Communism captured the imagination of leftists worldwide, and later when Cuba tried to inspire revolutions throughout the Western Hemisphere.

If the truth be told, the local bosses whom we appointed to quell these rebellions were rarely clever or wise. They were often brutal and cruel, using draconian methods of dominance and enforcement. Their tactics included “death squads” and open war against clueless peasants, and these tactics dominated the twentieth century. The results were yet more unrest, rebellion and war.

The reductio ad absurdum was Dictator Manuel Noriega of Panama—a man whose face was so pock-marked by smallpox they called him “La Piña” (the “pineapple”). His discipline was just as spiky: he resisted our “instructions” and “guidance” and had to be deposed by a real “invasion” of American Marines.

There could have been another way. Consider Costa Rica. Just north of Panama, it’s separated from The Triangle by Nicaragua alone. It’s a peaceful, prosperous, lovely country where American and other cruise ships dock. Americans go there to learn Spanish by living with local families, and many Americans go there to retire.

So tranquil is Costa Rica that it doesn’t even have an army. It doesn’t need one. Why? Because it has no American mines or plantations to protect; those it has are locally owned.

Costa Rica sits on the same Central American isthmus as the three countries of The Triangle, separated only by Nicaragua. Yet it’s peaceful, prosperous and stable. It sends no “caravans” of desperate refugees our way.

If Donald Trump had a moral sense, he might think on these things. If he had an iota of curiosity about anything other than himself and his own interests, he might ask about this history. He might discover how much we Americans bear direct moral responsibility—cause and effect—for the failure of The Triangle’s three bloody states, and for their abject poverty and violence that is now driving their desperate mothers and children to “invade” us.

But of course our own Nero or Caligula has none of these virtues. Instead of helping, he throws fuel on the fire by eliminating our scant $500 million of aid to the region. If he were smart or wise, he might divert the $6 billion he plans to steal for his Wall without Congress’ approval. That much money might make a dent in the dystopias that we ourselves helped create and substantially reduce the flow of migrants for the long haul.

Footnote 1: Ever-ready to confuse people with no interest in fact or detail, Fox recently called these three countries “3 Mexican countries” on a screen chyron and had to apologize.

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Links to Posts since January 23, 2017

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Diatribes of Jay

11 April 2019

Free Fall

Why an “Invasion” from “The Triangle”?

Links to Popular Recent Posts

Links to Posts since January 23, 2017

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