What makes a child spoiled is not being loved too much, but being indulged too much. Which means, satisfying desires that should not be satisfied.
We are a spoiled nation. Indulged as in CHALLENGE OF AFFLUENCE. (This essay can be found at www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_andrew_b_060315_the_challenge_of_aff.htm.) So rich have we become, by any reasonable historical standard, that the old disciplines of duty no longer suffice to govern us. We have so many choices, and lack the new morality to guide us to choose wisely, that we have gradually lost moral discipline. We have lost, in particular, the habit of making the crucial distinction between right desire and wrong desire.
Hence the trashiness of the culture, indulging our impulses that should be suppressed.
Does that have anything to do with the apparent desire among many Americans for a fascist leader, the DECIDER. Is there some inner sense of a lack of order and discipline, and hence a need for power that does not have to answer to us? Is this why it is at this moment that we are dealing with the threat of tyranny?
It seems to me possible that the Bushites gratify both sides of such disordered souls.
On the one hand, his posturing as strong and resolute and decisive (I think here of the great footage of Mussolini that Woody Allen used with such comic effect in his sober masterpiece CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS) may indeed provide a kind of reassurance to the disordered that the great leader will decide, will dictate, will brook no nonsense.
On the other hand, this Bushite regime has really asked for no sacrifice from its followers. And beyond that, it has also enabled people to indulge their baser natures-- the greed for the rich, the lawless bullying and arrogance for the "patriotic" average citizen. So in these respects, the Bushites have been less a corrective for the "spoiled" than a further spoiler.
And who better to spoil this spoiled nation than the frat-boy scion of a rich and powerful family who has always felt entitled to the advantages of favoritism and the privileges of the privileged-- entitled to cut into line for the Texas Air National Guard (and entitled to give short-shrift even exchange for his unearned advantage), entitled to be dealt into riches with the Texas Ranger baseball team, and so on through his life of entitlement.
We are a spoiled nation. Indulged as in CHALLENGE OF AFFLUENCE. (This essay can be found at www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_andrew_b_060315_the_challenge_of_aff.htm.) So rich have we become, by any reasonable historical standard, that the old disciplines of duty no longer suffice to govern us. We have so many choices, and lack the new morality to guide us to choose wisely, that we have gradually lost moral discipline. We have lost, in particular, the habit of making the crucial distinction between right desire and wrong desire.
Hence the trashiness of the culture, indulging our impulses that should be suppressed.
Does that have anything to do with the apparent desire among many Americans for a fascist leader, the DECIDER. Is there some inner sense of a lack of order and discipline, and hence a need for power that does not have to answer to us? Is this why it is at this moment that we are dealing with the threat of tyranny?
On the one hand, his posturing as strong and resolute and decisive (I think here of the great footage of Mussolini that Woody Allen used with such comic effect in his sober masterpiece CRIMES AND MISDEMEANORS) may indeed provide a kind of reassurance to the disordered that the great leader will decide, will dictate, will brook no nonsense.
On the other hand, this Bushite regime has really asked for no sacrifice from its followers. And beyond that, it has also enabled people to indulge their baser natures-- the greed for the rich, the lawless bullying and arrogance for the "patriotic" average citizen. So in these respects, the Bushites have been less a corrective for the "spoiled" than a further spoiler.
And who better to spoil this spoiled nation than the frat-boy scion of a rich and powerful family who has always felt entitled to the advantages of favoritism and the privileges of the privileged-- entitled to cut into line for the Texas Air National Guard (and entitled to give short-shrift even exchange for his unearned advantage), entitled to be dealt into riches with the Texas Ranger baseball team, and so on through his life of entitlement.
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