But … not so fast …
H.L. Mencken, the great American essayist and journalist (Yes, Virginia, there really were journalists in the Good Old Days!) used to say that for every complex, intractable, seemingly impossible problem, there was a quick, easy, convenient solution—that was wrong!
So, let’s play this out. What’s wrong with impeachment now?
Well, for one thing, it’s now, not then. If the Dems wouldn’t touch the subject with a ten foot alligator pole when they were down-and-outers two years ago, why would they want to stretch their democratic ligaments now when they are convinced that the Bush Administration is hoisting itself on its own petard and victory is just 15 months within their grasp?
Those who argue that impeachment will teach Americans a great lesson in the puissance and ultimate triumph of Jeffersonian democracy—whatever that may be!–appear to have forgotten the lesson of the last impeachment: mainly, NAFTA-loving, affable, charming, roll-in-the-Oval-Office-hay Bill was followed by snarling Cheney and his hand-puppet Bush. Just when exactly did impeachment serve the interests of this would-be Republic? Did Andrew Johnson’s? As I recall, his impeachment made it easier for the carpetbaggers to scour the fallen South, and put daggers to Lincoln’s program to “bind up the nation’s wounds.” Did the threatened impeachment of Nixon end the Vietnam War one day sooner? Wasn’t it rather a means to find a presidential scape-goat for the excesses of Empire; to bring a divided nation together so that it could elect Ronald Reagan six years later, promote the Contras in Nicaragua, death squads in El Salvador, and entrench deregulation and all its sins?
Here’s another problem: The Bush-Cheney-Gonzalez cabal, with the approval of our supine Congress and Paleolithic Supreme Court, have fine-tuned and oiled all the machinery for a Police State and Martial Law. Let’s play out this horror: Another 911 event in the midst of impeachment proceedings. Hannity and O’Reilley stridently proclaim that “so-called” Progressives have diverted the attention of the Executive branch from fighting the all-important War on Terror. Martial Law is declared, the 2008 elections cancelled. Many of us are doubtful about the role of this Administration in the cloudy events of 911. Can we be sanguine about its role and response to another such event—or a worse one?
Governments under siege are no better defenders of the commonweal than a misinformed public. And our public has been grossly misinformed for a long time about the very nature of the Empire in which they live and work, pray, play and die. While our corporate roosters outsource jobs; while they plunder the treasury to fight wars abroad; while they line the pockets of lobbyists and politicians, they foster sentimental nationalism among the mainstream-media-addicted masses. Laughing all the way to their banks and their hedge funds, they jet-set about our shrinking globe, frolicking among their class on the best beaches in the world, eating the best food in the world, and sh*tting their gold-colored sh*t for the rest of us to eat.
To propose impeachment now, and to proceed with it, is not to educate the public about their democratic powers, but to egregiously mislead it into thinking the ballyhooed Republic actually works—and is on their side! Such a proposal and undertaking now is a siren song to the naïve; a refusal to do the hard, solid thinking Martin Luther King espoused.
It presupposes that there is a Republic which is responsive to the needs and demands of the people; that that Republic may be salvaged; that it is merely overladen with the filth of neglect. We have simply to get back to the sterling, perdurable tablets upon which the Republic has been founded—the Constitution, the Declaration of Independence—and all will be well.
And while we are engaged in this futile exercise, shall we re-deploy the troops from Iraq to Kuwait; shall we streamline our forces so they are better able to pounce next time? Will we send $30 billion to Israel over the next ten years, or spend $65 billion to re-build our nation’s bridges? In order to fund universal health care, shall we cut our Defense budget or cut Social Security? Will we ask the big questions? Do we even know what to ask?
We are less and less likely to know what to ask, thanks to the consolidation of media empires that took place in the 90s, and continues apace with Aussie billionaire Rupert Murdoch’s recent purchase of Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal. Can we really expect a corporate-government alliance that sanctions the concentration of so much wealth, power and influence into the hands of one or a few individuals to be acting in our interests? So Milton cried for “the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely” according to his conscience “above all other liberties.”
We are trained not to call things what they are. If we have a psychopathic president and vice-president, the petit bourgeoisie think it boorish to disrespect their offices by saying so. If our economic system has created a new aristocracy, increasingly served by a new peasantry, let’s call it Globalization and The New World Order. The aggregation of corporate, government and media power, which Mussolini himself called Corporatism and Fascism—let’s just shake our heads sadly and call it “inevitable,” or the way things are or always have been. Let us go to pedophiliac priests to confess our sins and listen to their pronouncements of salvation in heaven. Let us abide by the words of Protestant preachers who tell us we, too, can become filthy rich if we obey the word of God (and our keepers!) and do not rock the Ship of State. Let us make obeisance to Israel—not because of the Wisdom of Solomon, but because the land-grabbing nation-state keeps the Muslim world divided, and buys our arms.
I am old enough to remember “the Vietnam Syndrome”: the idea that our “defeat” in Vietnam weakened the country’s morale—and our moral fiber. But that was just Bernays-type P.R. nonsense. We weren’t “defeated” in Vietnam. We wound up killing about 3 million Vietnamese and our bombing of Cambodia helped to unleash Pol Pot and the “killing fields” that buried four million. In the third of a century since our withdrawal from Vietnam we have learned disgustingly little about the machinations of the Empire. Dutifully we vote every 2-4 years supposing that this time, doing the same thing, will bring a different result.
So, what to do?
While international capital leaps borders, Daimler Benz buys Chrysler, dumps Chrysler, and piece-workers in China send shiploads to Wal-mart, the international peace movement is stymied and fragmented, and wage slaves around the world feel the walls of their prison cells closing in.
It is almost 200 years since the London Peace Society was organized to convince people that “war is inconsistent with the principles of Chistianity, and the true interests of mankind; and to point out the means best calculated to maintain permanent and universal peace.” On July 4th, 1845, Senator Charles Sumner of Massachusetts, in his speech entitled “The True Grandeur of Nations” declared war contrary to religion and humanity, and, under the conditions of modern civilization, likely to disappear. The first positive reaction to the depredations of the Industrial Revolution was Luddite-like resistance—smash the machines; the second, culminating in the Revolutions of 1848, was to utilize the new power of machines to move towards the ancient vision of universal peace. The third reaction, beginning in the twentieth century, has been a great dulling and numbing of our psychic connections; a retreat from the rich complexity of transnationalism to the safe simplicities of statism. Here, the work of Freud and Jung, and particularly Freud’s nephew, Bernays, established the psychic limits of our species, moulded working and middle classes into enclosed, patriotic, monitored and stimulated heartbeats, massaged by sentimentalism, willing to kill and die for the State and the God of the State.
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