Tag Archives: Anarchy

Things fall apart

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FalcolnWilliam Butler Yeats wrote that “things fall apart” and “the center cannot hold.”

By his dark and beautiful poetry, Yeats wrote what he saw and felt after the close of World War I.

Yeats described the alarming trends we find today in the too easy inclination among some citizens to redress the effects of conflict and war by isolation, intolerance and doomsday desperation.

Our political partisans fail to work together to hold the center.

This condition is not without historical precedent.

In Great Britain, the citizens voted to withdraw from the EU and only after they voted did they bother to learn what EU meant to their economic well-being and national security.

The Tory Prime Minister (PM) David Cameron couldn’t get his Labor Party opposite, Jeremy Corbyn, to join the fight to remain in the EU.

The former London Mayor, Boris Johnson, the PM’s old Eton “friend,” took up the “leave the EU” campaign in opposition.

“Light information voters” are voters too lazy to know much about what they are voting on; many EU voters, however, had “no information,” not a clue about the EU.

Yeats wrote how, “Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,” listen here.

Public policy generated by a voter’s xenophobic intolerance is anarchy.

Yeats described how “the blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned.”

The ceremony of sense, of comity and of tolerance fell beneath Britain’s electoral wave. Continue reading →

Reality check

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trumpfuReality TV has always struck me as cultural porn, transfixing bystanders with the participants’ non-stop trash talk, wrong headed views, erratic and impolite behavior, not to overlook their clumsy violence, cursing intolerance, calculated to demean each other “for amusement.”

The tv participants in these seemingly impromptu presentations are indifferent as to how they appear as long as they are being watched.

If the “players” have any sense at all, they know they are being abusive, even sadistic to one another.

Those watching are masochistic, as they submit, and perhaps even embrace this misconduct.

It’s not like a road side accident because this is no accident. “Huge” amounts of time and money and promotion are spent on this immersion “entertainment.” Parents reform a child’s worst impulses to act this way but disregard what they teach.

Marshall McLuhan studied cultural phenomenon and wrote how the “medium is the message” and how it forms our daily conduct. There could perhaps be no better example of McLuhan’s instruction than how reality tv has crossed over and embedded itself, compromised our “culture,” as it’s being mimicked increasingly off-camera, and is the latest in-your-face fashion this presidential season. Continue reading →

Anarchy?

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Henry David Thoreau said he heartily agreed with that Jeffersonian remark, “that government is best which governs least.”

He said, however, he’d go one better, believing “That government is best which governs not at all.”

Henry was, in truth and fact, a non-violent anarchist.

Some might think our current brand of green tea anarchists from mostly red states draw wisdom from Henry when enthusiastically shutting down the government – invoking the Affordable Care Act (ACA)(or Obamacare) as their pretext for what they’ve wanted to do ever since they’ve dominated the House Republican Caucus in the U.S. Congress and dictated what the Speaker may move to the floor for a vote.

But Henry’s no-government anarchism presumed a precondition, that would be satisfied “when men are prepared for it, [and then] that will be the kind of government which they will have.” Continue reading →