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Edited on Thu Feb-26-04 12:23 AM by arendt
Proscription is Bush's Prescription
by arendt
....proscribe 1. in ancient Rome, to publish the name of (a person)
....condemned to death, banishment, etc. 2. to deprive of the protection
....of law; outlaw 3. to banish; exile 4. to denounce or forbid the practice,
....use, etc. of; interdict
....attainder n. 1. forfeiture of property and loss of civil rights of a person
....sentenced to death or outlawed.
....bill of attainder a legislative enactment against a person, pronouncing
....him guilty, without trial, of an alleged crime (esp. treason) and inflicting
....the punishment of death and attainder upon him: prohibited by the U.S.
....Constitution.
----
Once again, George W. Bush is pushing for a return to the traditional
values - of the Roman Civil War. Namely, extra-legal oligarchic reaction and
the judicial persecution of enemies. In the present case, no matter how you
dress it up, it is the proscription of the civil rights of the gay community.
Just look at the dictionary definitions above.
How is rewriting the Constitution for partisan political purposes in reaction
to a series of honestly-won judicial victories anything other than a proscription?
Not only is Bush's call for gay proscription a strategic political strike against
tolerance and in favor of religious bigotry; but, coupled with the media
frenzy over Mel Gibson's pornographic homage to torture (and the hypocritical
adulation given to it by the so-called family values crowd), it raises a
tactical smokescreen over the presidential race at just the moment when
Bush was looking more and more like a lying, crooked, incompetent bum.
But, there is a silver lining to this smokescreen. Bush is creating a pattern
that ought to make anyone vaguely in the path of the fundamentalist
agenda extremely nervous. The pattern is one of having absolutely no
respect for the U.S. Constitution; of treating it like some old furniture, to be
thrown away on a whim. And that is precisely what a group of Senators
has done regarding the Ten Commandments. Co-sponsored by the
Southern fire-eater Zell Miller, faux-Democrat-GA, they propose to rewrite
the Constitution to make it subservient to any religious charlatan who
wants to grandstand on public property. Each of these initiatives is part
of a broad-front assault on the freedom of every non-fundamentalist to
practice their own brand of spirituality without fear or favor.
The pattern began with the shameful Patriot Act, which gave Bill of Attainder
power to George Bush, in violation of the Constitution. How is Camp Xray at
Guantanamo anything other than a massive Bill of Attainder against all its
current and future inmates, both domestic and foreign? Webster's dictionary
dares to speak the truth that cowed politicians won't: it is unconstitutional.
Of course, the Fatherland Security commission on purging the terrorist influences
from academia (led by serial extremist, David Horowitz and Lynne Cheney)
will take care of that terrorist, Mr. Webster.
The art of subverting a government is to do the dirty work in the dark, to pick
ambiguous cases and to use them to claim sweeping precedents. Inflammatory,
if not absolutely counter-factual, rhetoric is employed to pretend that a fatal wound
is merely a pinprick, and besides, it was self-defense. This pattern is beginning
to be glaringly obvious to even the most casual student of the Bush mis-administration.
----
The death throes of Roman democracy lasted over a century, from
the time of the brothers Gracchus to Caesar Augustus. It was a
century of brutal, bloody civil conflict, with factions kicking each other
out of power by any means, legal or not. It was a time of politics
without a net: those in power could "proscribe" their enemies,
stripping them of all rights and condemning them to death on a
say-so; or they could merely confiscate all their possessions by
"attainder". The courts were so corrupt as to be negatively effective,
rendering their verdicts in favor of the highest bidder.
The lack of genuine due process led to the further unravelling of democracy,
as the disenfranchised poor turned to demagogues, like Milo and Clodius,
and their gangs of thugs; and the rich turned to massive corruption and
private armies.
...."The business of vote buying reached a scale where it required
....a high specialization of labor: there were divisores, who bought
....votes, interpretes, or go-betweens, and sequestres, who held the
....money until the votes had been delivered...So much money was
....borrowed to finance candidacies that the campaigns raised the
....interest rate to eight per cent per month."
Will and Ariel Durant
"The Story of Civilization:
Vol. 3 Caesar and Christ"
pp 128-9.
Does any of this sound familiar? Just asking.
Fortunately, for students of history, the Roman Civil War had no ideological
component. There were no significant differences in religion on either side.
There were no ideologies to speak of, no communism, no fascism. It was
all about raw economic power and the subjugation of the Roman citizen
of modest means who served in the Army for decades only to return home
to find his farm in bankruptcy due to the massive use of slave labor by the
oligarchs. The cause of that Civil War was the refusal of the moneyed oligarchy
to grant the slightest semblance of fairness and citizen rights to its fellow Romans,
much less the other people they had conquered in the Italian peninsula.
Today, the Bush-led fundamentalist assault on America, funded by runaway
global corporations and their overseas sweatshop and prison labor, is
beating the record the Romans established for corrupting a democracy
from the inside, using exactly the same tactics on a larger scale with better
technology.
The Roman Empire that issued from the Civil War was the debased remains
of the once honest, if only superficially democratic, Roman Republic. It is
the Roman oligarch tradition which the so-called Christian fundamentalists are
copying, lock, stock, and gun-barrel as they, and their neocon enablers try to
impose an American Empire.
----
How many more brazen slaps in the face will the American public accept
from these self-appointed guardians of everyone else's morality and rights?
Do you wait until they declare your church a terrorist organization? Do you
wait for them to send you to Guantanamo? Or, do you just wait for these looters
to get done bankrupting America's treasury, ruining its military forces, and
making lots of live enemies and dead Marines in the process?
Like the Krell machine in the sci-fi classic, "Forbidden Planet", fundamentalism
is a "monster of the id" - a creature born of our own fears and hatreds. Like
the human crew in FP, no amount of Constitutional armor can save us from the
dark side of our own citizenry.
As Alexader Solzhenitsyn observed: "the line between good and evil passes,
not between classes or nations, but down the middle of each human heart".
Right wingers, who used to lionize this Russian Orthodox fundamentalist, have
decided, instead, that the line passes between gays and straights, Moslems
and Christians, Republicans and Democrats.
We are witnessing today, something that only a decade ago was considered
laughable:
...."Let me suggest somewhat whimsically that the heritage of fundamentalism
....was to Christian learning for evangelicals like Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution
...(was) for the Chinese. Both divorced a generation from mainline academia, thus
....making reintegration a difficult, if not bewildering task."
- Nathan Hatch, quoted in
Mark Noll, "The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind"
What is going on in America today is as insane and destructive as Chairman Mao
and his "Cultural Revolution"; and the fundamentalists are auditioning for the part
of the Red Guards. The deliberate inflaming of the gay marriage situation by Bush
is the equivalent of incitement to riot, the kind of riot where the police are on the
side of the rioters, the kind of riot called a pogrom.
God save me from people who are convinced God has saved them. And God save
America from Chairman George and his little Black Scofield Reference Bible.
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