Greg Greene tells it like it is on Blog for America:
Forgive us if we refrain from putting our Iraqi-election-analyst hats on. Still, we thought the President had a goal of using democracy as a pressure valve in order to reduce violence, and allow our troops to leave. If that's the case, the U.S. should have bent over backwards to prevent even an appearance of fraud ? right? Right?
Posted by Greg Greene at 02:03 AM
Wrong, Greg. You don't seem to get it. Democracy is the "opportunity" to cast a ballot. What's on it and whether or not it gets counted is totally irrelevant. See. It's a public relations exercise--just like those polls we are always taking part in and the manufacturers of soap and cars are always conducting. It's the process that's important, the feeling that public opinion is being considered. But, it would be stupid to let it affect anything. Don't you know that was Clinton's big problem? He actually paid attention to the polls and tried to do what people wanted. What a schmuck.
Perhaps I should explain that I've spent a couple of hours this morning reading my latest New Yorker. Then I had to stop. I just couldn't take it anymore. Though I will admit that this issue has a varied content that I guess is supposed to appeal to someone who's into social issues.
But, since I'm not an appreciator of comedy (don't understand the comics, though I like Oscar's tags), I was not enthused to learn about Sara Silverman who thinks it's funny to put red paint on her costume and let people think she's having her period and then announce that: no, she'd just had a peculiar sexual experience. From where I sit, the world would be a much better place if private behaviors were kept private. I mean, how can we agitate for a right to privacy in the Constitution when we flaunt our most intimate behaviors on the public stage?
It's true that one can make the effort to respect someone's privacy by closing one's eyes and trying not to hear their farts, but don't people also have an obligation to moderate offensive behaviors or do them behind closed doors?
One of the main New Yorker articles is about a guy named Viereck (no mention of the fact that viereck is the German word for 'square') who's supposed to be the "father" of neoconservatism, but who's rejected what the movement has evolved into. I think he mainly objected to liberalism because he really hated his father, a liberal and an early Nazi, but thinks that patriarchy is a good idea.
That led me to think that maybe where our problems with all these ideas comes from is that they all assume "government" as a given. Indeed, they assume that government is synonymous with society. But, if you accept that principle, you're already lost because government implies an outside control of the individual and then, to justify imposing control on an entity that wants to be free and unrestricted, you have to make the second assumption--that the individual deserves to be controlled because he's basically bad.
Never mind that, to begin with, the essence of that badness is nothing more than the reluctance of a mobile creature to be controlled.
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The big difference between liberals and conservatives when it comes to government is figuring how control of the population is best achieved. Our traditional liberals were convinced that if people were bribed with good things, social benefits, so they would conform their behavior to what was expected. Conservatives preferred to go the cheaper route of using threats of bad things happening, if people don't behave. Since bad things or the use of physical force tend to generate resistance, most recent conservatives have relied on predictions of bad things coming from outside, if the population didn't behave as directed.
The problem with this strategy (crying wolf on a large scale) is that it loses its effect, if nothing bad actually happens over a long period of time. So, for example, the demise of the Cold War wasn't so much an end to actual conflict, as an end to the reliability of the promise that a really nasty attack was in the offing.
To deal with this problem, the people who believe in governing with threats have had to be more and more inventive. Which, in effect, means that the lies have had to be more and more blatant and, as the mechanisms for verification have improved (the new technological capability in every living room), it was only a matter of time until the pattern of lies was fully exposed.
Which is where we are at now.
Where we are not at is the realization that all the assumptions about government are false--that, indeed, the organization of society isn't a matter of control at all, but a matter of mutual benefit. And further, that although individual interests are likely to conflict, since not everyone can have everything they want at the same time, time is of the essence. More particularly, that most people can get most of what they want, if they'll just take turns.
In part, that's because most of what people think they want before they get it, they don't actually want after they have it. So, they're more than glad to get rid of it and let one person's trash be another's treasure. In part, it's because people are fickle and more inclined to change rather than permanence. Another way of saying that is that people are easily bored, especially with what they have. So, taking turns actually fits nicely with enjoying a change.
The assertion that people resist change is also false. Humans like change. What they don't like is to BE CHANGED by someone else.
Perhaps one reason the PR people were actually successful in usurping the government was because, for the most part, their persuasion was gentle and what they were promising didn't sound like it was going to hurt. But, the reality has turned out to be different. The control they have wrested has turned out not to be gentle at all and the promises they made have turned out to be lies.
And that's where we're at. And the problem we face is how to wrest the instruments of force out of the hands of these people, who don't mean us well. In the nuclear age, that's going to have to be handled with particular sensitivity. People who govern with threats are not likely, when their power is challenged, to be particularly reluctant to actualize those threats with a show of force.
That might just be a promise they keep.