The Death of American Empire

Posted by Patrick Foy on June 12, 2007

An asylum for the sane would be empty in America. --George Bernard Shaw

Step back and look at the big picture. The farther you step back, the bigger the picture gets. Step back too far, and the world becomes a reductio ad absurdum, resulting in a kind of Buddhism. My departed friend Charles Bukowski wrote in one of his many poems, “We cannot acquire too much...there are laws we know nothing of.” What prompts this avenue of thought is a gloomy editorial not too long ago in Capitol Hill Blue by its founder, Doug Thompson, out of Washington, D.C. Every once in a while, like some of us, Thompson seems to nosedive into a depression. The title of his article ( March 9th, 2007) indicates as much: “Turn off the life support: America is dead”. Here’s a sample:

Maybe, just maybe, it’s time to pull the plug on this failed democratic republic called The United States of America. Turn off the life support. Disconnect the IVs. The US of A is brain dead with no chance for revival....

It doesn’t matter who controls Congress. Congress is a dead institution, ruled by timid legislators who no longer exercise any real role in the governing of this nation. It doesn’t matter what the Supreme Court may or may not do. The President of the United States has declared himself a “war time President” and granted himself dictatorial rights that no one in Congress or the Court appears able to successfully challenge him....

We need to rethink this experiment called America. Maybe we need to start with a clean sheet of paper.... Maybe it’s time for a new American Revolution. After all, the last one started because another guy named George tried to destroy our way of life.

All of this may be accurate, but it is too idealistic. [In fact, in the interim, Thompson has toned down the article, removing some of what has just been quoted.] We do not live in a perfect world. We live in a world of the possible, the tolerable, and/or the just barely manageable. We cannot go back to the dream of the Founding Fathers of the American Republic or to its original Constitution. To attempt to halt the present day free-for-all in America and begin anew would likely make matters worse, opening the door to greater demagoguery and perhaps complete chaos.

The truth is, the U.S. Constitution no longer exists. It is long gone, and nobody is particularly concerned. That optimistic framework of self-governance and independence was rendered irrelevant by the Civil War (a.k.a. The War of Northern Aggression) which lasted from 1861 to 1865. The legitimate issue of slavery aside, when half the country invades, pillages, ransacks and subjugates the other half, that event can in no way be indicative of the rule of law, and was certainly not authorized by the Constitution. The Civil War marked the end of the American Republic of 1789. We live in the aftermath, a postscript; we are making it up as we go along. Many wonderful and fantastic achievements have occurred during this aftermath--in the realm of inventions, science, entertainment, industry, space exploration, the arts, business, etcetera--for which Americans can justly be proud. But many terrible things have happened as well, mostly in the governmental sector, for which Washington must take the blame, along with the citizenry who tolerated or ignored what Washington was doing.

On the foreign policy horizon, let’s keep everything in perspective and on the table. G.W. Bush, who is a modern day, real-life Charlie McCarthy, and his mentor, Richard Cheney, who corresponds to Edgar Bergen, are only symptoms of a larger problem, a mystery bigger than the aberration misnamed “neoconservatism”. Bush and Cheney are the end-products of an historical development a century in the making.

Read the rest of the article at Taki's Top Drawer: http://www.takimag.com/site/article/the_death_of_american_empire/

Patrick Foy is author of The Unauthorized World Situation Report.

The South Carolina League of the South leads the way.