Despachos de Paraíso - Day 3

Monday, March 18, 2008

Tuesday March 11
Greek Gods Will Shit on Your 401k

Carla is sleeping upstairs. I've had too much coffee, so I'm up with lappie and my TUC Radio (Time of Useful Consciousness) mp3's, which for me is like a glass of warm milk. Tonight I'm listening to Gray Brechin's conversation with Chalmers Johnson—and jungle sounds, naturally. In 2007 Johnson was stumping in support of his new book. I say "stumping," but really his footfalls were pretty soft. With a title like "Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic," he was pretty much relegated to coverage by channels like C-SPAN 12: Apocalyptic Book Reviews.

purty sky things over the Playa Negra

Nemesis is the greek goddess of revenge, the attacker of hubris & arrogance. She is classically portrayed as a bright young woman with a whip in one hand and a scale in the other, but Renaissance artists seemed to like her with a sword. The Greeks have, as only the Greeks can, given us the image of someone with a score to settle. She is often shown astride the wheel of fortune, or the head of some punk-ass who had it coming. Astride it, literally: she rode the Wheel of Fortune around like a unicycle. She wasn't some some fucking messenger-boy like that fruit Hermes, either. Nemesis was a high-class broad. Her sister was Eroto, the goddess of love poetry. See? High-class.

vengeful and patient: Nemesis waits for her moment

Chalmers contends that Nemesis is "in the house," that she is in-country, biding her time, waiting to attack those who have shown incredible hubris.

The essential argument of Johnson's book is this: History shows us that there is no more unstable configuration that the United States today — that is, an internal democracy and an external empire. You can do one, or you can do the other, but you can't do both. These two enterprises are fundamentally in conflict with each other. Examples he sites of civilizations that have attempted this are the Roman Republic (which is important to us because so many of our Constitutional provisions are adapted from the Romans) and former British empire.

orange explosions!

After the assassination of Julius Cesar and the rise of Octavian, the Roman experiment succumbed to military dictatorship and democracy did not return for at least a thousand years. In short: the Romans chose to keep their empire and in the process, lost their democracy.

On the other hand, the British had the question put to them pointedly by India. They realized that to keep the jewel in the crown of their empire, they would have to resort to administrative massacres, which in order to carry out, Britain would have had to transform herself into a tyranny. So the British chose to keep their democracy, and in so doing let go of their empire. Johnson suggests that this was relatively easy for the British to do, since the United States was waiting in the wings.

mrs sloth demurely presents us with her privates

That brings us to America. With a current total of 737 military bases in over 130 different countries, its almost impossible to deny that we have an external empire. And the presidential elections of 2000 and 2004 notwithstanding, we have an internal democracy.

So Nemesis is in search of those who commit hubris. Stupidity, arrogance, things of that sort. Examples that Johnson offers which suggest that we are defying Nemesis to visit us with her whip: the Marine Corps spray-painting "Semper FI" onto the side of the ziggurat at Ur (and then guarding it with troops so that journalists could not photograph it), the destruction of the main gate at Nebuchadnezzer's palace, rolling tanks over tiles that were laid down by Alexander the Great, putting up two 10,000-foot runways next to the ziggurats at Ur, as well as a Burger King (the aroma of which is said to make our troops feel "more at home"). Not to mention Abu Grahaib, etc. These are the sort of things that will come back to haunt us.

pretty trees

Johnson suggests that there are only two possible outcomes for America: we lose our empire or we become a military dictatorship. What he considers to be the most likely is a financial whimper instead of a nuclear bang. "If you have a few thousand saved up, it's time to think about a down payment on that condo in Vancouver." Ha ha ha! Good times.