This will be my last article for Thomas Paine's Corner for some time. I am an old man and I intend to dedicate some of these next months to writing something for the future. The present seems unwilling to learn anything, and, my time runs only shorter. Just perhaps there is a better audience, one more capable of reading philosophy and absorbing the ideas imparted there by one who gives selflessly in an effort to bequeath to the future the understanding necessary to make their lives capable of some small part of the joy that has been my own.
In my taking a sans sabbatical know I have not forsaken the quest. I have merely decided to end-run and leave the din of the battle behind to get out ahead to see where it is humanity might end up, and, more importantly just perhaps to forewarn those left behind in the quaere of humanity what might be ahead, and where they might find respite from the pursuit swarming in around them from all sides.
I finished the Well's book this past weekend, gladly. I have moved on to Twains' "Roughing It" that I rightly assumed would be more uplifting than the history of man.
Twain relates an incident where he and two companions, having escaped a flood, fled the scene of it at night into a desert in a blinding snowstorm, only to become hopelessly lost, cold, unable to start a fire, and, losing their horses in the process of it, laying down thereafter together to die in the dark and the cold with only the shared warmth of their humanity to keep them through the night. All three swear off all their vices as they prepare to meet their end either by freezing to death, or, by the scorching desert sun sure to follow the next day lost in a limitless desert with no horses and no provision.
Morning comes for them, and they find they have survived. They also find where they laid down to die was but a few yards from the only stagecoach station for thirty miles of desert all around them. Their horses have found its stable, its supplies and a humble shack has every provision they might need to recuperate and get on their way out of the desert they were sure would take their lives the night before.
Twain the cynic is an optimist for us. It is no history of man Twain writes. He wrote for the future, as do I.
Everyone has suffered their setbacks, their predicaments it seemed impossible to pry themselves free of, if only for want a of being able to turn back the clock. Everyone has suffered in this world, and experienced their great joys too. Life is wonderment. The clock cannot be turned back. We can better prepare ourselves and those who might follow us into this world, if we can surmise for them and ourselves how wonderful it is just to watch the river flow. What a gift! What a paradise!
It is often society that deals the blow that hobbles and racks a soul. And if this is too often by our humanitarian estimation of it as such, as it has been mine, then we should address the problem of its frequency not by the sorry condition its frequency imparts.
Every human is licensed to kill. However, some seem to have a freer license than do others, and they seem the ultimate source of the problem of frequency we wish to address as iniquity. But again, it is the variability of the license and not the individual we are ultimately concerned with here. For if the perpetrators are all rounded up, and the licenses continue to be issued, what difference will we make? None.
These freer licenses are not issued so much as they are assumed. As such it seems doubly important we address the assumption of these licenses rather than the holders of them.
There are those who argue fervently against the death penalty. Their best arguments are that it is organized murder, which it is. However, while the death penalty is heinous, it is not so because it kills men one at a time. It is heinous because it licenses many other murderers.
Most death penalty deaths are not handed down by a jury and passed upon by a judge.
There are many more death penalty deaths issued by policemen who sit back and watch as rival gangs kill each other off. Innocent bystanders are also given the sentence of a death penalty death as policemen sit back and watch the inevitable occur.
Wars are like this. And we even have a term for the deaths of these innocents in war. We call them collectively, collateral damage. It's part of the licensing process that must be dealt with, if we are to ameliorate its ubiquity.
In the irrational state of our human logic we commonly hear pre-emptive defenses given to exonerate the potentially guilty as these licenses are being assumed. If our memories do not fail all of us, the defenses for these actions in Iraq and Afghanistan were that we were after the modern day equivalent of the Barbary Pirates.
There were those who ran around like chickens with their heads cut off exclaiming, this will only lead to the tragedy we all abhor. But they seem not to know how to address the assumptive licensing process.
It is however, far easier to know how to address this licensing process than it seems it is to affect what we know. The causality is obvious to all. When one license is assumed, there will be more to follow.
So you see, when our government leaders trumpeted the call to war after 9-11, each player who got behind the effort, as well as those who did not sound a call against it, they all took their part in the licensing of American soldiers to come home from their war, and for some of them to then to kill their wives and children. Everyone knew this would happen. Everyone who got behind the war had their part in splattering the blood of these innocents all over our fair land, as well as to further license others to then take from the license of these soldiers their own license to kill.
Every human is licensed to kill. It comes with our human nature.
Even in my own uneventful life four times I have been assaulted without prior warning with enough force to kill a man with less strength to their constitution than had I. Each time the assailant was fortunate I did not die due to their attack. For each I am grateful. For in that event my suffering would have been so minor compared to theirs.
That many of these government players lied to get the effort behind the war into full tilt, we can have no doubt. They summoned forth that part of human nature, the licenses to kill everyone has, and spread it far and wide throughout the land. These licenses self-propagate themselves. Even some of the classmates of these murdered children will assume their own license to kill decades from now. The heritage of it is spread like all abhorrent behavior. It is learned, and it is assumed.
This killing phenomenon is what I refer to as the trickle-down theory of murderous morality. The trickle-down theory is the best argument for the use of the death penalty. As a deterrent the death penalty doesn't work when we employ it against some common miscreant. But, when we employ the death penalty to curb the issuance of killing licenses by persons of high authority, we are sure to make of the world a better place.
I am again going to call to have this President and this Vice President immediately arrested and thrown into jail with no bail to await their trial.
I care not for the Constitution and its impeachment proceedings prescribed for the removal of a president or vice president from office. This process has never offered mitigation. These men are criminals for having lied the country into a war. It is not their prerogative to commit these criminal acts, to murder and to spread licenses to murder all over the world as they have.
Time and greater familiarity with the ignoble temperament of the players of this Administration have given us a better guess as to whom the Barbary Pirates are in these wars. It is neither the Iraqis nor the Afghanis.
Are not these men subject to the same laws as everyone else? Or are they kings? Can they kill whom they will? Can they act with impunity to the law?
Do the President and the Vice President of the United States have an unconditional license to kill only amenable by impeachment?
Do the President and the Vice President of the United States have an unconditional license to license others to kill that is only amenable by impeachment?
This is how these men would have us read the Constitutional powers of the Executive. It is far from any cogent reading of the Constitution however.
This is not what was meant by the Constitution to which all others in our land have a sworn oath of defense.
No American would swear an oath to defend the rights of murderers, kings of otherwise.
Let me tell you what I think has happened.
These Neocon Napoleons asked for their Pearl Harbor event, and they got it.
Anyone even remotely familiar with the psychology of remorse knows exactly what sort of insanity this wish-fulfillment has played out in amongst this group. Their planned War on Iraq has only doubled their psychosis. Its teetering failure threatening to derail the planned seizure of Middle East oil is a festering psychotic nightmare that repeatedly replays the psychosis of their murderous route to the point of their all becoming numbed to future crimes designed to bring home the bacon and the immortality of their New American Century.
It is a pipe-dream every American has stored away in their subconscious. Americans simply trust that their political leaders are going to pull a rabbit out of their hat. All Americans are simply sitting back in their chairs waiting to see if they can.
These Napoleons now are readying to use their license to unleash nuclear war upon Iran.
Exactly as I have described in this article, such an act will license all others who have nuclear weapons at their disposal.
Such is the importance of immediately arresting Bush and Cheney. In order to bring an effective halt to this insanity, both must be taken off the scene simultaneously. Otherwise, Cheney would resign, and a new general would emerge allowing the insane plan to proceed regardless of any impeachment process brought against President Bush.
It is time to call the police and have these pirates both apprehended and thrown into jail. There is no other course, if we wish to take away their license to kill in remonstration of every other license they have incited.
Don Robertson, The American Philosopher
--------------------------------------------------------
