The Last Farewell

It's time to bid a final farewell to the dead, departed American republic. Time to put our memories of it in the ground and sing "Amazing Grace."

Despite widespread public opposition, the current administration has vociferously refused to back down from its clearly illegal torture, "rendition," and internal spying policies.

Public opinion doesn't mean a whole lot any more, and the squeaky protests against the gutting of the Constitution coming from Congress will have little or no effect on the continuing presidential aggrandizement of power.

An important analysis of the growth of presidential power, from Jefferson's engineering of the Louisiana Purchase to Bush's claim that our state of (undeclared) war confers dictatorial powers on him, appeared yesterday in the New York Times magazine. The author, Noah Feldman, an NYU law professor, notes that "The stakes of the debate could hardly be higher: nothing is more basic to the operation of a constitutional government than the way it allocates power. Yet in an important sense, the debate is already long over."

Feldman, goes on to observe that the administrative-branch dictatorship the Bush administration has become, "...is not the system envisioned by the framers of the Constitution. The framers meant for the legislative branch to be the most important actor in the federal government: Congress was to make the laws and the president was empowered only to execute them. The very essence of a republic was that it would be governed through a deliberative legislature, composed carefully to reflect both popular will and elite limits on that will. The framers would no sooner have been governed by a democratically elected president than by a king who got his job through royal succession."

However, that's exactly what's happened, and the American Empire, formerly the American republic, now is no different than the Roman Empire under Septimius Severus and Caracalla. The original form of government still remains, but its content has been emptied out and replaced with military dictatorship. A powerless legislature is still permitted to sit, but that's mostly for show. Members of the the high court are carefully chosen so as to assure that the bench acts as an extension of the will of the dictator.

At this point, even the dictator himself seems to realize that his most recent power grabs violate the Constitution, but justifies them as temporary emergency measures necessitated by war.

But then, we're always at war. How convenient. It's hard to imagine not being at war when you have a gargantuan military establishment that sucks up half the national revenue. After all, you wouldn't have a Ferrari and not drive it.

The war, as George Orwell pointed out, is as much against us as it is against any real or imagined enemy, and it's meant to be perpetual. If the war was to end, the dictatorship would be at risk.

This particular war has two purposes: it's meant to secure the petroleum resources of the Persian Gulf, and to justify the final touches of the establishment of the American fascist dictatorship. It hasn't succeeded in its first aim, but has in its second.

Once you've seen one military dictatorship, you've seen 'em all. The Constitution has now become just a piece of paper in a museum, the flag nothing more than an unaesthetically designed piece of cloth.

Since there's nothing we can do about it, we might as well forget talking politics and have a party. I'll bring the chips.