This Land is Your Land...from The Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream Waters
At at certain point there is simply nothing more to say. At a certain point politics ends. If, then, at the bottommost rung of corruption, culture does not rescue politics, or at least rejuvenate it, then all is lost.
When, in the depths of the Great Depression of the 1930's, Woody Guthrie had the courage to compose the words: "This Land is YOUR land, from California to the New York Island, from the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream Waters" he caught up, in one breath, all the buried courage and hope the American People held in reserve for their vanquished country. With a few simple notes, Guthrie moved beyond what the country had then become--- to that imagined America which has always had more influence and power than the real one.
Likewise today, all around us, we view the hopelessness bred from two generations of greed and deceit. Official corruption is the norm. Our political parties do not hold fast to principles for which they believe and fight, but have rather surrendered love of country to love of wealth and power. In lieu of a principled politics they play a game designed to get the majority of the population to believe they have deeply irreconcilable views of world, which they do not. Everyone can plainly see they do not have such differences about the really important matters: namely: money and war. Practically all American politicians wanted to give the Bankers a bailout, and practically all of them agree, time and again, that the United States should continue to occupy most of the planet. Meanwhile these same politicians have agreed to set free International Corporations, groups of private individuals having no allegiance to any nation or its people, institutions whom we treat as "persons" under the law, to run wild over the entire globe, extracting, at a bargain prices, as much wealth as they can from any nation they can plunder.
The results could have been predicted. Indeed the results we are now watching were predicted.
Although certain foolish men, like former President Bill Clinton, still go around the world, praising themselves for trading away national sovereignty to these corporations in the NAFTA and GATT treaties; the people, as usual, were not consulted in the matter.
It is certainly a mark of the strangeness of these times, that politically left idealists like myself now find themselves among the last defenders of what amounts to traditional national sovereignty. After all, The State, qua State, is not the anarchists' cup of tea. But what becomes true for them, becomes true for conservatives, who must also choose a new politics if they are to advance their beliefs. The conservatives and the left now have nowhere left to hide except within the traditional ideal of the nation-state. For if a State order devolves, from a hyper-greedy Capitalism, into neo-feudalism, as ours is doing, then no one concerned with equity and justice, or even with wealth or power, can be pleased. For it is far harder to move a Capitalist and Neo-Feudalist society toward justice, than simply to move a Capitalist society alone, albeit slowly, toward that same justice.
Both Democrats and Republicans now rail, in public, of course, against British Petroleum Inc., while still taking corporate money and looking out for corporate interests. But it is notable that no Democrat or Republican politician has said a single word about what "compensation" is to due to each citizen of the United States for the destruction of the Gulf of Mexico. For to mention that-- would be to assert the primacy of the nation-state, and in United States, that national sovereignty is exactly what has been ceded to Corporations.
How has it come about that WE, the citizens, no longer have legal standing in the preservation, use and enjoyment of our own land? What happened to the WE in the Constitution, or that same WE used by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence? Furthermore, do I have to live on the Gulf of Mexico to claim my right to the use of it? Obviously not, for, as a citizen-- I have been free to travel and to use it at any time up until this point. Since when did our land come to have a purely monetary value? Did the people as a whole, unknown to me, cede the right to enjoy and use their coasts to British Petroleum Inc; or even stranger, did they somehow cede the right to their waters and their coasts to the President of the United States? Did they instruct him, or their Congressman, that the the coast of the Gulf of Mexico was worth to them only the paltry sum of 20 Billion dollars; or if that figure rises, as it surely will, to the paltry sum, of say, of 75 Billion dollars? (A figure still less than half of BP's total worth.) (As if such dollars could somehow magically restored a destroyed ecosystem!)
The notion that any nation or set of citizens can be compensated for the destruction of their land flies in the face of the very purpose of any nation-state, which is the defense and the sole use of its own territory. Since much of the Gulf of Mexico coast is held, not privately, but in public parks, marshes, federal lands, nature preserves, then I, Will Morgan, am a directly aggrieved party to this land's and water's destruction. Moreover, even if there were no public parks on that coast, the beach is open to my use at numerous spots; and even if that were not true, the water would be fully open to my use, and even if that were not so, the idea of the Gulf of Mexico, even if all I ever did was to imagine going there, is, therefore, a potentially realizable right, which, I, as a citizen of the United States, have in my possession; or else, again, the words "nation-state" or "citizen" have simply lost all meaning...
We are faced here with a strange ceding of our national rights to private, international institutions over which our government has no control. Moreover, if such an institution freely chooses to operate in a reckless manner, then shouldn't it, by rights, make itself open to the forfeiture of all its legal rights under American law, rather than merely apologize and open an escrow account on behalf of hotel-owners and fisherman? What are the lives of these hotel-owners and fisherman supposed to be like while they wait the thirty or more years for their waters to heal? (If indeed they ever heal) Can any citizen, whether resident of the Gulf or not, be compensated for being stripped of their profession and of their culture? Can any citizen anywhere be compensated IN MONEY for having the use of any part of their country taken from them? I think not. Every war ever fought whose purpose was to defend or seize land is evidence that such compensation does not exist.
If BP Corporation had attacked the Gulf Coast with high altitude bombers or dropped phosphate weapons onto its residents they might have done LESS permanent damage to the Gulf than they have by spewing crude oil into the Gulf for three months. In such a case we would have considered BP, under the old rules of the nation-state, to be an "enemy". We would have immediately declared war on them, destroyed their ships and plants, and bombed their headquarters in London. Instead, our President sat politely for a month, assuring all of us that those who had to put him into office would surely find a solution to the problem. After that, he went out of his way to assure the British Prime Minister that the slight scolding he gave BP before the cameras was certainly not intended to cause BP's stock to drop.
This meretricious behavior is all that remains of the modern nation-state: obedient to a fault to those Corporations which sustain it; lethargic, at best, in even understanding, much less acting upon, those Corporation's effects upon a real citizenry, eg "the small people".
Woody Guthrie was one of those "small people." No politician, no captain of industry, no businessman, Corporate CEO, or Wall Street Banker bothered to express, in notes or words, a heartfelt love for his country. For they were too busy enriching themselves on the wealth of the land the singer celebrated-- to stoop to a effort so far beneath their self-importance and rank. This is as Thomas Jefferson predicted, for the class of men best fitted to direct the State, he thought, should come, not from the "artificial class founded on wealth and birth" but from the "natural aristocrats of virtue and talent."
Thus the praise-less task of praise fell to a Hobo and an Oklahoma drifter named Woody Guthrie.
Listen again to what he sang, and may God save us from ourselves.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaI5IRuS2aE
Will Morgan
July 20, 2010
When, in the depths of the Great Depression of the 1930's, Woody Guthrie had the courage to compose the words: "This Land is YOUR land, from California to the New York Island, from the Redwood Forest to the Gulf Stream Waters" he caught up, in one breath, all the buried courage and hope the American People held in reserve for their vanquished country. With a few simple notes, Guthrie moved beyond what the country had then become--- to that imagined America which has always had more influence and power than the real one.
Likewise today, all around us, we view the hopelessness bred from two generations of greed and deceit. Official corruption is the norm. Our political parties do not hold fast to principles for which they believe and fight, but have rather surrendered love of country to love of wealth and power. In lieu of a principled politics they play a game designed to get the majority of the population to believe they have deeply irreconcilable views of world, which they do not. Everyone can plainly see they do not have such differences about the really important matters: namely: money and war. Practically all American politicians wanted to give the Bankers a bailout, and practically all of them agree, time and again, that the United States should continue to occupy most of the planet. Meanwhile these same politicians have agreed to set free International Corporations, groups of private individuals having no allegiance to any nation or its people, institutions whom we treat as "persons" under the law, to run wild over the entire globe, extracting, at a bargain prices, as much wealth as they can from any nation they can plunder.
The results could have been predicted. Indeed the results we are now watching were predicted.
Although certain foolish men, like former President Bill Clinton, still go around the world, praising themselves for trading away national sovereignty to these corporations in the NAFTA and GATT treaties; the people, as usual, were not consulted in the matter.
It is certainly a mark of the strangeness of these times, that politically left idealists like myself now find themselves among the last defenders of what amounts to traditional national sovereignty. After all, The State, qua State, is not the anarchists' cup of tea. But what becomes true for them, becomes true for conservatives, who must also choose a new politics if they are to advance their beliefs. The conservatives and the left now have nowhere left to hide except within the traditional ideal of the nation-state. For if a State order devolves, from a hyper-greedy Capitalism, into neo-feudalism, as ours is doing, then no one concerned with equity and justice, or even with wealth or power, can be pleased. For it is far harder to move a Capitalist and Neo-Feudalist society toward justice, than simply to move a Capitalist society alone, albeit slowly, toward that same justice.
Both Democrats and Republicans now rail, in public, of course, against British Petroleum Inc., while still taking corporate money and looking out for corporate interests. But it is notable that no Democrat or Republican politician has said a single word about what "compensation" is to due to each citizen of the United States for the destruction of the Gulf of Mexico. For to mention that-- would be to assert the primacy of the nation-state, and in United States, that national sovereignty is exactly what has been ceded to Corporations.
How has it come about that WE, the citizens, no longer have legal standing in the preservation, use and enjoyment of our own land? What happened to the WE in the Constitution, or that same WE used by Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence? Furthermore, do I have to live on the Gulf of Mexico to claim my right to the use of it? Obviously not, for, as a citizen-- I have been free to travel and to use it at any time up until this point. Since when did our land come to have a purely monetary value? Did the people as a whole, unknown to me, cede the right to enjoy and use their coasts to British Petroleum Inc; or even stranger, did they somehow cede the right to their waters and their coasts to the President of the United States? Did they instruct him, or their Congressman, that the the coast of the Gulf of Mexico was worth to them only the paltry sum of 20 Billion dollars; or if that figure rises, as it surely will, to the paltry sum, of say, of 75 Billion dollars? (A figure still less than half of BP's total worth.) (As if such dollars could somehow magically restored a destroyed ecosystem!)
The notion that any nation or set of citizens can be compensated for the destruction of their land flies in the face of the very purpose of any nation-state, which is the defense and the sole use of its own territory. Since much of the Gulf of Mexico coast is held, not privately, but in public parks, marshes, federal lands, nature preserves, then I, Will Morgan, am a directly aggrieved party to this land's and water's destruction. Moreover, even if there were no public parks on that coast, the beach is open to my use at numerous spots; and even if that were not true, the water would be fully open to my use, and even if that were not so, the idea of the Gulf of Mexico, even if all I ever did was to imagine going there, is, therefore, a potentially realizable right, which, I, as a citizen of the United States, have in my possession; or else, again, the words "nation-state" or "citizen" have simply lost all meaning...
We are faced here with a strange ceding of our national rights to private, international institutions over which our government has no control. Moreover, if such an institution freely chooses to operate in a reckless manner, then shouldn't it, by rights, make itself open to the forfeiture of all its legal rights under American law, rather than merely apologize and open an escrow account on behalf of hotel-owners and fisherman? What are the lives of these hotel-owners and fisherman supposed to be like while they wait the thirty or more years for their waters to heal? (If indeed they ever heal) Can any citizen, whether resident of the Gulf or not, be compensated for being stripped of their profession and of their culture? Can any citizen anywhere be compensated IN MONEY for having the use of any part of their country taken from them? I think not. Every war ever fought whose purpose was to defend or seize land is evidence that such compensation does not exist.
If BP Corporation had attacked the Gulf Coast with high altitude bombers or dropped phosphate weapons onto its residents they might have done LESS permanent damage to the Gulf than they have by spewing crude oil into the Gulf for three months. In such a case we would have considered BP, under the old rules of the nation-state, to be an "enemy". We would have immediately declared war on them, destroyed their ships and plants, and bombed their headquarters in London. Instead, our President sat politely for a month, assuring all of us that those who had to put him into office would surely find a solution to the problem. After that, he went out of his way to assure the British Prime Minister that the slight scolding he gave BP before the cameras was certainly not intended to cause BP's stock to drop.
This meretricious behavior is all that remains of the modern nation-state: obedient to a fault to those Corporations which sustain it; lethargic, at best, in even understanding, much less acting upon, those Corporation's effects upon a real citizenry, eg "the small people".
Woody Guthrie was one of those "small people." No politician, no captain of industry, no businessman, Corporate CEO, or Wall Street Banker bothered to express, in notes or words, a heartfelt love for his country. For they were too busy enriching themselves on the wealth of the land the singer celebrated-- to stoop to a effort so far beneath their self-importance and rank. This is as Thomas Jefferson predicted, for the class of men best fitted to direct the State, he thought, should come, not from the "artificial class founded on wealth and birth" but from the "natural aristocrats of virtue and talent."
Thus the praise-less task of praise fell to a Hobo and an Oklahoma drifter named Woody Guthrie.
Listen again to what he sang, and may God save us from ourselves.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XaI5IRuS2aE
Will Morgan
July 20, 2010
posted by Will Morgan @ 12:38 PM
1 comments
1 Comments:
5 Stars! Jefferson would get you a job as a writer after reading this one...You really should be writing for some type of newspaper or website..... Changing human behavior is our greatest obstacle as we seek meaningful growth throughout the world.
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