From Ralph

11/13/04

Seeking out self-interest...

'We all know in our hearts the futility of what is happening in Fallujah, the Sudan, and on the Ivory Coast and in far more places than our feeble minds can retain, because that is the nature of news broadcast, to overwhelm and confuse. It was TS Eliot who said, 'The human mind cannot sustain too much reality'.

Maybe that is just a physiological reality- the shadow of ourselves- the primeval instinct for self-preservation- the supreme cop-out. I speak only for myself, of course, when I say, that, although history has shocked me in many ways, like for instance, within the life of Napoleon, whose destiny was the driving force and the very reason for his life, something is more shocking now. To make war was Napoleon's means to an end- to be an Emperor. The suffering it caused was neither cause for concern, and even less, a moral issue. Men gave their lives willingly somewhere in the glory and glow of Napoleon's fierce insistence, that what he dreamed of, was his right, and God forbid, his duty- for France!- and maybe for Corsica and his father figure, Pascal Paoli, who rejected him as no more than a trouble maker. A great general, however, and an extraordinary legislator, he founded the Bank of France, reformed the legal system, made peace with the Roman Catholic Church, a treaty with Britain and crowned himself Emperor of France by the time he was 35. What on earth made me go down that rabbit warren? What am I trying to say??

Perhaps it has something to do with a confrontational law which no longer exists, frontiers which have dissolved, cataclysmic force that now cannot be contained by an intelligence more devious and self-conscious than man has ever known, and greed more obscene and ravenous than man can control. It has indeed made martyrs of us all.

Moral authority has been laid to rest, world opinion is no more than a game show and the difference between good and evil is about as relevant as changing channels. Seeking out 'insurgents', 'terrorists', 'freedom-fighters', anyhow, from block to block, identified as enemy only because they have a body, head, two arms, two legs(if they are lucky!), and are trying to hide from the 'liberators', has become a sordid and demeaning pursuit, And America had the gasping audacity to preserve the voting in of the world's most powerful magalomaniac to themselves, as though it had absolutely nothing to do with the rest of us. What is happening now is part of us all- world policing, world peace, global maintenance, universal prosperity, abolition of hunger and oppression- we are all involved. It is now world government.

Isolationism is over. If any sense is to be made of Fundamentalism from wherever it foments, then rationalized and made acceptable, we must accept that we have all lost the high moral ground. 'Moral Values' is no more than a political catch phrase. I think the human spirit is still worth more than that.....