Ipsos custodiet

The United States has always been soaked in blood and racism and sadistic cruelty, yet we've worked and worked and worked over the centuries to make it less so, and I don't hear from too many people ready to give up on the country. Giving up on a party because of its criminal past makes no more sense. But learning to outgrow both nationalism and party-loyalty, and to be full-time engaged citizens (not just voters) both of our nation and of the world may be an idea whose time has come.

-David Swanson on Dennis' P.'s new book, Savage Mules

Is that what "we" have been working on? Me, I'm just working on a better tan. Was the United States that killed a million Vietnamese substantially less sadistic and cruel than the United States that killed hundreds of thousands of Indians? Is chattel slavery worse than nuclear war? Is ginning up war with Mexico in order to grab land worse than invading and occupying Iraq because, because, because . . . ? At what point does the moral rubric become meaningless as a measure?

"Giving up on a party because of its criminal past" may not make sense, but what about its criminal present? Establishing a real history of the Democratic Party in the United States isn't an exercise in damning by ancestry. The point is to establish a genealogy of contemporary behavior. Why are Democrats so ineffectual as war opponents? Why do Democrats seem so institutionally committed to the imperial governing consensus? Why is every major national Democrat an Iran hawk? Why is every major national Democrat a paid tool of the Israel Lobby?

At what point does a person abandon political affiliation? This is the question that Swanson and the rest of the you're-right-but-don't-be-hasty crowd resolutely refuse to address. If ethnic cleansing followed by war followed by more war followed by interment and nuclear bombs and then more war and more war and economic sanctions and more war right on up to the present is insufficient reason to divest from the Donk, then what would mark sufficiency? Does Barack have to strap a kitten and a baby to every piece of US ordnance prior to use?

Meanwhile, the solution, such as that word has any meaning in the context, is not to become a "full-time citizen of the world." There's no such thing as a citizen of the world. The definition of human fullness in terms of citizenship is nuts. Personal fealty to an imaginary polity is bad enough, but pledging allegiance to the sum total of the global human population because We Are the World borders on insanity. "Engagement" is no answer. Disengagement is the non-answer to all our problems. Lord, grant me the strength to change the things I can, accept the things I cannot, and, oh, fuck it dude, let's go bowling.