I’ve been reading serious history books regularly over the past couple of years and a bit more infrequently for much of my reading life before that. My knowledge isn’t so broad as that of many scholars in the communities of academics or even the communities of commentators in the mass media or the alternative media on the Internet. Yet, I’ve found that I sometimes can find hints of patterns in situations where even most deep-thinking historians only provide a fact-based narrative. Such narratives are important, but raw facts are essentially concrete randomness, manifested chaos—organizing facts chronologically and geographically doesn’t nearly eliminate that chaos.
I think this doesn’t show I’m smarter than all those academics and other commentators. Many historians are still under the academic prejudice against narratives and in favor of technical analyses of texts or other evidence; this prejudice held, though never absolutely, for much of the 20th century. There is the additional problem that new facts have created the need for a greater understanding, a global re-understanding, of this world as a whole. Even a simple awareness of this need doesn’t seem to exist in the academic communities nor in the communities of commentators in mass media or alternative media.
It’s the transition from raw facts to facts ordered to some tentative or firm patterns, patterns necessarily set in a global understanding, that helps us to better and deeper understandings of the general human condition and that of, say, that of humans living in a river valley in the western region of Massachusetts. That transition can also produce ideological distortions, but I’m willing to take the risk if only because I tend to work from my new understanding of being upward rather than starting from any strongly formed political or social beliefs which can rigidify into ideologies. In these terms, my beliefs underlying my thinking is simply a firm belief in the Christian Creed (choose Nicene or Apostolic or Athanasian or any other similar statement). These beliefs allow God the freedom to have created a world, and human being, to suit His purposes and we can—mostly—read those purposes out of the empirical world which is part of His Creation.
I’ll concentrate in this essay upon a level in between all of humanity and the residents of the Chicopee River Valley: the United States which is a region of highly mobile and thus interpenetrating nations and classes held together by a highly centralized political State (Washington) and an excessively financialized economic system (Wall Street).
How did we get here? Well, the legend tells of brave souls seeking religious liberty in the New World. The reality has more to do with a Europe, mostly England and Scotland and Wales to start, in which young men and women were acquiring education and gaining knowledge of a world wider than their village or their neighborhood in London. Unfortunately, opportunities—including the basic ones of employment or entrepreneurial possibilities—weren’t developing nearly as fast as these young men and women were being freed from the constraints and securities of excessively local societies. It wasn’t just that these men and women partially released from parochial lives couldn’t find jobs “good enough” for their ambitious and literate selves. There were not nearly enough jobs for all of them. From the 1600s onward, some came to the United States (or the English/British holdings or trading centers elsewhere). You can check out the `revisionist’ writings of Bernard Bailyn (such as The Peopling of British North America: An Introduction) and others who discovered surprising amounts of documentation on those emigrating from the British Isles.
The United States wasn’t some sort of “city on the hill” but rather a place where many could find ways of making a living and maybe even make a fortune. Most of these men and women seem to have been inclined to hard work and to peaceful and stable lives, though willing enough to make war against the natives. See The Need for Abstractions in Moral Self-understanding for an essay where I was trying to apply deep reasoning about the nature of human being and being in general to find patterns where most will find raw facts which can be harvested for supporting evidence of one or another ideology such as those centered around: the superior European Christian men at work building that “city on the hill” or the brave native American warriors fighting off vicious invaders or the victimized native Americans who never had a chance against a people who weren’t superior but they were, kind of, you know…superior. There is truth in some of these ideological renderings, some great amount of truth even in the tensions between each of the conflicting ideological views. There is distortion as well, but—even more importantly—a lack of insight into the human condition, including that of the individual and communal human beings of the residents of the eastern seaboard English colonies and the United States which arose from them.
A civilization isn’t set in a world of raw facts. That way lies barbarism. A civilization is, at root, an ordering and an understanding of those raw facts. In our current lack of such an ordering or such an understanding, we see clear evidence of the advanced state of decay of Western Civilization. So it is that I’ll provide a tentative answer to the question which is my title: “Why Does a Developed Country (US) Have a Gangster/Warlord Ruling Elite More Suited to a Rising Barbarian Country?” To throw in a wrinkle, I’ll provide an answer which emphasizes the contingency and chaos in the quite raw facts of recent American history:
- The ongoing failure to assimilate African-Americans or even to try to understand why this assimilation hasn’t happening and shows no signs of happening for most African-Americans.
- The mishandling of our relationships with native Americans has continued in the form of a large unassimilated people who are largely ignored as our politicians seek desperately for non-European peoples to bring into this country with the illusion they will be assimilated.
- The criminal and unjustified wars against other countries—possibly Korea and certainly Vietnam and Iraq and Libya and now Syria.
- The corrupting interventions into the internal affairs and foreign relationships of many other countries—nearly every Latin American country if we go back to 1900 or so, the Philippines from the years of our brutal and murderous war of 1899-1913, Pakistan since its founding, Iran from the overthrow of Mohammad Mosaddegh in 1953 through the current deceitful behavior of the American government—and Kerry is quite proud of this—in not living to its side of the deal in the Iranian abandonment of some sorts of nuclear research, Russia during her prone years in the 1990s, and so on.
- The regular occurrence of events in recent decades, such as the assassinations or attempted assassinations of non-mainstream public figures in the 1960s, the destruction of Nixon in light of recent revelations by journalists who’ve actually listened to the White House tapes that George Bush and John Dean knew of the Watergate crimes before Nixon and Mitchell, the Iran-Contra scandal in light of plausible claims that it was mainly intended to protect the CIA’s heroin factories in the borderlands of Pakistan and Afghanistan, the unexplained crash of Flight 800, the ever-famous 9/11 in which affair we can readily find as much circumstantial evidence of participation by the government of Israel and the CIA and the US Air Force as we can find of participation by the Royal family of Saudi Arabia.
Let’s get one thing straight: from at least the time that the prophet Jeremiah was warning the people of Israel, intelligent skeptics have known that many wealthy and powerful men will kill or rob others when enough wealth and power are at stake. They will kill innocent people, even engaging in attacks upon population centers or unleashing useful barbarians or mercenaries. John Adams was aware of this general historical (that is—contingent) truth and apparently engaged in ultimately successful efforts to convince Thomas Jefferson that wealthy and powerful men will do what is necessary to pass on that wealth and power to their sons—no matter what the American illusion is of equal opportunity. Most of the advantages will come to the privileged children because they go to school with each other and marry each other’s siblings and so forth, but murders and even mass-murders and epic-scale robberies have never been out of the question when enough is at stake. And we should remember the always profitable manipulation of gold-prices, stock-prices, currency values, and so on. And, sometimes in all periods and regions of human history, such crimes can result from the efforts of vassals and other subordinates to take over or just to join their former masters in the top levels of wealth and power.
Such crimes require professional, unbiased, and competent investigations of the sort they haven’t gotten in recent American history. I’m not going to attempt to determine who really did what—anyone who thinks Al Qaeda or even Saudi Arabian intelligence and military personnel could have pulled off the well-coordinated, technically demanding attacks on 9/11 is free to do so; belief in the Easter Bunny is optional. I am going to claim that we began as a country with possibilities but a dangerously inadequate understanding of human nature, even as made evident in the Bible and in other historical writings as well as the simple and well-justified skepticism which Thomas Jefferson found in illiterate French peasants but not in the supposedly more sophisticated American citizenry. He claimed Americans to have a perverse sort of literacy (literalistic deformations of texts and other presentations of facts or narratives?) which leads to an invincible ignorance. This ignorance still exists.
From the beginning, Americans were a hardy people who stood on their own two feet when it came to clearing woods to grow corn or to build houses or churches. They were also a people unconsciously dependent, fully dependent, upon European civilization. Thus it is that we invite many non-European peoples, as well as having brought Africans in chains, thinking that we are all generic human beings. Exposed to a life which is simply human—middle-class American life in recent decades—and not a limited and defective type of human life (that of non-Americans), all immigrants could adjust easily. It was simply a matter of tossing aside the corruptions originating in the Fall of Man and taking on the life of that true, purified human being—us in the US. As to the slaves from Africa? It seems likely the Northeastern slave-traders and Southern slave-owners alike considered them to be so primitive, or maybe child-like, as to receptive to a permanent role of doing menial labor for more complete or more mature human beings. Some improvisation is necessary with any sort of ideology, even that which truly underlies American propositional beliefs such as those arising from John Winthrop’s vision of the “city upon a hill”.
If I tell someone about some recently declassified information that, yes, the United States (CIA and General Schwarzkopf the Daddy) overthrew a legitimate, democratically elected Iranian government in 1953 so that the US and UK could take Iran’s oil without paying taxes or royalties or even offering jobs to Iranians, they shrug and move back to telling me how the Iranians aren’t to be trusted because they don’t think rationally like Americans do. Apparently, Iranian man is a close cousin to Neanderthal man and, like that robust man, would still be using paleolithic technology if not for contact with us who are truly modern men, wise-wise men or homo sapiens sapiens.
So it is that the citizens and other residents of a country once potentially great, and perhaps that potential will re-emerge, live in a world which is dream-like, even hallucinogenic. The country was started to provide economic activities and attracted men and women willing to work very hard for the chance to own their own farm or blacksmith shop or even simply a house in Baltimore in which the wife engaged in some sort of profitable home-craft and cared for the 8 children while the husband went off to build those famous Clipper sailing ships. Even in the 1960s and early 1970s, when I was a pre-collegian, even as the bloody war in Vietnam raged and was waged, I had a sense of some shallow but strong sort of American decency. Even as more and more men went to work for bloated corporations, including some aircraft manufacturers which were part of a more respectable but already dangerous American weapons industry, there was still a sense of stability, of respect for strong family ties, even a sense of place more readily associated with the American South. Sunday school picnics were truly part of our lives—up to my 12th year or so—and not a joke. Little league was in a proper proportion to the totality of human life and teams were sponsored even by churches and other organizations (including insurance agencies and other businesses) whose leaders assumed and quietly demanded a respect for Sunday and for good sportsmanship.
Many, perhaps most, Americans never developed a proper skepticism about men who seek wealth and power. Note I say “seek wealth and power” rather than, perhaps, seek to do well while building great cars. Countries formed by heavy application of broadswords had their gangster experiences early; in some cases, including England and the France in which lived those skeptical peasants Jefferson studied, countries went from constant local warfare between warlords to a greater order and stability, often because one warlord—call him Charlemagne if you wish—used his broadswords effectively and intelligently against the lesser and greater in his realm. Those who couldn’t act properly were sliced in half, top of the skull to the groin. And, over time, the surviving warlords and their descendants were integrated into their countries, receiving certain prerogatives and public honors in return for good behavior and for helping to keep others behaving well, or at least peacefully enough that the growing central power could collect needed taxes.
Americans didn’t have to conquer warlords during the early generations of this country and never had to submit to a king who would bring those warlords under control in return for that submission.
Warlords are a form of gangster and that is a type of human being who can be found in all times of history and among all peoples, though some differences exist between Genghis Khan and William the Conqueror, between Ivan the Terrible and Henry VIII. We now have them in the United States and that includes a heavy percentage of leaders in Washington and on Wall Street. We’ve had them for at least a few centuries but they had few opportunities until the United States was founded and wealth and power began to consolidate and grow. In other words, a gangster is a pretty small fellow in lightly populated colonies with people struggling to feed themselves and make a future for their children. And, Americans, despite sometimes being good fighters as we saw in Morgan’s riflemen from the western regions of Virginia, weren’t much inclined to warrior ways as were, for example, the pastoral peoples disciplined into armies by Genghis Khan and by Shaka Zulu.
The gangsters began to show themselves in American history with a lot of probably justified smuggling to avoid British taxes and with early participation in the opium trade in East Asia; after all, there wasn’t much New England could make or supply that the Chinese would take in return for all that blue and white porcelain dinnerware. Americans got into that opium trade in a bigger way after England, desperate to balance the trade between China and India before China could come to own India, fought wars for the right of English drug-dealers to exploit human beings of the Chinese persuasion. In the latter decades of the 18th century and early decades of the 19th century, Americans of mostly the northeastern variety got into the slave business in a big way. Men with “the moral character of gangsters” from all countries and all ages will make money trading other peoples as chattel slaves, trading substances that destroy other human beings from inside out, stealing the wealth of other countries or that of their fellow-citizens. Quoted phrase is from Lord Acton who noted the problem with centralized and powerful governments is the way they attract those sorts: men with “the moral character of gangsters.” I’d say that all piles of wealth and power will attract such men, but Americans seem to assume that the gentlemen of honor, the George Washingtons, and even the bastards of honor, the Andrew Jacksons, are the ones who end up controlling the wealth and power of, say, the American government. Could be so, if the American political system had even as much integrity as the old-fashioned ethnic political machines, but the American political system is as well-ordered as the streets of our inner-city regions, as well-ordered as the money-center banks, as well-ordered as the boardrooms of our weapons manufacturing companies which resemble too well their depictions as true centers of evil in some science fiction movies.
Our government and our money-center banks and some of our corporations are run by men who are Harvard-trained and Stanford-trained gangsters, having no better moral character than the young thugs fighting for control of the drug-trade in inner-cities. And we have no social systems to keep them under control, no immune system which can handle these parasites run amok in our body public. And Americans remain oblivious to the real situation, some believing in universal conspiracies run by wizards in finely tailored business suits, the vast majority seeming to believe the world is run the way we learned in 3rd grade social studies and 12th grade American Government classes. The parasites will continue to suck out American wealth and misuse American power until the country collapses in one way or another. There is nothing that can rescue the United States of noble myth even if American men were to recover their balls and their brains. The parasites are attached to every major organ in the body public of the United States.