The Meaning of Memorial Day: Reply to a Friend

"In recent decades especially, the connection between American military intervention

and American freedom has become ever more tenuous.

Meanwhile, competence has proved notably hard to come by."

--Andrew J. Bacevich, "Memorial Day for a father whose son was killed

in Iraq", Los Angeles Times, May 31, 2010

Minuteman Memorial, The Green at Lexington, MA

Yesterday, a friend from Continental Congress 2009, who is also a combat veteran, wrote a heartfelt statement questioning the purpose of the deployment of American troops in the undeclared wars the United States has fought in his lifetime, including the war in which he served. He stated that he did not want to participate in Memorial Day activities that would perpetuate the lie that in these wars, our troops are fighting for freedom or dying for our country or our interests. Although his words were published on a private network, they echo what Andrew J. Bacevich, historian, grieving father, and author of the soon-to-be released Washington Rules: America's Path to Endless War, published today in the Los Angeles Times.

These reflections, public and private, have opened up for me the question that I believe many of us in the R3volution struggle with this Memorial Day: How do we honor the loss of our countrymen while at the same time recognizing that the character of America's wars has changed from that of fighting for liberty to that of advancing the interests of a few oligarchs with transnational ambitions?

Certainly the men whose names are written in stone on the Lexington Minuteman Memorial, who died rather than allow themselves to be disarmed, were fighting for their liberty and that of their families and posterity. And just as certainly, we cannot say the same about the loss of the precious lives of those who have been ordered to Somolia, Afganistan and Iraq.

And yet, this year as tyranny unfolds around the world, and the imperial ambitions of our politicians has become evident in a series of disasterous legislation passed, I do not have the stomach to ignore this question further, and distract myself by observing Memorial Day as "a celebration of the beginning of summer", thereby putting the reality of its origin and the dilemma of its current status down the memory hole. I thank my friend, whose identity will remain between us, for pushing me to face the question above squarely and to begin to wrestle with the meaning of Memorial Day in our times.

Here is what I wrote in response to my friend and fellow delegate, edited to suit this post. This is not the end to my questioning, but only the beginning of it:

Dear F.:

In a conversation with a Gold Star Mother from my hometown, I was recently reminded that Memorial Day is specifically to honor the fallen, and Veterans Day is to honor those who served and lived. Maybe, being from the rural Midwest I am too fussy about these things, but I like to keep them separated in my own mind.

As a youngster growing up in rural Illinois, Memorial Day was not a day only for picnics and cook-outs, and it was not a day to celebrate the beginning of summer. Instead, my grandparents still called it Decoration Day, and schoolchildren dressed in their school clothes (remember those?), would be taken to the cemetery, or to the war memoral in the town square, to decorate them with flags and flowers in memory of those who paid the ultimate price so that we might live free, become educated and make something of ourselves.

But my education did not prepare me to answer the following: What do you say to a mother or a wife or a child who has lost a child or a husband or a father in wars to which they never should have been sent? This is difficult, and I believe that most Americans do not know and so avoid the situation that would make us uncomfortable.. And so Memorial Day has become something other than honoring our war dead. All of them.

F., we are going to take your suggestion--no TV today. And we had already decided not to have a cookout. That can wait until the Glorious 4th! Today we will have a quiet day with the family, and think about those who died for freedom, and those who died in unconstitutional wars, and remember that each life was precious, and each one ended too soon. Some lost to the evil outside who threatened our liberty, and some to the evil within who shed and blood and treasure for their own wicked ends. In this way, I believe all of our soldiers died as a reminder, at least, that liberty must be defended, whether from within or without.

We have decided to stop today, even from preparations for the crisis that is coming, in order to remember the multitude of lives lost in all of America's wars, the good, the bad, and indifferent. We appreciate your service as well, then and now, and will set aside time to honor it specially on Veteran's day, though we strive to remember it every day.

And we appreciate your service to us today as well, the one you did us with your post about your own questions regarding your service in an undeclared war.
Thank you.

Liberty Song Saturday: Memorial Day

Amazing Grace in the wild, mournful tones of the bagpipes, to sing those fallen in battle to sleep.
War is terrible, and death is final. And yet, we become their world --we live their hopes and dreams-- when we remember them.

Accusations of Sedition

Lately, we have heard cries of "sedition" from supporters of the Obama administration, and from supposedly objective news reporters, who are showing their partisan colors with every word that comes out of their mouths. These accusations are heaped upon the heads of those who dare to criticize the current occupants of the executive branch, or who characterize their actions as dictatorial or imcompetent. It seems that the supporters of the Obama administration are floating the idea of sedition as a trial balloon for the possible instatement of some new version of the Alien and Sedition Acts. Unlike President Bush, who's support of the Patriot Act shows his contempt for rights but who nevertheless responded to protestors by saying "It's their right", the Obama adminstration has made no effort to correct the zeal of his supporters for tyranny.

Few of those who throw this word around so lightly understand the principles upon which our government is founded, and therefore are ignorant (at best) of the reason why throwing this accusation around is met by contempt from those who are so accused. Earlier today, I responded to the report of such an accusation on a message board I visit infrequently. There, the moderator reported that he was being accused of sedition by the Daily Kos because he had referred to Obama as "Der Fuhrer". And yet only a Fuhrer, that is a tyrant, would supress the free speech of free people via accusations of "sedition."

Here is my comment:

The concept of "sedition" does not properly belong to the legal tradition of a free society. To see why, consider the definition of sedition from Dictionary.com:

1. Conduct or language inciting rebellion against the authority of the state.

In a free society, any authority the state has comes from sovereign individuals. The state is not sovereign; it is the individual that is sovereign. And sovereign individuals do not owe allegiance to any state, or to any executive or representative thereof. We owe our honor and loyalty to the Constitution that protects our rights. Our rights do not come from the state, and they cannot be taken away from us by the state. Nor can we voluntarily surrender them. That is what unaLIENable means.

Further, according to the Constitution, the government receives any power it has as a matter of duty and privilege; the government has no rights. Rather, "We the People, in order to form a more perfect Union . . ." have from our status as sovereigns, granted the federal government a limited set of duties and privileges for the purpose of protecting our rights. Since liberty is one of those rights, we are at complete liberty to say anything we want about the government that We the People have created, and that extends to the liberty to criticize and lampoon the president and his appointees. By standing for election, the president has put himself if the public eye and must expect to be roundly criticized at his every move by citizens jealous of their right to free speech. If he can't stand the heat, he should get the hell out of the kitchen, as Harry Truman used to say.

This is why the American people objected so strenuously to John Adam's errant signing of the Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, and why one of this cabinet secretaries stated that he could walk from New York to the Canadian border by the light of his own buring effigies. This is why Woodrow Wilson is considered a tyrant who greviously exceeded his duty and violated the rights of those who voiced their disagreement with the US entry into WWI, when he ordered the Sedition and Espionage Act. And this is why the Patriot Act of 2001 is unconstitutional.

Sedition cannot rightly be a crime in a free society in which each individual is sovereign whose rights are protected by a Constitution such as ours.
If Chairman Obama really wishes to rule as the thin-skinned king he seems to identify himself as, he should go to a country that defines its people as subjects, and conduct his coup d'etat there. He will get no sympathy from the proudly free and sovereign people of the United States.

In this blog, as well in other places, I have dared criticize Obama's policies, and I have used words applied to him and his minions that emphasize how tyrannous and dangerous I believe those policies to be. To paraphrase the immortal words of Patrick Henry to the Virginia House of Burgesses in response to the Stamp Act, I now say:

"If this be sedition, make the most of it."

Directive 10-289: Obama Becomes Wesley Mouch

In Atlas Shrugged, the novel by Ayn Rand, the government passed Directive 10-289. It was a directive to make everything fair and equal, and was sold to the public as a remedy for the economic mess that the country had gotten itself into via government interference with business and redistribution of wealth. The New Intellectual Blog provides the full text of the fictional executive order here.

Directive 10-289 can be summarized as a series of regulations that attempt to freeze the economy in place, and to end the "creative destruction" that occurs in capitalism as innovation sustains long-term economic growth while at the same time destroying the economic stability of established companies and their employees that have been operating in the existing business environment. Among the eight points that make up Directive 10-289 are those that freeze individuals at their jobs, freeze prices and wages, nationalize patents and other intellectual property, and require that production and consumption rates continue at present levels. The natural consequences of Directive 10-289 drive the plot of the second half of the novel, as the economy of the United States is destroyed, the infrastructure of business and commerce collapse, and the nation falls into ruin due to the loss of innovation and commerce, manufacturing and the normal economic transactions that make life in a modern society possible.

Although no adminstration in the United States has ever attempted all of the mandates in the fictional Directive 10-289, many of the individual points have been tried at various times since the beginning of the progressive era. Readers familiar with the precepts of the New Deal, or of the attempted economic fixes of the Nixon era will recognize some of them. In general the United States federal government has not tried to freeze consumption and production to mandated rates; rather it tries to nudge producers and consumers into acceptable (to the government) levels of production and spending through the use of subsidies, tax breaks and other such inducements.

In the past year however,
Chairman President Obama has in effect created Directive 10-289 through the passage of a number of laws that put the apparatus in place for the federal government to control a major portion of the US economy. The Stimulus Bill and the Healthcare Act have already been shoved down our throats, and now with the Financial Reform Bill, the government stands poised to control 60% of the United States economy, and monitor not only the health and financial records of the entire populace, but also to monitor credit card transactions and spending habits as well.

That this adminstration intends to dictate to citizens how much money they will be allowed to make, what kind of health insurance they will be forced to buy and what healthcare they may have access to, what financial products they may buy and sell, and what property they may own is now obvious. To flagrantly violate our liberty and property rights through such legislation marks this admininstration's intent to enslave the American people to the service of a fascist socialist new world order that is now clearly out in the open.

In Atlas Shrugged, the men who plan the enslavement of the American people claim to do so out of concern for the "common good." They say things like:

"We must not let vulgar difficulties obstruct our feeling that it's a noble plan motivated soley by the public welfare.

"They fail to recognize that production is not a private choice, but a public duty. They have no right to fail . . . they've got to go on producing. It's a social imperative."

"What we've got to think of is jobs. More jobs for more people."

So they lie--some even to themselves--about the true motive for enslaving the people. But some of them know that in reality the issue is not the so-called "common good", it's not the public welfare, the social imperative or even jobs. It's about power. And that power is gained by criminalizing any action that a person would naturally take in the pursuit of his own self-interest.

"We're after power and we mean it. You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick, and you'd better get wise to it. There's no way to rule innocent men.The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws."

It's the same with the Obama adminstration's collection of laws that add up in practice to Directive 10-289. There's a reason each bill is so long and so convoluted. It is not because any of the publically proclaimed objectives of them need that many pages. Rather, it is in order to slip into the bills the structure that will make ordinary life as free human beings impossible to most citizens; it is to create slaves.

Just remember this as Obama halts one third of US oil production after doing nothing for five weeks, and ignoring the emergency plans for just such an accident as happened in the Gulf. Remember this as he goes on vacation this weekend without answering Bobby Jindal's request for permits to save his own state's coastline. Clearly, his actions are not about saving seagulls and fisheries from oil pollution.

Remember this as he moves to control 60% of our economy, and brings down the economy because of the loss of of fisheries, and the rising price of oil. A member of this adminstration has been recorded as saying that they need the price of oil in the US to equal that of Europe. Remember this when the price of food goes up because oil is the major energy source for its production and distribution across the country.

It's about power. It's about shoving irrational legislation down the throats of the American people in order to put in place an economic-political system that has failed miserably everywhere it has been tried.

Obama has become Wesley Mouch.

Liberty Song Saturday: Pendulum

Here is a cover of Pendulum by Jordan Page with a video that includes numerous quotes from the Articles of Freedom. It was originally put together as an ad for the Articles of Freedom Delivery Day--Patriot's Day, April 19, 2010. The Articles of Freedom were delivered to certain officials at every state capitol on that day.

The song, Pendulum, expresses the singer/songwriter Jordan Page's frustration with the false left-right paradigm:

". . . and the pendulum swings from the left to the right,
the momentum increases, the weight and the height,
But if nobody's listening, is anyone right?
And I can't find the key to the middle . . ."

This song is also about Page's personal observations of what is happening to his country and its Constitution:

"I saw a president blind to the needs of his people,
I saw a camel that passed through the eye of a needle,
I saw a group of old men whose money was evil . . ."

"I saw beggars and cripples dying in squalor,
I a saw a son whose sins has exceeded his father's,
I saw a nation of sleepers whose dreams were forgotten,
and a bushel of apples from a tree that was rotten. . ."

And finally, this is a song about Page's personal journey to the R3volution:

"I met a young woman with a baby inside her,
I looked but there wasn't a safe place to hide her;
I met an old man with a face like a mirror,
he showed me his sadness so I could see clearer . . ."

The quotes from the Articles of Freedom are special in their own right, and here they go together with the song. The Articles of Freedom document how our government has abrogated the Constitution, and how the actions of our elected officials in all three branches of government have destroyed Liberty. The Articles of Freedom are also a powerful call to action on the part of we, the people, to restore our Liberty by requiring our government to obey the Constitution.

Although the Articles of Freedom have been delivered to government officials in every state capitol already, it is still imperative that we join together to take the peaceful but forceful actions necessary to withdraw our support from a government bent on tyranny and the destruction of our Liberty.

If you love Liberty, go to the link above and sign the pledge.

It is our right and our duty to change a government that has become an instrument of tyranny.

Gone Fishin'

The Rasta-Jew on the grail for a mid-channel run.

We'll be back soon!

Update: "For It"

Note: I have been "gone fishing", but I interrupt my week of field work to update last week's post. Alert blog-friend Christine MM noticed that that the video I embedded in the post below was removed from YouTube by the user. Here is another version from You Tube:



Back to fishing! Check out my FB for short updates on the Silvery Minnow Project, and I'll blog that this coming weekend!