Joe,
Your writing is better than ever. ("Escape from America".) I am lately concerned that the people I read and admire on the web are moving out. Jim Willie at Hat Trick Letter moved to Costa Rica. And even some I do not admire, have foreign residences. Bush bought a farm in Paraguay. Damn I would hate to move half a world away and find my next door neighbor was W.
Personally, I want to hang around for the revolution, (or hang in the Revolution), because America sure has some catching up to do. Republicans hate everything the French Revolution represents, "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," but they love the guillotine. So there is hope for them even, and isn't it true that most revolutions begin with the party or group already in power?
I hope certainly that we can work through our imbalanced state because we have a fairly open system, but lately (last fifty years) since we decided that playing the "Super Power" game was more important, that we didn't need checks and balances, just a Unitary Executive, lately it has gotten a bit stretched. I don't blame Bush (too much). He ate the stale doughnuts, and now the country has a stomach ache.
But it seems to me that pre-emptive war denies the expanding role that President Bush has taken upon his office, Unitary Executive Privilege. After all if you know who you want to bomb next month, then the Congress ought to have an equal say in how it is going to be done: nukes, cruise missiles, death ray from space, botulism canisters dropped from crop dusters. It was lot simpler in Japan and Germany where conventional incendiaries were so darned effective.
The one near calamity I imagine, is if the Democrats, who have been given a mandate to do something about Iraq, do nothing, and the decider spills his poison into Iran and Syria, and these Democratic Presidential hopefuls go to Denver next year, with blood on their hands. I sure don't want to see that. So I keep my options open.
A racist friend once told me, when I asked him why he wanted to move to Idaho, that he once put a "taco" on his cars radio antenna, (remember those) and he drove north until someone said, "What's that?"
You could do the same thing with a hot dog, if you wanted to drive south, but they sell those things in all the Walmarts, don't they?
Belize sounds pristine. How's the fishing?
This is going to be an interesting year, and you can get all the news on Al Jazeera, so you have one up on the rest of us. I wish you well and look forward to more of your dispatches.
Dave
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Hi Dave,
Oh, Belize is not at all pristine. The government here is corrupt as hell, the upper business class runs everything for their own good. Theft, embezzlement of millions of dollars goes completely unpunished, despite televised inquiries by judges that flat out prove the theft and name the thief in office or in the financial business. Yet there is, oddly enough, more of a spirit of democracy here, perhaps due to the libertarian atmosphere that prevails among the people, colonialized as they are about so many things. There just aren't that many laws which apply to ordinary citizens, and many of those that do exist are completely ignored and/or unenforced. But I am not here to change their government.
And anyway, it cannot be done at this time. Not here. Not in America. With globalization, the corporation became the world's government, and there is little that ordinary Americans or Europeans can do about that, considering that THE CORPORATION is all they know and is the hand which provides for them in every aspect, whether they care to admit it or not.
And come next elections it will again provide Americans with candidates for a voting ritual that is merely symbolic of the old democratic order of the republic. As "voters," they will experience discontent and seek remedy, remedy being not progress but a short recess from our new economic condition which demands perpetual war. A short pause break in the slaughter before we launch another is seen as a great victory, for which the Democrats will probably get to take some sort of credit as "a solution to the war." And the corporation will provide them with more faux solutions even as they decry dire situations, such as health care, all of which will be discussed in the media, further lending the charade the appearance of legitimacy and seriousness. A noisy gaggle of Republicans, Democra ts and propagandized windbags of every stripe will argue and denounce one another publically month after month for more than two years, then the clamorous throng will bandy the fake issues and solutions they have been issued in a tragic little parade down the road to the next rigged elections.
So I'm here just to do a little more good for truly poor folks than is possible in America, where nearly every avenue is both terribly expensive and usually illegal according to some ordinance, code or law. For instance, we built perfectly fine little houses here with no permits, no interference.
Meanwhile I watch the Empire from afar, understanding that its hand is at work here too because the corporation's unseen hand is relentless if nothing else. But somehow, on such a white hot sunny day as this one, with the cyanine blue waves crashing on the beach as the young boys dive for conch and a lone fishing dory bobs against the skyline, it all seems more bearable. Maybe I'm just getting old. Hell, for sure I'm getting old.
So be it.
In art and labor,
Joe
