Turd Blossom dodges a bullet

Karl Rove should thank God (or at least his lucky stars) that (for at least the time being) he lives in a country where due process remains the rule of law, and perceived evil-doers are still considered innocent until PROVEN guilty. The irony, of course, is that in the society Rove envisions for us all -- a world of raw, naked power and political-religious demagoguery, secret prisons and unappealable military tribunals, inactivist judges and summary justice by executive decree -- people suspected of leaking the names of intelligence operatives generally just disappear in the middle of the night, and their bodies show up a few weeks or months later down some dark alley: beaten and tortured, their hands bound behind their backs and a bullet in the base of the brain. Kinda like they do right now in Iraq. Or else they operate with impunity beyond the reach of justice, because they are protected by those for whom the acquisition and accumulation of ever-greater wealth and power is the only value that really matters and...oops! never mind....

I don't want to sound shrill and I don't want to sound naive. But we are witnessing something right now in the history of our nation which is VERY distressing, and most days makes me just want to pull the sheets up over my head and pretend I can't see it. On one level it is simply the culmination of more than a century of accidental and unintentional imperial ambition, which (like not bringing condoms on a date so it won't seem like you're "planning" to commit a sin) has resulted in precisely the consequences we hoped to avoid but found impossible to resist. And yet we also seem to be living at a Tipping Point: that moment in time where our own insatiable lust for wealth and power (and big cars and cheap oil) have developed such momentum that they have taken on a life of their own, and threatened to transform the world in which we live beyond our recognition. Believe it or not, Global Warming may simply be the most visible and tangible symptom of catastrophic glacial changes in our "environment" which are beyond our ability to contain or control -- a hard reality to face for those for whom "containment" and "control" are Standard Operating Procedure. It's no longer a matter of mustering the willpower to push an ever-bigger boulder to the top of the hill (all the while whining about the absence of a "level playing field"). The rock is loose and rolling away, ready to crush anything unfortunate enough to be in its path.

The problem with Empire is mostly economic. It makes possible the concentration of previously inconceivable amounts of wealth and power in the hands of very few people, while spreading the costs of acquiring, accumulating and protecting that wealth to those who are increasingly powerless to control their own lives and determine their own fate. And so fatalism displaces hopeful imagination, and the optimists give way to the cynics. Ordinary human pleasures of home and family and community no longer seem adequate (and become increasingly difficult to sustain); while popular culture (with its obsession with "celebrity") seeks ever greater levels of extremity in order to evoke some sort of passionate (and profitable) emotional response from its faceless, nameless mass audience. Cheap bread and free circuses for the people, so that their Masters can afford to ignore the consequences of their avarice while gorging themselves on hummingbird tongues at their secluded seaside estates.

But I ramble from the point. The combination of Absolute Power and Demogogic Populism is a dangerous cocktail. As "the people" look for ever more powerful Leaders to rescue them from their own feelings of powerlessness, society itself grows increasingly unfeeling and anti-social. Like the natural human pleasures of home and hearth, the natural human accountability that comes from authentic human community no longer seems adequate, and gives way to ever more inhumane "cruel and unusual" punishments intended to deter potential bad-acters by frightening them into compliance with the "Rule" of Law. But the realization that the Rulers themselves are above the law makes these threats meaningless and ineffective. When powerless people no longer feel that they have a meaningful investment in the larger community, they no longer have any incentive to play by the "rules." And so we are left with only the Rulers, the Ruled, and the Unruly...or perhaps more descriptively: the Powerful, the Powerless, and those who refuse to submit to the former by accepting their "rightful" place among the latter.

I wish I could say I see an easy solution to this ugly conundrum. But I don't. Yet it does seem to me that the most likely path leads in a different direction: away from the ever-greater concentration of wealth and power in the hands of fewer and fewer unimaginably wealthy and powerful people, and toward the empowerment of more sustainable and autonomous, human-scale communities which are at once both self-sufficient and interdependent. A Utopian fantasy? Probably. But I'd rather imagine something like this than simply accepting a life where a "failure of imagination" may well have brought us all to the precipice of extinction.

So maybe we ALL ought to thank God (or at least our lucky stars) that Karl Rove has dodged a bullet, notwithstanding the fact that he has also apparently (for at least the time being) avoided indictment as well. Because perhaps what this REALLY means is that there's still hope for all of us as well....

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QUICK FRIDAY MORNING UPDATE: and now comes the Supreme Court, who in a 5-4 decision led by Bush appointees John Roberts and Sam Alito, together with long-time conservative stalwarts Antonin "Tony" Scalia and Clarence Thomas (and with the concurrence of "moderate conservative" Justice Anthony Kennedy, who wrote a separate opinion) have just cut the heart out of the Exclusionary Rule (which prohibits the use of illegally discovered evidence at trial) by effectively eliminating it as a sanction against police who violate the so-called "Knock and Announce" requirement when serving a search warrant. In other words, now when the police come for you in the middle of the night, you can no longer expect a knock at the door. Now they are "free" simply to kick the door in and stick a gun in your face, without necessarily even telling you who they are. Certainly a remarkable day for those who love still love liberty....