EVEN IN A DECAYED DEMOCRACY....?

It’s beautiful here on the Oaxacan coast this morning. Raven is singing along with Barbieri, after complaining that his pan dulce was stale. There’s no smell of napalm in the air....

And I am scrolling down the computer screen. Opening windows. Reading Subcomandante Marcos in La Jornada (“The Tower of Babel: between makeup and the closet”):

"In the new Tower of Babel, the common task is respect for who’s in charge. And the person in charge does it by substituting an excess of force for not being right. The mandate is that all the colors be made up to demonstrate the shiny color of money—or those that dress in multicolor do so only in the darkness of shame. Makeup or the closet. The same for homosexuals, lesbians, immigrants, muslims, native peoples, “colored people”, men, women, young people, old people, those who don’t adapt and all the names that other people take in whatever part of the world...This is the project of globalization: to make the planet a new Tower of Babel. In every sense. Homogenous in its way of thinking, in its culture, in its model. Dominated not by the person who’s right, but by the one with the force...In the new tower, the architecture is war against The Different, the bricks are our bones and the mortar our blood...."

Marcos’ singularly dark vision of this moment is shared by most of us. We want to find a glow of hope somewhere in the labyrinth that will give us the blast of spiritual adrenalin necessary to go forward. Towards that glow. In a world dominated by Doublespeak, Good is Evil and a leader who speaks about human dignity is reviled as a demagogue, a dictator or a populist.

Or, in the postmodern categorical thinking, we have the case of Hugo Chávez being reviled for fomenting “an excess of democracy” in a poor country. (Remember Kissinger, who said that people in the Third World should not be allowed to elect people who might inconvenience the agenda of the US—and who overthrew Salvador Allende, democratically elected President of Chile, on September 11, 1973, using General Pinochet as his hit man?)

Meanwhile, democracy—even of the representative sort—has become a thing of the past in the US. An article by Robert Kuttner in the Boston Globe, reprinted on www.commondreams.org reminds us that Bush benefits from the decay of democracy, and does not give us a very hopeful prognosis:

“Even in a decayed democracy, of course, if things get bad enough, the people will throw the rascals out. But repairing democracy itself -- that is harder.”

This echoes the modest proposal that Raven and I made a few days ago: IMPEACH THE BASTARDS, I believe we said.

We´re still saying it. Hoping that the sooner it happens the sooner the citizens of the US—and of the world—can start taking back control of their lives.

Raven is going to hold down the fort here in the tropical bunker for a couple of weeks while I am off to support the “excess of democracy” in Venezuela at the Foro Bolivariano de las Américas. ¡VIVA LA REVOLUCIÓN! (The revolution of consciousness....)