What is going on?

That is not a rhetorical question.

Some years ago filled with alittle learning and even less experience, I raged against the dishonesty of the Johnson administration and, especially, the war.  I was a United States Air Force officer with peace symbols on my car.  I recall telling my wife that if I got orders for 'Nam, we were heading to Canada.  My reading at the time was Hegel, Herbert Marcuse, Noam Chomsky and similar luminaries of the political Left.  In my eyes, the US was becoming the world's demon: an unjust society with greed as its Bible, totally missing that sacred touchstone of all Progressives social justice.

Then I lived in Asia for seven years.

What I saw from that perch was an American political system steeped in the lust for power at any price.  An America whose leaders lacked both integrity and honesty.  And and America whose people were growing shedding all notions of civility in favor of self-indulgence and immediate gratification. 

From the perspective of Asia where poverty was real, greed manifest and justice often only a hope, I started to grow up.  Around me were people who worked twelve hours every day for meager wages, proud that they were able to send their children to school in England or Australia.  People for whom words like honor, trust, fidelity meant something. To today, I remain embarrassed by my early naivete.  By my ignorance of the world and of history.

Left untreated, ignorance of one's place in history and the world leads to all manner of ills, not the least of which is tolerance for even more ignorance.  Lacking an understanding of history - of American history and America's place in the world - all societies and governments carry equal; there is no better or worse, good or bad. To the ignorant, such value judgements are constructs of society, artifacts of time and place.  What was "bad" before is "good"now - or at least not bad.  No one has the right to impose his or her values on someone else - least of all American values on the rest of the world!  America is just the same as any other nation.  "American Exceptionalism" is some sort of jingoistic idea espoused by ignorant red necks and (in contemporary Liberal terms) "Tea Partiers."

In the past twelve years, the lust for power by political elites and the increasing self-indulgence of our culture has become acute.   At our and our children's peril, we have entered an age free from the obligations of fidelity with our past and principles.  The elites call this progress.  Barack Obama built his campaign on "FORWARD." As if we could go in some other direction ("backward"?).  But does anyone really have a clear idea of what he means?  Forward to where?  And why there?  Is there only one there to go forward to?

This blog aspires to be an antidote to some of the ignorance that pervades our political thinking and discourse.  It won't change the world; yet I hope to offer something to them.  A moment of reflection or doubt.  A challenge to preconceived, half-formed notions that pass for reason and thought. 

At the very least, faced with so much uncritical thinking, cliches, intellectual dishonesty and nearly total amnesia of American history that is rampant in our country, this blog will serve as duct tape for my soul.  To keep integrity at the center of my politics.

(I invite - encourage - your comments.  Please keep them civil and free of profanity or they will be deleted.  The web sites and blogs to the left are some of my sources for inspiration - and fresh supplies of duct tape.)