Chase the Devil (II)
The Ogre does what ogres can,
Deeds quite impossible for Man,
But one prize is beyond his reach,
The Ogre cannot master Speech:
About a subjugated plain,
Among its desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips.
— August, 1968, W H Auden
The State of the Union was influenced by Carter's own Stangelovian, flat-topped, irony free, National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brezinski. Zbig was born in Poland and educated at Harvard, stereotypical of the too many, one was more than enough, European born, American educated, Russian obsessed figures who worked their way to the top of the National Security State with little concern for and caring even less about democracy.
While Zbig was certainly responsible for much of the State of the Union, its radically schizophrenic tone compared to the summer's “crisis of confidence” speech needs to be laid squarely at Carter's feet. In his summer speech, Carter rightly placed responsibility on the American people, “Our excessive dependence on OPEC has already taken a tremendous toll on our economy and our people.” In his State of the Union, he looks away from America's own actions, accusatorially pointing to OPEC, “The single biggest factor in the inflation rate last year, the increase in the inflation rate last year, was from one cause: the skyrocketing prices of OPEC oil.”
He continues,
“The region which is now threatened by Soviet troops in Afghanistan is of great strategic importance: It contains more than two thirds of the world's exportable oil. The Soviet effort to dominate Afghanistan has brought Soviet military forces to within 300 miles of the Indian Ocean and close to the Straits of Hormuz, a waterway through which most of the world's oil must flow. The Soviet Union is now attempting to consolidate a strategic position, therefore, that poses a grave threat to the free movement of Middle East oil.”
And then tragically, in what became known as the Carter Doctrine, places the National Security State completely in charge,
“Let our position be absolutely clear: An attempt by any outside force to gain control of the Persian Gulf region will be regarded as an assault on the vital interests of the United States of America, and such an assault will be repelled by any means necessary, including military force.”
To meet this challenge he declares,
“We've increased annually our real commitment for defense, and we will sustain this increase of effort throughout the Five-Year Defense Program. It's imperative that Congress approve this strong defense budget for 1981, encompassing a 5 percent real growth in authorizations, without any reduction.”
Out went the summer's appeal to solve the problem democratically, to look to each other and act together, replaced instead with the brutish and simplistic solution of militarily securing remaining oil reserves. Carter's never received nearly enough condemnation for the bloody imperious course he set in his last year, but then the actions of the National Security State have always remained removed from any constructive accountability. With Brezinski's instigation, Carter directly involved America in Afghanistan, funding and providing weaponry to numerous illustrious characters, among them the Saudi Arabian Osama Bin Laden, actions directly leading to America's bloody, tragic, and stupid 20 year occupation of Afghanistan.
Carter's increase in military spending was followed by every president after, all seeking to keep an “outside force” from gaining control of the Persian Gulf region, that is, an outside force besides the United States. Depending on how one accounts, at least ten trillion dollars has been spent producing a trail of destruction that includes Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Libya, with the present criminal idiocy of Ukraine more than tangentially tied along with the continuing unfolding tragedy of Israel/Palestine.
For 75 years, the American National Security State has used enormous resources to sow chaos and failure across the globe. Simultaneously, the republic's democratic processes continued to decline, eroding and stagnating to impotence, leaving power completely unaccountable, with each year the Security State plays an increasingly direct role in domestic politics.
In the early 1960s, the great thinker on democracy Hannah Arendt commented on the then accumulating failures of the National Security State, noting America was forgetting its revolutionary roots, the great political gift it had bestowed to the modern world. Arendt writes of America,
“Her own failure to remember that a revolution gave birth to the United States and that the republic was brought into existence by no 'historical necessity' and no organic development, but by a deliberate act: the foundation of freedom. Failure to remember is largely responsible for the intense fear of revolution in America.... Fear of revolution has been the hidden leitmotif of postwar American foreign policy in it's desperate attempts at stabilization of the status quo, with the result that American power and prestige were used and misused to support obsolete and corrupt political regimes that long since had become objects of hatred and contempt among their own citizens.”
America is not unique in this respect. The Romans threw-off their kings (rex) to begin the original republic. Rex was a figure so hated by the Romans, that five centuries later, as he overthrew the republic, Caesar still denied he sought to be king. Nonetheless, the die had been cast long before his crossing of the Rubicon, the weight of Rome's Mediterranean empire — economically, politically, and militarily — imploded an exhausted, dysfunctional, and eminently corrupt republic.
America failed to learn a different path. All empires have been and always will be created and kept together by violence. With an act many still find difficult to comprehend, as it was without precedence, in fact it was completely ahistorical, Mikhail Gorbachev voluntarily refused to use violence to keep the Soviet Empire together. If the United States were to restore the republic, it would need a Gorbachevian renunciation of the entrenched National Security State, a return to the foundational republican values of “faith in each other, faith in our ability to govern ourselves, and faith in the future.” Such a turn is far, far further away today then the summer of 1979, when in one speech, at the instigation of Pat Caddell, a different course was briefly suggested.