By an inevitable chain of causes and effects, providence punishes national sins by national calamities. George Mason
The sins that brought us Nixon, then Reagan, then Bush I and Bush II and now Trump are rather obvious. First and foremost of those was allowing the mass media to lie. Through lies sold through the New York Times - which sought and got the permission to lie from the Supreme Court - the TV and radio networks, worst of all cabloid media and the idiocy of the 24-7 "news" entertainment cycle are what defeated Hillary Clinton, probably the most vetted and demonstrably honest and competent person to have ever run for the office of president and gotten the nomination of one of the two real parties. In this election "social media" played what is being ever exposed as a larger role in promoting lies, building on the lies of New York Times reporters and columnists and Republican House committee chairmen and, of course, the most notorious of all venues of permitted lying, FOX, Sinclair, etc.
It is a sin to tell a lie. And it is an enormous sin to tell enormous lies, but to our free press, lying is a virtue because it gets the owners and advertisers what they want. The lies the media tell may be individually small, almost innocuous but the innocuous ones are the excuse for telling the bigger ones and the biggest ones of all. That might be considered tedious and not sexy at all but, then, democracy is based on such unentertaining realities. The part the expectation of continual entertainment by a TV trained audience that was educated to expect entertainment by their hours a day of getting it is less obvious.
And those lies have brought with them other license to the media to corrupt the country with enhancing the national disabilities of racism and inequality and exploitation for profit. George Mason in that quote above was addressing the original sin of the Founding fathers, the permission and advantaging of those who profited from enslaving other people.
Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant. They bring the judgment of heaven on a country. As nations cannot be rewarded or punished in the next world, they must be in this. By an inevitable chain of causes and effects, providence punishes national sins by national calamities.
He was talking about those who enslaved Black People, indentured servitude is seldom mentioned as part of that, though it was a serious enough sin that the Thirteenth Amendment, one of the few amendments to the Constitution that seriously reformed satanic evils embedded into the Constitution by such as Madison and Hamilton, addressed indentured servitude In 2017 he could as easily be talking about Donald Trump, the man who became president on the power of a phony TV show that presented him as a CEO strongman who lorded over people acting out the part of sleazy, corrupt house slaves currying favor with the petty tyrant. Such is the degraded state of a sufficient minority of the American public that such a putrid spectacle could last more than a season on TV, such, mixed with the corruption of our elections system, that embedded by the founders and enhanced by the majority of Republican-fascists on the Supreme court that they could eke out an election victory for Trump, clearly the least qualified, the most corrupt, the most dishonest habitual liar who has ever held the Constitutional office of the presidency.
So, no, what I said at the end of my piece, yesterday, is not ridiculous. It was the same observation that George Mason, the real father of the Bill of Rights made when he saw Madison and Hamilton and others setting up the permissions of slavery, the enhancement of slave power in the Constitution and the provisions making it almost impossible for a majority of voters prevailing in a attempt at national salvation through reforming the Constitution. That was not possible when the states numbered Thirteen, it took the disastrous civil war, a product of the Constitution and the system that Constitution set up to get even the Civil War amendments, passed in the all too brief period when the slave power was all too temporarily suppressed. It arose again with the corrupt deal that Rutherford Hayes made in 1876 to get the election through the Electoral College by agreeing to reempower the slave holders and a de facto continuation of slavery, the effects of which are still with us. Though I don't believe in numerology the numerology of that fact, a century after the Declaration of Independence was adopted is striking. A hundred years after that, in revulsion to the corruption of the Nixon presidency, Jimmy Carter, perhaps the most decent man to have held the presidency in our history was elected, all too briefly, before the media sandbagged him and installed Reagan and his floridly corrupt presidency which installed some of our worst Supreme Court members.
This doesn't come from nowhere. It comes from no exotic and new evil, it comes from the same things warned about in the Bible, "You will know the TRUTH AND THE TRUTH WILL MAKE YOU FREE". And the warning of God through Samuel when the people demanded that he anoint a king for them,
These will be the ways of the king who will reign over you: he will take your sons and appoint them to his chariots and to be his horsemen and to run before his chariots. And he will appoint for himself commanders of thousands and commanders of fifties, and some to plow his ground and to reap his harvest, and to make his implements of war and the equipment of his chariots. He will take your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. He will take the best of your fields and vineyards and olive orchards and give them to his servants. He will take the tenth of your grain and of your vineyards and give it to his officers and to his servants. He will take your male servants and female servants and the best of your young men and your donkeys, and put them to his work. He will take the tenth of your flocks, and you shall be his slaves. And in that day you will cry out because of your king, whom you have chosen for yourselves, but the Lord will not answer you in that day.
Which is wiser than anything you're likely to get from the hack poli-sci guy they put on cabloid TV or NPR this morning. God was warning of the real life effects that corrupt political choices would lead to. Secular scholarship has not produced a clearer articulation of that
I think you have a choice. You as an individual, "you" as the entire country. You can either live within the bounds of morality or you can suffer the consequences of living outside of them. You can choose to allow the media to lie and deceive but then you can't have democracy. Our elites, in elite law firms, in alleged civil liberties law firms and groups, on the allegedly liberal Warren court chose to empower liars in the very period when those lies were empowered by the modern mass media. They did so pretending that the world was still the world of the 18th century printing press was still sufficient to protect us from that enhanced power of big media free to advance its own instead of the common interest. And now the fans of such "civil liberty" whine and complain as a series of crooks and gangsters are elected by the people so lied to, a situation made only worse by the slave empowering features of our equally outmoded Constitution.
I am only pointing out that there are obvious effects from obvious causes, that the permission of the billionaire boys club members to lie through the enormous megaphone of mass media has given us the obvious effect of Donald Trump as president and such things as the neo-Confederate Jeff Sessions as his Attorney General, Neil Gorsuch his fifth vote on the Supreme Court, put there by the neo-confederate Mitch McConnell's manipulation of the Constitutional government. It would be possible to write a successful and valid history of the United States on the theme of struggle against the corrupt Constitution and the impediment and defeat of any temporary success in making progress in equality against it. .
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