Hi, All -
2430 Rayburn
Washington, D.
C. 20515
"I am not influenced by the expectation of promotion or pecuniary
reward. I wish to be useful, and every kind of service necessary for the public
good, become honorable by being necessary." -- Nathan Hale
“While I certainly feel that this administration
has misled this country and committed atrocious acts, the Democratic majority
in Congress is focused on passing its legislative agenda…to improve the lives
of the American people.”
Madam, please, let us really try to call things by their right names here for a moment.
The Bush administration did not “mislead” the country. It lied through its collective teeth to the entire world in order to wage an illegal and unwinnable war against a non-threatening and insignificant sovereign state in order to aggrandize its own power, profit and privilege!
If that is not grounds for impeachment, nothing is…which unfortunately seems to be the disastrous, on-going consensus among most members of the American political class these days!
Secondly, I, for one, frankly do not care that the Democratic majority is focused exclusively on its own agenda at this time. To my mind, madam, that is both morally and practically irrelevant to the issue at hand! As I see it, it is like denying the leak in the roof that is spilling torrents of water onto the living room floor by running around the house dusting bookshelves!
There are two reasons I have for saying this: first, to my knowledge, no Democrat holding high public office in our country has ever taken an oath to stay focused on their party’s agenda exclusively.
Instead, what they have all sworn to do of their own free will is to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States!" That is the issue at hand! It always has been! It always will be! Nothing else!
Secondly, if the issue at hand is not addressed in good faith immediately by people like yourself, nothing that you and your fellow Democrats will ever do, or can even imagine doing, will be of any avail whatsoever in helping to “improve the lives of the American people.” Indeed, unless you honestly and courageously address the issue at hand here and now there will no longer be anything left for Americans that could possibly make being an American worthwhile ever again!
Now comes the difficult part for us both!
In all candor madam, I must inform you that outside the beltway we the people know exactly what is going on in Washington, D. C.
For example, we know that as such there is no such discrete thing as “Islamic Terrorism!” The reason we know this is because we recognize that as human beings the evil to terrorize others, either by commission or omission, is in all of us! Mr. Bush is simply using Islam as a convenient scapegoat!
From this, the ultimate truth that has become the real terror of our time then follows. As the means chosen by today’s economic, political and spiritual elite in America to destroy Constitutional Democracy forever the so-called “war on terror” is a fraud!
Further down in your letter to me, you write: “while I respect the initiative that Rep. Kucinich has taken on this issue, I feel that this is not the best time to address it.”
Madame, in all honesty I ask you, in America what constitutes a "bad time" to be a passionate and unrelenting friend of our Constitutional Democracy that alone assures us of our own well-being and the well being of our posterity? Where does such a time come from? Why is it bad? Is there any limit to it? Does the badness ever expire? If not, why not? If it does expire, then when will that be, and why? (Funny isn’t it, when you really try to call things by their right names, the right questions just seem to pop into one's head automatically.)
Madam, if you have any serious doubts about your own moral and practical relevance at this time in our life together as Americans, please consider this:
unless you and your fellow Democrats as Americans learn to accept the fact that the innate capacity to do evil is fundamental to your own human nature and is now being projected upon the world stage by George W. Bush, the mediating salvation provided by our Constitution, and the American creed that flows from it, will soon vanish from the world scene forever!
In other words, unless you and your fellow House Democrats find the courage to cast aside all self-serving denial that enables you to enjoy an unalloyed good opinion of yourselves vis-à-vis the critical mass of gratuitous evil that now pertains in today’s world, all of you will be directly responsible for human society ultimately descending into a state of endless, absolute horror governed only by those most skilled in the uses of human genocide to advance their own power, profit and privilege…just for the hell of it!
For my part, Madam, with the urgency of this imperative before you there are two, and only two, courses of action open to you as an honorable member of the U. S. House of Representatives. Indeed, I would even go so far as to say that anything else you might chose to do from this moment forward as an American public servant will be utterly unavailing and superfluous in the extreme.
The first course of action open to you is that you can recognize the true origin of the world’s evil and refuse unconditionally to be a party to the horror that will, and must, engulf our world absent that recognition, which is to say absent the mediating salvation of the U. S. Constitution and the American Creed.
If that is your decision, then, by definition, and at the cost of your own life, if need be…
wherever you are, whatever your stand, and with every breath that you take, you will, as you must, unconditionally and without any reservation or equivocation support the Constitution by honoring the oath of office you swore to uphold at all times!
If, on the other hand, keeping your promise in good faith has ceased to be a viable option for you, for whatever reason, that is okay too! Consequently, for your own mental health, if not for the life-affirming well-being and democratic belonging of authentic Americans everywhere, you can simply continue in your present state of denial and accept as a given what you have allowed yourself to become. Accordingly, you will, as you must, resign from office immediately!
Congresswoman, please know that regardless of which course of action you choose, there will always be this consolation in it for you:
Without question, and to your great credit, it will be exactly what any other honorable American would have done in your position!
Consequently, in the days and weeks ahead I will expect to see evidence of your honorableness, one way or the other.
Congresswomen, I know that your job is not an easy one, and I can only imagine what it must cost you personally each day trying to function whole surrounded by almost unendurable pressures that constantly vie for your good faith attention and resolution.
But nothing else in today’s world is now, or ever will be, as important as our Constitution and the American Creed! That is because they, and they alone, constitute the only moral referent left in the world capable of holding the world together in a human(e) way by exorcising the demons within us all!
Indeed, because in the end they require us all to talk to each other in good faith, the U. S. Constitution and the American Creed taken together have always been like the trustworthy, principled adult without whom the young children in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies must inevitably destroy themselves as they go about the unholy business of annihilating everything around them that is not their own implausible and demon-possessed selves.
Look around you! Nothing else in all of Western Civilization is capable of being that adult. Not Judaism! Not Christianity! Not Islam! Moreover, materialism is not! Rationalism is not! Objectivism is not! Nor are “Privatization” (i.e. “keep it away from the people”), Neo-liberal economics or neo-conservative Empire building. Indeed, if not the problem itself, they are all part of the problem, not the solution.
Madam, when all is said and done perhaps resigning from office will finally emerge as being the best course of action for you. But neither of us want that! From your record, I know that you have always been a stalwart, powerful and honorable advocate for the well-being of ordinary Americans.
The problem, as I see it, is translating (with a never-ending vengeance, come what may!) an honorable advocacy such as yours into an effective defense of all that now holds our world together even as it is the only hope of the future for us all !
Having
said that it must also be said that to our great disgrace we Americans over the
last generation have been largely responsible for creating a world totally
bereft of a unified and coherent language of honor, hence morality, which is
love, compassion, truth and justice in good faith! For my part, the
cause of that woeful condition is no mystery. To make a long story short, the
truly honorable, hence moral, promise of America, which her founders grounded
in spiritual reality, has been co-opted and marginalized by her leaders of the
past thirty years enthrall in a dream world to something that simply does not
exist in the real world - the deregulated, undifferentiated “free market!”
Please permit me to suggest why you must find a way to do that, and how you might begin to go about it. As we both know, our founding fathers were all loyalists to the end, more or less. What changed everything in the world for all time was the sense they had of their honor being betrayed by the powers that be. That was, and still is, a moral referent, not a material nor a rational one.
If you are interested, I invite you to share that language with
me. In that way, perhaps, I can be useful to you by making the difficult task
of keeping your promise to the Constitution a little bit easier.
Until then, as always, in democratic freedom with equal justice for all under
the rule of law, I am
cc: Rep. Pelosi, Senators Clinton
& Schumer
Well said, although I think it may fall on self-inflicted dead ears. Check out:
Ralph Nader: "Things Are a Lot Worse than We Thought!" - 3 mins
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rIO-tCPSfHA
Posted by: Larry | October 16, 2007 at 10:56 PM
Good comment, Larry.
If that Mass. Democrat is right, then maybe the worst is the price we have to pay for allowing the Supreme Court to put Bush in the White House in the first place, and then subsequently enabling his madness to unfold.
Anyway, if the worst is to come, I say "so what?" We all created the problem, so we are responsible for getting rid of it, come what may.
Better that than leaving it for our children to deal with, I think.
As De Tocqueville said, "remember that life is neither pain nor pleasure; it is serious business, to be entered upon with courage and in the spirit of self-sacrifice."
Later,
Robert
Posted by: Robert Fobes | October 17, 2007 at 06:31 PM