Black Dogs of the AMG (American Military Government).

                           

"What's the point of having such an overly militarized police force if we can't use it?"

Ian McEwan describes two dogs that were not only vicious, but trained by the SS to be that way, and how one day, as purportedly witnessed by two drunks, and that was denied by the female owner of the hostelry at which two English ladies were staying, had been trained to have sexual congress with women diabolically restrained so as to be made available for their canine depredations.

Theses black dogs, a metaphor/euphemism for dark depressions supposedly coined by Churchill who suffered from them are, in McEwan's novel of the same name, said to be likened to one dog as being a personal depression, whereas two dogs represent a kind of cultural depression, “civilization’s worst moods”, and symbolizes the deep hatred branded in to the human heart that usually lies dormant, but that can be, by an act of senseless violence or planned torture, arise and consume not only the object of its rage but the host as well:

"That day I came face-to-face with evil - these animals were the creatures of debased imaginations, of perverted spirits no amount of social theory could account for. This evil lives in us all ... a terrible cruelty, a viciousness against life erupts and everyone is surprised by the depth of hatred within themselves. Then it sinks back and waits. It is something in our hearts. If human nature/consciousness/the spirit/soul does not develop and expand, the sum of our misery will never diminish. This change is possible. It is within our power. We need to find the answer within ourselves if we are ever to be at peace with each other. Not that it will ever happen, but it is our only chance."

Of survival, one assumes.

The unanswerable rebuttal to this is, "Try having an inner life on an empty stomach, or without clean water, or while sharing a single room with seven other people."

Analogous perhaps to the shamelessly wasteful way we use energy, no matter how derived, and how we share existence, on the only sphere capable of sustaining life, in an unsustainable manner while our fellow living, breathing creatures, our Earthly relatives, the only kind we have, or will ever have, we regularly abuse and disabuse - even to the level of complete eradication.

And as the DNC (Democratic National Convention) gets under way, it is obvious that it is not The Donald and his cohort of deranged Nationalists bearing their arms and brandishing their childish, churlish demand he Make America, by which we're meant to presume he means the United States thereof, Great again, there was little, if any, mention of, even from the recalcitrant Ted Cruz Missile, any Revolution.

Yet here are the youth, protesting outside the DNC, who are members of the Democratic party (you know democratic, as in the majority, of which they are not a part, rules), calling for a Revolution, even as the target of their rancor and intransigence is the very person charged with fomenting revolutions in the Middle East, specifically Syria, which  is now, like Libya, Afghanistan, Iraq, Egypt, and Yemen, ungovernable and wracked by daily violence precisely because of  Revolution. And this is what the protesters want for the US?

As the cavalcade of horrors known as the Republican debates rolled on, it became increasingly evident from the lack of the same on the Democratic side, that the nominee was already decided, despite the sideshow Bernie provided, and that it was for some unknown reason previously decreed that that nominee would be the person who for decades has been known to be the most divisive candidate the Democratic party has ever put forward.

Many of those who are calling for said revolution were either not, or only barely, alive during Mrs. Clinton's first residency in the White House as first Lady, so are perhaps unaware of the rabid response of the Republican Party to the election of her husband, and the subsequent escalation of that anger to a white hot fury when the then First Lady decided that Universal Healthcare was something the US should and could provide for its citizens as a kind of sop thrown them to assuage them for the damage done to their livelihoods by the combination of Neo-con War-mongering and Neo-Liberal globalization that was funneling the profits of a great industrial nation to bureaucrats, absentee CEO's, and a financial "industry" that was intent on privatizing every public asset our Great Society had amassed.

So they can be forgiven their altruistic demands that their voices be heard. For, like the supporters of Donald Trump, to whom he gave absurd assurances via his, "I am Your voice" nonsense, they feel abandoned, their voices muted, by their country, their Party, and their government. Hence, both constituencies have expressed their preference for someone outside of the Party structure. Bernie, like Trump, is a member of the party that nominated him only by necessity, there being no other avenue in the land of the free to be nominated other than by membership in one of the only two permissible National Parties ... Let freedom Wring out ... every chance that the AMG (American Military Government) that both parties are intractably invested in, from ever being challenged ... or even mentioned ... even by Bernie; as though the US is ruled by its civilian facade rather than by its military Rulers who coyly hide behind them like revelers at a masked ball. They peer through their flimsy disguise with a cynical smile on their lips, because they know that we know that they know that we know that their cardboard effigies are so tattered and crumpled that the bleary eyes of a bloated War Party no longer feel the necessity of even a drop or two of Visine to disguise their jaundiced plans for continued misrule of an electorate that chooses to continue to pretend they don't know it is the Joint Chief of Staffs, far more than any elected representatives, who decide what is good for the country.

It is this mask The Donald lets slip. Like Dubya before him, whose "I'm here for the haves and the have-mores" speech let it be known that he no longer felt the need to even pretend he represented anyone other than the rich and well-positioned within society, Trump likewise feels that the time for pretense is over, and we might as well face the fact that the AMG that's been in place since WW2 is now in its zenith, and further obfuscation of that fact is no longer productive. Is in fact, counter-productive. Because whereas the US speaks of Democracy, one need merely look at the list of its allies that are Militarily ruled to see who really runs things in Washington. Every single one of the regime change victims of the US military over the last generations have all been thinly disguised military dictatorships, until the disguise merely slips away, as it its doing today in Turkey, the country whose president most nearly reflects the image of dictatorial rule proclaimed as now necessary in the US by The Donald.

Hillary insists we keep the farce going. I tend to agree with her. But I know that cynicism such as this is corrosive. With nothing to stop the continued militarization of not only the world's governments but of the world's economies, there is nothing left to stop the inevitable crack-up that is baked into the yellowcake when every country is encouraged, by the "Sole Superpower" that brags it has brought about the very "End of History" as though that were a good thing, to ask themselves the same question Madeleine Albright, who believes there's a "special place in hell" for you if you don't vote for Hellary, posed to an earlier Clinton administration (whose "Commander-in-Chief" was publicly humiliated, his orders flagrantly flaunted when the Pentagon made it clear, when told to stop discriminating against its gay personnel, just who would decide military issues):

"What's the point of having this superb military you're always talking about if we can't use it?"

That signals the end of diplomacy. The end of Democratic rule. The end of civil discourse.

I suspect we're all dead.