Obituary of the Republican Party
November 5, 2008
As originally published July 15th 2005
A popular political party that rose to tremendous power in the 20th century, the Republican Party redefined the nation’s political agenda and dramatically reshaped the role of government in the private lives of its citizens.
The resilience of the party was observed throughout such morally testing times as the Nixon resignation and the Iran-Contra affair hearings. The party was symbolized by an elephant and possessed the animal-like quality of stubbornness that was often imitated but never duplicated.
Placing an inordinate amount of “political capital” in an oft repeated but rarely defined term known as “values,” the contradiction between the party’s actions and its rhetoric on the subject ultimately lead to its demise. The beginning of the end started on November 7th, 2000 with a great revolutionary crisis that eventually caused the party to wind up on the ash heap of history.
The party is survived by 62,040,610 bewildered citizens. Eventually those that supported the party came to learn of its great hypocrisy and strict adherence to its single tenet of profit and power before country.
The beginnings of the schism which ultimately lead to an unrepairable fracture of the party was fostered by the group’s recruitment of corporations and the religious right, whose competing interests and dogmas were too diametrically opposed for a public ultimately concerned with political pragmatism. The final shot to the great political beast was administered by the ideologue and capitalist President George W. Bush, who embodied what the party had morphed into, from a pragmatic organization into the world’s biggest corporate and religious special interest group.
Bush, while leading the party towards the “ash heap,” never came to realize that his wanton lust for power and profit would never allow his moral motivations to be ratified. Some claim that this internal tug-of-war was created by Bush’s political master, Karl Rove; conclusions cannot be easily drawn except to say that Rove’s obvious Machiavellian machinations lead a majority of the public to question the validity of their initial judgment that the party and its leaders were trustworthy. In fact, while many of the “religious right” claimed that there did indeed exist a morally unambiguous truth, their observations of the Bush administration and the Republican Party lead them to believe that truth as the party observed it was malleable and justice would only be doled-out to those who dare question the right of the ruler to rule.
At a time when the party held its greatest political power, a small minority was calling for a return to the moderation that they believed the party once stood for. Unfortunately, the voices of the reasonable were drowned out by those that claimed that the results of the elections were enough for the party to forsake respect for the truth.
The Democratic party issued the following statement,
“We offer our condolences to those unsuspecting souls that were blindsided by these events. You are in our thoughts and our prayers and we wish you the best.
The Republican Party was a fierce political adversary and the competitor in all of us will miss their fighting spirit. In years past the Republican Party has tried to keep us honest, sometimes more so than we tried to keep ourselves. For this we thank them for their shining example of what becomes of a party that fails to turn that discerning eye inward to introspectively correct faults and remain humble.
The example that has arisen out of the ashes could not be clearer. Whatever organizations come to represent the disparate groups affected by these events will be better off for it. Homage, no matter how bizarre, must be paid posthumously to the Republican Party for allowing this much needed evolution and for this we again thank them.”
Services will be held at the Lincoln Memorial at 900 Ohio Drive, S.W. Washington, DC 20024. Memorial donations may be made to Amnesty international, Children’s Defense Fund, American Civil Liberties Union, the Natural Resources Defense Council, Fairness & Accuracy In Reporting, NAACP, the United Nations, Sierra Club, Human Rights Watch, Greenpeace, Citizens for Tax Justice, and the Public Broadcasting Service.
Book Review: “The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River,” by Richard White
June 13, 2008
Subjects of study often change in their significance depending upon the angle upon which one observes them. In this way, Richard White, in “The Organic Machine,” alters the perspective of environmental historians by asking them to consider the difficulty of disentangling human history and its mechanical artifacts from the natural. To White, the instructive lessons of natural and human history are to be found not in detailing their separate events but in the inextricable relationships between the two.
While White explains that Rudyard Kipling sees nature and man-made technology as 2 disparate issues, Ralph Waldo Emerson, “American capitalism’s poet/philosopher,” sees things quite differently. When Kipling observed a human technological artifact, a cannery for instance, he saw a stark contrast with nature; inside, mechanized, routine, crowded and unnatural. When he observed nature he saw something quite the opposite; outside, organic, life, solitude and freedom.
White clearly sympathizes with his interpretation of Emerson and the book is a reflection of this. While Kipling observed a dichotomy between humans and nature, White believes that Emerson saw that by putting land and water to work human beings were opening up potential new ways of accessing nature. More sophisticated readers (besides this author) may take issue with the nuances of White’s characterization of Emerson ideas about nature and technology. White also believes that Kantian reason justified this way of thinking. The mechanical was not the antithesis of nature; it was the realization of nature in a new form. However, White lucidly recognized the echoes of both men’s ideas in the way Americans related to nature.
When Americans spoke of nature they acknowledged the dichotomies provided by Kipling but when they acted in nature, as illustrated in this case by their actions on the Columbia River, they are Emersonians through and through. It is in this Emersonian way that humans come to know nature, by imbuing it with their cultural intentions, their hopes and their dreams.
White’s contribution to environmental history is by recognizing that humans have failed to see the Columbia River as a whole. They have also failed to recognize it as an “organic machine” in a constant state of flux and seemingly with its own volition, yet inextricably influenced by human culture. In doing so, we have not only created further social and cultural divisions, as well as mechanized disassembly of the river; we have failed to appreciate the implications of our history. White’s Emersonian vision doesn’t see human beings “raping” or “killing” nature but rather our failure is in understanding our relationship with it.
White uses salmon to not only illustrate these points but also as a way to define the river and how humans relate to it. The salmon are both symbols of nature as a token for a way of life and as an example of how the river brings together the energy of the land and sea with human and non-human labor. The salmon are fished for a multitude of reasons but especially because they define the lives of people who fish them. In failing the salmon we have failed ourselves.
We have disappointed the salmon by consciously deciding not to create the conditions on the river for their prosperity and we have done so because we have refused to see the whole and our relationship to it. In doing so, we have created a detrimental division of the river. In failing to acknowledge that human and salmon history have merged at the crossroads of the Columbia River, we have neglected to identify the extent of the consequences to the salmon, the river, our labor, our institutions and our way of life. White uses our relationship with the salmon to elevate this more important metaphor and to refocus the conversation with salvation for not only the salmon and the river but with us in mind.
While White convinces the reader about “organic machines,” human relationships with nature and knowledge of nature through labor, many of his descriptions of man’s impact on nature to a certain extent belie his conclusions. By his own standard of measurement for success and through his laborious descriptions of dams, governmental institutions, industry, etc. the reader is still unsurprisingly left with Kipling’s dual dichotomies of nature on the one hand and human beings on the other. For instance, while White informs us that plutonium exists in minute quantities in nature he goes on to explain the fouling of an entire environment and the subsequent likely untimely death of hundreds, if not thousands of people in its production. The irony is that this element was being created supposedly for the defense of these people and the environments in which they lived.
The reader certainly believes that man is a part of nature but nature itself and the other organisms that share this planet don’t do the types of things White describes. Nature and other species of life on this planet do not intentionally poison the environment in which they live. Nature doesn’t have a clear volition or an ability to understand its being. The great irony that White fails to adequately explain is that human beings are the only organisms capable of truly understanding their relationship with nature but yet they choose not to accept the realities of their position and instead radically alter environments for social, political and especially economic gain. White tangentially touches upon but doesn’t effectively address that until man figures out his true nature and comes to grips with the artificial that he creates for unnatural purposes, the problems that man experiences with nature as described are going to continue, ad infinitum.
The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River. Richard White. New York: Hill and Wang, 1995. 113 pp. Illustration, bibliographical essay, index. $13.00
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