It Can't Happen Here Read online

It Can’t Happen Here

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  Jack R. Nelson

  Copyright 2012 Jack R. Nelson

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  IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE

  The prediction abilities of our brains evolved to deal with the speeds and agilities of prey and predators, which are linear accelerations. But that was ages ago. Now we live in an era of exponential changes; those J-curved graphs pointing toward counterintuitive accelerations. We see the numbers but don’t believe them. We must force ourselves to think more clearly about future trends. Synergy means the behavior of whole systems not predicted by the behavior of their parts taken separately.

  Many of us, even young adults, hold to attitudes from fifty years ago, when the total population of the USA was under 180 million. Now we are over 311 million.. The general level of education - real literacy and critical thinking - has declined in that same time. Yet media penetration into every moment of our lives gives glib demagogues powerful access to this ignorant electorate.

  Furthermore, complex societal ills like gangs and abandonment turn out hordes of young sociopaths. Fifty years ago they were scattered aberrations, now they are multitude, a subculture empowered by technology.

  Fifty years ago in a world of three billion people the USA was The Superpower, the Soviet Union a third-world empire with nukes, and China floundering in the aftermath of the loopy Great Leap Forward.

  Now the world’s population is more than doubled on a playing field that looks like the science fiction of fifty years ago. Things ain’t what they used to was. The synergies are changed. We must force ourselves to think more clearly about future trends.

  My purpose in this essay is to address factors destabilizing the United States.

  CONFUSION

  This question began to focus for me in January of 2011.

  1. On January 8 Jared Loughner ran amok in Tucson. We have not seen such a conspicuously lunatic mug shot in national media since Charles Manson. Yet the commentary was overwhelmingly political.

  2. January 14, Los Angeles police officers killed a naked man in the street. Reginald Doucet Jr. The police report that Doucet attempted to take an officer’s gun. Doucet was shot twice, an apparent sufficiency.

  3. January 18, Congressman Steve Cohen accused Republicans of chronic lying about health care. He compared the alleged lying campaign to the big lie methods used by Nazi propaganda master Josef Goebbels. More likely neither side has a monopoly on misinformation, but Cohen’s statements were greatly distorted by opinionated TV reporters. Hitler’s vile regime is so demonized that we can no longer use it for illustrative purposes, although its elements are in human nature and politics before him and after. North Korea, Khmer Rouge, Kosovo, Sudan, Rwanda...

  4. Polls show about half of Republicans think President Obama is a Muslim and do not believe he is a citizen legally qualified to be President. The Republican leadership has consistently used weasel words to allay the ignorant. Leaving some wiggle room in order to keep these people on board, the leaders admit only a coyly qualified acceptance of Obama’s US citizenship and professed religion. This cynical manipulation is big lie methodology.

  5. The Republican majority in the House of Representatives features public readings of the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution, treating them as if they were Holy Writ rather than a working plan for consensual government. Many haven’t sufficient prose or grammar to parse the meanings, and promote interpretations distant from the scholarly work of Constitutional argument.

  The US Constitution is the oldest and most successful of its type, and a great work of the human spirit. But human products are imperfect, and like any of them the Constitution can be distorted and misused. For example, George W. Bush did not win the vote in 2000. Rather, his opportunistic party and family manipulated legal institutions and personal connections until the President of the Senate, Al Gore…yeah, him…applied parliamentary procedure to quash Senators’ last-ditch efforts which would have provoked a true Constitutional crisis had Gore been willing to continue the electoral fight at such a cost.

  So...? Is there more than a general connection here; a uniting theme? My epiphany came when I was discussing the Doucet shooting with my mother. She felt sure there must be good reason for the police to kill a naked man. Very innocently, she said, “Well, you have to respect authority.” I agree that naked or clothed, it is beyond foolhardy to attack armed officers, but that was not her point. She was talking from a viewpoint of automatic credence and even reverence due to authority figures.

  CRAZED AND IN CHARGE

  The sociopath is a special kind of crazy; a creature without conscience, motivated by amoral and remorseless self interest. They are manipulators, and we are mere markers in their game. Estimates say 1% to 5% of the population is sociopath. Some of them are simply criminals. Some go into politics and work acceptably because it suits their purpose; gaining power and self-aggrandizement. Adolf Hitler rose to power through plurality in democratic elections, legal manipulations of state institutions, and militarized thugs. A main lubricant for his insane agenda was the good German folk’s acceptance of vested authority’s inherent correctness.

  I could see my mother, and millions of Americans like her, as Good Germans.

  The intelligent sociopath quickly detects your mental state and emotional buttons. Civility, empathy and conscience are learned behaviors. The sociopath is not diverted from his objectives by these feelings, even though he can mime them. They can be compelling characters, with that glow of supreme self-confidence. With the sociopath, you must always remember you are dealing with a reptile in human guise, only pretending genuine human emotions. Hitler was said to be a most charming fellow when it suited him.

  Where is this going? Lunatics shooting and shot, confusion of fact and opinion in high office and in the media, fundamentalist fervors, a naïve electorate, cynical manipulations, angry polarizations, vulnerable institutions …Americans feel threatened on so many fronts, and yet like the Good Germans in 1934, few would recognise tyrany’s ascendency.

  IT CAN’T HAPPEN HERE

  An overthrow already happened in the election of 2000. The subsequent lies, incompetence, cronyism and corruption of George W. Bush’s White House were the sleazy work of small-minded men. Dumbstruck in a schoolroom on 9/11? New Orleans? Iraq? We got off easy. Using the same machinations as the 2000 Bush campaign, a genius sociopath would collapse our Republic, like Hugo Chavez and his democratic charade in Venezuela. Or like Josef Goebbels and Adolf Hitler in Germany. Or any ruthless group with ideological imperatives.

  Do you think Federal authority could not be turned on the people? Do you remember National Guard troops killing students at Kent State? World War II prison camps in the Nevada desert cannot be dismissed as ancient history or a special case. American citizens were rounded up and effectively dispossessed without due process. Where is the Supreme Court? Consider the decision allowing State expropiation of your home just to sell it to developers who promise to pay more taxes, or the decision that anonymous immortal corporations have the same rights as us living persons. Madison and Jefferson surely spin in their graves.

  We face multiple tipping points. The news in early 2012 is not encouraging, with sabres rattling in the Mideast and the Euro trembling on the precipice of default. Think of something like the Tea Party on steroids after several years of extrapolated current events; religious PACs, withering industry, local and state government bankruptcies, mega-unemployment, spreading poverty, homeless camps, transnational gangs, humiliating military entanglements, terrorism. When a society is fearful, confused, angry, the people look for a leader who by force of character will put things right. They turn away from critical reas
oning and want quick emotionally satisfying answers.

  Charisma is a common characteristic of dangerous sociopaths, because they are so focused and willful. Imagine a charismatic President and new majority of Congress coming in on a wave of fundamentalist, nationalist, populist law-and-order angst, with racist subtexts. Our new President Psycho would begin by appointing his own Heydrichs and Himmlers to run the FBI, ATF, Secret Service, Border Patrol and other armed federal authorities. They would be duly confirmed by Congress, perhaps with some arm-twisting, and at first most citizens would be satisfied with the new discipline.

  Leaders like Saddam Hussein identify and empower the sociopaths, from street police to cabinet ministers.. Take your East LA gang lieutenant, put a suit on him, tell him he's immune as long as he's loyal to a draconian rule-set not much different from what has enforced his gang-loyalty since childhood. Soon the personnel who are not with the new