By Bernie Quigley for The Free Market News Network, 2/26/07
At the end of this cosmic age Vishnu will change into a white horse and create a new world. This refers to Pegasus, who ushers in the Aquarian Age. - Carl Jung
Photo by Annie Leibowitz
FMNN reader Tom asks: "Am I reading that Arnold and many Californians would love to secede from the Nation? Does west coast harbor secession?"
I see nothing overt. But part of what I do in my life is write about historical patterns as they portend a change in culture and California appears to be in a state of awakening and beginning to feel a state of autonomy similar to what New England felt in the mid 1700s.
History has soft conditions and hard conditions, much like the body has bones and blood. They each do their own things, but they go to the same place. Beneath the hurrah and hubris, lay simple events dictated by economy and perhaps by nature. These bring about secession movements, revolutions and glorious events, but they are only glorious in the eyes of the victors, who paint themselves as great moral warriors and their enemies as criminals. Beneath each historical turning there are simple economic determinants which demand economic and political change.
Among the main ones are different economic structures rising together or a variety of different economic structures acting together. There is an almost biological destiny to these events: the Strong will Eat the Weak, and by weak is implied an economic system no longer suited to the period; it will soon to be overtaken by a new system.
Redundant economic systems are another cause of change. Beneath the triumphant echoes of American Revolution was the basic economic reality of two political and economic systems doing the same thing. One or the other is eventually irrelevant.
It is different for different regions. Where I live in
So what was the point of paying for British security when they no longer needed it and business-supporting tariffs when they were making their own goods and conducting their own trade? New Englanders no longer shared the objectives of British globalism in many ways and naturally came to see themselves as a separate people. As Sun Tzu said, “The war is over before it begins.” The American Revolution was the end-game of a practical relationship that had served its conditions well and worked since 1607. By 1776, it simply no longer made sense.
Much has been written about red and blue state alienation in the last two decades. It is an important division which must be considered if we are to be a federation: A federation implies that each distinct region respects the needs and the culture of the others. But I see this as well as an end-game; the end of 200 years of North/South contention.
It is the fate of all dynamic regions to divide into two parts (which might be called Particle and Wave or Yin and Yang) as the Romans did and as the Christian Church which followed in its wake did; as Paris divides between the Burgher’s Right Bank and the Artist’s Left Bank and as New York City likewise divides between the artist’s Downtown and the businessman’s Uptown. The fate of our country and of this continent will be East/West. What we have seen so far in 400 years is prelude.
Contention has been growing between East and West for a long time – perhaps since the opening of the West. But there has been a distinct breach between
LA does not do this:
If you watch pop culture closely as it has been my job to do in different places in the past 40 years, you see this invisible hand of culture everywhere today. I saw it most recently with the
The
This can get pretty arcane. If you work in this realm you can see the institutions speak symbolically as the
A big issue these past years is why does Martin Scorsese not get the big awards? He’s a great American director, no? And why does Clint Eastwood get one? He makes cop movies and is not so great, is he?
Yes, but Scorsese, like Robert De Niro, is a New Yorker and is always referring to Italian directors of the 1930s and ‘40s that you learn about in film school (and those glasses – he wants to look like one). And they are always going to places like
Not Clint Eastwood (except for
This is, to paraphrase Clausewitz, culture as warfare by other strategies. The distinction is already there, although it is still amorphous in the ozone. One day it will delineate and rise to politics. Perhaps eventually in history, to warfare.
But not today.
Today,
We live in a system of federalism born in the mind of Alexander Hamilton. It proclaims a strong central government without barriers to advance the flow of corporate capital. It was possibly the best form of economy in building new regions out of a frontier. But eventually, those regions will be built, and when they are built they should be able to take care of themselves. The relationship of the regions to the central power will become similar to the relationship between New England and
I bring it up because there was an interesting op-ed in the NYTs two weeks ago by Gar Alperovitz, an old historian and scholar at the
He writes: “SOMETHING interesting is happening in
“Governor Schwarzenegger is quite clear that
The Governor today advances his own and the state’s ideas on global warming.
“The federal government doesn’t believe in global warming,” he says. “We do.” End of conversation.
At one point this question will occur without hostility, but by fair-minded people with basic and simple curiosity: But don’t we pay the feds to think about this? Why are we doing their work? Why are we being taxed for work they are supposed to be doing when we are quite capable of doing it ourselves, and when we do it successfully and they fail at every turning?
1 comment:
Well written and interesting, and you are right "there is something happening in California". For this I think you can blame Bush. California is just to big to be unrepresented by our government- to have a President who is hostile to our values, and to have political parties who see the state as nothing more than a place where they come to get money. Still, no one is seriously talking about succession. For all the damage Bush and the right wing have done, we are still Americans.
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