THE BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG

Mark Karlin

Editor and Publisher

July 5, 2008

"The United States is a Radical and Revolutionary Nation."

How those phrases -- radical and revolutionary, which we ostensibly celebrate every July 4th -- send shivers of disgust down the spine of the entrenched status quo in D.C. and the great masses who are convinced that calling themselves "patriots" is itself enough to bestow virtue upon them.

Yes, before radical and revolutionary became words that had all the Hellish connotations of being called a "Communist," the Declaration of Independence was written and forged as a compact by people who created a revolutionary and radical nation in the then monarchal world of governments.  One of the great and saddest of ironies is that we celebrate in word the "American Revolution" on July 4th, but implicitly and explicitly denonuce -- via conventional "centrist" and mainstream media wisdom -- the concept of "revolution" as something that is Un-American!

Since BuzzFlash was founded in May of 2000 -- and was the largest leading Internet voice at the time for a return to our Constitutional roots -- the Netroots has grown to an incalculable number of sites (many of them now larger in readership than BuzzFlash) who advocate not revolution, but an honoring of our Constitutional principles and amendments as intended.

Scalia and his right wing cohorts on the Supreme Court are really judicial activists who are pre-Constitutional and pre-Revolutionary in their outlook; they want the unitary branch executive authority of a monarch -- and rule by a court of advisors.  If this sounds like the views of Tories and royalists, that is because Scalia, Alito, Roberts, Thomas, and most of the time Kennedy would have been sending the revolutionaries off to hang on behalf of King George.  Revolution is a word that they deplore as believers in rule by the intellectually elite and "chosen."

BuzzFlash has never been a radical or revolutionary publication if that is defined as deviating from the Constitution or Declaration of Independence; yet, the right wing often defines a devotion to issues like civil liberties guaranteed in the Bill of Rights as radical -- and they don't mean that as a compliment.

The right wing, ironically, are the dangerous radicals today.  They want to rewrite the Constitution to build a nation where church and state are not separated, where there is no balance of powers between the three branches of government, where civil liberties are suspended upon the whim of the chief executive (read oligarchical king or queen), where the marketplace (the big one) is fixed based on fixed contracts handed out to corporate members of the Royal Court, and much more that has to do with the pre-American Revolution characteristics of rule by a king, favored companies, government secrecy, and the economic suppression of the masses.

Meanwhile, the Republican Party -- using Madison Avenue and brainwashing memes -- has convinced the "subjects" that the mere mention of being "patriotic" or the wearing of a lapel pin endows them with a superior morality and right to prevail in any conflict -- because being born American is an entitlement under this exercise in vanity and self-delusion -- not a virtue that someone has to work at.

That is precisely the status quo of hereditary government that the American patriots of the late 1700's revolted against, and took the radical step of forming a one-white man/one-vote democracy.  But the Constitution provided, in its beautiful crafting, a certain amount of elasticity.  So in time, blacks and women were added to the voting roles and, as a nation evolving toward higher goals, we moved forward.  Dynamic change and improvement: these were two other "radical" notions of the American Revolution.

Any rock-brained poor soul can wave an American Flag (or in the bitterest of ironies a Confederate Flag) and smuggly call him or herself a "Patriot," but Patriotism is something that has to be earned.

Patriotism is not, as John McCain recently proclaimed, putting your nation over yourself.  In America, it is putting the principles of your nation -- as embodied in our revolutionary documents -- over our personal interests. 

Principles are far different than blind allegiance and a sense of entitlement by birthright.  Principles require sacrifice, grit, and courage.  The founding principles of America require a commitment to a true democracy, where the majority of citizens -- not the corporatocracy and the Federalist Society -- rule.

We have, in large part, become a lazy and spoiled nation in which entertainment, the newest gadgets, the cheapest goods, plentiful gas, and self-aggrandizing "news" from the corporate media, have come to define our definition of success and fulfillment.

It's a long way from the battle against Naziism and and an expanionist Japanese empire in which all Americans participated in WW II.  It's a long way from the sense of community that we developed in rebuilding the infrastructure of the nation during the depression.

Maybe it's time to become radical again by returning to the revolutionary documents that created our nation.

We can't afford the neo-Monarchists to prevail if we honor the Spirit of '76.  They have done enough damage already.  They are the Tories in our midst. 

THE BUZZFLASH EDITOR'S BLOG

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