Last week America engaged in one of its perennial paroxysms of constitutional cogitation - this time over the Obama health care bill - with (mostly) predictable results.

Four of the great legal priests on our High Temple's Council of Scriptural Interpretation said that, yes, the Affordable Care Act was within the boundaries of what a small collection of men riding horseback to a meeting in Philadelphia one summer two-and-a-quarter centuries ago allow us to do today as a continent-wide superpower society of 300 million people in the age of atom bombs, space travel, heart transplants and genetic engineering. George and John and Thomas say it's okay, we can have health care. Whew. That's a relief.

But then four other priests insisted, "Oh, no, this is fundamentally not allowed. Not at all."

And one apparently went both ways, voting against it before he was for it.

Such, in "the greatest country in the world" - as regressives, doing their national equivalent of Allahu Akbar, seek to assuage their insecurities and reassure themselves by constantly shouting at the rest of us - is the way we determine whether tens of millions of children will or will not receive pediatric care. This - by pondering what would John Hancock do? - is how we figure out whether one-sixth of our population deserves to have their lives lengthened by early cancer detection and intervention, or must instead resort to 'treatment' of their already metastasized masses in hospital emergency rooms.

The very fact of this debate and the questions on which it turns tells you far more than you'd care to know about just how great your greatest country is, the one which spends vastly more on health care than any other, but delivers the least to its citizens. But that is the subject of an essay (or six) for another day.

Today's rant is on the destructive dogmas and horrid habits of our national addiction to the practice of constitutionalism itself.

By that, I don't mean the fact that law in America is ultimately decided by five unelected, politically insulated and almost entirely unremovable individuals, meeting in secret and doing who knows what underneath their black robes. I have addressed the wisdom of that profoundly undemocratic process, known as judicial review, previously.

Though that's not our concern here, the absurdity of the process as demonstrated so emphatically once again last week nevertheless cannot go without being briefly noted. How anyone can argue with a straight face that judicial review of legislation in America - especially in our hyper-polarized era, where presidential elections are as much about loading up the courts as they are about executive branch policies - is not entirely political, but purely about 'finding' the constitutionality of issues, is quite beyond me. I guess it's just a massive coincidence that the votes of Supreme Court are almost always entirely predictable based on ideology, eh? I guess it's also just a quirk of legal quantum mechanics that conservative justices always find their way to the conservative ruling, no matter what principles they need to invoke to get there. If, for example, the question is whether the federal government has the power under the commerce clause to smash state law on medical marijuana, Scary Scalia explicitly says, "Hell, yes, the feds can do just about anything they want!" Anything except, as it turns out, providing people with health care. Then, it's abundantly clear to the very same good judge, that the national government has no such power according to the very same provision of the Constitution.

Anyone who would still today deny that the Supreme Court is little short of a profoundly non-democratic mini-legislature is simply lying to you, and probably lying to themselves as well. The very ideological predictability of the justices' votes, and the way they obliterate any principle in their way makes that emphatically clear, as does the swaggering aggressive activism of the regressive majority of the Court in cases like Bush v. Gore or Citizens United. As, for that matter, does the rage this week in the regressive community focused on John Roberts for his defection from Tory orthodoxy. Does anyone seriously think that these people have a problem with his 'legal reasoning', as opposed to his ultimate vote? Let's not be ridiculous. They're angry because a guy on the conservative team defected to the enemy, and legal principles have nothing whatsoever to do with it. It's like the friends and family of a Red Sox fan who suddenly starts rooting for the Yankees.

By the way, the vote itself also demonstrates the pure politicization of the judicial process. By the available evidence, the good tool Roberts appears to have been all set to have voted his ideology in this case, just as he has in the past, and just as we'd expect him to have done on this issue. But then something happened, and he switched votes. I can tell you what that something was, and why it effected John Roberts and not, say, Anthony Kennedy, who is normally considered the ideological swing vote (though never, it should be noted, when there is real money on the table). What happened was that the rising crescendo of criticism of the Court for its ideological bias, its massive overreach, and the horrific decisions it has been rendering, such as those creating the Bush presidency and the monstrosity of corporate-owned government, got to him. If there was a single development that switched Roberts' vote, it was the New York Times front page article published in recent weeks detailing poll data which demonstrate that America's admiration for the Court is way down, at historic lows. This is why it was Roberts who switched, and not one of the associate justices. His name will forever be attached to this court, and he didn't want history to record that it was the Roberts Court that ruined the historically well-regarded institution. He didn't want 'Roberts Court' to show up on the same list as Dred Scott and Plessy v. Ferguson. By taking a hit on this big issue once, he can now go back to stuffing plutocracy down our throats, as he assuredly will, but henceforth with an historic alibi in his pocket. In other words for the next thirty years we'll be hearing: "Hey, you can't say my vote is always just a shill for the corporatist oligarchy - look how I voted on Obamacare!"

But I digress (and digress some more).

Our current system of jurisprudence - which is often really our current system of legislation - is wrong on all sorts of levels. It was, to begin with, a bad idea for these justices to be deciding health care policy in America. And it was an even worse idea for them to be doing so on the basis of attempting (or pretending to be attempting) to decipher the Founders' thoughts about the provision of health care to the public, more than a century before governments anywhere ever contemplated providing such services, and two centuries before it became the norm in developed countries.

But what's really wrong, at the foundation of this pyramid of bad practices, is the whole notion of constitutionalism itself. Somehow we've gotten it into our heads that we as a twenty-first century contemporary society are only permitted to do what the Constitution of the late eighteenth century permits us to do. I, for one, don't see the wisdom in that at all, and I say that for a number of good reasons.

To begin with, it is a fool's errand to believe that we can ascertain the intentions of the Founders on a huge raft of contemporary issues which - like radar itself, would have been completely off their screens in the pre-industrial, let alone pre-post-industrial, agrarian society in which they lived. Even the Founders themselves - the very people who wrote the document in question - began debating about what the Constitution permits immediately after ratification, notably the 1790 row between Hamilton and Madison over whether a federal bank was permitted.

That particular debate - between two key authors of the Constitution a mere one year after it was ratified - suggests a second problem with the notion of constitutionalism as the foundational mechanism for policy-making. Namely, that the document is written in vague enough language in many places so as to permit multiple interpretations on given questions, each sometimes equally valid. Not for nothing, for example, is one of the key provisions of the document referred to as the "elastic clause". So already, any rationale for making decisions on everything from health care to pornography to torture to racial equality in this fashion is on the shakiest of grounds on the basis of these two critiques alone. But there are other reasons for rejecting this approach as well. Americans love and revere their constitution, but my guess is very few of them could begin to tell you why, and among that handful, even fewer still could defend the laudable characteristics they might be able to identify in any sort of comparative contest against alternative possibilities. It's quite a lot like religion. If you feed a society "Allah, Allah, Allah" non-stop, 99 percent of its members are gonna turn out to be good Muslims (some of them quite fervent) without thinking about it one way or the other (and the other one percent will, I assure you, be very quiet about their doubts). You can even go "Jesus, Santa, Jesus, Santa" if you want, and then come along ten years later and say "Just kidding about the Santa part - but the Jesus thing is totally real!", and that's exactly the set of beliefs you'll get, almost no one ever looking askance.

And that's pretty much how we do our knee-jerk constitutional adoration in this country, as well.

But, truth be told, it's actually not such a very good document, if we're honest about it. I know you're not supposed to say that, but then again if we occasionally told the truth in America we wouldn't be in the mess we're in right now either. So I will.

The first thing to notice about the Constitution, looked at dispassionately, is what is not in it. It is, in terms of actual content, very little of a moral statement at all. It does include some guaranteed freedoms as something of an afterthought in the Bill of Rights, but it does not otherwise have any substantive content, especially on any serious ethical or philosophical issues. Moreover, on the great moral question of democratic inclusion, the prescriptions of the Constitution are highly wanting (though some - but not all - of this may be fairly excused by the ethos of the historical moment). There is no room for women here, nor for less-than-wealthy men, nor for non-whites. I don't know about you, but if you want me to be impressed with any given manifesto or political statement, it needs to stand for something at least a bit novel and profound.

So what is in the document, then, if not some secular equivalent of the Ten Commandments? It is essentially a blueprint for a governing structure, and little else of note. The Constitution says who decides in American society, how they come to occupy those positions, and how these positions relate to each other in terms of their powers. That's just about it, really.

Now, if that happened to represent some brilliant form of governing structure, far superior to all the others, then I might be persuaded that our national reverence for this centuries old document was well founded. In point of fact, however, I would argue rather the opposite is true here. Though I think the Constitution represents a fairly clever bit of engineering on the part of the Founders, given the goals and parameters of their moment, those aren't goals I particularly share, nor can they be fairly argued to be very much helpful to national governance in our time.

For the key thrust of the regime created by the Founders in the Constitution is the dilution of power. Their task was to come up with a government of stronger power than the failing Articles of Confederation, but they were adamant that it not be too strong, so they found three ways to spread power out. First, vertically, by sharing power between the states and the federal government. Second, horizontally, within the federal government, by means of separation of powers across independent branches of policy-making and implementing institutions, otherwise known as the idea of 'checks and balances'. And, third, by expressly limiting the powers that the federal government possessed over the public and over the states, as itemized in the Bill of Rights.

It was a fairly clever bit of engineering considering the needle the Founders had to thread between strength and weakness at their specific historical moment, but is it a particularly efficient or otherwise felicitous form of government for our purposes today? I dunno - can you say 'gridlock', dude? Do Americans seem remotely enamored with their government today?

This is a governing structure that is designed to mostly be incapable of doing anything, other than when very, very broad consensus exists across all the governing institutions. The diffusion of power also means that assigning responsibility is rather difficult as well. If you're unhappy with your government today, who do you blame? Democrats? Republicans? The President? Congress? The Courts? And if you have a hard time affixing blame, how can you choose a different alternative as a remedy?

I would argue that this is a form of government - one in which so many veto points guarantee relative inaction - only well suited to a people who are paranoid about the supposed perils of governmental powers. It's true that probably no other culture on the planet fits that description as well as American society, but that said, it seems to me that there comes a point at which the dysfunctionality of weak government outweighs any benefits. Besides which, the small government limitations in place today seem only to apply to making it difficult for our government to provide benefits for its citizens, like health care. When it comes to the really ugly stuff (and the stuff that the Founders were concerned about) - like unrestrained warfare, warrantless spying on citizens, endless incarceration without due process, and now even assassination of citizens on the president's unilateral whim - there's no small government to be found anywhere in sight, anyhow. And, by the way, do the other democracies of the world - those not possessing the power-diffusing principles of governance America has - suffer from totalitarian regimes controlling their subjects' lives in some sort of nightmare right out of Orwell? Is that what you see in Sweden? Canada? New Zealand?

Which reminds us that there is a better way, actually. In a parliamentary, unitary (non-federalist) democracy, power resides in parliament. Period. Which also means that responsibility resides there as well. There are no checks and balances, no competing institutions, no great secular scripture on high to consult, and no gridlock. If you don't like the way things are going in your country, you know who to blame, and what to do about it at the next election.

And this reminds us further, then, that American ultra-reverence for the US Constitution is even more misplaced. The main thing - indeed, just about the only thing - that the document does is to spell out the governing structure for the society. I'd say that's undeserving of reverence enough but if, in doing so, it prescribes a fairly dysfunctional one, why must we always genuflect in its direction every time we need to make a decision more than two centuries later? If it doesn't even do the one thing it was designed to do so very well, why in the world should it be controlling our lives?

There are two great ironies here. One is that I suspect that we take the Founders a whole helluva lot more seriously than they took themselves. They referred to their regime-creating enterprise as an "experiment", and they meant that rather literally. Not only did they not think their Constitution walked on water, they didn't really have much of a clue as to whether it could work. And there were good reasons to adopt such a healthy skepticism. First because they had gotten it wrong very recently, and not once, but twice. They had tried monarchy and abandoned it as a failure. They then substituted the Articles of Confederation, a governing design so flawed it barely lasted a decade. Moreover, if you look at what actually transpired at the constitutional convention, you see all sorts of ideas and debates and compromises flying around amongst the delegates. The point is, it's not like these people were hand-delivered an instruction manual for good governance by the Supreme Being. They knew that they weren't, so how come we don't?

The other great irony here is that our twenty-first century slavish reverence for the diktats of the Constitution (or what some of us claim to be able to decipher as its diktats) does a massive disservice to the one great thing that the Founders actually did contribute in penning the document.

In truth, it's not the contents of the Constitution that are to be greatly admired, for all the reasons noted above. This was a significantly flawed document in 1787, and is even more so today. What really matters is not what they did so much as that they did it. The really amazing thing about the Founders and the Enlightenment movement of which they were leading lights, was the transition they provided to the concept of self-rule, and to the notion of governance based on the principle of reason, or rational analysis based on empirical observation. This idea was almost wholly foreign to their time, and their broader ethos that humans could be trusted to think for themselves and govern themselves was truly a gigantic leap out of the dark ages and into modernity. Indeed, Enlightenment ideas arguably represent the most significant development in all of human history.

For this, I truly admire the confidence, courage and ingenuity of Founders' generation, and I'm truly grateful for their contribution.

In light of this, then, how much more absurd and sad is it that we - centuries further down the road - dishonor their contribution by continually trying to make policy on the basis of interpreting some über-text written by some quasi-deities from a wholly different culture and time, instead of following their prime directive and thinking for ourselves?

I'm pretty confident that the Founders would agree that in slavishly seeking to decipher their ancient words and letting those govern us today, we have in fact missed the very core essence of what they were trying to say.

Justice Antonin Scalia, one of the most destructive forces in American history, not long ago had a message for liberals and other patriots still smarting from the judicial coup he engineered which put another of the most destructive forces in our history into the White House for eight years: "Get over it" said the nice judge.

I'd like to return the favor with respect to his brand of regressivism masked as constitutional originalism: It's just parchment, people. Get over it.
(c) 2012 David Michael Green is a professor of political science at Hofstra University in New York. He is delighted to receive readers' reactions to his articles, but regrets that time constraints do not always allow him to respond. More of his work can be found at his website, www.regressiveantidote.net.

FOR ME, there was no surprise. From the very first day, I was convinced that Yasser Arafat had been poisoned by Ariel Sharon. I even wrote about it several times.

It was a simple logical conclusion.

First, a thorough medical examination in the French military hospital where he died did not find any cause for his sudden collapse and death. No traces of any life-threatening disease were found.

The rumors distributed by the Israeli propaganda machine that Arafat had AIDS were blatant lies. They were a continuation of the rumors spread by the same machine that he was gay - all part of the relentless demonization of the Palestinian leader, which went on daily for decades.

When there is no obvious cause of death, there must be a less obvious one.

Second, we know by now that several secret services possess poisons that leave no routinely detectable trace. These include the CIA, the Russian FSB (successor of the KGB), and the Mossad.

Third, opportunities were plentiful. Arafat's security arrangements were decidedly lax. He would embrace perfect strangers who presented themselves as sympathizers of the Palestinian cause and often seated them next to himself at meals.

Fourth, there were plenty of people who aimed at killing him and had the means to do so. The most obvious one was our prime minister, Ariel Sharon. He had even talked about Arafat having "no insurance policy" in 2004.

WHAT WAS previously a logical probability has now become a certainty.

An examination of his belongings commissioned by Aljazeera TV and conducted by a highly respected Swiss scientific institute has confirmed that Arafat was poisoned with Polonium, a deadly radioactive substance that avoids detection unless one specifically looks for it.

Two years after Arafat's death, the Russian dissident and former KGB/FSB officer Alexander Litvinenko was murdered in London by Russian agents using this poison. The cause was discovered by his doctors by accident. It took him three weeks to die.

Closer to home, in Amman, Hamas leader Khaled Mash'al was almost killed in 1997 by the Mossad, on orders of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu. The means was a poison that kills within days after coming into contact with the skin. The assassination was bungled and the victim's life was saved when the Mossad was compelled, after an ultimatum from King Hussein, to provide an antidote in time.

If Arafat's widow, Suha, succeeds in getting his body exhumed from the mausoleum in the Mukata'a in Ramallah, where it has become a national symbol, the poison will undoubtably be found in his body.

ARAFAT'S LACK of proper security arrangements always astonished me. Israeli Prime Ministers are tenfold better protected.

I remonstrated with him several times. He shrugged it off. In this respect, he was a fatalist. After his life was miraculously preserved when his airplane made a crash landing in the Libyan Desert and the people around him were killed, he was convinced that Allah was protecting him.

(Though the head of a secular movement with a clear secular program, he himself was an observant Sunni Muslim, praying at the proper times and abstaining from alcohol. He did not impose his piety on his assistants.)

Once he was interviewed in my presence in Ramallah. The journalists asked him if he expected to see the creation of the Palestinian state in his lifetime. His answer: "Both I and Uri Avnery will see it in our life." He was quite sure of this.

ARIEL SHARON'S determination to kill Arafat was well known. Already during the siege of Beirut in Lebanon War I, it was no secret that agents were combing West Beirut for his whereabouts. To Sharon's great frustration, they did not find him.

Even after Oslo, when Arafat came back to Palestine, Sharon did not let up. When he became Prime Minister, my fear for Arafat's life became acute. When our army attacked Ramallah during "Operation Defensive Shield" they broke into Arafat's compound (Mukata'a is Arabic for compound) and came within 10 meters of his rooms. I saw them with my own eyes.

Twice during the siege of many months my friends and I went to stay at the Mukata'a for several days to serve as a human shield. When Sharon was asked why he did not kill Arafat, he answered that the presence of Israelis there made it impossible.

However, I believe that this was only a pretext. It was the US that forbade it. The Americans feared, quite rightly, that an open assassination would cause the whole Arab and Muslim world to explode in anti-American fury. I cannot prove it, but I am sure that Sharon was told by Washington:

"On no condition are you allowed to kill him in a way that can be traced to you. If you can do it without leaving a trace, go ahead."

(Just as the US Secretary of State told Sharon in 1982 that on no condition was he allowed to attack Lebanon, unless there was a clear and internationally recognized provocation. Which was promptly provided.)

In an eerie coincidence, Sharon himself was felled by a stroke soon after Arafat's death, and has lived in a coma ever since.)

THE DAY Aljazeera's conclusions were published this week happened to be the 30th anniversary of my first meeting with Arafat, which for him was the first meeting with an Israeli.

It was at the height of the battle of Beirut. To get to him, I had to cross the lines of four belligerents - the Israeli army, the Christian Lebanese Phalange militia, the Lebanese army and the PLO forces.

I spoke with Arafat for two hours. There, in the middle of a war, when he could expect to find his death at any moment, we talked about Israeli-Palestinian peace, and even a federation of Israel and Palestine, perhaps to be joined by Jordan.

The meeting, which was announced by Arafat's office, caused a worldwide sensation. My account of the conversation was published in several leading newspapers.

On my way home, I heard on the radio that four cabinet ministers were demanding that I be put on trial for treason. The government of Menachem Begin instructed the Attorney General to open a criminal investigation. However, after several weeks, the AG determined that I had not broken any law. (The law was duly changed soon afterwards.)

IN THE many meetings I held with Arafat since then, I became totally convinced that he was an effective and trustworthy partner for peace.

I slowly began to understand how this father of the modern Palestinian liberation movement, considered an arch-terrorist by Israel and the US, became the leader of the Palestinian peace effort. Few people in history have been privileged to lead two successive revolutions in their lifetime.

When Arafat started his work, Palestine had disappeared from the map and from world consciousness. By using the "armed struggle" (alias "terrorism")' he succeeded in putting Palestine back on the world's agenda.

His change of orientation occurred right after the 1973 war. That war, it will be remembered, started with stunning Arab successes and ended with a rout of the Egyptian and Syrian armies. Arafat, an engineer by profession, drew the logical conclusion: if the Arabs could not win an armed confrontation even in such ideal circumstances, other means had to be found.

His decision to start peace negotiations with Israel went totally against the grain of the Palestinian National Movement, which considered Israel as a foreign invader. It took Arafat a full 15 years to convince his own people to accept his line, using all his wiles, tactical deftness and powers of persuasion. In the 1988 meeting of the Palestinian parliament-in-exile, the National Council, his concept was adopted: a Palestinian state side-by-side with Israel in part of the country. This state, with its capital in East Jerusalem and its borders based on the Green Line has been, since then, the fixed and unchangeable goal; the legacy of Arafat to his successors.

Not by accident, my contacts with Arafat, first indirectly through his assistants and then directly, started at the same time: 1974. I helped him to establish contact with the Israeli leadership, and especially with Yitzhak Rabin. This led to the 1993 Oslo agreement - which was killed by the assassination of Rabin.

When asked if he had an Israeli friend, Arafat named me. This was based on his belief that I had risked my life when I went to see him in Beirut. On my part, I was grateful for his trust in me when he met me there, at a time when hundreds of Sharon's agents were looking for him.

But beyond personal considerations, Arafat was the man who was able to make peace with Israel, willing to do so, and - more important - to get his people, including the Islamists, to accept it. This would have put an end to the settlement enterprise.

On July 4, the people of the U.S. marked the passing of another year's perfunctory, Independence Day festivities. The date, also, was occasioned by the formal announcement from physicists at CERN (European Organization for Nuclear Research) that, according to the banner headline at CERN's official website, "Higgs within reach [...] Our understanding of the universe is about to change [...] [Our] experiments see strong indications for the presence of a new particle, which could be the Higgs boson."

Thus, augur the smart people at CERN, a change in our fundamental understanding of the universe, and our place as human beings in it, is at hand. From their lips to the mouth of the God Particle, this development, if true, would be cause for celebration -- that a display of fireworks should be in order -- because of an embrace of the philosophical and social implications of this discovery could be the starting point of a profound form of independence: the release from ossified systems of thought and being, such as those dominating the present era, including the hagiography of U.S. Independence Day.

The people of the U.S. need independence from the demonstrably false notion, held by so many that within their debt-enslaved, corporate interest-beholden lives, they possess any degree of meaningful independence. As U.S. citizens, we are free to, without question, proclaim to the now credulous world how free we are -- but when a citizen resists and takes action (e.g., Bradley Manning) he will, in rapid order, grasp the true nature of this sweet land of liberty. As OWS activists have recently apprehended, under the present order, an individual is at liberty to practice freedom of speech, as long as by doing so, one does not threaten the agendas of the privileged and powerful.

Any fireworks tracing the night sky should be viewed as a demand for the explosion of self-deception. Withal, the concept of independence, clutched by so many under late U.S. empire, is loud and showy, but ultimately evanescent and leaves one feeling empty at its conclusion... a hollowness that traditional Forth of July fare, in the form of obscene portions of hormone-injected, antibiotic-ridden, industrially slaughtered, barbecue-charred animal flesh and beer (the true opiate of the masses) can never sate.

The indicators strongly suggesting the existence of the Higgs Boson -- a particle that serves as a creator and connecting principle of (seemingly) disparate matter -- comes to us in an age, when the people of the U.S. seem unwilling or unable to connect the fact that greenhouse gases, emitted from the tailpipes of their automobiles idling at drive-thru windows of fast food outlets serving industrial bred, raised, hideously exploited, cruelly slaughtered, and carelessly processed animal flesh (an even larger contributor to Climate Chaos than the aforementioned automobiles' exhaust particles) are responsible for less than propitious changes to global climate patterns.

News of the Boson particle -- the so-called God Particle -- into public consciousness arrives, as well, at a time, when as Carl Jung aptly posited, "the gods have become diseases." In short, estranged gods (i.e., patterns of the human psyche that are analogs of terrestrial and cosmic patterns) invade the ego and reside therein as pathologies i.e., compulsions, depression, anxiety, addiction, because their purpose has been discarded and forgotten e.g., the recognition of the sacred quality of life and the evocation of the numinous through ritual. And mainly to bring to humankind the recognition that we, most definitely, are not gods ourselves...to the understanding that our mastery of fire and machine should not infect us with the hubris to believe we are the masters of the universe.

Moreover, we can start with a bit of humility regarding our relationship to the planet upon which we reside and depend on for our survival. The heat waves, droughts, wildfires, and super storms extant should serve as warning enough that there are forces larger than ourselves (that are beyond the control of our tiny, mad will) afoot in the world.

The existence of the Boson Particle would pose essential questions regarding the nature of interconnection and interdependence, cosmological and terrestrial, and our place, as a species, among the order of things. For example, through our hubris, we have conjured raging fires and rising sea levels. Ancient poets would have grasped and vehemently chanted tales of warning...that the gods of fire and the sea had taken offense at our arrogance.

We have reached an age when their metaphors are being made manifest.

Yet, give Americans the choice between freedom, art, and science or all-you-can-eat buffets and the viewing of Jersey Shore, and, well...they have already made their choice clear. Hence, we find ourselves, as a people, stranded in a howling wasteland of destiny deferred.

In a banana republic, there exists a vast stratification of wealth, wherein the middle and merchant classes have been conditioned to harbor little identification with the poor, but feel affinity, thus side with, an economic and military elite. In these societal structures, militarized police are used to quell dissent. The military is glorified and intellectuals are scorned. The function of the political class is to serve the status quo, and they are generally well rewarded for their efforts in behalf of their economic betters.

Any of this sound familiar?

Rather than bananas, we have fast food burgers (grass fed, free range variety, of course, for the minority endowed with economic privilege).

Would you like an order of fries (or, in the case of the latter class, an arugula salad) with your fascism?

Due to the consolidation of wealth and privilege into fewer and fewer hands, requiring escalating amounts of officially mandated surveillance and brutality to maintain social order, the natural trajectory of late stage capitalism tends towards hyper-authoritarian excess, even towards fascism.

Therein, liberals retreat to their comfort zones, while the forsaken laboring class constructs insulating walls of resentment. Dialog becomes prohibitive. "Reasonable" liberals gape with mortification at those to the political right and left of themselves, and attempt to cope by erecting buttresses of unassailable reason...that outsiders perceive as citadels of implacable snobbery.

As important as the function is, and how devoid the retrograde right seems in regard to it, in the struggle to re-imagine and remake the present order, intellectual prowess alone will not suffice, because the intellect, when it marries a like-minded soul, produces a progeny of idiots.

But when the intellect learns the painful dance of self-awareness i.e., develops an awareness of the living landscape of the heart, alive with breathing imagery, then it becomes possible to know the world, sans a fool's swoon of self-referential arrogance.

As is the case with any natural disaster, the seemingly boundless font of stupid extant in the current day U.S. is a sublime thing (as in the relationship between the words, awe and awful) to behold. The scene unfolding before us evokes the mortifying sense of awe experienced while watching a seething nimbus of locust descending on a region's harvest crop.

Images such as these can incur awful pain. There are so many walls of exponential inanity rising before us, in the present day U.S., that one can go mad with grief. We find ourselves within a labyrinth of idiocy; whatever direction we turn, we trudge headlong down yet another corridor of the dumb.

Yet, obstructions are not necessarily a bad thing...Barriers can stop one's drift and slow down manic evasions. There must be something providential glimpsed when gazing upon the blank visage of the hopelessly dim...something we can learn from those unwilling or incapable of learning. But what that is, I, myself, am apparently too dim to glean.

Then it follows: I am humbled. Humility is one key to learning. The loss of arrogant preconceptions opens one, heart and mind, to the novel...to an emergent font of new forms.

The unmovable wall of stupid becomes a holy obstruction...unfathomable as the face of divinity. I feel like an idiot when I contemplate the unfolding of eternity. How can one match the eloquence of the night sky, or the weave of a spider's web stippled with morning dew? <> Madame Spider and Mother Boson, I stand before your craft...a gibbering fool. But you have taught me this:

Continue with the work you were born to perform...Live in the world...to demure, would entail falling into the ranks of an idiot's parade comprised of one.

There is much to learn from the stupid, unless the lesson is being presented, exclusively, in the form of first person singular.

No compulsion to gain permanent control can be successful. The field of battle, scattered with the slain corpses of our obsessive aspirations, stands as a testament to our desperate folly. Victory is a vain fantasy of the naive and the psychopathic.

Conversely, allow yourself to be touched by life...caressed and buffeted by beauty, necessity, even mortification and grief. Just continue unfolding into life...All things are transitory. No state of being is permanent. This is the reason attempts at tyranny are an exercise in futility from the get-go.

On the day that Independence Day is celebrated in the U.S. arrived confirming evidence of the existence of the Boson Particle, a possible connecting component of matter.

Accordingly, let's make a few connections: The present order has wrought economic tyrannies and inevitable environmental collapse, and is proliferate with the seeds of its own destruction. It should be evident to anyone with the cognitive capabilities of an over-ripe squash that global, neoliberal capitalism (and its game-rigging, political class-owning, mammon-worshipping cartel of privileged thieves) has entered into an exponentially increasing state of entropic breakdown.

Moreover, measures can be taken to give a push to its doomed trajectory. For example, deflating of the privilege-garnered, liberal comfort bubble, because mainstream liberalism is the buffer zone and graveyard for progressive change insofar as providing true aid for the laboring class and minority communities.

Let current day conservatives keep riding their train of crazy...Their vehicle is in runaway mode; therefore, the sane option is to get out of its hurtling way.

The New York Times and its outstanding financial reporter, Gretchen Morgenson, have published an important article about the LIBOR banking crisis, challenging American regulators to take this mess as seriously as the British appear to be.

We found out just over a week ago that Barclays CEO Bob Diamond, as well as several other senior Barclays officials, were pushed out of their jobs after Bank of England chief Mervyn King trained a mysterious Vaderesque power on them, impelling them to leave with an "inflection of the eyebrows." Morgenson's piece from Saturday, "The British, at Least, Are Getting Tough," wonders aloud why American regulators - Ben Bernanke, cough, cough - don't take a similarly stern approach with our own corrupt bank officials. First, she summarizes what seems to be the mindset of American officials:

"Dirty clean" versus "clean clean" pretty much sums up Wall Street's view of cheating. If everybody does it, nobody should be held accountable if caught. Alas, many United States regulators and prosecutors seem to have bought into this argument.

This viewpoint has been particularly in evidence since 2008. Time and again, American regulators have appeared to be paralyzed by corruption in cases when most or all of the banks have been caught raiding the same cookie jar. From fraudulent sales of mortgage-backed securities, to Enronesque accounting, to Jefferson-County-style predatory swap deals, to municipal bond bid-rigging, the strategy of American regulators has been to accept "Well, everybody was doing it" as a mitigating factor when negotiating settlements, where that should have made them want to crack the whip even harder.

Why? Because "everybody is doing it" corruption is way more dangerous than corruption involving one or two rogue firms going off-reservation. Regulators who spot that kind of industry-wide problem, to say nothing of cartel-style anticompetitive corruption, should be in a panic: They should always impose serious, across-the-board punishments, and it goes without saying that senior executives responsible have to be removed.

This is exactly what has begun to happen in England, now that the British have gotten wind of this LIBOR scandal, which involves the worst and most serious form of corruption - huge companies acting in concert to fix prices/rates. As the Times explains:

Last week's defenestrations of Marcus Agius, the Barclays chairman; Robert E. Diamond Jr., its hard-charging chief executive; and Jerry del Missier, its chief operating officer, apparently occurred at the behest of the Bank of England and the Financial Services Authority, the nation's top securities regulator. (Mr. del Missier also seems to have lost his post as chairman of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association, the big Wall Street lobbying group. His name vanished last week from the list of board members on the group's Web site.)

Morgenson notes that the Barclays CEO, Diamond, seemed shocked that there were actual consequences for his misbehavior:

MR. DIAMOND seemed shocked to be pushed out. An American by birth, he probably thought he'd be subject to American rules of engagement when confronted with evidence of wrongdoing at his bank. You know how it works on this side of the Atlantic: faced with a scandal, most chief executives jettison low-level employees, maybe give up a bonus or two — and then ride out the storm. Regulators, if they act, just extract fines from the shareholders.

The article goes on to point out the frightening fact that del Missier, the outgoing Barclays COO, was at the time the scandal broke the sitting head of SIFMA, the trade group representing securities dealers. We know from the emails Barclays released last week that del Missier was privy to the discussions about rigging LIBOR rates; he was one of the people Diamond was writing to when he penned a memo claiming that Paul Tucker, the Bank of England deputy chief, had urged the bank to fake its LIBOR rates.

At the very least, del Missier should have said something, should have opposed the idea. Instead, he went right on being a front for Wall Street's largest professional association:

With each new financial imbroglio, the gulf widens between Main Street's opinion of Wall Street and the industry's view of itself. When Mr. del Missier, the former Barclays chief operating officer, took over as chairman of the Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association last November, he said: "We will continue to work on maintaining and burnishing the level of confidence investors have in our markets, in our own financial institutions, and in the general economic outlook for the future."

Given the Libor scandal, let's just say good luck with that.<>