As my friends from many of the former Republics of the Soviet Union say: There were no people there, only an overarching and overbearing Public to whose weight each added his own by bearing the dual responsibility, the double obligation of abdicating any connection to a people, and maintaining a full participatory role as Publican in the Soviet Republic. Being a member of what might be the people was subversion and responded to or reacted against by the public with one form of violence or another, verbal, physical, social, psychological . . .
Publius triumphed over Populus at every turn in the Soviet Union, I am reminded. I am also reminded by my friends from many of the former republics of the Soviet Union that there probably isn’t any country becoming more like the Soviet Union in this way than the United States, where We the People have been transforming rapidly into We the Public. When this change is complete, the Declaration of Independence will certainly be obsolete, completely irrelevant, an archaeological artifact.
The people and the public, must I remind us, are not the same. The public are always the people in service of the state, even to the point where they abdicate or completely surpress their responsibility to themselves and one another as the people, becoming entirely statist in their overarching role as the public. Are the responses from the monied elite to the Occupy Wall Street movement a surprise? Are we startled by the police response in Oakland? Do we think the NY Times or the NY Post or the NY Daily News support anything other than the status quo coin flip they call the political process?
Where are the writers, which isn’t to say no one is saying anything or that nothing gets reported without the status quo slant. However, media in America is corporate conglomerate media. Expecting the newspapers here in the east to speak out against banks and bankers, with who owns the papers and publishes them, is like expecting eastern media in America to be anything but reactionary Zionist in their politics, their financial support, and their editorial policies. Tea Party supporters raising the specter of communism in response to the Occupy Wall Street movement is both heinous and naive. I agree with the Tea Partyers when they say that Communism is not the answer. But then Occupy Wall Street is a far cry from Bolshevism or communism filtered through another prism.
More democracy is the answer, but then choice in America is not a substantive option but a choice from among variegated sameness.
REVUE ONE 