Shame

Most of us have felt it at some point in our lives, despite an unstinting effort to eliminate it over most of the last century. Shame appears to be a cousin of guilt, which psychoanalysis has sought to seek and destroy, but guilt differs in its associations with legal and judicial issues. A judge may declare you to be guilty, for which you may feel shame, or you may not, but shame essentially comes from within. 

Religious and political institutions have tried to instill the concept of shame to keep the populace in line with the prevailing notions of desirable behavior. The political institutions tend to favor the concept of guilt, along with fear, since they have a whole judicial system, backed up by police and prisons, to channel behavior as needed. Their arsenal has been expanded lately by the internet, with its surveillance apps and social media, as well as by the emergence of new organizations created to combat “misinformation” and “disinformation”. Lacking most of these tools, our religious institutions, which disproportionately focus their efforts to shape human behavior on matters related to sex, usually try to have their members internalize their precepts. 

Remorse, whether genuine or staged, can be useful in sentencing hearings, even if it carries little weight during trials. Shame is real, which means it cannot be called up for effect, but neither can it be easily dismissed once it has made its presence felt. 

Besides personally feeling regret and embarrassment with our own foul deeds, we do encourage feelings of shame in others, certainly more often than in ourselves, and we lament its absence wherever we think it should be. Thus, we are familiar with hearing “shame on her!”, currently out of fashion, and “shame on him!”, now more popular than ever in regard to men’s treatment of women but rarely heard any more regarding other areas of comportment. 

The most forceful public assertion of shame that I can recall was when Special Counsel Joseph Welch turned to Senator Joseph McCarthy on June 9th, 1954, and said “Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last”? The unspoken answer was clearly “no” and that marked the beginning of the end of McCarthy’s vicious career of destroying other people’s lives through lies, slander and innuendo. Shortly after this, he was investigated, censured by the Senate, and left to die in disgrace. It also marked the last time that shame played a major role in American public life. Full immunity to shame has been developed over the subsequent seven decades and has opened the way to breathtakingly new behavioral extremes by the two entrenched contenders for the presidency in 2024, both cheered on by young acolytes who, as members of the Enron generation, have no need to develop an immunity to shame, a concept to which they’ve never been introduced. 

The last time I’ve seen a poll on the upcoming USA election, 77% of US voters wanted neither available option. Is that a sign that a majority of Americans still have a conscience, or is it just that they realize they’re being toyed with by the bi-partisan oligarchy? 

Men behaving badly toward women is not a new phenomenon but political “leaders” publicly bragging about it is something of a novelty, as is stealing from charities set up to assist children with cancer. And now we scheme to get countries to fight wars with other countries we openly admit we want to weaken and overthrow. Machiavelli might have approved and Hitler certainly would, but who would have imagined that this would be the policy of the unitary superpower, the upholder of the rules-based order? 

As we’ve removed shame from its role in shaping our actions, we’ve tried to replace it by assigning the role of “friend” to countries, much as we’ve assigned the role of “person” to corporations. Saudi Arabia is a rich friend so when its Crown Prince decided to carve up a US-based Saudi journalist into small disposable packages in its Turkish consulate, the event was treated by both recent presidents as just an erratic episode among friends. Then, when Israel, another friend, but more a member of the family than a friend, opted to try out genocide to deal with neighbors it wasn’t getting along with, we declared our unconditional support, much as we might with a close friend, whose drug-addled son has just gone on a rampage, shooting several classmates and by-standers. “How can we help poor young Hannibal? Do you need a loan to get the therapy he needs, or a good lawyer?” Friendship is a beautiful thing, but it has its limits. President Trump taught us something of those limits. President Biden has pushed the envelope even further. The total lack of shame in both men is, well, shameful. 

For eighty years we’ve wondered how all those good Germans could have lived with the mass exterminations of a chosen people in their midst. This year’s chosen exterminees aren’t really in our midst but they are ever so much more visible in their agony than any previous victims of mass extermination efforts. So now we know. This time it’s us, whether we’re Americans, Europeans or Israelis, or anyone else sending the butcher tools. Those weird pronoun people weren’t all wrong after all. Pronouns can be important. It’s no longer they or them. Right now, it’s us and we, and there’s no relief in sight.

A Solution for Gaza

 

Most people we know, personally or through their writing, live with apprehension over how the rest of 2024 will play out. They seem to harbor more fear of what a second Trump Presidency might bring than horror at what we are witnessing right now. President Biden has been anointed by establishment Democrats with the title of last best hope to save democracy but as the year moves along he keeps digging himself ever deeper into a hole. His bold plan to incite a proxy war war with Russia to weaken and overthrow that large country’s government has not worked out as intended and now, as Israel has taken control of US foreign policy, things are looking bad for American interests and for its good name. By being sucked in to aid the final solution to Israel’s Palestinian problem, the president has made us all collaborators in genocide. 

Many DNC establishment columnists have managed to write glowing reports on the economy while ignoring the death and destruction that are spreading the perception that rather than being the savior of the rules-based order, the US has become a rogue state and the world’s largest agent of state terrorism. The Democratic Party is more likely to promote some democratic concepts than its rival, the Republican Party, now completely dedicated to a selective libertarianism marching in the direction of a Neo-feudal society. The current situation will not be corrected without strong measures, a few of which I will propose. 

The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) was formed to provide collective defense against Soviet aggression. With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, NATO had honorably completed its mission and should have been dissolved but, as with all well-financed organizations, it is easier to search for a new mission than to liquidate all the high-ranking directors in its employ. Thus, NATO was transformed into a large international agent of US imperialism. In the past three decades, to my knowledge, NATO has never intervened militarily to defend any of its member states. Who would they be defending them from? However, over that period, when the US has developed an antipathy toward another nation, after imposing illegal sanctions which often don’t produce the desired effect, it has invoked NATO to launch an attack on the offending country with the goal of overthrowing the government and replacing it with a new Neo-con compliant regime. Of course the CIA has been the silent partner in these operations. The military actions have been conducted under the concept of “shock and awe” and have typically been effective, if a bit extreme. The second phases of establishing dependable puppet regimes have usually been less successful. The pattern has been repeated in Serbia, Iraq, Libya and more of Latin America than we can keep track of. 

Now that Israel has turned itself into the world’s principal pariah nation, repeating the war crimes that we saw eighty years ago and thought that we would never see again, it is time to put our strengths to work. We could halt the genocide in Gaza immediately by simply cutting off all all financial and military aid to Israel, but that would provide no acceptable solution for the future. Therefore, while it may seem distasteful to some of the more successfully indoctrinated subjects of the US and its NATO colonies, should the American president simply declare Israel to be in violation of the US rules-based order and direct NATO to bring “shock and awe” to Tel Aviv, the overthrow of the government could be achieved in a few days, or possibly minutes. A Nurimberg-style war crimes tribunal could be set up to deal with the worst of the Netanyahu cabinet and a new and more humane government could be installed. Israel has made it clear, to all those not willfully deaf and blind, that it has no intention of accepting a two state solution for Palestine, so it will be up to NATO to expel the illegal settlers from the occupied territories and secure the borders as defined in 1948.

The NATO forces will then have to maintain security at those borders for decades to come. If NATO must continue its existence to keep the American economy rolling, it would be far better to have it engaged in a long-term peace keeping mission rather than preparing to act out Lindsey Graham’s nightmarish fantasies of wiping off the planet those nations he just knows are working in the service of the Devil. In addition, a two or three mile wide neutral buffer strip could be created outside the long Gaza border which would house both the NATO peacekeeping forces and a new airport serving both the Israeli and Palestinian communities. It would give them an opportunity to try working together. 

The US has proved successful at bending other small countries to its will, sometimes in clear conflict with their own interests. Israel is a very small country. President Biden has changed course many times in his long political career. He faces ignominious defeat at the hands of a self-admitted tyrant in November. With a few bold strokes as outlined above, he could emerge as the man who created lasting peace in the Middle East and initiated an era of good relations with all the countries of the area. Israel might be the greatest beneficiary of all since its very survival as a nation would be secured. There will be long and loud shrieks of protest coming from Zionists everywhere and in its death throes, AIPAC may lash out to derail the president’s initiatives, but with one more simple act, i.e., the dropping of all charges against Julian Assange, the President would become not only the man who brought peace to the Middle East but also the champion of a free press. At that point the president could glide into next summer’s Democratic Convention to ask the delegates to select his worthy successor and to announce that he will be leaving the White House at the end of year to spend his remaining years basking in the afterglow of his newly found place in history.