Perpetual Baseball 3

McMurphy, a perpetual ball player, knows that psychological introspection on a group basis is just a trick to make him take his eye off the ball. Without a ball and a bat, far from a real baseball field, he has to either blow some life into the mouths of the dead around him or condemn himself to just thinking about playing perpetual baseball alone with himself in the terrible solitude of a mind cut off from the bounce of emotion. Perpetual baseball, like baseball itself, is a game requiring individual boldness and initiative, but individual effort cannot come to fruition (without the miracle of a home run) unless combined with a team of individuals trying to aid one another and using the same bases of security in order to fulfill their mission. Perpetual baseball is a team sport and Ratched has McMurphy’s team on their butts in a vicious circle where questions do not seek real answers and guilt is the name of the game. She is striking them all out. Their bats seem clumsy and useless. They lack the power to even begin the journey on the base paths. How easy it would be to coach his team and get his players and himself going if he and his eight disciples were on a real ball field in a real game and Ratched were but the enemy pitcher on the mound! McMurphy could jump up and shout encouragement with words everyone could understand. Wait for a good pitch! Keep your eye on the ball! She’s throwing you curves! It would be the easiest thing in the world to make his players see that she was trying to get them out of the game completely, to nullify them, to strike them out. And he himself could jump into the game, go to bat for his team, make something happen. But they are not on a ball field, they are mice in a laboratory with a well-meaning scientist who is not even aware that she is forcing them to submit to the law of an evil experiment. If McMurphy were to jump up from his seat in the vicious circle and try to save his disciples by hoping beyond hope that they could imagine they were in a game on a ball field, if he were to jump up and shout, “Wait for a good pitch! She’s striking you out! She’s trying to rig the game!”, if he were, so to speak, to start announcing the rules for perpetual baseball right in Ratched’s laboratory, where only the game of perpetual reason counts, his disciples would only believe that he was crazy and nurse Ratched’s laboratory approach would win the game because McMurphy would be a case study before their eyes of that wildness that obeys only the laws of life and speaks its own language. McMurphy would show himself as he truly is but in a way that would make him seem to be really crazy.

   The question then is not whether McMurphy, a poker player, will put up or shut up. He must shut up because Ratched’s well-meaning mind does not hear any words that do not fit a programmed groove of mathematical meaning and syntax. She does not catch any words that she cannot throw back in a pat sentence that has the firm indifference of a straightjacket. Words alone will not produce the miracle of speaking to his disciples of the tree of life because he can only speak to them, with Ratched refereeing her own game, through a word processor that edits out any nuances that speak of unpredictable possibilities. Ordinary words are just another routine out. He must put up a bet voiced in words able to duck the fists of Ratched’s logic yet secretly with the power to lead his poor souls to some blessed, unspeakable redemption. Four cards are now dealt face up to all the players and they all lose if someone does not have an ace in the hole.

   At the next board meeting, the following afternoon, McMurphy turns over his hidden card:

Nurse Ratched: Last time we were discussing Mr. Harding and the problem with his wife, and I think we were making a lot of progress. So who would like to begin today? Mr. McMurphy?

McMurphy: Yeah. I’ve been thinking about what you said about uh, you know, getting things off your chest, and uh well there’s a couple of things that I’d like to get off my chest.

Nurse Ratched: Well that’s very good, Mr. McMurphy. Go ahead.

McMurphy: OK. Today as you may or may not know—it doesn’t matter—is the opening of the World Series. What I’d like to suggest is that we change the work detail to night so that we can watch the ball game.

   The World Series! Up to this point, watching the film, we have not really listened to the talk of the board because the members, Ratched included, have not said anything that comes from themselves. But now we feel the tension and excitement of some new possibility, we hear the words of a new language. We all obey laws, like McMurphy’s disciples, of sterile obligations that war against our deeper obligation to create ourselves in a way that befits our human dignity. We all take absent problems seriously. But here is an absent business that is real. All they have to do to know the sorrows and joys, the outs and base hits of a free enterprise is to turn on the television set!
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Perpetual Baseball 2

R. P. McMurphy walks through the mental hospital for the first time smiling ecstatically. He has, in fact, like Hamlet, faked madness to get out of the prison, and now his joy upon his admission to the new Eden that his cunning has made possible is straight-ahead wacko. He warbles like a bird-man of some new American race and crows like an Indian on the warpath. His words are as jaunty as his steps. He quickly turns the inmates of the ward where he is assigned—those who have ears to hear— into his apostles. He uses the ordinary language of typical American games—poker, monopoly, basketball, baseball—as the wine of new prophecy. Such games are only water outside the hospital because, although they get close to life, they never get beyond an imitation of life. Inside the hospital, where men are cut off from the miracles of fresh real possibilities, they strike a note of reality. Games produce a more robust flavor in the brain than the mellow tantalization of pills and indoctrination. The language of games is essential to McMurphy because he does not know any path to a New Jerusalem that can be walked without trying to create a direct personal contact with every fellow he meets along his way. He needs his disciples as much as they need him. They don’t speak any language that knows the words of a real communion, but they do turn on to the arguments of games. R.P. McMurphy tries to absolve them from the useless search for a soul already lost by preaching the gospel of leaving themselves to go in a direction that seems farther away from themselves, to first base, to second base, to third base, and then farther away still towards the only really sane self for postmodern man, the one always ready to be born anew by a perpetual innocent search played out independently of the rules of ordinary behavior. He tries to put them on a new schedule of sleeping only to wake up fresh every morning for the start of a new ball game. He preaches that salvation is possible if they but dare to begin to play the game that the rules of the mental hospital, a tightly knit mini-copy of the rigged life outside, do not allow.

   The war between McMurphy’s apostles and the enemy team breaks out at the group therapy meetings ruled by Nurse Ratched, the queen of the ward. Outside, during exercise breaks on the basketball court, McMurphy teaches his team with a basketball how to penetrate to the heart of the real experience offered by the game by daring to throw the ball in a basket. Free from the eye of Nurse Ratched, playing basketball or not, he teaches them how to catch the ball of life. But here, sitting in a circle with his team dazed by Ratched’s presence, he can only watch with gaping eyes while she cuts them up with the knife of analysis. The therapy meeting is like a board meeting of a corporation whose members have all lost their souls. Board members of business corporations meet to decide how to use a power that is absent from the meeting but is real because the reality of human work, of goods and services produced, lies behind the accounting figures of their discussions and decisions. The members of Nurse Ratched’s board meet to analyze publicly how to use a power that is simply non-existing. She wants the human beings of her circle to mark the debits and credits of an absent balance sheet. Psychology calls this absent government in the human soul that has life-like fantasies but no real business the unconscious. Nurse Ratched wants her executives, whose egos are half-dead and near burial, to become conscious of something unconscious, to analyze an absent business, to hold the mirror of rational logic before their lost souls.

   For example, at the first board meeting that McMurphy attends, Nurse Ratched wants one member, Harding, who has admitted at previous meetings that he suspects his wife is cheating on him, to tell why he suspects her. Harding says that he can only “speculate as to the reasons why”. Ratched asks if he has ever “speculated” that perhaps he is “impatient” with his wife because she does not meet his “mental requirements”. Her measured, calculating words are alive with sexual innuendo. He answers that the only thing he can truly speculate about is the very existence of his life, with or without his wife. But he is unable to keep the focus of the group away from his relations with his wife because others interrupt with snickers expressing more sexual innuendo. Harding himself suddenly uses the word “peculiar” and the word flies wildly among fellow members of the cuckoo board, causing alarm. He bravely insists that being “peculiar” is not the problem: “I’m not just talking about my wife. I’m talking about my life. I can’t seem to get that through to you. I’m not just talking about one person. I’m talking about everybody. I’m talking about form, I’m talking about content, I’m talking about interrelationships. I’m talking about God, the devil, hell, heaven. Do you understand finally?” But under the stare of Ratched and with the hubbub of the cuckoo group, without the bounce of action and reaction to add rhyme to their reasoning, his words float by without effect. The truth risks becoming a feather unless it becomes a man. Harding’s mental health requires the courage of his accepting his being’s uniqueness, whatever it may be, as a vital and necessary element of his personality that need not be subject to anyone’s analysis. By putting himself in the position of being judged “peculiar” by a group, he turns himself into a defenseless object out of touch with a wholesome inner experience of his uniqueness. Ratched’s weapon against the mental health of being unique is the fist of two plus two equals four. She urges them to speak freely because getting talk of peculiarities out in the open under the gun of rationality produces the fission between mind and soul that reveals the world of guilt. The innocence of our experience is routinely destroyed when the mind, detached, dictates that every experience is necessarily good or evil. Ratched wants her patients to analyze what they are rather than be who they are. Being unique, from the point of view of rational knowledge, can only be a fault that must be corrected for if it is a genuine element of being then it means anything may be, no one’s peculiarity should be ruled out because it does not fit some abstract rational standard. Ratched wants them to do the rational tail chasing of all losers. She wants them to confess in public the sin of not being just like everyone else.

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Perpetual Baseball 1

The first prophet of baseball appeared in 1975 in the film masterpiece, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. Ken Kesey, the author of the book of the same title, owns the glory of having created the character who in the film reaches dimensions that make him the world’s first perpetual baseball player. His hero, Randall Patrick McMurphy, gets loose from handcuffs and in a mental hospital in the state of Oregon, where most of the action takes place, walks on a new moon. A west coast cowboy without a horse sounds the soul of a new and dangerous California in a tragedy that is, in the film version, the equal in power to anything in ancient Greek tragedy. Since the Civil War, the Europeanized minds of most American writers and artists who tried to revive the American soul only dug more holes or planted the ground with foreign seed. When Randall P. McMurphy gets loose from his handcuffs, the soul of America pounded into the ground at Gettysburg, which baseball preserved in a muted and disguised form, rises again fresh and true and shows the world how to walk tall on a new deadly ground. McMurphy leaves one location, a prison, wins a base in a different place, a mental hospital, struggles there against an organized group of enemies trying to pacify him, tries to escape and fails, but by his out allows a friend, a member of his team, to escape. The art of the film imitates the art of baseball. A tragic hero lives out a destiny routinely possible in any baseball game.

   When the guards delivering McMurphy from the prison to the mental hospital release him, he gets a new chance to step up to the plate. The new life he can create for himself will be full of risks because although his new environment has a measure of freedom, it will be the unrelenting mission of the group of enemies all around him, the women nurses and the men guards, to shut him up and turn him to stone. The confrontation with the pitcher takes the form, near the beginning of the film, of an interview with the head of the hospital, a psychiatrist. He is an intelligent, scientific humanist who, if he does not yet know all the laws of human behavior, at least is certain that all human behavior must obey laws. His business is to decide who is sane and who is insane, who is worthy to play the rigged game and who is not worthy. Like every pitcher he hates the sudden spontaneity of a base hit and his science is devoted to eliminating all home runs from the universe. McMurphy wants to get by him and be admitted to the mental hospital because life among the mentally ill seems a paradise after the handcuffs and the prison he has just left. To get on base in the psychiatrist’s prison seems at the worst an easy intermediary trip to full freedom. Like all ball players, McMurphy is sure that the only way back home is to first get on base. He has more than enough wit to handle the psychiatrist’s curves and he does earn a base in the cuckoo’s nest where he will be observed to decide if he is normal.

   He is, but his normalcy borders on madness because he has an innocent and fierce wind in the soul that blows where it will. He has enough discipline and reason to set his sails and steer his ship, but he obeys no law except the imperative to be born again with each new tug of the universe on his mast. He is a new Christ admitted to an evil world for a new crucifixion. He is insane because his humanity violates the rules of the rigged game. He is judged a social misfit because he will not sit down and quietly obey his enemies like a vegetable. He has the stiff, self-reliant hardness of a Ty Cobb. He is ready to steal any base in any ball game at any time against any team. Yet he is a new cowboy, not the old sort, usually on a horse above the ground with the glamour and god-like detachment of the sun. The old cowboys got off their horses mostly to punish now and then a few wild western men who disobeyed the law. Randall McMurphy is against any law that cannot prove on the spot its necessity by showing a man some new possibility for life. Like Achelous, the Greek river God, who turned himself from a man back to a river in order to squirt away from the grip of Hercules during a wrestling contest, McMurphy is a new cowboy because he has his eye on not just what is possible. He is not just ready to steal bases. The law allows that. He is ready to try to go all the way home at any moment. His boldness will send him off and running from first base for the plate on just a base hit like Enos Slaughter who scored from first base on a base hit to win the 1946 World Series. He is as innocent as Jesus, as self-reliant as Ty Cobb, and as bold as Enos Slaughter. He is too dangerous to be let out of the mental hospital. He has to be specialized, one way or another, so that he learns to live only according to predetermined models of behavior. Experts in the necessary laws of behavior must operate on him. He must be forced to stand passively touching a base and not be allowed to run freely around the bases.

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The End of All Beginnings 3

Anita had sized up Robert Dolan at their first meeting on a parent’s night at his high school. He did nothing to her as a man. He struck her as too tame and too good. He did not give off as he talked to her the kind of bold rough undertone that the voices of real men give off. Anita’s search for mister right was a hunt. A man’s presence had to make her feel he was a bold hunter looking for game before she gave him back a sign that she was game.

   Ursula opened the door for her mother and Rachel. She kissed her mother’s left cheek and closed the door behind them. They took a few steps into Robert Dolan’s apartment and looked about. Anita Ridley was an attractive woman of forty-six with a slim figure and a height and carriage that resembled her daughters. Robert went up to her and offered his hand. The two shook hands.

   “How are you, Anita?” asked Robert. “I’m happy to see you. Have a seat.”

   Robert waved towards the sofa and Anita sat near one end. Robert sat at the other end and looked at Anita.

   “Ursula and I have found happiness and peace together,” he said. “We wish the same for you and Rachel.”

   “I’m not happy,” said Anita Ridley, “and I won’t be at peace until you give me back my daughter.”

   “I’m not holding her against her will. She’s free to leave.”

   “Do you want her to leave?”

   “No.”

   “Then you’re holding her here. You’ve found some way to control her and keep her here against her will.”

   “I’m here because I want to be here,” said Ursula strongly.

   “You’re not. You’re here against your will if you’ve started a relationship with an old man. A girl doesn’t normally do that.”

   “I won’t leave,” said Ursula in a stronger voice, almost yelling. “You won’t make me leave.” But her voice broke and she was near tears. “You don’t understand me,” she said in a softer voice, trying to hold back her tears. “I’m happy.”

   “You can’t be happy living with a seventy-year-old man,” said Rachel.

   “Come home with me and let me take care of you,” said Anita. “I only want what’s best for you.”

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The End of All Beginnings 2

Anita's latest relationship was with Charles Balch. He had won six months ago $450,000 in damages from the Federal Government in a suit that had been brought against him alleging fraud in money he managed as an administrator of government contracts. He had bought a luxury yacht with the money the court awarded him and had been entertaining Anita on it all summer. Charles Balch fit with Anita’s standards and breaking with him had been difficult because financially and sexually he was definitely a mister right. Anita discovered however that he was incapable of resisting other women. When they were at restaurants, he sometimes gawked at attractive women. A few days before a scheduled week-long trip with him to Paris, she found out that he had been spending time on his yacht with another woman. Anita decided to enjoy in his company all the pleasures available to her by accompanying him to Paris. Charles was a well built man who lifted weights and rowed regularly on the Charles River. His lovemaking in Paris was qualitatively on a par with her former husband and although she had sighed emotionally remembering their bouts of sex in Paris, she dropped him with a short note over the internet as soon as they were back in Boston.

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The End of All Beginnings 1

Six years ago when her husband told her he was leaving her, Anita Ridley had been shocked.  But as time went by she adjusted to her changed circumstances and began enjoying being free to date men. She still believed that the good life meant one man joined faithfully to one woman. Even as she searched for new relationships on the internet and gave herself to some men after carefully eliminating others, she still believed she was searching for mister right and ready to make another marriage. The father of Ursula and Rachel, Upton Ridley, had lived up fully to the standards she used to judge men both by his successful behavior among other men in business and by his performance with her in their bedroom. Upton had fallen in love with Marya Buttridge, a twenty-six- year-old married beauty. Marya fired Anita with hatred and jealousy but in the end she understood her husband’s actions. Upton Ridley attracted women and Anita had reasoned finally that the same quality in Upton that had aroused her love had made a beautiful young woman yield to him and there had been little Upton could do but also yield. He provided income regularly for her and their daughters and she was often in contact with him making plans and decisions regarding Ursula and Rachel’s  future. Upton’s masculinity remained the standard she used to judge the men she began dating and accepted into her bed. She was a church member who sang in a choral group at her church but the life of excitement and pleasures that Upton had released her to enjoy did not trouble her morally. She had been a faithful wife and  had fully enjoyed the pleasures of marriage. She had no moral problem seeking the same pleasures with new men that Marya Buttridge, a twenty-six-year-old beauty, had taken from her. The main thing was that she was always still looking for mister right even though in the six years that she had been divorced, she had been intimate with four men.

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The Mystery of American Nationalism

American nationalism is a mystery because like a mystery it has no clear basis in fact. The North American continent has produced empires here and there but never any cut and dry state  on its own with its own language and borders and an army to defend it like European nations. New England got up on its own an army and fought the British army in its fields but it soon had to rely on aid from other colonies and France to survive and win independence. Then it’s 4 states gave up their independent sovereignty and joined 9 other former colonies to form a union of states. Abraham Lincoln turned the conflict over whether or not to extend slavery to new western states into a war and changed a union of states into a quasi-empire. 20 million immigrants from Europe who could not speak English then arrived and decided with scant knowledge of American history that they were in a nation like the ones they had abandoned to make money. Most of their aged and disgruntled grandchildren and great grandchildren who had never lived for their entire lives in a nation voted for Donald Trump. He is now the leading politician in a gigantic blob of well-paid bureaucrats and elected representatives in charge of hundreds of departments, agencies and commissions financed with such an enormous supply of thousands of billions of dollars that it is positively scary both whether they rule a nation or they don’t. They have a large military and a great supply of hydrogen bombs and that makes Washington for every foreign state a state even though it is not a state, is not located in a state and has no legal or political power over people living in any national territory. So the mystery endures. American nationalism has no basis in fact but it is alive and full of a new passionate energy to make America great again. Donald Trump is it’s national leader.

Daniel McNeill

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The Sudden Reversal of American Political Roles

We Americans are in turmoil because the election of Trump has caused overnight a complete reversal of our political roles. In the past, the rough and uneducated white American was bitter against the enormous power of Washington and demanded “states rights”. For the educated liberal democrats composed of whites and people of all colors and ethnic origins, “states rights” meant little more than the horrible practice of hanging African-Americans in the post bellum southern states. Now the people who were once for “states rights” have morphed into brute nationalists. They are in the White House and they want Trump’s government to prove to the world that the US is nothing more than a nation by building a wall on the Mexican border and expelling 3 million illegal immigrants. The US will continue to be a force for global unity but at home it has the possibility of gaining power by bullying actions against the rights of both its citizens and its states. Overnight, just like that, liberals must become passionate about demanding “states rights” because a nationalistic Federal Government would be a drastic political perversion of the correct moral and patriotic direction of our union’s history. American liberals have always also found it not comme il faut  to ever refer to America as a union of states. They will be forced now to recognize at last that they live in a union of states if the strongest defense they find against an extreme right-wing government in Washington is “states rights”.

Daniel McNeill
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Preventing the US From Becoming a Bull Nation

I have said that America is not a nation. The sole basis for political power in Washington is the Constitution and there is not a word or thought in it about setting up a central government as the head of a nation. This does not mean that I or anyone else should oppose the legal and constitutional powers granted to the Federal Government. We should always support it  loyally because it still protects the democratic rights of our states and unifies them. But the question now is whether we are against Washington becoming the head of a bull nation like China, Russia, Turkey, Egypt, Iran, India and potentially the European Union. Rounding up and exporting our immigrants would be a means for Washington to show its power, if it wishes, to act like a bull nation. I support the rights of the 210,000 immigrants in my state who are illegal to remain. But I support at the same time the right of Massachusett’s immigrants, all citizens of foreign states, to have the right to live and work and vote in my state and also in any other state in the world. I am for a United States of the World in which the Washington government would become the central government of a world union of states by foreign states joining the present American union. I assume all the illegal 210,000 immigrants that I support in Massachusetts would also support me  by being for a United States of the World. They are all legal citizens of some nation-state somewhere. They should be for their state joining the American union and for every state joining it so that all of us from anywhere in the world can go and live in any state in the world with full rights as citizens simply by residing in a state of our choosing. That will assure that  all immigrants will be free to be immigrants anywhere and that America will not ever become a bull nation.

Daniel McNeill

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American Political Schizophrenia

In the few days since Trump’s victory, there is little public talk about actions the new president will take domestically to the advantage of the average American. Trump is going to export 3 million immigrants and build a wall along the Mexican border. There is talk of billions of dollars to be spent on repairing infrastructure which will create jobs but it is already leaked here and there that leaders in Congress and the Senate will have none of it. Victors are exultant about possibilities for using their power hatefully against minority groups and losers are depressed about losing their rights to be unmolested as lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transgenders, immigrants, hispanics, african-americans or women exercising abortion rights. Some of us are suffering from a catastrophic political trauma while others are so elated by the same political event that their hatred of everything foreign or female or odd has made them delusional. These joys and woes are without any real political content and have resulted in an American political schizophrenia. Only diplomats and the military are in touch with reality. The military owns bases all over the world and it has the military hardware stacked ready to fight two major wars worldwide simultaneously. Diplomats are stationed worldwide in stable states where American investments are safe and in states where conditions are deteriorating but in either case they are in touch with reality. We at home feel a need for our souls to be soothed by a solid inclusion like other peoples in a nation. Donald Trump has revealed  that as president he may exclude some of us from this nation which we sense we need more than ever as it slips further from our grasp. History has taken our political system  worldwide and far beyond the limits of some national form. Our politically  schizoid minds are seeking psychological relief in a phantom nation. Christ told us that we always have the poor with us and he was a master at therapy. Those trying to cure their political schizophrenia by demanding a larger minimum wage are on the right path to political mental health. But the American demand that our Federal Government end poverty nourishes our hungry psyches much less than people living in nation-states because we alone of all peoples have the power in our American empire to wound poverty worldwide and even kill it. The reach of our government in Washington is worldwide. We should not try to cure our schizophrenia by fighting poverty only in the US. All poverty everywhere must go. It is therapeutic to demand an end to poverty  for ourselves but  we can be fully cured only by demanding that our Congress admit new states to our union. We need to go beyond our worries about only our local poverty and our local rights. We need to take our technologies and our capital and our advanced political system with universal human rights guaranteed by a written constitution to new American states located all over the world. Then we can actually get our hands on all poverty everywhere and kill it all with the powerful bold strokes of our American empire’s strengths. That would end once and for all our American schizophrenic detachment both from the real needs of our souls and from the economic needs of everyone in the world.

Daniel McNeill

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Protests Should Be For Something

Americans believe the government in Washington is a national government and unless they rid their minds of this false belief there is little hope for the expansion of our freedoms.. The nationalists now entering the most important offices in Washington will be quite happy to use their power  by ruling us as though their political powers are national. We should not help reinforce their power by believing that meaningful political actions can take place only nationally. Under the Constitution, the Federal Government is granted full sovereign powers only when dealing with foreign states. It never enjoys unlimited sovereignty when dealing domestically with Americans. The million women protesters that may come to Washington in January to publicly demand their rights should be careful that they do not demand them from a government that is not national, not a state, not located in a state, and has no power in itself to either give them rights or take them away. If the Federal Government is a fully sovereign government of our nation, then it would have the power to marry us Americans and also to deny us same-sex marriages. It has no power to marry anyone and it was certainly not granted by the Constitution any power over men and women’s bodies. The Federal Government was granted no power over slavery. Some sovereign states made slavery illegal in their states and it took an amendment to the Constitution to make it illegal in all our states. The Supreme Court of Massachusetts declared in 2004 that the state did not have the right to deny marriage to same-sex couples. Marriage is a state business exclusively. Democratic protest is a good thing but if it is protest only against an American president elected legally under the laws that make us a firm and secure union of states ruled by a Constitution it is bad. Protests should be for something. Read the Constitution and you will find there plenty of things that you should demand that the Federal Government do. We owe unflinching loyalty to the Federal Government no matter who is president and it owes us the same degree of loyalty by unflinching obedience to the Constitution. But neither the Constitution nor the rights of states will protect us from new leaders in Washington bent on using their victory in Donald Trump’s election to act unconstitutionally. Only protests and actions by men and women guided by the Constitution and states’ rights can do that.

Daniel McNeill

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The Running of the Nationalistic Bulls

Watch out. The American, Chinese, Russian and European bulls have a hunger in their bellies for more.The American bull has been roaming the world for over half a century sniffing out in small states economic food to feed its advanced industrial technologies. China gobbled up the large nation of Tibet and is still feeling pain in its belly digesting its peoples. Russia gathered up 14 states into a union and ruled them dictatorially from Moscow. A united Europe under Hitler almost swallowed the Soviet Union but Russians refused to be sucked down into Europe’s belly and in payback swallowed small states in Eastern Europe. When Russia was forced by the American bull to vomit up those states, the European Union, even without some new Napoleon, deigned to add them as a soupe du jour to its meal selected from a large menu of European states. What streets will the bulls run down in the future? How can the smaller independent states in the world keep themselves out of their maws? Bulls are always hungry for more food. Donald Trump will soon be in the White House. American presidents in the past, think Wilson and Roosevelt, have sometimes jumped on their bull’s back and used its power to help humanity worldwide. No more. America is sick of trying to unite a world whose envy of its power and hatred of its misuses of power blind it to the real good the American union of states has done for humanity. The American Congress has the constitutional right to admit new states to its union and help America escape from being no more than a bull nation. No more of that either. Sooner or later states with millions and millions of peoples, firm borders guarded by armies and their industries bloated with advanced technologies turn into bulls with nothing to offer to the future of humanity but their voracious appetites and indecent roars.

Daniel McNeill

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The Four Big, Bully Nations

I started this blog because I had a vision for a new consciousness possible for Americans. I saw that young thirtyish people and their parents had been preached to in their high-school textbooks and by the media and two generations of history books that they lived in a nation. They had no idea that they lived with amazing political and intellectual freedoms precisely because they lived in a revolutionary union of 50 semi-sovereign states rather than a nation. Now with the disastrous election of Trump, the nation that they all believed falsely that they lived in is false no more. It is here growling, gruesome, grotesque, growing in irrational intensity and hating all freedoms political, sexual, ethnical, religious. I was always against the American political and economic system as a young man and middle-aged man. But my sudden vision taught me that the fact that we were a union of states and,just as important, that our union had survived for so long the anti-state-sovereignty actions of corrupt, dictatorial  and unpatriotic men in the federal government meant that the revolutionary vision of our founding fathers for a vital, democratic union of free states self-ruling with the integrity of their sovereignty intact was still alive. Now it is dead. Both Trumpists victorious and Clintonists defeated see nothing possible politically in America except by clothing themselves in the ugly and unpatriotic dress of nationalism. The monster. Moby Dick. The white whale whacking all little ships of state with its merciless tail down into the abyss. America has become overnight with the election of Trump a big nationalistic bully like the three other big, bully states in the world, China, Russia, and the European Union. Yes, Europeans want their union to be a big, bully nation like the other three. My vision that the union of free and democratic states in America can extend itself and free the world by transforming itself to the United States of the World is near death. Neither Europeans nor Americans, neither those on the left nor on the right, care at all for the freedoms and human riches possible in a genuine and expanding union of states. They want only to be members of big, bully nations like China and Russia.

Daniel McNeill

Click on this URL to see a display of Daniel McNeill’s books: www.amazon.com/author/graceisall

Click on this URL for the website of The United States of the World: www.usoftheworld.com

Full Sovereignty Exercised By American States

50 states of the American union with limited sovereignty exercised full sovereignty by electing Donald Trump president of a government in Washington that is not a state and is not fully sovereign. Their actions defy and upset all notions about what makes a state sovereign. People in states outside the American union fear joining it because they might lose their sovereignty and be ruled by some abstract and all-powerful government far away in some distant city. It would not be so. American states parcel out their sovereignty assigning part of it to a central government and keeping the greater part for themselves in their state governments. The citizens of each state are free to live and vote in any of 50 states by choosing one to reside in. They vote for representatives to the legislatures of 2 governments neither of which are fully sovereign. Ironically, they would be more subject to undemocratic domination by the central government of a union of states if each state retained its full sovereignty. Joseph Stalin of Russia once ruled a union of 15 fully sovereign soviet states as a dictator. It is easier to rule a group of sovereign states despotically than states who have designated a portion of their sovereignty to a president who must be elected democratically every 4 years and shares his power with a Congress and a Supreme Court. It is impossible for a president in Washington to dictate laws to citizens living under laws of their own states which they themselves make and that they are all free to challenge in federal and state courts and to overturn. The Washington government does have the power to make laws necessary to unify commerce, police actions and the legal system but it has only the measured amount necessary to assure universal rights to all citizens of the union and to keep it together. We saw in the presidential election states exercising their democratic power to control a central government  located outside their state in a federal district. Nation-states throughout the world should not fear joining such a union by applying to Congress for admission. They will all keep the government they have and gain a second one in Washington. They will join the 50 states of our union and exercise the same power states used to elect Donald Trump president.

Daniel McNeill

Click on this url to see a display of Daniel McNeill’s books: www.amazon.com/author/graceisall

Click on this url for the website of The United States of the World: www.usoftheworld.com

Crossing All Borders Everywhere Freely

   An immigrant arrived recently in Italy from Kenya in Africa. He said in English to reporters that he came for a better life. That is what I want too. A better life. If it means leaving the state where I was born, then so be it. States can still be states without national borders keeping people out. I and the immigrant from Kenya and everyone in the world should have the right to go and live in any state to live a better life. It makes sense.

   I have so far in my life lived and worked in 5 states. In each state I had the right to register to vote simply because I took up residence in it. None of them had the right to prevent me from living in them with full democratic rights. 45 other states in the American union of states are also open to me. In no matter what state I live, I am subject to laws of the state and also to laws of the central government of the union located in Washington in a federal district. I vote for the governor of the state I live in and for the president of the US. I vote for representatives to the legislatures of two governments, one state and one federal.The citizens of American states have all the democratic power they need because they vote by right for political leaders for two governments neither of which are fully sovereign.The federal government in Washington is not a state, is not located in a state and it like all the 50 states does not possess by law full sovereignty. American politicians in 51 legislatures create laws that can be legally challenged by any citizen and overturned in both state and federal courts. States can still be states without full sovereignty but only in a union of states willing to grant in a written constitution limited sovereign powers to a central government. The American union proves that politicians can recover from addiction to the political drug sending a hallucination flashing through their minds convincing them that they and their citizens can not be free unless they live locked up behind national borders in a fully sovereign nation-state. Nation-states should apply to the Congress in Washington for admission to the American union and completely cure their politicians of a bad habit. Then we can one day all live in any state in the world we wish to try to find like the Kenyan immigrant a better life.

Daniel McNeill

Click on this url to see a display of Daniel McNeill’s books: www.amazon.com/author/graceisall

Click on this url for the website of The United States of the World: www.usoftheworld.com

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Americans Voting For a Nearly Perfect Union

The reason Americans are so deeply interested in the presidential election is that their political system works far better than any other in the world. It is a nearly perfect union of 50 states with limited sovereignty whereas all the nation-states of the world with full sovereignty work imperfectly and some so badly they are near collapse. Americans want the right president for their system because he is the only official in the whole system who exercises individually sovereign powers. He is not at all like a leader however of a nation-state because he by no means exercises all sovereign powers. He has full power only over the military and diplomacy and he can exercise these powers only in relation to foreign states, never in relation to American states. His only other great power, his right to veto legislation sent to him from Congress, is limited because Congress can vote to override his veto. So the real issue of the presidential election for Americans is who is most qualified individually to keep the system in good order. For foreigners in nation-states it is generally impossible to understand our political system. Foreigners are used to one leader in one state embodying all sovereign power. Some Americans who understand neither their own political system nor American history believe erroneously as do most foreigners that they are voting for the leader of a state. Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton cannot become the leader of a state because the American Constitution does not set up the Federal Government in Washington in the District of Columbia as a state and it is not located in any state. American history is very complicated and very difficult to understand. It alone can explain how a government in Washington that is not a state and not located in any state and possesses no national territory can nonetheless own territories, buildings and military bases within  American states and also own military bases in many national states all over the globe, military bases that the American president controls with full power. But American history is perhaps too difficult for anyone to understand. The typical American voter doesn’t care about it. He wants only that his grand and nearly perfect political system continue working for him with the right president fixed in one corner exercising bits of a sovereignty spread out in portions to other corners of Washington’s government and to corners throughout 50 state governments.

Daniel McNeill

Click on this url for a display of Daniel McNeill’s books:www.amazon.com/author/graceisall

Click on this url for the website of The United States of the World: www.usoftheworld.com

Perpetual Baseball

McMurphy in the film One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest is normal, but his normalcy borders on madness because he has an innocent and fierce wind in the soul that blows where it will. He has enough discipline and reason to set his sails and steer his ship, but he obeys no law except the imperative to be born again with each new tug of the universe on his mast. He is a new Christ admitted to an evil world for a new crucifixion. He is insane because his humanity violates the rules of the rigged game. He is judged a social misfit because he will not sit down and quietly obey his enemies like a vegetable. He has the stiff, self-reliant hardness of a Ty Cobb. He is ready to steal any base in any ball game at any time against any team. Yet he is a new cowboy, not the old sort, usually on a horse above the ground with the glamour and god-like detachment of the sun. The old cowboys got off their horses mostly to punish now and then a few wild western men who disobeyed the law. Randall McMurphy is against any law that cannot prove on the spot its necessity by showing a man some new possibility for life. Like Achelous, the Greek river God, who turned himself from a man back to a river in order to squirt away from the grip of Hercules during a wrestling contest, McMurphy is a new cowboy because he has his eye on not just what is possible. He is not just ready to steal bases. The law allows that. He is ready to try to go all the way home at any moment. His boldness will send him off and running from first base for the plate on just a base hit like Enos Slaughter who scored from first base on a base hit to win the 1946 World Series. He is as innocent as Jesus, as self-reliant as Ty Cobb, and as bold as Enos Slaughter. He is too dangerous to be let out of the mental hospital. He has to be specialized, one way or another, so that he learns to live only according to predetermined models of behavior. Experts in the necessary laws of behavior must operate on him. He must be forced to stand passively touching a base and not be allowed to run freely around the bases.

   Perpetual Baseball is Part 4 of Daniel McNeill’s book on the metaphysical meanings in baseball as expressions of American culture, The Theater of the Impossible. The book is for sale at his author’s page. www.amazon.com/author/graceisall. Read the whole of Part 4, Perpetual Baseball, at: www.usoftheworld.com/culture

The American Election Is About Germany and Turkey

The American election for president is about Germany and Turkey. It is about the political responsibility of a superpower union of states like the US and the irresponsibility of nation-states. If Clinton wins, Germany and Turkey will win and continue to act irresponsibly. Germany’s advanced economy is booming with no unemployment. The election of Clinton means it can go ahead with its global plans securely protected by the US. It will invest its excess capital not in Europe but in economic opportunities around the globe. The states of the world will go on as usual using to their advantage what worldwide unity exists because of US financial and military  actions globally. But Clinton will support not only good states like Germany but also bad states like Turkey. Their state sovereignty allows them to act politically just as if they had no need to be backed up globally by Clinton and American power. The dictator in Turkey was elected democratically and he is now consolidating his power by imprisoning and firing thousands of Turks who have done nothing more than use their democratic freedom to criticize his government. Turkey is an American ally and Clinton will continue the alliance. She will support all good states and most bad ones. She alone will take full political responsibility making difficult choices for world unity because without it all of our states worldwide will become poorer and dangerously less peaceful. Clinton as president will perhaps do some positive things for us Americans in small increments but her focus will be global. Trump as president will not be for America first and the world second because the hard truth is that the global investments and enterprises of the American rich and the world’s rich are absolutely vital for world unity and an American president must support them to aid world unity.

   We propose that Germany apply to the American Congress and become a US state. Then its citizens will vote for an American president and become politically responsible because they will be voting like we Americans not only for national unity but for global unity. Turkey should become a US state too. The American Constitution states that the Federal Government must assure a republican form of government in each state of the union. It has the legal authority and power to force states in our union to act democratically even if a dictator like Turkey’s present dictator refuses to act democratically.

  But really why should any nation-state in the world act responsibly? That’s the primary job of all American presidents. We Americans have no choice but to act responsibly and to choose a global president. But at least we are not acting selfishly and irresponsibly like citizens in nation-states. There is even a certain unselfish grandeur in we Americans choosing with passion a world leader who will not be able because of nation-state irresponsibility to primarily lead us.

Daniel McNeill

Daniel McNeill’s books are for sale at: www.amazon.com/author/graceisall

Read Chapter 6 of his novel, The End of All Beginnings, at:www.usoftheworld.com/fiction 

Anxiety About Voting

The issue of the American presidential election is grand, momentous. We Americans feel we are faced with an immense, weighty, crucial decision. Yet the candidates do not put the issue clearly before us and we ourselves cannot make the issue clear to ourselves. We know  only that Donald Trump’s character and abusive actions towards women and minorities may not allow us to vote for him and so maybe we should vote for Hillary Clinton even though her long past experience as a Washington political insider will not take America in some new better direction. The candidates are both flawed and their words now in the days just before the election no longer seem even vaguely relevant to the deep emotional tension we all of us feel that has strangely nothing to do with the candidates. We are sick of listening to them. We know we are not voting for any real political issue and yet we all feel that the result of our individual decisions will be fatal for us in our future in a way that for some reason we have never felt in the past in a presidential election. Some of us hear in our minds words from the Irish poet Yeats, “The best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity”...”The center cannot hold”...”Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.” But no words correspond to our anxiety. We are facing something dangerous and alarming. We do not know what it is and even if we did know, we know our vote will not do anything to help us. So we are alone and abandoned politically and psychologically and no one and nothing can change the tension we feel. The only relief is to go into a voting booth and do something. We need to act politically even though we fear that neither Trump nor Clinton will act politically for us. If we knew that Clinton or Trump as president will be forced to keep a hold on the center and keep the world from anarchy by supporting the worldwide designs for power and riches of the best and the worst on our planet, it would only increase our anxiety. It’s better not to think of the world and do our best to deal with the anxiety caused by our political impotency in America.

Daniel McNeill

Daniel McNeill’s books are for sale at: www.amazon.com/author/graceisall

Read Chapter 3 of his novel The End of all Beginnings at: www.usoftheworld.com/fiction