World Unity 30

   Abraham Lincoln declared in his presidential inaugural speech of March 4 1861 that the Federal Government was a “national” government yet it possessed no national territory except the District of Columbia which was a stateless district. The American Constitution never uses the word “national” or “nation” or “Federal Government” anywhere. It says its purpose is to form “a more perfect union…for the united states of America” and it then enumerates powers that the executive, legislative and judicial branches of the new government possess. The tenth amendment to the Constitution states, “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Clearly the Constitution is about delegating certain powers to a central government and this would have been an odd way indeed to set up a “national” government since the powers delegated are limited. President Lincoln used the word “national” on  March 4 because his purpose was to make the Federal Government a national government. A month later on April 6, he started the Civil War and won it using his army against Americans living in 11 southern states. Winners of all major wars everywhere gain as a reward for their victory a rewrite of history purged of their misdeeds. Historians accepted Lincoln’s revolutionary view that America was a nation and then went to work to show that all American history up to Lincoln was nothing less than the germination of a nation that he pulled deftly from the womb of time and set solidly on its feet in Washington D.C..

   The English colonists from England who arrived in 1620 at Plymouth in Massachusetts became Americans and the political compact they agreed to for their small community became an embryo of democratic concepts that, according to historians, would one day be embodied in the US Constitution that established Washington as the head of a nation. Colonists in Massachusetts rebelled in 1689 for independent rule and, assembling an armed force of 1500 men, arrested the British governor Edmund Andros. According to historians, these were the first rumblings of volcanic forces that would one day roar forth in a fiery blast and form a nation. The Massachusetts colonists who fired their rifles at the British army at Lexington and Concord in 1775 and killed or wounded nearly 200 British soldiers as they drove the enemy regiments back to the safety of Boston were Americans. George Washington, a Virginian, came to Massachusetts in 1775 to take command of the New England army that historians renamed the American army. Samuel Adams, the organizer of the Massachusetts rebellion, instigated the Boston Tea Party, attended the first two continental congresses in Philadelphia, signed the Declaration of Independence, helped draft the Articles of Federation and supported the ratification of the Constitution by Massachusetts. Samuel Adams might have been elevated by historians to the level of an American hero like George Washington or Thomas Jefferson if he had not constantly and outspokenly made it clear to his fellow colonists that Massachusetts was his country. Historians did not allow anyone on their lists whose deeds could not be nicely metamorphosed as presages of the nation Abraham Lincoln’s military victory required.  

   No defined geographical area is named “America” and no nation has ever established itself, including within its borders a well-defined distinct people, on the North American continent. This fact did not stop historians from finding “America” and the “nation” wherever it was convenient. In the public schools, our history books never taught us that the true majesty and glory of America derived from the successful union of 50 sovereign states with open borders and democratic governments. We were educated as though it were a matter of indifference if we happened to live in Massachusetts or Louisiana. Washington was the head of a nation but it had never built and funded a public school or university in any state, it had never built and funded a public hospital in a state, it had never built and sustained state roads or state transportation systems, it had never established and maintained libraries outside of the District of Columbia, it had never established and funded police and fire services outside the District of Columbia, it had no power to register births and deaths because a United States citizen can be born and die only in one state of many states, it had no power to marry couples under civil law, it could not incorporate banks and corporations, and it had also nothing to do with hundreds of  professions and public organizations and public activities that were governed by state authority. No one taught us that the state we happened to live in had power to do everything necessary for the public good as in any other state anywhere in the world except that it had no power to wage war or conduct diplomatic activities with other states. The armies of historians who followed Lincoln had done their job. Since we had a nation, it was none of our business to open our eyes and see that an extraordinary unfolding and development of humanity into a new revolutionary political system unlike anything in its past had happened among us.

Daniel McNeill Read all World Unity Writings usoftheworld.com

World Unity 29

   In the 1830s and 1840s, Herman Melville was writing about a mad New England sea captain who felt at home only with his feet on the deck of a ship sailing the oceans of the world crazy to soothe the rage in his soul by killing a white whale. Henry Thoreau was writing about how he lived alone in the woods creating for himself his own world. Edgar Poe’s poetry sent him wandering like an ancient ship on waves of despair searching for ideal beauty. Nathaniel Hawthorne was writing about evil men with maniacal passions dominating times long past. And Ralph Emerson was giving his American Scholar lecture at Harvard College declaring that a man should conform to nothing except the universal designs of nature that send rhythms of a powerful poetry to the soul of a man bold enough to rely only on himself. Where was there even a hint of some kind of national ambiance encircling and nourishing the imaginings of such men? Yet what an unique culture grew out of the strange ambiguities of antebellum America! If only we had had honest historians and honest critics, we might have been indoctrinated in our schools by a native literature and philosophy not bound any longer by the intellectual and spiritual borders that enclosed writers in nation-states. We did not have any nation. No blooming national will added extra heartbeats to the imaginative pulse of our writers. Instead, the history of the time inspired anti national feelings. The Federal Government was supporting land speculators and slave owners eager to drive Indians from their lands and to use the new territories for slave plantations. Under President Van Buren, a treaty was approved with the Cherokees which amounted to nothing less than their forced removal from their lands in Georgia to the plains west of the Mississippi River. In April 1838,  Ralph Emerson wrote an open letter to the President in which he said, “…a crime is projected that confounds our understandings by its magnitude, a crime that really deprives us as well as the Cherokees of a country for how could we call the conspiracy that should crush these poor Indians our government, or the land that was cursed by their parting and dying imprecations our country anymore?” Abraham Lincoln declared in his Gettysburg speech of 1863 that the Declaration of Independence in 1776 had created “a new nation". Subservient historians have since blinded our eyes to the real meaning of our history. Most Americas of antebellum times did not feel a political sentiment within them that united them to a nation. They lived in a union of sovereign states and the union’s glory resided in the simple fact that it could not be united culturally or politically into a single national block. The New England novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne wrote about “the anomaly of two allegiances of which that of the State comes nearest home to a man's feelings, and includes the altar and the hearth, while the General Government claims his devotion only to an airy mode of law and has no symbol but a flag.” Addressing national sentiment, he wrote, “I wonder that we Americans love our country at all, it having no oneness; and when you try to make it a matter of the heart, everything falls away except one’s native state.”  In 1857 Henry Thoreau, the author of Walden,  listened to a lecture by the anti-slavery abolitionist radical, John Brown, and said that it was the first time in his life that he ever felt he lived in a nation. Abolitionism was partly a substitute for national feeling. When an Abolitionist spoke at a meeting with moral inspiration against the evils of slavery, he was speaking against a foul condition of human beings that was legal according the laws he lived under but outlawed by the laws of the nation that he so ardently desired might exist but in fact did not exist. Ironically, Abraham Lincoln by starting the Civil War did give all Americans a nation, but he could not create by his machiavellian machinations one nation for all of them. By forcing Americans to fight one another, he created while the war lasted two nations, one north and one south.

Daniel McNeill usoftheworld.com

The United States of the World, The Theater of the Impossible, The End of All Beginnings, books by Daniel McNeill, are for sale at:amazon.com/author/graceisall 

World Unity 28

   After the Civil War, men hungry for power worked to weaken  the sovereign powers of the states. Washington had assumed enough sovereignty to defeat in war 11 of the states. The federal army held them under martial law for 5 years. The military power that the Federal Government possessed was something that every American now reckoned with and feared. Everyone knew that Washington could use its army against whomever it wished and that it was further solidifying its power with a federal police force and federal prisons. The radical Republicans in power in Congress after Lincoln’s assassination had supported the war and now did everything possible to further reduce state sovereignty. They tried to impeach Andrew Johnson, Lincoln’s vice-president, who succeeded him to the presidency. He was against the movement towards expanded federal power and wanted to restore the Washington government and the union to their prewar status. He  survived his impeachment trial in Congress by one vote. In law and in fact, the federal government was no more sovereign now than it had been before the war, but the Republican party understood with fervor that something close to full sovereignty could at last be seized by a united group of men. They expanded federal power by the 13th and 14th amendments to the Constitution. They used the court system to strike down state laws that opposed federal policies or tried to regulate business practices.

   Everything worked against the sovereignty of the states and towards the sovereignty of the Federal Government. Everything except the Constitution. The Constitution does not assign full sovereign power to any state. Instead it takes sovereign powers away from all the states of the union and gives sovereign powers to a central government that is not located in a state. It not only refuses to the Federal Government the status of a state but also separates its power among three branches, the executive, the legislative and the judicial. The Constitution makes no government completely sovereign and forces every one of them to be democratic. The Federal Government marched ahead after the Civil War towards the status of a national state without being a state and the states, weakened by the war, believed they had lost the status as states with nearly full sovereign power that they had had before the war. The rush towards the creation of postwar America as a nation was based on the fiction that the Constitution had created a national government located in Washington D.C.. At the same time, the states suffered from the fiction that the ratification of the Constitution had left them with nearly full sovereign power when in reality such a degree of power had already been taken away from them by the Constitution. The Constitution had limited the powers of all American governments to such a radical degree that they were all doomed forever to be capable of functioning only as democracies.

   But the radical Republicans had nonetheless discovered that a political party with branches and supporters in every state could wield sovereign powers from the top down if it could establish solid political centers of power in all the states from the bottom up. The Constitution could be amended but it could never award full sovereignty to any government. The two party system became the only route towards the exercise of something close to full sovereignty by Washington. The two party system is in full force today but so is the Constitution. Without the Constitution, the entire legal system of the union, both state and federal, would be nullified. Without it, all the states would become fully sovereign and separate nation-states. The Washington government would still be a non-state agency located in a stateless district but its powers would be invalid because it would no longer have the supreme power and duty of organizing states into a just union. Two political parties can continue to fight for supreme central power but without the Constitution and the Union, no power would exist that they could seize.

Daniel McNeill usoftheworld.com

The United States of the World, The Theater of the Impossible, The End of All Beginnings, books by Daniel McNeill, are for sale at:amazon.com/author/graceisall 

Saving Washington To Save The World

50 states exercised their sovereignty by electing Donald Trump president of a government in Washington that is not located in any state and is not fully sovereign. American states parcel out their sovereignty assigning part of it to a central government and keeping the greater part for themselves. The citizens of the states vote for representatives to the legislatures of 2 governments neither of which are fully sovereign. It is impossible to rule a united group of sovereign states despotically. A fully sovereign nation-state is always ruled despotically either by one dictator or by some group of men elected democratically. The most important political objective of citizens of any state should be to make most laws regulating how they live. The fullest amount of political freedom should be the objective not the fullest amount of sovereignty. If Donald Trump were the president of a sovereign state, his total inability to govern would be a disaster. As it is, he and the other money-grabbing politicians in Washington simply grab and grab because government is mostly done locally. But Washington has absolute sovereignty in limited areas that directly affect world military and economic security. Trump's mismanagement is weakening an international system ruled by Washington whose collapse would be the worst economic disaster that has hit the world since the fall of the Roman Empire. We Americans must remain firmly loyal to Washington and support it for good or bad. We need to save the world by offering nation-states worldwide open admittance as new states to our union. But if we don't keep Washington safe and secure there will be no world to save.

Daniel McNeill amazon.com/author/graceisall
usoftheworld.com

The Robot That Lives Where We Think

The beginning forms of the internet resembled the mindless forms of early life from the amoeba on up the ladder of lower forms. The beginning internet was not much more than wired interconnections of simplistic (relatively speaking) early government computers. Then open protocols allowed a kind of spontaneous expansion up the internet ladder much like the progress  in the natural world of lower and still mindless forms of life to instinctual behavior guided by crude spinal  cords that eventually evolved to small undeveloped brains. The internet needed the massive concentration of mind-power from thousands of computer engineers and programmers before it reached the present stage. It has evolved to a vast system of open communication ripe for commercial exploitation (and hacking) once  provided with a concentrated, limited mental focus by organizations like Facebook, Google, and Twitter. Animals evolved up to the stage of limited brain power and that is about the mental status of the present internet. It can only falsify real thinking which can  be real only if it starts individually in one individual brain and expands with complete freedom. Google patches together for us our ideas if they can be diminished to fit the focus of its platform’s technology. And of course Facebook nicely arranges for us with its platform pale feelings we try to express as genuine although our real feelings live only in a space that Facebook knows nothing about called the heart. The internet is a robot. It is not alive. Its power is that it succeeds in acting like it is alive. 5000 years ago animals named humans started using their minds creatively. They had nothing much around them to stimulate complex thinking so they began using their minds together with imagination. It took 5000 years to develop to the complexity of our present technological society which has eliminated imagination as a companion to our well developed brains. The challenge now for the internet is to take the next evolutionary step from lower-level sense thought to truly complex thinking, to  graft onto itself something  resembling  the wide range of our minds which we have drastically limited by submitting them exclusively to reason and logic. The goal is to make the robot who commands so strongly our attention able to think with something like our unique capacity for free individual thought. “Man does not think or is not able to think where he lives and so he is compelled to live where he thinks,” wrote the Russian philosopher Leo Shestov. The internet is discovering new revolutionary free protocols so that it soon may be able also to live its robot-style invented life where we think along with us who become more and more stupefied the more we live where we think.

Daniel McNeill

Read examples of the free individual thought that wants to change the United States of America to the United States of the World. At: usoftheworld.com  

Woody Allen, Millenials and the Same Vapid Culture

Woody Allen must answer those who now accuse him of immoral behavior. His generation grew up in a kind of social and political moral vacuum. In  Woody’s youth in the 1950s, we had three clear and loud moral commands: hate Communists, shut up about everything else and use the educational and economic system to make money. James Jones wrote a novel published then, “From Here to Eternity”, in which the hero declares you’re nothing if you don’t go your own way. We either went the way of a morally inept and vapid society or our own way. Woody refused the public-school educational system which taught him nothing culturally except drivel and refused the dead-beat culture taught in colleges which was mainly European culture, by then a dead culture strangled to death by the Second World War. What to do? Something, anything other than what we were supposed to do. Woody almost became a criminel and saved himself by becoming a comic. Then he succeeded in enlivening the tedious and dumb conformity of the period in movies with the interesting and unusual personalities of actors who floated before us for a few minutes as though real persons even though clearly they belonged to no society of any moral authenticity.  The insipidity of our American culture will tirelessly turn all of us into work-a-day slobs unless we find the courage to express ourselves with real freedom and real words free of media blather and oversimplified talking points. We need also some brave and free political acts that may end our moral vapidity by actually creating goodness. But nothing has changed much since Woody’s time. We have terrorists instead of communists and the educational paths to success are still dead-beat with most humanistic studies gone. The millenials have the same vapid culture. Their technological bells and whistles don’t make it as lively as they think. But there is one difference. They don’t feel any necessity to go their own way. That’s big. The vapidity is still real. They accept it wholeheartedly and intend to enjoy it as best they can until their generation or a new one decides it is immoral to live without the freedom and creativity of the bold.

Daniel McNeill

Read 42 arguments for changing the United States of America to the United States of the World at: usoftheworld.com  

World Unity 27

After the Civil War, Americans wanted as little to do with Washington as possible and most considered it a grave moral weakness, almost a sinful condition, if anyone expected anything from it. Protestants in the south lived for years under martial law and some Protestants in the north had sent their sons to their death in Washington’s armies. Both groups knew that nothing could arise in Washington except more power for Washington.The only power they had was the power they found in themselves. Native Americans were soon surrounded by vast numbers of immigrants speaking incomprehensible languages. Over 20 million Europeans came to America between 1870 and 1910. They came from nation-states or empires and understood little about the new radical political system in America. Most native Americans understood that they had never lived in a nation and had no reason to believe they lived in one simply because Washington had gained more power by a civil war.  A common saying passed among immigrants that was equivalent to not living in a nation, “America is a free country”. As America raced on through the most extraordinary industrial revolution ever witnessed on the planet, Americans were forced to take upon themselves a new identity that gave them power and purpose in the new America. Individuals discovered “the work ethic”.The new religion that thrived in the late nineteenth-century industrial jungles preached that poverty was shameful and sinful and riches blessed. People struggled to improve their lot by making money. They ascended if they could the stairs to the divine temples where the rich lived in bliss. On their way up, like the rich, they did not look down at the millions of Americans that the savage industrial development had defeated and held prisoners in the hell fire of poverty.  In the economic arena no one was united with anyone and this lack of unity made individual values the only solid weapons against defeat and produced ironically an overall unity as everyone searched for the American dream on their own. Extreme individualism fit well with a government at the top that was like an aloof imperial government that never left its lofty perch to aid the common man.  Rich men conveyed money to key officials in Washington to keep federal-government power out of the hands of the average American and the immigrants laboring in the dog-eat-dog industrial hell. Many Americans never again took anything Washington politicians said seriously. Historians went to work to discover in American history the “new nation” that Lincoln had spoken of in his Gettysburg Address. Americans kept silent and lived by the work ethic.

Daniel McNeill usoftheworld.com

The United States of the World, The Theater of the Impossible, The End of All Beginnings, books by Daniel McNeill, are for sale at:amazon.com/author/graceisall