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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