| Sticks and Saws 70-degree weather one day, sleet and snow and sleet the next. Promises of 1-3 inches of ice by Sunday night, matching legendary ice storms of years past. Yet another day of no work. These were the ingredients chosen to make a morning in front of the TV. I found something called Link TV on my basic cable. It was on the channel that gave me German television and NASA programming before, but for an hour before noon it had a Democracy Now! fundraiser as the National Conference for Media Reform started up in Memphis. The word "democracy" was used many times, specifically that this country is still the greatest democracy on Earth. No it isn't. The United States is not a democracy and has never been a democracy. It is and was a republic. That's important to remember. Never : U.S. as Democracy :: Always : U.S. as Republic. Yet there she was, the Democracy Now! lady whose name I forget, speaking of who controls our great democracy and how an independent media is vital to it. It occured to me that I was listening to rumbles of revolution. Think about it. There is a group of people, growing numerous and prosperous, who are dedicated to changing the United States into a democracy, something it is not. To give the first five examples that come to mind about people in favor of democracy: 1). They are largely reality-based rather than faith-based. 2). Their intellectual foci are Bill Moyers, Howard Zinn, Noam Chomsky and the ghost of Franklin Roosevelt rather than William Kristol, Pat Robertson, Dick Cheney and the ghost of Ronald Reagan. 3). They favor big government which acts and organizes for the benefit of its members -- ordinary citizens, in a democracy -- rather than small government which either poses no resistance whatsoever to corporatism or aids it at the expense of human beings and the greater biosphere. 4). They favor Humanism over Dominionism. 5). They favor diplomacy over militarism, unarmed demonstrations over violence. That's a considerable amount of opposites to the norm held by an increasing number of people. So why is it that change is and has been slow and quiet? It's because of Number Five. Ideas and words have a tough time against bricks and bullets and depleted uranium. Even when people armed with ideas and words bubble up in the iron swamp they're easily popped, but like them are remembered, revered, even given national holidays. They're spoken of to children and passed on as legends. They remain long after their bloodline fizzles out or forks like a bush robot because they are remembered for what they did in their lives. No stories are told of murder weapons or selfish fools except in the context of what great people they killed or inhibited. Those who favor democracy and diplomacy and so on are vulnerable because they are slow to combat outside of absolute necessity, such is their distaste for it. They even hesitate to defend themselves because they find it easier to just get along with others. The only thing that makes them threatening, the one tool by which they can lever themselves into authority, is a large population in unity. Which brings me to an interesting point. You know what a fasces is, right? It's a bundle of sticks, ideally tied to or around an axe with string or ribbon. It symbolizes the authority of "strength through unity," particularly Roman authority. Because Rome was once a republic, the young republic of the United States appropriated the fasces as one of its many symbols in order to give itself a much-needed sense of power. The symbolism made sense. The bundle of sticks was stronger than one, so a collection of individuals -- a senate, a people -- was stronger than an individual alone. Affixing an axe to it only heightened the psychological impact: it was a bundle of sticks against which no stick could fight back. Think about the implications of that. The sticks are only together because they are bound. The strength of the whole depends entirely upon the binding and the accumulation of bound parts. More parts are always needed to increase the strength of the whole, so they are taken from elsewhere and struck into shape by the axe. If any stick slips out of formation, it has the axe to answer to. What a perfect symbol for an ancient republic and a fascist empire! Strength through unity -- a unity imposed by ribbons of cloth! It should be no surprise, therefore, that the U.S. took it into its iconography. But wait, didn't I say a moment ago that the democracy-lovers had only their numbers in unity with which to take authority? Why knock a long-standing symbol of that? I like symbols. I don't like when they're vaguely defined or simply inaccurate upon close inspection. A fasces doesn't mean "strength through unity," it means "inflexibility through binding." Look at that! I just swept away at least two thousand years of mistaken symbolism. For my next trick, I'll show you a real symbol for "strength through unity," one that's far more appropriate for modern usage. Are you ready? It's a coping saw. In its simplest form, a coping saw has three parts: a handle, a curved bar and a thin, serrated steel blade. The parts are made from different materials in different ways in different locations and can be repaired or replaced if necessary. A creative mind could find uses for all three seperate parts, but only when brought together can they reach their full potential. A coping saw is used for dexteritous cutting, up to and including making artworks out of wood panels. A fasces is made of a bundle of thin sticks tied by a ribbon to an axe, the instrument of their creation and destruction. The ribbon is itself a product of binding and knows nothing but how to bind others. The ribbon is the weakest part of the whole, being that it requires the natural repulsion of as many bound sticks as possible to stay in place. The ribbon, once tied, knows how to expand but not how to contract, so it always needs more sticks to ensure its hold. Luckily for the ribbon, the axe which can so easily undo it is bound to the sticks where it can do no harm except to those outside the fasces. The whole arrangement is useful, perhaps, for supporting weight with the sticks and bluntly chopping at things with the axe head. Consider that. A dexteritous tool versus a hard weapon. One is useful for practical and aesthetic reasons if wielded skillfully while the other is useful for only the practical and takes no skill to wield. If the most vital part of both is removed, one is far easier to put back together than the other. For that reason, one is naturally more stable, more reproducable and longer-lived than the other. And above all, when a metal saw meets wooden sticks, which one has the advantage? The democratic buildup in this country, the transmutation from republic to democracy, has been slow. It's taken almost 231 years so far. If I had to guess, I'd say the parts are already manufactured, just not assembled, and the blade might be missing its necessary teeth. The more people give democracy their support, the faster we'll saw that fasces apart. |