Factions

That's the word we have been looking for, "factions". I seem to remember that George Washington, in his Farewell Address to Congress said that one of the most important jobs of government is to control factions. The first time I read that, way back in Sawyer Elementary School, I didn't understand it, but I think I do now. Humans, being  social animals, tend to form themselves into groups. Even in Washington's day, the US government was not a monolithic organization. Like Old Dog said, there are wheels within wheels, and there always have been. Washington didn't say to demolish this system, just keep it under control. Lots of luck with that one!

Speaking of factions, I am not now, nor have I ever been a member of the National rifle Association. I tried to join at the age of 16, and they said that I had to be at least 21. By the time I turned 21, I was no longer interested. I figured that, since they didn't want me when I wanted them, I don't want them now. I am not now, but I have been a member of both the John Birch Society and the Libertarian Party. I left them both because I no longer believed in everything they had to say. No hard feelings, it just wasn't a good fit anymore. When I was in those groups, I thought of them as "we", but now they are just "they" like everybody else. All the they groups aren't bad guys, they're just not my guys. I am me and they are they. Another word I was looking for last night but didn't think of until after I signed off was "detachment". I don't feel alienated from the rest of humanity, just detached.

When I mentioned imperialists last night, I was thinking of Japan. All the other imperialists that were on our side, I classified them as the good guys. That said, I think that World War II was about ideology as much as it was about territoriality. On one side you had your fascists, which were national socialists and, on the other side, you had your communists, which were international socialists, at least on paper. Truth be known, international socialism turned out to be largely a front for Russian imperialism, but that wasn't well known at that time. The Allies, except for Russia, called themselves "democracies", and I guess they were, compared to the two socialist groups. So what you had were three competing ideologies, four if you count imperialism. Funny thing, Japan and Germany became democracies after the war, but Russia did not.

What I would have done in Vietnam is the same that was done to Japan and Germany, beat it into submission and then rebuild it in our own image. I think the US agenda was merely to contain the spread of communism, not to overthrow it. It wasn't that they couldn't defeat North Korea and North Vietnam, it was that they didn't want to.

The reason the US can't seem to make up its mind half the time, or even most of the time, is that the US is not one person. It is a collective of diverse individuals, many of whom have formed themselves into factions. If everybody agreed on everything, there would only need to be one single faction, and we would all be in it. What fun would that be?