Ron Paul


Now that the caravan has moved on, I thought that it would be interesting to have a look at one of the more interesting candidates on the Republican side this year. Ron Paul was not a favourite of the media. He had a deeply anti-modern message. That message was that government really should be restricted, that foreign policy should be predicated on the national interest and not some sort of 7-11 convenience store Imperialism, and that understanding the world meant understanding some of America's faults.

He even had an airship. I think his candidacy, and that of Mike Huckabee, showed up something about the politics of the US as the world enters into a period of resource depletion, recession, and accelerated war (I write accelerated because war never really went away after 1945, it shifted to the third world, and then came back via the arcs of instability that I have gone on about before).

The conventional wisdom, which in the American media is debased, self interested and trivial, had Paul as a 'sure loser' in his own bid for congressional re-election in 2008. Free-market evangelical Calvinists who consider that their liberalism means they are 'true conservatives' had identified him as not one of them.

He had NASA employees in his district who would 'surely' not vote against their own self interest. He had also galvanised opponents by taking pro-life positions against the abortion industry. He wanted to restrict money supply, and had 'esoteric' libertarian views. He was wasting the time of proper reporters by making them write about a hopeless campaign. Some of his Protestant supporters even actually believed that their God was a God who could define reality and not just sit in a celestial country club not existing.

Obviously, he was toast. And, anyway, he was against an expensive war of choice that has achieved practically nothing except the creation of a temporarily oil-rich Kurdistan statelet within Iraq. He and Denis Kucinich, whom those in the know of what they knew despised as well, were written off.

Equally obviously, Paul and Kucinich were therefore going to win re-election, which the former effectively did last month. This renomination to his one-party rotten borough, (in the same elections in Texas that Hillary obviously 'won' because the media couldn't be bothered to wait until the full results which favoured Barack Obama) was somewhat heartening and emphatic.

I'm rather glad of Paul's quirky independence and honesty, even though I disagree with most of his views. His tale, however, and it is one oft told, makes me think of how unreal the world is at the moment. People who get their opinions from the media or from bestsellers written by loud marketing vehicles are bereft of any facility to deal with any major change.

I thought of this last night, as I walked from Fulham Broadway to Putney High Street. Absurdly expensive Zavvi dvd stores, sandwich shops, 'designer' boutiques selling what I am told are tacky knock-offs of designer clothes for inflated prices and estate agents lined the route. These are all going down.

They will start shutting soon, even if I do sound like Travis Bickell when I write it. The screens in the electronics shops showed stories of rice famines that would affect three billion, and interest rate cuts which were really subsidies to banks but which would not affect debtors. This is the beginning of our future as the food inflates and the oil runs out. Yet this strange half-existence of enforced consumer jollity set in high streets of pointless shops full of things made elsewhere clings on.

Middle class people in the redesigned pub which now looks like all the others, a knock off of a Manhattan nightclub with incompetent staff, sticky bars and a pretentious wine list based around poorer new world stuff and bad beaujolais still shouted about how they didn't believe in God to impress each other.

People are so inarticulate. As for the beers, well, my memory of the abbey and breweries at Leuven is that beers didn't taste like that. Then again, I got drunk with one of the Stauffenbergs and a lovely Welsh girl over there, so perhaps my memory is clouded.

In the middle of all this, I thought of Ron Paul, Mike Huckabee, and Barack Obama, and also of the candidates I'd been wrong about. I thought that Romney and Rice would be running against Obama and Warner or somesuch by now, but Hillary is refusing to give in and McCain has been powered through.

I'm really not keen on the narcissism and cynicism of the Clintons. The West has squandered two decades now in deficits, derivatives, and personal debt. We have not addressed the crushing problems of energy depletion, climate change, or voter disconnection.

A greedy, self-righteous, and fundamentally stupid professional class has emerged in the media and political 'industries' spouting a nepotistic and intolerant version of liberal democracy. Hillary seeks to put herself at the head of it. And the world is turning towards an unprecedented, drawn out crisis. However, even I have come to feel a twinge of sympathy for her given the way American men are behaving, and how her husband and her lies keep sabotaging her campaign. Not enough to forgive her deceitful corporate badness, though.

I've put a video of the sexism flying about below, though I think some of the comments are fair. What is interesting to me is how, near the end of the cheap energy and resource use that makes most of our isms possible, the representatives of liberal individualism and capitalism in the media and political class are eating each other via the dissolving acid of spite.

So I thought of people who had the courage to just say what they thought, and who got hammered for it. And I raised a silent glass in a pub made deliberately noisy to keep people shouting and drinking and attached to a vague shell of identity, and thought to myself 'well done, congressman Paul you were one of the honest ones at the fall of Rome'.

The image of Ron Paul at the top of this blog should alert you to a great site called 'The Daily Galaxy', which is eclectic and not really easy to categorise.