Your Opinion: Response to Beatty on military junta

Dear Editor:

I had submissions in the hopper. It has been a very busy month for our political system from Syria to the government shutdown.

However, the posting of Oct. 3 headlined "Military junta may be needed" and offered by Mr. Beatty required an immediate response. Sinclair Lewis is purported to have said, "When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross." Though there is debate whether the statement was actually made by a character in one of Lewis' books, the statement is fundamentally accurate. In 2,000 years great atrocities have been wrapped in flags and religious symbols. Beatty's proposition would validate it.

After consuming most of his presentation introducing his intellectual mentors, his life journey in his thinking and philosophy, including his admiration for Pat Buchanan, which helped significantly in understanding his thinking, he ended with three one-sentence solutions that America should surrender its governance to "regularly scheduled referendum" and otherwise all public safety is administered by a military junta. The simplicity of the proposition belies the horrible reality such a thoughtless concept provides.

The regularly scheduled referendum poses multiple issues administratively. Is our government to be reduced to a small group of bureaucrats who compile issues of national moment to be addressed in these referenda or is the only question how much we pay the military junta? The predictable real impact would be to make the nation an assortment of allied principalities managed by choices of the corporate wealth in the geography. If this is the American way that Beatty suggests. He has no concept of what our flag symbolizes.

Additionally, there is the blithe nature in which he proposes the military junta response. Is Beatty suggesting that the Joint Chiefs of Staff in the year 2013 conspire to remove the president, the House of Representatives and the Senate, that the Joint Chiefs overthrow the elected government of the United States and assume absolute control of the government to institute Beatty's world.

Surely, Beatty is not rationally proposing that the House, Senate and president voluntarily offer the governance of the United States to the Joint Chiefs. The folly of that event is clear.

"When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying the cross." Mr. Beatty, I would hope that my opposition is not a solitary response. This isn't a partisan question.