The Order of the Cincinnati

This was a deep laid plan, which discovered sagacity to look forward, genius to take advantage, and art to appropriate to themselves the opening prospects of dignity and rank, which had fired the minds of ambitious men. The ostensible design of this novel institution, was striking to the compassionate mind, and flattering to the lovers of freedom among the American officers. Many of them knew not enough of the world, and of the history and character of man, to suspect any latent mischief or any concealed object that must not yet be divulged, for fear of disgusting the public ear.
- Mercy Otis Warren, History of the Rise, Progress and Termination of the American Revolution (1805), Vol.II of Liberty Fund edition, pg. 617.

With brooding foreboding for the future of the newly founded republic, Mrs. Warren recounts the establishment of an order of veteran Revolutionary War officers, the Society of Cincinnati, which, in its hereditary pretensions, it was feared among many patriots that in shirking the yoke of one monarchical tyranny, the new country would adopt another. With like apprehension, presaging the perils of the "spirit of finance," she writes...

A funding system afterwards introduced, attended with all the intricacies of more aged financiers, which never could be understood, and a public debt thereby enhanced, which was probably never intended to be paid, was impregnated in the brain of a young officer [Alexander Hamilton] of foreign extraction, an adventurer of a bold genius, active talents, and fortunate combinations, from his birth to the exalted station to which he was listed by the spirit of favoritism in American arrangements. Yet when the system appeared, it was embraced with warmth by a considerable class, as the legitimate child of speculation. But it appeared a monster in the eye of a very large part of the community, who viewed it as the parent of a national debt that would hang on the neck of America to the latest generations. -ibid, pg. 665

Thus the Federal Reserve system, at this moment, as feared by many of the paranoiac persuasion, to be veering towards immanent collapse. It is notable that Mrs. Warren identifies so early on the two ingredients that would much later merge to form what President Eisenhower called the "military-industrial complex" in his final speech to the nation in 1961 (a speech that I would regard as far more significant than George Washington's much celebrated farewell address).

As I write, doubtless at the moment there are mobs meandering in lower Manhattan, that center of the "spirit of finance," who chant with an almost religious zeal, "9/11 was an inside job!" They refer of course to that Sepember 11th of six years ago, an occasion of psychological warfare truly awe striking in its exhibition of ambition and technological prowess. Indeed this anniversary is the first whence 9/11 returns to a Tuesday (after Tyr, the Nordic god of war). I do hope they are wrong with the "inside job" charge - it could hinge on what one means by "inside". For here I sit, in a city of seven hills, named Cincinnati. If the "inside job" was in fact, as argued by Michael Ruppert, a "crossing of the Rubicon" executed by the Bush administration in order to the establishment of an American Empire, in emulation of another republic that became an empire, namely that of Rome, centered by another city of seven hills, then I, sitting atop one of these seven hills, have something to worry about. Not quite five years ago, George W. Bush came to my city to make his case for going to war with Iraq. In his speech, at the time heralded as "The Cincinnati Address," he summoned the image of a nuclear "mushroom cloud" over an American city, if we did not take action. The U.S. of course did take action, the American "sheeple" as it were followed him into Iraq, but now having spent so much blood and treasure, the people want to drag him, and his "US", out of Iraq. So, will he now make good on his threat? And, will that American city crowned with a mushroom cloud be the one where he gave his "Cincinnati Address" at Union Terminal? From whence he advanced the plan to terminate the union? Will he, like Nero, burn this city of seven hills?
Let us hope not.