Trying to follow the slow-motion demise of The U.S. of A. has turned me into Jo-Jo the idiot circus boy after being given an exploding cigar laced with a low grade nerve gas. It’s hard to make sense out of things when my neurons are winking out one by one like cheap Christmas tree lights. It’s a bad acid trip on every level I can think of.
On one hand we have a complete fraud as a president. While campaigning he presented himself as a force of change, but after being elected only changed things for the worse. Unless of course you’re talking about the members of the moneyed class. For those guys he did everything they asked him to except stop being a black guy.
On the other hand we have four grotesque parodies of politicians vying for the Republican nomination: A blow dried Citizen Kane, a horny Stay-Puft Marshmallow man, a Google search term, and Rumplestiltskin.
Texas Political hack and lobbyist Bill Miller was the first person who said, “Politics is show business for ugly people.” And the presidency is the Academy Award bestowed by The Elite to their favored sycophant. The quality of the candidates, including the incumbent, proves conclusively that the position of president is a role played by whichever sock puppet the corporatocracy chooses for us.
There’s something going on in the United States beside a nervous breakdown. And we don’t need pundits … we need some good crime reporters on the news every night. And then maybe a couple of miracles.
I’ve said more than a couple of times that We’ve Lost and They Won. I’m not talking about something that will happen or only happened recently. The game has been over for ten years. We have been living in denial of our defeat for a loooong time. Here’s how I know We’ve Lost on a cellular level:
History is written by the victors … and history is full of liars.
Alternate Reality Time:
After Nazi Germany won the second world war, high-ranking government officials wrote books about the history of the war and their roles in it. To promote their books they went on talk shows to retell their stories of What Happened during the run-up to the war and the subsequent events.
According to the Nazi victors, World War II started on August 31, 1939 when a group of anti-German Polish saboteurs attacked a German radio station in Upper Silesia, Germany. This Polish aggression against Germany justified Germany's defensive action of invading Poland the following day. The rest, as they say, is history. In post-war victorious Germany nobody was going to write a book called. “Where’d All the Jews Go?” And even if somebody would write it … the media wouldn’t cover it.
But hold on there cowboy … Germany lost … and we know from the sworn affidavit of Alfred Naujocks at the Nuremberg Trials that German operatives, dressed in Polish uniforms and led by Naujocks, seized the radio station and broadcast a short anti-German message in Polish. The attack on the radio station was a part of a larger operation dubbed Operation Himmler and was comprised of 21 incidents in all that gave the appearance of Polish aggression against Germany.
On the day following the attack on the radio station Germany launched the invasion of Poland that started World War II in Europe. That same day, in a speech in the Reichstag, Adolf Hitler cited the 21 border incidents as justification for Germany's "defensive" action against Poland. Just a few days earlier, on August 22nd, he had told his generals, "I will provide a propagandistic casus belli. Its credibility doesn't matter. The victor will not be asked whether he told the truth."
Condoleeza Rice, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, and George W. Bush have all written books retelling the lies about 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. They’ve all gone on the talk show circuit, and because they are the victors, nobody asked if they were telling the truth.
This isn’t LIKE living in a victorious post war Germany. This IS living in a victorious post war Germany.
American Style.
American fascism is slightly more benign … for now.
We still have the freedom to listen to voices like Amy Goodman that run counter to MainStream Media. She does great work. But if you watch or listen to her show for any length of time you soon get the feeling that all she’s really doing is making a chronicle of the symptoms of our defeat. Here’s another bit of evidence to pile upon the camel’s back. And the camel, by the way, not only has a broken back, but has been pressed to the thickness of a few microns by the weight of evidence over the last ten years.
The English philosopher Herbert Spencer held a number of repugnant ideas in his head like “Social Darwinism” but he got a couple of things right. Whenever I hear someone tell a returning veteran from Afghanistan or Iraq “Thank you for your service,” I remember Spencer’s quote, “When men hire themselves out to shoot other men to order, asking nothing about the justice of their cause, I don’t care if they are shot themselves."
The other Spencer saying comes to mind when I read about the denial of the Global Climate Change, Peak Resources, or Overpopulation. "The greatest of all infidelities is the fear that the truth will be bad."
Fear of embracing The Bad Truth leads us directly into denial and keeps us from experiencing "Joliet" Jake E. Blues’ epiphany, “YES! YES! JESUS H. TAP-DANCING CHRIST... I HAVE SEEN THE LIGHT!”
We’re screwed.
We’re screwed if we don’t recognize the fact that We Lost and They Won. We’re screwed if we keep wasting time talking about politics as if it means something to the 99%. We’re screwed as long as we don’t talk about what we really can do to go in a different direction.
We’re screwed if we don’t read … and act on … Deep Green Resistance:
http://deepgreenresistance.org/
"The task of an activist is not to navigate systems of oppressive power with as much personal integrity as possible; it is to dismantle those systems." -Lierre Keith
