G
Gandalf Grey
Guest
In the reign of the one-nutted king
By Joe Bageant
Created Mar 4 2007 - 3:45pm
---Janked rats cried for blood as the prosthetic hand of love waved goodbye
to reason
By Joe Bageant
Not long ago protesting Danish construction workers won a historic victory
against workplace tyranny---they retained their company sponsored
on-the-job-beer breaks. Heartless employers being what they are, had asked
workers to pay half the cost of the beer. Oppression is ever boundless.
About that same time last fall a couple hundred American protesters gathered
in a Washington D.C. parking lot. Chronic liberal malcontents, they had the
gall to ask why our government was slaughtering hundreds of thousands of
abysmally ordinary folks in Iraq, people moreover like themselves who, even
under Saddam Hussein, whose reign was so infamously marked by his penchant
for black velvet paintings and the most sordid kinds of torture,
nevertheless managed to do what most common folks do in the world---send the
kids off to school every morning, cursed the Baghdad traffic, and perhaps a
little fudged on their taxes. So why are they being wiped out at great
public expense, and for no apparent reason?
This being a free republic, the American protesters stood in the parking
lot, packed butthole to belly button inside one of our fatherland's
designated Free Speech Zones (a bad case of branding if ever there was one),
and though they are no longer called that, the function is still the same.
Jabbing their signs upward, the protesters tried to wedge their message into
the wavering thicket of signage above their heads. Between rather strangely
meterless chants, such as "One, two, three, four, end the war!" the evil
librul protestors were left to contemplate just what those the Plexiglas
faced squadrons of police ninjas might do, should one of the dissidents make
a cautious move toward the Porto Johns, which were placed slightly over the
yellow painted line that assumedly marked the outer boundary free speech in
America. Was it better to ease over into the Porto John, or to hold it until
the "designated hour of disassemblage"? However ineffective state supervised
dissidence may be here, protesting is hard going in America. No Dane's beer
wrecked bladder could survive it.
Pity the poor American left, (who would be considered right wing moderates
in most of the world, but in America being against any war makes you a
leftist.) Any time American leftists start pointing at the root causes of
our national disease, they are neatly handed a fresh bloody war to oppose.
Each new generation of the left gets its energies sapped, gets locked into
the position of continually opposing one war, then another and another. Ever
since World War I (when they came up with the novel idea of world peace, a
notion now considered completely goofball in America today) they've been
standing on the street corners or in the parks---or more recently, inside
the Free Speech Zones way the hell out at the edge of town. At any rate,
they can never come close to naming the dark and profitable tumor at the
heart of America, the economic system under which we all live. To survive
and grow, the American system needs war, making war inevitable. To keep up
the pretense of freedom it needs harmless dissent.
America has a long record of stifling dissent exactly when dissent is most
needed. Democracy American style means we get free speech for trivial
matters but not for life-and-death issues. When an election is stolen, the
very party from whom it was stolen refuses to protest the theft because
well, "Nobody likes sour grapes, do they?" thereby assuring future electoral
thefts. When America supplies Israel with cluster bombs to kill Palestinian
children and grandmothers, you don't see rallies against Israel or American
arms cartels. You see yet another exercise of free speech on behalf those
things the politicians and corporations could care less about, and thus
grant us permission to "dissent" upon. Issues such as gender and identity,
or just about anything related to sexual freedom: "Go ahead, parade and rant
about your own penises and vulvas. Just don't challenge the banks, the war
machine or the fraudulent democratic process by which we manage the people.
Remember, ****ing with these things is called terrorism. So stick to your
own narrow "issues" like sexual freedom and nobody will get hurt. Got it
punk?"
Good ole sexual freedom, one of the American left's dearest golden oldies.
It's not as if sexual freedom has not been a fact of life in this country
ever since the puritans lost that fight in the Sixties and Seventies. Sure
there is a small but very damned loud contingency of bitter enders making a
last stand at imposing restrictions that the public has already rejected.
But we did win the sexual revolution, my friends. Look around at the movies,
gay and lesbian focused TV shows, pre-marital and extra-marital sex as the
main fare in magazines, popular novels and TV shows. Hell, we've even
created a couple of new sexes I still haven't figured out, all those
"crosses" and "trans" whatevers. We may not have become the Amsterdam of the
New World (which as near as I can tell, is Rio de Janero) but we
nevertheless won.
Better yet, people stand behind what they have won too. Bill Clinton is
living proof. The fact that Clinton, despite cigars, blowjobs, impeachment,
and $40 million spent by the Republicans to rub his face in a cum stained
dress on television for years on end, remains massively popular. Every year
we find him waving to the world from near the top of the list of the world's
most admired men. As a martyr symbol for sexual freedom---though we wish the
hell he could have kept it in his pants in the first place---all his
supposed sins, not to mention his genuine crimes against humanity, were
washed away. Much is attributed to his charm, his Oxford encyclopedic mind
and fried chicken grin. But he is no more charming than Ronald Reagan was,
even if Clinton could spot that senile old saint of the GOP a hundred IQ
points and still whip him on Jeopardy. Yet charm and smarts will get you but
so far, not to mention into a lot of trouble if you happen to have Clinton's
libido. Clinton's charm was only by comparison to the mostly second string
power hungry puds who preceded and succeeded him in that bugged Oval Office
chair.
The truth is that Clinton, like Reagan, ****ed over tens of millions of the
American poor, sentenced uncounted children to death by embargo, and shipped
millions of American jobs wholesale to the slums of Mysore and Mexico City.
He was as close to being a Republican as you can be without getting the
mandatory GOP lobotomy and a wet kiss from Ted Hagarty. Still though,
millions of Americans (including me) refuse to repudiate him because his
right to sexual privacy represented their own, and still represents their
own. And all the Bible haired gasbags on the Christian Broadcasting Network
and all the sexually frustrated Holy Rollers in the country are not going to
turn things around. We won that one.
But we have never won against a war until it is too damned late and the
Pentagon and the Halliburtons of this country have wrung every blood stained
buck from it and moved on toward setting up the next one. Yet the left,
perhaps sensing the futility of protesting the latest war from inside their
free speech cages---which seem only to be reserved for war
dissenters---dissipates its energies further by charging at the sly
Republican matador's array of fluttering capes, one of which is labeled
sexual privacy. No cage required. You can usually parade that one right down
the street, further proof the fatherland is a free land, and that the powers
that be could care less about that issue.
Janking the rats
While we are sniping at liberal sacred cows here, I may as well plink
briefly at another one---gun control. It's all bullshit. The left plays into
the parched red claws of the worst conservative elements when it makes a
fool of itself over what it does not understand, when it succumbs to the
righteous wailing of the anti-gun intelligentsia in the brownstones of
Chelsea. Twice as many people own guns as vote in this country, and half of
American households have at least one gun. Get over it. The guns are here to
stay. Gun control and sexual privacy are just two of the dozens of political
wedges liberals to drive on behalf of the same elite political and owning
class the sends yet another generation off to die in the name of the
country.
A rancid clammy smell permeates the room, the taste of vomit in the throat,
then.
SCREAMING MAN HERE! DIE FOR THEIR COUNTRY? BAGEANT YOU LOATHESOME DOUBLE
DEALING GODDAMNED LIZARD! NOT A SINGLE CALLOW CORN FED KANSAS STRIPPLING OR
LOS ANGELES MEXICAN SCARFING THEIR MICROWAVED BURRITOS IN IRAQ HAS DIED FOR,
OR HAD HIS ARMS BLOWN OFF FOR, HIS COUNTRY. THEY DIED (OR ARE TRYING TO
MASTER THE ARTS OF LOVE WITH THAT SEXY NEW PROSTHETIC CLAW) IN SERVICE OF
THE SYNDICATE. THEY DIED AT THE ORDERS OF ITS CEO, PRESIDENT SPARKY AND HIS
GANG OF ADDLED COLD WAR DROOLERS. AND MAKE NO MISTAKE ABOUT IT! THEY WILL
SOON GO OFF TO IRAN WHISTLING THE THEME FROM ROCKY AND SLEEP THE SLEEP OF
ZOMBIES IN THE 100 DEGREE DESERT NIGHTS BECAUSE, AHA! THE SYNDICATE'S MIND
SCRUBBING MACHINERY IS FAULTLESS! FROM THE PLEDGE OF ALLEGINACE IN GRADE
SCHOOL, TO THAT LAST SURPRISED LOOK ON THEIR FACES WHEN THE I.E.D. SAYS
"HELLO DARLING" IN FARSI, THEY WILL BE DREAMING OF EAGLES, AND FLAGS AND
PARIS HILTON'S CROTCH. BIRTH TO DEATH, THE MIND SCURBBER'S PROGRAMMING IS
FAULTLESS, I TELL YOU. FAULTLESS!
Hmmm..
Anyway, the reason liberals are sucker bait for every wedge the Republican
think tanks can hand them is because liberals, like every other American,
are conditioned to compete against each other---even fellow liberals. In a
monetized rat race society (best called The Company) that continually pits
its citizens/workers against one another in a toxic winner take all rat race
for quality education, health care, employment, crime free neighborhoods,
and political attention of any sort, then dubs it mere "competition," as if
it were a happy game of badminton, well ****. EVERYBODY rich or poor feels
existentially threatened. Republican capitalists feel threatened that
liberal humanism might empower workers, which it would, if anybody bothered
to practice it. The gay man fears the common homophobe, as if that dumb
******* has any more power than he does. So he grabs the bullhorn at the Gay
Pride rally and publicly denounces the homophobe---who really couldn't give
a **** and won't hear the denunciation anyway---never confronting the real
enemy because, like the homophobe, he has been conditioned to combative
personal response toward the guy down the street, instead of reason. CBS
Sixty Minutes covers the gay "issues," fifteen minutes a year, thereby
validating its protesters in a television managed state. Divisive politics
once again beats the snot out of reason.
Reason necessarily sets order and priorities to the world. For instance,
reason might dictate that issues such as secret torture sites, military star
chambers judging the citizenry, security state data banks on tens of
millions of Americans' private lives, or our destinies being bought and sold
without our participation (or even knowledge) by corporate campaign
contributions just might, mind you, have a higher priority than or animal
rights or abortion rights, at least for now. The fight for all these must be
continual of course, but, noble as these things are, we have a better chance
of achieving them or holding onto them if we are all rowing the societal
boat together, away from the waterfall ahead. A gay marriage license hanging
in your cubicle in the global labor gulag doesn't mean much.
A forensic search for signs of liberalism in America, true liberal unity of
the kind that broadly underpins any humane and progressive society, shows it
was DOA. Thanks to our birth to death indoctrination regarding the "American
spirit of competition," the rats in the race are not inclined to run
together or exercise their unified strength toward common purpose, or even
consider it. Though the world is by no means a simple either/or proposition
governed by the narrowest sort of struggle, we are conditioned to
unquestioningly assume so. If we stop to think, or apply reason and then act
on it, other rats will eat our lunch. That's what they are trained to do.
Luckily for the rat keepers of global capitalism, they have little to fear
when it comes to Americans being attracted to reason. Reason is boring stuff
in a nation---and increasingly, a world---whose cultural glue is television,
and whose main diversion is profoundly simplified emotionalism and conflict.
In fact, in the American rat race, reason is not only a fatal weakness, but
is also generally unavailable to a people who stay janked every waking
moment, ready to take on the next rat, then go home and watch more rats do
each other in on television, in a steady diet of visible conflict, both
overt an implied. Given that the human nervous system is programmed to
respond instantly to conflict, there simply is no mental space left for much
quiet thought to take root. Not when your nation's cultural values resemble
those of Tamerlain or Aleric the Goth---tribal, hierarchical, aggressive and
acquisitive.
By contrast, I am sitting in my kitchen in the village of Hopkins, Belize,
watching a lone Garifuna carpenter put a zinc roof on a nearby native
cabana. Squatting barefooted on the roof joists, he saws and nails and chats
all day with passersby on the sandy street below. A couple of times a day
one or another of them will voluntarily climb up to lend the carpenter a
hand for a half hour or so, then move on. Cooperation is an assumption, not
a consideration. In the same loose spirit neighbors often drift from house
to house at mealtimes, making easy conversation and gossip, eating a little
here, a little there as they go along so as not to burden any particular
household's meal. Next week the family sharing the food may be doing the
visiting because their own refrigerator is empty. No stigma attached. In a
culture marked by unemployment and food insecurity such sharing of labor or
food is a socially beneficial practice. Though no one here thinks about it,
such practices represent a very reasonable social support system in a
country with almost no social service resources. The elites on the other
hand, say the typically relaxed Belizean worker is lazy, and that the
country would be more prosperous if people like the Garifuna would sweat
harder to join the New World Order rat race, which profits the owning class
leaders as handsomely here as in the rest of the world. When the working
people call for improvement their demands are deemed unreasonable by the
elites, unaffordable is the usual excuse, though that doesn't prevent elite
in government from promising these things at election time.
Whether in Belize or America, neither the owners of government nor their
subset of social and financial managers are going to respond to any well
reasoned, socially beneficial cause unless they are forced to do so---with
emphasis on the word force. Social progress and a humane environment is
antithetical to the success of the owning and governing classes in America,
both being exactly the same thing in a nation whose Constitution is
essentially a guarantee of the rights of property. Things were that way from
the beginning, creating dynastic owning class, not just the Rockerfellers,
Bushes, Kennedys, but thousands of discreet regional and local ones across
the country which have been in place for a century or more---longer in
places like the South. Regardless of what written law says, they choose
which laws will actually be enforced. Or abolished. For them the long term
application of reason's kid brother, common sense, spells destruction.
**** Iraq, let's bomb Persia
On the other hand it doesn't take much critical thinking to stomp the ****
out of weakest guy and grab his lunch money. Or his turf or his oil. If
doing so should require some degree of thoughtfulness, then we had best
leave reason and thinking to more thoughtful leader rats. And so Condi Rice
and George Bush wrinkle their brows and try to look thoughtful, and profile
for the cameras or seize them head on with a bright vulpine stare. But not
even the Republican leadership has ever believed that logic and reason were
driving their game. Down inside the Republican leadership is deeply
realistic, even if it is of the tooth and claw reptilian brain sort of
realism: Eat, ****, kill, own the top of the rock where then sun is best.
They've had the top of the rock for the two terms usually granted them
before the game is up and the public throws them out, not because of any
particular public wisdom, but because when theft and high crime becomes
obscenely obvious to even the blindest beer sucking idiot, it is always the
Republicans who are in office. And now, even though the game is up,
President Sparky and the neocon Nefertitti have no choice but to keep on
trying to look wise and leader like, and keep on keeping on in the face of
the brewing public backlash, just keep on prevaricating until the neocon
junta they rode into town with can get out of Dodge before the indictments
come down---at which time Sparky signs the pardons on his way out the door.
SCREAMING MAN HERE! GODAMMIT BAGEANT, DON'T MAKE THINGS MORE COMPLICATED
THAN THEY ARE! THIS NATION OF FEEBS AND NOSE BORERS CAN'T EVEN SPELL
PREVARICATE! THE "PUBLIC BACKLASH" AS YOU CALL IT.ALL THAT SQUEALING ABOUT
THE BLOODY FOLLY IN IRAQ IS JUST SQUEALS FROM INSIDE THE SWINERY. THE
UNLETTERED HORDES HAVE FIGURED OUT WE HAVE LOST A WAR. THAT A BUNCH OF GOAT
SKINNERS IN FLIP FLOPS IS KICKING OUR ASSES UP AND DOWN THE STREETS OF
BAGHDAD LIKE A GODDAMNED SOCCER BALL. AND THEY SEE NOW THAT THEIR BOY,
GEORGE-ONE-NUTTED-KING-OF-THE-HUNS, TURNED OUT TO BE SIMPLE IN THE HEAD.
COMPLETELY REPRESENTATIVE OF THE PEOPLE WHO VOTED FOR HIM---A LOSER!
True enough. But no matter. We live in, as Gore Vidal put it, "The United
States of Amnesia," and President Sparky will later be canonized into
Republican sainthood, alongside Ronald Reagan, and dozens of airports and
highways will carry his name, until peak oil renders them dim relics
resembling the Mayan ball courts of Tikal. The deal stands unless real
catastrophe intervenes, either something natural, like a giant meteor
splashing a thousand mile wide hole in the Eastern Seaboard, or an unnatural
one inflicted by the money elites themselves, such as a depression so deep
that corn mush makes a dramatic comeback among the proles. Or, as the
administration would have us believe, maybe an all out nuclear war waged
upon us by Kim Il Sun with his both of his missiles. In any case, it must be
a genuine catastrophe, meaning that it must come between Americans and their
shopping malls. Otherwise, so long as voters can manage to hang onto their
jobs and be convinced of their safety from people like the Korean Brat Boy,
or the hapless dimwitted Shoe Bomber, they will stick with the incumbent rat
pack and its leader for at least eight years, even if their leader does
stumble over three syllable words and call the Greeks "Grecians." The
armature of all politics is fear, whether there be danger or not. Fear, and
the mind numbing monotony of the thinnest domestic platitudes.
Well hell. Now that the Bush administration has played all the fear cards
available---at least until he can bring a swarm if self-exploding Iranians
down upon us---the 2008 Democratic presidential hopefuls are left to hoof
the boards peddling the moldiest of platitudes. They don't seem one bit
embarrassed. Here you have candidates for leadership of the most
powerful---and clearly dangerous---country in the world and they have
absolutely nothing of substance to say on real issues domestic or foreign.
On domestic issues, they set their jaws for the cameras, and with a steely
glint in their eyes hinting of gravitas, deliver meaningless speeches in
threadbare language about health care, taxes and Social Security to millions
of Europeans and Middle Easterners on CNN and Aljazeera. I say that because
absolutely no one in America is listening except the blogosphere and the
congenital political junkies television seems to have produced, along with
the millions of sports fans and shopping channel addicts. The record shows
that neither party has done **** for over forty years about any of those
things, and probably never will, especially given that the country is (A-)
broke (shhhh, the mooks in the voting booths still think we are the richest
nation in the world), and (B-) so far in the hole we are a net debtor nation
to countries such as Mexico; if the Empire manages to survive a bit longer,
we may yet grovel before Yemen and Bolivia for a few bucks for a pint of
gasoline for the Hummer and a cup of French roast.
Meanwhile, as I write this, John McCain gives out a love call to the
Christian Right, promising to take down Roe vs. Wade, and lead America back
down the happy road toward coat hangar abortions. Like the one to leading
back sexual repression, that road washed out long ago, which doesn't stop
McCain and his kind from stoking illiterate white Christian nitwits to a
frenzy, thereby sidestepping the issue of whether we are going to devaluate
the dollar and pay the Mexicans in cash, or simply open the borders and let
millions of unemployed gringos go do yard work and send much needed pesos
home to their families.
Same goes for foreign policy, another of those creatures the administration
has rendered all but extinct, thanks to wardens and stewarts such as John
Bolton and the hard-faced Nefertitti in the $7,000 high heels (though I
gotta admit that Condi has the kind of legs that nearly justify them.) Oh,
the Republicans have announced whose Persian ass we are going to attempt to
kick next, but that is plain old thuggery, not foreign policy. Essentially
it's a retread of the WMD ruse, only this time the claim is "Iranian
intent," which neatly eliminates the problem of proof. "Hey, they are
thinking about it, and thinking leads to doing. So that makes'em a threat to
Americans."
As we said earlier, the human nervous system is programmed to respond
instantly to danger and violence, so thuggery smells like foreign policy to
rats that have been kept on the treadmill of fear by the GOP and in the dark
by both parties. And besides, sending the Empire's legions into Persia will
draw attention away from Iraq, just as Iraq draws attention away from the
war now being lost in Afghanistan. In the United States of Amnesia, history
is only eight and one half minutes long, about the length of time between
television commercials, and far less important than catching the second
segment of American Idol. Given that it takes longer than that to even say
hello to any foreign policy issue, odds are good we will continue to hear
zilch from the presidential candidates on the subject. And besides, there
are too many of both party's skeletons doing the "Danz Macabre" in that
closet.
Feast of promises
Like those "spider plants," sometimes called air plants, that hang from the
trees out my cabana window, the same ones that sprawl gracefully from little
jars of tap water in the apartments of solitary librarians and the elderly,
subsisting apparently on nothing but air and some miniscule bit of nutrients
to be obtained from water, American liberals seem to exist on bottled water
and hope. Legend has it that American liberalism once had deep traceable
roots in farm populism, the struggle for dignity of immigrants, fair wages
and good working conditions for laborers, and other such noble principles.
So noble in fact that even high minded sons of the owning class, people like
John Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt were drawn to them as a way to kill time
between games of touch football at Hyannisport, the search for the perfect
Cuban cigar and accompanying highball, not to mention the prerequisite
sexual dalliances with other birds following the flock of the famous (Judth
Campbell Exner once told me JFK always had to be on the bottom due to his
bad back, and that he cackled like a frat boy when they screwed on the desk
of the oval office, as if thinking, she said, "Oh, if Bobby could see me
now!"
At any rate, noble causes and party politics are antithetical these days.
Beyond that, you must be the rich, or at least very useful to the
rich---like the Bush family was to the oil companies during its rise---to be
a player in either party, both of which are faces of the only real party in
this country, the party of business. Without a class base made up of real
people there can be no genuine political party. Without people from
different classes defending their class interests, there can be no politics.
Americans have been sold the idea that they are all somehow "middle class,"
whether they be shoveling chicken **** for Tysons, a seven buck an hour
"dietary technician" at the local hospital, or hawking credit card
applications out of a telemarketing center in Nebraska, they are all now
supposedly in the great middle class. Consequently, there are no politics to
our political system, just business transactions taking place behind the
curtain of a fraudulent democracy.
After forty years of having their natural base absorbed by the amorphous
middle class that isn't, and the meat of politics has been removed from the
table, leaving Spider plant liberals left to find sustenance in the most
minuscule nourishment. There are just enough tiny differences in the two
parties to sustain ever hopeful liberal voters, who have long accepted the
thin gruel served by the Democratic political elite as the prelude to a
promised feast. Of course the feast never comes because no Democrat is ever
going to do more than "address" a problem, rather than solve it. In fact,
for one of the Democratic elites to even acknowledge the existence of the
most glaring sort of inequity sends good liberals into political insulin
shock, so accustomed have their systems become to calorie free ideas and
"reality lite." Al Gore makes a film about global warming, but dares not
name the corporations that not only refuse to seek remedy, but insist on
escalating the problem, and who just happen to fund both parties. Instead he
tells the audience that they are personally to blame and must start
sacrificing, hanging their clothes on lines and so forth. Movies being
reality in this country, and documentaries liberal America hails it as a
turning point in our ravenous energy consumption, drives the six blocks home
from the Cineplex wondering where the hell one buys wooden clothespins,
having never seen one in entire suburban their lives. Al Gore gets an
Academy Award at the annual swarming of very rich swans living in a paradise
wherein they never even see their own laundry from the moment it drops from
their gilded bodies.
Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton makes familiar noises about reforming health
care, but flatly declares that the insurance companies which hold the entire
nation for ransom "absolutely must be part of the solution." By that logic,
when it comes to stopping the war in Iraq, then Halliburton, Blackwater
Security, twenty thousand hired gun mercenaries, and several thousand
contractors presently cutting the fattest hog in their history must be
involved in ending the war. Even SCREAMING MAN has more veracity and
substance.
THE SCREAMING MAN HAS NEVER BEEN ACCUSED OF VERACITY! NOR ABSTENTION FROM
ANY SUBSTANCE KNOWN TO CIVILIZED OR UNCIVILIZED MAN, NOR AVERSION TO ANY
DEVIANT PRACTICE WHATSOEVER. (THEY DO NOT CALL HIM THE POL POT OF THE
BOUDOIR FOR NOTHING!) FUTHERMORE, FOR A HEFTY FEE, SCREAMING MAN'S
ENDORSEMENT, AND OR PHYSICAL PERSUASIVE EXPERTISE, IS AVAILABLE TO ANY VILE
PERSONAGE OR POLITICAL PARTY, REGARDLESS OF THEIR CRIMES WHATSOEVER. ARE YOU
LISTENING HILLARY CLINTON? YOU'RE GONNA NEED HELP IN TAKING OUT THAT GREAT
MOCHA HOPE OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY BEFORE NEXT NOVEMBER!
Right now, almost seventy percent of Americans finally, mostly for the wrong
reasons, reject a senseless war that kills tens of thousands and bankrupts
our children's children. In response, it took four years for Democrats to
come haltingly to the conclusion that it just might be a good idea to end
it. But even so, a large number are still saying, "Let's test the water a
bit more, maybe wait until the polls show ninety nine percent. Can't be too
careful. And besides, Iraq would descend into chaos and bloodshed if we
pulled out."
Bloodshed and chaos? What do they think the Pentagon is conducting over
there right now, a Red Cross community blood drive? And mention cutting the
Pentagon back and spending a little of the dough on public education and
even the Dems begin to sound like Foghorn Leghorn in high dudgeon: "Whoa
there hoss! We gotta have thousands of nuklur waarheads ready to pop at any
time. Somebody in the Middle East besides our strategic partner, po'
defenseless little Israel, just might build one of their own."
How this "strategy" of reducing Israel's neighbors to rubble and guts serves
you and me is a reasonable enough question, one that can never be asked in
the United States, although I can assure you that the media and the public
here in Latin America openly ponder it. The question of why we continue to
hone the teeth of the Middle East's meanest junkyard dog, but refuse to
insist on a chain and muzzle is left to the readers' speculation. Israeli
belligerence is the third rail of American foreign policy that fries anyone
with the balls to bring it up. Look at what recently happened to poor ole
Jimmy Carter. Smoke is still curling up from his pasty old carcass. Will we
ever see the day when an American politician says out loud what so many of
us (and them) say privately?
Then there' is the foreign policy issue of the Third World and AIDS.
AW RIGHT BAGEANT! JUST SHUT UP AND LET SCREAMING MAN DIRECT YOUR DOLPHIN
WAXERS ACROSS THE KEYBOARD. LOOK, WHEN IT COMES TO AIDS, LET'S CALL IT LIKE
IT IS: EVERY WHITE MAN IN AMERICA KNOWS THE WORLD IS TOO DAMNED CROWDED, TOO
DAMNED BLACK AND FAR TOO ****ING BROWN. AND AIDS IS THE ONE THING THAT'S
WORKING OUT RIGHT FOR THE WHITE MAN. EVERY COUCH BOUND BEER SUCKING CACKER
KNOWS THAT IN THE BACK OF WHAT MIND HE HAS. AND EVERY ARUBA TANNED CPA
RUNNING THE FAMILY LEXUS THROUGH BUBBLES' CAR WASH IS SECRETLY THINKING THE
SAME THING---WHEN HE THINKS ABOUT IT AT ALL. AND EVERY POLITICIAN SECRETLY
KNOWS IT TOO, EVEN MOST OF THE BLACK ONES. SO THEY AIN'T GONNA BUST THE BANK
TO SAVE THE HOTTENTOTS IF THERE ARE NO VOTES IN IT.
THE BEAUTY OF IT IS THIS: THE WHITE GUY'S TEAM, AMERICA, WINS BY DOING
ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! THE WHOLE IDEA IS SO GODDAMNED SICK NOBODY IN THE
WESTERN WORLD WOULD DARE ACCUSE HIM OF IT BECAUSE, HEY! THEY'VE THOUGHT THE
SAME THING. YESSIR, WHITEY HAS DRAWN THE "GET ONE GENOCIDE FOR FREE" CARD IN
HISTORY'S GREAT BOARD GAME. HE DOESN'T CATCH MANY BREAKS FROM HISTORY THESE
DAYS. WHEN HE DOES, HE'S GOTTA RIDE IT AND TRY NOT TO SMIRK. WHO SAYS WHITE
MEN DON'T DO SOLIDARITY?
Well, to be honest, those thoughts have crossed my mind too, though not with
such glee. Anybody with the intelligence of a flatworm can see AIDS is
taking out a lot more black and brown yellow asses that white ones. It comes
down to morals and how you really feel about it. If you happen to be among
that five percent of the world called Americans, who are horfing at least a
quarter of the world's wealth, one that depicts the faraway ninety-five
percent as either French queers, terrorists or HIV positive semi-cannibals,
well, you are not likely to cultivate your inner Mother Theresa are you?
Though dismal be the heart of man, we spider plants are feeling a bit
hardier these days. Supreme manager of the Democratic political smoke and
bubble machine that she is, Nancy Pelosi, at least to hear the echoes of the
media tell it, is serving up one helluva bunch of appetizers, a cornucopia
of proposed legislation. And as of this writing, there is even grappling on
the floor of Congress to take away those same imperial powers that Democrats
as well as Republicans granted our one nutted cowboy king. But even if he is
stripped of his Stetson crown and all the scepters of the empire, meaning
that those cattle prods of its "black site" torture chambers around the
world are called home and smashed, and even if Guantamo is leveled by the
corps of engineers and every prisoner given a fair trial on television for
all the world to see, we will only be approximately back to go. Back to
where we started. Which was not a good place at all, since the system was
already broken and was high balling toward its own destruction financially,
ecologically and socially.
And so we sit patiently under the tent out here on the lawn, in the final
dimming moments of the Empire. We've had the appetizers and are waiting for
the meat course: socialized medicine, a halving of the Pentagon's budget,
nationwide public transit, a tripling of corporate taxation, (which would
still not put corporations where they were in the fifties when they paid 80
percent of America's bills and still made billions), an energy plan that
works toward elimination of the automobile and a the closing of coal fired
plants, universal free higher education just like every other civilized
first world nation..none of which can even begin to happen without complete
campaign finance reform. That's some heavy meat and taters for any cook.
The band plays on, we fiddle with our napkins and wait. ****tails are poured
inside the grandly restored old homes in DC's Georgetown district. The deal,
the insiders agree, remains the same: Who buys the most campaign ads will
almost certainly play Pied Piper to the most votes.
Meanwhile, not a soul under the tent has noticed that the lights in the
kitchen were turned off a long, long time ago.
_______
--
NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not
always been authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material
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political, human rights, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. I
believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright
Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107
"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson
By Joe Bageant
Created Mar 4 2007 - 3:45pm
---Janked rats cried for blood as the prosthetic hand of love waved goodbye
to reason
By Joe Bageant
Not long ago protesting Danish construction workers won a historic victory
against workplace tyranny---they retained their company sponsored
on-the-job-beer breaks. Heartless employers being what they are, had asked
workers to pay half the cost of the beer. Oppression is ever boundless.
About that same time last fall a couple hundred American protesters gathered
in a Washington D.C. parking lot. Chronic liberal malcontents, they had the
gall to ask why our government was slaughtering hundreds of thousands of
abysmally ordinary folks in Iraq, people moreover like themselves who, even
under Saddam Hussein, whose reign was so infamously marked by his penchant
for black velvet paintings and the most sordid kinds of torture,
nevertheless managed to do what most common folks do in the world---send the
kids off to school every morning, cursed the Baghdad traffic, and perhaps a
little fudged on their taxes. So why are they being wiped out at great
public expense, and for no apparent reason?
This being a free republic, the American protesters stood in the parking
lot, packed butthole to belly button inside one of our fatherland's
designated Free Speech Zones (a bad case of branding if ever there was one),
and though they are no longer called that, the function is still the same.
Jabbing their signs upward, the protesters tried to wedge their message into
the wavering thicket of signage above their heads. Between rather strangely
meterless chants, such as "One, two, three, four, end the war!" the evil
librul protestors were left to contemplate just what those the Plexiglas
faced squadrons of police ninjas might do, should one of the dissidents make
a cautious move toward the Porto Johns, which were placed slightly over the
yellow painted line that assumedly marked the outer boundary free speech in
America. Was it better to ease over into the Porto John, or to hold it until
the "designated hour of disassemblage"? However ineffective state supervised
dissidence may be here, protesting is hard going in America. No Dane's beer
wrecked bladder could survive it.
Pity the poor American left, (who would be considered right wing moderates
in most of the world, but in America being against any war makes you a
leftist.) Any time American leftists start pointing at the root causes of
our national disease, they are neatly handed a fresh bloody war to oppose.
Each new generation of the left gets its energies sapped, gets locked into
the position of continually opposing one war, then another and another. Ever
since World War I (when they came up with the novel idea of world peace, a
notion now considered completely goofball in America today) they've been
standing on the street corners or in the parks---or more recently, inside
the Free Speech Zones way the hell out at the edge of town. At any rate,
they can never come close to naming the dark and profitable tumor at the
heart of America, the economic system under which we all live. To survive
and grow, the American system needs war, making war inevitable. To keep up
the pretense of freedom it needs harmless dissent.
America has a long record of stifling dissent exactly when dissent is most
needed. Democracy American style means we get free speech for trivial
matters but not for life-and-death issues. When an election is stolen, the
very party from whom it was stolen refuses to protest the theft because
well, "Nobody likes sour grapes, do they?" thereby assuring future electoral
thefts. When America supplies Israel with cluster bombs to kill Palestinian
children and grandmothers, you don't see rallies against Israel or American
arms cartels. You see yet another exercise of free speech on behalf those
things the politicians and corporations could care less about, and thus
grant us permission to "dissent" upon. Issues such as gender and identity,
or just about anything related to sexual freedom: "Go ahead, parade and rant
about your own penises and vulvas. Just don't challenge the banks, the war
machine or the fraudulent democratic process by which we manage the people.
Remember, ****ing with these things is called terrorism. So stick to your
own narrow "issues" like sexual freedom and nobody will get hurt. Got it
punk?"
Good ole sexual freedom, one of the American left's dearest golden oldies.
It's not as if sexual freedom has not been a fact of life in this country
ever since the puritans lost that fight in the Sixties and Seventies. Sure
there is a small but very damned loud contingency of bitter enders making a
last stand at imposing restrictions that the public has already rejected.
But we did win the sexual revolution, my friends. Look around at the movies,
gay and lesbian focused TV shows, pre-marital and extra-marital sex as the
main fare in magazines, popular novels and TV shows. Hell, we've even
created a couple of new sexes I still haven't figured out, all those
"crosses" and "trans" whatevers. We may not have become the Amsterdam of the
New World (which as near as I can tell, is Rio de Janero) but we
nevertheless won.
Better yet, people stand behind what they have won too. Bill Clinton is
living proof. The fact that Clinton, despite cigars, blowjobs, impeachment,
and $40 million spent by the Republicans to rub his face in a cum stained
dress on television for years on end, remains massively popular. Every year
we find him waving to the world from near the top of the list of the world's
most admired men. As a martyr symbol for sexual freedom---though we wish the
hell he could have kept it in his pants in the first place---all his
supposed sins, not to mention his genuine crimes against humanity, were
washed away. Much is attributed to his charm, his Oxford encyclopedic mind
and fried chicken grin. But he is no more charming than Ronald Reagan was,
even if Clinton could spot that senile old saint of the GOP a hundred IQ
points and still whip him on Jeopardy. Yet charm and smarts will get you but
so far, not to mention into a lot of trouble if you happen to have Clinton's
libido. Clinton's charm was only by comparison to the mostly second string
power hungry puds who preceded and succeeded him in that bugged Oval Office
chair.
The truth is that Clinton, like Reagan, ****ed over tens of millions of the
American poor, sentenced uncounted children to death by embargo, and shipped
millions of American jobs wholesale to the slums of Mysore and Mexico City.
He was as close to being a Republican as you can be without getting the
mandatory GOP lobotomy and a wet kiss from Ted Hagarty. Still though,
millions of Americans (including me) refuse to repudiate him because his
right to sexual privacy represented their own, and still represents their
own. And all the Bible haired gasbags on the Christian Broadcasting Network
and all the sexually frustrated Holy Rollers in the country are not going to
turn things around. We won that one.
But we have never won against a war until it is too damned late and the
Pentagon and the Halliburtons of this country have wrung every blood stained
buck from it and moved on toward setting up the next one. Yet the left,
perhaps sensing the futility of protesting the latest war from inside their
free speech cages---which seem only to be reserved for war
dissenters---dissipates its energies further by charging at the sly
Republican matador's array of fluttering capes, one of which is labeled
sexual privacy. No cage required. You can usually parade that one right down
the street, further proof the fatherland is a free land, and that the powers
that be could care less about that issue.
Janking the rats
While we are sniping at liberal sacred cows here, I may as well plink
briefly at another one---gun control. It's all bullshit. The left plays into
the parched red claws of the worst conservative elements when it makes a
fool of itself over what it does not understand, when it succumbs to the
righteous wailing of the anti-gun intelligentsia in the brownstones of
Chelsea. Twice as many people own guns as vote in this country, and half of
American households have at least one gun. Get over it. The guns are here to
stay. Gun control and sexual privacy are just two of the dozens of political
wedges liberals to drive on behalf of the same elite political and owning
class the sends yet another generation off to die in the name of the
country.
A rancid clammy smell permeates the room, the taste of vomit in the throat,
then.
SCREAMING MAN HERE! DIE FOR THEIR COUNTRY? BAGEANT YOU LOATHESOME DOUBLE
DEALING GODDAMNED LIZARD! NOT A SINGLE CALLOW CORN FED KANSAS STRIPPLING OR
LOS ANGELES MEXICAN SCARFING THEIR MICROWAVED BURRITOS IN IRAQ HAS DIED FOR,
OR HAD HIS ARMS BLOWN OFF FOR, HIS COUNTRY. THEY DIED (OR ARE TRYING TO
MASTER THE ARTS OF LOVE WITH THAT SEXY NEW PROSTHETIC CLAW) IN SERVICE OF
THE SYNDICATE. THEY DIED AT THE ORDERS OF ITS CEO, PRESIDENT SPARKY AND HIS
GANG OF ADDLED COLD WAR DROOLERS. AND MAKE NO MISTAKE ABOUT IT! THEY WILL
SOON GO OFF TO IRAN WHISTLING THE THEME FROM ROCKY AND SLEEP THE SLEEP OF
ZOMBIES IN THE 100 DEGREE DESERT NIGHTS BECAUSE, AHA! THE SYNDICATE'S MIND
SCRUBBING MACHINERY IS FAULTLESS! FROM THE PLEDGE OF ALLEGINACE IN GRADE
SCHOOL, TO THAT LAST SURPRISED LOOK ON THEIR FACES WHEN THE I.E.D. SAYS
"HELLO DARLING" IN FARSI, THEY WILL BE DREAMING OF EAGLES, AND FLAGS AND
PARIS HILTON'S CROTCH. BIRTH TO DEATH, THE MIND SCURBBER'S PROGRAMMING IS
FAULTLESS, I TELL YOU. FAULTLESS!
Hmmm..
Anyway, the reason liberals are sucker bait for every wedge the Republican
think tanks can hand them is because liberals, like every other American,
are conditioned to compete against each other---even fellow liberals. In a
monetized rat race society (best called The Company) that continually pits
its citizens/workers against one another in a toxic winner take all rat race
for quality education, health care, employment, crime free neighborhoods,
and political attention of any sort, then dubs it mere "competition," as if
it were a happy game of badminton, well ****. EVERYBODY rich or poor feels
existentially threatened. Republican capitalists feel threatened that
liberal humanism might empower workers, which it would, if anybody bothered
to practice it. The gay man fears the common homophobe, as if that dumb
******* has any more power than he does. So he grabs the bullhorn at the Gay
Pride rally and publicly denounces the homophobe---who really couldn't give
a **** and won't hear the denunciation anyway---never confronting the real
enemy because, like the homophobe, he has been conditioned to combative
personal response toward the guy down the street, instead of reason. CBS
Sixty Minutes covers the gay "issues," fifteen minutes a year, thereby
validating its protesters in a television managed state. Divisive politics
once again beats the snot out of reason.
Reason necessarily sets order and priorities to the world. For instance,
reason might dictate that issues such as secret torture sites, military star
chambers judging the citizenry, security state data banks on tens of
millions of Americans' private lives, or our destinies being bought and sold
without our participation (or even knowledge) by corporate campaign
contributions just might, mind you, have a higher priority than or animal
rights or abortion rights, at least for now. The fight for all these must be
continual of course, but, noble as these things are, we have a better chance
of achieving them or holding onto them if we are all rowing the societal
boat together, away from the waterfall ahead. A gay marriage license hanging
in your cubicle in the global labor gulag doesn't mean much.
A forensic search for signs of liberalism in America, true liberal unity of
the kind that broadly underpins any humane and progressive society, shows it
was DOA. Thanks to our birth to death indoctrination regarding the "American
spirit of competition," the rats in the race are not inclined to run
together or exercise their unified strength toward common purpose, or even
consider it. Though the world is by no means a simple either/or proposition
governed by the narrowest sort of struggle, we are conditioned to
unquestioningly assume so. If we stop to think, or apply reason and then act
on it, other rats will eat our lunch. That's what they are trained to do.
Luckily for the rat keepers of global capitalism, they have little to fear
when it comes to Americans being attracted to reason. Reason is boring stuff
in a nation---and increasingly, a world---whose cultural glue is television,
and whose main diversion is profoundly simplified emotionalism and conflict.
In fact, in the American rat race, reason is not only a fatal weakness, but
is also generally unavailable to a people who stay janked every waking
moment, ready to take on the next rat, then go home and watch more rats do
each other in on television, in a steady diet of visible conflict, both
overt an implied. Given that the human nervous system is programmed to
respond instantly to conflict, there simply is no mental space left for much
quiet thought to take root. Not when your nation's cultural values resemble
those of Tamerlain or Aleric the Goth---tribal, hierarchical, aggressive and
acquisitive.
By contrast, I am sitting in my kitchen in the village of Hopkins, Belize,
watching a lone Garifuna carpenter put a zinc roof on a nearby native
cabana. Squatting barefooted on the roof joists, he saws and nails and chats
all day with passersby on the sandy street below. A couple of times a day
one or another of them will voluntarily climb up to lend the carpenter a
hand for a half hour or so, then move on. Cooperation is an assumption, not
a consideration. In the same loose spirit neighbors often drift from house
to house at mealtimes, making easy conversation and gossip, eating a little
here, a little there as they go along so as not to burden any particular
household's meal. Next week the family sharing the food may be doing the
visiting because their own refrigerator is empty. No stigma attached. In a
culture marked by unemployment and food insecurity such sharing of labor or
food is a socially beneficial practice. Though no one here thinks about it,
such practices represent a very reasonable social support system in a
country with almost no social service resources. The elites on the other
hand, say the typically relaxed Belizean worker is lazy, and that the
country would be more prosperous if people like the Garifuna would sweat
harder to join the New World Order rat race, which profits the owning class
leaders as handsomely here as in the rest of the world. When the working
people call for improvement their demands are deemed unreasonable by the
elites, unaffordable is the usual excuse, though that doesn't prevent elite
in government from promising these things at election time.
Whether in Belize or America, neither the owners of government nor their
subset of social and financial managers are going to respond to any well
reasoned, socially beneficial cause unless they are forced to do so---with
emphasis on the word force. Social progress and a humane environment is
antithetical to the success of the owning and governing classes in America,
both being exactly the same thing in a nation whose Constitution is
essentially a guarantee of the rights of property. Things were that way from
the beginning, creating dynastic owning class, not just the Rockerfellers,
Bushes, Kennedys, but thousands of discreet regional and local ones across
the country which have been in place for a century or more---longer in
places like the South. Regardless of what written law says, they choose
which laws will actually be enforced. Or abolished. For them the long term
application of reason's kid brother, common sense, spells destruction.
**** Iraq, let's bomb Persia
On the other hand it doesn't take much critical thinking to stomp the ****
out of weakest guy and grab his lunch money. Or his turf or his oil. If
doing so should require some degree of thoughtfulness, then we had best
leave reason and thinking to more thoughtful leader rats. And so Condi Rice
and George Bush wrinkle their brows and try to look thoughtful, and profile
for the cameras or seize them head on with a bright vulpine stare. But not
even the Republican leadership has ever believed that logic and reason were
driving their game. Down inside the Republican leadership is deeply
realistic, even if it is of the tooth and claw reptilian brain sort of
realism: Eat, ****, kill, own the top of the rock where then sun is best.
They've had the top of the rock for the two terms usually granted them
before the game is up and the public throws them out, not because of any
particular public wisdom, but because when theft and high crime becomes
obscenely obvious to even the blindest beer sucking idiot, it is always the
Republicans who are in office. And now, even though the game is up,
President Sparky and the neocon Nefertitti have no choice but to keep on
trying to look wise and leader like, and keep on keeping on in the face of
the brewing public backlash, just keep on prevaricating until the neocon
junta they rode into town with can get out of Dodge before the indictments
come down---at which time Sparky signs the pardons on his way out the door.
SCREAMING MAN HERE! GODAMMIT BAGEANT, DON'T MAKE THINGS MORE COMPLICATED
THAN THEY ARE! THIS NATION OF FEEBS AND NOSE BORERS CAN'T EVEN SPELL
PREVARICATE! THE "PUBLIC BACKLASH" AS YOU CALL IT.ALL THAT SQUEALING ABOUT
THE BLOODY FOLLY IN IRAQ IS JUST SQUEALS FROM INSIDE THE SWINERY. THE
UNLETTERED HORDES HAVE FIGURED OUT WE HAVE LOST A WAR. THAT A BUNCH OF GOAT
SKINNERS IN FLIP FLOPS IS KICKING OUR ASSES UP AND DOWN THE STREETS OF
BAGHDAD LIKE A GODDAMNED SOCCER BALL. AND THEY SEE NOW THAT THEIR BOY,
GEORGE-ONE-NUTTED-KING-OF-THE-HUNS, TURNED OUT TO BE SIMPLE IN THE HEAD.
COMPLETELY REPRESENTATIVE OF THE PEOPLE WHO VOTED FOR HIM---A LOSER!
True enough. But no matter. We live in, as Gore Vidal put it, "The United
States of Amnesia," and President Sparky will later be canonized into
Republican sainthood, alongside Ronald Reagan, and dozens of airports and
highways will carry his name, until peak oil renders them dim relics
resembling the Mayan ball courts of Tikal. The deal stands unless real
catastrophe intervenes, either something natural, like a giant meteor
splashing a thousand mile wide hole in the Eastern Seaboard, or an unnatural
one inflicted by the money elites themselves, such as a depression so deep
that corn mush makes a dramatic comeback among the proles. Or, as the
administration would have us believe, maybe an all out nuclear war waged
upon us by Kim Il Sun with his both of his missiles. In any case, it must be
a genuine catastrophe, meaning that it must come between Americans and their
shopping malls. Otherwise, so long as voters can manage to hang onto their
jobs and be convinced of their safety from people like the Korean Brat Boy,
or the hapless dimwitted Shoe Bomber, they will stick with the incumbent rat
pack and its leader for at least eight years, even if their leader does
stumble over three syllable words and call the Greeks "Grecians." The
armature of all politics is fear, whether there be danger or not. Fear, and
the mind numbing monotony of the thinnest domestic platitudes.
Well hell. Now that the Bush administration has played all the fear cards
available---at least until he can bring a swarm if self-exploding Iranians
down upon us---the 2008 Democratic presidential hopefuls are left to hoof
the boards peddling the moldiest of platitudes. They don't seem one bit
embarrassed. Here you have candidates for leadership of the most
powerful---and clearly dangerous---country in the world and they have
absolutely nothing of substance to say on real issues domestic or foreign.
On domestic issues, they set their jaws for the cameras, and with a steely
glint in their eyes hinting of gravitas, deliver meaningless speeches in
threadbare language about health care, taxes and Social Security to millions
of Europeans and Middle Easterners on CNN and Aljazeera. I say that because
absolutely no one in America is listening except the blogosphere and the
congenital political junkies television seems to have produced, along with
the millions of sports fans and shopping channel addicts. The record shows
that neither party has done **** for over forty years about any of those
things, and probably never will, especially given that the country is (A-)
broke (shhhh, the mooks in the voting booths still think we are the richest
nation in the world), and (B-) so far in the hole we are a net debtor nation
to countries such as Mexico; if the Empire manages to survive a bit longer,
we may yet grovel before Yemen and Bolivia for a few bucks for a pint of
gasoline for the Hummer and a cup of French roast.
Meanwhile, as I write this, John McCain gives out a love call to the
Christian Right, promising to take down Roe vs. Wade, and lead America back
down the happy road toward coat hangar abortions. Like the one to leading
back sexual repression, that road washed out long ago, which doesn't stop
McCain and his kind from stoking illiterate white Christian nitwits to a
frenzy, thereby sidestepping the issue of whether we are going to devaluate
the dollar and pay the Mexicans in cash, or simply open the borders and let
millions of unemployed gringos go do yard work and send much needed pesos
home to their families.
Same goes for foreign policy, another of those creatures the administration
has rendered all but extinct, thanks to wardens and stewarts such as John
Bolton and the hard-faced Nefertitti in the $7,000 high heels (though I
gotta admit that Condi has the kind of legs that nearly justify them.) Oh,
the Republicans have announced whose Persian ass we are going to attempt to
kick next, but that is plain old thuggery, not foreign policy. Essentially
it's a retread of the WMD ruse, only this time the claim is "Iranian
intent," which neatly eliminates the problem of proof. "Hey, they are
thinking about it, and thinking leads to doing. So that makes'em a threat to
Americans."
As we said earlier, the human nervous system is programmed to respond
instantly to danger and violence, so thuggery smells like foreign policy to
rats that have been kept on the treadmill of fear by the GOP and in the dark
by both parties. And besides, sending the Empire's legions into Persia will
draw attention away from Iraq, just as Iraq draws attention away from the
war now being lost in Afghanistan. In the United States of Amnesia, history
is only eight and one half minutes long, about the length of time between
television commercials, and far less important than catching the second
segment of American Idol. Given that it takes longer than that to even say
hello to any foreign policy issue, odds are good we will continue to hear
zilch from the presidential candidates on the subject. And besides, there
are too many of both party's skeletons doing the "Danz Macabre" in that
closet.
Feast of promises
Like those "spider plants," sometimes called air plants, that hang from the
trees out my cabana window, the same ones that sprawl gracefully from little
jars of tap water in the apartments of solitary librarians and the elderly,
subsisting apparently on nothing but air and some miniscule bit of nutrients
to be obtained from water, American liberals seem to exist on bottled water
and hope. Legend has it that American liberalism once had deep traceable
roots in farm populism, the struggle for dignity of immigrants, fair wages
and good working conditions for laborers, and other such noble principles.
So noble in fact that even high minded sons of the owning class, people like
John Kennedy and Franklin Roosevelt were drawn to them as a way to kill time
between games of touch football at Hyannisport, the search for the perfect
Cuban cigar and accompanying highball, not to mention the prerequisite
sexual dalliances with other birds following the flock of the famous (Judth
Campbell Exner once told me JFK always had to be on the bottom due to his
bad back, and that he cackled like a frat boy when they screwed on the desk
of the oval office, as if thinking, she said, "Oh, if Bobby could see me
now!"
At any rate, noble causes and party politics are antithetical these days.
Beyond that, you must be the rich, or at least very useful to the
rich---like the Bush family was to the oil companies during its rise---to be
a player in either party, both of which are faces of the only real party in
this country, the party of business. Without a class base made up of real
people there can be no genuine political party. Without people from
different classes defending their class interests, there can be no politics.
Americans have been sold the idea that they are all somehow "middle class,"
whether they be shoveling chicken **** for Tysons, a seven buck an hour
"dietary technician" at the local hospital, or hawking credit card
applications out of a telemarketing center in Nebraska, they are all now
supposedly in the great middle class. Consequently, there are no politics to
our political system, just business transactions taking place behind the
curtain of a fraudulent democracy.
After forty years of having their natural base absorbed by the amorphous
middle class that isn't, and the meat of politics has been removed from the
table, leaving Spider plant liberals left to find sustenance in the most
minuscule nourishment. There are just enough tiny differences in the two
parties to sustain ever hopeful liberal voters, who have long accepted the
thin gruel served by the Democratic political elite as the prelude to a
promised feast. Of course the feast never comes because no Democrat is ever
going to do more than "address" a problem, rather than solve it. In fact,
for one of the Democratic elites to even acknowledge the existence of the
most glaring sort of inequity sends good liberals into political insulin
shock, so accustomed have their systems become to calorie free ideas and
"reality lite." Al Gore makes a film about global warming, but dares not
name the corporations that not only refuse to seek remedy, but insist on
escalating the problem, and who just happen to fund both parties. Instead he
tells the audience that they are personally to blame and must start
sacrificing, hanging their clothes on lines and so forth. Movies being
reality in this country, and documentaries liberal America hails it as a
turning point in our ravenous energy consumption, drives the six blocks home
from the Cineplex wondering where the hell one buys wooden clothespins,
having never seen one in entire suburban their lives. Al Gore gets an
Academy Award at the annual swarming of very rich swans living in a paradise
wherein they never even see their own laundry from the moment it drops from
their gilded bodies.
Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton makes familiar noises about reforming health
care, but flatly declares that the insurance companies which hold the entire
nation for ransom "absolutely must be part of the solution." By that logic,
when it comes to stopping the war in Iraq, then Halliburton, Blackwater
Security, twenty thousand hired gun mercenaries, and several thousand
contractors presently cutting the fattest hog in their history must be
involved in ending the war. Even SCREAMING MAN has more veracity and
substance.
THE SCREAMING MAN HAS NEVER BEEN ACCUSED OF VERACITY! NOR ABSTENTION FROM
ANY SUBSTANCE KNOWN TO CIVILIZED OR UNCIVILIZED MAN, NOR AVERSION TO ANY
DEVIANT PRACTICE WHATSOEVER. (THEY DO NOT CALL HIM THE POL POT OF THE
BOUDOIR FOR NOTHING!) FUTHERMORE, FOR A HEFTY FEE, SCREAMING MAN'S
ENDORSEMENT, AND OR PHYSICAL PERSUASIVE EXPERTISE, IS AVAILABLE TO ANY VILE
PERSONAGE OR POLITICAL PARTY, REGARDLESS OF THEIR CRIMES WHATSOEVER. ARE YOU
LISTENING HILLARY CLINTON? YOU'RE GONNA NEED HELP IN TAKING OUT THAT GREAT
MOCHA HOPE OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY BEFORE NEXT NOVEMBER!
Right now, almost seventy percent of Americans finally, mostly for the wrong
reasons, reject a senseless war that kills tens of thousands and bankrupts
our children's children. In response, it took four years for Democrats to
come haltingly to the conclusion that it just might be a good idea to end
it. But even so, a large number are still saying, "Let's test the water a
bit more, maybe wait until the polls show ninety nine percent. Can't be too
careful. And besides, Iraq would descend into chaos and bloodshed if we
pulled out."
Bloodshed and chaos? What do they think the Pentagon is conducting over
there right now, a Red Cross community blood drive? And mention cutting the
Pentagon back and spending a little of the dough on public education and
even the Dems begin to sound like Foghorn Leghorn in high dudgeon: "Whoa
there hoss! We gotta have thousands of nuklur waarheads ready to pop at any
time. Somebody in the Middle East besides our strategic partner, po'
defenseless little Israel, just might build one of their own."
How this "strategy" of reducing Israel's neighbors to rubble and guts serves
you and me is a reasonable enough question, one that can never be asked in
the United States, although I can assure you that the media and the public
here in Latin America openly ponder it. The question of why we continue to
hone the teeth of the Middle East's meanest junkyard dog, but refuse to
insist on a chain and muzzle is left to the readers' speculation. Israeli
belligerence is the third rail of American foreign policy that fries anyone
with the balls to bring it up. Look at what recently happened to poor ole
Jimmy Carter. Smoke is still curling up from his pasty old carcass. Will we
ever see the day when an American politician says out loud what so many of
us (and them) say privately?
Then there' is the foreign policy issue of the Third World and AIDS.
AW RIGHT BAGEANT! JUST SHUT UP AND LET SCREAMING MAN DIRECT YOUR DOLPHIN
WAXERS ACROSS THE KEYBOARD. LOOK, WHEN IT COMES TO AIDS, LET'S CALL IT LIKE
IT IS: EVERY WHITE MAN IN AMERICA KNOWS THE WORLD IS TOO DAMNED CROWDED, TOO
DAMNED BLACK AND FAR TOO ****ING BROWN. AND AIDS IS THE ONE THING THAT'S
WORKING OUT RIGHT FOR THE WHITE MAN. EVERY COUCH BOUND BEER SUCKING CACKER
KNOWS THAT IN THE BACK OF WHAT MIND HE HAS. AND EVERY ARUBA TANNED CPA
RUNNING THE FAMILY LEXUS THROUGH BUBBLES' CAR WASH IS SECRETLY THINKING THE
SAME THING---WHEN HE THINKS ABOUT IT AT ALL. AND EVERY POLITICIAN SECRETLY
KNOWS IT TOO, EVEN MOST OF THE BLACK ONES. SO THEY AIN'T GONNA BUST THE BANK
TO SAVE THE HOTTENTOTS IF THERE ARE NO VOTES IN IT.
THE BEAUTY OF IT IS THIS: THE WHITE GUY'S TEAM, AMERICA, WINS BY DOING
ABSOLUTELY NOTHING! THE WHOLE IDEA IS SO GODDAMNED SICK NOBODY IN THE
WESTERN WORLD WOULD DARE ACCUSE HIM OF IT BECAUSE, HEY! THEY'VE THOUGHT THE
SAME THING. YESSIR, WHITEY HAS DRAWN THE "GET ONE GENOCIDE FOR FREE" CARD IN
HISTORY'S GREAT BOARD GAME. HE DOESN'T CATCH MANY BREAKS FROM HISTORY THESE
DAYS. WHEN HE DOES, HE'S GOTTA RIDE IT AND TRY NOT TO SMIRK. WHO SAYS WHITE
MEN DON'T DO SOLIDARITY?
Well, to be honest, those thoughts have crossed my mind too, though not with
such glee. Anybody with the intelligence of a flatworm can see AIDS is
taking out a lot more black and brown yellow asses that white ones. It comes
down to morals and how you really feel about it. If you happen to be among
that five percent of the world called Americans, who are horfing at least a
quarter of the world's wealth, one that depicts the faraway ninety-five
percent as either French queers, terrorists or HIV positive semi-cannibals,
well, you are not likely to cultivate your inner Mother Theresa are you?
Though dismal be the heart of man, we spider plants are feeling a bit
hardier these days. Supreme manager of the Democratic political smoke and
bubble machine that she is, Nancy Pelosi, at least to hear the echoes of the
media tell it, is serving up one helluva bunch of appetizers, a cornucopia
of proposed legislation. And as of this writing, there is even grappling on
the floor of Congress to take away those same imperial powers that Democrats
as well as Republicans granted our one nutted cowboy king. But even if he is
stripped of his Stetson crown and all the scepters of the empire, meaning
that those cattle prods of its "black site" torture chambers around the
world are called home and smashed, and even if Guantamo is leveled by the
corps of engineers and every prisoner given a fair trial on television for
all the world to see, we will only be approximately back to go. Back to
where we started. Which was not a good place at all, since the system was
already broken and was high balling toward its own destruction financially,
ecologically and socially.
And so we sit patiently under the tent out here on the lawn, in the final
dimming moments of the Empire. We've had the appetizers and are waiting for
the meat course: socialized medicine, a halving of the Pentagon's budget,
nationwide public transit, a tripling of corporate taxation, (which would
still not put corporations where they were in the fifties when they paid 80
percent of America's bills and still made billions), an energy plan that
works toward elimination of the automobile and a the closing of coal fired
plants, universal free higher education just like every other civilized
first world nation..none of which can even begin to happen without complete
campaign finance reform. That's some heavy meat and taters for any cook.
The band plays on, we fiddle with our napkins and wait. ****tails are poured
inside the grandly restored old homes in DC's Georgetown district. The deal,
the insiders agree, remains the same: Who buys the most campaign ads will
almost certainly play Pied Piper to the most votes.
Meanwhile, not a soul under the tent has noticed that the lights in the
kitchen were turned off a long, long time ago.
_______
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"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson