Tag Archive | afghanistan

America the Dutiful

Dec13

Feasting On The Whitey House

My senior year in high school (no, I will not tell you) I won the Veterans Affairs Voice of Democracy speechwriting competition for the central section of California.  When I think back to the soaring prose and metaphors I used to describe how I felt about the land of my birth in those days, I can almost hear the mortars and gunfire on the beaches of Normandy, juxtaposed with the granite faces of El Capitan and Half Dome.  In those days, veterans ate that sort of naïveté up.  The horror of the treatment of Korean War and Viet Nam War veterans had yet to fully sink in to the brains and nervous systems of the veterans of “the Good War.”  Now that the handiwork of Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld have hit home for the veterans of the Gulf War, I don’t think we need to be shrieking our disappointment at the veterans coming home from Afghanistan; we need to be preventing our children from volunteering for the slaughter in the first place.

You see it was not the alleged incidents of spitting on returning Viet Nam veterans by Californian peri-adults, nor the warnings by commanding officers to vets heading stateside to “remove your uniform,” that represented the real threats to veterans of the US military.  The military-industrial complexes’ desire to hide the evidence of its misdeeds coupled with its burning desire to avoid taking responsibility for the consequences of its actions represents the real and grave danger to America’s citizens in uniform. 

I bring this point to the floor not because it will motivate you to vote or not vote this Tuesday.  I mention the love affair America’s elites have had with fascism (corporate power coupled with governmental authority) because it is the real arch-enemy of every sentient being walking the planet at this very moment.  It is not just the willing defenders of “freedom and democracy” around the world who have been placed in mortal danger, but everything any of us have ever lived for, smiled for or bothered to live another day because of that we are placing at risk by refraining from engaging in a repeat performance of the voter turnout of 2008.

No, the Democrats are not any better at defending their constituents than are the Republicans; they are, however, slower in the uptake and more likely give America’s grass roots more time to secure a suitable response to what the global power structure has had in mind for our country since, at least, the mid 19th century; since, at least, the beginnings of the formation of the nation-state of Israel in the mid-19th century.  Since, at least, the return to hegemony of the global banking establishment at the conclusion of the American Civil War we have all been conditioned to believe had to do with a difference of opinion between North and South over the issue of “slavery.”  

No one who presently works in or around a large corporation in 2010 can seriously, consciously believe “America the Beautiful” gives a tinker’s damn about anyone’s freedom much less whether that freedom is morally dispensed.  More likely the divide between North and South had to do with the South’s willingness to accept Feudalism as a mode of operation while the Northern establishment remembered all-too-well what had happened when the British East-India Company had the Colonies in its talons.  It was a social fissure that the global banking establishment, also known as the House of Rothschild, wanted to exploit for the purpose of furthering its plans for global enslavement.

The ugly truth of so-called “capitalism” is that it does not work as an economic system.  G’head.  Go back to that Junior Chamber of Commerce project you did as a naïve child and rather than paying yourself zero dollars for your time and effort setting up your “little business,” pay yourself and your employees a “living wage” and see how successfully your little project turns out. 

Without significant subsidies on the part of government and/or labor, capitalism is simply a rehashing of the Feudalism from which it was spawned.  Capitalism IS Feudalism in disguise and Feudalism is all about “earning your keep.”  Those who become too old to remain gainfully employed or who begin a “search for truth” at an inconvenient time, are deemed to be unable to “earn their keep,” are left outside the castle’s walls and battlements, and become the perennial victims of evil knights, disease and the elements of nature we thought we had become civilized to ameliorate. 

“Earning your keep,” was the reason why America became, “like a dream,” to working people all around the world.  Here, in America, surrounded by the twin motes of the Atlantic and Pacific, a person who felt a need, as most of us do, to give something back to a world that is worthy of their efforts, could feel fulfilled and motivated to do so.  Most people who live and work under the auspices of the global banking establishment do so because they are forced to do so under a real and significant threat to their lives.  Not so in the America that Jefferson and the Founding Fathers had envisioned and begun to build.  Here, sir, the People govern.

Not anymore.  Get over it.  Accept it.  Move beyond the limitations of perception and ego and dare to live that original dream. 

Vote for Greens and Democrats on Tuesday.  America the Dutiful will work on how to deal with all the moral lepers once the awareness of a national nervous breakdown, punctuated by Jon Stewart’s closing remarks this past Saturday, begins to sink in to foment the catalyzing event that needs to transpire to undo the damage done by the feudal fascists on September 11, 2001.

Pain On Pain On Play, Repeating

Dec13

I have these moments from time to time where I am dumbstruck by the absurdity of human behavior, usually my own. But these moments are usually

brief, they pass on and I am always confident that another moment will soon arrive.

Listening to the news on satellite radio this afternoon, I had a moment where “dumb struck” didn’t quite hit the mark. Neither did idiotic. It was an overwhelming feeling that my home planet, Earth I believe it was called, had been taken over by aliens. Aliens whose chief concern seemed to be keeping the remaining residents of the planet so totally distracted and confused that the vast majority of them would remain stunned while these aliens completed their takeover.

Who were/are these aliens and what was their purpose?

At one level – the level of action – it does not matter what their purpose is or was. We have had our brains so traumatically insulted and our social relationships so thoroughly polarized into “us” versus “them” categorizations in our communities that we can consider ourselves invaded by a foreign enemy. At that level, purpose is not relevant. The invaders must be removed and neutralized by whatever means necessary.

At another level – the level that generates the confusion – these aliens appear to resemble us humans in terms of form. They seem to have two eyes, two ears, a mouth, a nose, two locomotive appendages and two appendages designed for grasping and holding whatever the hell they want as tightly as they desire; but there are qualities to these individuals, I can only label them spiritual in nature, that render them totally inhuman, completely insane and almost evil – if I were to believe in such a thing. What is stunning is that these individuals know our language well enough to know how to subvert it, giving twisted meaning to words that rest at the core of our ability to form trusting relationships with each other. So while on the one hand I and a trusted friend might say, “I love you,” and we mean, “be at peace with all the joy your heart can sustain,” these aliens actually mean, “there is something I demand from you and I will not relent until you give it to me.” The insanity of these folks is that they see something physically viable inside our skins and they are ferocious enough to tear people apart while they search for what they seek. In the end, however, these human zombies sit in a pile of eviscerated flesh and blood, gorging themselves on what remains while on the lookout for still more people on whom they can demonstrate their “love.”

What was striking to me of what I heard on XM today was that there is even a debate concerning whether or not it serves the interests of humanity to tell one another the truth in any matter. The United States fought fascism tooth and nail in WWII, all the while proclaiming that the national security apparatus that the Germans had erected to serve their interests was anathema to democracy, anathema to truth and anathema to humanity. And yet we allowed these fascists, these Nazis, to infiltrate our own national security apparatus, convince us that our allies in our fight against them – the Russians – were among our worst enemies, and then proceeded to inform us that propaganda was truth and truth were the lies we told ourselves to sleep peacefully at night. The truth to these zombies, these eaters of human flesh, is that there has never been a moment in this dangerous world where sleeping peacefully was either wise or warranted and that we, the ones they refer to as, “useless eaters,” owe to them our very lives for their vigilance in our stead.

So when a lone, and altogether uncomfortable Netroots hacker, Julian Assange of Wikileaks, decides to publish 91,000 two and three year old documents about the United States’ occupation of Afghanistan, our national media and our national focus is directed at the “crime” of Assange and his anonymous contributor for telling truths our national security apparatus does not wish the public it allegedly serves to know. A similar outcry was heard when Daniel Ellsberg of the Rand Corporation saw to the publication of the Pentagon Papers, effectively ending the US propaganda efforts at home over the war in Viet Nam.

The moment of clear thinking I had today and would like to share comes in the form of a question.

“Why is telling the truth to each other considered reprehensible in our society?”

What sort of double-bind peddling, fascistic, Nazi-worshipping, goose-stepping baloney is this? This national shame over knowing the truth in any matter is not in any way an expression of American values; this is fascism that has crept up on us since the twilight of World War II and has succeeded in pinning us to a wall of our own stunned inability to act according to our wishes and our deepest values. It is not that we are apathetic and therefore we are bad people; we have been STUNNED and TRAUMATIZED into apathy by the well-monied powers that sought for the rise of fascism in the first place, that sought for the destruction of our democratic experiment almost from the first days of its inception in 1776.

A careful reading and study of history proves this point.

The truth is that there is no shame in telling the truth, even at the expense of embarrassing your government and placing its nefarious plans at risk. If the US wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq were waged for good and just causes, there would be no collective will to see the information about the filth that is war to ever see the light of day. Human beings, rather than their alien doppelgangers, do not work that way. Yet, even after a decade-long orgy of secrecy and misdirection by our alien invaders, the truth of our well-known misbehavior comes back to its makers. And they would like you and me, their willing human subjects, to absorb the burden of their responsibility for them, once again. As musician and lyricist Imogen Heap sings, this is, “pain on pain on play, repeating.”

Now we must do something about this, and I would strongly suggest we not play the “kill the messenger” game because we need these messages to keep our sail and rudder true to the winds of change blowing toward us. We have ten years of gooey lies perpetrated on us by aliens whose sole purpose in life has been the systematic enslavement and exploitation of human labor. They want a life beyond what they deserve, and the power to secure that lifestyle beyond what they can control. They are driven mad by a headlong pursuit for security even while they inhabit a planet whose own fiery end is assured as surely as it circles its own life-giving death star. In short, there is no guarantee of security granted anyone in the entire known universe, and yet we allow ourselves to be dictated to by mentally-ill psychopaths who believe that security is their exclusive entitlement.

If anyone wants to disassemble an internecine entitlement program for budgetary reasons, I suggest they begin here with the entitlement of the rich and powerful to occupy their positions of authority and leadership in this world of shadows they have manifested for us all. Tear down the walls of this hideous miscreation and we will at least be free to choose how we will all live. Wars and lies were never what any of us wanted in the first place.