A Q and
A For The People Of A Forsaken Republic:
Addressing The Origins Of
The Whose-Your-Daddy Nation
By Phil Rockstroh
02 October, 2007
Countercurrents.org
"We must become the change we want to see."
-- Mahatma Gandhi
"In any case, I hate all Iranians."
--Debra Cagan, Deputy Assistant Secretary to Defense Secretary,
Robert Gates
How many times do we, the people
of the US, have to go around on this queasy-making merry-go-round of
propaganda and militarism before we shout -- enough! -- then shutdown
the whole cut-rate carnival and run the scheming carnies who operate
it out of town? It is imperative the nation's citizens begin to apprehend
the patterns present in this ceaseless cycle of official deceit and
collective pathology. This republic, or any other, cannot survive, inhabited
by a populace with such a slow learning curve.
Over the last three decades,
the authoritarian right has risen to create the nation they have been
longing for since their humbling by the Watergate scandal. After being
subdued and humiliated by the mechanisms of a free republic, the right
has turned the tables -- and subdued and humiliated the republic. If
the trend continues, all but unchallenged and unabated, we might as
well replace the torch held aloft by Lady Liberty with a taser.
How could it come to this?
How did so many US citizens grow so apathetic, oblivious, if not flat-out
hostile to the tenets of a free republic?
The authoritarianism inherent
to the structure of multi-conglomerate corporatism is antithetical to
the concept of the rights and liberties of the individual. Most individuals
-- bound by a corporation's secrecy-prone, hierarchical values -- will,
over time, lose the ability to display free thinking, engage in civic
discourse, and even be able to envisage the notion of freedom.
This is true, from the florescent
light-flooded aisles of Wal*Mart to the insular executive offices of
Haliburton to the sound stages of CNN and Fox News. Under the prevailing
order, reality, for the laboring class of the corporate state, has become
debt slavery; in contrast, the simulacrum of reality, in which, the
striver class exists, is a milieu defined by obsessive careerism. Under
the hegemony of corporatism, freedom might as well be fairy dust. It
only exists in an imaginary land, not the places one arrives by way
of one's morning and evening commute.
In addition, economically,
by way of decades of financial chicanery, perpetrated by the nation's
business and political elite, we are eating our seed crop, and the consequences
of this harvest of deceit have left the people of the US, intellectually
and spiritually malnourished.
As a result, many attempt
to sate the keening emptiness and mitigate the chronic unease by gorging
themselves on the Junk Food Jesus of End Time mythology, which is a
belief system wherein corporeal events and actions (personal and collective)
have no lasting consequence because even the human body is to be cast
aside, like a junk food wrapper, when the cosmic CEO decides to make
the earth a part of his heavenly franchise.
Accordingly, the corporate
state requires modes of being that evince obliviousness and obedience
(the defining traits of the US consumer) on the part of the majority
of the populace. Ergo, the rise of both Christian consumerists and the
vast apparatus of the right-wing propaganda matrix that dominates news
cycles via the electronic mass media.
All coming to pass, as George
W. Bush -- the reigning mascot of this fantasyland of infantile omnipotence
and instant gratification -- is rocked to sleep by his handlers cooing
preposterous tales of how history will place him in the pantheon of
those men whose greatness was unrecognized by the shallow and petty
minds of their own era.
When, in fact, Bush, whose
ruinous wars of aggression, deficit-ballooning tax breaks for the wealthy,
and policies of crony capitalism (that enabled the economy-decimating,
easy credit banking scams of the present) displays the character traits
of a man ridden with severe psychological trauma; his attempts to tamp
down immense inner turmoil, by means of his grandiose bearing, his absolute
certitude regarding his own infallibility, and his bullying behavior,
have resulted in an exteriorizing of his pathologies on a global scale,
and this is playing out ugly, for all concerned.
Why do the people of the
nation (for the most part) slouch, slack-jawed and passive, before this
assault upon their collective integrity and personal dignity?
For generations, the ephemeral
dazzle of pop culture paternalism and tabloid Manichaeism, as confabulated
by advertising and public relations hacks and corporate news courtesans,
has overwhelmed gravitas, history, even self-awareness. As all the while,
shallow opportunists have been elevated to the status of pundits, experts
and sages. Withal, the present system generously rewards those individuals
who have mastered the art of impersonating human traits and responses
in utterly contrived environments. As a whole, the majority of the populi
have come to garner information about the world at large, and, worse,
their own self-image, from a medium where phoniness is a treasured commodity,
while authentic human traits and responses are banished to a beggar's
road.
Is it any wonder that the
media types who thrive in these artificial settings have come to define
authenticity as being only those attributes that appear authentic on
television? Apropos, if you ask these "media personalities"
about the shortcomings and corruption of the present system, they will
plead the careerist's Nuremberg Defense ... of only being a stormtrooper
obeisant to the "bottom line."
Fantasy alert: One would
hope that if one were to descend down a ladder constructed of these
layers upon layers of bottom lines, one would arrive in a Hell reserved
for those possessed with such shameless cupidity.
Reality redux: Yet as much
as the human heart might yearn for such outcomes, there will never arrive
the terrible majesty and bitter reckoning of anything resembling Judgement
Day, heralded by celestial trumpets and legions of naked and cowering
sinners; instead, in human affairs, there arises dire exigencies that
can no longer be ignored nor explained away. The arrival of such a moment
for the US is nearly at hand.
When a nation manifests a
mixture of mass ignorance and official mendacity, in combination with
uncheck power emanating from an insular and arrogant elite, a golden
age of peace and plenty is as possible as holding a tea dance in a tsunami.
As sure as a village of desperate fools who devour their seed crop,
a nation that refuses universal health care to its children -- yet rushes
to the aid of its parasitic class of wealthy "speculators"
and "investors" from the consequences of their own greed-besotted,
fiscal debacles -- is doomed.
This is the classic pattern
of collective immolation experienced by a nation when power and privilege
is increasingly consolidated in fewer and fewer hands. In essence, this
is the key to the conundrum paralyzing the leadership of the Democratic
Party: In a culture in which an individual's worth is determined by
the degree one can be exploited by the corrupt interests that control
both the private and public sector, the public at large has little value
to the political establishment ... That is: other than, every few years,
being bamboozled for their votes in the sham spectacles known as the
US electoral process, a scam mostly financed, hence controlled, by the
aforementioned big money interests.
In sum, this is the reason
the Democratic Party feels little allegiance to their base. In turn,
the political classes themselves are only of value to the big money
corporate elite, because, by their delivery of staggering amounts of
pork, massive tax cuts, and the passage of desired anti-regulatory legislation,
they serve as their errand boys.
Moreover, the corporate control
of congress is a microcosm of US society as a whole. Accordingly, the
increasingly corporatized, ever more submissive people of the US should
be termed, the Whose-Your-Daddy Nation.
Yet, since life does not
exist in stasis, within this hierarchy of deceivers and dupes, we will
gnaw at one another's ankles until the whole pathetic pyramid collapses.
All around us, we can feel
the shoddy structure starting to sway and buckle. Axiomatically, the
value of the dollar is collapsing like the smooth facade of a con man
called-out by a group of wised-up marks. At present, in the wake of
the bust in the housing market, repo men are retracing the tracks of
real estate grifters who fleeced legions of wishful thinkers who brought
the American dream and now only possess the misery of debt slavery.
One would think the time
for insurrection has arrived -- that, at long last, an awakened and
enraged public would rise up and foreclose on these reprobates and ne'er-do-wells
squatting in the White House and skulking through Congress. The power
and privilege of the corporately controlled elite of Washington should
be repossessed like the Lexises of Atlanta real estate agents and the
oversized pickup trucks of Tucson contractors, confiscated in the wake
of the collapse of the housing market. Foreclosure signs and repossession
notices should festoon the whole of official Washington.
Turn about would be fair
play. Since, the rise of Reaganism, the financial sector has been engaged
in selling off the assets of the nation's public sector to the highest
bidders. It is amazing that, at this point, this klavern of kleptocrats
haven't yet torn from the walls and absconded with all the copper plumbing
fixtures and fittings on Capitol Hill.
Is a turnaround possible?
If we wake-up and smell the
jackboot. From the miasma of right-wing media propaganda, to the proliferation
of predatory capitalism, to the corruption and cupidity of the prison
industrial complex, to the pandemic of police brutality and the trampling
of the rights of the accused, to perennial civilian shooting sprees,
to the muzzling of descent, to the rise of the national surveillance
state, to the use and acceptance of torture as state policy, to the
adoption of an unlawful, immoral foreign policy doctrine that promotes
policies of perpetual war, one is forced to conclude that bullying,
and deferring to bullies, has become the dominate mode of being in the
US.
Remedy: In order to turn
this trend around, the people of the US must begin to acquire the anti-authoritarian
traits of empathy and engagement. The gaining of empathy alleviates
the pathological need to be a bully, while social and political engagement
mitigates feelings of powerlessness that authoritarian bully-boys, such
as Bush, Cheney, Giuliani, et al., exploit.
In short, remedial human
lessons for the US population, in general, and for the corporate and
political classes, in particular.
Let us start the process
by having a period of grief and repentance for the death and suffering
that our government, in our name, has inflicted on the people of Iraq.
This should be done as the US begins the process of a complete military
withdrawal from their decimated nation, and the bestowing of economic
reparations upon the millions of Iraqis who have suffered under the
brutal machinations and murderous mayhem unloosed by our country's contemptible
invasion and occupation.
To do so, might save the people of our next target, Iran (as well as
ourselves) a world of grief.
Phil Rockstroh, a self-described, auto-didactic, gasbag
monologist, is a poet, lyricist and philosopher bard living in New York
City. He may be contacted at [email protected]
Visit Phil's website, http://philrockstroh.com/
Leave
A Comment
&
Share Your Insights
Comment
Policy
Digg
it! And spread the word!
Here is a unique chance to help this article to be read by thousands
of people more. You just Digg it, and it will appear in the home page
of Digg.com and thousands more will read it. Digg is nothing but an
vote, the article with most votes will go to the top of the page. So,
as you read just give a digg and help thousands more to read this article.