An
Evolution That Would
Blow Darwin’s Mind
Of Moral Regression, Heartland Extremism, and Solidarity against
the Wicked Witch
By
Jason Miller
05 August, 2006
Countercurrents.org
Forget
the exploits of John Brown and Carrie Nation. Their violent efforts
for virtuous causes are but distant memories in the Land of Oz. Here
in contemporary Kansas, many socially conservative uber-patriots fastidiously
and “peacefully” adhere to an American sociopolitical system
which is becoming increasingly hostile to science, peace, human rights,
the environment, and minorities. Yes, the “American Way”
has become rife with many of the truly vulgar and destructive aspects
of humanity.
Since 1998, pro-Evolutionary
forces have been grappling with anti-Evolutionary forces for control
of the Kansas State School Board. In the recent election, power changed
hands for the fourth time in eight years as Darwinists reclaimed a 6-4
advantage on the board. It is virtually a foregone conclusion that the
board will again re-write the science standards to restore Evolution
to its proper stature. Thankfully, reason will again prevail in science
classes from Overland Park to Dodge City.
Those of us who believe in
the validity of scientific inquiry, draw a distinction between faith
and science, and recognize the dangers of state-validated religion are
celebrating progress manifested in the election results.
Yet as I pondered the situation
more deeply, I realized that Evolution represents but a minor skirmish
in a much broader conflict. And at the same time, reflecting on the
notions of evolution and change conjured thoughts of how, in many ways,
the United States has followed a plummeting moral trajectory as it has
evolved over the years.
While it is reassuring to
know that our Kansas public school children will learn one of the most
widely held and accepted theories in the biological sciences (and at
least for now, their spiritual education will be left to their parents
and clergy), there are much larger stakes to consider. Stepping back
and examining human existence from a global perspective reveals countless
disturbing images of unmitigated suffering thrust upon a majority of
the Earth’s inhabitants.
Ohio, Georgia, and Pennsylvania
are still struggling to inject religion into their science classes under
the clever guise of the “theory” of Intelligent Design.
Recent legislative initiatives, amendments to state constitutions, and
actions by a variety of activist groups (like the Minutemen) clearly
demonstrate that many of the Western European immigrants to Turtle Island
still suffer the spiritual diseases of homophobia, xenophobia, hubris,
and racism.
Preying upon these spiritual
maladies, the opportunists in DC and on Wall Street (who reside at the
peak of the capitalist pyramid) blitz us with propaganda readily disseminated
by their partners in the corporate media to fuel “culture wars”.
Like a blacksmith with bellows, they super heat raw emotion to a white
hot state that leaves human reason in cinders.
As we wage slaves run the
rat race, fighting over the scraps so “charitably” tossed
our way in America’s “ownership society”, we claw
each others’ eyes out over issues like Evolution, homosexual rights,
and abortion, enabling those leading our depraved social and political
institutions to plunder the world’s wealth with little or no constraint.
Aside from the numerous seductive distractions they provide through
television and consumerism, what better way to manipulate the masses
than by perpetually thrusting contentious issues into their faces that
splinter them into warring factions?
Remember December? When Iraqi
and American body bags were filling up faster than Santa’s elves
could pack his sacks of toys? And Christians in the United States were
beside themselves because some stores weren’t saying “Merry
Christmas” to customers? It boggles the mind!
It is widely known that the
Bush Regime has heavily courted radical Christian elements in the United
States to garner much of its political support. Ostensibly bearing the
cross of the Christian God who blesses only America, George Bush is
on a sacred mission to fulfill Manifest Destiny around the globe.
With the backing of Diebold,
Katherine Harris, the Supreme Court, and a heavily mobilized base of
extremist Christians who stampeded to the polls to support Bush’s
eagerness to fulfill their apocryphal prophecies in the Holy Land, elect
a degenerate individual many apparently believed was an Evangelical
who manifested the virtues of Christ, and to empower a group willing
to proclaim that Christianity is the official state religion, George
Bush and his cronies blatantly subverted our Constitutional Republic
by taking office twice without winning the electoral or the popular
vote.
Astoundingly, now that Mephistopheles
has revealed his true identity, he and his fellow Neocons, Zionists,
Fundamentalist Christian leaders, and plutocrats still garner support
from amongst their subjugated masses. Admittedly, he has been on shaky
ground lately, but Bush still has enough adherents that he has avoided
impeachment and prosecution for his crimes against humanity.
Through its denial of civil
rights to Gays, opposition to abortion and stem cell research, unwavering
support for Israel (and its heinous ethnic cleansing and war crimes),
dedication to preserving the dominant role of White America, and creation
of a nationalist furor that is beyond being obscene, the Bush Regime
has garnered the support of enough Americans to empower them to unleash
Hell upon millions of human beings to further the interests of US multinationals,
the military industrial complex, Israel, and the rest of its cohorts.
Strauss’s disciples
learned their art well as they are clearly demonstrating with their
virtuoso performance. And Kansas is a microcosm of the stratum of American
society that is entranced by the Neocons’ euphonious symphony.
A symphony they brilliantly composed to drown out the sounds of their
abuse of power, exploitation and murder.
As 60 Minutes revealed this
week, the Bush administration heavily edits the findings of its own
scientists to minimize public awareness of the dangers of phenomena
like Climate Change. Employing lawyers to water down admonitions drafted
by NASA and EPA scientists, the Bush Regime seriously limits what would
be well-founded citizen and Congressional concern about abusive environmental
practices by the amoral profit seekers of corporate America.
Capitalizing on their paranoid
belief that they are somehow facing persecution by evil secular humanists,
the wealthy elites are steering Dominionists and other Christian extremists
down a path to the tyranny each group craves. Removing prayer from public
schools was not about abolishing Christianity. Eliminating mandatory
prayer was to prevent our government from endorsing and potentially
mandating a specific religion. State-imposed religion is a powerful
element of virtually any despotic regime worth its salt.
In blaming Hispanic immigrants
for “stealing” benefits from tax-supported social programs
while providing “nothing” in return; perpetuating Black
American poverty, under-education, and crime by isolating many of them
in inner-city ghettos or warehousing them in the prison industrial complex;
and vilifying Gays for “destroying the moral fabric” of
the United States, our de facto oligarchs abuse vulnerable populations
already despised by many other Americans and scapegoat them for the
ills plaguing our nation. Another block in the foundation of a “successful”
fascist state.
[Note: Fascist states are
generally characterized by authoritarian rule, extreme nationalism,
corporate domination, anti-liberalism, and militarism. Starting to look
and sound awfully familiar, eh USA?]
In granting federal money
to tax-exempt religious entities for “faith based initiatives”
to aid the growing numbers of impoverished in the Twenty First Century
Gilded Age, the plutocracy gains the dual advantage of currying the
favor of its Fundamentalist Christian base amongst the “commoners”
and creating a subterfuge for eliminating “wasteful” federal
spending on public social programs to benefit the poor. Many of those
resting comfortably atop the financial summit, whose wealth exists thanks
to a deeply corrupt system which impoverishes billions of human beings,
despise the elements of “liberalism” which serve to limit
their boundless greed and visions of unrestrained, Dickensonian Capitalism.
Reducing taxes and privatizing
have become the mantras of the Bush Regime’s economic policy.
At the end of the day, who doesn’t want to pay less in taxes and
see a reduction in poorly managed government bureaucracies? The problem
is that the tax cuts are providing massive benefit to the super-rich
(like the Walton and Mars families) while putting very little money
back into the pockets of the working class. Meanwhile, military expenditures
continue to rise to more insane levels as programs to benefit children,
the elderly, the sick, and the impoverished are reduced or slashed rather
than redesigned or improved.
What was that definition
of fascism again?
Not even public education
escapes the rapacious attacks of the ruthless wolves at the top of the
food chain. The No Child Left Behind Act furthers their goal of strengthening
the Fourth Purpose. John Taylor Gatto defined the Fourth Purpose in
an interview about his book, Dumbing
us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling:
Throughout the 19th century,
a new Fourth Purpose began to emerge, tested thoroughly in the military
state of Prussia in northern Europe. The Fourth Purpose made the point
of mass schooling to serve big business and big government by extending
childhood, replacing thinking with drill and memorization while fashioning
incomplete people unable to protect themselves from exhortation, advertising
and other forms of indirect command. In this fashion, poor Prussia with
a small population became one of the great powers of the earth. Its
new schooling method was imitated far and wide, from Japan to the United
States.
Some conjecture that the
ultimate goal of social conservatives is to eliminate public education.
I disagree. The ruling class realizes what a sacred cow they would be
slaughtering. Besides, as Gatto’s insight indicates, the most
effective way to control human beings is through their psyches. And
what better time to capture human minds than when they are young and
malleable?
Profits, property, and power
trump humanity in the sociopathic value systems of the vicious malefactors
at the helm of the United States. Witness the willful neglect leading
to the tragic death and diaspora of tens of thousands of Black Americans
in New Orleans. Consider the slaughter of over 100,000 Iraqi civilians,
the liberal distribution of depleted uranium throughout Iraq’s
countryside, the wanton destruction of much of Iraqi infrastructure,
the death of over 2600 American military personnel in Iraq, the sacrifice
of almost 3,000 American civilians in the Neocon’s Pearl Harbor
on 9/11, the torture of human beings, and the suspension of basic justice
for those suspected of “terrorism”.
Their willful refusal to
employ the power the United States clearly has to enforce an immediate
cease-fire in Lebanon provides yet another overt example of Neocon moral
bankruptcy. The United States has deliberately stymied UN intervention
efforts to give Israel time to finish destroying Lebanon with funding
and equipment we furnished. Israel has displaced a million people, killed
over 600 innocent civilians, and destroyed over $2 billion worth of
infrastructure through its invasion of a sovereign nation. This in retaliation
for the capture of two of its soldiers by Hezbollah, a powerful group
of militants over which Lebanon has virtually no control. In contrast,
Israel has suffered the loss of 26 of its civilians. While tragic, these
losses pale in comparison to the devastating horror the Israeli war
machine has inflicted upon Lebanon
A sane government concerned
with human welfare and justice would have put a stop to these blatant
crimes against humanity long before the situation escalated to this
point. But the Bush Regime has justified and encouraged the Israeli
atrocities. They obfuscate well, but it does not take much critical
thinking to see the true agenda of our malevolent leaders.
Virtually all citizens of
the United States have been deceived by their government to some extent.
While I remain a tenacious dissident against many of the United States’
political and social institutions because of my passion for social justice
and human rights, my choice to manifest my dissent through writing and
publishing burdens me with a degree of complicity in the schemes of
the Bush Regime. As I research, analyze, write, and publish, I serve
humanity as writers have throughout history. I educate, inspire both
support and opposition, amuse, comfort, provoke thought, agitate, anger,
and in some cases, win hearts and minds. Yet at the same time, by asserting
intellectual arguments which are mostly opposed to the American Empire
because of my personal beliefs, I participate in the intellectual civil
war the ruling elites love to perpetuate to keep those of us in the
“lower classes” from achieving solidarity against them.
Contrary to our patriotic
programming, dissidents in the United States are not free to exercise
their First Amendment rights because millions of poor wretches fought
and died in wars of imperial conquest under the pretext of “protecting”
or “spreading freedom.” For now, our leaders allow domestic
dissent because they want to keep their populace at odds with one another,
they know that their strangle-hold on the psyches of many of their citizens
is virtually unbreakable (if people start to see through the Reagans
and Bushes, the ruling elite come up with a “liberal” Democrat
like Bill Clinton to pacify the “Soccer Moms” yet still
maintain the status quo of de facto plutocratic rule), and they are
not ready to shed the thinning veneer that they govern according to
the Constitution.
Yet despite my unintended
contribution to the intellectual wars our overlords use to distract
us, if I stop writing and publishing, I will surrender a significant
means to contribute to the struggle for social justice and human rights
and to counter the lies of the corporate media, government propagandists
and history revisionists.
The answer is not to stop
thinking, debating, or writing. Regardless of how we contribute to the
struggle or how much we differ in opinion, we of the poor and working
classes need to “agree to disagree” and unite against those
who prey upon us.
230 years ago, the United
States was founded by valiant rebels who shattered the manacles of colonialism.
Sadly, the nation they predicated on Constitutional limitations of government
power with significant emphases on the rights of individual humans (admittedly
marred by the denial of rights to Blacks, women, and Native Americans),
has evolved into one of the most violent, narcissistic, and oppressive
empires in the history of humanity.
Sorry Dorothy, but the Wicked
Witch of the West is alive and well. But don’t despair. Human
beings possess an uncanny ability to Evolve, especially for the better.
Jason Miller
is a 39 year old sociopolitical essayist with a degree in liberal arts
and an extensive self-education (derived from an insatiable appetite
for reading). He is a member of Amnesty International and an avid supporter
of Oxfam International and Human Rights Watch. He welcomes responses
at [email protected]
or comments on his blog, Thomas Paine's Corner, at
http://civillibertarian.blogspot.com/.