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A Q and A For The People Of
A Forsaken Republic: Addressing the origins of the Whose-Your-Daddy
Nation
Phil
Rockstroh
Tuesday October 02, 2007
A Q and A For The People Of A Forsaken Republic: Addressing
the origins of the Whose-Your-Daddy Nation
by Phil Rockstroh
“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.
(Article continues below)
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.
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INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
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