Mad Dog Motherfucking Mean

Now remember, when things look bad and it looks like you’re not gonna make it, then you gotta get mean. I mean plumb, mad-dog mean. ‘Cause if you lose your head and you give up then you neither live nor win. That’s just the way it is.”

– Josey Wales

Been awhile friends but the bad man is back, back with a vengeance and like the avenging spirit that was the famous Clint Eastwood role in High Plains Drifter I am getting ready to paint the town red. Red with pigs blood that is, of course in post-democracy America, in our all-seeing fascist surveillance society I speak in purely figurative terms, lest the midnight knock come and the jackboot of Homeland Security kick down my door. This is what it has come to, it’s nut-cuttin’ time, time to throw down, stand up, be counted and dispense with whatever passes for resistance in this electronically lobotomized lemming colony. Face it, things are never going to get better for the average person in Murka, the entrenched rot of corruption is too deep, can’t be easily cut out, the financial system lies in smoking ruins thanks to a gangster government and the failed political system that has facilitated it. The swine and swindlers will continue to bleed this place until there is no blood left and then it will run in the streets, likely when the fascists and their propaganda pimps begin calling for the inevitable pogroms. Any moves to somehow ameliorate the suffering, take for instance yesterday’s surprise announcement of the tapping of the oil reserves to stop the psychotic speculators and their masturbatory greed will be harshly and immediately attacked by a corporate media machine determined to keep the game rigged at all costs. Enjoy today because today is the best day that you are going to have for the rest of your lives, each subsequent day will be a gradual erosion of living standards, whatever remains of your rights and one toehold deeper into the abyss. This is the new American birthright for to be an American is to be a fat bovine creature, swaddled in stars ‘n stripes ensconced in front of the precious television that provides the sweet, sweet spike for tens of millions of addicts.

I have been away from it all for awhile, just not much inclination to write much. The ‘death’ of our Emanuel Goldstein, Osama bin Laden felt like a good place to end it all, the closing of the circle of the big lie of 9/11 that I have railed against for the past six years since I have been doing this. I certainly did consider it and did so very seriously, there are other projects that I would like to do, maybe some fiction, a book, other forms of media but the situation is too grave and there are too few fighters. I have made the journey since mid-2005 when I first started to blog, primarily to keep my sanity as those were still the worst days of the Bushreich before the abhorrent little twit was exposed as the impotent borderline retard that he always was by the wrath of nature combined with capitalist greed that was Hurricane Katrina. Bush never was quite the same after that and it was hard to believe that the peak of the fascist right-wing freak show that was the siege over the still breathing corpse of one Terri Schiavo had only occurred a few months prior. Bush and Cheney continued to cut a category five swath of destruction through the country and the world but it was slowed and the ouster of the criminally psychotic Tom DeLay from power jammed up the machine albeit briefly. It was my outrage against the right-wing scum, the traitors that manifested itself in the Republican party that drove me to raging against the machine in the first place.

I originally identified with the left (or the putrid excuse that passes for it these days), still having some idiotic and naive sort of faith in the Democratic party being able to provide some semblance of a return to normalcy were it to regain political power. While I am and always have been a registered independent I bought into the lesser of two evils meme, especially when the greater of the evils was just a notch below Satan. I broke into blogging at a number of liberal sites, quickly learning my lesson that intolerance and censorship was not the sole domain of the right when I ran afoul of the turds at Daily Kos, when it all comes down to it, and I have said this before Markos Moulitsas-Zuniga, who built a perfect mousetrip, somehow being trotted out as the voice of progressives and liberals is when it all comes down to it about as left as Stalin and his rotten blog is a cesspool of idiotic political correctness, elitism and bad writing. I was run out of there very quickly as have been many others with the ability to transcend the bullshit and think for themselves. I bounced around on a number of lesser blogs as a regular contributor, one a fairly prominent one run by a self-proclaimed Democrat who wears her party alliance on her sleeve. I had a chance to become more widely read had I hewed to just doing political attacks and screeds on Republican Nazis but early on I understood that the entire fucking system was rotten, I was too much of a renegade to be mainstream. I made other alliances, the people who I worked with were passionate and devoted but few were able to grasp the bigger picture, with the election of Obama in 2008 there was no longer that common enemy and the ‘left’, basking in their imagined triumph rapidly began to fragment into the collection of competing identity based groups that they are in order to divvy up the spoils. They did not as I warned continue to wage war against the fascists and they came to embrace the ongoing murders of civilians, brown-skinned, non-Christian ones as long as their tolerance for immorality was cloaked in humanitarian bullshit like women’s rights, they became cruise missile liberals. I officially made my split from them with my blistering goodbye entitled A Farewell to Arms: Why I Left ‘the Left’ from which I excerpt the following at length:

To HELL with the ‘left’! I am finished, done, disillusioned and over it, the divorce papers have been filed and are now finalized and I am not going back. As of this day, I will no longer allow myself to be affiliated or endorse the ‘left’ in any way, shape or form. So long folks, it was real and it was fun but in the end it was unfulfilling and dare I say, a waste of time and effort. Is this overly harsh? Perhaps it is but the break has to be made and it can no longer be put off. I assure you, this was no hasty decision but rather something that has been a slow and agonizing process, a steady drip…drip…drip.., like Chinese water torture and suddenly the mind goes, the spirit breaks and the ugly reality of the situation cannot be denied or disguised. So to all of my good friends on the left I wish you the very best but I am no longer one of you and maybe I never was, it was never dogma to me only a desire for some sort of social fairness and a fair shot but the American left being a shell of it’s former self with labor broken and the DLC corporatists having taken over the Democratic party it has been reduced to shills for the Democrats and squabbling identity groups each with an agenda that prevents any sort of unity necessary for a mass movement for real change. Sucks but that is just the way it has to be.

And –

By choosing to focus on wedge culture war issues no matter how noble the cause may, be the ‘left’ has failed abysmally in only providing gasoline on the fire that is being ignited on the extreme right and this is going to be costly in impossible to overstate terms in the future as a new, ultra-virulent strain of cult of personality, anti-intellectual, Christian fascist vengeful malignancy percolates throughout this country. There is an ideologically driven cataclysm coming and it will have every bit the force of the Nazis, Stalinists or Khmer Rouge and the gutters will be filled with blood, the streets with violence and no guarantee of personal or family safety by the law or militarized police who will protect the wealthy and elites only while the shock troops hunt down liberals, gays and today’s Juden, the Muslims who have been so easily demonized by the Pentagon and the Zionists who seem to have reasserted an ugly but more subtle form of control with the newest blown out of proportion ‘terrorism’. The king of the Israeli fifth column in America, Senator Joseph Lieberman will soon be using his position as head of the Senate Heimat Security Committee to launch witch hunts and hold show trials which will rival those of Stalin and McCarthy and people like you and I will be accused of being ‘terrorist sympathaziers’, the propagand about white al Qaida has already been getting some mileage as the creeping cat feet of fascism march onwards. Just how important are social issues when the task of rolling back American fascism renders all else irrelevant?

Myself and others have warned about the triumphal premature celebrations in the defeat of the extreme right, electoral victories and half measures at silly centrist governance have allowed this vicious hydra to regenerate. The failure of the ‘left’ to generate the cohesiveness necessary in order to form a viable political mass movement and the embracement (no matter how tepid by some) of the corrupted Democratic party and the amateur that is Barack Obama has set up the dominoes perfectly for the perfect storm once the economic collapse finally does occur. The plethora of gay marriage iniatives in the early days of the insipid Obama administration smacked of a sort of arrogance among limousine liberals, as though the enemy had been vanquished and it was time to exact that revenge which would both terrible and satisfying in rolling back the dark ages iniatives or the Religious Right roundheads. But that focus provided cover for the rats that are the corporatists, banksters and lobbyists that rode into power tucked away inside Obama’s Trojan Horse and whose plunder and subsequent fall into public disfavor have driven Democrat and Obama’s poll ratings down faster than whaleshit sinking to the bottom of the sea and allowed the American fascists to regroup and now in the aftermath of the underwear bomber false flag, with the fear fresh anew the sheeple will tolerate ANY police state measures to protect their putrid little lives as they cower and submit.

I have a lot of friends on the left and I mean them no malice or insult in my breaking ranks, they are good people, probably better than I in that they are pure of heart and always seek to build a better society, to nurture and to foster love instead of hate. Sadly though, in the real world butterflies, zebras, moonbeams and fairy tales are just that, illusions when confronted with an enemy that recognizes no rules, decorum, compassion or fairness and when the time comes will happily leave liberals and progressives with only their eyes to cry with..if they are even that generous. You see, my friends never understood the nature of this war, and it is war and only those of staunch spirits, strong stomachs and the righteous tenacity to climb upon that wall and fight the bastards on their own terms are ultimately going to have a chance. As the ‘left’ is comprised today it can be dismissed, laughed at and generally ignored by the rotten bitches, bastards and corporations that run this system and that is exactly what Rahm Emanual, his sock puppet ‘boss’ and the rest of the establishment are doing, they are doing. Liberals and the ‘left’ have this view that ‘we are better than they are so we don’t have to stoop to their level’, but in the end they always lose.

And –

As Nietzsche spoke of fighting monsters and warned of the abyss well it does look back but ultimately humanity is doomed to war, it is out nature and to deny that is the ultimate form of self denial. The best resistance against militarism, the police state and war is coming from the libertarian front, for example Justin Raimondo’s Antiwar.com, I also have long admired the Ron Paul movement for calls for ending the Federal Reserve although I have been more than a bit dismayed to see it so easily co-opted by the corporate teabaggers and the Dick Armey of Darkness, the Palinazis and the idiot buffoon racist Birthers and religious fanatic Birthers and so has one of the founders of the movement. There is however a good deal of misdirected but righteous anger out there that is too easily hijacked and misdirected into the fascist brigades that the ‘left’ has failed to take advantage of to bolster it’s power and rally around some sort of real cause rather than the agendas of identity groups seeking government action to redress a history of injustice.

I have always been an independent with views more compatible with the old left, the labor left and the intense focus on social issues in which the activists ignore basic economic fairness, antiwar, pro-civil liberties matters in order to waste energy tilting at windmills. Let’s face it, no matter how moral that the crusade for gay marriage may be (basically another civil rights fight to eliminate the sad fact that in 21st century America that there are still people who are treated as second class citizens and face institutionalized persecution) – it’s a loser with large demographic blocks that nothing short of a mass die out over a period of a few decades is going to resolve and while it sucks, it’s the truth, shit, millions of morons are ready to launch a civil war because the fucking President is black and until the numbers of these anachronisms are reduced America will always be defined by the hatred of the other, which of course will always be exploited for maximum political gain by fascists. The younger generations do not care about whether one is gay or straight or has a different skin color, they are far more tolerant and acceptable than their parents or grandparents but the reality is that as America is currently constituted this is a loser for the ‘left’ and energy would be better spent in fighting imperialism, economic royalism, a vast for profit prison gulag and a militarized police that is determined to keep it full.

Also, global warming (the carbon footprint is akin to a carbon jackboot stomping up and down on a human face while the speculators get richer than Midas), immigration ‘reform’ and the ugly sort of imperialist liberalism that supports more war, military spending and murder to promote pet causes such as women’s rights and other emotional based malarkey is just intolerable. The Empire is broke, women are oppressed by institutions within our own borders and the cycle of militarism will not be seriously challenged as long as there are cruise missile liberals determined to use force to be Team America global police. I saw an ugliness among too many liberals and progressives during the past summer’s Iranian uprising, the ‘Green Revolution’ not to be confused of course with ‘Green Shoots, or ‘Green Energy’ and the ‘left’s’ piling on the regime of the devil Ahmadinejad only served to reinforce the incessant neocon propaganda and Zionist right-wing warmongering that has the doomsday clock ticking towards World War III. In all liklihood, Israel will attack Iran at some point in the coming year, Obama’s infatuation with the phony war on terror will ensure that the U.S. is sucked in which will be catastrophic but now that the antiwar movement has been marginalized by the foulness that is the Democrat party, now that Cindy Sheehan has served her purpose and been unceremoniously dumped and now that the ‘left’ has once again failed to mobilize around any serious issue that has crossover appeal we are all helpless to stop it.

I will devote my energies to trying to assist whatever remains of the antiwar movement (which isn’t much after most of the larger groups were co-opted by the filthy corporatist Democrats and Raht Emanual), continue to support the abolishment (or at the least auditing) of the Federal Reserve, fight for a reigning in of excessive corporate power, rail against the abuses of civil liberties, the police state, torture and surveillance and the menace of globalization. In a sad land of ignorance and hostility that has institutionalized torture with about half the population being down with it just how long is it going to be until they actually start to torture the other half?

The ‘left’ is too fragmented and there are far too many internal squabbles to mount any sort of a counter-movement against this irrational, ignorant and mean army of darkness that is suckled at the teat of the imperialist warfare state and lives in a world of unreality fed by a lifetime of indoctrination to illusions and lies and I am getting off of that woebegone merry-go-round once and for all before it either kills me or drives me totally fucking batshit.

And –

Loose the Rats: I remember once when I was in my early twenties, a certain restaurant that I had worked for had become so intolerable that there was a parting of the ways (mutual of course) regarding employment. Well, said restaurant naturally had a pretty high turnover rate so myself and a fellow former wage slave conspired one night over many a beer (and I must admit a bit of weed) to seek revenge against the owners. We would go in on a stealth mission and create a disturbance that would be guaran-fucking-teed to cause maximum chaos. So we went to a local pet shop and purchased two live rats which we smuggled in during peak hours in our backpacks and while we swilled a few beers in a booth in the back, ate chicken wings and were generally looked at as scum by our former co-worker wait staff we had a hard time not pissing our pants. Well, when we were finished, we paid our bills and let the rats out of the backpacks and just left the fucking place….we never knew what happened and that was the beauty of it. Maybe the rats caused a total scene and a mass evacuation and maybe business was forever wrecked for those satanic pricks who owned the goddamned place – somehow I doubt it because the damned place stayed in business. Perhaps though, the owners found the rats first before they ran off the paying customers and caused a pox of word of mouth advertising that was up there with the Bubonic Plague and changed their ways, I don’t know and shit, I really don’t know exactly were I am going with this little thread so I digress…..

Maybe the moral of the pet shop rats is that it was a shock that could have actually have been naïve enough to think that such a futile and stupid act would have changed hearts and minds but that was back in the 80’s when things were different and there was still some semblance of actual fucking sanity in this rotten shell of a country, back when it was STILL POSSIBLE to avoid the coming forced anal probes by militarized Darth Vader police goons in local shopping malls. Nothing that I was ever going to do on the left, much like loosing the rats on those miserable, skinflint, authoritarian pricks who ran that shithole of an eatery was going to do a damned thing to change anything or any body, it was just plaintive wails from planet shit directed at the choir…amen.

So to those on the ‘left’ who I have joined in battle with over the years only to realize that it is ultimately a futile struggle I say good luck and may your efforts bring fruit and some degree of satisfaction so long as they do not conflict with mine. I am going it alone from this point onward, bound by no loyalty to ideology, faction or any group, that only belongs to those who are allies the bigger fight at hand now. I would implore you who are able to transcend your past prejudices, ideals and indoctrinations to become a bit less dogmatic and much more pragmatic in reaching out to those who not only can be saved but who also are trying to break free from their own conditioning.

Granted it was a long excerpt but it pretty much expressed my feelings at the time, for better or worse I struck out on my own.  For some reason that I still can’t quite understand myself I thought that I could actually work at trying to salvage some of the wretches from the media creation that is the Tea Party, really just a collection of pissed off people with reasons to be pissed off but nowhere to go thanks to the abysmal failure of ‘the left’ in this country that was hijacked by cynical political operatives and deep-pocketed, tax chiseling plutocrats like the Koch Brothers. Being that a good amount of the pseudo-movement, other than the re-branded browshirts of the GOP base are remnants of what used to be the Ron Paul revolution, which due to the anti-interventionist, pro-civil liberties and anti-Federal Reserve stance of Dr. Paul I long had been sympathetic to despite my loathing of libertarian economic theory. I got into this thing, writing and raising hell out of the need to stop fascism at all costs so I have always been of the opinion that a progressive-libertarian alliance would be sufficient to slow the machine, there was enough common ground and the other things could be hashed out later on after the fascist cancer was cut out. I followed up “A Farewell to Arms” with another piece entitled In Defense of Joe Stack that ensured that the break with the ‘left’ would be permanent. It was about as subtle as the attack on Colonel Kurtz’s compound at the end of Apocalypse Now.

I tried to work with the disaffected and even reached out to my local Glenn Beck teabagger klavern to try to talk sense but it was useless, those people are just too far gone, to propagandized, too angry and too deeply infiltrated by the dead enders of the the Republican base and the Religious Right, there is nothing left of what used to be the Ron Paul movement, like the party itself all non-adherents to the Ayn Rand doctrine of “Fuck You I’m Rich” and the Neocon dogma of imperial conquest and the sanctimonious place on the planet for the wart on the ass of humanity that is fortress Israel any who don’t drink the Kool Aid have been ousted. So much for that Idea. I have only worked sparingly on writing over the past year and a half, largely out of a sense of total disillusion and the absence of any sort of organized resistance to the ongoing destruction of what remains of the country that I was born into.

But the lone wolf thing just doesn’t work that well, not when the economy continues to collapse, with an assist to a fanatical Republican party that will block any effort by the extremely disappointing Obama to mediate and somehow get people back to work. The GOP has long been a bastion of a certain fascism, at least since the end of World War II and the tracks of the oligarchs along with their descent into gangster capitalism through their affiliations with rescued Nazi war criminals, rogue intelligence networks, stone cold military psychopaths and organized crime are easily traceable for one who devotes a bit of time to the job. What is ongoing in America today is a textbook example of how the capitalist mafia, the CIA operates abroad, Robert Parry’s recent piece entitled The GOP’s CIA Playbook: Destabilize the Country to Sweep Back Into Power is a must read and I excerpt the following:

Modern Republicans have a simple approach to politics when they are not in the White House: Make America as ungovernable as possible by using almost any means available, from challenging the legitimacy of opponents to spreading lies and disinformation to sabotaging the economy.

Over the past four decades or so, the Republicans have simply not played by the old give-and-take rules of politics. Indeed, if one were to step back and assess this Republican approach, what you would see is something akin to how the CIA has destabilized target countries, especially those that seek to organize themselves in defiance of capitalist orthodoxy.

To stop this spread of “socialism,” nearly anything goes. Take, for example, Chile in the early 1970s when socialist President Salvador Allende won an election and took steps aimed at improving the conditions of the country’s poor.

Under the direction of President Richard Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the CIA was dispatched to engage in psychological warfare against Allende’s government and to make the Chilean economy “scream.”

U.S. intelligence agencies secretly sponsored Chilean news outlets, like the influential newspaper El Mercurio, and supported “populist” uprisings of truckers and housewives. On the economic front, the CIA coordinated efforts to starve the Chilean government of funds and to drive unemployment higher.

Worsening joblessness could then be spun by the CIA-financed news outlets as proof that Allende’s policies didn’t work and that the only choice for Chile was to scrap its social programs. When Allende compromised with the Right, that had the additional benefit of causing friction between him and some of his supporters who wanted even more radical change.

As Chile became increasingly ungovernable, the stage was set for the violent overthrow of Allende, the installation of a rightist dictatorship, and the imposition of “free-market” economics that directed more wealth and power to Chile’s rich and their American corporate backers.

Though the Allende case in Chile is perhaps the best known example of this intelligence strategy (because it was investigated by a Senate committee in the mid-1970s), the CIA has employed this approach frequently around the world. Sometimes the target government is removed without violence, although other times a bloody coup d’etat has been part of the mix.

Home to Roost

So, it is perhaps fitting that a comparable approach to politics would eventually come home to roost in the United States, even to the point that some of the propaganda funding comes from outside sources (think of Rev. Sun Myung Moon’s Washington Times and Australian media mogul Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.)

Obviously, given the wealth of the American elites, the relative proportion of the propaganda funding is derived more domestically in the United States than it would be in a place like Chile (or some other unfortunate Third World country that has gotten on Washington’s bad side).

But the concept remains the same: Control as much as possible what the population gets to see and hear; create chaos for your opponent’s government, economically and politically; blame if for the mess; and establish in the minds of the voters that their only way out is to submit, that the pain will stop once your side is back in power.

Today’s Republicans have fully embraced this concept of political warfare, whereas the Democrats generally have tried to play by the old rules, acquiescing when Republicans are in office with the goal of “making government work,” even if the Republicans are setting the agenda.

Unlike the Democrats and the Left, the Republicans and the Right have prepared themselves for this battle, almost as if they are following a CIA training manual. They have invested tens of billions of dollars in a propaganda infrastructure that operates 24/7, year-round, to spot and exploit missteps by political enemies.

This vertically integrated media machine allows useful information to move quickly from a right-wing blog to talk radio to Fox News to the Wall Street Journal to conservative magazines and book publishing. Right-wing propagandists are well-trained and well-funded so they can be deployed to all manner of public outlets to hammer home the talking points.

It’s pretty simple to see that the Republican party, which IS by definition a terrorist organization is hellbent on letting it all burn, so intent are they at mobilizing their millions of haters to defend a system that quite simply is as much a failure as the Communism that they for the better part of a half-century used to justify their plunder of nations, drug trafficking and money laundering and racketeering scams. Now fully metastasized, the menace of full blown carnivorous capitalism has come home to feed, those who really run this lunatic funhouse will continue to exploit economic misery, racism and fear using their media messaging machine and Operation Gladio style entrenched stay behind network until Americans are in the streets killing each other while they continue to suck the blood from the dessicated carcass of what used to be a land of opportunity.  That day is coming, while our corporate media crawls around in the semen stained underpants of Anthony Weiner or peddles more tabloid pornography about dead children to the lemmings, electronically colonizing their brains the world is erupting outside of our borders, look at Greece, soon there will be a triggering event and the chaos will come home, progressives, liberals and non-politicized folks are going to have to make a choice, kill or be killed, it’s the law of the jungle and it has been embraced by those who run it. GABOS. – Game Ain’t Based On Sympathy.

Plumb Mad Dog Mean: The system has failed and the day of reckoning is coming, best saddle up and get prepared lest you be destroyed by it, read some history on what happens when the thugs are unleashed. If you happen to have children ponder how you would like to see them raped in front of you, the last thing that you witness before your own murder. The armies of darkness are already connected and are awaiting their orders from their handlers on the right-wing propaganda machine, the real economic conditions continue to create misery and the always convenient scapegoats are produced.The time has come to cast aside any notions of being able to rationalize with these people because it isn’t going to happen. One could always flee the country, much like the Jews who could see the writing on the wall fled Nazi Germany before Hitler’s murder machine was operating at peak efficiency but that is expensive, prohibitive and let’s face it, the rest of the world, save the Muslim countries is under the control of the same type of elitist rich pigs that America is and the war machine is hellbent on destroying the Muslim world as surely as the American Indians were laid to waste to make room for expansionism and capitalist greed. The time to fight is now, no more fucking around, especially with the political process – it just doesn’t work!

Embracing a New Radicalism: The only way to fight back against the fascist endgame is to return to our past, prior to the “New Left” that arose out of the protest movements of the Sixties and that which to this day far too many continue to embrace despite it’s outdated model. There will be no more mass protests, the days of turning out into the streets is over, the right-wing has ensured that not only will there be no media coverage but their goons ala the scumbaggers are drooling over the prospect of being unleashed, like the Rockefellers of yore who bussed in murderous freaks to break strikes so will the front groups of Koch Industries and their ilk bus in vicious haters to bust up the hated libruls [sic]. Those who cling to a resurgence of that form of mass protest are as delusional as those who still believe that change can be affected at the ballot box, While there continue to be suckups, sycophants and self-infatuated groupies who continue to buy Brand Obama and the even worse Brand Democrat a return to the radicalism of old, rather than the sign carrying, keyboard thumping ineffective form of activism that exists on the pathetic remnants of the “professional left” today. It is not effective and shooting a few marbles from a slingshot is not going to put a dent in the Deathstar that is the American fascist capitalist infrastructure, it’s militarized police state, high-tech surveillance and disinformation machine and legions of trained activists and spokespeople. For what is needed, I would suggest listening to Chris Hedges, a man as reviled by the “professional left” and it’s venal gatekeepers like HBO’s Bill Maher and his ilk as he is by the mouth-breathing fascist droogs on the right. Hedges has always been a hero of mine and his work has continued to rise in order to address the threat that we face today. Hedges, who recently wrote a scathing book entitled The Death of the Liberal Class is taking his game to the next level, his recent work and speeches, like this one on The Myth of Human Progress are essential for those who are serious about surviving. Hedges addresses the rancid putrescence of the failed liberal establishment and doesn’t mince words:

We will be saved only with the birth of a new militant radicalism, one that defies all formal power structures including the Democratic party.

The failure of the liberal class whose role in society is designed to prevent unchecked assault by centralized power is discovering what happens when you tolerate the intolerant. Let hate speech pollute your airwaves, let corporations buy up your courts and state and federal legislative bodies, let the Christian religion be manipulated by charlatans to demonize Muslims, gays and intellectuals, discredit science, sanctify unfettered capitalism and become a source of personal enrichment, let unions wither under corporate assault, let social services and public education be gutted and stripped of funding, let Wall Street carry out fraud, deception and plunder with impunity and you roll out the welcome mat for fascism.

The liberal class and much of the left has busied itself with the toothless pursuits of inclusiveness, multi-culturalism, identity politics and tolerance.. a word Martin Luther King never used and forgot about the primacy of justice. We chatter about something called the American Dream now that the oligarchic elite have regained control of all of the levers of power that dream is being exposed as a cruel hoax and we are being shoved back into the cage. Slick public relations campaigns, the collapse of public education .. nearly a third of the country is illiterate or semi-literate…the rise of amoral politicians such as  Bill Clinton and Barack Obama who pose as liberals while selling their souls and betraying basic liberal and democratic principles for corporate money have left us largely defenseless.

The last vestiges of unionized in the public sector are reduced to protesting in states like Wisconsin for collective bargaining – in short the right to ask employers for fair working conditions. This shows how far labor and the country has deteriorated and it looks as though even this basic right to ask as well as raise money through union dues has at least for the moment been successfully revoked in Madison. The Democratic party and the remnants of organized labor steered passions in Wisconsin away from a general strike where workers should have gone to tepid attempts to recall legislators. The public debate meanwhile dominated by corporate controlled systems of information, ignores the steady impoverishment of the working class and absence of legal and regulatory mechanisms to prevent our reconfiguration into a neo-feudal society. The airwaves are saturated with good looking and charming corporate apologists. They ask us why public sector employees have benefits sneeringly called entitlements while non-unionized and working class people are denied and the argument is ingenious, it pits desperate worker against desperate worker in a mad scramble for scraps. It is of course the wrong question, why we should ask don’t working men and women have health insurance, pension plans, job protection and living wages and until we again speak in the language of open class warfare, grasping as those who went before us did, that the elite will always promote itself at our expense, we are doomed to a 21^st century serfdom. The elite with no check left on their greed and criminality are gorging on money, while they are slashing basic services, budgets for schools, fire fighters and assistance programs for children and the elderly so WE will pay for the fraud they committed when they wiped out 14 trillion dollars of housing wealth, wages and retirement savings.

Hedges is reviled by the same type of vapid, self-righteous cretins who I chose to disassociate myself from when I left ‘the left’, I refuse to be a “team player” in the “post-partisan era” and for those who would crucify one as myself on the cross of political correctness for my rhetorical flourishes – they can go and fuck themselves. I have been called everything: whack job, fascist, misogynist, Jew hater, homophobe, heretic and reactionary, coming from feckless weaklings with no stomach for the rough stuff I suppose that is a badge of honor. Being that I am now totally dispensing of all bullshit let it be known that first and foremost that I fucking hate everybody, spare me the pox of political correctness that is what drove me away from the butterflies, moonbeams, zebras and fairy tales crowd in the first place. Others should shun those who would negotiate with fascists who should be destroyed and tolerate the most intolerant in order to wear their high-hats, they would be arguing that “they are better than that” by not engaging those who wish to destroy them while they are in the cattle cars being trucked off to the gas chambers and forced labor camps.

So, it is with this that I now return to my roots, a rhetorical bomb-thrower hellbent on engaging and destroying the fascists, collateral damage be damned. Time to get plumb mad dog motherfucking mean because you don’t bring a protest sign to a knife fight. 

A nickel’s worth of my two cents

EE

Let Them Eat War: Mr. Obama Joins the Club

The moment the first explosions rocked Libya I knew that Barack Obama had just locked down another four years in the White House. This was his initiation, his right of passage, just like laying in a mock coffin and sucking off upperclassmen in the Skull and Bones tomb. By definition every U.S. President is a war criminal and our very own proud owner of the Nobel Peace Prize finally has that most precious of things, a war that he can claim as his own. Not that Afghanistan and Iraq which continue to burn, bankrupt and morally pollute didn’t qualify Obama for the exalted title of war criminal in chief but they are really Bush’s wars, now the Pope of Hope has pissed his name into the snow. Of course there is all of the happy horseshit about the international seal of approval including that of the United Nations but ultimately is is more war for a nation that remains to become weary of such bloody and ultimately futile adventures. The national credit card was long ago maxed out on wars of choice, the monstrous sword of Damocles that is the national debt hangs over the heads of every American currently alive and whomever happens to be born here over the next fifty years but there is always more support for America’s favorite pastime – killing brown people.  

Eight years to the day after the abortion that was George W. Bush dialed up the attack on Iraq Mr.Obama took time off from his NCAA tournament bracket and green-lighted the attack on the devil Col. Gadhafi who like the earlier version of the “New Hitler”, Saddam Hussein is killing his own people. Now there is change that you can believe in! Never mind the blatant hypocrisy of not launching a similar attack in support of those seeking ‘democracy’ in Bahrain courtesy of our great friends in the House of Saud (the irony that 15 of the alleged 19 September 11th ‘hijackers came from Saudi Arabia is lost on the American sheeple) seeking to preserve their tyrannical and corrupt regime. Now that the warfare state has become the preeminent power in America, only nosing out the genocidal Wall Street speculators whose taste for rotting flesh that they can pick for their daily sustenance and who right now are in an orgy of mania on the level of hardened pederasts as they rut with each other in the commodities pits placing futures bets on crude. The D.J.I.A. (Dick Jammed In Ass) was up 178 points today despite the lack of positive real economic news that benefits the ordinary fucked-over schmuck who is now left to contemplate the coming of five-dollar a gallon gasoline and has yet to get a handle on the accompanying hyper-spike in food prices that will follow like a category five blast of an economic hurricane after the initial tidal surge. In a bit of news that I find both somewhat encouraging for a bizarre reason and terrifying the first signs of violence and rage connected to double digit food inflation manifested itself at a San Antonio, Texas area Taco Bell where a customer named Ricardo Jones went batshit over a price hike on his bag of Beefy Crunch Burritos and engaged in a potentially deadly standoff with local police after he fired an assault rifle at police. Such incidents are to be expected in a culture where gun violence is revered but somehow it seems to be crossing a line when an extra 3.50 tacked onto a bag of burritos could lead to a Heat style shootout with the blue boys.

Think that Obama is going to save you from the rapacious looter capitalist flesh-eaters? Think again, not only is the Pope of Hope now a real live War President but he got the message from the 2010 elections that anything other than boot-licking obedience to the banksters, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce outsourcing pimps and the rest of the corporate pigs will not be tolerated. Look for Obama to assume the traditional position for commander in chief when it comes to the finance oligarchs, assume the position of footstool and don’t ever think of fucking with them again and they will be very kind to his reelection campaign. Barry O. is assured of another term for his willingness to have all of America take a haircut so that the Wall Street casinos can have plenty of comp chips to gamble with. Not even Wall Street and the Chamber are insane enough to tolerate even in moments of amusement the possibility of a Sarah Palin presidency leaving the rapidly fading star of the scumbaggers to embark on some sort of world tour to pitch the virtues of entrenched American stupidity, gross ignorance and xenophobia, today’s stop will be in Israel where she will do Wasilla style crack-ho style lapdances for Bibi Netanyahu who likely only is going to spare the time wasted in bothering with her out of some sense of honor among thieves and a gift to his most reliable fifth-columnist William Kristol. Hell, Bibi entertained Fred Fucking Thompson in the run-up to the 2007-2008 GOP primaries so maybe hosting Palin is for sheer entertainment value, it has to be more exciting than trying to converse with a cadaver like that marble-mouthed lug of a bad actor.

CRUISE MISSILE LIBERALS LOVE WAR TOO!

The most disgusting thing of all regarding Obama and his wars, both in terms of military ordnance dropped on civilians and the ongoing war on civil liberties at home is just how down with it all that the liberals are with it all. Liberals, especially liberal Democrats LOVE war, as long as it can be wrapped up in some sort of a self-righteous humanitarian guise.The Libyan adventure gives them one that they can line up and salute for. It has been a long and sad regression on the ‘left’ since Rahm Emanuel and the conniving Democrats were able to successfully ostracize the anti-war movement back in the run-up to the Pelosi-Reid majority in 2006. Not only was impeachment of the Bushreich war criminals off the table but the law was laid down that any such criticism of the wars was taboo. Afghanistan was embraced by the Democrats as ‘the good war’ while the Iraq debacle was chained to Bush’s neck like an albatross. Cindy Sheehan was excommunicated after she served her purpose to the corrupt and cynical DLC/Corporatist Democrats, MoveOn.org was bitch-slapped after they dared to question the motivations of the great General Petraeus and the assemblage of sycophants and travelers the likes of Ariana Huffington, Cyber Stalin Markos Moulitsas Zuniga and their ilk all fell into line and for the sake of political (and lucrative career enhancing) expedience all learned how to just stop worrying and love the bomb. Obama was elected in a landslide, reneged on his implied promises to close Guantanamo Bay, restore accountability and the rule of law and draw the wars down and the useful idiots on the ‘left’ all got onboard. Whether it was the silence over matters that would have in years past had them screaming for Bush’s head on a pike or a rethinking of antiwar stances to now make supporting the obviously neocon ginned up Iran Green Revolution or biting on the bait of Time Magazine’s cover of the Afghan woman with her nose cut off (see above picture) the once pacifist ‘left’ became apologists for Obama’s murderous actions. Even Code Pink renounced their principles and whored out to the war machine once their guy had the keys.

And today as the bombs and cruise missiles continue to rain down on Libya there is more of the same sort of fatheaded liberal apologists, whether it be the insipid Bill Press who is on Sirius/XM morning drive time radio with the daily DNC talking points or the windbag Juan Cole on Antiwar.com Radio the support for this latest filthy, anti-constitutional attack on a country that didn’t do one goddamned thing to threaten America was as vomitous as it was definitive as to the true character of the state worshipping hypocrites that they are. Chris Hedges pegged the liberals dead on for the cheese-eaters that they have become, first in his savage and dead bang diatribe Liberals are Useless and later on in his book The Death of the Liberal Class. Hedges, who has come to be the moral voice of these most immoral and diseased of times hits it spot on again in his recent piece Power Concedes Nothing Without a Demand that speaks to the abject failure of American liberal institutions as they have been subverted with nary a whimper by a decades running coordinated and now unstoppable fascist/militarist element juggernaut:

The liberal class is discovering what happens when you tolerate the intolerant. Let hate speech pollute the airways. Let corporations buy up your courts and state and federal legislative bodies. Let the Christian religion be manipulated by charlatans to demonize Muslims, gays and intellectuals, discredit science and become a source of personal enrichment. Let unions wither under corporate assault. Let social services and public education be stripped of funding. Let Wall Street loot the national treasury with impunity. Let sleazy con artists use lies and deception to carry out unethical sting operations on tottering liberal institutions, and you roll out the welcome mat for fascism.

The liberal class has busied itself with the toothless pursuits of inclusiveness, multiculturalism, identity politics and tolerance—a word Martin Luther King never used—and forgotten about justice. It naively sought to placate ideological and corporate forces bent on the destruction of the democratic state. The liberal class, like the misguided democrats in the former Yugoslavia or the hapless aristocrats in the Weimar Republic, invited the wolf into the henhouse. The liberal class forgot that, as Karl Popper wrote in “The Open Society and Its Enemies,” “If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”

Why is it that there is never any money to find socially beneficial programs, education, the rebuilding of a crumbling infrastructure, renewable energy programs or anything that is useful to actual human beings in America but there is always money for war? This speaks to a deep cancer in our society, our precious green and camouflage clad ‘heroes’ have been glorified through movies, television shows, print media, toys and video games that worship war. Ike knew what the hell he was taking about when he warned of the rise of the Military Industrial Complex and the accompanying costs to a society that at the time was filled with wonderful capability, economic and scientific advantage and a gold plated reputation coming out of World War II that was only beginning to be tarnished by the rise of the CIA, the brutal public murder of President Kennedy and the subsequent Vietnam War. Something went terribly awry in America around the time of the JFK killing and the same institutional elements behind that coup d’etat are still calling the shots. All else is subservient to the agenda of the American war machine,

As if any more confirmation that Obama was just a lightweight version of  Lyndon Baines Johnson without the social programs was needed the attack on Libya makes any more argument on that one moot. Mr. Obama was nowhere to be seen in Madison during the mass protests that none of the corporate media deemed worthy of coverage, choosing instead to focus on created news like a few dozen or so geriatrics, losers and deluded and easily duped freaks flying Gadsen flags and wearing those faggy Revolutionary War style wigs and tri-color hats descending on town hall meetings to vent their frustration at the mythical death panels that in real life reside inside insurance claims departments. He will however be seen pimping his manhood over the ongoing attacks on Libyan civilians. Hey, Bill Clinton bombed the shit out of Belgrade and contributed to the starvation and misery of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children with his bombings and sanctions, cruelty that his own Secretary of State Madeline Albright went on 60 Minutes to obscenely justify as acceptable.

I have to agree with Chris Hedges, Liberals ARE Useless….take my word for it, I ran with the pack for long enough before I was shunned as a leper for daring to say the obvious that if it was wrong under Bush, then it is also wrong under Obama. But being excommunicated from the world of the dueling cults of the jackass and the elephant is just fine with me. 

Meet the New Nazis, Same as the Old Nazis

The corporate media on Sunday sought to play on both the gullibility, the emotions and the misplaced sense of patriotism of the public when launching this bullshit biscuit into the lemming feeding trough. Gadhafi said the strikes were a confrontation between the Libyan people and “the new Nazis,” and promised “a long-drawn war.”

“You have proven to the world that you are not civilized, that you are terrorists — animals attacking a safe nation that did nothing against you,” Gadhafi said in a televised speech.

The Colonel might just be onto something there. The Homeland (formerly the USA) is currently engaged in an endless series of wars of conquest, employs a blitzkrieg style of attack strategy (shock and awe) in the initial attacks of target countries, is currently engaging in a campaign of ruthless persecution of a religious minority (the anti-Muslim hysteria), runs a gulag of secret prisons and torture facilities, has a government that not only spies on ordinary citizens but encourages them to spy on each other and rat out disloyal or bad citizen type behavior, employs a kangaroo court justice system in which ordinary citizens can be brought up on vague charges (terrorism) or just disappeared (the stripping of Habeas Corpus) and disappeared. All of this is facilitated by a pack of vicious thugs who worship state power (teabaggers and Christian Zionists) and was set into motion by a modern day Reichstag Fire (9/11). Then there is that magnificently efficient system of state propaganda in the corporate media that Herr Goebbels would have been proud of. In Der Heimat versus Hitler’s Nazi regime though at least the trains ran on time and the German infrastructure was the advanced envy of the world, so much that Eisenhower modeled the intrastate highway system after it. Today, in 2011 the roads are pocked with automobile chewing potholes and other defective surfaces, the bridges are crumbling and even when the government tries to do something to shore it up and look to the future as in the national high-speed rail initiatives American Nazi apparatchik in waiting like Florida Governor Rick Scott turns town the money in order to nurture the hatred of his own personal S.A. the teabaggers. Make no mistake, with the coming wave of hyperinflation and dollar devaluation there is going to be plenty of opportunity for the real goons to assert themselves after Obama’s piss-warm and utterly feckless regime which has failed to change anything falls and then the pogroms will begin.

When taking into consideration the OSS/CIA (Wall Street’s enforcement arm) post-WW II assimilation of thousands of Nazis, including serious war criminals into the service of American finance capitalism under the guise of waging the Cold War it’s apparent that the Third Reich didn’t really lose the war, it just changed venues.

Just my two cents

EE

Star Spangled Land of Misfit Toys

Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don’t know because we don’t want to know.

Aldous Huxley

I have long found Chris Hedges to be a beacon of morality in the belly of the beast that is post 9/11 fascist America. His book War is a Force that Gives Us Meaning is a superbly written, uncompromising look at the horrors of war seen through the eyes of a man who has been there, Hedges served as a war correspondent in some of the most vicious and senseless slaughtering sprees of the late Twentieth Century. His sheer courage in coming out in the early days of the Bushreich and denouncing war during a commencement address at Rockford College when the phony War on Terror was just ramping up during which he was jeered by the audience, his microphone cut off and he was run like a rabid dog from the campus, later his employer, the so-called liberal New York Times stabbed him in the back. Hedges went on to write what I consider to be a definitive expose of the authoritarian Christian Right entitled American Fascists and contributes weekly columns to the fine website Truthdig. As a fan, it was only natural that I would pick up his latest scathing condemnation of the dumb, foul rottenness that is America in terminal decline and while uneven it delivers like a baseball bat to the head. We truly are living in the existential Hell that is the Empire of Illusion.

We are a culture that has been denied, or has passively given up, the linguistic and intellectual tools to cope with complexity, to separate illusion from reality. We have traded the printed word for the gleaming image. Public rhetoric is designed to be comprehensible to a ten-year old child or an adult with a sixth-grade reading level. Most of us speak at this level, are entertained and think at this level. We have transformed our culture into a vast replica of Pinocchio’s Pleasure Island, where boys were lured with the promise of no school and endless fun. They were all, however, turned into donkeys – a symbol, in Italian culture, of ignorance and stupidity.

-Chris Hedges

It’s no small wonder that I am at times accused of being an elitist by many that I know for not giving a rat’s ass what silly babble and games what they participate in. It is really a tragic and sad waste of a mind when people have nothing to talk about that is any more intellectually in depth than what was on television the prior night, who will win the next ridiculous football game or wring their hands over manufactured McNews stories like the boy and the balloon but this is what people find important. Try to invoke any serious real issues and one gets the thousand yard stare, a few moments of awkward silence and then the mental loop restarts and the ‘conversation’ returns to what was on television, shit, I know some people who are so fucked up that they even talk about the commercials. I happen to have at one time worked with a clique that idolized Jared Fogel, the pitchman for Subway who became the avatar of the American obsession with weight loss to look like the false idealized images that they see on TV. Fogel is the former scale busting mammoth who lost hundreds of pounds allegedly by eating nothing but Subway sandwiches while in college. As with all urban myths the legend of Jared is comprised of far more bullshit and outright chicanery than it is of serious truths. One who has become a walking talking Subway robot by spreading the gospel of Jared is one of the sheeple who is in the final stages of the consumer capitalist evolution and should be cryogenically frozed until the day that human cloning is perfected and the corporations can truly become Gods of creation.

What is not mentioned in the constant advertising featuring the bespectacled yuppie wonder boy in his post-flubber days is that his successful weight loss formula was more the result of a drastic reduction in daily calorie consumption as well as regular exercise than from gobbling turkey sandwiches and peddling Subway’s snake oil. In fact if you go to Subway’s website you will notice the preponderance of disclaimers on every Jared related page. That Fogel is a nationally recognized pseudo celebrity (he still shows up on NFL postgame shows) is no surprise, especially when you see the orgy of adulation over the contestants of American Idol or Survivor or some other crapfest who are made into examples that in America, anyone, no matter how humble, fucked and beset by myriad of woes can become famous and therefore evidence that the system works. Here is an interesting little site that I found on The Cult of Jared that is recommended reading. They want to have their meatball sub and eat it too but the truth is that Fogel could have lost the weight eating at Taco Bell, McDonalds or Popeye’s had he undertaken a similar cut in caloric intake and engaged in regular exercise. The Subway diet plan as with all get rich quick schemes or revolutionary weight loss plans are quite simply only chum for flocking suckers the likes of which there is no shortage of in modern day America. Of course the dietary industry which is the modern day equivalent of snake oil and miracle cures peddled by the traveling medicine men of the old West has a vested interested in keeping Americans fat for life, as much as a vested interest as the fast food and restaurant lobby who are not above producing fake ‘trust us we’re experts’ type studies that encourage more gluttony.

But I was talking about feeling like one of the tribe who has been cast out as one who just doesn’t get it, everyone is talking about the Super Bowl commercials, the tripe that is broadcast into their skulls every night when they get home that renders their brains into so much gelatin or whatever else is thrown out as bread and circuses. I am a rarity, an anachronism in this empire of illusion, I openly denounce television and unlike millions, I read books. So if that makes me an elitist in the eyes of the slaves so be it. Shit, as the saying goes in the land of the blind a one eyed man can be king and there is nothing quite like understanding that the USA has become a land of lemmings, wimps, haters, abject morons and regressive right-wing filth that has been nurtured like mushrooms – kept in the dark and fed a steady diet of bullshit. Heretics such as myself fit Mencken’s very definition of the iconoclast:

The Iconoclast proves enough when he proves by his blasphemy that this or that idol is defectively convincing – that at least one visitor to the shrine is left full of doubts.
And as a corporate wage slave I am all too aware that I am a pariah, a leper and the most dangerous and vilified of all – GASP – a pessimist. Far be it from me to check my dignity at the door and take my hit of optimism opium from the pushers who staff the gulag. In less primitive times one who dares to violate the dictates of the workplace positivity police would have their tongue cut out and be cast out into the wilderness. Today one is first mocked and shunned by imbecilic childish co-workers and backbone challenged managers and if the ostracism doesn’t work there is PIP or some other acronym that stands for the corporate form of Dean Wormer’s double secret probation which is the final step before firing and the corporation is able to shaft the ‘malcontent’ when it comes to unemployment (they will keep their dead peasant insurance policies though) and any severance that may have been earned. Corporate America is a cruel and heartless place, a combination of Orwell, Huxley, Machiavelli, Tony Robbins and Dogbert’s Top Secret Management Handbook and the governing ideology of that particular institution is what has fucked the entire country, like the alien black oil in the X Files, it has seeped in and prepared the pod people for the harvest. But more on the quackery of the optimism opium a bit later.

But I digress…..

Hedges’ brilliant and passionate smack down of the desolate wasteland of 21st century America and the pathetic lost souls that inhabit the fucking place only validate my sheer contempt for the masses of asses, the useful idiots and my fellow Murkans. Shit, I really do hate most fucking people, like Daniel Plainview in the classic morality play There Will Be Blood, I find nothing good in them…. at least not anymore since the Reagan years and the demarcation from anything even remotely resembling reality. My faith in the humanity and redemptive qualities of my fellow Americans has long ago left the building and I am fully cognizant that I live in some Bizarro universe where I am one of the dwindling number of holdouts who has not been assimilated by the body snatchers. Fucked is fucked, as an old sage bartender once told me in my borderline petty criminal early years… ”desperation is not pretty”. The book is broken into five long pieces on the power of illusion and the ruinous moral and social consequences of each: celebrity, love, wisdom, happiness and ultimately America, in my opinion the penultimate illusion of them all. I have to say that I was even stunned at the job that he does in this book on exposing the bursting and sweating rancid underbelly of capitalist American culture post 9/11. Hedges critiques the reality television ‘fuck you’ culture of crap like a master coroner performing an autopsy on all that is rotten, vile and viscerally doomed about the media culture that has swallowed us whole.

“We deal in illusions, man. None of it is true. But you people sit there day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds. We’re all you know. You’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here. You’re beginning to think that the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you. You dress like the tube. You eat like the tube. You even think like the tube. In God’s name, you people are the real thing, WE are the illusion.”

-Howard Beale

Let’s face it, anyone who is not intoxicated by the siren song of the Matrix, who is not plugged into the hive and who is fully aware of the downward trajectory of this sorry assed country is fully aware of the power of illusion that is broadcast into nearly every home, the most insidious mind control device in human hisotry is that glass screened electronic god in the living room. A rogue government and the oligarchy that it serves owes their success in colonizing the brains of the lemmings to that pernicious invention and the use of it to erase and reprogram the human mind. Television, at it’s most basic level is a tool of the corporations to advertise, to create a set of artificial needs, false ideals and Aryan American archetypes in order to sell products. People have long since immersed themselves in such imagery to the extent of adapting their own inner workings to include snippets of what they see as television. Hedges first chapter deals with how the culture of celebrity has corrupted the very souls of Americans and he uses the examples of sensationalist, mean-spirited, mental masturbatory droolfests such as professional wrestling, the Jerry Springer Show and it’s imitators and reality television swill as examples of how successful that the dumbing down, the coarsening and the fattening of the sheeple has been.

There can be no serious argument that the average intellect in this country has been in freefall since the advent of television, specifically cable television. It is the opiate of the masses, the tool of the oligarchy and It is a damned certainty that elements within the government immediately realized the mind controlling potential of television just as big business realized that the new medium could be harnessed for advertising and commercial purposes so did the power brokers realize that it could be similarly utilized to manufacture consent, a term coined by Noam Chomsky who like so many others who dare to ask the serious questions are ghettoized into little niches, you will never see Chomsky on the corporate media, the same goes for the great John Pilger and especially Chris Hedges. You won’t see Chris Hedges as a guest on the phony liberal cable network shows, he is too serious and his antiwar credentials are impeccable due to his time spent as a war correspondent, he has seen the carnage, the atrocities. If MSNBC’s hallowed duo of Keith Olbermann and Rachel Maddow would ever seriously address the fascist warfare state then they would by out of their GE owned studios faster than shit through a tin horn.

The coming of the 1980’s, Ronald Reagan (our pre Obama product as president) and emerging technologies that would be able to prolong the mental assault 24/7 the American public slowly began to accept televised illusions as real life, revisionist historical entertainment as fact, the glorification of wealth over all else as attainable and realistic and the myth of Rambo as a realistic personification of American foreign policy. I do not have enough time or space to look at this topic here so as to do it justice. The 1980’s saw the spread of corporate nationalist propaganda delivered over hundreds of channels, each appealing to a particular segmentation of a populace too mired in the pathetic quality of the daily grind of their boring and irrelevant lives. Now whenever they needed a fix, the ability to click the little button on the black remote and to be transported into a different world, a world of escape from the drudgery, a world where they could collectively bond with role models test marketed to appeal to their particular fancies, to be politically socialized by talking heads spewing radical ideologies, unencumbered by the Fairness Doctrine which was repealed under Reagan and which would forever change their way of thinking as well as to demonize what had been the real America prior to January 20 1981. They were given everything and anything in order to keep them tuned in so that the propagandists could keep the stimulation applied, the indoctrination process could continue uninterrupted, the herd could be brought to order and shepherded in directions that were desirable to their masters.

Television in itself is a relatively new invention, having only gained mass exposure in the past half century or so but if you want to approximate a time when the demarcation line between fantasy and reality in American life began to become defined it would definitely be in the early 1980’s with the explosion in the satellite and cable television industries. This is the time that it became possible to pump 100+ channels of violence, filth, fascist political indoctrination, Horatio Alger anyone can get rich quick scheme infomercials, lurid sexual innuendo and whatever other flotsam and jetsam of the human spirit that could be mined for profit into millions of homes throughout the country. The rise of both the radical religious right as well as the rise of the political reactionary right can both be traced to the rise in the availability of cable television and how those movements were able to use the technology to brainwash the masses.

Thus began the dumbing down:

Children became more violent and dysfunctional.

Freak shows like Morton Downey and Springer drew mass audiences while pandering to deviates who would see their sorry lives displayed for public amusement.

Today more people vote on cheese talent shows like American Idol than in most elections.

Television also creates insecurity and mental illness, viewers of too much television are often unable to make the differentiation between fantasy and reality, look at the rise in school shootings and generally deviant violent behavior. They live vicariously through the imagery designed to sell them caricatures of a lifestyle that they in turn believe that must be lived up to in order to be ‘normal’. The barrage of imagery as well as its calculated usage to influence the psyche by those whose craft is manipulation has a devastating effect on Americans. The inability to detach oneself from television worlds breeds violence, insecurity, greed and other such undesirable behavior. This is especially true for children who are very impressionable, there are highly paid marketing firms who specialize in trying to get the products and or ideas of those who pay them seared into the minds of kids from the earliest age possible in order to create lifetime customers. Is this evil? If not outright evil it is certainly devoid of any sort of decent ethical principle but then again isn’t this exactly the sort of deviant behavior that unchecked capitalism is intended to produce?

Will there be a time when television fantasy, physical reality and dreams become indistinguishable to some? Is that time already here? The psychological dependence on television to create identity and loyalty should be a national shame. Generations that have been born into the cable television era have become more violent, more superficial, more unquestioning and most importantly, far dumber than those who were their predecessors.

The rise to power of the evil regime of Hitler was borne on the wings of massive public rallies, fantastic gatherings steeped in the power of nationalism, symbolism, fire, resentment and demagogic ravings of destiny. The most famous of the state sponsored bacchanalia being the 1934 Nuremberg rally, meticulously choreographed and captured on film by Leni Riefenstahl, Triumph of the Will would become the benchmark for all German propaganda. The national madness of the German people can be seen in these rallies and films, the unraveling and descent of a sophisticated society into primal and pure evil was facilitated by them.

With television there is no need for mass rallies, the demagoguery and imagery can be delivered directly into your very own living room. One has only to watch the raving Glenn Beck on FOX and to see the despearate maniacs who take to the streets as he eggs them on, incites them against the great phantom socialist, communist, liberal conspiracy – to borrow from the late, great Molly Ivins – it probably sounded better in its original German.

Porn is about reducing women to corpses. It is about necrophilia. ….The one emotion they are allowed to display is an unquenchable desire to satisfy men, especially if that desire involves the women’s physical and emotional degradation. The lighting in the films is harsh and clinical. Pubic hair is shaved off to give the women the look of young girls or rubber dolls. Porn, which advertises itself as sex, is a bizarre, bleached pantomime of sex. The acts onscreen are beyond human endurance. The scenarios are absurd. The manicured and groomed bodies, the huge artificial breasts, the pouting, oversized lips, the erections that never go down, and the sculpted bodies are unreal. Makeup and production mask blemishes. There are no beads of sweat, no wrinkle lines, no human imperfections. Sex is reduced to a narrow spectrum of sterilized dimensions. It does not include the dank smell of human bodies, the thump of a pulse, taste, breath—or tenderness. Those in the films are puppets, packaged female commodities. They have no honest emotions, are devoid of authentic human beauty and resemble plastic. Pornography does not promote sex, if one defines sex as a shared act between two partners. It promotes masturbation. It promotes the solitary auto-arousal that precludes intimacy and love. Pornography is about getting yourself off at someone else’s expense.

-Chris Hedges

The chapter on pornography entitled the Illusion of Love is not one for the squeamish. The descriptions are clinically graphic and hit like a crowbar to the skull. I will never look at porno the same way again after reading this, I am no connoisseur of such stuff and in the days when I did view it on occasion it was extremely tame compared to the sickening, misogynistic sadism that Hedges describes as being the modern porn underworld. It all ties in with the increasing degradation of the society, the dehumanization, the loss of our souls in pursuit of instant gratification, we are on a ship of doomed fools selling postcards of the hanging and any of the fellow passengers could be a flesh eating zombie ready to fuck you up the ass and eat your brain at any moment.

Hedges focuses on the vicious need for the sort of American male that I would say is exemplified in the Becker/Dittohead/Strong Daddy Christian elements on the far right and the need to wreak revenge against the women who have challenged his blessed, God given right for American male superiority per his birthright, the women are the objects of wrath and subjugation, fantasy and role playing, the scapegoats provided by a rapacious blood sucking oligarchy and the virulent fascist damnation that comes with it. I excerpt one of the tamer pieces from this chapter:

The most successful Internet porn sites and films are those that discover new ways to humiliate and inflict cruelty on women. In the Web site Slut Bus, women are lured into a van, offered money for sex, filmed having sex, and then dumped on the side of the road. Money is held out toward the woman as the van pulls away. She is always left without payment. The message is clear. Women are compliant sex machines. They are good only for sex. And they are not worth paying for their services.

“The mission?” the slutbus.com Web site asks. “Pick up the hottest girls we find. And get them to let us fuck them & cum in their pretty little faces while videotaping the whole thing.”

“The fun?” the site goes on. “Treating these slutty bitches like they deserve to be treated … with a slam bam thank ya ma’am & a swift kick in the ass! What? You thought we would actually pay these sluts? Hahahahaha. Think Again!

There is a discussion with a Dr. Z who preaches the wondrous joys of silicone love doll ownership that is freak-a-tude at its finest in which he describes the ‘relationships’ that he has had over the years with love dolls, proudly proclaiming that the top three or four blow jobs he has had in his life were from his dolls. Reading the two and a half pages of amiable dementia spouted by Dr. Z only made me wonder if he will be the next deranged right-wing psychopath who will show up in a Santa Claus suit at his ex-wife’s family’s Christmas party armed to the teeth and with a homemade flamethrower or some other similar human time bomb incident. This is the sordid type of sickness that lies deeply in the tortured psyches of these wretched pieces of human (and I use that term extremely loosely) garbage once you peel back the rantings of Rush. I learned (much to my sick sense of humor) that there is actually a porno movie that came out called Who’s Nailin’ Paylin: Adventures of a Hockey MILF, I am sure that one is a big hit with the Beckers and Dittohead angry white masturbators whose own cocks are milked dry over such perverse rot while their manhood is measured by the inches of the barrels of their beloved guns, their phallic symbols.

Authoritarian right wing Christian freaks seem to be particularly prone to the dirty nasty nekkid sort of stuff in porn, violence, nudity, humiliation and the Rapture only with ATM (ass to mouth action), cannonades of cum shots and of course the humiliation of the woman figure. Is there anything more vile than Christianity, the very concept of Eve being cloned from Adam and then turned out by Satan is the earliest and far most widely acceptable form of misogynist head fuck in history. The domineering male types, like those in the Promise Keepers and other male dominator factions of the filthy fascist minions of Satanic deceit practiced by the overly horny, goat herding false prophets on the right are nothing but seed sprayers, addicted to masturbation and when their torture fuckfest fantasies can’t be fulfilled by their mousy little child bearing wives they are the ones who are predominantly busted trolling the internet for child sex or other acts of brutality and perversion.

The seed sprayers, yeah, I get a kick out of that little moniker that I just made up, there is something I seem to recall from my child days of being read the riot act out of the unholy, everchanging book of doom that decried self pleasure as the spilling of God’s precious seed or something along those lines. Well these fuckers bring to mind that old classic Outer Limits tale, Specimen Unknown and the space plants who were inadvertently brought back to Earth and took the fucking place over by launching their barrages of little seeds, nice metaphor for the ongoing multiplication and takeover of enlightened society by the retrograde morons, closet sadomasochists (remember Rev. Gary Aldridge?) and leering degenerates throughout the land who get a chubby even thinking of dunking prepubescent little girls (or boys for that matter) into the baptism tank and peeking through their undies.

When I was a kid back in Colorado, we were temporarily captured in the little cult of a mid 70’s local Baptist church and their little bus that was sent out to troll for recruits. A youngish, hip dude named Brother Jess ran the place and while the rampant degeneracy that emerged from the Religious Right’s rise to power in the years of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson and that very strange Timothy LaHaye whose Council For National Policy preached a militarist gospel that is so bizarrely Israel centric…as in Likudnik genocide fever dreams that it could have been concocted by the fucking Mossad itself.

Brother Jess had shoulder length hair, a bitchin’ blonde haired wife with big boobs and in his house a living room to basement mural of the life of Jesus – hand painted no less but he didn’t seem to be more than a good ole boy juiced on Jesus Juice and just preachin the ole time religion, dunking dozens a week in a baptism tank behind the pulpit that could have accommodated Shamu the fucking whale and ensuring that that collection plate got passed around multiple times during services so that the new temple that was being constructed off the main building could be completed. It wasn’t he who was the problem, it was the other freaks who attended that church….they just creeped me out, it was a horrifying experience at such an early age but a formative one. I will always remember when I was just a tyke in the third or fourth grade and overheard the teacher’s assistant who reeked of some sort of liquor laughing about the kids believing in Santa Claus, as if they were stupid or something but while that was like seeing a beloved idol dipped in and dragged though shit (and the terrible realization that my philandering drunken rat bastard father was REALLY eating the cookies and putting the stuff under the tree but I am rambling. I really got the whole concept about how phony good ole time Christian religion was early on, one day on the bus some dimbulb was leading us in a rousing singing of “you can’t get to Heaven with hippie hair, cause the lord don’t like that mess up there” and standing in front of a glowering figure with hair down to his ass and a wild beard and it sure as fuck wasn’t Ted Nugent.

I certainly must confess some deviate behavior earlier in my own life. From going hog wild in some of the raunchiest whorehouses in Subic Bay when I visited there as a 19 year old in the US Navy to having my toes sucked after they had grenadine poured on them in Louisiana’s famous hipster bar Ruby’s Roadhouse but nothing like the vilest forms of fetishistic, violent, reducing a woman to a vagina fuck object that goes on now. After reading Hedges’ description of the Gonzo porn industry I felt like taking a shower, a very cold one to relieve the sensation that I had been bludgeoned over the head. This is some hard core prose and it’s brutality is like a rolling blitzkrieg but that is his intent. The obscenity is that beatdown, slutmania porno is the flip side of the American obsession with murder, war and the glorification of the carnage, wrapped up in faux heroism that flows from the television sets like a backed up shitter. Abu Ghraib comes to mind and Hedges makes that point. The evolution of the fascist society and the melding of the mass mind with sadosexual kink behavior, Christian hatred and repression found an outlet in military condoned assaults on brown skinned Muslim devils was a root cause of the vile twisted perversity of what went on when a bunch of West Virginia peckerwood hicks were encouraged to get their jollies in Saddam’s rape rooms. Just imagine what will happen when the mobs are given the green light to go and round up the liberals.

Positive psychology is to the corporate state what eugenics was to the Nazis.

-Chris Hedges

In his chapter that covers the Illusion of Happiness, Hedges goes after a favorite villain of mine, the positive thinking hoax that I mentioned earlier on in this essay the positive thinking scam. You know the way the con works, it’s all about enforcing conformity and rooted in the need for the corporate state to build an unquestioning supply of cheap, cowed and easily abused labor that can be drawn upon. It’s a standard truck used by all cults but has really taken off with the osmosis of every aspect of American society with the corporate borg. The one trick that is always used by these people is the old litmus test of ‘is the glass half, empty or half full?’, a meaningless mental trick that allows for those with advanced degrees in basket weaving and finger painting to find employment in the Human Resources departments tasked with eliminating the renegades from the cattle. It is a very old school ruse, this think positively trickery, used in earlier times to give some form of comfort to the poor slaves who worked themselves to death, were savagely whipped, starved and crushed to death by the incompetence of their co-workers as they hauled stones to build immense replicas and monuments to the Pharaohs. There are thousands if not millions of shit shovelers, toilers and the abused who must be made to benefit that one son of a bastard who gets his face on the Sphinx. It was religion then, the hope that a better life in some magical kingdom in the sky awaited if only submission to pain and the worst human injustice and cruelty was tolerated, as the giant talking blimp broadcasts in Blade Runner ‘a new life awaits you in the off world colonies’. It was hogwash then, and it’s even more hogwash now.

I have long stated that I could indirectly trace every rotten thing that has gone so horribly awry in America to the denial and delusion associated with the entire ‘think positively’ confidence game. It only encourages apathy and submissiveness and it was the naïve belief in the market based fraud that is capitalism that has wrecked the global economy, the dogma that what is good for Wall Street is good for America, that the bill would never come due on the little pieces of Satanic plastic credit cards that were maxed out to be like the images on the television. The fraudsters who run the banking system were all too happy to inflate the housing bubble that has devastated this country with neutron bomb style efficiency. The never-ending ATM that was phony home equity fueled the mass illusions as long as the flim flam men could scheme to turn that imaginary mortgage equity into derivatives and bad paper that was ultimately worth as much as low grade toilet paper of the 100 grit quality. And it only continued because the jackasses in this country believed the charlatans like Mad Money Cramer, George W. Bush and Alan Greenspan, the Ayn Rand cultist who ran the Fed and came as close as a human being has ever come to being anointed as God on Earth. Suckers all, they bought into it, did not question it as they should have and in the end were impoverished by it. Oh, and allowed themselves to be conned again into bailing out the same banks, the modern day Pharaohs who reside in the temples of avarice that are Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan Chase. Fools, goddamned fools, sheep and morons and we all have made to suffer because of the childish minds of Pollyanna Murkans skipping down the primrose path to perdition who fell for it all hook, line and sinker.

Which is why it is nice to see the entire myth get a long awaited debunking by Hedges and more importantly by Barbara Ehrenreich who actually will get some play in the mainstream media with her new book Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America. She doesn’t criticize the fascist warfare state when calling out the Jiminy Crickets so perhaps people can finally start to ponder how badly they have been hornswoggled by the positivity pimps. I haven’t read the book yet but I plan on it, I did happen to catch her interview with Amy Goodman on Democracy Now the other day and you should check it out if you haven’t already. Once this mindset has been broken there may be a chance but the zombies are legion, perhaps digging through dumpsters and fighting feral cats and dogs for scraps to feed themselves or standing in food pantry lines with their kids will render them somehow susceptible to reason, somehow I doubt it though.

I am reminded of my days as an outside representative who would make regular visits to a certain high profile national chain of convenience stores. The managers of these stores suffered from some sort of shellshock, they were walking wounded, broken people hounded by micromanaging corporate types, tyrannical district managers who always popped in at unexpected times and harangued by customers. They were psychically damaged material doing a thankless job for a pack of corporate pricks. What I remember in particular was one frumpy manager (looked like a dumpster in pantsuit) who had been transformed as some are by taking Jesus into their hearts. ‘Sally’, not her real name of course had found her proverbial file inside of the jailhouse cake because she had just been recruited into the notorious Amway Inc upon which the DeVos family (which includes Xe/Blackwater’s Erik Prince) built it’s massive fortune. ‘Sally’ backed me into a corner and explained that she would soon be wealthy beyond her wildest dreams, out from under the corporate schmucks who she baked bricks for and that her entire mindset was changed after attending Amway drink the Kool Aid sessions. I remember that she tried to explain the difference as though there were two parallel universes and that she had been able to transcend them…..it was like stepping through The Stargate she told me – everything was right on the other side, it was filled with wonderful positive and successful people and she too was going to leave the drudgery behind and join them. You can sell anything in America but nothing sells like hope, it’s like vails of ‘holy’ water sold in a leper colony, there is a reason that that bombastic shit-eating snake oil salesman Dr. Phil exists as a sort of demigod in Murka.

Ultimately though it’s all bullshit, the get rich schemes, the positivity pod people, the idea of transformation into a capitalist chrysalis and ultimately the corporate system itself. Like the wretched slaves in Plato’s cave allegory Americans have learned to love their bondage. As for me, I have always been a heretic, only now I no longer blame myself for not fitting into their bullshit system, choosing to call it out as what it truly is, fraud of the highest order writ large on stone tablets and given to charismatic Judas Goats like Dr. Phil, Oprah, Tony Robbins and any of the myriad of pitchmen and women to carry down the mountain to deliver to the unwashed masses of asses.

A few years after my conversation with ‘Sally’ over the Stargate, after I had quit my job and moved on to other things I happened to stop by a certain national convenience store for gas. a Big Bite and a Big Gulp and lo and behold there she was, toiling away behind the counter looking as sad, beaten and frumpy as ever with a look on her face like she had a big stinky turd in the inner front pocket of her green smock. The Stargate ultimately led to yet another boulevard of broken dreams as it ALWAYS does in lemming land, P.T. Barnum had it dead right, there IS a sucker born every minute…and they breed like rabbits on hormone supplements here in the home of the slaves.

The New Hammerhead was a perfect cowboy. He was vicious & stupid & ignorant of everything except his own fears and appetites. He beat the mortal shit out of anything that made him uneasy, for any reason at all. The Hammerhead was a perfect warrior. He defended the flag. Any flag. He learned to understand words like “orders” and “patriotism”, but the secret of his success was an animal taste for blood. He thrived on motion. But he was brainless; he had to be aimed.

-Hunter S. Thompson

Finally there is the Illusion of America, anything that Hedges says at this point is pretty much anticlimactic because let’s face it, you and I already understand the depths of the abyss that we are descending into. All in all it’s a pretty bleak assessment of where we are at right now, in a kinky, impoverished, militarist, delusional land of misfit toys and in pissing on the positivity pimps let me tell you one thing – enjoy today, it is going to be the best day of the rest of your life, every subsequent day is going to be incrementally worse as the system continues to rot, the facades are slowly torn away and the raw power of the police state is rolled out in order to protect the oligarchy from the rabble.

The Dow Jones is back over 10,000 again and with it goes the increase in oil and commodities prices, get ready for food prices to climb as well and any astute cynic can tell you that the official unemployment figures are horseshit, they are more likely twice what is announced but our shiny new reality show president has decided to cast his lot with the capitalists. The same swine who wrecked the system are now being given free reign to blow the next big bubble and all with house money. None of the surge in fraud and speculation means jack shit to the real economy, it has had a permanent hole blown in it, much like the USS Arizona and there is no way that fucker isn’t going down just the same way. There are always the illusions, it’s NFL season again so that of course buys some time in terms of distraction but there is a growing ugliness out there that we can all attest to, those with the keener antennae have smelled blood coming for quite some time now.

The anger of the fucked over has been very successfully co-opted by the dark forces of the fascist right and their corporate media. The very disturbing rise of the Beckers, a drooling but exponentially growing pack of know nothings, dead enders and goons who will when the time is right be used by the establishment as protection just like Hitler’s S.A.. They buy books with Beck’s image on the front in some sort of Stasi/fascistic military uniform, whatever it is it isn’t American. Or maybe it is. Maybe the inner Jack Bauer inside the easily manipulated angry army is just a bit closer to coming out now, it is after all a land where militarism is worshipped above all else. The National Football League, that greatest of American capitalist institutions may have in the interests of making more money shunned Rush Limbaugh who is a perfect fit for the fraternity of high rolling white assholes who are the owners, perhaps their stadiums are in their own minds their plantations upon which their “million dollar niggers” to borrow from the dearly departed Nazi sympathizer Marge Schott can frolic to their delight. Engaging in the modern form of gladiatorial combat that so served the Roman elite, how many slaves empowered by smiley faced positive thinking toiled to build that monstrous new stadium of his? A garish monstrosity complete with the world’s biggest television screens, a new coliseum which will soon host the Circus Maximus of them all: The Super Bowl. Matt Taibbi called the nationally televised home opener there “a genuinely terrifying broadcast event of a kind not seen since the premier of The Triumph of the Will. This was a debutante ball for America’s new idiot fascism.” But really, isn’t such outrage expressed by commissioner Roger Goodell over Limbaugh’s virulent racism hypocritical in how the NFL has so successfully become a showcase for American militarism?

Television will feed the basest emotional needs of the busted out freaks, haters and losers but at what point does the fascist right capitalize on the failures of the pathetically impotent Obama administration to provide even the most basic forms of assistance to those not dwelling in the ivory towers on Wall Street? The anger is out there and it is growing like a cancer just getting ready to do some serious eating on the victim. The abominable betrayal of the Democrats on the so-called health care reform fiasco is going to come with a price, forcing bankrupted, jobless Americans to buy overpriced coverage from the insurance parasites backed by the threat of state punishment isn’t exactly going to do much to keep the corporate Democrats in power for long and it’s going to only feed the flames being doused with gasoline by Beck, Cheney, Kristol and the rest of the neocons desperately trying to get back into official power. 2010 is not going to be a good year for the jackass party, print this out and tack it up somewhere because come next November I will be proven right. I will say one thing though, if the extreme right ever manages to seize power again then it’s a done deal for people like you and I.

Hedges’ book was scathing, a long and brutal scourging of much that has occurred as we have been flipped fascist but his best commentary, from a fairly recent Truthdig column entitled Globalization Goes Bankrupt from which I excerpt:

The rage of the disposed is fracturing the country, dividing it into camps that are unmoored from the political mainstream. Movements are building on the ends of the political spectrum that have lost faith in the mechanisms of democratic change. You can’t blame them. But unless we on the left move quickly, this rage will be captured by a virulent and racist right wing, one that seeks a disturbing proto-fascism.

Every day counts. Every deferral of protest hurts. We should, if we have the time and the ability, make our way to Pittsburgh for the meeting of the G-20 this week rather than do what the power elite is hoping we will do—stay home. Complacency comes at a horrible price.

And –

The draconian security measures put in place to silence dissent in Pittsburgh are disproportionate to any actual security concern. They are a response not to a real threat, but to the fear gripping the established centers of power. The power elite grasps, even if we do not, the massive fraud and theft being undertaken to save a criminal class on Wall Street and international speculators of the kinds who were executed in other periods of human history. They know the awful cost this plundering of state treasuries will impose on workers, who will become a permanent underclass. And they also know that once this is clear to the rest of us, rebellion will no longer be a foreign concept.

The delegates to the G-20, the gathering of the world’s wealthiest nations, will consequently be protected by a National Guard combat battalion, recently returned from Iraq. The battalion will shut down the area around the city center, man checkpoints and patrol the streets in combat gear. Pittsburgh has augmented the city’s police force of 1,000 with an additional 3,000 officers. Helicopters have begun to buzz gatherings in city parks, buses driven to Pittsburgh to provide food to protesters have been impounded, activists have been detained, and permits to camp in the city parks have been denied. Web sites belonging to resistance groups have been hacked and trashed, and many groups suspect that they have been infiltrated and that their phones and e-mail accounts are being monitored.

And –

Our global economy, like our political system, has been hijacked by a tiny oligarchy, composed mostly of wealthy white men who serve corporations. They have pledged or raised a staggering $18 trillion, looted largely from state treasuries, to prop up banks and other financial institutions that engaged in suicidal acts of speculation and ruined the world economy. They have formulated trade deals so corporations can speculate across borders with currency, food and natural resources even as, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, 1.02 billion people on the planet struggle with hunger. Globalization has obliterated the ability of many poor countries to protect food staples such as corn, rice, beans and wheat with subsidies or taxes on imported staples. The abolishment of these protections has permitted the giant mechanized farms to wipe out tens of millions of small farmers—2 million in Mexico alone—bankrupting many and driving them off their land. Those who could once feed themselves can no longer find enough food, and the wealthiest governments use institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the World Trade Organization like pit bulls to establish economic supremacy. There is little that most governments seem able to do to fight back.

And –

But the game is up. The utopian dreams of globalization have been exposed as a sham. Force is all the elite have left. We are living through one of civilization’s great seismic reversals. The ideology of globalization, like all utopias that are sold as inevitable and irreversible, has become a farce. The power elite, perplexed and confused, cling to the disastrous principles of globalization and its outdated language to mask the political and economic vacuum before us. The absurd idea that the marketplace alone should determine economic and political constructs caused the crisis. It led the G-20 to sacrifice other areas of human importance—from working conditions, to taxation, to child labor, to hunger, to health and pollution—on the altar of free trade. It left the world’s poor worse off and the United States with the largest deficits in human history. Globalization has become an excuse to ignore the mess. It has left a mediocre elite desperately trying to save a system that cannot be saved and, more important, trying to save itself. “Speculation,” then-President Jacques Chirac of France once warned, “is the AIDS of our economies.” We have reached the terminal stage.

And –

The institutions that once provided alternative sources of power, including the press, government, agencies of religion, universities and labor unions, have proved morally bankrupt. They no longer provide a space for voices of moral autonomy. No one will save us now but ourselves.

“The best thing that happened to the Establishment is the election of a black president,” Holmes said. “It will contain people for a given period of time, but time is running out. Suppose something else happens? Suppose another straw breaks? What happens when there is a credit card crisis or a collapse in commercial real estate? The financial system is very, very fragile. The legs are being kicked out from underneath it.”

“Obama is in trouble,” Holmes went on. “The economic crisis is a structural crisis. The recovery is only a recovery for Wall Street. It can’t be sustained, and Obama will be blamed for it. He is doing everything Wall Street demands. But this will be a dead end. It is a prescription for disaster, not only for Obama but the Democratic Party. It is only groups like ours that provide hope. If labor unions will get off their ass and stop focusing on narrow legislation for their members, if they will go back to being social unions that embrace broad causes, we have a chance of effecting change. If this does not happen it will be a right-wing disaster.”

The G20 turned the Iron City into a martial law area of lockdown, a test run for what is coming once the oligarchy is no longer able to maintain the illusions. The left has failed in preventing this and will be the sacrificial lambs fed to the cannibals when the time comes, you can count on that. In addition to Glenn Beck’s increasingly bold minions there is the Nixon style image remaking campaign being conducted for the darling of the angry white masses Sarah Palin, she will be their future leader, it’s God’s will you know…the real New Hitler is already here and 2012 is surely only going to be more miserable as the economic Diaspora is creating permanently scarred and desperate people looking for both a savior and scapegoats.

The neocons aren’t going to go quietly into the goodnight, the Obama illusion is just that, a big lie, a fraud and a temporary placebo passed off as a panacea, ultimately however like all illusions it will dissipate leaving in it’s place a thirst for blood that knows no satisfaction and will not be slaked until every enemy and perceived enemy that is offered up has been eradicated.

EE

Hateful Lemmings

“When fascism comes to America it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.”

-Sinclair Lewis

On Monday, the 35th anniversary of Roe V. Wade, George W. Bush played to the rubber fetus crowd with his annual phone call to anti-reproductive rights activists. Pandering to the so-called pro lifers who are all that remain of the red plague that has swept America is vintage Rove, especially on the day prior to the State of the Union Address. The hateful lemmings awaiting Rapture can always be counted on to maintain steadfast and unwavering in support of their exalted king’s holy crusade to call forth a rain of fire from the skies over Tehran. There are increasingly ominous signs that an attack on Iran is imminent with the incessant barrage of MSM propaganda proclaiming that Bush’s evil twin Ahmadinejad wants to wipe out God’s chosen state of Israel and the yahoos are anxious to Armageddon it. The cult of the glorious reappearing has now consummated it’s unholy union with the ivory tower dwelling ideologues at the American Enterprise Institute and the doomsday clock is moving closer to midnight.

That Le Enfant Terrible finds it necessary at this juncture to continue to cater to the whims of the extremist Christian Right speaks volumes as to the disproportionate amount of influence that the lunatic fringe holds over American policy. The support of dead enders praying feverishly for apocalypse and worldwide human suffering brought on by war, plagues, pestilence and environmental disasters somehow has become a much sought after precious thing. A thing that should instead bring forth a scarlet letter of shame that any advanced society would justifiably use to marginalize it. Radical clerics like Falwell and Dobson and their ilk are deferred to and treated as king makers for any potential Republican candidate and doddering old Senator McCain has puckered up to kiss Dobson and Falwell’s rings and pampered fat asses with an alarming frequency. Why these reactionary zealots are given any credibility at all is a travesty and we will all eventually be the ones who reap the whirlwind. The extremist elements of the Christian Right need to be stigmatized and isolated as the cancer on free society that they truly are and not embraced by charlatan politicians pandering for votes. It only serves to further empower the menace to democracy that is represented by the ravenous wolves lurking amongst the sheep.

Having just finished the new book American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America I am compelled to recommend this very informative and alarming examination of the dangerous influence of the extreme Christian Right. Hedges is a former foreign correspondent for the New York Times, a graduate of Harvard Divinity School and the author of another book that should be required reading for all advocates of armed conflicts War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning.

Hedges shines a light on the parasitical false prophets who prey on the weak, the failed and the confused in order to lure them into the flock and turn them into foot soldiers in a political army. He correctly points out that the fundamentalist theocratic movement is driven by economic despair, exurban loneliness, despair and frustration at a world in which they have failed utterly and which they are all too willing to turn on for revenge once recruited. His unrelentingly frank examination of the Christian Right is as comprehensive and damning an indictment of the perversion of religion for the acquisition of political power that I have yet to come across:

In this version of the Christian Gospel, the exploitation and abuse of other human beings is a good. Homosexuality is an evil. And this global, heartless system of economic rationalization has morphed in the rhetoric of the Christian Right into a test of faith. The ideology it espouses is a radical evil, an ideology of death, it calls for wanton destruction, destruction of human beings, of the environment, of communities and neighborhoods, of labor unions, of a free press, of Iraqis, Palestinians or others in the Middle East who would deny us oil fields and hegemony, of federal regulatory agencies, social welfare programs, public education – in short, the destruction of all people and programs that stand in the way of a Christian America and its God-given right to dominate the rest of the planet.

American Fascists also addresses the necessity for a male dominance based hierarchical order for in the world of the extreme Christian Right a woman’s place is to act as chattel. Women are to perform their duty as deferential baby machines and to never challenge the authoritarian king of the castle. The war on science and the replacement of history with magic is examined in a look at the bizarre new Petersburg, Kentucky Creation Museum where dinosaurs coexist with humans. All animals were created on the sixth day and that would include a vegetarian T-Rex that was only turned into a ravenous carnivore after the garden was defiled by original sin. The reality of global warming is vehemently denied and Darwin is reduced to a pejorative. The construction of the alternate reality that Hannah Arendt identified as a precursor of totalitarianism is essential: 

“Before mass leaders seize the power to fit reality to their lies, their propaganda is marked by its extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact depends entirely on the power of man who can fabricate it.”

Much to his credit, Hedges does not allow himself to be constrained by the impoliteness of political correctness – a concept that the right has used so effectively in manufacturing animosity. Liberals have a tendency to be overly sensitive when it comes to dealing with zealots and reactionary freaks and the Religious Right benefits immensely from the refusal to engage it on a level playing field. This unwillingness to call this movement out for what they are – fascists with an innate loathing for democracy only allows it to grow stronger and more organized. Hedges writes:

Most liberals, the movement has figured out, will stand complacently to be sheared like sheep, attempting to open dialogues and reaching out to those who spit venom in their faces.… Debate with the radical Christian Right is useless. We cannot reach this movement. It does not want a dialogue. It is a movement based on emotion and cares nothing for rational thought and discussion. It is not mollified because John Kerry prays or Jimmy Carter teaches Sunday school. Naïve attempts to reach out to the movement, to assure them that we too, are Christian or we, too, care about moral values are doomed. This movement is bent on our destruction. The attempts by many liberals to make peace would be humorous if the stakes were not so deadly. These dominionists hate the liberal, enlightened world formed by the Constitution, a world they blame for the debacle of their lives. They have one goal – it’s destruction.

Taboo analogies are made to certain 20th Century European regimes and the fervor and certitude that drove mass movements to create totalitarian fascist states. The references are not gratuitous and are backed up by historical statements regarding the religious institutions in those states and their failure to act morally in denouncing the hatemongering demagogues before the societies collapsed upon themselves. In some instances the churches actually encouraged it much like in early 21st century America where the attacks on homosexuals and other elements deemed undesirable are both sanctioned as well as a holy war against people of an entire religion. An earlier essay by Mr. Hedges forms the basis for his book and is essential reading for those lacking time but interested in getting the message.

When not attacking the rights of women and gays, the educational system, liberalism, science and the democracy that they so despise, the American fascists relish every opportunity to shriek for the blood of Muslims. They regularly denounce the Islamic faith as Satanic among other pejoratives. A war of civilizations is what they desire, a redux of The Crusades and with any luck at all it will even bring about Armageddon! The Islamic fundamentalists that the theocratic demagogues rail about should be familiar to them because they in fact possess many of the same traits as is pointed out by Davidson Loehr in The Fundamentalist Agenda.

The Christ of the theocratic fundamentalists is an angry one, his is a kingdom based on fear and control. The world of the Jesus as terminator is a hateful and a vitriolic one that has no compassion, no tolerance for peace and an insatiable bloodlust for those deemed by the movement to be enemies. Their version of Christ has only contempt for the poor, the sick and the downtrodden and nowhere in it are the meek blessed. The fundamentalist twisting of the gospels to show that the acquisition of wealth is somehow a sign of divine blessing is blasphemous and if there is such a place as Hell may the radical clerics who preach this filth one day burn there. There are reinterpretations of scripture and a strange worship of the stone tablets of the Ten Commandments despite their implicit warning about false idols and graven images.

I personally caught on to the hypocrisy of the Religious Right early in life when my parents would send myself and my younger sister off to the friendly neighborhood Baptist church for Sunday school in order to get us out of the house. The fundamentalist fire and brimstone preaching Baptists would even send a nice gaily painted school bus around the neighborhood trolling for youthful prospects.

I remember that in addition to prayer a plenty we used to engage in sing-a-longs on that bus and one of the verses of the songs that I will always remember went something like this: “You can’t get to heaven with hippie hair cause the lord don’t like that mess up there”

My young little mind must have already contained the seeds of skepticism because lo and behold while our Sunday school teacher was leading us in song I noticed that he was standing in front of a picture of some dude with really long hair and a scraggly beard…and it sure as fuck wasn’t Ted Nugent.