American Twilight – the Ascendancy of Monsters

It’s enough to make the mountains cry, what’s been done to this beautiful land…and its (mostly) beautiful people.  Most of us after all are pretty decent folks, even many of those whom I am prone to rail against – the mistaken ones or the sleeping ones.  The monsters among us finally are few…they just have a disproportionate affect on the rest.

It’s distressing that so many of our smartest people still haven’t fully realized how dire our circumstances are.  I still hear people whose intelligence I respect speak in (what seem to me) wholly unrealistic terms of ‘the future’ or of saving our system of governance from within the narrow confines of its own paradigm.  These both seem hopelessly naïve to me given that we have precious little ‘future’ to speak of and the simple and obvious fact that our ‘system’ is corrupted to the point of total dysfunction.

Maybe if more people awaken I keep thinking…

But to wake up is to swim against the tide.  It’s just so easy not to in post-modern America.  We’ve been numbed from birth by propaganda and mythology, distracted by trivial matters sanctified, and blinded by the Madison Avenue bullshit that is pumped constantly in prodigious proportions into the airways and tee-vees, movie houses and radios, newspapers, schoolbooks, magazines and billboards and even into the magic tubes of the Internet.  And it’s all lies, distractions and half-truths – a perfect storm of obfuscation.  They want us to believe anything and everything – only NOT the truth.  The actual truth is the LAST thing they want us to know anything about.

Some people distrust truth, but we should seek it out instead, and honor it.

This ancient but evolving assault on truth by the powerful against the rest of us has reached new heights in recent decades.  The illusion that has been carefully crafted and aggressively fostered in America is starting to break down though, thanks in large part to the calamitous Bush administration, that and the fact that most any house of cards will collapse eventually.

But people want desperately to cling to the old familiar ‘truths’, and are reluctant to give them up.  Too many people really don’t want to know the actual truth…the more unpleasant the truth in question the more people don’t want to know it.  ‘Don’t confuse me with reality if it means giving up what I’ve always believed’ seems to be the thinking.  This unwillingness or inability to face the truth is what made the ascendancy of monsters in America possible.  A lot of people had to swallow an awful lot of crap for that to have ever come to pass, of course it all goes way back, it’s just never been this naked before.

Those of us who love America most, and I include myself in this, love the myth of America, not the actual America.  We love the America of the Declaration of Independence, the America of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights – the America that was the grand and inspired vision of some very bright folks back in the late eighteenth century, and which has been cynically used to manipulate generations of gullible and good-hearted Americans into sacrificing themselves or their progeny for the greater glory of the republic.  What a bunch of sickening garbage!  …once you know the bitter truth that is.

The actual America was stolen from the Indians, settled at least in part by slaves and indentured servants, and was raped and pillaged by monsters with cruel, greedy hearts and no conscience who murdered and stole their way to great fortunes only to assume false mantels of nobility to mask their ruthless domination, oppression, and exploitation of those they viewed as the lesser humans.

As I say, this is an ancient (though evolving) assault.  General Smedley Darlington Butler, a true American hero, spoke eloquently and bravely of the true nature of our nation – its government and ruling class anyway.  He wrote this before I was born.  It was true then, it’s even truer now.

WAR is a racket. It always has been.

It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives.

A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of the people. Only a small “inside” group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few, at the expense of the very many. Out of war a few people make huge fortunes.

Read General Smedley Darlington Butler’s War Is a Racket.

Sadly, Smedley was largely ignored and the evil just kept creeping on America.  It didn’t miss a beat.

One of the saddest facts about the reality of post-modern America from my personal point of view is that Ft. Benning, Georgia, the place of my birth, is home to the School of the Americas.  This school of horror and dishonor is a national disgrace and a shameful blight on all things American.  It is there that our government has for decades trained foreign armies in the techniques of torture, murder, and the ruthless oppression of those who would dare stand up for the rights of poor people – that being their only crime.  We, meaning our government, are on the wrong side of struggles for justice in virtually every case going back 100 years and more.  It has been our official though unstated policy to help rich criminals oppress their innocent poor.  It is an abomination and could not possibly be less in keeping with all that we (ordinary) Americans hold dear.  Our sorry excuse for a government is eminently undeserving of us.  It has knowingly and willfully betrayed every American value.

Our forefathers not only had the vision of what America could be, they saw the threats that would naturally arise.  They gave us tools to prevent it but we have not used them.  This entire administration should have been impeached and criminally charged by now.  Our government is egregiously out of order for not having done so.  They have abandoned the people.  And all of those who have argued against impeachment for whatever foolish or selfish reasons are culpable in the crimes against our nation that continue to unfold daily.  That includes you Pelosi and Reid, and even some frontpagers at daily kos who you’d think would know better.  You know who you are.  Shame on you all!