(noon. – promoted by ek hornbeck)
This is the Democrats’ story. It’s a story of consequences, it’s a story of tragedy, it’s a story ripped from the pages of history and stained with the blood of the innocent.
There are no characters in it and almost no dramatic confrontations, because most of the people in it are so sick and so much the listless playthings of enormous forces.
No We Can’t has been a recurring theme of this story. When Obama got elected, No We Won’t replaced it. We haven’t seen any change, change has been consumed in a firestorm of corruption.
Enjoy your stay in Dresden.
Welcome to Hell.
Greetings from Slaughterhouse Five . . .
In Slaughterhouse Five, Billy Pilgrim . . .
went to the New York World’s Fair, saw what the past had been like, according to the Ford Motor Car Company and Walt Disney, saw what the future would be like, according to General Motors. He asked himself about the present: how wide it was, how deep it was, how much was his to keep.
When we ask ourselves about our present, the answer is staring us in the face. It’s as narrow as the tunnel vision of our “leaders”, it’s as deep as the corruption that oppresses us, it’s as empty as our future and none of it is ours to keep.
Billy Pilgrim must have attended a White House strategy meeting right after the Inauguration . . .
I think you guys are going to have to come up with a lot of wonderful new lies, or people just aren’t going to want to go on living.
It’s pretty clear what the result of that meeting was. Wonderful new lies. Because of those wonderful new lies, 30,000 American soldiers are crawling into the quagmire of Afghanistan, like the big, unlucky mammals they are. 40,000 Americans will die in 2010 because of inadequate healthcare, like the big, unlucky mammals they are. More Americans will lose their jobs, lose their savings, and lose their homes, like the big unlucky mammals they are.
When the harsh truth scares the fuck out of the big unlucky mammals of this degraded species, too many of them swallow the lies, it’s they only way they can go on living.
So it goes.
So it will always go unless Americans overcome their fear, unless progressives start getting serious, unless we take support for this criminal government off the table and put civil disobedience on the table.
We’re learning from our mistakes, but we’re not learning fast enough. Progressives have a lot of enemies, and time is one of the most lethal of them. We’re running out of it, we don’t have much time left to save this country, to reverse America’s direction so time will be our ally instead of our enemy.
We have to learn what Billy Pilgrim learned by watching a war movie in reverse. Everyone in America, every human being on this planet has to learn what he learned by watching that war movie in reverse . . .
It’s a movie about American bombers in the Second World War and the men who flew them. American planes, full of holes and wounded men and corpses took off backwards from an airfield in England. Over France, German fighter planes flew at them backwards, sucked bullets and shell fragments from some of the planes and crewmen. They did the same for wrecked American bombers on the ground, and those planes flew up backwards to rejoin the formation.
The formation flew backwards over a German city that was in flames. The bombers opened their bomb bay doors, exerted a miraculous magnetism which shrunk the fires, gathered them into cylindrical steel containers, and lifted the containers back into the bellies of the planes.
When the bombers got back to their bases, the steel cylinders were taken from the racks and shipped back to the United States of America, where factories were operating night and day, dismantling the cylinders, separating the dangerous contents into minerals. Touchingly, it was mainly women who did this work. The minerals were then shipped to specialists in remote areas. It was their business to put them back into the ground, to hide them cleverly, so they would never hurt anybody ever again.
If we could watch America’s Two-Party Plunge Into Hell movie in reverse, every stolen dollar in the bank vaults of Wall Street, in the accounts of the war profiteers, in the pockets of K Street’s and Capital Hill’s corporate whores would be returned to us. The tea baggers would walk backwards out of their We Love Corporate Fascism rallies, drive backwards to their neighborhoods of racism and ignorance, and go back up into their attics, where it’s always dark, where the odor of bat shit is thick in the air, where they’d stay because that’s where they belong.
The tens of thousands of people at Obama’s campaign rallies would stop clapping, stop cheering, turn their backs on him, and go home. The Twin Towers would unburn, the dead Americans in Iraq, the dead Americans in Afghanistan, would rise up from the bloody ground where they fell, go back to their bases, unload their weapons, fly back home, unjoin the military, and walk out of the enlistment centers.
The multitudes of the innocent, slaughtered in Bush’s wars, would live again. Bush would be unelected, Reagan would be unelected, Nixon would be unelected. JFK would come back to the White House from Dallas. The pages of American history would turn back to 1960. Eisenhower would speak on national television again. He’d warn Americans about the threat of the Military-Industrial Complex.
And this time, Americans would listen, this time, they would heed his warning.
We can’t turn back time, but we can prevent all of these tragedies we’ve endured from happening again. We can dismantle the war machine, we can throw corrupt incumbents out of power, we can take back our democracy, we can end the corporate rampage that is destroying us and the world we live in. We need to summon the courage and determination to do that, we need to eliminate the cause of all of these tragedies, the cause of all of this inequality, the cause of all of this suffering. We need to bury capitalism in the ground. We need to bury it forever so it will never hurt anyone ever again.
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So it goes.
So it will always go unless Americans overcome their fear, unless progressives start getting serious, unless we take support for this criminal government off the table and put civil disobedience on the table.
Otherwise, we would have abandoned the two parties long ago. Each generation has to learn the lesson all over again, and by the time they do (and some never do), they’re ready to retire, and it’s the next generation’s turn.
Want to bury capitalism? The IWW always welcomes new members.
That’s my line.
I’m a man of wealth and taste
I’ve been around for a long, long year
Stole many a man’s soul and faith
And I was ’round when Jesus Christ
Had his moment of doubt and pain
Made damn sure that Pilate
Washed his hands and sealed his fate
Pleased to meet you
Hope you guess my name
But what’s puzzling you
Is the nature of my game
believe the dems do not want to win in any real sense.
the elite want to move in and out of power so they do not have to do anything. each time the dems are in power during my adult lifetime, they do the least they can to rock the boat because that is their surest way to not piss off their corporate overlords.
then they cede to the overlords key lieutenants, the rethugs.
then the cycle begins anew as the lieutenants go too far, too fast and the middle class gets too squeezed.
but we are out of flexibility in these go rounds.
i don’t think the middle class can remain a coherent force after this busting.
we are prolly toast.
50% of the folks at the great orange satan don’t get that at all.
obama will prolly not get it.
the door is swinging shut.
It is from somebody more educated than I am. He has done more things than I have, been more places yet chose to leave America for a better life. That is becoming an industry, the leave America industry. What does that say.
http://www.brianoleary.info/Me…
You certainly know how to turn a word.
Great writing and great essay.
I was just watching Rachel Madow who had Jeremy Scahill on talking about the drones & mercs of Dyn-Corps & Triple Canopy over & in Haiti respectively.
Jeez, isn`t there a grieving period or something.
that we shouldn’t continue the fight. To do otherwise would be tantamount to voluntarily accepting the shackles and manacles that the corporate state would place upon us, until such time as our usefulness to these cruel masters reached the point of diminishing returns.
The sad truth is that Big Money has, through their infiltration of nearly all aspects of our political system, determined who those candidates are whose names might be known to us. In most cases, the candidates who appear on the ballot have already been leased by financial behemoths that encircle and surround us. The sad result is that we have very few friends in Washington, D.C. — on either side of the aisle.
Many of those with whom I maintain contact argue that the government has become corrupt and evil. I maintain that a government “of the people, by the people, and for the people” is a much different proposition. Those areas of our government that are corrupt (growing in number and scope) are those that have been the most thoroughly infiltrated by the large corporations, psychopathic predators, singularly devoted to ever increasing financial gain, regardless of the cost to others.
I’m led to wonder if Obama ran for office with the intent of serving one term only. Perhaps his idea of success was that if he could dash the hopes of the growing, desperate masses (numbering in at least eight, if not nine figures) and drive a stake into the hearts of the millions of recent, progressive-minded newcomers to the political scene, he could clear the way for an unimpeded continuation of the total conversion of our once great nation into an oligarchy in which all but a privileged few inhabit the servant class.
Should Obama wish to assume a lucrative position with Goldman Sachs (he has at least a couple of important connections), United Healthcare, and/or the Carlyle Group, he is certainly constructing an impressive resume.
That said, I would contend that our primary task is to employ any means possible to expand the awareness that we at DD have to a much broader audience. Conveying that passion in such a manner that we don’t come off as too strident, turning off those we approach, quickly defeating our purpose, remains a delicate, but vital task.
Well said “again”! Rusty I always look forward to reading your words of TRUTH.
Today the Supreme “Corporate” Court handed down a ruling that equals the “worst” ruling in their history. Of course the other ruling was the Dred Scott decision that said it was OK for White Men to “own” Black Men. Today’s decision basically said that it is OK for Corporate America (mostly White Men) to “own” EVERYONE & EVERYTHING!
This decision almost a year to the day after Obama’s inauguration & a year after Obama’s retreat from YES WE CAN – made it clear that Corporate Empire has stated loud & clear – NO YOU CAN’T!
Unless Obama starts channeling Martin Luther King & begins a new Civil Rights Movement, We the People are on our own to begin a movement that will free us from the modern day plantation owners, greedy soulless corporate monsters far worse than Simon Legree & the worst slave beaters, redneck lynchers, southern bigots, people who fought for the “right” to own human beings.
To me this Supreme Court Ruling toady is the equivalent of the first shots fired at Fort Sumter!
The only difference is that the South wanted to secede from the Union. The Corporations with this ruling now own the “entire” Country, no need for succession, they will now control it ALL!
The battle lines have been drawn – see you in the streets! It is the ’50’s again, the dawn of a new Civil Rights Era.