April 9, 2003
Gulag America
The View From the Street
How happy I am not to be a political columnist in a real newspaper, because then I probably wouldn't be able to say what I am now going to say.My goal has always been to be able to speak not the stilted language of The News or of respectable journalism, but the language of bars. The formal language of official politics and its colonized media is inherently, from the ground up, a Big Lie. The language is constructed to conceal the most horrifying truths. It is a device of manipulation. I have no aspiration to learn that language, or to ever speak it.
I believe in the native intelligence of human beings. I believe all people are intelligent, creative and talented, each in a unique way. The differentiations of grades and SAT scores are artificial ways of dividing people, pushing them down, excluding some from participation, and creating a phony elite that enjoys the pleasures of life at the expense of others.
I think the average person you would run into in a bar has the native capacity to think and communicate on a more intelligent level than the mindless crap that spits out of the TV at them as propaganda for the corporate state. It is designed to numb people, to dull their wits. And it works. It works when people conform, when they emulate what they are being handed. It doesn't work when people think for themselves.
The upper 20 percent are highly indoctrinated. It is through a cultivated ignorance that they are able to participate with and support a murderous state. To those below that sub-elite, the lies of the corporate media are not as persuasive. They have been lied to all their lives, and ripped off and excluded. To them life is a struggle for existence against tremendous odds. They may not have time to think that much about the geopolitical games reported to them on the news.
It is to the outsiders I speak, the "ordinary" unentitled majority who do not have access to all of the pleasures and luxuries of George W. Bush and his ilk, or even of the well-indoctrinated upper 20 percent tier of professionals and managers.
To those who are not too well-indoctrinated, who understand about the mass murder and plunder their government is engaged in, it is clear that the men who are now in control of the US government are the most evil, criminal men who have ever risen to power here. It is a catastrophe, a crisis of unthinkable proportions, going on around us right now as we sit here doing whatever we are doing. Right now people in Iraq are being subjected to an ongoing onslaught of inhuman horrors. Through no fault of their own. As citizens of what was designed to be a democratic republic, we are in part responsible. Silence is acquiescence, a small measure of complicity.
I may not have the power to stop them -- not now anyway -- but I can at least speak about it. I can refuse to accept the suppression of free thought. I can defy them by allowing myself to think clearly, to not surrender my mind to their landslide of garbage and intimidation. The final refuge of freedom is the integrity of your own mind. If you surrender that, there is nothing more to fight for, to even live for.
What these madmen, these savage, psychotic barbarians named Rumsfeld, Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Perle, Ashcroft et. al. are doing is absolutely as depraved as anything human beings have ever done. These man are monsters, a scourge upon the earth. They have already created so much damage it is hard to imagine ever undoing it.
Funny how the brainwashed used to parrot the line fed to them by corporate media: "Get over it," in reference to the judicial coup of 2000. Even among those who knew that something deeply wrong had taken place, most just wanted to let it go and let the system correct itself.
If George W. Bush had "governed" from a position that was even remotely just, equitable, that made the slightest attempt to represent all the people in respect to the doubt cast upon his corrupt ascension to power, it might have been possible to let the crime go and let things right themselves.
However, it has become apparent that this regime has made no attempt to moderate its agenda one iota for democratic considerations or anything else. Its illegal seizure of power was just a prelude for a massive criminal adventure. It is bent on world domination with no compromises. Democracy has become little more than a word the regime uses as a justification for invading a country and suppressing its population. This is not a democratic government and it has no intention of ever becoming one. It does not want to have to subject its power to elections or any other kind of democratic checks and balances. This is one out-of-control regime, hell-bent on domination or destruction.
We are the generation that must face this crisis, probably the greatest challenge ever to the American dream of a free and democratic country. This is not something we are really up for. But this is our lot. We did not seek political involvement, but it has come knocking on our door, crashing it down. While most of us relaxed, enjoyed our freedom and left politics to others, our government has been hijacked by maniacs.
There is no point in mincing words about the criminal nature of the gangsters now staked out in the White House. It is time to drop pretense and formality and speak clearly about the war crimes that are now being committed by Bush and company. All this blubber about "The President" is just a distraction. He's not the president. Presidents in America are elected.