I was told so often during my life that the United States was a great country. In grade school the USSR became Russia, and in junior high we saved Kuwait from a bad man. Over time I struggled with the notion that most of what I thought about my country during those years was bullshit. Howard Zinn then informs me that most of what I learned about US history was bullshit as well. This made me a proud version of what a lot of Americans love to hate. In fact, so many of the people who voted for George W. Bush twice but are now hating his guts over immigration, are those same people who looked down on me for criticizing the guy when we invaded Iraq. Which has me wondering now, whether this defection has now turned the virtue of dissent into bullshit as well. Perhaps I’m simply coming at it from the wrong angle though, as bullshit is really an inherent facet of politics and history and people anyhow.
Indeed – the symptoms that seem to bother me so much today, were certainly there before. The difference is simply a matter of degree. Like visions of old public service announcements turned to cobwebs in the back of my mind, it appears that we’ve decided to ignore just about every good piece of advice available to us for long enough to warrant an intervention. Whereas the republic was a recreational drug user throughout my childhood, today it’s got a junk habit that could resurrect Williams Burroughs and kill him again in the same day. It has crippled our ability to do any of those things we could do before, but rather than realize it at some point, there’s always maintenance of the high, like what we’ve got to steal and how to get the money from all that without getting caught, arrested or worse. In our earlier years we landed Neil Armstrong on the moon and built the Hoover Dam. Now we can’t even build a fence.
Symptoms like these are difficult to ignore, but we’re good at it now. Anti-American was the tune you’d hear in that head of yours before thinking the worst about this country and its government. As to the serious junk fiend there’s nothing worse than being told you’ve got a problem, and for the government this person goes by the name of ‘whistleblower’. For the Limbaugh fans out there, this is a word that can kill a good high in a bad way, so we’ve become very lethal in regards to these people in particular. Without even hearing what one has to say…you can just tell that they’re speaking up because they hate America, and they’re dumb enough to think you’d fall for it. Agency after agency, year after year it happened, and so the idea Republicans came up with was to just appoint whoever raised the most campaign money or was otherwise known to have no ethical understanding or aptitude outside the basic concept of loyalty. The idea being that as long as the addict was inhibited by swarming droves of drug peddling hacks there’d eventually be nobody left to complain about anything.
Thankfully an election allowed for our government to get counseling and some kind of a methadone regimen started. I honestly don’t think that the general public is even capable of grasping the scope of what has been done to so many of the government’s most civic-minded collections of talent we’d been able to take for granted for so long. It’s impossible for any of us to know how serious these injuries actually are, due to the heroin effect a lack of information turns into over such a long period of time. Borrowing a line from our Secretary of State, if Iraq is experiencing “birth pangs”, then we in United States are in the middle of a Trainspoting ‘three buckets and a dead baby crawling across the ceiling’ kind of withdrawal. The body is purging and becoming ugly in a way that’s making the brain in charge wish it was dead, and every time one of the buckets gets used, the stink is bothersome for only as long as it takes another wave of expulsion to burn its way out.
That the brain is stupid and the nervous system prefers another fix above all else is the only thing any of us can be sure about at this point. The messages haven’t been delivered intact or on time for as long as I can remember, with unconnected dots still being ignored, and addiction continuing on in its debilitating triumph over everything. Nerves like Tim Russert and David Gregory appear to work correctly at times, but for the most part they’re beholden to the drug above all else. Take for instance the appearance of Orin Hatch on Meet the Press a little while back, where he stated that Carol Lam, the former US Attorney from San Diego who successfully prosecuted Duke Cunningham, wasn’t a trial lawyer and had worked on Clinton’s election campaign. The statements were 100% false, yet Russert wasn’t fazed in the least, and even when given a full week to realize it and decide how to address what amounted to a failure on his part, Russert tells me to read about the lies that Hatch told on NBC’s website. More pressing matters needed to be addressed, like what David Broder and a couple other dizzy fucks had to say about an election still 18 months away.
David Gregory fills in for Chris Matthews on Hardball and just lets the dope do it’s thing, leading of course to a similar lapse, this time involving Speaker Pelosi’s trip to Syria. Beltway drug addicts had come to the conclusion that a shot in the vein was easier than actually taking the time to read a couple of articles, quotes from those who actually went on the Democratic and Republican trips to the Middle East, perhaps a blog or two (Andrew Sullivan and Glenn Greenwald perhaps?), and figure out why certain strings were being pulled that week. This knucklehead came out firing at Scott McClellan for months in a day after day over the CIA-leak contradictions he was trying to sell from the podium, yet his dope-addled, lazy faculties couldn’t determine whether or not the right-wing croakers he’d run into earlier were really his friends, and weren’t just using him for what he could provide? It was a brown powder in a bag that cooked up nice, and did the trick for Gregory, who was banking on his sudden “balance” to somehow end up making him seem more acceptable to the brain and its corporate media minions, all of whom now depend on this nervous system to continue using, while the mutilation ensues.
As far as that goes, what we’re living through right now is the saddest, most transparently motivated attempt by the elite to destroy whatever isn’t to their liking that we’ll ever see in our lifetimes. Digits are being loped off and fused back onto the body in wrong places, testes removed and reattached to the right ass cheek in the spot where a man’s wallet goes, and as for the rest of what’s supposed to be down in front, it’s on the top of the head now like a unicorn, smacking us right between the eyes whenever we try to walk anywhere. A sensation that our hapless, wealthy President and Vice President have both enjoyed during their years of free air travel and bodyguards, though as white blood cells begin to multiply and go to work, and the withdrawal sickness evolves, our sense of things like ‘I don’t remember having eight fingers attached to my chin’ or ‘how come my feet are gone’ become real. Of course, with this nervous system of smack addicts to rely on, over time there’s a good chance that a memory of this body even having feet or thumbs to begin with will be impossible.
Just as nature planned it, there’s consolidation in every industry, a perfect example being AT&T, which was so well managed in the beginning of the new century that it had to resort to the gimmicks of a penny stock, a five to one reverse stock split to get its shares out of the $5-10 neck-deep muck, now having bought SBC and seemingly every other telecom outfit that could have competed with it, the big money is happy and satisfied with the thrill of predictability once more, and the process of anti-anti-trust that began in the 80s is finally making the work that comes with managing wealth so much easier than it was with all that pesky “competition” to worry about.
Catching the fever in this regard is so tempting for so many, not only because the demands of having to go to work and earn a living becomes a bore once you become one of those serial board-member types, but if a larger company with the cash wants to give my stock options $3 more in value than they’re worth today and all I have to do is break the news to my 20,000 (soon to be laid off) strong workforce, file some paperwork with the rarely curious SEC, accept the bribe of a seat on the board of the acquisition company and a few million and change of this, that, dollars, shares, write ups in Dow Jones publications, a handful of pocketed “analysts” who will write about how keen my sense is for the “right deal” is what this country is all about.
And I think here is where the thing can end for today, as it has come around to the supposed root of all evil. The true force perhaps, behind the transformation of our elected government into nothing more than “something on TV”. I think that’s as much bullshit as anything else really. Another cop-out to go on the pile atop history, the pledge of allegiance, dissent and whatever else I babbled on about here.
