Number 1.3.1
(NEW SERIES-2008)
(NEW SERIES-2008)
(Read, Print, or Download in >PDF>> Format)
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NOTES FROM
A DYING NATION
NUMBER ONE, Part 3
NOTES FROM
A DYING NATION
NUMBER ONE, Part 3
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ALL LIES ALL THE TIME:
THE NATION'S DANCE
OF DEATH
THE NATION'S DANCE
OF DEATH
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..........How many times have you heard disgruntled people ask—or how many times have you yourself asked—how it can be that we can put a man on the moon but can't do something simple, like, say, keeping the I-35 bridge in Minneapolis from collapsing?
..........Is it lack of will? Of money? Unresponsive local government, or the fruits of ineptitude that come from ever-weaker education? Or is it plain old-fashioned mob-style corruption? Or—or maybe the Bushiscti really did detonate it with Ultra Low Frequency weaponry in another routine shooting up of the fear-quotient among Americans at a dangerously dull and un-frightened moment in a long, quiet summer.
..........Naturally, something of the sort would be perfectly typical of the Buschisti psycho-pattern. After all, the mere fact that the Bushiscti include both Lon Cheney and Homeland Security Director Michael Karloff is enough to make it more than believable. We all know that that pair of madmen, along with their trained monkey, have always been very, very subtle in all their undertakings. They were subtle beyond subtlety itself in stealing the 2000 election, ditto the 2004. We all know, further, that they way out-subtled their own personal bests with 9/11 itself, and with their paint-by-number alert system, and with their destruction of New Orleans, and with all their other quaint and curious behavior right on down "to the pupil age of this present twelve o'clock at midnight."¹
..........Just last week, on nothing less than Valentine's Day itself (nice touch), the New York Times ran an article about the trained monkey's latest ever-so-deft hand in the Bushisctis' great double effort of keeping the "War on Terror" genocidally alive and kicking while at the same time bankrupting the US and crushing it into a helpless police state. (Perhaps I should explain: The bankrupting and crushing are a means of making the genocide easier, since there will no longer be a "United States" to oppose it). And just what did the monkey do and say in his Valentine's Day effort toward these dual and noble ends?
..........Well, under the headline "Eavesdropping Law Is Likely to Lapse," Eric Lichtblau explained that "At a morning appearance in the Oval Office, President Bush pressed the House to adopt quickly a plan that the Senate approved on Tuesday to broaden the government's spying powers and give legal immunity to telephone companies."
..........You see, not prosecuting corporations when they break the law is one of the many useful ways of helping bleed the rest of America to death—to bleed to death non-corporate America, that is, regular America. And in order to do that particular kind of America-destroying, and to go on doing more and more of it, the trained monkey knows perfectly well that he must do more than simply say that that's what he and Lon and Karloff want to do, already do, and want to go on doing. No, the trained monkey must be more subtle than that. And so here's what he does: He attaches an entire ham to his left forearm, including his hand, with a great deal of duct tape, while his aides tape to his right forearm and hand a three-pound sledge hammer. Thus prepared, he sits down at a piano and plays Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata."
..........That's just about how subtle he is. Here's what this extraordinarily delicate keyboard performance sounds like:
...................."At this moment," he said, "somewhere in the world
....................terrorists are planning new attacks on our country.
....................Their goal is to bring destruction to our shores that
....................will make Sept. 11 pale by comparison."
....................To stop an attack, he urged, Congress must act
....................immediately to strengthen the eavesdropping.
..........And here's my question: How is it possible that we as a people can put men on the moon and achieve countless other wonders and yet can't or won't see through the chicanery, the fraud, the comic-book simple-mindedness, the absolutely absurd ham-handedness of this bit—like its thousand previous kin since 9/11—of vaudeville and snake-oil shtick—he's talking about A-bombs, is he? or he's talking about zero, zilch, nada, no plan,just empty threats, is he?—as it's performed and has been performed over and over both by the trained monkey and by Lon and Karloff and the others?
..........Now, I'm well aware that the House adjourned without extending the bill as the monkey wanted it extended. Conceivably—just conceivably—that fact may indicate a tiny increment of learning having taken place among our dear assembled leaders. But let's not forget that these are the same dear assembled leaders who approved the good Jane Gorgon's Joe McCarthyistic thought-control bill by a vote of 404 to six. By evidence such as that, our dear assembled leaders haven't learned anything at all in the entire six years that have passed since they did ditto with the so-called "Patriot Act," and ditto again later with the "War Commissions Act of 2006."
..........I'm also aware that these dear leaders claim that the vote was so overwhelmingly favorable to Jane Gorgon's Orwellian thought-control bill simply because none of them had read it or discussed it. How comforting. After all, that's what they did with the Patriot Act, for nongod's sake, as we all know thanks to Michael Moore and the honorable John Conyers.
..........And even though they did adjourn without extending the spying bill and without voting to declare that corporate spying on Americans is a guiltless crime, there's still the much more important question of how they're going to behave when they come back from vacation. Will they do anything then to prove that they've at long, long last seen through the trained monkey's fraud-act—the way Keith Olbermann and Ted Kennedy have seen through it, finding proof in the monkey's behavior that he himself is a traitor to his country and therefore should be prosecuted and tried for treason.
..........If only it could happen in that way. But is there even the least, the most remote possibility that it might?
..........Let's go back to the "Moonlight Sonata" and see if we can get a hint. The trained monkey, you remember, sat down to perform the old Beethoven piece with a ham taped to his left forearm and hand and a three-pound sledge hammer taped to his right forearm and hand. The performance? Exactly as to be expected. Subtle it was not. The trained monkey bashed and hammered away at the keyboard until its pearly teeth flew and the piano itself came near collapse.
..........So much for the performance. It was exactly as subtle as the trained monkey's ham-handed performance as reported by Eric Lichtblau:
...................."At this moment," he said, "somewhere in the world
....................terrorists are planning new attacks on our country.
....................Their goal is to bring destruction to our shores that
....................will make Sept. 11 pale by comparison."
....................To stop an attack, he urged, Congress must act
....................immediately to strengthen the eavesdropping.
..........But the reviews from the critics? The reviews, that is, from our dear assembled leaders, the very same ones who have already brought us the "Patriot Act" twice and the "2006 War Commissions Act" once, and who now appear poised and ready to bring us the Medusa-written Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act, for which we will all, I know, be ever-grateful.
..........Here's some of the stuff they said about the trained monkey's ham-and-hammer performance of the "Moonlight Sonata": They said that it was "Eloquent and graceful," "Insightful and dramatically rendered," that it "showed an understanding of the deepest elements of musicality," that it had "a lightness of touch and yet a clarity of attack unheard by audiences since Glenn Gould," etc., etc., etc.
..........How could it be otherwise? How could they not have been every bit as servile and fawning as all those in the Hans Christian Andersen tale who stood along the parade route exclaiming about the grandeur of the emperor's new clothes? I know, as I said, that the House didn't extend and alter the FISA bill before it went on vacation—but of what significance can we consider that scintilla of independence when it follows mountains' worth of precedent revealing only dependence, acquiescence, and servitude? For seven entire years, precedent has been set again and again and again of namby-pamby kow-towing to the trained monkey, and of namby-pamby kow-towing to Lon Cheney, and of namby-pamby kow-towing to Karloff, as well as to all the other and equally industrious liars, traitors, murderers, deceivers, Constitution-destructors and concentration camp constructors, police-state lovers, and wholesale criminals against humanity—kow-towing, in short, to the full complement of vile and contemptible sociopaths and crime bosses who now make up the so-called leadership of our nation.
..........Do you see the point we've come back to yet again? Again, the "Moonlight Sonata" as played with hammer and ham: How can it be that so crude, so idiotic, so transparently stupid a performance could ever be declared subtle? Ever be tolerated? Why would they and how could they believe him even for a split second?
..........Here once more, just so we can be amazed once again, can once again contemplate with sheer awe the fact that so crude a pile of hogshit as this one passing out between the lips of the President of the United States of America should or could or would actually be believed in any way whatsoever as true, or as containing truth, or as being anything else than a big enough pack of lies to send even Mark Twain around the bend:
...................."At this moment," he said, "somewhere in the world
....................terrorists are planning new attacks on our country.
....................Their goal is to bring destruction to our shores that
....................will make Sept. 11 pale by comparison."
....................To stop an attack, he urged, Congress must act
....................immediately to strengthen the eavesdropping.
..........Unless, of course, every word of it were all too true, and those terrorists are right here, right at home, right here among us, hectoring us at this very moment and then being so gracious as to perform for us the "Moonlight Sonata."
..........And so, the point we've come back to yet again is the point, earlier, where we asked question number three. For memory's purposes, here's that question:
....................How can it be that seemingly nothing is being effectively
....................done, if not necessarily to stop the US immediately from
....................functioning as a force of death, ruin, and destruction, then
....................at least to slow it in its rapaciousness, or even simply to
....................begin an amelioration of its repugnant nature and behavior
....................in the hope of someday making both of these productive
....................and humane?
..........Let's provide an answer, to begin, that has to do with all those members of Congress who kow-tow pusillanimously to the Monkey, Lon, Karloff and the rest of the criminals by praising as subtle, skilled, true, and effective things that are in reality stupid, ham-handed, idiotic, and false.
..........Of those congressional figures, it seems to me, there are three and only three causes that could possibly explain their otherwise seemingly insane behavior.
..........The first possibility is this: That they really are in fact genuine morons; that they really are "bloody ignorant apes," that they really are so dumb, gullible, and inexperienced that they actually do believe the clumsy, inane, stupefyingly transparent lies that the trained monkey is uttering—that "'somewhere in the world terrorists are planning new attacks on our country. Their goal is to bring destruction to our shores that will make Sept. 11 pale by comparison,'" and really do believe that "To stop an attack, . . . Congress must act immediately to strengthen. . . eavesdropping."
..........Seems inconceivable, doesn't it? How could anyone with any decent education at all, any person who makes the least effort to keep up with the best available news and commentary—how could any such person remain that stupid, ignorant, uninformed, depraved, and unthinking as opposed to behaving in the manner of a normal, intelligent, adult, thinking human being?
..........I'm well aware that these latter criteria—normal, intelligent, adult, thinking—rare as they are, in likelihood do still exist in some members of Congress. And yet, if that's true, why do they continue to behave as they do (and as they have done since 9/11), again and again bowing to the inane, jumping to the service of the crude, the fake, and the absurd?
..........Clearly, we need to consider the next of the three possibilities that could explain such submissive and pandering behavior, causing our innocent leaders ever and again to depart from reality and adhere instead to the false and untrue.
..........The second possibility is that this behavior is simply brought about by a combination of cowardice, greed, and fear. The fear, simply, is the fear of not being re-elected; the greed is ignited by the powerful desire to continue being fed at the corporate trough; and the cowardice is made evident in the congress-members' inability to exercise any nobler quality of character for the purpose of overcoming the previous two.
..........But this second possibility can't in itself account for the infantile behavior, since the desire for re-election should logically—and obviously—cause legislators to distance themselves from the trained monkey, to part ways rather than serve as his lackeys. After all, if only sixteen percent of Americans still believe the "official" 9/11 story, wouldn't it make political sense, if seeking re-election, to court the 84% majority rather than to continue bowing and pandering to the least popular president in American history?
..........Clearly, we haven't found the answer to our question. Congress-members aren't—not in every case—acting out of moronic stupidity. And, as we've seen, neither are they acting out of any normal desire or incentive for reward. So, then, if they're not stupid, and if they're not acting out of attempts to serve their own interest, what's left as a motive for behavior that looks both stupid and counter-productive?
..........And so we come to the only remaining possibility.
..........The cause of the legislators' behavior is fear. The cause of the legislators' behavior is terror. After all, as Paul Craig Roberts has told us, "The light of liberty has gone out in the United States."
..........It's been said since antiquity that politics is dirty. But there is, even so, a highly significant difference between dirty politics and terrorism. Usually, dirty politics stops short of murder, torture, breach of international law, and ongoing crimes against humanity. As a rule, the dirty methods in dirty politics are not, do not become, and do not remain the sole means or method of gaining or holding power, nor the sole means of shaping or directing political change.
..........The Bush-Cheney "administration" is far beyond the realm of "dirty politics" and has been so from the very beginning of its so-called tenure. From the beginning, yes, even from before the beginning, it cheated and lied and deceived. It then very quickly—with 9/11—resorted to mass murder, treason, and criminal destruction of extreme proportions. Seizing the advantage it had gained by terrifying the American public, the administration turned immediately to the use of torture, the elimination of habeas corpus and other constitutionally guaranteed rights, the breach both of international law generally and of international conventions of war particularly, and, making use again of lies, deceit, and terror, it illegally invaded two innocent nations, and in just one of them so has so far murdered 1,173,743 of its people, driven countless more from their homes and even from their country, has brought disease, poverty, and malnutrition to millions, and to countless others has brought the unspeakable horrors, suffering, and ruinous birth defects caused by the use of "depleted uranium," or U-238, in weaponry,² with its radioactive half-life of 4.51 billion years.
..........This entire program of systemic murder, ruin, criminality, and destruction has been made possible for the monsters seeking and executing it by means of one thing alone. That one thing is this group's sole "political" tool, and it is through the use of this single, constantly reapplied, and incessantly visible and present tool that the group is now victorious. That one, single tool is the instillation of terror into people.
..........When terrified, people will do things that in other circumstances they would not, or very likely would not, do.
..........The United States Congress has ceased to exist as an equal branch of a three-part government for the very simple reason that it is terrified. A good number of its members, in point of fact, really are demagogic, extremely stupid, driven solely by greed or by opportunism, or are in a great number of other and generally despicable ways blind. Let's go ahead and set those people aside for the moment, just leaving them out of the argument. That means that we're now setting aside, let's say, a third of the members of Congress. What is it known that we can say about the remaining two-thirds of the congressional membership? What we can say about the remaining two-thirds of the congressional membership is this: that they are terrified.
..........The United States today, now, this minute, is not a democracy nor is democracy the political method by which it is organized and governed.
..........No, the United States today, now, this minute, is a terrorist state, and the political method by which it is organized and governed is terrorism.
..........We know that in 2002 Vice President Lon Cheney told Senator Paul Wellstone that "If you vote against the war in Iraq, the Bush administration will do whatever is necessary to get you. There will be severe ramifications for you and the state of Minnesota." We know that Wellstone did vote against the war in Iraq. And we know that soon afterward he was assassinated. ³
..........This fact is terrifying. It is a matter not of politics clean or dirty, but it is a matter of terrorism.
..........We know perfectly well, six-and-a-half years later, and have known perfectly well now for several years, that 9/11 was an inside job, that it was planned and executed by elements of our own government and other "governing" bodies—we know, that is, that in its treason it was an act of terrorism, that it was terrifying, that the people were terrified by it, and that its sole initial purpose was exactly that: To bring about a situation whereby they would be terrified.
..........And so a person must ask why, if we know all of this to be true, why is it that the trained monkey's ludicrous and transparent threats of something "worse" than 9/11 are able so severely to terrify members of congress even now that they will say that up is down, that ham-handed is subtle, and the monkey's absolutely appalling rendition of "Moonlight Sonata" was simply sublime?
..........Terrorism works. It works on us, and it's working on us now.
..........How can such a thing have come about? Such a thing has come about because we let it. And we let it come about because we're wretchedly stupid. We've allowed ourselves to be made wretchedly stupid, and we've allowed ourselves to remain wretchedly stupid. We've even come to flaunt our stupidity, to brag about it, and to defend and protect it as we would defend and protect—as we should have defended and protected—real and meaningful rights, like those in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
..........But it's too late.
..........We lose.
..........Or do we?
..........It's not easy to know how to get out of so wretched and dangerous a mess, but I myself vote, as I said at the end of Part 1 of this essay, for the only thing that I can conceive of as being of any real or lasting help. I vote, that is, for a systematic turning to the real both as a weapon for defense and as a tool for recovery and resurrection. Neither the trained monkey nor the legions of traitors, murderers, criminals, torturers, killers and looters arrayed behind him—both the visible ones and the invisible—will be quite as terrifying once you've become able to see and know the reality of what they are and the reality of what it is they're doing. It's not that they'll suddenly stop being frightening, or that they'll suddenly stop being monstrously, cold-bloodedly, unremittingly destructive. But something will change. The Bushiscti in this way are like typhus, or like poliomyelitis. Both of those diseases are frightening, in fact terrifying. But once you know, once you're able to identify and understand the real identity and nature of the rickettsia that causes typhus, or the real identity and nature of the virus that causes polio-then the terror caused by these diseases changes. The reason it changes is that, since you now know what those diseases really are, you can begin to do something about them. But if you don't know what they are—if you think the diseases are caused by masturbation, or by angels, or by black cats or devils or dolphins—then there's not a thing you can do about them except go on suffering, being terrified by them, and being destroyed by them.
..........And so—what are the Bushiscti? Very simple. They are perjurers, liars, deceivers, manipulators, greed-driven opportunists, cold-blooded murderers, traitors, genocidal killers, war mongers, thieves, bandits, breachers of international law, and committers of crimes against humanity. They are the people who organized, planned, and executed all of 9/11 and blamed it on others. They are the people who created Al Qaeda. They are the people who allowed Osama bin Laden to bomb the US embassies in Africa to help Americans start getting a sense that there really was an enormous terrorist-Muslim enemy "out there" and that it really, really did hate America. They are the people who kept John O'Neill from finding out the truth about the USS Cole attack and who later, in his first few days as head of security at the World Trade Center, kept him in the dark about the approaching attacks, making sure he died in the collapse of the north tower when it, like the south tower and WTC7, was made to collapse not from aircraft impact but from other, carefully controlled, demolition methods.
..........That is, the Bushiscti are criminals. They are traitors.
..........That's the simple reality of what they are—and anyone can find, read, study, and see the proof of it for themselves if only they are willing to take the time and expend the energy to do so.
..........And then? Well, it's not a hard question, is it. Charge. Arrest. Trial. And after that conviction or acquittal. If the former, sentencing.
..........If this does not happen, then, truly, we are doomed as a nation, as a republic, as a culture, and as a people. It can begin by impeachment, whether of Cheney first, or Bush first, or even Condoleezza Rice first.
..........But it has got to happen. "Fascism is here today because we allowed it to be here," writes Pablo Ouziel in his excellent short piece, "Failed Fascist States." Yes, we allowed it to be here. We have been wretchedly stupid. And now we've got to wake up, look straight at it, and get rid of it. Otherwise, as said, we are doomed. Paul Craig Roberts is capable of looking straight at it, or at its effects:
....................What a laughing stock Bush has made of America. What
....................ruination this utter idiot and his supporters have brought
....................to America. What total traitors the neoconservatives are.
....................Every last one of them should be immediately arrested
....................for high treason. Neoconservatives are America's great-
....................est enemies, and they control our government! All Amer-
....................icans have to show for six years of Bush's "war on terror"
....................is an incipient police state.
..........The elections? Oh, yes, the "elections." Well, before you do or think anything else, click here and be absolutely sure to read Carolyn Baker explaining why she isn't going to vote—and you'll learn forty times more from her about the real than you'll ever learn by following every single morpheme of every single "debate" between or among every single "candidate."
..........Then, after reading Carolyn Baker, be sure to go back and read the whole of Pablo Ouziel's very short and absolutely dead-eyed "Failed Fascist States." You'll learn almost as much there as—and in some ways more than—you did from Carolyn Baker.
..........Then begin reading and reading, as much as you can get your hands on, that's about the real. If it's not about the real, dump it.
..........And be careful who you listen to, because there are plenty of spies and enemies around who have made entire careers of faking people out by making those people think they're listening to genuine progressive liberal thinkers who are talking about and devoting themselves to the real.
..........Such a figure, one out of many but a very influential one, is Amy Goodman, whom I've written about here before. Someone else has now written about her also, pointing out precisely the fact that Goodman pretends to lead people to the real while in actuality she keeps them from it. Sean Madden is the writer, and in his "Open Letter to Amy Goodman," he says to her that "You deign to give your goodhearted listener-viewer-readers the symptoms, never the fundamentals which would empower them." Amy Goodman gives people plenty of the sort of real, or the seemingly real, but then she stops short of the real real, and, without that, none of the rest can matter. Sean Madden is shrewd enough to identify—clearly—this tactic and this characteristic in the so-called "progressive" or "liberal" media—media that, however anti-Bushiscti they may make themselves seem, will never identify what the Bushiscti are for real, and thus will condemn us to the loss of nation, republic, culture, and people by failing to charge, arrest, try, and convict.
..........By no means trust the devious deep-deceiver Noam Chomsky (see Barry Zwicker's fifth chapter in Towers of Deception, and also Daniel L. Abrahamson's "Controlled Asset of the New World Order"), but do listen carefully to Carolyn Baker. "Who Really Owns These Candidates?" she asks, meaning in particular—at this point—Obama and Clinton. Here's a chunk of what she says, looking not at the conventional, not at the superficial, not at the personal or the idiosyncratic, but at the real:
....................In 2007 I reviewed Daniel Estulin's True Story of the Bild-
....................erberg Group, an expose of that group and two related
....................monster organizations of the ruling elite, the Council on
....................Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission. With
....................control of central banks, discount rates, interest rates
....................and gold prices, the core members of these organiz-
....................ations, Estulin demonstrates, have set out to loot the
....................planet—and they are doing just that. The current mort-
....................gage crisis and ensuing global economic meltdown, as
....................I stated in my review, is due to the stupendous success
....................of the Big Three's strategy for planetary economic heg-
....................emony as the cacophony of their carefully engineered
....................global economic cataclysm reverberates across Amer-
....................ica and around the world. It was never about home buy-
....................ers who didn't read the fine print when taking out liar
....................loans. It was always about silver-tongued, ruling elite
....................politicians and financial systems which ultimately and
....................skillfully stole and continue to steal governments from
....................people and replace them with transnational corporations.
....................No, I'm not making that up. One of the explicit goals of
....................the Bilderberg Group, the Council on Foreign Relations,
....................and the Trilateral Commission is the ultimate dissolution
....................of nation-states to be replaced by global corporate hege-
....................mony.
..........If you doubt that Carolyn Baker is, indeed, looking directly at and talking accurately about the real here, it could be that a read of Daniel Estulin's book would be helpful, or of another that Carolyn Baker recommends, Trilateralism: The Trilateral Commission and Elite Planning for World Management, edited by Holly Sklar (1980).
..........Who among the presidential candidates is talking about the things Carolyn Baker is talking about? Who among them is looking straight at Bush and Cheney and Chertoff and saying in forthright, audible words what they really are—criminals, traitors, liars, thieves, looters, mass murderers, breachers of world accords and international law? And if none among the candidates is talking about what they really are, why aren't they?
..........The answer to that question is of essential and inestimable importance.
..........Amy Goodman will lie to you, mainly by omission. Noam Chomsky will lie to you, probably also mainly by omission. But Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and even John McCain will lie to you—and lie and lie and lie—by commission and by omission and by omission and by omission and by omission and by omission.
..........Why?
..........Why won't any of them speak even a morpheme of the truth of what Bush and Cheney and Chertoff and the many who are ranked, visibly or invisibly, behind them actually and really are?
..........Why won't any of them, in a word, talk about or tell the truth?
..........If you can answer these questions, you've provided yourself with a reason not to vote. And if you can't answer these questions, you've provided yourself, also, with a reason not to vote.
..........Either way, it looks like you've got a reason not to vote.
..........God spare us. God save the republic.
..........Carolyn Baker takes up the old cautionary reprimand that "You Have No Right To Complain If You Don't Vote." And she responds to it this way:
....................This nonsensical and frightening platitude sounds as if
....................it might have been taken from Joseph Goebbel's propa-
....................ganda playbook. What kind of tortured logic concludes
....................that I can only complain about a rotting political system
....................if I play by its rules? Whoever invented this notion had
....................undoubtedly never read the Founding Fathers who as-
....................serted in no uncertain terms that if my government has
....................become the enemy of the Constitution, it is not only
....................prudent, but obligatory to "alter and abolish it."
..........And certainly none of us is going to hear anything whatsoever in the presidential debates to the effect that we must "alter and abolish" the present government, nor anything like, say, this, from Lincoln's First Inaugural Address:
....................This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people
....................who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the
....................existing Government, they can exercise their constitu-
....................tional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to
....................dismember or overthrow it.
..........Those words, delivered on March 4, 1861, by the nation's sixteenth president, are most unlikely to be welcome within the hearing of its forty-third—nor, as I'm sure Carolyn Baker would agree, within the hearing of its forty-fourth, whoever that may be.
..........Since 1861, since the close of the Civil War, and certainly since the end of World War II, during the span of the past six decades, we have become a nation no longer holding out to its own people the promise of renewal or rebirth from its own potential oppression, but a nation, instead, dedicated to the very negation of such renewal, dedicated to the strengthening of the oppression it exercises over its own people, a nation dedicated not to the promise and pursuit of life at all, but of death. A month or so ago, in "The Twin Evils of Comfort and Ease," Gaither Stewart, drawing from roots as far back as Thorstein Veblen, said that
....................To achieve their ends amoral leaders infantilize the people,
....................keeping the majority content in a shell of comfort and ease.
....................Their weapons are ignorance and blindness, misinformation
....................and lies, censorship and euphemisms. . . and the assur-
....................ance of comfort and ease.
Stewart is right; infantilizing of an entire population is exactly what has happened—a grim and desperate idea that I've written about also, not only in A Nation Gone Blind but in essays like "U.S.A.—Land of Babies." Stewart—quite correctly, to my way of looking at it—sees a direct link between that infantilizing on the one hand and the United States' gradual but certain turning away from life in order the better to embrace death, on the other. Here are some of his words, with "comfort and ease" suggesting the American "life style," something that Pappy Bush declared, quite insanely in my own view, "non-negotiable":
....................Comfort and ease is a golden cage. Retreat into the be-
....................guiling cocoon of comfort and ease erases the possibility
....................of communication with the rest of mankind. It is a reject-
....................ion of the reality of the world and man's place in it.
....................A rejection of comfort and ease as a life goal is to choose
....................truth over lie. It is to choose the way of extremism, of op-
....................position to the lie. There are periods when truth exists
....................more easily. There are other periods, mendacious and
....................ugly periods, when truth rings seditious, subversive, rev-
....................olutionary, when it however shines in its extremism.
....................In my mind, comfort and ease as a goal reflect anti-real-
....................ity, anti-man, anti-life. For to live life, you have to accept
....................and live with reality—in the desperation and despair it
....................provokes. You have to learn to live without illusions.
....................That is unpleasant at first. Uncomfortable. Uneasy. But,
....................we can learn.
..........Can we? Can we learn? If we can't, we'll continue to be deceived, betrayed, and purposefully oppressed by a "leadership" whose ends are bent to "anti-reality, anti-man, anti-life." So there it is, death again.
..........And on that note, on that recurring note of the death—the death of those other than themselves—that the Bushiscti are so deeply in love with, let's turn back to Carolyn Baker and listen for a moment to her extraordinary list of some of the things that don't count in the current presidential campaign, some of the things that aren't being talked about, and some of the things that—in pursuit only of their own self-serving commitment to the death of others—some of the things that the Bushiscti, and the Clintoniscti, and the Obamiscti, don't talk about, but keep ever and carefully hidden from the eyes and ears of the likes of you and me. These passionate words are written, again, under that knee-jerk heading, "You Have No Right To Complain If You Don't Vote":
....................I have every right to complain about "choices" that
....................aren't really choices and election charades that dis-
....................tract my attention from issues that corporate clones
....................dare not touch—like the 200 species that went ex-
....................tinct today and the million innocent citizens of Iraq
....................who've died since 2003 and the unprecedented num-
....................bers of U.S. military suicides in the same period of
....................time and the carcinogenic bovine growth hormones
....................in my genetically engineered lunch and the guy
....................down the street who blew his brains out over mort-
....................gage foreclosure and bankruptcy resulting from
....................having no health insurance and the polar bears that
....................drowned today because their ice shelves had melted
....................away. All of this happened while the election dis-
....................traction served the same purpose as mainstream
....................media coverage of Britney Spears' latest psychotic
....................episode or the true confessions of yet another
....................steroid-crazed athlete.
..........And indeed she does—at least until they take it away—have every right to complain about grave and life-challenging truths being not only overlooked but purposely buried in and by a campaign that inanely parades itself as significant and purposeful when in fact it has nothing to do with much of anything beyond personality, and certainly nothing to do with the utterly grave forces and groups that are now at work destroying not only the rights and freedoms of vast numbers of the people harboring on this planet, but the very ability of the planet itself to go on being able to harbor them.
..........Destructiveness is rife, creativity absent; fraud, emptiness, and malevolence are everywhere, while constructive hope and thinking are nowhere to be found. Except in voices like those of Gaither Stewart, Carolyn Baker, Chris Floyd, Sean Madden, Manuel Valenzuela, Paul Craig Roberts, and others whom you'll find in Online Journal or on Information Clearing House, and in other notable outlets and publications, but not on Democracy Now and not in Progressive Magazine, and—most assuredly—not in the New York Times.
..........That said, allow me to close with someone else's words—words about what's real—again from Carolyn Baker, who, like me, will not be voting for president in the election of 2008:
....................I will complain—I will scream and rant bitch and whine,
....................and I won't shut up, and what I will complain most loudly
....................about is a culture where citizens get what they settle for
....................because they refuse to face the reality that the system
....................is completely rigged against them, and they prolong
....................their own agony by hanging on to the fantasy of busi-
....................ness as usual as their empire, well into collapse, sucks
....................the last drops of their blood and rides off into a Stage
....................Five smog-alert sunset to rape and pillage and plunder
....................the rest of the planet in the name of things like "demo-
....................cracy," "the two-party system," "Super Tuesday", and
....................let's not forget, "the first female president."
..........Some things matter—enormously—and some things matter little or not at all or even less than not at all, existing merely to divert people from what does matter. If you're as well informed as Carolyn Baker, and if you're as impassioned as Carolyn Baker—as impassioned toward life, as impassioned toward the real—then you're well equipped to use your own eyes, and use your own ears, and use your own mind, to measure the penury and fraud and deceit and evasion and avoidance and miserable complicity in crimes of an intolerable magnitude that are endemic to the campaign and to all of those participating in it—and, after that, you're well equipped also, quietly and calmly and for real, to decide for yourself whether to vote or not.
..........
......................................................................—Eric Larsen
......................................................................—Febuary 23, 2008
>CLICK HERE FOR PART ONE OF "NOTES FROM A DYING NATION>>
..........
>CLICK HERE FOR PART TWO OF "NOTES FROM A DYING NATION>>
>READ, PRINT, OR DOWNLOAD IN PDF FORMAT>>
>EMAIL ERIC LARSEN>>
>GO BACK TO IDEAS>>
¹..........Henry the Fourth, Part 1 (II, iv).
².........."It is the combination of high density and flammability that make DU such a coveted weapon by the military. When a DU projectile hits a tank, the much less dense steel armor gives way. At the same time, the impact causes the DU to ignite, turning it into the equivalent of a welding torch. The projectile quite literally burns its way completely through the tank wall. Inside the tank, it sprays molten uranium on the occupants, burning them alive, and often has enough momentum to burn another hole through the opposite wall. Usually the burning projectile will ignite the ammunition or the fuel within the tank, causing it to explode catastrophically. It is not difficult to imagine why the military would do everything in its power to keep such a weapon from being banned!"
³.......... Four Arrows and Jim Fetzer, American Assassination: The Strange Death of Senator Paul Wellstone (Vox Pop, 2004), p. 28 and throughout.
1
The Moonlight Sonata
The Moonlight Sonata
..........How many times have you heard disgruntled people ask—or how many times have you yourself asked—how it can be that we can put a man on the moon but can't do something simple, like, say, keeping the I-35 bridge in Minneapolis from collapsing?
..........Is it lack of will? Of money? Unresponsive local government, or the fruits of ineptitude that come from ever-weaker education? Or is it plain old-fashioned mob-style corruption? Or—or maybe the Bushiscti really did detonate it with Ultra Low Frequency weaponry in another routine shooting up of the fear-quotient among Americans at a dangerously dull and un-frightened moment in a long, quiet summer.
..........Naturally, something of the sort would be perfectly typical of the Buschisti psycho-pattern. After all, the mere fact that the Bushiscti include both Lon Cheney and Homeland Security Director Michael Karloff is enough to make it more than believable. We all know that that pair of madmen, along with their trained monkey, have always been very, very subtle in all their undertakings. They were subtle beyond subtlety itself in stealing the 2000 election, ditto the 2004. We all know, further, that they way out-subtled their own personal bests with 9/11 itself, and with their paint-by-number alert system, and with their destruction of New Orleans, and with all their other quaint and curious behavior right on down "to the pupil age of this present twelve o'clock at midnight."¹
..........Just last week, on nothing less than Valentine's Day itself (nice touch), the New York Times ran an article about the trained monkey's latest ever-so-deft hand in the Bushisctis' great double effort of keeping the "War on Terror" genocidally alive and kicking while at the same time bankrupting the US and crushing it into a helpless police state. (Perhaps I should explain: The bankrupting and crushing are a means of making the genocide easier, since there will no longer be a "United States" to oppose it). And just what did the monkey do and say in his Valentine's Day effort toward these dual and noble ends?
..........Well, under the headline "Eavesdropping Law Is Likely to Lapse," Eric Lichtblau explained that "At a morning appearance in the Oval Office, President Bush pressed the House to adopt quickly a plan that the Senate approved on Tuesday to broaden the government's spying powers and give legal immunity to telephone companies."
..........You see, not prosecuting corporations when they break the law is one of the many useful ways of helping bleed the rest of America to death—to bleed to death non-corporate America, that is, regular America. And in order to do that particular kind of America-destroying, and to go on doing more and more of it, the trained monkey knows perfectly well that he must do more than simply say that that's what he and Lon and Karloff want to do, already do, and want to go on doing. No, the trained monkey must be more subtle than that. And so here's what he does: He attaches an entire ham to his left forearm, including his hand, with a great deal of duct tape, while his aides tape to his right forearm and hand a three-pound sledge hammer. Thus prepared, he sits down at a piano and plays Beethoven's "Moonlight Sonata."
..........That's just about how subtle he is. Here's what this extraordinarily delicate keyboard performance sounds like:
...................."At this moment," he said, "somewhere in the world
....................terrorists are planning new attacks on our country.
....................Their goal is to bring destruction to our shores that
....................will make Sept. 11 pale by comparison."
....................To stop an attack, he urged, Congress must act
....................immediately to strengthen the eavesdropping.
..........And here's my question: How is it possible that we as a people can put men on the moon and achieve countless other wonders and yet can't or won't see through the chicanery, the fraud, the comic-book simple-mindedness, the absolutely absurd ham-handedness of this bit—like its thousand previous kin since 9/11—of vaudeville and snake-oil shtick—he's talking about A-bombs, is he? or he's talking about zero, zilch, nada, no plan,just empty threats, is he?—as it's performed and has been performed over and over both by the trained monkey and by Lon and Karloff and the others?
..........Now, I'm well aware that the House adjourned without extending the bill as the monkey wanted it extended. Conceivably—just conceivably—that fact may indicate a tiny increment of learning having taken place among our dear assembled leaders. But let's not forget that these are the same dear assembled leaders who approved the good Jane Gorgon's Joe McCarthyistic thought-control bill by a vote of 404 to six. By evidence such as that, our dear assembled leaders haven't learned anything at all in the entire six years that have passed since they did ditto with the so-called "Patriot Act," and ditto again later with the "War Commissions Act of 2006."
..........I'm also aware that these dear leaders claim that the vote was so overwhelmingly favorable to Jane Gorgon's Orwellian thought-control bill simply because none of them had read it or discussed it. How comforting. After all, that's what they did with the Patriot Act, for nongod's sake, as we all know thanks to Michael Moore and the honorable John Conyers.
..........And even though they did adjourn without extending the spying bill and without voting to declare that corporate spying on Americans is a guiltless crime, there's still the much more important question of how they're going to behave when they come back from vacation. Will they do anything then to prove that they've at long, long last seen through the trained monkey's fraud-act—the way Keith Olbermann and Ted Kennedy have seen through it, finding proof in the monkey's behavior that he himself is a traitor to his country and therefore should be prosecuted and tried for treason.
..........If only it could happen in that way. But is there even the least, the most remote possibility that it might?
..........Let's go back to the "Moonlight Sonata" and see if we can get a hint. The trained monkey, you remember, sat down to perform the old Beethoven piece with a ham taped to his left forearm and hand and a three-pound sledge hammer taped to his right forearm and hand. The performance? Exactly as to be expected. Subtle it was not. The trained monkey bashed and hammered away at the keyboard until its pearly teeth flew and the piano itself came near collapse.
..........So much for the performance. It was exactly as subtle as the trained monkey's ham-handed performance as reported by Eric Lichtblau:
...................."At this moment," he said, "somewhere in the world
....................terrorists are planning new attacks on our country.
....................Their goal is to bring destruction to our shores that
....................will make Sept. 11 pale by comparison."
....................To stop an attack, he urged, Congress must act
....................immediately to strengthen the eavesdropping.
..........But the reviews from the critics? The reviews, that is, from our dear assembled leaders, the very same ones who have already brought us the "Patriot Act" twice and the "2006 War Commissions Act" once, and who now appear poised and ready to bring us the Medusa-written Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act, for which we will all, I know, be ever-grateful.
..........Here's some of the stuff they said about the trained monkey's ham-and-hammer performance of the "Moonlight Sonata": They said that it was "Eloquent and graceful," "Insightful and dramatically rendered," that it "showed an understanding of the deepest elements of musicality," that it had "a lightness of touch and yet a clarity of attack unheard by audiences since Glenn Gould," etc., etc., etc.
..........How could it be otherwise? How could they not have been every bit as servile and fawning as all those in the Hans Christian Andersen tale who stood along the parade route exclaiming about the grandeur of the emperor's new clothes? I know, as I said, that the House didn't extend and alter the FISA bill before it went on vacation—but of what significance can we consider that scintilla of independence when it follows mountains' worth of precedent revealing only dependence, acquiescence, and servitude? For seven entire years, precedent has been set again and again and again of namby-pamby kow-towing to the trained monkey, and of namby-pamby kow-towing to Lon Cheney, and of namby-pamby kow-towing to Karloff, as well as to all the other and equally industrious liars, traitors, murderers, deceivers, Constitution-destructors and concentration camp constructors, police-state lovers, and wholesale criminals against humanity—kow-towing, in short, to the full complement of vile and contemptible sociopaths and crime bosses who now make up the so-called leadership of our nation.
..........Do you see the point we've come back to yet again? Again, the "Moonlight Sonata" as played with hammer and ham: How can it be that so crude, so idiotic, so transparently stupid a performance could ever be declared subtle? Ever be tolerated? Why would they and how could they believe him even for a split second?
..........Here once more, just so we can be amazed once again, can once again contemplate with sheer awe the fact that so crude a pile of hogshit as this one passing out between the lips of the President of the United States of America should or could or would actually be believed in any way whatsoever as true, or as containing truth, or as being anything else than a big enough pack of lies to send even Mark Twain around the bend:
...................."At this moment," he said, "somewhere in the world
....................terrorists are planning new attacks on our country.
....................Their goal is to bring destruction to our shores that
....................will make Sept. 11 pale by comparison."
....................To stop an attack, he urged, Congress must act
....................immediately to strengthen the eavesdropping.
..........Unless, of course, every word of it were all too true, and those terrorists are right here, right at home, right here among us, hectoring us at this very moment and then being so gracious as to perform for us the "Moonlight Sonata."
2
Back to Question Three
Back to Question Three
..........And so, the point we've come back to yet again is the point, earlier, where we asked question number three. For memory's purposes, here's that question:
....................How can it be that seemingly nothing is being effectively
....................done, if not necessarily to stop the US immediately from
....................functioning as a force of death, ruin, and destruction, then
....................at least to slow it in its rapaciousness, or even simply to
....................begin an amelioration of its repugnant nature and behavior
....................in the hope of someday making both of these productive
....................and humane?
..........Let's provide an answer, to begin, that has to do with all those members of Congress who kow-tow pusillanimously to the Monkey, Lon, Karloff and the rest of the criminals by praising as subtle, skilled, true, and effective things that are in reality stupid, ham-handed, idiotic, and false.
..........Of those congressional figures, it seems to me, there are three and only three causes that could possibly explain their otherwise seemingly insane behavior.
..........The first possibility is this: That they really are in fact genuine morons; that they really are "bloody ignorant apes," that they really are so dumb, gullible, and inexperienced that they actually do believe the clumsy, inane, stupefyingly transparent lies that the trained monkey is uttering—that "'somewhere in the world terrorists are planning new attacks on our country. Their goal is to bring destruction to our shores that will make Sept. 11 pale by comparison,'" and really do believe that "To stop an attack, . . . Congress must act immediately to strengthen. . . eavesdropping."
..........Seems inconceivable, doesn't it? How could anyone with any decent education at all, any person who makes the least effort to keep up with the best available news and commentary—how could any such person remain that stupid, ignorant, uninformed, depraved, and unthinking as opposed to behaving in the manner of a normal, intelligent, adult, thinking human being?
..........I'm well aware that these latter criteria—normal, intelligent, adult, thinking—rare as they are, in likelihood do still exist in some members of Congress. And yet, if that's true, why do they continue to behave as they do (and as they have done since 9/11), again and again bowing to the inane, jumping to the service of the crude, the fake, and the absurd?
..........Clearly, we need to consider the next of the three possibilities that could explain such submissive and pandering behavior, causing our innocent leaders ever and again to depart from reality and adhere instead to the false and untrue.
..........The second possibility is that this behavior is simply brought about by a combination of cowardice, greed, and fear. The fear, simply, is the fear of not being re-elected; the greed is ignited by the powerful desire to continue being fed at the corporate trough; and the cowardice is made evident in the congress-members' inability to exercise any nobler quality of character for the purpose of overcoming the previous two.
..........But this second possibility can't in itself account for the infantile behavior, since the desire for re-election should logically—and obviously—cause legislators to distance themselves from the trained monkey, to part ways rather than serve as his lackeys. After all, if only sixteen percent of Americans still believe the "official" 9/11 story, wouldn't it make political sense, if seeking re-election, to court the 84% majority rather than to continue bowing and pandering to the least popular president in American history?
..........Clearly, we haven't found the answer to our question. Congress-members aren't—not in every case—acting out of moronic stupidity. And, as we've seen, neither are they acting out of any normal desire or incentive for reward. So, then, if they're not stupid, and if they're not acting out of attempts to serve their own interest, what's left as a motive for behavior that looks both stupid and counter-productive?
..........And so we come to the only remaining possibility.
..........The cause of the legislators' behavior is fear. The cause of the legislators' behavior is terror. After all, as Paul Craig Roberts has told us, "The light of liberty has gone out in the United States."
3
Terrorism
Terrorism
..........It's been said since antiquity that politics is dirty. But there is, even so, a highly significant difference between dirty politics and terrorism. Usually, dirty politics stops short of murder, torture, breach of international law, and ongoing crimes against humanity. As a rule, the dirty methods in dirty politics are not, do not become, and do not remain the sole means or method of gaining or holding power, nor the sole means of shaping or directing political change.
..........The Bush-Cheney "administration" is far beyond the realm of "dirty politics" and has been so from the very beginning of its so-called tenure. From the beginning, yes, even from before the beginning, it cheated and lied and deceived. It then very quickly—with 9/11—resorted to mass murder, treason, and criminal destruction of extreme proportions. Seizing the advantage it had gained by terrifying the American public, the administration turned immediately to the use of torture, the elimination of habeas corpus and other constitutionally guaranteed rights, the breach both of international law generally and of international conventions of war particularly, and, making use again of lies, deceit, and terror, it illegally invaded two innocent nations, and in just one of them so has so far murdered 1,173,743 of its people, driven countless more from their homes and even from their country, has brought disease, poverty, and malnutrition to millions, and to countless others has brought the unspeakable horrors, suffering, and ruinous birth defects caused by the use of "depleted uranium," or U-238, in weaponry,² with its radioactive half-life of 4.51 billion years.
..........This entire program of systemic murder, ruin, criminality, and destruction has been made possible for the monsters seeking and executing it by means of one thing alone. That one thing is this group's sole "political" tool, and it is through the use of this single, constantly reapplied, and incessantly visible and present tool that the group is now victorious. That one, single tool is the instillation of terror into people.
..........When terrified, people will do things that in other circumstances they would not, or very likely would not, do.
..........The United States Congress has ceased to exist as an equal branch of a three-part government for the very simple reason that it is terrified. A good number of its members, in point of fact, really are demagogic, extremely stupid, driven solely by greed or by opportunism, or are in a great number of other and generally despicable ways blind. Let's go ahead and set those people aside for the moment, just leaving them out of the argument. That means that we're now setting aside, let's say, a third of the members of Congress. What is it known that we can say about the remaining two-thirds of the congressional membership? What we can say about the remaining two-thirds of the congressional membership is this: that they are terrified.
..........The United States today, now, this minute, is not a democracy nor is democracy the political method by which it is organized and governed.
..........No, the United States today, now, this minute, is a terrorist state, and the political method by which it is organized and governed is terrorism.
..........We know that in 2002 Vice President Lon Cheney told Senator Paul Wellstone that "If you vote against the war in Iraq, the Bush administration will do whatever is necessary to get you. There will be severe ramifications for you and the state of Minnesota." We know that Wellstone did vote against the war in Iraq. And we know that soon afterward he was assassinated. ³
..........This fact is terrifying. It is a matter not of politics clean or dirty, but it is a matter of terrorism.
..........We know perfectly well, six-and-a-half years later, and have known perfectly well now for several years, that 9/11 was an inside job, that it was planned and executed by elements of our own government and other "governing" bodies—we know, that is, that in its treason it was an act of terrorism, that it was terrifying, that the people were terrified by it, and that its sole initial purpose was exactly that: To bring about a situation whereby they would be terrified.
..........And so a person must ask why, if we know all of this to be true, why is it that the trained monkey's ludicrous and transparent threats of something "worse" than 9/11 are able so severely to terrify members of congress even now that they will say that up is down, that ham-handed is subtle, and the monkey's absolutely appalling rendition of "Moonlight Sonata" was simply sublime?
..........Terrorism works. It works on us, and it's working on us now.
..........How can such a thing have come about? Such a thing has come about because we let it. And we let it come about because we're wretchedly stupid. We've allowed ourselves to be made wretchedly stupid, and we've allowed ourselves to remain wretchedly stupid. We've even come to flaunt our stupidity, to brag about it, and to defend and protect it as we would defend and protect—as we should have defended and protected—real and meaningful rights, like those in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
..........But it's too late.
..........We lose.
4
Question Four
Question Four
..........Or do we?
..........It's not easy to know how to get out of so wretched and dangerous a mess, but I myself vote, as I said at the end of Part 1 of this essay, for the only thing that I can conceive of as being of any real or lasting help. I vote, that is, for a systematic turning to the real both as a weapon for defense and as a tool for recovery and resurrection. Neither the trained monkey nor the legions of traitors, murderers, criminals, torturers, killers and looters arrayed behind him—both the visible ones and the invisible—will be quite as terrifying once you've become able to see and know the reality of what they are and the reality of what it is they're doing. It's not that they'll suddenly stop being frightening, or that they'll suddenly stop being monstrously, cold-bloodedly, unremittingly destructive. But something will change. The Bushiscti in this way are like typhus, or like poliomyelitis. Both of those diseases are frightening, in fact terrifying. But once you know, once you're able to identify and understand the real identity and nature of the rickettsia that causes typhus, or the real identity and nature of the virus that causes polio-then the terror caused by these diseases changes. The reason it changes is that, since you now know what those diseases really are, you can begin to do something about them. But if you don't know what they are—if you think the diseases are caused by masturbation, or by angels, or by black cats or devils or dolphins—then there's not a thing you can do about them except go on suffering, being terrified by them, and being destroyed by them.
..........And so—what are the Bushiscti? Very simple. They are perjurers, liars, deceivers, manipulators, greed-driven opportunists, cold-blooded murderers, traitors, genocidal killers, war mongers, thieves, bandits, breachers of international law, and committers of crimes against humanity. They are the people who organized, planned, and executed all of 9/11 and blamed it on others. They are the people who created Al Qaeda. They are the people who allowed Osama bin Laden to bomb the US embassies in Africa to help Americans start getting a sense that there really was an enormous terrorist-Muslim enemy "out there" and that it really, really did hate America. They are the people who kept John O'Neill from finding out the truth about the USS Cole attack and who later, in his first few days as head of security at the World Trade Center, kept him in the dark about the approaching attacks, making sure he died in the collapse of the north tower when it, like the south tower and WTC7, was made to collapse not from aircraft impact but from other, carefully controlled, demolition methods.
..........That is, the Bushiscti are criminals. They are traitors.
..........That's the simple reality of what they are—and anyone can find, read, study, and see the proof of it for themselves if only they are willing to take the time and expend the energy to do so.
..........And then? Well, it's not a hard question, is it. Charge. Arrest. Trial. And after that conviction or acquittal. If the former, sentencing.
..........If this does not happen, then, truly, we are doomed as a nation, as a republic, as a culture, and as a people. It can begin by impeachment, whether of Cheney first, or Bush first, or even Condoleezza Rice first.
..........But it has got to happen. "Fascism is here today because we allowed it to be here," writes Pablo Ouziel in his excellent short piece, "Failed Fascist States." Yes, we allowed it to be here. We have been wretchedly stupid. And now we've got to wake up, look straight at it, and get rid of it. Otherwise, as said, we are doomed. Paul Craig Roberts is capable of looking straight at it, or at its effects:
....................What a laughing stock Bush has made of America. What
....................ruination this utter idiot and his supporters have brought
....................to America. What total traitors the neoconservatives are.
....................Every last one of them should be immediately arrested
....................for high treason. Neoconservatives are America's great-
....................est enemies, and they control our government! All Amer-
....................icans have to show for six years of Bush's "war on terror"
....................is an incipient police state.
..........The elections? Oh, yes, the "elections." Well, before you do or think anything else, click here and be absolutely sure to read Carolyn Baker explaining why she isn't going to vote—and you'll learn forty times more from her about the real than you'll ever learn by following every single morpheme of every single "debate" between or among every single "candidate."
..........Then, after reading Carolyn Baker, be sure to go back and read the whole of Pablo Ouziel's very short and absolutely dead-eyed "Failed Fascist States." You'll learn almost as much there as—and in some ways more than—you did from Carolyn Baker.
..........Then begin reading and reading, as much as you can get your hands on, that's about the real. If it's not about the real, dump it.
..........And be careful who you listen to, because there are plenty of spies and enemies around who have made entire careers of faking people out by making those people think they're listening to genuine progressive liberal thinkers who are talking about and devoting themselves to the real.
..........Such a figure, one out of many but a very influential one, is Amy Goodman, whom I've written about here before. Someone else has now written about her also, pointing out precisely the fact that Goodman pretends to lead people to the real while in actuality she keeps them from it. Sean Madden is the writer, and in his "Open Letter to Amy Goodman," he says to her that "You deign to give your goodhearted listener-viewer-readers the symptoms, never the fundamentals which would empower them." Amy Goodman gives people plenty of the sort of real, or the seemingly real, but then she stops short of the real real, and, without that, none of the rest can matter. Sean Madden is shrewd enough to identify—clearly—this tactic and this characteristic in the so-called "progressive" or "liberal" media—media that, however anti-Bushiscti they may make themselves seem, will never identify what the Bushiscti are for real, and thus will condemn us to the loss of nation, republic, culture, and people by failing to charge, arrest, try, and convict.
..........By no means trust the devious deep-deceiver Noam Chomsky (see Barry Zwicker's fifth chapter in Towers of Deception, and also Daniel L. Abrahamson's "Controlled Asset of the New World Order"), but do listen carefully to Carolyn Baker. "Who Really Owns These Candidates?" she asks, meaning in particular—at this point—Obama and Clinton. Here's a chunk of what she says, looking not at the conventional, not at the superficial, not at the personal or the idiosyncratic, but at the real:
....................In 2007 I reviewed Daniel Estulin's True Story of the Bild-
....................erberg Group, an expose of that group and two related
....................monster organizations of the ruling elite, the Council on
....................Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission. With
....................control of central banks, discount rates, interest rates
....................and gold prices, the core members of these organiz-
....................ations, Estulin demonstrates, have set out to loot the
....................planet—and they are doing just that. The current mort-
....................gage crisis and ensuing global economic meltdown, as
....................I stated in my review, is due to the stupendous success
....................of the Big Three's strategy for planetary economic heg-
....................emony as the cacophony of their carefully engineered
....................global economic cataclysm reverberates across Amer-
....................ica and around the world. It was never about home buy-
....................ers who didn't read the fine print when taking out liar
....................loans. It was always about silver-tongued, ruling elite
....................politicians and financial systems which ultimately and
....................skillfully stole and continue to steal governments from
....................people and replace them with transnational corporations.
....................No, I'm not making that up. One of the explicit goals of
....................the Bilderberg Group, the Council on Foreign Relations,
....................and the Trilateral Commission is the ultimate dissolution
....................of nation-states to be replaced by global corporate hege-
....................mony.
..........If you doubt that Carolyn Baker is, indeed, looking directly at and talking accurately about the real here, it could be that a read of Daniel Estulin's book would be helpful, or of another that Carolyn Baker recommends, Trilateralism: The Trilateral Commission and Elite Planning for World Management, edited by Holly Sklar (1980).
..........Who among the presidential candidates is talking about the things Carolyn Baker is talking about? Who among them is looking straight at Bush and Cheney and Chertoff and saying in forthright, audible words what they really are—criminals, traitors, liars, thieves, looters, mass murderers, breachers of world accords and international law? And if none among the candidates is talking about what they really are, why aren't they?
..........The answer to that question is of essential and inestimable importance.
..........Amy Goodman will lie to you, mainly by omission. Noam Chomsky will lie to you, probably also mainly by omission. But Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama and even John McCain will lie to you—and lie and lie and lie—by commission and by omission and by omission and by omission and by omission and by omission.
..........Why?
..........Why won't any of them speak even a morpheme of the truth of what Bush and Cheney and Chertoff and the many who are ranked, visibly or invisibly, behind them actually and really are?
..........Why won't any of them, in a word, talk about or tell the truth?
..........If you can answer these questions, you've provided yourself with a reason not to vote. And if you can't answer these questions, you've provided yourself, also, with a reason not to vote.
..........Either way, it looks like you've got a reason not to vote.
..........God spare us. God save the republic.
..........Carolyn Baker takes up the old cautionary reprimand that "You Have No Right To Complain If You Don't Vote." And she responds to it this way:
....................This nonsensical and frightening platitude sounds as if
....................it might have been taken from Joseph Goebbel's propa-
....................ganda playbook. What kind of tortured logic concludes
....................that I can only complain about a rotting political system
....................if I play by its rules? Whoever invented this notion had
....................undoubtedly never read the Founding Fathers who as-
....................serted in no uncertain terms that if my government has
....................become the enemy of the Constitution, it is not only
....................prudent, but obligatory to "alter and abolish it."
..........And certainly none of us is going to hear anything whatsoever in the presidential debates to the effect that we must "alter and abolish" the present government, nor anything like, say, this, from Lincoln's First Inaugural Address:
....................This country, with its institutions, belongs to the people
....................who inhabit it. Whenever they shall grow weary of the
....................existing Government, they can exercise their constitu-
....................tional right of amending it or their revolutionary right to
....................dismember or overthrow it.
..........Those words, delivered on March 4, 1861, by the nation's sixteenth president, are most unlikely to be welcome within the hearing of its forty-third—nor, as I'm sure Carolyn Baker would agree, within the hearing of its forty-fourth, whoever that may be.
..........Since 1861, since the close of the Civil War, and certainly since the end of World War II, during the span of the past six decades, we have become a nation no longer holding out to its own people the promise of renewal or rebirth from its own potential oppression, but a nation, instead, dedicated to the very negation of such renewal, dedicated to the strengthening of the oppression it exercises over its own people, a nation dedicated not to the promise and pursuit of life at all, but of death. A month or so ago, in "The Twin Evils of Comfort and Ease," Gaither Stewart, drawing from roots as far back as Thorstein Veblen, said that
....................To achieve their ends amoral leaders infantilize the people,
....................keeping the majority content in a shell of comfort and ease.
....................Their weapons are ignorance and blindness, misinformation
....................and lies, censorship and euphemisms. . . and the assur-
....................ance of comfort and ease.
Stewart is right; infantilizing of an entire population is exactly what has happened—a grim and desperate idea that I've written about also, not only in A Nation Gone Blind but in essays like "U.S.A.—Land of Babies." Stewart—quite correctly, to my way of looking at it—sees a direct link between that infantilizing on the one hand and the United States' gradual but certain turning away from life in order the better to embrace death, on the other. Here are some of his words, with "comfort and ease" suggesting the American "life style," something that Pappy Bush declared, quite insanely in my own view, "non-negotiable":
....................Comfort and ease is a golden cage. Retreat into the be-
....................guiling cocoon of comfort and ease erases the possibility
....................of communication with the rest of mankind. It is a reject-
....................ion of the reality of the world and man's place in it.
....................A rejection of comfort and ease as a life goal is to choose
....................truth over lie. It is to choose the way of extremism, of op-
....................position to the lie. There are periods when truth exists
....................more easily. There are other periods, mendacious and
....................ugly periods, when truth rings seditious, subversive, rev-
....................olutionary, when it however shines in its extremism.
....................In my mind, comfort and ease as a goal reflect anti-real-
....................ity, anti-man, anti-life. For to live life, you have to accept
....................and live with reality—in the desperation and despair it
....................provokes. You have to learn to live without illusions.
....................That is unpleasant at first. Uncomfortable. Uneasy. But,
....................we can learn.
..........Can we? Can we learn? If we can't, we'll continue to be deceived, betrayed, and purposefully oppressed by a "leadership" whose ends are bent to "anti-reality, anti-man, anti-life." So there it is, death again.
..........And on that note, on that recurring note of the death—the death of those other than themselves—that the Bushiscti are so deeply in love with, let's turn back to Carolyn Baker and listen for a moment to her extraordinary list of some of the things that don't count in the current presidential campaign, some of the things that aren't being talked about, and some of the things that—in pursuit only of their own self-serving commitment to the death of others—some of the things that the Bushiscti, and the Clintoniscti, and the Obamiscti, don't talk about, but keep ever and carefully hidden from the eyes and ears of the likes of you and me. These passionate words are written, again, under that knee-jerk heading, "You Have No Right To Complain If You Don't Vote":
....................I have every right to complain about "choices" that
....................aren't really choices and election charades that dis-
....................tract my attention from issues that corporate clones
....................dare not touch—like the 200 species that went ex-
....................tinct today and the million innocent citizens of Iraq
....................who've died since 2003 and the unprecedented num-
....................bers of U.S. military suicides in the same period of
....................time and the carcinogenic bovine growth hormones
....................in my genetically engineered lunch and the guy
....................down the street who blew his brains out over mort-
....................gage foreclosure and bankruptcy resulting from
....................having no health insurance and the polar bears that
....................drowned today because their ice shelves had melted
....................away. All of this happened while the election dis-
....................traction served the same purpose as mainstream
....................media coverage of Britney Spears' latest psychotic
....................episode or the true confessions of yet another
....................steroid-crazed athlete.
..........And indeed she does—at least until they take it away—have every right to complain about grave and life-challenging truths being not only overlooked but purposely buried in and by a campaign that inanely parades itself as significant and purposeful when in fact it has nothing to do with much of anything beyond personality, and certainly nothing to do with the utterly grave forces and groups that are now at work destroying not only the rights and freedoms of vast numbers of the people harboring on this planet, but the very ability of the planet itself to go on being able to harbor them.
..........Destructiveness is rife, creativity absent; fraud, emptiness, and malevolence are everywhere, while constructive hope and thinking are nowhere to be found. Except in voices like those of Gaither Stewart, Carolyn Baker, Chris Floyd, Sean Madden, Manuel Valenzuela, Paul Craig Roberts, and others whom you'll find in Online Journal or on Information Clearing House, and in other notable outlets and publications, but not on Democracy Now and not in Progressive Magazine, and—most assuredly—not in the New York Times.
..........That said, allow me to close with someone else's words—words about what's real—again from Carolyn Baker, who, like me, will not be voting for president in the election of 2008:
....................I will complain—I will scream and rant bitch and whine,
....................and I won't shut up, and what I will complain most loudly
....................about is a culture where citizens get what they settle for
....................because they refuse to face the reality that the system
....................is completely rigged against them, and they prolong
....................their own agony by hanging on to the fantasy of busi-
....................ness as usual as their empire, well into collapse, sucks
....................the last drops of their blood and rides off into a Stage
....................Five smog-alert sunset to rape and pillage and plunder
....................the rest of the planet in the name of things like "demo-
....................cracy," "the two-party system," "Super Tuesday", and
....................let's not forget, "the first female president."
..........Some things matter—enormously—and some things matter little or not at all or even less than not at all, existing merely to divert people from what does matter. If you're as well informed as Carolyn Baker, and if you're as impassioned as Carolyn Baker—as impassioned toward life, as impassioned toward the real—then you're well equipped to use your own eyes, and use your own ears, and use your own mind, to measure the penury and fraud and deceit and evasion and avoidance and miserable complicity in crimes of an intolerable magnitude that are endemic to the campaign and to all of those participating in it—and, after that, you're well equipped also, quietly and calmly and for real, to decide for yourself whether to vote or not.
..........
......................................................................—Eric Larsen
......................................................................—Febuary 23, 2008
>CLICK HERE FOR PART ONE OF "NOTES FROM A DYING NATION>>
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¹..........Henry the Fourth, Part 1 (II, iv).
².........."It is the combination of high density and flammability that make DU such a coveted weapon by the military. When a DU projectile hits a tank, the much less dense steel armor gives way. At the same time, the impact causes the DU to ignite, turning it into the equivalent of a welding torch. The projectile quite literally burns its way completely through the tank wall. Inside the tank, it sprays molten uranium on the occupants, burning them alive, and often has enough momentum to burn another hole through the opposite wall. Usually the burning projectile will ignite the ammunition or the fuel within the tank, causing it to explode catastrophically. It is not difficult to imagine why the military would do everything in its power to keep such a weapon from being banned!"
³.......... Four Arrows and Jim Fetzer, American Assassination: The Strange Death of Senator Paul Wellstone (Vox Pop, 2004), p. 28 and throughout.