Elegy

The reason I called the previous “moment” A Possibly Penultimate Moment was because the next one was going to be the last one. I was going to say essentially what Michael in NY wrote … but he nailed it … so there’s no reason for The Department of Redundancy Department to issue a duplicate statement. All that’s left now is to write the elegy.

Almost everything I’ve written about has nibbled around the edges of The Great Big Scary Fact and Mike in NY summed it up best when he wrote, “… the American system has LOST ITS CAPACITY FOR REFORM.”

The Corporatocracy controls the institutions that need reformation. And They Will Not Allow It. They own enough of our elected representatives to guarantee that any reform will be derailed.

This country desperately needs a single payer health care system. The majority of Americans want a single payer system and are willing to pay more taxes to get it. The Majority. But our elected representatives are doing the bidding of their masters and the Healthcare Industry is dictating how the deck chairs on the Titanic are going to be rearranged. To hell with all of us in steerage … The Corporatocracy bought up all the lifeboats.

The ascendancy of The Dimwitted Ronald Reagan in 1981, and the abolishment of The Fairness doctrine in 1987, set the stage for The Corporatocracy’s dominion over all. They would not have succeeded without the lies of Rush Limbaugh, Fox News, and The Crazy Christians. They needed these mouthpieces to tell lies in order to control millions of Stupid Americans. They knew the power they would wield when they controlled the minds of an entire class of poor white people, described by the author James Lee Burke as those with the lowest self-esteem of any group in the Western Hemisphere.

These are the people who blame Jews, Yankees, Liberals, Women, Gays, Brown and Black People for their problems … anyone besides themselves. These are the people who believe the devil is more real than God and the flames of hell roar under their feet. The men with the power to shut down the factories and outsource the jobs live in mansions behind walls but the enemies are those who come ragged and hungry into the poor white’s domain and ask for part of what the white man had been told what was his by birth.

The class war is a war between the have-nots and the have-nots … incited by those that have it all.

No reasonable person would deliberately incite these people but The Corporatocracy is a psychopath. They believed they would be safe in their gated communities patrolled by hired Blackwater goons. So their mouthpieces continued to spread the racism, fear, and lies, and the Corporate-controlled Mainstream Media did what they were told … and allowed everything to go unchallenged.

So here we are … a little more than a generation later … and America has been grotesquely distorted into something most of us could never have imagined. 46 years ago John Kennedy got his head blown apart in Dallas but today people with handguns and assault rifles attend rallies where Barack Obama will speak.

I have felt that the country that I live in is not the one of my birth. But now I know that feeling is a lie.

When we were very young we were told lies about our country. Our parents, teachers, and religious leaders told us lies … and we believed them … we were little kids … what did we know? If you were white … and somewhere in the middle class … it was safe and secure living in the bountiful empire. Television, the most powerful medium ever invented, affirmed the lies with every program and every commercial. Our government, and our capitalist system, was the finest in the world. All of our authority figures said so. And we believed them.

We ate our Chiquita bananas at lunch blissfully unaware that The United Fruit Company coerced our president into overthrowing a government so they could continue viciously exploiting the people of Guatemala. We were reaping the benefits of empire. We ate countries alive to gouge out their resources so we could maintain The American Dream on the cheap. Capitalism needs greater and greater profits. It needs a constant supply of cheap resources and cheap labor. The Corporatocracy does not swear allegiance to anything … except profit. There is no such thing as “loyalty to people or country” when it comes to Capitalism. Everything is up for grabs.

Starting with the Reagan Revolution the unions were dismantled … but labor still wasn’t cheap enough. So George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton mid-wifed globalization via GATT and NAFTA thus enabling The Corporatocracy to roam the planet at will to exploit cheap labor.

The Corporatocracy has always been against anything that benefited the people. Social Security, labor unions, the G.I Bill, Medicare … and of course Civil Rights for anybody unless you’re a white male … preferably rich. These few instances of liberal progress were abhorrent to The Corporatocracy because they deviated from the course of Capitalism’s Manifest Destiny. They have spent decades doing everything they could to either eliminate them outright or dilute them into ineffectual mush.

The corruption of the American system by The Corporatocracy is virtually complete. I believe we have passed the point where restoration is possible. The tipping point was when The Supreme Court installed George W. Bush as president. We knew then that our Democratic Republic had been taken away from us.

And we did nothing.

The media pacified most of us by going into overdrive with the message that this was a perfectly acceptable transfer of power.

And we did nothing. We went on with our lives … went to work … picked up the kids from school … strolled through shopping malls … and denied that our government had been taken from us.

Then came the attacks of September 11th.

Then came war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

We knew the reasons the government gave for these things were lies.

And we did nothing.

Instead of a nationwide revolt against the regime that illegally took control of our country … we marched down the street … And this is the crazy part … we applied for a permit so we could legally protest against an illegitimate government. They were starting an war against Iraq based on lies and we made sure we were the ones who followed The Rules! Then we followed that up by sending email to the people who allowed the coup d’état of December 2000 to take place.

The idea we had as children, and carry around with us to this day, about The United States of America … is dead. We do not want to admit that. So we continue to do … whatever it is we do … to avoid going to the funeral. James Lee Burke described the tension created by that dissonance.

He wrote, “Psychoneurotic anxiety is almost untreatable because its causes are armor-plated and deep seated down in the bottom of the id. … at one time patients who suffered from it were lobotomized with their full consent.

… The level of tension is not unlike what you feel if you have to open the door of an abandoned refrigerator in a vacant lot five days after a child has disappeared from the neighborhood.”

This is the nightmare … courtesy of The Corporatocracy.

Elegy October 15, 2009