It’s Not Our Fault They Started It

The 1985 Flesh-Eating-Zombie flick, Return of the Living Dead, takes place at a medical supply warehouse in Louisville, KY. Foreman Frank is training teenaged Freddy for his new job. He tells Freddy, that the film, Night of the Living Dead, was based on a true event. The military, testing a new nerve gas, had a leak and corpses in the army morgue returned to life. After the accident one of the corpses, safely contained in a specially constructed capsule, was mistakenly shipped to their warehouse. Frank tells Freddy that it is down in their basement … and takes him down to show it to him.

Since the movie’s called Return of the Living Dead, it’s only a matter of time before somebody gets loose from their container. And more Flesh-Eating-Zombies show up. During an attack, Burt, owner of the warehouse, drives a pickaxe through the skull of a zombie … but that doesn’t stop it.

Burt: I thought you said if we destroyed the brain, it’d die!

Frank: It worked in the movie!

Burt: Well, it ain’t workin’ now, Frank!

Freddy: You mean the movie lied?

One of the best moments of the film is the anguished look on Freddy’s face when he realizes that … the movie lied?

Now the reason I’m telling you this, outside of the fact that I really like Flesh-Eating-Zombie movies, is when it comes to politics, current events, and American history, I think we’re a lot like Freddy.

Now I have to tell you another story.

Years ago a friend of mine asked me to videotape his sister’s wedding. It took place in a Catholic Church. He and I were up in the balcony, tape was rolling, and the congregation was lining up to receive the sacrament of Holy Communion. He whispered to me, “Watch this” and ran down and got in line. At that time I had nothing to do with the Catholic religion for over 20 years … still don’t … But my initial reaction when I saw him take communion was:

MORTAL SIN!! HE DIDN’T GO TO CONFESSION FIRST!! BLASPHEMER!!

For all you non-Catholics out there a mortal sin is a sin that unless you confess it, and receive absolution, you’re condemned to Hell for eternity after you die. And it’s a Super-Duper Mortal sin to receive The Body of Jesus Christ if you’ve got a Mortal Sin on your soul. And I knew for a fact my friend had a carload of unforgiven Mortal Sins. By the way … according to Catholic Doctrine, the Mortal Sin of purposely missing Mass on Sunday is considered equal in gravity to intentional murder. And I’ve got at least 2,340 Mortal Sins on that count alone! Um … the purposely missing Mass one … not the murder part.

Even though I thought I’d gotten rid of all that gibberish Catholic Voodoo … there I was up in the balcony thinking … MORTAL SIN!!

After a few moments the Voice of Damnation left my mind and I wondered, “Where The Hell Did That Come From?”

It came from indoctrination … when I was 7 years old. That’s when everybody in our second grade class had to memorize the Catholic Catechism to pass the test so we could receive the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ. The scary nuns grilled us for weeks so we could take part in symbolic cannibalism.

And all that gibberish was embedded in our skulls when we were only 7 years old. I’m sure there are studies aplenty showing how indoctrination of the very young is the most efficient way to imprint whatever the hell it is you want to put into little psyches. That was the primary job of the scary nuns … crank out more Catholics.

But the gibberish didn’t end there.

By the time we get out of High school we’d been studiously indoctrinated … for 12 years … into believing The Myth of America.

All of it lies.

And those lies are what most American operate on for the rest of their lives … regardless of what our country does … right in front of our eyes.

Sure … there’s this vague idea that sometimes our country has done bad things … but most of the time we’ve been a force of good on this planet.

Well …

A few years back I did a little egocentric-based research. Starting with my birthday, May 1951, I tried to find out if our government ever told the truth about anything during my lifetime. And guess what?

Didn’t happen.

Not Once.

If The Government was for example, your brother-in-law, and he had never once in over 50 years told the truth, wouldn’t it be prudent to completely disregard anything he said? I mean you couldn’t even be skeptical at that point. Skepticism would have died years before. The truth is … He Lies. The chance of him telling the truth is right around Zero. Yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

But because of our indoctrination, when we see horrible examples of Our Government In Action, we initially see them as aberrant incidents. Not the norm.

Sydney Schanberg said, “We Americans are the ultimate innocents. We are forever desperate to believe that this time the government is telling us the truth.”

But when enough awful things start piling up … the familiar becomes normal. We become inured to the maimed and dead of illegal wars started by our government, the wretched excesses of Corporate America, the corruption that dictates the actions of every sector, and this leads to a dissonance in the minds of anybody who’s paying attention.

Because a long time ago people we trusted … lied to us … and those lies were buried deep.

The simple reality is that this country behaved like a beast until the Spanish-American War of 1898. Then we became an empire. And we’ve acted no less bestial than any other empire. Before we became an empire we killed the Native Americans and everyone else within arm’s reach who got in the way of “America’s Destiny.” For the next 111 years, as an empire, we’ve killed anyone else around the globe who got in our way. Year after year, decade after decade, regardless of who is in office, Republican or Democrat … we’re not The Good Guys and never were.

I have no idea what the solution is to make the dissonance go away. This is a perfect example of even though I know what I know on an intellectual level … that doesn’t mean diddley when I come across the latest horror perpetrated by America in the papers or on the Net.

We’ve had decade upon decade upon decade of government and corporate crimes against humanity … and there I am in my chair thinking …

You mean the movie lied?

Yeah … and me and a hell of a lot of other people just can’t get over that.

It seems that receiving the typical American Education instills a form of chronic subconscious naiveté that holds precedence over facts.

Where’s the Red Pill when we need it?

P.S. Would you be as surprised as I was when I realized The Matrix was released 10 years ago?

It’s Not Our Fault They Started It July 30, 2009