HOW AMERICA BECAME AMERIKA

I want to begin this morning with an apology to those of you who check on this blog every day. I have been absent all week because we have been without internet access – not to mention telephone and satellite television services. Our neighbor’s house was struck by lightning last Saturday, and our connections to the world went up with the smoke that brought all the neighbors out to grab garden hoses and try to douse the flames shooting out of the upstairs window while the fire department drove by a few times in a futile attempt to find the address two blocks from their station! But that’s another story.

I will say, though, that our neighbors had an exceptionally bad week-end. They were on a mini-vacation gambling in a casino in Seneca, KS when the call came over the loudspeaker for everyone to move to a west wall because a tornado was approaching the casino. As they started to do that his cell phone rang. It was one of the neighbors calling to tell him his house was on fire. While he was on the phone, his wife’s phone rang. It was her brother-in-law calling to tell her that her mother-in-law who lived on the farm where her husband was raised had just survived the destruction of her home and all the outbuildings when the tornado struck the farm.

So if you think you’ve got it bad right now, just give a moment’s thought to my neighbors and be thankful you're you. If, on the other hand, you can say that your week has been worse, I’ll just have to be thankful that I’m me!
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One of the posters I remember from the protests of the sixties had a red background that included the spelling AMERIKA along with a vague picture of jackbooted, goose-stepping Nazi troops and prominent swastikas. In my mind, that spelling of America has become synonymous with the loss of personal freedom and the ascent of political/governmental power in the hands of tyrants interested only in power and money.

Last night I watched Amy Goodman interview Gore Vidal on her show, “Democracy Now!” I was pleased to learn that Mr. Vidal and I would find little about politics upon which to disagree. To get a good look at his opinion of BushCo, you’d have to dig down at least six feet and lift the coffin of some serial killer. I mean it just couldn’t be any lower.

He was very clear about how he thinks the Bushies twisted 9-11 into an occasion for carrying out their wacko plans for Amerikan hegemony through control of the oil in Iraq and the rest of the Middle East. At one point he commented on dick Cheney’s statement back in 2002 that Iraq’s oil would pay for the war. “For that remark alone,” Vidal said, “he ought to be dragged into the street and shot.”

The line of thought he followed was, I thought, clear and clean, and his indictment of this administration was right on the money. There is no doubt about the fact that BushCo did everything they could to push this nation into a war that should never have happened, but which has enriched them and their friends beyond measure. There is no doubt that they have put the lives of American soldiers and 100 times as many Iraqi citizens on the line for their own personal view of politics and with no regard whatsoever for the “little people” they have destroyed along the way.

There is also no doubt, as Vidal asserted, that this administration has capped the procession of America into the dark depths of Amerika; that the dumbing down of America has paid off in the creation of Amerika; that the enforced ignorance of the American people has enabled BushCo to strip the American system of government into an Amerikan system of oppression and denial of constitutional rights.

But it isn’t just BushCo. The road to this crossroads has been a long and slippery one that has so cleverly misled the citizenry that they willingly back the theft of their own freedom and even do it in the name of freedom.

Vidal’s vituperative attack on George W. Bush and his henchmen was right on the money, but it led me to think about the genesis of the mindset that enabled them to not only take over the Whitehouse – as Vidal and I agree they did through a coup that included the Supreme Court back in 2000 – but also to mutate the workings of our government to the point that the balance of powers has lost its teeth, the constitution is ignored, and the president is deemed to have the right to ignore every law that Congress passes.

The roots of this evil tree were planted long before George W Bush ever took office. In fact, some began even before he was born. As Vidal pointed out during the interview last night, Benjamin Franklin had his doubts about the viability of the constitution on the day he signed it.

The problem as Franklin saw it was that a constitutional republic like ours leaves too much responsibility in the hands of the people. It’s not that the people are collectively incapable of handling the responsibility in an ideal world. It’s that we don’t live in an ideal world.

Franklin’s greatest fear has come to pass, and that is that we no longer have a press that keeps people informed at the level that is necessary for them to be able to capably handle their responsibility. To top that off, as Vidal also pointed out, our public school system has failed miserably in its charge to educate the public in such a way that they will be capable citizens.

Stop a few folks on the streets and ask them what the term balance of powers means. If they have any idea at all, ask them how it works. If they can answer that one, give them a gold star and get them to run for office because I don’t believe there are more than six Congressmen who could answer that one to my satisfaction.

After the civil war the country sank into some really sorry times because a president wanted to punish the South instead of help it fit back into the Union. He made his friends a lot of money and caused a lot of grief to the little people, too, but America did not become Amerika.

In the 1920s the president refused to help the little people of the nation while his friends were doing fine in the umbrella formed by his refusal to regulate business. The nation and nearly the entire world with it crashed with the stock market, but America did not become Amerika. Instead, the country united under the apt leadership of Franklin and – in no small part – Eleanor Roosevelt pulled itself up by the bootstraps thanks to what the Republicans constantly tell us can’t work – government programs.

The country remained united in its efforts to fight and win World War II shortly thereafter, too, and that – in an odd way – wound up contributing to the frame of mind that has brought America down to being Amerika.

America emerged from World War II as a strong world power. At that point it stood at a crossroads. For a while – the administration of the Marshall Plan as the prime example – it appeared that it would use its power as a means for positive development throughout the world. At some point, though, those in power began to see that there was advantage to be gained if they could tip the scales more toward Amerika than America.

Vidal points to Harry Truman as the instigator of The Cold War.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower pointed to the military/industrial complex as the villain that would lead us astray.

Perhaps both are right. I think we are where we find ourselves because of two primary factors. One is fear and the other is arrogance. The Cold War instilled a national consciousness of fear that has never left us. I didn’t have to go through the “duck-and-cover” exercises most school kids apparently had to endure in the fifties and sixties, but that kind of collective exercise goes along way toward establishing as sense of vulnerability. Top it off with the McCarthy hearings and popular entertainment like “I Led Three Lives”, the TV show of purportedly true stories about how undercover FBI agent Kim Philby (?) fought to save us from the scourge of Communism, and you end up with a population whose fear makes them vulnerable to manipulation.

BushCo certainly didn’t miss the lesson in all that. The fear-mongering they have done has this society about as paranoid as a culture can be before it goes completely bananas. (Actually, I think it’s done that already.) Just the name “Office of Homeland Security” strikes fear in my heart, although not the kind of fear the office was created to peddle.

At the same time, we had the “virtue” of “patriotism” pounded into our heads to the tune of movie after movie about American heroism in WWII to the point where I couldn’t see a flag rise up a pole without feeling goosebumps rise along my spine. In 1965, I was ready to go to Vietnam and “nuke ‘em” without asking why. It was my patriotic duty. It was putting your life on the line “for your country”. It was just what any red blooded Amerikan boy was expected to do without hesitation. It was total bullshit.

Those who saw the light clearly enough to show up in Chicago in 1968 to protest the Democratic Convention were the ones who really understood. Robert Heinlein and George Orwell really understood.

The rest of us were like the sheep of today who bow toward George W. Bush and honor him as their president. We weren’t savvy enough to know that the call to unquestioning “patriotism” is a call to join in the Amerikan quest for dominance and power. We were arrogant enough in our belief in America to miss the fact that it was already transforming itself into Amerika.

The transformation was capped off with the take-over of censorship of school books for the nation in Texas in the sixties. It was capped off with the ascension of Newt Gingrich in the House of Representatives and his “Contract with America” that was really the manifesto for Republican Party domination of government and the destruction of the balance of powers that enabled the Karl Roves and dick Cheney’s of the world to link up with a dufous like George W. Bush in order to push the citizens of the country past any sense of moral turpitude into a false patriotic fervor that would unquestioningly allow the executive branch to do anything it wanted to in the name of keeping America safe.

Instead it has made Amerika weak and vulnerable and unwelcome all around the globe.

Now we are faced with a new presidential election that will decide whether we continue to follow the Amerikan course through the “leadership” of John McCain or whether we (might possibly) change course and return to some modicum of the true American spirit with Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton at the helm.

Of course, it is quite possible that none of these people have the ability or maybe even the interest in change to turn us back into the America that could have been and maybe still could be. Both parties are so corrupt and the country is so divided that it might be impossible, but we can still dream. Can’t we? Please, can’t we??


Be the change you wish to see in the world. -- M. K. Gandhi

Individually we have little voice. Collectively we cannot be ignored.
But in silence we surrender our power. Yours in Peace -- BR

The reason for going was to keep the crude flowing and raise a false flag abroad. – from a poem by Jack Evans titled 3500 Souls - http://www.myspace.com/paralegal_eagle