the banality of American decay

Someone once said that the worst kind of evil is banal, lazy, ignorant.

I can’t think of a time in recent history, certainly not in the history of the United States, when that truth has been more evident. Today we permit our leaders to steal elections, lie us into wars that in turn earn them and their cronies literally billions of dollars, while slaughtering foreign people, stealing their lands and resources for their own direct benefit. To accomplish this our sons and daughters in the armed services have their honorable devotion, discipline and readiness to make the ultimate sacrifice abused to the most odious extreme. We have built secret prisons where thousands never proven guilty of anything, never even having seen the inside of a courtroom or spoken with a lawyer are retained, beaten and horribly tortured indefinitely, and often murdered. We have leaders, even high-profile names and faces that everyone in the world knows, who are blatantly contemptuous of the law, ignoring the protections and freedoms of a country which they are unabashedly raping, and yet nothing is done. Some have even admitted in consequence-free hearings that they have, in fact, broken the law, but oh well! The Executive continues to steal the power of legislation and judgement from the rest of the government structure, essentially creating a monarchy of sorts. Admissions have been made in no uncertain terms that the wars they have created were not started by anything approaching fact, to be precise all that was truly known was that such manufactured fears were not based in fact.

Yet, we went to war anyway, and thousands of our people and those of other nations who have joined our murderous foreign policy have died, supposedly ‘making the ultimate sacrifice for the country, and for freedom’, and yet the homecoming of their bodies is hidden from the media, by laws hastily enacted to quash dissent. They learned their lesson from Vietnam: an informed populace is an unstable constituency. This censorship of the truth is an effort to hide damaging facts and the consequences that would curtail the insatiable military-industrial complex that has created this war and will create yet more in the near future. And yet we do nothing.

It is not the children of our leaders who die in these desert landscapes, but the progeny of the “ordinary American”, many of whom choose the army as a career simply because there were too few options, aside from the usual array of poverty-wage jobs. But what of the tens of thousands of civilian dead (a low estimate) in the lands where we are bringing “freedom”? And the tens of thousands more than are inevitable, what of them? We poison their lands, stealing their only source of genuine income, destroying their infrastructure (so corporations directly connected with our government can rebuild it and make trillions in the process) and inflicting unwanted nationhood and democracy upon those who never asked for it and in fact quite vehemently implored us not to come. What our government means when it says “stability’ is a safe and stable environment for US investment, where those investments won’t be jeopardized by an irritating populace seeking basic human rights and an end to the raping of their homeland’s resources for export. A truly vicious loop of greed and death is there right in front of our eyes:

• Our government scares its own people with ghosts (propaganda only), invented villains, so it can create a war (or wars).
• The corporations involved in arms manufacturing, military logistics and intelligence supply the weapons, experts and equipment, earning trillions.
• Yet more corporations (sometimes the same as above) get no-bid contracts to clean up the mess we deliberately make and rebuild the countries we destroy: Corporations who count among their members, or stockholders, or recent employees, most of the highest level politicians in Washington. They, of course, also earn millions and some cases billions in personal profit directly from this engineered slaughter in another land, confident that their children will never carry a rifle, or bake in the stinking heat within a humvee, being fired at by desperate locals terrified of the all-powerful invader from the west. It is the masses of deluded and overworked who send their children off to die.

Several of these corporations have actually been shown, in evidence, to have broken the law, ignored safety guidelines for their employees and the soldiers in the war, and dishonestly reported expenditures and accomplishments in order to embezzle yet more millions. But, what do we do? Nothing. A few effete gripes from the Opposition and then all is swept under the rug again. The lies have formed a pile higher than the Washington Monument, but we ignore them, how? It’s not only frightening from a moral perspective, but more as a seeming lack of grasp on reality! One wonders how we actually fail to recognize the immediacy of these liars and murderers and fear-mongers. But then, we should know by now that the larger the lie, the more successful it is.

Protection of our civil liberties has given way with the resistance of candy glass under the repeated and blatant attacks by the administration, which are explained away by constantly parroting out mantras of “Freedom isn’t Free” and other propaganda tactics meant to outgun our righteous wrath with fear of terrorist attacks. The people of the United States of America are more targeted by terrorist ire than ever before, the world at large is far less safe than it was before 9/11, we all earn less money, and keep less of what we make. Our backs are breaking beneath our debt, while the super-rich get more and more tax cuts forced through Congress and rationalized by repeating the same old drivel that rings of Reagan-istic “trickle-down” rationale. CEOs make retirement packages in the hundreds of millions while the same company ‘cuts’ its retirement plans for the bulk of its employees, citing a need to “stay competitive”.

No one can seem to find the money to rebuild a great American city (New Orleans) that our government continues to turn its back on. The rulers ignored the deadly peril that city and its entire region was facing, it ignored the need for urgent, fast-paced and precise support efforts, and lectern speech promises to rebuild are forgotten as half of that city continues to sink into the poisoned earth and millions are homeless, jobless, and penniless. But, we’re okay, right? Nothing to really worry about, is there? Meanwhile many insurance companies are finding ways not to provide the coverage thousands of their policyholders paid for...

Our phone calls are monitored, our library records, purchase records, credit ratings and even our right to use a dissenting voice are all controlled by the government (see NSA arresting peaceful protestors on public property because they wouldn't stop waving their signs), and this is what our soldiers are dying to protect? A handful of corporations earn billions of dollars from the war and we are worse off than we have been for a long time, and we’ve got a long night ahead. How is this not something to take action against? Many speak of patriotism as if it were something which was meant to protect certain leaders from scorn no matter what their actions…to “support the troops” by never disagreeing with any use the Chiefs of Staff make of them? Try again: Patriotism to us should be to defend the tenets and rights the Constitution (in this case) stands for, not blind obedience to a near-dictatorship, the sort of chest-beating jingoistic nationalism that fuels the fires of millions of deluded hearts: Easy answers, the comfort of fitting in without argument...a pat on the head and the promise of a cookie.

We have our televisions, and our huge automobiles (try, sometime, counting the number of car or car-related commercials on television in just one hour of programming. Last count I did was 27 in one hour, admittedly while channel surfing), and shopping malls and computers and guns and microwaveable dinners. We can cut our grass three times a week in the summer sunshine and go to church and think about good we are. We are fools and very pleased with ourselves for being so.