Tuesday, April 11, 2006

Pre-Dawn Revelatory Observations

I woke very early the morning of the Superbowl. I had a succession of crazy, disturbing dreams. No idea about what exactly. Vague screeds on politics, I think. Some shit about the modern terrain. So I fired up the computer and out came this mess:

1) The facts and the truth are not working. If they haven’t worked at this point, they will never work. The mechanism is in place to deflect any harm to the ruling party that the truth may do. Where there used to be a handful of men running ragged to keep the plates spinning atop the rods, there’s now an army of men for this job. The truth is now the product of the manipulation not the source of it. This manipulation can be seen in the social control of the flow of information.

2) Now that all branches of government are controlled by this faction (through sheer numbers, fear, or social control), they’ve begun to rewrite the fundamental principles and premises of American Government—whereas before they could only attempt to circumvent these fundamentals. Examples abound. From the comparatively casual augmentation of congressional redistricting, to dubious electoral mandates (unaccountable paperless voting, felon roll calls, legal pressures via party operatives, et. al.), to the installation of a judge to the Supreme Court who’s life’s work seems to be pointed toward vastly increasing the powers of the Executive Branch of the Federal Government. The process of transforming the compact of the nation from “We the people…” to “We the powerful…” is becoming less encumbered by law and tradition every day. Accountability is a devalued currency. It's certainly absent in the realm of political attacks and the untethered world of the seconds-long sound byte and the story-of-the-hour news cycle--America's prefered channels of information reception. Once again we see manipulation on a vast scale. But here, it’s far less ethereal and intellectual than what we see in the social sphere. Here, it’s a manipulation of the laws and methods of the land; a re-ruddering of the very apparatus which steers this vessel, America.

3) The binary opposition to the powers that be are far too thoroughly entrenched to come to our rescue. They have far too much interest in the status quo to undo all the damage that’s been done even if they do manage to wrest back power in the coming years. To fix things, to weed the garden, would be to upset all facets of American life if only for a short time. The opposition party is so totally weakened and so totally dependent on the current apparatus for what little power they still enjoy, they shouldn’t even be considered a party in their own right. They are but a wildly useful prop for the ruling party. If the soul of this great nation is to be saved, we must look to a political party and political solutions outside of this fetid one-party system. Or perhaps to a solution outside of politics altogether.

4) I have finally realized that the fundamental nature of the current war in Iraq is racism. By that I don’t mean to say that racism is our Government’s reason for being there. (That far more nefarious explanation happens to revolve around the almighty dollar and the corruption it has spread via the corporate-federal daisy chain that’s subverted the modern Democracy). The perpetual struggle of “The War on Terror” is socially financed by stoking the fires of racism within a population. It is yet another means of manipulation by a ruling party and their affiliate conspirators. Another means of population control and psychological influence peddling. While racism within America seems to be ever so slowly on the wane, an event like 9/11 is all that America’s bigots needed to resurface after several decades of veritable fringe-dwelling. And once this portion of the population is aroused and prodded by the media and other figureheads sympathetic to the cause of the ruling party, a rift between the citizenry can be exploited for any number of reasons, the least of which might be to keep that citizenry fighting among themselves while the conspiratory forces begin their assault. From there on, a constant barrage of disinformation, baiting, showmanship and posturing is enough to prolong the exploitation presumably until the cash dries up, if ever. It is in this incarnation that we can see the public’s (if only a segment of that public) rationale being used as fuel for the war machine. All the ruling party need do is stoke those fires on occasion by exploiting an occasional barbarity of the enemy—a barbarity that, in a time of war, would otherwise remain more or less banal and certainly no more barbaric than our own transgressions.

I have concluded from this understanding that the current war in Iraq is a racist war and intend to call it that on every occasion. I urge you to do the same.

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