Transcript
Let Your Life Be a Friction to Stop the Machine
Nightmare
and insanity are akin: mysterious and involuntary states that skew and
distort objective reality. One wakens from nightmare; from insanity
there is no awakening.
Whether Americans live in the one state or the other is the paramount question of this era.
For
two hundred years Americans have been indoctrinated with a mythology
created, imposed and sustained by a manipulating cabal: the financial
elite that built its absolute control on the muscle and blood, good
will, ignorance and credulity, of its citizenry.
America
began with the invasion of a populated continent and the genocide of
its native people. Once solidly established, it grafted enslavement of
another race onto that base.
With
those two pillars of state firmly in place it declared itself an
independent nation in a document that nobly proclaimed the equality of
all mankind.
In that act of monumental hypocrisy America’s myth had its beginning.
* * *
A
Constitution was written that came to be regarded as American Holy
Writ. Its central purposes were to defend private property and suppress
mass democracy. It has fulfilled both those mandates beyond the wildest
dreams of its creators.
Once
the existing oligarchy was secure in law and native people largely
exterminated, the ruling class increased its wealth and power
fantastically in the 19th century, using the government as its enabler, exploiting to the limit the device of chartered corporations.
With
its phenomenal money power, the financial elite began to use the
military to expand its sway beyond the continent. Regions, territories,
islands, and whole countries were annexed, invaded, and possessed
outright, their peoples crushed, suppressed, and ruled.
Because
ordinary Americans, like any people, need to believe that whatever the
ruling elite undertakes in their nation’s name must be essentially
benevolent, noble in purpose and justified in fact, the myth had to be
radically modified for imperial expansion.
The
foundational story was that Americans had come to a howling wilderness
teeming with godless savages and, through invincible strength of
character and purity of purpose, had tamed the land and honorably earned
the right to possess their bountiful home.
In
the era of extra-territorial expansion that version was polished to
justify and ennoble imperialism. The new corollary was that America
could not ignore colonialist brutality but was obliged, by the Manifest
Destiny that led us to civilize our own continent, to carry our mission
into barbaric darkness wherever tyranny created abuse and suffering.
A
national myth that absolutely binds the loyalty of a people to its
government must be a subtle and powerful elixir that elevates and
aggrandizes that people’s self-regard. National policy will then appear
to be an extension of its superior citizenry’s inchoate will, and the
basis for a justified arrogance toward the lesser world.
The
simple, powerful myth of America’s altruistic and heroic benevolence,
shaped and maintained by the financial/political power elite, infused
Americans with a deep and outrageously hubristic sense of racial
superiority that, mobilized behind various imperial enterprises, has
given all such adventures the character of a quasi-religious crusade. In
this way insatiable imperialism acquires the apparent moral perfection
of a syllogism.
* * *
With
WWII, the world was reconfigured. American Capitalism emerged supreme
from the horror that had virtually wrecked its capitalist partners. The
Soviet Union, though, having absorbed by far the greatest devastation
from Nazi Germany, had astonishingly risen above its ruin to become the
leading challenger to America as a world power.
This
challenge was not competitive, it was systemic: Soviet Communism was a
direct threat to American hegemony in that it categorically refuted the
philosophical basis of Predatory Capitalism. Grounded in Marx and Lenin,
it attacked Capitalism’s inherent evils, monstrous inequities and
flagrant injustices that, exacerbated by speculation, exploitation and
fraud, would destroy it. And it promoted world revolution to that end.
This
face-off of giants in the Cold War necessitated further refinement of
the American myth. Now, instead of simply intervening in situations
where despotism or tyranny required America to forcefully implant our
just and ethical democracy, America had to become the shield and bulwark
of the sacred capitalist system in which “free enterprise” was
magically and increasingly identified with democracy and equally to be
defended.
This
version prevailed through many surrogate confrontations around the
globe in the era of Mutually Assured Destruction and survived even the
debacle of Vietnam, lasting until the collapse of the Soviet Union, as
the propaganda stream became ever more intense and pervasive. On radio
and television Americans were subjected to an unrelenting barrage of
hyper-patriotism in which American moral superiority was a given, and
America’s self-touted courage, generosity and decency were its
unchallengeable proofs.
The
implosion of the Soviet Union left America, in its own terminology, the
“Sole Superpower in a Unipolar World”. This, however, did not result in
diminution of the myth. The practical effect of having no doomsday
enemy--China couldn’t plausibly be cast in that role then--was to
supercharge it by increasing its element of pure, hubristic ego. America
was no longer just called upon to defend the “Free World” from
monstrous heresy; it was now, by virtue of its universally acknowledged,
beatific “exceptionalism”, required to oversee and police it in the
interests, and for the benefit, of lesser nations.
* * *
“Power corrupts”, said Lord Mahan, “and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”
When
the only rival and counterweight to American power disintegrated there
was a sense within the American power elite that the opportunity
existed, for the first time in history, for one country to absolutely
dominate and effectively control the entire world.
This
consensus was expressed in a policy statement composed by a cadre of
major right-wing political players representing massive corporate
capitalist interests called the Project for a New American Century. This
triumphalist manifesto laid out a plan for absolute American access and
control of essential resources and raw materials worldwide, to be
guaranteed by the military which would enforce Full Spectrum Dominance.
The
American Myth, which had seemed to have lost momentum and its animating
principle in the totally unexpected so-called Cold War “victory”, was
now re-energized with a less defensive and reactive essence, and given
the glowing radiance and patina of a true and, for the first time,
self-professed and articulated, imperial mission.
The
attack on the Towers, an unimaginable provocation, was the trigger
mechanism for the explosive launch of the effort to impose that imperial
model in practice on the world.
* * *
It
has been without question the most spectacular failure in the history
of American misadventure. After a decade marked by the waste of
trillions of dollars and tens of thousands of American lives, the
stunning bankruptcy of our internally burglarized nation, and a
consequent recession more fundamentally damaging than the Great One,
Imperial America has nothing to show for the botched folly of its
arrogant overreach but unequivocal disasters in Iraq, Afghanistan, and
Pakistan, with no end of madness in sight.
An
impartial observer would have to say that the hypnotic hold of the
American Myth on the loyalty of the people has led only to disgrace and
disaster, and set a direct course to inevitable imperial decline and
ruin. That would be inarguable on any rational basis, but it entirely
mistakes the motive for, and the purpose of, the myth. The American Myth
was never intended to serve the interests either of our country or of
our people: it was created solely to buttress, shield, and exalt the
ruling financial class. It has done that with astonishing and unbroken
success that staggers the imagination from our earliest days.
The
massive looting of Iraq/Afghanistan/Pakistan war funding to enrich the
Corporate Tyranny—for that is what it has become—is on an unique scale
of its own, without anything remotely comparable to its flagrant
obscenity in the whole long history of war.
Neither
the Pentagon nor any branch of the U.S. government can give any
accounting whatever of the many billions of tax-generated dollars that
have vanished, evaporated. There is no doubt but that beyond the
outrageously inflated, no-bid contracts handed to giant corporate
favorites with their preposterous guaranteed profits, much of the money
was simply stolen in bulk by, through, or in spite of the military, and
distributed among thieves and accomplices, some of it on huge pallets…
for convenience, presumably.
* * *
While
this wholesale robbery was going on under the oversight of the military
abroad, the Corporate Tyranny had evolved a whole set of impenetrably
complex devices for the generation of money without any economically
productive source or result at home.
The
sole driving force and purpose of Capitalism is the realization of
profit. According to that calculus, reducing production costs increases
profit margin. This leads to the obvious conclusion that as production
costs near zero, profit is maximized.
There
is no provision for social good in Capitalist theory. Corporations,
created to optimize business opportunity through efficient
specialization, were originally required to operate for public benefit
but that provision was quickly finessed and forgotten.
American
law courts have always favored corporate concentrations of wealth since
they, like the Congress, exist to serve the moneyed interests. The
American Myth was created to provide cover for the financial oligarchy
to exploit the country and the citizenry, and the judiciary has
consistently cooperated in ruling for corporations against the people.
Indeed,
without ever considering the question in law, the Supreme Court long
ago endowed corporations with “personhood”, that is with all rights of
human beings under our Constitution. The way this travesty occurred--the
slipshod by-product of an obliquely related case--shows that the court
preferred to incorporate this perversion of the plain intent of the 14th
amendment as an unexamined assumption rather than risk an eventual test
which would unquestionably have created violent public outrage.
Given
the collusion of Congress and the courts in securing legal
invulnerability for the Corporate Tyranny and the principle that the
only duty of corporations is maximization of profit, it was not
surprising that megabanks, huge brokerage houses, giant insurance
conglomerates, gilded hedge funds and the credit agencies pretending to
certify their work, all engaged in massive and systemic fraud and
deception for just that purpose. The result was the crash of ’08, the
recession, and the stunning and unprecedented rescue and bailout of the
biggest banks, investment houses, and insurance and credit conglomerates
with taxpayer dollars. So much for the hallowed Invisible Hand of the
Free Market…
* * *
The
last decades have seen two related megatrends in American geopolitical
mechanics, both with dire effects on the power of the American Myth.
First, what belief the world at large had in it has been shattered by a
catastrophic series of imbecile and irretrievable military failures and
disasters, which has caused erosion of its efficacy at home. Second, in
response to this, the State has made increasingly crude efforts to boost
the Myth’s waning power by the imposition of totalitarian methods of
surveillance, intimidation and coercion on the American people to a
degree unprecedented in scope and scale.
The
whole clanking, medieval apparatus of Homeland Security that has
sprouted like an enormous poison fungus since 9/11 with its brutal
police state mindset; the odious Patriot Act with its flagrant
subversions of the Bill of Rights; the endless, fantasy-based
terror-peddling of the prostitute corporate media with its clowns and
harpies churning irrational fear and anger in the uninformed: all this
grim, repressive endeavor is a concerted attempt to distract Americans
from the real causes of their injury, abuse, and oppression.
And
yet, even with the American Myth now totally and irreparably blown full
of holes and exposed demonstrably for the tissue of lies, deceptions
and frauds that it has always been, it somehow keeps its phenomenal hold
on the great mass of the American people. The tragic reality is that,
for the majority, their own identities have been so deeply and
thoroughly infused with the myth that to disbelieve it is to disbelieve
in themselves.
* * *
So
the American Myth is dead, and yet it lives on in its deadness,
horribly masking our crapshot economy, our bankrupt debtors prison of a
society, our Ghost Dance charade of kabuki democracy, while typhoons of
impending social, economic and ecological disaster build their enormous,
lightning-charged thunderheads above the dark future before us.
And
what is it that the dead Myth still imperfectly obscures for Americans?
What is outside and beyond the opaque wall of faltering, failing
dishonesty and deception? What is the horror that the shoddy, tattered
Myth has so long and so effectively concealed?
It
is the world that has suffered unrelieved exploitation by the violence
of our imperialist mania. It is the many wrecked and pillaged economies
financially looted by our imposed predatory capitalist austerity
regimes. It is the teeming hundreds of millions of starved, deprived and
dying children sacrificed to Wall Street commodities gaming. It is the
multitudes of humble, innocent, ignorant people, barely surviving in
absolutist and dictatorial regimes propped up in their barbaric cruelty
by our military while our banks siphon off the profits left after arming
their brutal police and armies and bribing their ruling Kings, Sheikhs
or Generals. It is the millions of dead and maimed in the raped
populations of simple tribal people whom our indiscriminately murderous
juggernaut has left in its bloody wake in Iraq, Afghanistan, and
Pakistan. It is the appalling legacy of hate and repulsion, disdain and
fear, that America has earned with its appalling hegemonist villainy in
every corner of the world.
And
at home, what is it we Americans have been so complicit in hiding from
ourselves in our devotion to the perverse legend that has come to
inhabit our souls like a succubus?
It
is the millions of us with no work and no hope in middle age whose jobs
and homes have been devoured by the heartless fraud machine of Wall
Street. It is the trashed and demolished weedlots of our major cities
eroding in crumbling, fire-gutted ruin. It is the many towns and cities
with industries shut down and factories deserted or dismantled and
shipped overseas. It is our decaying, disintegrating public schools, our
bankrupt states and counties, our overtaxed, antiquated public
transportation systems, our obsolete, dissolving infrastructure, our
bloated, irrational prisons complex, our punishing and inadequate health
care disaster, and over it all, the repressive mechanism of our police
state, armed and empowered, ready for use against the American people
themselves.
* * *
This
is where we are. The great question now is whether we as a nation can
awaken from this long historic nightmare and face the terrifying and
exhilarating prospect of living in the full light of reality without the
false props and dishonest constructs of a hoodwinked, herded and
dishonored people or, whether we have internalized the falsity and
disease to such an extent that it has become an organic, overmastering
form of insanity?
In
1846, Henry David Thoreau, offended to his soul by the injustice of the
American government’s invasion of Mexico, protested it and went to jail
for his convictions. Later, in his essay On Civil Disobedience, he said
this:
“If
injustice is of such a nature that it requires you to be the agent of
injustice to another, then, I say, break the law. Let your life be a
counter friction to stop the machine.”
To
attempt to break the hold of the American Myth will be a titanic,
daunting challenge. To even begin to openly rebel against the might of
the National Security State will require the courage to face much more
than official disapproval and denunciation. Imperial America will not
respond to even the most peaceful and orderly protest with anything less
than hard police repression and the level of punishment will rise in
relation to the scope and seriousness of the action undertaken.
Small
protests will have no effect and will be meaningless. Organized mass
events, when they occur, will draw the whole fiercely and brutally
motivated National Security State apparatus down upon themselves.
Americans, excepting those of our underclass who have felt it, have no
experience with violent police or military repression. Those who commit
peaceful civil disobedience, a first and innocent tactic of serious
protest, will swiftly find out to their cost how it works. In a National
Security State that has excised and eradicated all defensive laws and
regulations intended to prevent abuse of the public, whatever the State
does is legal. To such a pass have we in America come as a result of our
long historic indoctrination in serving our financial elite, our Ruling
Class.
To
achieve any redemption for Americans, to make possible any more just,
humane and life-honoring society, will require complete abandonment of
the system of Predatory Capitalism. If offers no prospect of reform or
improvement and we have all been witness to the idiocy of the so-called
“democratic process” in action for generations now.
America
is nearing the greatest crisis point in its history and the terrific
cataclysm, when it happens, will determine the future our country is to
have. If we cannot, in dominating numbers, rise to reject the heartless,
mindless, soulless machine of Imperial Predatory Capitalism, we will be
condemned to a fascistic command and control horror in which human
beings are mere possessions of the State, units of production or
service, and then perhaps not even that, as excess population in that
brave, new world nay be eliminated.
That
end is not inevitable. We are not lost. We are not even defeated
because to this moment we have not engaged. We have not honored our
responsibility as human beings. We have not risen to defend our
humanity. We have let ourselves be ruled.
All
around the world the thunder of vast and immeasurable discontent can be
heard and felt. In Egypt and Spain, Jordan and Greece, Iraq and Sudan,
Afghanistan and Ireland, Latin America, the Far East and Africa, the
legitimate anger of humanity is expressing itself against the dead and
killing hand of Predatory Capitalism and its agencies of violence. And
here, in America, so long trapped and encapsulated, frozen like a fly in
amber in a false religion of state idolatry, the anger is deep,
widespread, and growing.
It
is up to those who know and care to lead. As Thomas Paine said, “These
are the times that try men’s souls.” Nothing is guaranteed us. That
can’t matter. We cannot be concerned with odds or outcomes. We cannot
let the Machine of Injustice grind on. We must oppose it with all the
moral force we own. We must act with quiet courage to confront a vicious
tyrannical system that is destroying the earth, its life, and its
people. We must put our lives on the line to oppose it.
The
Nightmare Machine of rapacious exploitation has overthrown humanity’s
decency and reason and its bloody inhuman treason flourishes over us.
This must be ended.
Let your life be a friction now to stop the Machine.
See also - The Century of the Self - How politicians and business learned to create and manipulate mass-consumer society.
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