Posted by pancho from customer-148-233-78-77.uninet.net.mx (148.233.78.77) on Wednesday, February 12, 2003 at 6:30PM :
The New World was "discovered" and claimed through bloodshed...the United States was formed in 1776 through bloodshed...it was cleared of its native population, built by slaves and settled with more blood...in 1812 there was a war with Britain...then the Mexican American War in 1834...then the Civil War thirty years later, then the Spanish American War...the First World War, the Second World War...Korea, followed a few years later by war in Vietnam, then the Gulf War and now we're waiting to see how much peace Americans can stand. In between the formal engagements there were any number of warlettes and skirmishes, client butchers like Somoza and Noriega and Sharon doing our dirt for us... always resulting in more deaths.
Wars are no longer fought to right wrongs or expand territory or gain an enemy's wealth, not by the United States at least...War has become Big Business by itself. There isn't any foreign territory to be gained any longer...the "treasure" is right there in the bank accounts and the collective Treasury of the parents of the soldiers we send to War. A whole hell of a lot of money has been made in the last year alone...and the only thing that was raided was our bank accounts...that and the US Constitution, whose undoing will make it possible for a lot more money to be made in the future by these same sorts of "businessmen", right here at home and off of us...the only "real enemy" they have left to conquer.
The social degradation has been immense. The trade in slaves weakened the social fabric from the beginning, as it has in every country that sought to build itself up through the buying and selling, raping, breeding and working to death of guiltless people. The Civil War, some have argued, marked the end of the American political experiment because the Constitution's guarantee of self determination and State's Rights was trashed when the country went to war to prevent the southern states from exercising their rights to secede from the Union. The residual effects of Slavery still plague our society and will continue to do so no matter how many Condis and Powells are taken into the Manor by Whitey.
Every trend that white youths and often their parents adopt has been born in the ghetto as if the white man himself couldn't stand himself. From marijuana and drugs to gambling, the penchant to place all ones pretences in a gaudy car or clothing because they were the most one could hope to afford, to music, jazz, rock and roll, the blues and now rap...to trends in language and fashions, attitudes towards sex and the broken family, all started and were scoffed at initially by Whites, in the ghetto, another creation of the White man to set himself apart from other humans. I have a strong feeling we're going to be seeing white gangs of youths not primarily formed for drug dealing, but just to have a sense of family, belonging and protection as more and more children get left behind by a school system that is becomming rapidly "ghettoized" through a lack of funding or concern...just as inner city schools were allowed to crumble and fail for generations and their families with them.
The dismantling of public education, the place where the population of the world here in America could mix and mingle, is being deliberately fostered so that the idea of vouchers will become increasingly appealing...and not to create better educational opportunities but to create numerous Madrassas of Christian Fundamentalist teachings which will supply the dwindling and fearful white majority with the right kinds of citizens...hostile towards other religions and ethnic minorities, easily manipulated into placing Jesus on the Board of Directors of every corporation, in every council meeting and policy group and in your bedrooms...to usher in a "Godly Age" of intolerance and bigotry and "murder for God". The Jews, the Muslims and the Christians each have a core group intent on maintaining their hostilities...who would run like hell from "Peace on Earth" if it meant all of us living and allowing others to live in peace and with respect. They´ve been at it for some time...obscuring their real work behind the same pious cant they won Paul over with. And there are "Pauls" in all of them...who will never win out over the Mullahs in them all.
American society is a rigid...tight-assed, Puritanical place that reacts violently every so often to the rules and chains it binds itself with. It is not at all a "free" society but one that must break out of the prison it's locked its soul in and mistakes the "prison riot" that ensues for a sign of Freedom and a love of individuality. There is no free "love" here and there never was. There is license, and that's a very different thing...and it comes out as a periodic letting go of all restraint, good or bad, to indulge in what is forbidden, not what is lovely.
The freaky fifties, sandwiched at both ends by a war placed such pressures on society that the younger generation was "beat", dropped out, turned off and turned away from the whole set of rules and beliefs that seems to drive this most violent of all nations with its glaring contradictions which can't seem to exist for long within the State or the individual without bursting at the seams.
Now we're off to another battle and America must prepare for an endless war...a very long war...a war everywhere and all the time...a war in which you never know who is the enemy or when your own child might be picked up and shipped off to a brig in Guantanamo to be held held indefinitely because he or she happened to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. From all of this coming up-tightness, bred of an impossible religious ethic, massive ignorance, economic instabilty born more of unabated greed than any market needs... and paranoia, to which we'll respond with violence and injustice and brutality, will come another cultural revolution when we can't stand ourselves any longer in another decade or two, like the Beatnik era and the Hippies after them...only what can it possibly be like...what will we see in America we haven't seen yet?
I think Puritans fuck from desperation, not desire. They approach it as a release from the tensions they torment themselves with, trying to be God's purist creations, even though they must win the very lands and homes in which they hope to practise their religion of peace through violence, theft and bloodshed. And later, when the land has to be cleared and cities and railroads and churches built...they resort to more bloodshed and war to create god's heaven on earth. The accumulated hypocrasy and stench drives them periodically insane like participants at a Mardi Gras who break all rules and boundaries for one night a year...or else they would go truly insane.
It's an exhausting cycle and it's just about done us and our children in. Not entirely...not completely. There are places one can go to escape the worst effects of what we are calling an "enviable lifestyle". But it's growing...the accumulated injustice and double-dealing...the squeezing of every honest buck and every dishonest ten million is taking its toll. Fathers and mothers both working can barely provide a home for children who can't be allowed to play in a park unsupervised...and have no one at home to care for them besides that great big demented Nanny, the electronic media.
So sit back and relax for, as Bette Davis said... "it's going to be a bumpy ride".
-- pancho
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