Posted by panch from pool0395.cvx25-bradley.dialup.earthlink.net (209.179.217.140) on Sunday, June 23, 2002 at 12:33PM :
At 14 I spent ten minutes worried that the United States was going to start a nuclear war over Cuba. Then I came to my senses and realized I was being had. Since then I skipped over every article that tried to prove I should be scared to death, at least scared enough to support whatever harebrained scheme this country came up with for robbing the public treasury...which is increasingly all politics is about.
The Soviet Union had every reason to be afraid of America, not the other way around. As my Russian Armenian pal told me..."Americans are the brainwashed ones, we KNOW we are being lied to." A Union that couldn't make enough butter for its people was hardly any threat. It wasn't even a "communist" government...the last place Marx would have thought of...a country that was the most backward in Europe, that exchanged one despot for a Party of them.
America outspent them, that's all. Drove them into bankruptcy trying to maintain a superpower status when they didn't have enough sugar or shoes. We drove ourselves into bankruptcy too, moral as well as fiscal, but our credit was better...we were turned into a nation of snitches, of paranoid people who dismantled their own freedoms to "protect" their freedoms...killing hundreds of thousands of people, our own as well as innocent civilians around the world.
It was because our money people were terrified of the IDEA of communism and trade unions and social security...Roosevelt is remembered as either a man so liberal he ruined American values...or a man so conservative that he took measures to head off serious disenchantment with market capitalism...especially as it was practised back then....and thereby barely saved Capitalism and the American franchise.
I refused to buy any of it...threw away my draft card and rode my cycle into the sunset.
Not much has changed...we still have enemies...a new one now. Now we undertsand the value of enemies to the bottom line...profits and a docile body politic, missing its brains and balls. We're going to have to discover Martians real soon.
The news has been taken up exclusively with nonsense...with reports of Ossama and Saddam...of threats and Saddam and the need for strong action...Homeland Security and inspirational talk from Ashcroft and the sickening sight of Bush trying to make sense...we even settled for a coup de etat to put his ass in office.
Meanwhile the real things...cheating in schools, the air and water, health care...all of the same things we ignored when we were scared to death of Commies...we're still avoiding now because we're too busy being MADE afraid of shadowy terrorists...only this time we MADE SURE to actuyally produce the conditions and aggravate the sores that would give us at least a few desperate murderers.
For the sake of your own mental health...though there are more and more drugs being made available to you....refuse to believe any of it. All you can do about it is worry, accept assholes in office and turn your minds to mush so you don't see one of several awful possibilities...that we are being sold a bill of goods...by people who say they love us and America...who seem honest enough, who tear up and hold hand on heart. Would these people lie to us? Would they place us at risk just for their own personal gain, in power and money?
If you don't know history, you can repeat it. Who remembers, or realizes the significance of the fact that Johnson lied to get us into the Vietnam War...that there was No attack on an American battleship...that this was manufactured because Johnson wanted us in that war...why? To fight communism? Then why did we not "win"...why did we get out after making all those sales? How come our stupid Intelligence agencies had "no idea" that the Soviet Union was about to collapse...that the Berlin Wall was coming down...how come we fed the North Koreans when they are 'enemies" in danger of starving to death? How come...how come?
And how come I have to be made to feel like a traitor if I use my head...ask questions? Is this now the new "new" American Way?
-- panch
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