WHO ARE YOU, AMERICA?
Over the three presidencies before Trump’s (two of them Democratic) MILLIONS of Arab Muslims — and millions of mostly unmentioned others — were wittingly sacrificed on the altar of Shock Doctrine (neo-fascist) economics, led aggressively (and largely unilaterally) by the United States of America, which has been swinging its muscular arms at the world like an enraged silverback gorilla since the fall of the Soviet Union… and acting like a chainsaw-wielding maniac at an outdoor slumber party since 9/11.
Washington’s cynical exploitation of that monstrous terrorist act gave some of history’s greatest criminals and profiteers — still in business today — license to torture, listen-in, assassinate, and commit mass-murder anywhere, with no declaration of war or pretense of legality (nothing that would pass the laugh test, anyway, back when America’s leadership thought it was important to distinguish themselves from the Third Reich, Stalin, or the Stasi; back when they at least pretended to respect habeas corpus, the Nuremberg Principles, the Magna Carta, and our Constitution).
Today, the war machine that President Eisenhower tried to warn us about IS the government, every bit as much as Exxon and Goldman Sachs IS the government (it sure as hell isn’t us, We the SHEEPLE…).
The genocidal war machine that’s replaced the U.S. government — and extinguished anything resembling democracy, here — does whatever it wants, while Americans argue about which duopoly party’s candidate is more corrupt and generally revolting:
“Yours is an ignorant, sexist racist, who’s said and done a TON of bigoted things!”
“Are you kidding me?! Yours has made a career out of incarcerating minorities and making offensive and dishonest racial slurs — including against your party’s last president!”
(Two scummy, racist, obviously criminal elites, neither with any principles — and in 2016 the whole nation was wetting itself that its Darth Sidious might not be the one to take the helm of the empire, delivering us, personally, to the next level of hell. “It should be a woman! Darth Sidi-ess!”)
Meanwhile, bee colonies and other pollinators disappear, the Great Barrier Reef perishes, and, as ever, the genocide train rolls on: in Iraq, Palestine, Syria, Somalia, Libya, Yemen, and beyond (wherever there are brown people, wherever there’s oil, wherever a political leader won’t allow their nation to be enslaved by Western corporations; wherever it helps Washington outmaneuver its geopolitical rivals — with over 1,000 military bases in the world, dozens of dictators, and millions of myrmidons at DC’s disposal, the genocide train rolls on and on.).
WHO ARE YOU, AMERICA?
Most of us have been grappling with our friends and families on the other side of the (largely imaginary) aisle, with great vehemence — LONG BEFORE TRUMP WAS PIED PIPER’d INTO OFFICE — for not agreeing with us about the alleged chasm of difference between death by arsenic and death by cyanide.
Meanwhile, in lock-step behind the curtain (despite all the noisy bickering on the front pages) the political and institutional leadership of the United States has:
1) radically increased the exploitation of fossil-fuels (including tar sands, deep-water and Arctic drilling, fracking, mountaintop removal for coal, etc.) — even as the world’s climatological systems are in unprecedented jeopardy, with the Sixth Mass Extinction event underway (50% of living things gone in 40 years; the oceans signaling collapse; glaciers, ice caps, and permafrost melting; events fast outpacing the most dire computer modelling);
2) created a world with more refugees than at any time in recorded history;
3) eviscerated the Bill of Rights, nullifying one Amendment after another;
4) hunted like an animal every journalist and whistleblower who dared to expose the criminality of our government — which has given itself, with the Smith-Mundt Modernization Act, signed by Barack Obama, the right to propagandize citizens of the United States, on U.S. soil;
5) created a cruelly oppressive global economic system that utilizes more SLAVES than at any point in recorded history; and
6) allowed our elections to be turned into opaque, easily manipulated, unverifiable farces, where millions of voters are routinely disenfranchised (with the blatantly stolen presidential elections of 2000 and 2004, and the brazenly rigged Democratic Primary of 2016, the entire world has seen the “Emperor’s New Clothes” attire of Uncle Sam — who generally SELECTS, rather than ELECTS, these days… even if fluky things, like Bernie Sanders filling stadiums or Donald J. Drumpfuck beating Secretary Blood-n-Guts, occasionally happen).
AMERICA, WHO ARE YOU?
Your children are growing up and growing old in an increasingly violent, water-scarce cauldron that generations of Americans cultivated and ignored: fat, smug, and comfortable (we apparently enjoyed arguing and being entertained more than working together to confront EXISTENTIAL THREATS TO OUR SPECIES).
You call yourselves Christians? You call yourselves Liberals?
You’ve let your elections and government become utterly defiled.
You’ve let corporate P.T. Barnums distract and divide you, lying to you again and again and again… and yet you stick to them like Othello to Iago. (Is Putin also responsible for your blinkered devotion to inveterate propagandists? That would be a convenient — and trendy — excuse.).
You’re World Wrestling Federation fans. You’re Nero, fiddling with personality politics while modern day Rome — THE WORLD — burns; while your nation becomes the most hated and feared entity in the world, regardless of which party holds the White House.
You refuse to question your masters, swallowing their nonsensical, ahistorical framing of issues and their bogus, xenophobic, self-flattering narratives.
You are told that you have only two options come Election Day.
You obey. You obey. You obey.