I am
just flabbergasted by how quickly the republic is being dismantled.
It's like all the gains we've made for life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness in the past 200 years are, for lack of a more
articulate phrase, not worth shit.
I mean, in truth, it's obvious what is happening. The
thing is, I don't know. Does society as a whole, in general, just
has a short collective memory? Or is the American public
specifically, in contrast to much of the world, just very poorly
educated and poorly informed about how the world really
works?
I think it's hilarious that deep down inside, I'm
probably a bigger patriot than W. I actually believe in the
American Dream, the Horatio Alger myth, all that capitalistic
propaganda bullshit about how hard work and determination is
supposed to get you what you want, and it doesn't matter what your
background is. In contrast, W is some autocratic throwback to the
19th century, the child of what in our modern world passes for a
royal dynasty. What did he ever achieve on his own?
As a child of immigrant parents who lived the
archetypal life of scrambling from the depths of poverty, I think
it will be close to impossible to make me believe that W earned
everything that he's achieved. You'd be hard pressed to make me
believe that daddy never pulled any strings for his little boy.
And here we are, riding, of all people, Colin Powell,
for getting to where he is because of affirmative action.
Goddamn bunch of lousy hypocrites.
But anyway, as I'm alluding to in the title of this
post, and as I've mentioned in a previous post
elsewhere, maybe there is no point in us winning WWII. I mean,
really, deep down, what's the difference between our current
Orwellian capitalist dystopia and the U.S.S.R.? Between W's regime
and the Third Reich? (And if you think people are not being
arbitrarily tortured and/or killed because of their race or ethnic
background, you obviously have never honestly talked to a person of
color.)
Tangentially speaking: this means the massacre of the
children in Nagasaki and Hiroshima (not to mention the countless
cases of leukemia and other malignancies in the long, long
aftermath) was completely meaningless. Totalitarianism won anyway.
What W is doing is ensuring that anything good that Americans have
accomplished will be discarded in future history books, and we will
take our place alongside the evil regimes of the 20th century. I
won't be surprised if the 22nd century remembers Hitler, Stalin,
and Bush in the same thought. The Nazis, the Red Communists, and
the Republic Party. (Abraham Lincoln is undoubtedly rolling in his
grave.)
I'm just ranting now. But you know what, despite what
you might think, I really love the idea of this country. Too bad W
is destroying it.
But. I weep at the
juvenile stupidity of our so-called representatives. (Link from
This Modern World by Tom Tomorrow.) Maybe if, just once, they
opened a 7th grade social studies textbook?
America, what is happening to you?
Words from another country, another world, but the
struggle is the same:
Ang bayan ko, Amerika...binihag ka, nasadlak sa
dusa....
My country, America...you have been conquered, fallen into disgrace
and misfortune of suffering.