“The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it is profitable to continue the illusion.At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain,they will just take down the scenery,they will pull back the curtains,they will move the tables and chairs out of the way, and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theatre” — Frank Zappa (1977).
For a long time I have been trying to understand why many other perceptive fellow citizens seem unable or unwilling to concede that this country or its ruling class is the cause of most of the suffering inflicted on people around the world.The fact that these people are the most destitute and least well equipped to withstand this country’s predatory assaults either military or economic cannot go unnoticed.In all cases, we have allied ourselves with ruling oligarchies and dictators everywhere in our pursuit of money,power and sheer rapacity.Thus we have had the spectacle of Iran,Guatemala,Panama,Vietnam,Brazil,Argentina, Chile and others in a procession that would make Alexander the Great drool with envy.
As soon as one opens the talk about America as a predator,one hears angry denials,defensive arguments and accusations that other countries are worse than our won. “Look here”,one friend told me one day,”we may have committed many crimes.But they were born from our desire to help primitive societies.And the help we have provided would easily dwarf all the bad things we have done.So,there”.
That attitude is only one part of trying to understand our peculiar defensiveness when it comes to anything American.No other people in the world,in Europe or Asia, feels it necessary to blow their horns about being the greatest or the best about anything.If anything,if you talk to a Chinese,an Indian or a Frenchman,you will find that they will denounce their rulers as the most corrupt,most wicked creatures to walk the earth since the Dinosaurs.Sexual transgressions on the part of the rulers are taken as par for the course.The Clinton affair would not have elicited a second glance in France,Italy or China.More heinous crimes, such as 9/11, would be automatically laid at the door of the rulers.
Expecting the ruling elite to be pure as the driven snow is a peculiar American fetish for which no counterpart exists anywhere else.The President, by the fact that he is elected, is conferred with the magical power of infallibility, with the paid propaganda organs of the US press/media working on overdrive and competing with each other on being the most obsequious.You would think that this country, which claims to be the leader of the Western world would have progressed to the point, six centuries fater the Magna Carta, to look on with skeptcism about any human being claiming to be infallible.And we might as well perish the thought of ascribing motives like committing crimes in the pursuit of political agenda to the President or his inner circle.
Last week, as part of our family’s Christmas celebrations, I happened to accompany my in-laws to one of the mega churches run by another Jimmy Swaggart clone.The entire service was a staged spectacle designed to tug at your emotions and elicit unquestioning obedience.As the minister , starting in low whispers to the hushed congregation, reached a crescendo in his stemwinder of a sermon,I was reminded ofsimilar scenes in Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will”.
That is when it hit me that the America we are used to thinking of as a nation of rational men and women of independence, the true heirs of Descartes,Newton and Jefferson does not exist.The true America that one encounters is a nation of men and women earning their incomes from corporations in which their livelihoods and their independence are compromised each day.That lack of autonomy in their own lives shows up as fear and subservience.Despite knowing that Mr.Bush was a fraud, they elected him because they were afraid that the Third World ( the blacks, browns and yellows) are passing them by.They and their representatives gave Mr. Bush a carte blanche to invade a perfectly innocent nation that had done America no harm and had no intention to do so.In the process nearly a million innocent Iraqis have been slaughtered and at least 3000 American soldiers have lost their lives.
To launch the war on a pretext everyone knew was a
lie is the characteristic of a people under the spell of a cult who have bid goodbye to reason.Yet,one cannot fully bring oneself to blame the people because the knowledge they need to assess the veracity of their rulers is vieled by an elaborate masquerade of lies, obfuscations and disinformation.In fact this is standard operating procedure in many corporations whose financial statements have been laid bare as lies in the wake of the Enron scandal.Despite this exposure, many people continue to treat the words of financial writers as gospel.That,once again,is the very definition of a cult.
Whether one sees the rightwing extremism of Mr.Bush,the belief in the magic of Supply Side Economics ( a fraudulent theory at best) or the magical solution to the problems between the Israelis and the Palestinian people offered by the Israeli Propagandists of the PNAC,one sees a willing suspension of disbelief that is the hallmark of people who have taken leave of reason.
The one ray of hope I see is the election of 2006 in which the electorate has soundly rejected all Republicans everywhere.At long last, it is beginning to dawn on the people that they have been had and only an assertion of their free will and rejection of dogmatic solutions will save them.
But then, I also happened to read the text of the British playwright Harold Pinter’s Nobel acceptance speech in which he says America is a nation that shows a peculiar propensity to descend into periodic bouts of madness.So, let us enjoy this interlude until the next McCarthy or Bush makes his appearance on our stage and hold us in his/her spell.
