The Mind Is a Beautiful Thing to Waste

The American intellect has been relegated to a large, comfortable La-Z-Boy.

Courtesy of News Gardner

A movement is taking shape, called “Money Out of Politics.” On July 27th, a rally is planned in Washington D.C., at which it is estimated a million people could attend. Today, we are seeing how unbridled cash inflows by corporations and billionaires have turned our democracy once and for all into an oligarchy. Everything the Trump administration benefits Big Business (Big Oil, Big Pharma, Big Tech, Big Bank, etc.) and is designed to turn all Americans into little more than profits & loss statements. “How revenue/profit are you worth to the system?”

Two essential strategies used by Republicans for bringing about this state of affairs involved the “un-educating” of Americans. This involved making Americans civically ignorant and focusing all attention on the 2nd Amendment — and the 1st when they are criticized for being abusive and racist in their attacks. The second strategy involved transforming corporations into “people” and permitting unlimited spending on elections. As we have seen, Elon Musk bought a president and now is enacting a coup against our democracy — and very little can stop him, especially given that armed agents are supporting the federal government.

Below is an article I wrote on May 14th, 2010. I am reviving these articles because as I go through them, it astounds me how much of the fascism we see blooming today was still just a young sapling 15 years ago — one that could have easily been crushed underfoot if our leadership had been more balls-out and Americans less distracted by their petty interests.

Sadly, a lot of those interests were created by the right-wing propaganda machine, which was forever screaming about the onset of communism under Obama. The left then got into the game eventually by obsessing over pronouns and transgender rights. Corporations, however, loved that we were so busy with our small fry concerns. It permitted them to do whatever they wanted while bickered.

Writtten on May 10th, 2010

Ideas and thoughts are like people.

If a person sits around day in and day out eating Oreo cookies and drinking RC Cola, expends as little energy as possible physically shuffling from ever-close La-Z-Boy and big, AC-cooled car and spends hours upon hours listening or watching the opinions of others, then the brain, like one’s muscles, begins to atrophy.

Well, atrophy might not be the right word; the brain begins to evolve into a Venus Fly-trap like specimen: any ideas that are fed it from the given “talking head” leach out reason and in their stead leave a gooey mass of “someone else’s rhetoric;” rhetoric which has been crafted, analyzed by marketers and focus-groups and presented with as much emotion and mindlessness to guarantee reaction from the masses.

As was the first monkey to stand up on his two legs and reach for an apple a bit higher in the tree was ridiculed by the other slow-to-evolve, less brave monkeys, so too are progressive and original thinkers persecuted and ridiculed in the post-GOP, “dumb-down America” experiment commenced on January 20, 1981 and still in progress.

A Corporation is a person, and that “person” becomes the country

And so, we have it, the most extraordinary run against our rights and freedoms, the right granted by the hyperactive US Supreme Court in its decision to permit corporations to pump millions of dollars into political candidates of their making, a stomach wound from which few — and no Constitutions — can survive empties our democracy of vitality and a future.

Now, the GOP and the radical, neo-fascist right are pressing to have individual criminals, American citizens with sympathies for the cause of our enemy, denied their Miranda Rights.

In the same way that a corporation cannot be confused for having the same rights and privileges as a person, so too a person cannot be held to represent an entire nation. Especially if that person is a US citizen. Timothy McVeigh’s “American-ness” was never questioned. Many in the Teabag Party probably consider him a patriot; a bit radical, but he was a man devoted to a cause they believe in: trying to save America from the Big Brother “federal government.”

Faisal Shahzad (attempted to bomb Times Square on May 1st, 2010), a name which sounds scary and foreboding, is a US citizen. Never mind where he was originally from; the color of his skin, lacking the pure-bred, small-town America breeding of a Timothy McVeigh, is entitled to all the rights afforded by the US legal system. End of discussion.

Yet, because of that name and those eyes hidden by a seemingly permanent shadow, one in which he and all Pakistanis are undoubtedly plotting the destruction of the US, people, those same “patriots” who support the Teabag nuts, W, think that we were victorious in Iraq and who question Obama’s “American-ness,” want this man to be tried as a war criminal.

Even the former-maverick (yet, he swears he never called himself that) John McCain, a man so hungry for power he has completely tilled the soil of what had been an honorable record in the Senate so he could plant the seeds of his mind-numbing, knee-jerk reactionary (and finally) near fascist policies just so he can hold onto that wonderful view of the Washington Monument, staggers about like a scarecrow mumbling in a recent ad: “build the fence, dang it.”

Again, my dear friends, the right is wrong and what we are witnessing thanks to their ever abuse of that word is a tidal wave-like movement in the English language: the word “right” will very soon not be able to be used to express “correctness” but will actually be used to express “wrong-ness.” Thank you, GOPCONers.

Flash Paper

The right is playing with fire. Living in a nation whose sole and most potent tool for uniting the unevolved masses is xenophobic rantings at the drop of the shapka (I was living in Russia then), if we continue to go down this road of anti-immigrant rhetoric, then it will very, very quickly become one that does not stop with the immigrants. Very quickly, it will start to engulf all Americans, regardless of their race, color, or ethnicity. How many of us, after a nice day at the beach, may fall prey to the overzealousness of a local cop?

“Papers.”

“What? Are you kidding me? Man, I was playing Little League right around the corner from here when you weren’t even born yet.”

“Sir, please step out of the car.”

“What?!”…and the rest becomes a blurb in the local paper.

Sounds ridiculous and far-fetched? Not so.

So, before we sit about and Facebook away about how we are Americans demanding that immigrants carry proper identifying papers and then we post cute little neo-fascist “Bill of Anti-Immigrant Rights”, let’s exercise the brain and think. Let’s imagine. Let’s go a few steps beyond the cool-sounding rhetoric and venom that regularly embodies every single minute of right-wing propaganda and take yourself to that place where the 22-year-old cop with a high school education and right-wing “news” training is standing before you with a gun on his hip and demanding to see YOUR papers.

It can and will happen. Keep stoking the embers.