McDemocracy
for release 01-24-05
The high-flown
words in Gdub's inaugural address gave me the creeps when I heard them
and then again when I read them.
They were the pastel painted words of a liar and a hypocrite, and like
many of the assertions and policies of this government, they had almost
nothing to do with the real world.
This is a government dedicated not to the will of the people, but to the
will of its corporate sponsors. The FDA is being turned over to the industry
that it is supposed to regulate, the EPA is a passing joke, Interior wants
to give away our remaining wild lands to big timber and oil and the insurance
and drug companies are running our healthcare programs. The foxes are
guarding the hen house and we are told it is an 'ownership society.' That's
right. And they own it.
How many times have you heard George Bush preface a statement with the
phrase, "What the American people need to understand is....such and
such." He also seems to assume that just because words issue from
his royal lips, that makes them true.
Saith the Bush:
"So it is the policy of the United States to seek and support the
growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and
culture, with the ultimate goal of ending tyranny in our world."
Now isn't that nice? Translation: If we want your resources, we will invade
your country and enforce McDonald's Democracy at the point of an American
gun.
These sound like words that William McKinley or Teddy Roosevelt might
have said. The Spanish American War was the first and most prominent example
of American imperialism before our present incursion into the Middle East.
The neo-con wizards of strategy thought that an invasion of Iraq would
be similar to our waltzes into Grenada and Panama. With their characteristic
malassessment of culture, terrain and resources, they forged ahead under
false colors into the folly of this war. But this is not a 'Splendid little
war." This is a big ugly war. Every day the death toll clicks upward.
And there was not a word in the President's inaugural speech about it.
Why? Because the Iraq war is a debacle and they don't want to talk about
it.
I am not under the illusion that Gdub had anything to do with the composition
of his inaugural speech. It was very well written. Gdub can't put two
sentences together end to end on his own. He is just a game-show host
for the Corporacracy. A Pat Sejack for Big Biz. A mouthpiece.
I was born in 1948, the year George Orwell published his novel 1984. The
title was conceived by inverting the last two digits of the year of publication
intended to indicate that it was a vision of the near future. In 1984
I went to prison. That is circular karma and therefore politically correct.
So, I can speak with a mandate on the subject of police states. In his
classic novel, Orwell describes how a monolithic political party uses
high technology to monitor its populace and guarantee blind obedience
through surveillance and propaganda. One of the government's tactics was
to deconstruct the language itself. They invented Newspeak--the language
of the Party. If you can change the meaning of words, then you can change
the way people think. Without the vocabulary of insurrection there can
be no revolution, Unless you are a Thought Criminal. That means you actually
think instead of blindly accepting what you are fed by the organs of propaganda.
This is why I found the President's inauguration speech so chilling. When
I heard him say,
"The
survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success
of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the
expansion of freedom in all the world, "
I would
have totally accepted the statement if it had come from the lips of Jimmy
Carter or Nelson Mandela. But from the lips of George Bush Junior, it
rang hollow. This is from a guy who thinks that liberty means that you
are free to work twelve hours a day with no overtime and have no health
insurance and can't determine or express your own sexuality. This is from
a guy who calls invasion 'liberation' and talks of freedom and liberty
when he's running a chain of concentration camps and is holding prisoners
without charge or counsel or trial.
So The Poet's Eye is squinting in skepticism. It's one of the symptoms
of being a Thought Criminal. But there was something about the whole ambience
of the inaugural ceremony that was cold and phony. From the giant repeated
American flags draped on the capitol and making it resemble the Nuremburg
rally of 1938, to the cheesy quasi-religious music, to the excessive security,
to the lavish parties, it was a crass statement about our pomposity and
greed and our rapid decline into a vulgar imperial theocracy.
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