The Poet's Eye
     commentary by Lightning Rod

The Poet's Eye is skeptical without being cynical,
innocent without being naive and critical without
being judgemental.

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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