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The
Army of Good Americans
Marching Forward
By Manuel Valenzuela
01/05/06 "ICH" -- --
Festering in our midst like a toxic cloud of pollution the army of
good Americans exists, living and working among us, inhabiting our
neighborhoods and cities, co-existing peacefully with us, though
perceiving an utterly different conception of reality than the rest
of us. Their numbers, though dwindling more every day with the
almost weekly revelations of corporatist lies built upon corporatist
lies and government deceptions meshed with corporate criminality,
remain high, thanks to those unable to escape the clouds of 9/11 and
the manipulative propaganda of the corporatist media. The Kool-Aid
drinking brigades remain strong, still ardent supporters of
frivolous, fictitious and diminishing deceptions, still hypnotized
to the dim-witted, slurred speech of their great Commander in Chief,
still spewing the talking points they hear emanating from the
corporatist media and still clinging to the ingrained and
unenlightened selfishness that permeates their existence.
Today they are harder to recognize
than in previous years, their once proud bumper stickers and car
magnets on pickup trucks and SUVs praising their Dear Leader now
nowhere to be seen, evaporating like a morning fog, thrown into
trash bins or stored inside closets, lest they be fingered as part
of the ignorant legions of automatons that helped steer America
directly towards its present predicament. Gone are the large W’s
emblazoned on their vehicles, that blue “Wastika” showcasing blind
loyalty to criminality and fascism, while advertising mental
fragility and propensities to be the followers of incompetence.
Missing from the giant trucks and monstrous SUV’s masking quite
apparent deficiencies below the belt are the plethora of
patriotism-laced and nationalism-filled slogans that reeked of
machismo yet betrayed delicate insecurity, now conveniently hidden
from view as their precious war for fictitious democracy and freedom
continues its decent into quagmire and debacle.
Yet this vast army of sheeple
lingers throughout the American landscape, for they have not quite
surrendered to truth or reality, two concepts as unfamiliar to them
as reason and logic. They have simply retreated back to the
canopied forests where barbarians live, crawling under rocks and
boulders, returning home only to await the beckoning calls of
further war through the trumpets of fear and hatred. Like
fair-weathered fans, hiding at the first sign of defeat, rising with
the arrival of victory, wanting only to be seen with winners and
associated with success, this army of followers abandons ship when
trouble can be seen and defeat smelled, forgetting that a war and
quagmire exists in Iraq, evading their complicity in furtherance of
criminality, finding it easy to whitewash from their minds war
crimes and the murder of over 120,000 Iraqi and American lives.
For they are the Army of Good
Americans, fearing what they do not know or understand, easily led
into the dark expanses of human nature, ignorant to the ease with
which they are manipulated and made blind to the power they
willingly cede to the criminals and murderers in power. Birthed
from the rubble of the World Trade Center, rising like a phoenix on
9/11 to claim dominion over America, this army has been the
oxygen-rich blood maintaining alive the criminals in office. They
are the defenders of war crimes and the apologizers of corruption.
Filled with the emotions and passion of mammalian instinct, making
them unthinking, uncritical, illogical and without reason, the army
of good Americans has become the key used by corporatists to
unlocking imperial aspirations abroad and destroying freedoms and
rights at home. It is this army – a large part of American society
– that has become an oasis to corporatists whose ambitions would
have otherwise perished in the deserts of the Middle East.
Their legions, marching lock step
behind their Dear Leader, filled to the rafters with the fear,
hatred, xenophobia and patriotism needed by authoritarian regimes to
thrive, have become the conduits of destruction, violence, rape and
murder, the co-conspirators of illegality and death. Easily they
answered the call to scapegoat and hate that which they did not
know, their fear magnified and manipulated by their puppeteers,
becoming the pawns of expendability and the tools of power, their
emotions abused, their religious beliefs manipulated, their vote
exploited, their majority numbers used to invade and occupy foreign
lands and pilfer the treasury at home.
To them 9/11 was their call to
arms, that transcendental moment where imploding towers falling
birthed trance-like obedience and blind faith to criminals, though
preferring the cowardice of chicken hawks, the timidity of yellow
elephants and the comfort of armchair warriors rather than the
bravery of enlistment and deployment. After all, in the demented
mind of the army of good Americans, those less fortunate, those
relegated to the lower castes of society due to the weaknesses
espoused by the failed theories of social Darwinism are destined to
become the cannon fodder of America, returning either dead or maimed
for life serving their role where “survival of the fittest”
governs.
Sitting comfortably on their
couches, engorging themselves with microwave dinners, watching
reality television and the latest exploits of sensationalist news
reports while thousands of innocents die in order to appease their
thirst for vengeance, the army of good Americans pretends to support
the troops through car magnets and ribbons, hiding behind the red,
white and blue, hiding insecurities through the bravado of tough
talk, yet in reality sacrifices nothing both for a war they asked
for or for the soldiers their loud voices sent to hell on Earth.
Instead, they bask in the glow of
American comfort, kneeling down and praying nightly to the monitor
in the center of their households, becoming the obedient drones of
propaganda, absorbing and taking as their own the cocktail of
talking points spewed by corporate media and its clusters of lackeys
and hacks. On weekends they can be spotted playing with the many
adult toys purchased through maxed out credit cards, thinking
themselves beneficiaries of the mirage called the American Dream,
not realizing their role in exponentially increasing the debt they
will forever be enslaved to pay. After work they can be seen
visiting the famed cathedrals of consumerism, those monstrous malls
of materialism surveying suburbia, teeming with the products of
overindulgence and the goods of escapism, sadly having become the
center of American society and culture.
It is this army of good Americans
that will, upon the next happenstance bogeyman atrocity, once again
rise up in a fear-induced, hate-engendered frenzy, waving Old Glory,
hiding behind its colors, its xenophobia metastasized to a
rabid-filled, vengeance-seeking wickedness of blindness of reason
and deafness of wisdom, asking, begging government and its
corporatist masters to further usurp its civil liberties, freedoms
and rights, gladly sacrificing the future of their children for the
chance to be protected and be made secure from evildoers, both real
and concocted, demanding, in its infinite ignorance, the full
spectrum of the American police state.
Bubbles of Comfort and
Fantasies of Deception
The army of good Americans would
rather live in the slavery of ignorance rather than the freedom of
knowledge, preferring shackles of fiction to the liberty of
reality. Loyal followers to lies and deceit, easily manipulated and
corralled, addicted to being misled and loving the exploitation of
their emotions, they would rather not know truth than stop believing
in fantasy, choosing to remain inside the bubble of comfortable
deceptions rather than sit atop the mountain of concerns. Merrily
they drink the Kool-Aid that enables them to remain unknowing,
unconcerned and unrepentant sheeple, wishing to remain embedded into
the same system that abuses, exploits and subjugates them. They
would rather subsist in ignorance than thrive in truth, preferring
to maintain the illusions and fictions manufactured by propagandists
that allow them to escape the reality that is the human condition.
In the fantasy conjured up by
their masters they see only the reality they want to believe in, the
altered existence that they would much rather be part of. Weak
minded in character, needing to be dominated and led, searching for
a master to guide and exploit them, more likely to believe in the
fables of archaic stories and fictions of metaphysical gods, and
searching the periphery of the world for answers they do not know or
understand, they will forever be made to believe any lie or
manipulation or deception thrown at them, for they crave leadership,
whether malignant or benign, and are in desperate need to place
blind faith in fictional leadership, whether that of invisible gods
or incompetent presidents. For this army follows, it does not lead,
it relies on commands, not its own internal minds, and it
appropriates the thoughts of others, incorporating them as their
own, regurgitating them as if they have even a basic comprehension
of the much broader issues.
The army of good Americans, like
their counterpart in 1930’s Germany, blindly follows and seldom asks
questions, always with a wink and a nod turning a blind eye to
criminality, rapidly forgetting morality and humanity, pretending
not to know the actions of their government and later, when the
consequences to those actions finally arise, saying they did not
understand, denying complicity and accepting ignorance. Yet
purposefully they cover their eyes when it is convenient, but not
when it is suitable to their wants and needs, when their fears and
hatreds have fed on the vicarious crimes against humanity committed
by their leaders. Through quiet acquiescence to the crimes of their
masters they become complicit actors to the actions of madmen, their
psyches becoming a vacuum devoid of virtue and morality, their
failure to speak out or act against the crimes they allow to
continue making them as guilty as those committing them.
Since 9/11 the crimes of the Bush
administration have been known to all, yet to the army of good
Americans, rabid with a hunger for Arab blood and entangled with the
enraptured desire to inflict pain on that which is unknown and most
feared, the crimes against humanity and the war crimes committed in
their name are free to continue, allowed to permeate the conscious
of America and enter the imagination of our once innocent children.
The use of malevolent torture, false imprisonment, cruel and unusual
punishment and dehumanization are seen as virtues that must be
inflicted on Arabs and Muslims, lest the debauchery of American
culture be laid to waste. The infliction of collective punishment,
mass bombings, destruction of homes and lives, assassinations,
shootings and suffering is seen as a necessary means to achieve
victory, regardless of the amounts of innocent blood spilled and the
level of misery spawned, for the full might of America’s military
must be shown off and utilized.
To the army of good Americans,
many of them undereducated and unenlightened, many filled with the
hatred and fear becoming of all great pawns, unwise to long-term
consequences and possessing the myopic lens of short-term
satisfaction, war against brown-skinned peoples is a consequence of
deep rooted racism and xenophobia, a chance to unleash the mightiest
army in the world upon third world sub-humans who have conveniently
been made scapegoats by those who decide reality. Lacking the
fundamental precepts of humanity, empathy inside them as rare as
underground fields of oil in New York City, unable to place Iraq and
the Middle East on a world map, made unaware of alien cultures and
of history itself, good Americans epitomize the ugly American, that
creature molded by America’s degraded education system, reared by
television and not parents, reprogrammed through fiction and not
reality, unable to comprehend the world outside its bubble or the
existence of cultures different than its own.
Sadly, it is the ugly American –
millions of which comprise the army of good Americans – that would
have no problem incinerating the Middle East with nuclear weapons,
killing millions of Arabs in the process. Such was the thought
process of the good Germans of yesteryear. Inside the minds of many
ugly Americans, though they would deny it upon questioning, lives
the growing desire to rid the nation of Arabs and Muslims and gays
and all brown-skinned immigrants, for America is a “white, Christian
nation,” their fear, hatred and xenophobia rising like a giant wave
of testosterone, resurrecting a hypocrisy and bigotry lying dormant
for decades.
Their buttons pushed expertly by
hate radio, miscreant politicians and vitriol filled so-called men
of god, the ugly American is a manifestation of frustrations and
inner anger, of impotence of character, of deep seated insecurities
and of malignant fundamentalist religions, born in ignorance and in
a capitalist system espousing social engineering and social
Darwinism, the worst of America, a creation that should not exist in
a nation of such wealth and splendor.
An Army, Used and Abused
The army of good Americans is
easily controlled through television, made to believe everything it
hears, manipulated with the greatest of ease thanks to its inability
to think on its own. No longer a free thinking individual, soldiers
in this army depend on the stenographers of the state and the
propagandists of the corporatists to feed him with information and
opinion, lest he be left out in the wilderness, unable to think or
understand, unable to spew talking points, susceptible to those
wishing to pop his bubble of comfortable surroundings. He is a
product of an education system now designed to make subservient to
the state all students, indoctrinating the mechanisms of servitude
and allegiance into young minds, no longer creating independent
minds but rather robotic psyches both through standardized teaching
and the purposeful bankruptcy of financial resources.
Taught to never question superiors
or to analyze a situation using reason or logic, the good American
is but a hollow figment of what used to be a human mind. He has
become a producer and a consumer, trained from birth to desire the
fruits of materialism and never question the evils of American
capitalism. He has as responsibility allegiance to government and
undying loyalty to corporations and their products. He is to
blindly follow leadership, no matter how corrupt or criminal it
might be, no matter how detrimental to his life it is. He is taught
that the actions of government or of leaders are always right, never
wrong. Blind faith and belief in the goodness of America’s
government must always exist, for the Christian god has blessed
America as a nation superior to all other lands, and its people have
thus been made to be direct conduits of the Almighty itself.
The good American has been reared
to never deviate away from the illusions concocted by his masters,
for in these chimeras of control the population is better managed
and manipulated. Purposefully made ignorant to the lands and
cultures of the world, unable to understand the complexities of
human civilization, the good American naturally is made to fear that
which he does not understand, for fear of the unknown is a great
harbinger of human warfare. Fear of the unknown is a tool of
control, a reality of the human condition, and, therefore, it is of
great importance that the good American be made to know as little
about nothing as possible, lest fear be controlled and the unknown
understood.
With blind faith enveloping his
existence, with every lie and deception and manipulation told by
governance taken as true, the good American can easily be molded to
fear and hate any scapegoat or bogeyman created and enemy
manufactured, for if his bubble of comfort is said to be threatened,
if his way of life is in any way said to be compromised, he can be
made to become mesmerized to threats real and created, transforming
an ordinary citizen into an agitated piston serving to embolden the
engines of war. In this way, one more soldier of hate is molded
from the clay of those in control and one more slave of power is
created, joining millions more as pawns in the games those at the
top play.
Manipulating the ingrained hatred,
fear and xenophobia of good Americans, the elite concoct a potent
army of political power that allows them unfettered control over the
direction of the nation. With the loyal allegiance of the most
ignorant, unenlightened, gullible, naïve, weak-minded and easily
led, by controlling the racists, bigots and the most faithful and
religious, those that will never question and never challenge
authority, an entire army of good Americans can be manufactured,
combining an amalgam of personalities and characters, fusing them to
the dictates of power, creating an easily manipulated army of
citizens that will remain quiet, complacent and subservient, even
when lies and deceptions become readily apparent, when the
corruption and incompetence of leadership is made known and even
when the worst war crimes upon innocents become manifest. For in
the army of good Americans, like the good Germans of decades long
past, the crimes of leaders are known and the wickedness is
apparent, yet in the silence and failure to act complicity and
acquiescence is inferred.
In spite of the tangled web of
lies and deceptions by the corporatists having been exposed, despite
the vast assortment of war crimes being uncovered, regardless of the
enormous betrayal and exploitation of emotions of the citizenry by
those in power, and notwithstanding the blatant corruption and
incompetence by government that has been apparent for years, a vast
percentage of the army of good Americans still refuses to deviate
from its beliefs, maintaining its grand illusion of the fantasy
concocted for its consumption, reluctant to escape the bubble of
comfort it would rather not deviate away from.
Even with the obvious criminality
and the apparent debauchery of its heroes and leaders, in spite of
what truth and reality have uncovered, good Americans still cling to
the belief in an illusion they have been living in since 9/11, that
the president is an honorable man, not the immoral deviant he
appears to be, that he has restored integrity to the White House,
not brought the quite evident level of incompetence and criminality,
and that he has their best interests at heart, not those of the
corporate world that owns him. They fail to escape their insulated
bubble of infallible circumstances, unable to see that their devout
faith has been exploited, their fears abused and their ignorance
fomented, all for their precious vote and political allegiance,
failing to comprehend that their emotions have been molded to enable
the corporatists in power to maintain hegemony over the nation. In
furtherance of criminality and corruption they have been
manipulated, falling for the propaganda of the keepers at the gate,
still to this day unable to see that their blind faith and loyalty
to the same government damaging their interests is inevitably
eroding the fabric of the country and the freedoms and rights both
of themselves and their progeny.
They are being used and abused,
becoming the pawns of power, a citizenry robbed of life, liberty and
the pursuit of happiness, without their knowledge or understanding,
the clandestine pillage of their rights taking place with their
silent acquiescence, dragging all of us down with them. They are a
large segment of American culture whose metamorphosis is
transforming them from placid citizens to legions of soldiers
helping to cement their own downfall. Living in the denial that has
caressed them for years, becoming the comfort their insecure lives
depend on, they fail to see a reality afforded to billions of human
beings the world over. This army of good Americans, like their
German predecessors before them, believes itself the voice of sanity
in a battle of fear and insecurity, of good versus evil, yet the
exact opposite is true. They are the paranoid and psychotic fire
whose flames sustain the insanity and wickedness emanating from
America’s present government. Through their political power and
influence the criminality in government can continue eviscerating
the nation’s freedoms, rights and treasure; their denial sustains
the growing division between supporters of the cabal of criminality
and those opposed.
Their Own Worst Enemy
The seeds planted on 9/11 by the
new Pearl Harbor have grown into a pestilence of weeds spreading
like wildfire throughout the lands of the free and the home of the
brave, causing a great rift among the peoples of America. Slowly
this vast field of weed dries up the further away from reality it
travels, the more denial it reaches for the more its branches turn
crisp brown and attractive to the fire raging from Atlantic to
Pacific that threatens the America both of good Americans and the
rest of us.
The army of good Americans is its
own worst enemy, yet it refuses to escape the denial enveloping its
collective mind that like a parasite refuses to excrete itself from
its host. Easily its members blame everything but themselves for
their diluted thoughts; the fantasy they are made to believe in
cannot be altered, its flawless truth is smeared by the “liberal
media”; everyone is to blame for the Iraq debacle except George the
Lesser; in every corner they find scapegoats to blame for the
afflictions demonizing the nation; France is to be blamed for
everything that goes wrong with America; blind faith and loyalty
makes them unable to visualize and analyze the much broader issues
haunting our current troubles, failing to see outside the parameters
of the box that sits like a golden calf in their living rooms,
speaking and preaching to them on a nightly basis while spellbound
they sit, staring at its images, absorbing its sounds, believing its
fables.
Sadly, this army, thinking itself
righteous and loyal, and no doubt full of decent, law abiding
people, yet unable to see beyond the limits of its own fear, hatred
and paranoia, is dragging America down into the periphery of a most
ominous black hole. Refusing to think outside the box of what they
have been programmed to see, reluctant to question the authority
they have been trained to always follow, hesitant to form opinion
based on reason and logic, instead of regurgitating the programmed
responses of talking heads and professional deceivers, the army of
good Americans fails to understand the ramifications upon their
lives and the future of their cherished nation.
In thinking themselves patriots
loyal to the Bush administration, believing the corporatists in
power have their interests at heart, refusing to see reality or hear
truth, maintaining their illusion of embedded propaganda and deceit,
being unable to escape their bubble of comfort and of consumerist
escapism they are giving comfort and assistance to the enemy of all
American people, a cabal of criminality lurking within our shores,
hidden in the hallways of governance, having hijacked the levers of
power, commandeering American society straight towards the iceberg
called fascism, its benign-looking top hiding a most dangerous
underside.
Without the army of good Americans
the corporatists in power cannot survive, for the legions obedient
and loyal to them act as the buffer of protest, dissent and debate.
They are a great wall holding waves of truth and reality at bay,
creating a nation living under two distinct and separate realities,
cementing division and animosity, fracturing friends and family,
causing rumbles in the underbelly of American culture, maintaining
in elected office the lackeys and prostitutes protecting those at
the highest echelons of corruption, and governance. Without the
army of good Americans the criminals drunk with power would have no
mandate, no power or ability to steer the nation and its people to
ruination.
It is this army that grants Bush,
Cheney and the corporatists the energy to declare absolute power,
regressing the nation backwards towards a veritable state of fascist
affairs, enabling the continued, planned and systematic erosion of
civil liberties and eviscerated freedoms along with the gutting of a
democracy that has mutated into a charade full of smoking mirrors,
broken glass and compromised electronic voting machines, becoming
the illusion normally reserved for the peoples of the third world,
those ruled by dictators and despots. Like no army to ever march in
the United States, the army of good Americans has granted life to
criminals, corruptors, corporatists, autocrats and murderers,
allowing human wickedness to flourish, becoming, in the span of four
years, the bodyguards of tyranny abroad and criminality at home, the
brainwashed automatons granting validity to torture, kidnappings,
illegal renditions, bombings, depleted uranium, cluster bombs,
collective punishment, gulags, misery, false imprisonment, rapes,
murder and utter destruction in the Middle East while enabling the
onslaught upon civil liberties, the decimation of due process, the
erosion of the Bill of Rights, the disregard of the Constitution,
the senseless death and maiming, both physically and mentally, of
tens of thousands of American soldiers for a war based on lies and
criminality, and the rise of the police state inside America. The
army of good Americans has become the tool used to implode the
foundations of the republic.
The America before 9/11 and the
America afterwards have, thanks in large part to the army of good
Americans, with their lust for Arab blood, their omnipresent fear,
their enraptured hatred of chosen scapegoats and their addiction to
being led by corrupt, immoral and incompetent corporatists, become
two different distinct nations, separated by paradigm shifts and
societal tremors, by abdications of citizenry and usurpations of
what used to be the People’s government. The army of good Americans
is willingly sacrificing its rights and liberties as well as those
of the rest of us to appease its fears and insecurities, exchanging
freedom for authoritarianism, democracy for corporatism.
Thinking that in allowing for
warrantless wiretaps and NSA eavesdropping because they have nothing
to hide will not affect them, they have helped seal their own fates,
for in the evisceration of rights of minorities those of the
majority are next to follow. In granting dictatorial powers to
their Dear Leader, in the misguided belief that only he can protect
them from bogeymen, the army of good Americans is opening the doors
to the coming police state, for in such a place those apologizers of
criminality soon find themselves on the receiving end of what they
helped engender. In pushing for the extension of the Patriot Act,
in the naïve belief that its laws only affect bogeymen, the army of
good Americans is conditioning its children to a future of less
freedom and rights, for the future will never miss what they never
had.
This group will in the next few
years become the eyes and ears of the police state, informers,
spies, snitches and narks spawning fear, mistrust and insecurity,
helping to maintain tyranny inside a nation that once fought to
eviscerate it. It is in their character, their selfishness and lack
of empathy assisting in persecuting neighbors, customers, friends
and relatives. They will have become traitors to the republic they
claim to love and the freedoms they swore to protect, becoming
betrayers to its principles and founding vision, to its citizens and
to the ideals of the Founding Fathers. Yet the hand that feeds them
will inevitably come back to haunt them, for they will invariably
cannibalize each other, seeking the favor of authority yet receiving
as payback that which they helped birth.
One day, in the not too distant
future, in the middle of the night, a knock will come at their door,
it being not a dream nor a fantasy, its noise an ominous reminder of
the police state now upon America, coming to serve power on those
who thought they had nothing to fear by sacrificing liberty and
freedom for so-called security. When that day arrives, the army of
good Americans will look back to the past, afraid to peer at the
future, wishing for the days of old, contemplating memories of what
used to be, the life that was taken for granted, unsure what they
were thinking when in their fear and hatred-filled days they
released the valves that opened the flood of corporatist rule upon
their children, ashamed of themselves for allowing such a fate to
devour what was once a great and shining beacon on a hill.
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