Response to BRS

Believe it or not, politically, I am a pretty positive person. I truly and wholeheartedly believe that there is great hope for our country. Unfortunately, I am in complete disgust every time I turn on the TV and every time I listen to the leaders of this country speak. It's hard not to be cynical when the country is stuck in a two-party quagmire in which both sides are corrupted by special interests that care nothing for the well being of the country as a whole. Nothing ever gets acted upon because nobody demands it because everyone is too distracted by the media and disillusioned by the bland and corrupt choices they face every two years. It can and must be fixed, but people have to wake up to the harsh realities we have created by sitting on our hands for twenty years. There is hope…I’m just not sure how to go about saving the country just yet. I’ll get back with you when I figure it out. In the meantime, I’m going to call all the bullshit I see.

The link between bullying and capitalism lies in the very way we live our lives. The cut-throat, dog-eat-dog, take-no-prisoners, it's-either-him-or-me mentality has pervaded every aspect of life in the current social structure and it does way more to destroy than to help. Look at the way many "model" businesses are run. Because of their limited liability, their enormous size, and their enslavement to the bottom line, they are willing to destroy everything in their path--workers, wildlife, the environment...hell, we're at the edge of extinction ourselves. That is the model kids grow up following. They see their parents living their lives the way they do, they watch vapid and materialistic shows like "My Super Sweet Sixteen", and “Deal or No Deal”, and they are viciously and callously attacked every moment of their adolescence with ads that claim that their product represents freedom or integrity or courage. They are taught to care little for their fellow person. So they treat each other like garbage. Just like Cho was treated his entire life.

I agree that you have to hold every murderer accountable for his or her actions. They decided to pull the trigger. Without people willing to commit cold blooded and horrible acts of violence, we wouldn't need this discussion. But the fact remains that this is something that continues to happen. By calling him evil, we are taking the easy way out. There is no good or evil out there. We are all capable of both. He did a very evil thing. But we cannot deny that the way he was treated throughout his entire life had a direct role in the way he chose to end it. And yes, I am claiming that capitalism is to blame for horrible way people treat each other and the irresponsible and gaping gaps in our (physical and mental) health institutions—especially those that should provide for the poor and minorities. We practice a form of unbridled capitalism that trumps democracy, takes power from the people, and gives it to a small minority of rich white dudes. This feeling powerlessness pervades the entire population, all the way down to the students I teach (talk to a young black high school student for a couple hours and you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about). I think there is room for a strictly regulated form of capitalism, but the minute the wealthy become more powerful than the elected, democracy has been rendered helpless.

Finally, the utopia I refer to is one that existed before our collective memories. One that has become extinct because it did not believe in global dominance. One that never truly made it into our history books. People used to live in harmony with the earth rather than at war with it. Ishmael called them The Leavers. We may never be able to live that way again, but with more emphasis on people and less on things, we can take a major step in that direction.

We are the Ass-Whores of Capitalism

For the inexcusably uninformed, the drugged up and detached, the oblivious and transient, and the reclusive and withdrawn, I have some disturbing shit to break to you. Another confused and tormented young person decided to take out his frustration/anger/fear/pain/sadness on many of his fellow young people. Then he turned the 9mm Glock 19 handgun on himself. He left a “manifesto”. The manifesto was sent to NBC. NBC released the manifesto and proceeded to play it over and over and over again. All media outlets followed in like manner. It revealed the disturbing mind behind the shootings and instantaneously sold a hundred thousand alarm systems, over five hundred thousand handguns, a million cans of mace, ten thousand SUVs, and twenty-five gas masks. I can’t back that up, but I will not deny the utter terror I felt watching it. It is permanently branded in my long term memory. I know it. I’m doomed to flashback to the sound of his voice when I’m eighty-five living in a post-apocalyptic fallout shelter. Fuck.

There have been three questions troubling me about this so-called manifesto, the second of which reveals much about the nature of this tragedy, the third of which reveals even more about the underbelly of our prosperity.

• Why did I watch it?

That I have always known the answer to this question does not make it any less disconcerting. The truth is that I have an intense fascination with death. Combine that with an insanely obsessive personality, and you’re in my brain. The three people I have studied the most in my life (in order of initial obsession): Jim Morrison (died in a bathtub of heart failure after years of heavy drug use), Hunter S. Thompson (died of self-inflicted gun shot wound after decades of heavy drug use), and Elliott Smith (died of self-inflicted stab wounds to the chest). Six Feet Under is one of my favorite TV shows. I love eulogies. I wrote one for my grandfather. I feel most at one with the world during a funeral. I married the granddaughter of a funeral director. How fucked up is that? I’m sure everyone has a different reason for watching that video. I wouldn’t doubt if the majority of the people who have seen it stumbled upon it accidentally. When they show clips of it TWENTY-FOUR HOURS A DAY, it’s hard to avoid—even if you don’t have cable…which brings us to my next question.

• Why did NBC release “selected pieces” of the “multimedia manifesto”?

First of all, Cho Seung-Hui is not Karl Marx so don’t call his rambling (but tragically successful) attempt at infamy a freaking manifesto. Please—he did not change the world on Monday. He did something horrifying and unthinkable, but he is nothing more than a tormented individual with easy access to a destructive and unnecessary weapon of mass destruction (sold legally). He did not write one of the most influential pieces of political theory in the history of literature. He pulled the trigger of a semiautomatic pistol many, many times and played God for two hours to satisfy his psychotic delusions of grandeur and his primal desire for revenge after a lifetime of embarrassment, torture, and self-loathing. The simple fact that NBC called it a “manifesto” reveals the true irony of the entire twisted series of events that began early morning and continues at this very moment.

A manifesto implies overtones of political and social importance. The only thing political about what Seung-Hui sent NBC was the decision by NBC to immediately put it on the air. And why did they do it? Money. Why else? In this twisted dystopia we were handed by our parents, money trumps everything. Money is more important than people, it’s more important than the planet we live on, it’s more important than God. We are talking about paper with pictures of dead white dudes on it. Think about that for a second.

They glorified the killer. They gave him his fame. That’s what sensationalist journalism has come to. Glorifying a mass murderer for profit. Let’s not confuse it with anything else. They showed it because they knew people would watch. I’m sure the TV movie is right around the corner. It’s the same reason they committed to twenty-four hour coverage of Anna Nicole Smith’s death and the diaper-wearing astronaut, and conveniently forgot that the IPCC had just published a historic and definitive scientific report that cast humanity as the major cause of global warming trends. Only this time hundreds of families were affected. And hundreds more have been put in danger as a direct result of their careless and greedy actions. In their blind ratings scramble, the corporate vultures in the media have provided self-absorbed and demented young people a pedestal upon which to prop their destructive and false sense of importance. Cho made reference to the Columbine killers as if they were his heroes. He clearly thought of their glorification as he meticulously prepared his plan. There have been numerous threats in schools across the country since the tape was released.

And we have not seen the last of it.

The worst part about it all will be the fallout surrounding teenagers in schools across the country. Despite the finger pointing in the media now raging, the youth of America will be the ultimate scapegoat. Every time something like this happens, the answer is to take more rights away from young people. Install metal detectors, build walls around our playgrounds complete with razor wire and watch towers, put up cameras in every hallway, hire armed guards, board up all of the windows, more structure, less freedom, more suspicion, less acceptance—let’s go ahead and make teenagers feel like criminals. That will make them less violent. Our jails do such a great job rehabilitating violent criminals; we should apply the same logic to teenagers. Shit, people have even suggested arming teachers. Are you kidding me? That’s your answer. More guns? In the wake of the NRA Convention in St. Louis, I’d ramble on about this country's irresponsibly lax gun laws, but I couldn’t say it any better than KBO did in this post.

Guns may be the most physically dangerous of products shoved into our ears, but you have to dig much deeper to find the root of the carnivorous weed of capitalism. So...

• What don’t they want us to think about?

In our attempt to continue America’s economic dominance of the world, we have written a blank check to capitalism. A few blind and confused politicians have sold the collective soul of an entire nation. We have been hollowed out by a model of thinking that places all value on things and things alone. There is no value to the individual. There are no more values. Everything is extrinsic. Do whatever you can to get as much stuff as you can as fast as possible no matter who or what you have to destroy in the process. People are insects. We step on them everyday without second thought. How do we live with ourselves after trampling so many innocent people to get our things? Well, it’s easy when you have seven hundred channels of mindless distraction at your disposal.

We have become the ass-whores of capitalism. They have been penetrating our psyche for so long that we can’t feel it anymore. We have been fucked in so many psychological orifices that we are numb to all sensation. To make it worse, we are also junkies to their drug. We can’t stop. We need more. More violence. More death. More porn. More food. More drugs. More humiliation. More gluttony. More atrocity. They keep cramming it down our deadened throats as we stare blankly into the television set. The more we see, the more we want, until reality becomes so dulled that mass murder is the only real event that gets the dopamine flowing. The people who starve or freeze or get blown up each day as a result of our consumption seem so distant. So out of reach. So…artificial. And whenever we are reminded of them, and those blurry images begin to come into focus, we quickly change the channel.

We sold our souls to a system that by its very nature relies entirely upon greed to function. It is self destructive and uncontrollable. It relies upon the consumer to care more about money than people. This way of life erodes the inherent compassion that we once had as children.

Everyone is always quick to point out the undeniable role that bullying plays in almost every rampage. Politicians and administrators are quick to beef up security, add cameras, and train teachers in bullying prevention. But once again, no one is willing to look into the driving force behind almost every act of bullying.

So many people in all walks of life and at all ages have been identified as freaks, treated like outcasts, and then tossed aside like insignificant pieces of garbage. We sometimes unknowingly teach our kids that the only way to be “successful” is to exploit and belittle others for their own personal gain. (It’s not necessarily our fault either…for many of us [especially the generation of kids in high school now) it’s the way we've been raised--it's all we know.

And how is success valued in an extrinsic society? Growing up, it's grades, awards, letters, wearing the most expensive clothes, sitting at the “cool table”, etc…and once you get to the adult world, it’s who has the biggest house on the block, or the biggest SUV, or the highest paying job, or the most “successful” kids. Notice, this capitalistic definition leaves no room for integrity, courage (in the standing-up-for-what-you-truly-believe-in sense), kindness, generosity, selflessness, charity, or any of the other values that once epitomized humankind. All of the things that once were the true measure of success are now just catchy phrases exploited to sell the products that we buy to distract ourselves from the harsh realities of the unjust world we have created. Every day I witness good kids give up the fight for what they’ve always known is good and honest and just and adopt a new set of principles driven by the desire to fit into an unnatural and selfish model of living—a model of living that relies upon conformity and punishes individuality.

This devolution towards materialism and away from empathy has corroded the decency and geniality for which we used to strive. It has turned us into an ugly people who do and say ugly and hurtful things. Cho Seung-Hui, Eric Harris, Dylan Klebold, Osama Bin Laden, and every other twisted mind to commit mass murder on American soil in the last twenty years are little more than a manifestation of our ugly and evil addiction.

Our collective insides turned out for all to see.

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LINKS:

+There are an estimated 200 million guns floating around the United States. I think it's safe to say that we have a gun problem. If you don't think so, read this article which features an interview with the dude who owns the firearms store that sold Cho the Glock 19. He actually said this: "I've sold 160,000 guns, and out of those, half a dozen have been used for homicides or suicides...I know it's a tiny percentage, but it just absolutely tears me up every time it happens." Could he be any more oblivious in his roll of the violence in this country?

+If you want a carefully researched and well rounded account of the events of April 17th stop watching the shit spin on the 24 hour news channels. I recommend the the Special Report in latest issue of Newsweek titled "Making of a Masacre" by Evan Thomas. It 10 pages long, but that's because it is real news without spin and without knee-jerk perspective. Though the entire article is terrifying and heartbreaking, I was most affected by section that described how Cho got the guns. Evans writes:

"Buying a gun is easy in Virginia, a state with a strong gun-loving population. There is NO WAITING PERIOD and only MINIMAL BACKGROUND CHECK. On Feb. 9, Cho walked across the street from the Virginia Tech campus to a pawnshop, where he picked up an Internet-purchased Wather .22...He began buying ammo at stores like Wal-Mart, and on March 13, he went upscale. At Roanoke Firearms, he used a credit card to purchase a
Glock 19 and a box of 50 cartriges for $571. The semiautomatic, lightweight Glock, a
favorite of police and gangbangers alike, can fire five rounds a second. A magazine of ammo, holding up to 33 hollow-point bullets (effective at tearing internal organs), can be swapped out for another in under two seconds." (I added all caps for emphasis)

Yeah...no problem with any of that at all. We have the right to bear arms that are "effective at tearing internal organs," right?

+Read "Story of a Gun" if you are interested in educating yourself about the effects of irresponsible gun-lobbyists from the NRA and the Republicans who they pay off.

+Every single person who has followed the shooting has a moral obligation to read "Lost Lives", a special report written by Andrew Romano. It remembers all thirty-two of the victims.

+In case you forgot, we are also in the middle of a bloody civil war in Iraq. Listen to Keith Olbermann's podcast (via Quicktime) on the day of the shooting and you may understand how numb we have become to the violence that we hear about each day. That's right, 32 young Americans died in the ten days before the Virginia Tech shooting and we didn't bat an eye. After pointing this out, Olbermann appropriately asks, "why isn't our flag permanently at half staff?"

+And finally, Bill O' Reilly's defense of playing the Cho tapes explains yet another insightful reason for releasing the tapes: to affect policy by scaring the shit out of people.

O' Reilly begins, "I ran the tape last night and I’d run it again.”

“Evil must be exposed and Cho was evil. You can see it in his face, hear it in his voice. All of us who saw the tape will never forget it. And it made me and millions of others angry. Once evil is acknowledged, steps can be taken to contain it. And once anger is in the air, policy can change...public policy must make it more difficult for evil people. It's a lot harder for terrorists to kill Americans today than it was before 9/11. And that's because new laws and better security have been imposed."

He goes on to talk about how the tape could help people to become more active in fighting for stricter gun laws, and I'm glad he's willing to admit that despite his conservative bias, but is he suggesting that the tape was necessary to make that happen? Seriously, 32 people were killed.

He continues by explaining the old conservative mantra, “public safety trumps privacy," and explaining how he believes the "greater good was served by protecting people from the likes of Cho."

So there you have it. He admitted that he and his colleagues at Fox played the tapes to scare and anger the public. They know that we will watch if we are scared and angry, and thier ratings will soar. Their employers know that we will buy lots of shit if we're scared and angry. And Bush knows that we will not question his wars or his assault on our civil liberties if we are scared and angry. Just like 9/11 and every other sensationalized story that the media has spewed since.

The Politics of Fear

I. HUAC and Junior Senator Joseph McCarthy

So back in the days leading up to the Second World War, the United States Government established the Special Committee on Un-American Activities Authorized to Investigate Nazi Propaganda and Certain Other Propaganda Activities (the SCUAAINPCOPA for short…not really…they just called it the McCormack-Dickstein Committee). In case you didn’t catch it by the ridiculously long and unnecessarily specific title, this committee was charged with the super-fun task of locating Nazi spies in the US. It eventually grew into the more widely remembered House Committee on Un-American Activities or HUAC.

In the late thirties and through WWII, HUAC investigated, and essentially turned a blind eye to the heinous (and very “un-American”) crimes of the Ku Klux Klan and the hypocritical detention camps used to pacify potential Japanese-American spies (i.e. every Japanese- American they could find), while working to find and question anyone suspected to have been in the same room at any point in their life of a copy of Mein Kampf (before 1945) or The Communist Manifesto (after 1945). The true nature of this committee was not brought into the American public eye though until they began orchestrating hearings exploring the accusation that many in the motion picture industry were spreading Communist propaganda. From 1947-1958, HUAC was responsible for blacklisting the “Hollywood Ten” and publicly interrogating hundreds of other entertainers, government employees, lunch ladies, etc. The members of this committee are largely to blame for creating much of the anti-communist hysteria during the Cold War (even though Joseph McCarthy gets most of the credit).

The reason I bring all this up is because HUAC and its predecessors, along with Senator Joseph McCarthy, introduced a new brand of government sponsored fear mongering that has been assaulting free speech for over seventy years. The 21^st century version of this strain of politics has mutated into a steroid pumped and media driven monstrosity that has people fleeing to guarded and gated communities, locking all four deadbolts on their front door, activating the alarm system, and hiding under their beds in the middle of the afternoon in anticipation of the next suicide bombing to ravage the bloody streets of Ladue.

II. Fear and Loathing in the Rubble at Ground Zero

Since 9/11, we have been under attack. They’d like us to believe that we are under attack from suicidal heathens who want nothing more than to see every American dead (see “Fade to Black and White”). They’d like us to believe that the world is at an apocalyptic crossroads—that we are on the verge of the cultural and religious crusade of our time—that now is our time to stand up for freedom and fight the ultimate enemy. Sounds exciting doesn’t it? I’d go see that movie. The only problem is that we are not living in a freaking movie! Bush, you are NOT Aragorn, the rightful heir to the kingdom of Gondor. Go back and reread his speeches—they are terrifying, but also darkly hilarious. I really think he has convinced himself that we are in a battle for Middle Earth against a bunch of Orcs. Seriously.

The real attack is being waged against the American public is the same one that McCarthy and friends used during the red scare—the attack on dissidence. The formula for this sort of assault on everything truly American is very simple. All you need is an ideological scapegoat, and a citizenry that is, above all other things, blindly patriotic and senselessly terrified. That’s it.

During the Cold War, these ingredients conveniently fell into place and set into motion Senator McCarthy’s lifelong dream of conducting the political witch-hunt of the century. Patriotism comes naturally after you kick the shit out of a bunch of genocidal Nazis. There’s really no need to discuss it further than that. Finding a scapegoat was almost as easy. There were plenty of members of the Communist party right here in the United States (McCarthy first claimed there were 205 Communist spies in the state department alone) just ripe to be persecuted and prosecuted, labeled as “un-American” and filed neatly and voicelessly in a jail cell or, after they ratted out all of their friends, the witness relocation program. And the Communists were an easy propaganda target with the arms race going on, the ideological differences, the poverty, and of course the ominous symbols (a hammer and a sickle…really…that’s what they chose).

Creating the fear was just as effortless. People all over the world and in the US were still reeling from the destruction and aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When it came out that the Russians had nukes just as powerful, people were so petrified that they moved to the suburbs and started buying as many appliances as possible to get their mind off the impending doom of the apocalypse. The McCarthyists knew they could use the public’s irrational fear to ensure that they had the license to wage whatever proxy wars (foreign or domestic) they wanted under the pretense that they were fighting communism. In the meantime, it was a perfect opportunity to beef up military spending to create a permanent armaments industry and as Eisenhower put it, invest in “an immense military establishment.” And if anyone said anything that they didn’t like, they could easily shut them up by playing the Commie card. The duel effect of these policies of terror did much to scar the American people. They were not only afraid of a nuke falling on their head, they were also afraid of being labeled a Communist and shunned by their neighbors. Fortunately, with the help of courageous journalists (wow, I wish we had some of those!) like Edward R. Murrow (go watch Good Night, and Good Luck right now if you haven’t seen it yet) the dangers of this type of fear mongering were temporarily defeated and McCarthy and his henchmen were dishonored (even though the arms race and proxy wars continued well into the eighties).

Does any of this sound at all familiar to you?

Bush didn’t drop any nukes, but he didn’t have to. Bush also didn’t need to look far for a scapegoat. Bin Laden killed both stones with one bird (four really) when he decided to get 19 of his friends together and fly some planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. And just like in the fifties, people were scared. When people are scared, they get paranoid. The lens with which they view the world becomes a deeper shade of red, and instead of smiling at the light-brown-skinned, unfamiliar bearded dude that passes them in a quiet hallway, they look down, fist clenched around their keys, breath held, wondering if the strange man looks “American” enough. It goes without saying that when a country finds itself in a situation where a large majority of people are behaving as if they were on an acid trip in Las Vegas with Hunter S. Thompson, it is headed down a very dark road.

Today’s media-machine doesn’t help either. I mean, just after 9/11 they had reporters on camera dressed in those bright yellow biohazard suits complete with gas mask and the scary international symbol. They KNOW that the minute most of us see those suits we are naturally going to think about that freaky scene in E.T. when Elliot and posse escape from the evil yellow-suit-wearing-government agents via flying bicycle. I don’t know about all of you, but this scene gave me vivid nightmares for years. Now CNN has their reporters dressing like them? What the fuck. If I EVER see ANYONE walking down Arsenal wearing one of those suits, I am moving to Canada the next day. You can hold me to that. Fox News, CNN, MSNBC—they bathed themselves in that fear like pigs in feces. Ratings soared and people couldn’t change the channel. The tune-in-or-else-you-and-your-family-will-die-in-a- horrible-death-at-the-hands-of-the-terrorist-policy adopted by the 24 hour news stations kept us on the edges of our seats, shaking our heads, and wondering if we should go to confession before the Red Horse of War darkens the sky the neighborhood Walmart.

So, of course we were willing to sacrifice some civil liberties. Tap my phone, read my emails, install cameras in the street lights, hell, you could put one on my front door if you think it’s going to help. Send to FBI to tail law-abiding citizens if you think they hate America, set up secret CIA prisons around the world, torture anyone with that terrorist look in their eye. And while you’re at it, hold them without charge and deny them legal council—you know what, just get rid of habeas corpus all together, it’s outdated anyway. A suspected terrorist is as bad as an actual terrorist, and we’re better safe than sorry. Do what you have to do Big Brother, because we’re at war, and I have a yellow ribbon sticker on my car, and a flag flying outside my house, and I love America enough to make a sacrifice or ten so that you can save us from the terrorists. I’ll sacrifice my fucking country for America if you ask me to.

When this sort of suspicion is ambient, people feel it necessary to overcompensate. It’s like the big car/small penis theory. If you’re constantly looking at everyone and wondering whether or not they love America enough, you naturally feel like everyone is wondering the same thing about you. So you break out the American flag and fly it proudly everyday instead of just on holidays. You buy a little flag for your car window, and a red, white, and blue ribbon magnet to put opposite your yellow one. You order a “these colors don’t run” t-shirt off ebay, a bumper sticker with an eagle on it, and maybe even a patriotic bandanna. This behavior is the nonverbal equivalent to standing in the middle of the street and yelling at the top of your lungs, “I AM NOT A TERRORIST.” And you feel it necessary because you have turned your suspicion inward upon yourself. You are afraid that you are a terrorist. Whoa.

An ideological scapegoat.

A citizenry that is blindly patriotic and senselessly terrified.

III. Thanks for Letting the Terrorists Win, Asshole

We are turning into a nation of whimpering slaves to Fear — fear of war, fear of poverty, fear of random terrorism, fear of getting down-sized or fired because of the plunging economy, fear of getting evicted for bad debts, or suddenly getting locked up in a military detention camp on vague charges of being a Terrorist sympathizer.
-Hunter S. Thompson

In post 9/11 world you’re either with us, or you’re a terrorist. The ‘us’ represents America as a whole around the world, but here in the US, it embodies the administration, the radical right, and the glut of corporate elite slithering in and out of Bush’s revolving cabinet door. Bush claims to be fighting in the name of freedom and democracy, but his actions expose the inherent hypocrisy oozing from every gaping crack in his failed administration. This is an administration that has no problem distorting and manipulating the news by leaking false information and/or blatantly lying—outing CIA agents to send a very loud message to political opponents—or using wire taps and FBI agents to identify and then harass the opposition within this country. When these types of things happen again and again, it becomes clear that they have something to hide. Their agenda is so full of holes that they know an informed American public would be outraged if they were to find out the truth. And EVERYTHING comes back to their loosely defined “War on Terror.” They may have been wrong once or fifty times, but they will leave no stone unturned whether that stone be in Baghdad or Baltimore. There are terrorists amongst us after all.

Meanwhile, as the administration works on the political front to silence any resistance, they leave the right-wing media machine to say what they know they can’t say. Just as Rove Inc. learned about the damage the media can wreak on executive power during Vietnam, they also learned from the mistakes made by McCarthy in the fifties. They learned not to conduct a media-driven witch-hunt yourself, allow your puppets…I mean pundits to do it for you. While those in Washington are very careful not to fall into the McCarthy trap, the Limbaughs and O’Reillys of the country have free reign to point fingers and create labels and let their listening/viewing audience know that there is no reason to pay attention to what all those “crazy libs” are saying. It’s all black and white—us and them. They love the terrorists and hate America. We are spreading freedom and protecting the country from the forces of evil. They want the terrorists to win—hell, classified sources inside the White House say that many of them are actually on Bin Laden’s payroll. We’re securing the borders and bringing terrorists to justice. They have tailor-made responses for every issue. If a liberal starts attacking you with questions that would require you to (gasp) think, just click here and we’ll tell you exactly what to say to make the bad people go away.

So, dissenters are accused of not supporting the troops and antiwar politicians are accused of being weak on national defense. Scientists are labeled as kooks and the critics within the military are labeled as cowards and traitors. This ‘us or them’ rhetoric is extremely dangerous. What kind of America does the right want? An America without dissent? One with only one right way to do things? An America where the citizens never question anything the government does? An America in which people live in fear of expressing their opinions? An America in which there is no need to justify any war or any decision made by the government? Now that, my friends, sounds just as much like Fascism than anything the terrorists are doing or have done. The right might respond that this does not apply because we are not killing innocent people like the terrorists. Last time I checked the civilian death toll in Iraq was at the lowest estimate 61,000 and at the highest estimate 67,000.

Next time Bush starts to throw out ultimatums, or his pundits make claims about who is with ‘us’ or against ‘us’, think about the ‘us’ he is referring to. Are there really only two sides? Us or them? Cannot ‘us’ have more than one opinion? Is there any danger in debate? Dissent? I constantly teach my students to question authority, not so they become terrorists, but so they become concerned and empowered citizens. But I guess that is exactly what people like President Bush fear the most. Because with a concerned and empowered citizenry, people like him would never get elected.

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LINKS

• Awesome history of the fucked up HUAC hearings

• 2003 article about the current trend of censoring Hollywood dissenters

• What happens when people protest in America (click on picture gallery)

• Letters section of September 23, 2002 issue of The Nation that features this letter by some guy named John Zavales:

“I was in the Pentagon on September 11. Our office was on the opposite side of the building, and as we filed out none of us guessed how horrible it was until we saw, from the parking lot, the columns of smoke. That first evening, amid the shock and sense of loss, I thought, "This is what blowback really means." No one can excuse Al Qaeda's murderous hatred, but I now realize that this terror network was made possible by the arms and money we provided the Afghan mujahedeen during our demented anti-Soviet crusade. Those Americans who supported these thugs and psychopaths should be ashamed. Whenever I see that antidrug ad that claims that buying pot helps terrorists, I am reminded that our own cold war "patriots" helped to slaughter 3,000 people, and tried to kill me at my desk.”

• Bush is at it again, accusing Democrats of “undercut[ting] the troops” and “giving our enemies the victory they desperately want.” What he doesn’t mention in his radio address is that he left the Iraq War funding out of his budget so he wouldn’t freak out the American public. He knows that everyone is concerned about the unthinkable deficit in the national budget (see the graph here and an article about the deficit here). He knows that if his budget truly stated how much money he is pouring into this disaster of a war, he would be dealing with an even more outraged public. Now, he wants Congress to pass his “emergency war spending bill” as if this war is some disaster that hit us out of nowhere. We’ve been in there for four years buddy; don’t act like you couldn’t put this into the budget. America voted to get out of Iraq Mr. Bush, not just to “change the course” (although that would have been an excellent idea in 2004, but you were too stubborn to listen). You ignored the critics who told you to change your failing strategy three years ago, you ignored the voters in November, you ignored the Iraq Study Group Report, you ignored the Congressional resolution against the troop buildup plan, and now you claim that Democrats are hurting the troops. You forced the Democrats into this situation because of your constant refusal to listen to anyone who doesn’t say what you want to hear. They are trying to do what you do not have the backbone to do. You can pour all the money you want into this war, and give the troops all of the equipment they need, but the only way that they are going to stop getting killed, is if we bring them home.

The Politics of Fear (Conclusion)

III. Thanks for Letting the Terrorists Win, Asshole

We are turning into a nation of whimpering slaves to Fear — fear of war, fear of poverty, fear of random terrorism, fear of getting down-sized or fired because of the plunging economy, fear of getting evicted for bad debts, or suddenly getting locked up in a military detention camp on vague charges of being a Terrorist sympathizer.
-Hunter S. Thompson

In post 9/11 world you’re either with us, or you’re a terrorist. The ‘us’ represents America as a whole around the world, but here in the US, it embodies the administration, the radical right, and the glut of corporate elite slithering in and out of Bush’s revolving cabinet door. Bush claims to be fighting in the name of freedom and democracy, but his actions expose the inherent hypocrisy oozing from every gaping crack in his failed administration. This is an administration that has no problem distorting and manipulating the news by leaking false information and/or blatantly lying—outing CIA agents to send a very loud message to political opponents—or using wire taps and FBI agents to identify and then harass the opposition within this country. When these types of things happen again and again, it becomes clear that they have something to hide. Their agenda is so full of holes that they know an informed American public would be outraged if they were to find out the truth. And EVERYTHING comes back to their loosely defined “War on Terror.” They may have been wrong once or fifty times, but they will leave no stone unturned whether that stone be in Baghdad or Baltimore. There are terrorists amongst us after all.

Meanwhile, as the administration works on the political front to silence any resistance, they leave the right-wing media machine to say what they know they can’t say. Just as Rove Inc. learned about the damage the media can wreak on executive power during Vietnam, they also learned from the mistakes made by McCarthy in the fifties. They learned not to conduct a media-driven witch-hunt yourself, allow your puppets…I mean pundits to do it for you. While those in Washington are very careful not to fall into the McCarthy trap, the Limbaughs and O’Reillys of the country have free reign to point fingers and create labels and let their listening/viewing audience know that there is no reason to pay attention to what all those “crazy libs” are saying. It’s all black and white—us and them. They love the terrorists and hate America. We are spreading freedom and protecting the country from the forces of evil. They want the terrorists to win—hell, classified sources inside the White House say that many of them are actually on Bin Laden’s payroll. We’re securing the borders and bringing terrorists to justice. They have tailor-made responses for every issue. If a liberal starts attacking you with questions that would require you to (gasp) think, just click here and we’ll tell you exactly what to say to make the bad people go away.

So, dissenters are accused of not supporting the troops and antiwar politicians are accused of being weak on national defense. Scientists are labeled as kooks and the critics within the military are labeled as cowards and traitors. This ‘us or them’ rhetoric is extremely dangerous. What kind of America does the right want? An America without dissent? One with only one right way to do things? An America where the citizens never question anything the government does? An America in which people live in fear of expressing their opinions? An America in which there is no need to justify any war or any decision made by the government? Now that, my friends, sounds just as much like Fascism than anything the terrorists are doing or have done. The right might respond that this does not apply because we are not killing innocent people like the terrorists. Last time I checked the civilian death toll in Iraq was at the lowest estimate 61,000 and at the highest estimate 67,000.

Next time Bush starts to throw out ultimatums, or his pundits make claims about who is with ‘us’ or against ‘us’, think about the ‘us’ he is referring to. Are there really only two sides? Us or them? Cannot ‘us’ have more than one opinion? Is there any danger in debate? Dissent? I constantly teach my students to question authority, not so they become terrorists, but so they become concerned and empowered citizens. But I guess that is exactly what people like President Bush fear the most. Because with a concerned and empowered citizenry, people like him would never get elected.

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LINKS

Bush is at it again, accusing Democrats of “undercut[ting] the troops” and “giving our enemies the victory they desperately want.” What he doesn’t mention in his radio address is that he left the Iraq War funding out of his budget so he wouldn’t freak out the American public. He knows that everyone is concerned about the unthinkable deficit in the national budget (see the graph here and an article about the deficit here). He knows that if his budget truly stated how much money he is pouring into this disaster of a war, he would be dealing with an even more outraged public. Now, he wants Congress to pass his “emergency war spending bill” as if this war is some disaster that hit us out of nowhere. We’ve been in there for four years buddy; don’t act like you couldn’t put this into the budget. America voted to get out of Iraq Mr. Bush, not just to “change the course” (although that would have been an excellent idea in 2004, but you were too stubborn to listen). You ignored the critics who told you to change your failing strategy three years ago, you ignored the voters in November, you ignored the Iraq Study Group Report, you ignored the Congressional resolution against the troop buildup plan, and now you claim that Democrats are hurting the troops. You forced the Democrats into this situation because of your constant refusal to listen to anyone who doesn’t say what you want to hear. They are trying to do what you do not have the backbone to do. You can pour all the money you want into this war, and give the troops all of the equipment they need, but the only way that they are going to stop getting killed, is if we bring them home.

Interlude

If you don’t believe me when I write about the striking parallels between the current administration and those in power during Vietnam, read Matt Taibbi’s interview with Seymour Hersh in the new Rolling Stone. Wow. I think we sometimes forget that the Roves and Cheneys and Rumsfelds have been around for decades. I almost fell out of my chair when I read the opening two paragraphs of the article. Cheney and Rumsfeld were around during the Nixon era? Are you kidding me? And there are primary documents proving that Cheney (as Rumsfeld’s aid) took notes about possible responses to a scathing Hersh report about the administration that included obtaining a “search warrant: to go after Hersh papers in his apt”? And he’s still using the same tricks? We wonder why the American public is so apathetic. We wonder why our government officials haven’t learned any lessons from our history. We wonder why corruption is still rampant in Washington. It’s the same crooked story every time they get one of their Republican puppets elected. By the time Bush II is done, twenty out of my twenty-eight years here on earth will have been under a Republican president. I hate to bring up such a downer, but that interview really threw off my equilibrium.

Read at your own risk because Seymour Hersh has been around, and he is not very optimistic about the direction our country may be headed in the last two years of Bush’s reign.

The Politics of Fear (Part I)

Editor's note: This post has been plaguing me for over a month. It started as a response to a forward that arrived in my inbox sometime in late February. It morphed into something that required way too much research and way too many words. I still haven't gotten to my response to that forward (sorry Polihan). I will someday. At this point I just want to purge it from my entire being. It's really long, so I'm going to post half of it right now, and half next Saturday. I don't want you to think that you have to set aside an hour every time I post something. Peace.

I. HUAC and Junior Senator Joseph McCarthy

So back in the days leading up to the Second World War, the United States Government established the Special Committee on Un-American Activities Authorized to Investigate Nazi Propaganda and Certain Other Propaganda Activities (the SCUAAINPCOPA for short…not really…they just called it the McCormack-Dickstein Committee). In case you didn’t catch it by the ridiculously long and unnecessarily specific title, this committee was charged with the super-fun task of locating Nazi spies in the US. It eventually grew into the more widely remembered House Committee on Un-American Activities or HUAC.

In the late thirties and through WWII, HUAC investigated, and essentially turned a blind eye to the heinous (and very “un-American”) crimes of the Ku Klux Klan and the hypocritical detention camps used to pacify potential Japanese-American spies (i.e. every Japanese- American they could find), while working to find and question anyone suspected to have been in the same room at any point in their life of a copy of Mein Kampf (before 1945) or The Communist Manifesto (after 1945). The true nature of this committee was not brought into the American public eye though until they began orchestrating hearings exploring the accusation that many in the motion picture industry were spreading Communist propaganda. From 1947-1958, HUAC was responsible for blacklisting the “Hollywood Ten” and publicly interrogating hundreds of other entertainers, government employees, lunch ladies, etc. The members of this committee are largely to blame for creating much of the anti-communist hysteria during the Cold War (even though Joseph McCarthy gets most of the credit).

The reason I bring all this up is because HUAC and its predecessors, along with Senator Joseph McCarthy, introduced a new brand of government sponsored fear mongering that has been assaulting free speech for over seventy years. The 21^st century version of this strain of politics has mutated into a steroid pumped and media driven monstrosity that has people fleeing to guarded and gated communities, locking all four deadbolts on their front door, activating the alarm system, and hiding under their beds in the middle of the afternoon in anticipation of the next suicide bombing to ravage the bloody streets of Ladue.

II. Fear and Loathing in the Rubble at Ground Zero

Since 9/11, we have been under attack. They’d like us to believe that we are under attack from suicidal heathens who want nothing more than to see every American dead (see “Fade to Black and White”). They’d like us to believe that the world is at an apocalyptic crossroads—that we are on the verge of the cultural and religious crusade of our time—that now is our time to stand up for freedom and fight the ultimate enemy. Sounds exciting doesn’t it? I’d go see that movie. The only problem is that we are not living in a freaking movie! Bush, you are NOT Aragorn, the rightful heir to the kingdom of Gondor. Go back and reread his speeches—they are terrifying, but also darkly hilarious. I really think he has convinced himself that we are in a battle for Middle Earth against a bunch of Orcs. Seriously.

The real attack is being waged against the American public is the same one that McCarthy and friends used during the red scare—the attack on dissidence. The formula for this sort of assault on everything truly American is very simple. All you need is an ideological scapegoat, and a citizenry that is, above all other things, blindly patriotic and senselessly terrified. That’s it.

During the Cold War, these ingredients conveniently fell into place and set into motion Senator McCarthy’s lifelong dream of conducting the political witch-hunt of the century. Patriotism comes naturally after you kick the shit out of a bunch of genocidal Nazis. There’s really no need to discuss it further than that. Finding a scapegoat was almost as easy. There were plenty of members of the Communist party right here in the United States (McCarthy first claimed there were 205 Communist spies in the state department alone) just ripe to be persecuted and prosecuted, labeled as “un-American” and filed neatly and voicelessly in a jail cell or, after they ratted out all of their friends, the witness relocation program. And the Communists were an easy propaganda target with the arms race going on, the ideological differences, the poverty, and of course the ominous symbols (a hammer and a sickle…really…that’s what they chose).

Creating the fear was just as effortless. People all over the world and in the US were still reeling from the destruction and aftermath of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. When it came out that the Russians had nukes just as powerful, people were so petrified that they moved to the suburbs and started buying as many appliances as possible to get their mind off the impending doom of the apocalypse. The McCarthyists knew they could use the public’s irrational fear to ensure that they had the license to wage whatever proxy wars (foreign or domestic) they wanted under the pretense that they were fighting communism. In the meantime, it was a perfect opportunity to beef up military spending to create a permanent armaments industry and as Eisenhower put it, invest in “an immense military establishment.” And if anyone said anything that they didn’t like, they could easily shut them up by playing the Commie card. The duel effect of these policies of terror did much to scar the American people. They were not only afraid of a nuke falling on their head, they were also afraid of being labeled a Communist and shunned by their neighbors. Fortunately, with the help of courageous journalists (wow, I wish we had some of those!) like Edward R. Murrow (go watch Good Night, and Good Luck right now if you haven’t seen it yet) the dangers of this type of fear mongering were temporarily defeated and McCarthy and his henchmen were dishonored (even though the arms race and proxy wars continued well into the eighties).

Does any of this sound at all familiar to you?

Bush didn’t drop any nukes, but he didn’t have to. Bush also didn’t need to look far for a scapegoat. Bin Laden killed both stones with one bird (four really) when he decided to get 19 of his friends together and fly some planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. And just like in the fifties, people were scared. When people are scared, they get paranoid. The lens with which they view the world becomes a deeper shade of red, and instead of smiling at the light-brown-skinned, unfamiliar bearded dude that passes them in a quiet hallway, they look down, fist clenched around their keys, breath held, wondering if the strange man looks “American” enough. It goes without saying that when a country finds itself in a situation where a large majority of people are behaving as if they were on an acid trip in Las Vegas with Hunter S. Thompson, it is headed down a very dark road.

Today’s media-machine doesn’t help either. I mean, just after 9/11 they had reporters on camera dressed in those bright yellow biohazard suits complete with gas mask and the scary international symbol. They KNOW that the minute most of us see those suits we are naturally going to think about that freaky scene in E.T. when Elliot and posse escape from the evil yellow-suit-wearing-government agents via flying bicycle. I don’t know about all of you, but this scene gave me vivid nightmares for years. Now CNN has their reporters dressing like them? What the fuck. If I EVER see ANYONE walking down Arsenal wearing one of those suits, I am moving to Canada the next day. You can hold me to that. Fox News, CNN, MSNBC—they bathed themselves in that fear like pigs in feces. Ratings soared and people couldn’t change the channel. The tune-in-or-else-you-and-your-family-will-die-in-a- horrible-death-at-the-hands-of-the-terrorist-policy adopted by the 24 hour news stations kept us on the edges of our seats, shaking our heads, and wondering if we should go to confession before the Red Horse of War darkens the sky the neighborhood Walmart.

So, of course we were willing to sacrifice some civil liberties. Tap my phone, read my emails, install cameras in the street lights, hell, you could put one on my front door if you think it’s going to help. Send to FBI to tail law-abiding citizens if you think they hate America, set up secret CIA prisons around the world, torture anyone with that terrorist look in their eye. And while you’re at it, hold them without charge and deny them legal council—you know what, just get rid of habeas corpus all together, it’s outdated anyway. A suspected terrorist is as bad as an actual terrorist, and we’re better safe than sorry. Do what you have to do Big Brother, because we’re at war, and I have a yellow ribbon sticker on my car, and a flag flying outside my house, and I love America enough to make a sacrifice or ten so that you can save us from the terrorists. I’ll sacrifice my fucking country for America if you ask me to.

When this sort of suspicion is ambient, people feel it necessary to overcompensate. It’s like the big car/small penis theory. If you’re constantly looking at everyone and wondering whether or not they love America enough, you naturally feel like everyone is wondering the same thing about you. So you break out the American flag and fly it proudly everyday instead of just on holidays. You buy a little flag for your car window, and a red, white, and blue ribbon magnet to put opposite your yellow one. You order a “these colors don’t run” t-shirt off ebay, a bumper sticker with an eagle on it, and maybe even a patriotic bandanna. This behavior is the nonverbal equivalent to standing in the middle of the street and yelling at the top of your lungs, “I AM NOT A TERRORIST.” And you feel it necessary because you have turned your suspicion inward upon yourself. You are afraid that you are a terrorist. Whoa.

An ideological scapegoat.

A citizenry that is blindly patriotic and senselessly terrified.

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Intriguing shit I came across researching for this post:

• Awesome history of the fucked up HUAC hearings

• 2003 article about the current trend of censoring Hollywood dissenters

• What happens when people protest in America (click on picture gallery)

• Letters section of September 23, 2002 issue of The Nation that features this letter by some guy named John Zavales:

“I was in the Pentagon on September 11. Our office was on the opposite side of the building, and as we filed out none of us guessed how horrible it was until we saw, from the parking lot, the columns of smoke. That first evening, amid the shock and sense of loss, I thought, "This is what blowback really means." No one can excuse Al Qaeda's murderous hatred, but I now realize that this terror network was made possible by the arms and money we provided the Afghan mujahedeen during our demented anti-Soviet crusade. Those Americans who supported these thugs and psychopaths should be ashamed. Whenever I see that antidrug ad that claims that buying pot helps terrorists, I am reminded that our own cold war "patriots" helped to slaughter 3,000 people, and tried to kill me at my desk.”