The Army of Good Americans — by Manuel Valenzuela
by Manuel Valenzuela
Valenzuela's Veritas
January 4, 2006
Marching Forward
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.
[...]
Click here for the full article at Manuel Valenzuela's blog. The above excerpt is roughly one-third of the whole essay.
Valenzuela's Veritas
January 4, 2006
Marching Forward
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.
[...]
Click here for the full article at Manuel Valenzuela's blog. The above excerpt is roughly one-third of the whole essay.
posted by Sean M. Madden at
8:46 PM
)
1 Comments:
A wonderful piece of prose, but far above the head of the majority of those he is describing.
While there are plenty of 'educated idiots' among GWB supporters, the large base is formed of the type that the US Military had to down grade the reading levels for, in their publications and manuals.
Many of those capable of reading and understanding this wonderful flow of words, who are for GWB and the present Republican Corporate Identity (RCI), are the greedy and self-centered, who have no concern for anything outside their ken.
But, this all comes much too late. The RCI started building toward this point decades ago. The demeaning of the education system, to the point that America is I belive 34th on the list of overall education standards has not happened accidentally.
The remedy really has to begin in the classroom too. As long as RCI controls the media, and the very young are subject to baby-sitting through television, realistic, compassionate development will never happen.
The vicious cycle is so well established in the working class and lower middle class, that it will be very difficult to break. The best way is to obtain control of the media, and that will require billions of dollars, as those corporations are the bastion of the RCI hegemony.
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