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 In light of recent events I’ve been trying to figure out what happened to the people that used to populate this nation, forty-four years ago when I first began to publicly Question the Johnson administration.
In my younger years I covered a great deal of this country, hitch-hiking mostly, but I frequently stopped for awhile here and there to live for a time among very different kinds of people. America then was a country composed of many different mini-communities, multiple forms of English and a wide variety of
traditions – all of which combined to expand my view of what this country was really all about.
In the 1950’s the Corporatocracy was in its infancy, and “The Gray Flannel Suit” was what the laptop is today, but more. The almighty corporations were dictating every facet of life then to those who lusted for a corporate career that was in reality only a thin veneer for individual greed and freedom from actual responsibilities. The code name for this behavior was shrouded in the myth of the “Team-Player.”
The way the Corporations ‘tested’ prospective leaders was by shipping them off to the ends of the earth – as a way of insuring that the subject employee would be willing to cut all ties to keep the precious job, regardless of what these moves might mean to family life, to traditions, to personal preferences. The only thing that really mattered to the company was total loyalty – to the boss and to the company. This was fantastic for the corporations but it was a near death experience for close-knit families and to the freedom of the kinds of life that so many people sought.
This produced a rebellion among the young that played itself out as their imitation of the Beat Generation from the 1940’s. They called themselves Hippies and they threw off what many saw as the hypocrisy of their family lives (corporate life in miniature). They ran away to the cities to discover some of what that stifling structure of so much Patriarchal authority had tried so hard to destroy. In sum they sought to “Walk on the Wild Side” or the Edge as many termed it then.
It was this rejection of everything corporate and essentially Victorian that the kids rebelled against – because they saw through the shallowness and they didn’t give a damn about the toys (for the most part). They wanted something they could touch and feel, and something that touched them back – they thought it might be love, but whether lust or love, drugs or demons, what they wanted was something that they thought of as REAL. This social revolution was co-opted in the end, and many became leaders that soon came to stand for what they themselves had rebelled against in youth. The Vietnam War was part of this as well – along with massive demonstrations against the war, and basically against the status quo.
Their parents and the corporations watched all this in disbelief and not-so-quiet anger. For their part the corporations began to dream forbidden dreams of Empire and total control, while the die-hard parents dreamt of retribution and reconstructing the framework of absolute authority that their children had tried so hard to shatter. It was here that The Burbs really began to have an impact upon the way “America” lives.
The seventies were a mess – with no clear outcomes – just a lot of half-way stuff that mostly led nowhere. The only major event was the birth of Cheney and Rumsfeld as a major part of the presidency of Gerald Ford. After which came Ronnie and the 1980’s with his New Direction for the nation, and for the wayward children (that public) that “needed” a father figure who would make everything right again. Of course the ‘Great Communicator’ was backed by corporate interests and tons and tons of questionable
cash – but this was the birth of Empire: for real this time, no more touchy-feely allowed. Kill the arts, reinvigorate Nixon’s War on Drugs, and introduce the world to ‘Greed is
Good!’ (1) And all the while Reagan ran the Arms for Hostages scam, the Iran-Contra Wars and the Death Squads in central America that have given us MS-13 and the gangs that grew out those political repressions practiced by the Reagan-Bush administration.
Ronnie ran on diminishing the size of the federal government while in fact he tripled the size of government. He supposedly stood for solid economics, yet he took us from the world’s leading creditor nation to the world’s leading debtor nation in the eight years that he spent destroying everything decent, that he could lay his hands on, in America: And to this day he is thought of as a timeless-hero of the Republican Party.
Along the way from Johnson to Reagan the idea that the government ought to become non-partisan, in order to function, began to take root. This government was based on partisanship – opposition positions that once fully discussed would end up not in capitulation but with the best ideas possible as the end result: Being non-partisan simply means surrendering one’s ideals to some mythic commonality. This was the poison-gift that Newt Gingrich cursed America with when he gave us his ‘Contract On America’ that annihilated any hope for actual representation by the congress, of those they supposedly serve.
What Newt left us in place of representative government was government by fiat (bi-partisanship at its worst), which has only grown since that piece-of- work was tossed from office. By the end of Ronnie’s tenure, the idea of one voice within the government had become the norm: fulfilling as it did the wet-dream of the Corporatocracy which was a government based on corporate structure and no longer on the Constitution.
Political parties died then and were replaced with a Carpetbagger mentality of get all you can from every
deal – forget morality, obligations and consequences—just trust in Big Daddy, do whatever he says and all will work out in the end. That sick dictum then began to be studied in colleges and universities across the land – and soon there were no longer many serious objections, to the nation’s new course toward brutal and total empire.
People of the Corporation began to leave the cities in droves for the privacy of gated communities, for the comfort of their own schools where the problems of segregation were eliminated by the segregation of class according to the corporations that largely made home-ownership possible.
Along the way of course personal life suffered immeasurably, as all differences between Team-Players became homogenized into the corporate ideal form; a format that did not put up with exceptions, except as that might benefit the bottom line.
Somewhere during the Clinton years all the gloss began to tarnish on the veneer of corporate life – largely because they had been plundering and raping the world with such abandon for so long, that some cracks in their inevitability were finally beginning to appear.
Privately all this was buttresses by things like the Walkman, soon to be followed by the laptop, the cell phone and the i-pod – each and every new device devoted to segregating people from each other while catering to every “special need’ of that most sacred of all beings – “The Consumer.” This marked the end of citizenship and the beginning of whatever the hell this is today.
This all reached its peak in Afghanistan over another corporate pipeline deal that needed government help, if it was to be signed. This was some months before 911: “The "moment in history" was a secret memorandum of understanding the mullahs had signed with the Clinton administration on the pipeline deal. However, by the late 1990s, the Northern Alliance had encroached further and further on territory controlled by the Taliban, whom, as a result, were deemed in Washington to lack the "stability" required of such an important client. It was the consistency of this client relationship that had been a prerequisite of US support.” (2)
But that September day opened the door for corporate completion of the deal – the costs escalated out-of-control and that let everyone in the Corporatocracy & government into one of their most aggressive and carefree escapades since the Vietnam War.
Consequently it is hardly surprising that the so-called people of this place are not interested in blood or wars when those events are not on their own streets. They’ve created neat little bubbles for their every consideration – be that diet, career, sex, relationships or business opportunities – and each separate ‘moment’ does not intersect with any other, because then things might just begin to get really messy.
For instance in business we all know that anything can be done to a competitor – the hell with morality, with consequences to others, anything goes! Privately some limitations still exist, but these are governed largely by whether or not you get caught. To have a personal code of conduct that involves real values is to limit yourself in a world of rabid capitalists and ruthless entrepreneurs. And as for politics – oh that’s just another opportunity, or not, depending on the payoff. Otherwise “why waste your time on that stuff, because it’s all bullshit anyhow!”
Where does this little journey down memory lane actually take us –
well that depends on what interests you. If you’re wondering how we got into this mess at the moment – you only need look at how Americans were tied to the mess in their world just before the crash of 1929. Everyone was in the markets then, literally Every One! Today, the set-up has been completed once again and 40lk’s are not even thought of as being a part of the markets.
The biggest deterrent to paying attention today is that so many are making money (or they were) on the markets – someone has to profit from all those war industries, and those oil company profits have to be realized by some lucky investor out there – someone who can’t really bitch about the price of gasoline – given his or her dividend checks for their “investment,” That’s right folks, all you investors in those massive multi-national corporations – you without the conscience, you who doesn’t really care to know just how those profits are being made, but you certainly don’t blink when it’s time to cash the checks – right!
Americans don’t care because they know that they’re making money on the blood and ashes that our occupation forces are creating. That’s just one more reason why so many have come to hate us: the world knows what we do, it sees that these corporations need the little people to exist – did you really think that this was somehow still-secret from the wider world?
The Corporatocracy planned it well – but what you might not know is that they also plan to stick you with the crash that’s coming. You might want to begin to look around or you’ll be just like all those losers, who lost it all in the Dot-Com bust a decade or so ago.
That’s the funny thing about corruption – it always starts out GREAT, but sooner or later the whole thing turns into the sewer that it always was, and this is what the Carpetbaggers with their laptops are desperately trying to steal before everything else goes belly-up!
And just how much of this do you suppose will matter to any of the idiots running for office in November—the correct answer is zero, so why waste your time!
Jim Kirwan
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