Broken Democracy

In the Whitehouse, the students of Machiavellian and Orwell’s Big Brother are hard at work. They are busy remaking terms like “healthy forests” and “clear skies” to describe legislation weakening environmental standards. They are desperately trying to paint the most blatant attack on another nation in our history as a glorious triumph while Iraq sinks deeper into civil war and anarchy. They blame their opponents for their own failures. As liars go, they have no equal in American political history. These sociopaths lie for advantage, lie to obfuscate what is clear, lie at all times, as a matter of course. They present legislation to cripple Social Security, reduce taxes on the wealthiest robber barons America has ever seen, give gigantic helpings of pork to the most the anti-democratic anti-labor corporations and allow these same plutocrats to actually write the legislative regulations for their own industries. To say that democracy is dying is an understatement. Rather, it has been dead for some time. We just haven’t looked up from our favorite “reality” shows to notice.

So, shame on America for abandoning its children so our richest can get richer. Shame on America for abandoning its wild places and the environment. Shame on America for killing the weak, the poor and the innocent because they stand in the way of our lust for oil and other resources. Shame on America for talking about democracy as we bring poverty, pestilence, and pollution to those who can’t defend themselves. Shame on America for pretending that we still get to choose who our leaders are.

We are not the land of the free or home of the brave. We treat our weakest citizens and the citizens of our client states with utter contempt. We are the bully of the world and each and every one of us must share collective guilt. As Ward Churchill said of the technocrats in the World Trade Center, we are all Mini-Eichmanns. When we keep the corporate machinery rolling by buying the products of the transnationals we complicity accept the child abuse, poverty and cultural and environmental devastation in the corporate colonies of China, Indonesia, Haiti and elsewhere. When we vote, based on our biases and prejudices, we follow the path of the “good Germans” of seventy years ago. We have chosen, by our complacence, homelessness for our mentally ill, a corrupt health care system, the highest child mortality rate in the industrial world and the transfer of our nation’s wealth into the hands of the most despicable of men. We have chosen poverty for a sixth of the world’s population, and the crushing, by our military, our spies and our mercenaries, of any nation that stands in the way of corporate rapaciousness We have become as corrupt as any of the privileged moguls who ride upon our backs.

Shame, shame, shame, all you pious hypochristians, you putrid-patriots, you “good” Americans. You, who think Pat Robertson represents the teachings of Jesus Christ, shame on you. You who think that supporting the president somehow gives you a pass when it comes to accepting responsibility for you own deeds, shame on you. You, who sit on your asses letting right-wing pundits tell you what to think, while your ability to smell excrement atrophies, shame on you. Shame on you, you “America First” bigots, you “Proud to be American” Nazis, you “Strongest in the World” moral cowards, you “Support the Troops” flag-wavers, you are the ones who put the troops in harms way by failing pay attention or to speak out. Shame, most of all, to those of us who could have made a difference, but instead chose to look the other way or to sell out.

And shame on all of us, if we do not rise up, disavow our Mini-Eichmann job descriptions, and do what ever it takes to buck the elite off our backs. It is only when we do this that we can call ourselves a democracy, or for that matter Christians.

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Johnny Peaceseed