Land of the Free, aka, Home of the American Dream - of roast beef and apple pie, and lunacy....
Mr Mad
An NRA Fact: "It's mad people who kill, not guns!" This sort of thinking poses a marvelous conundrum for the Empire. How will it ever be possible for an insane society to cure itself?
Clearly, ObamaCare wont fix it, especially since Donald Trump won the presidential race and plans to end ObamaCare! Trump says he is planning to make America great again. We think that he plans to do this after he has built a wall between the US and Mexico - we may only wonder how US citizens will mangage, paying their illegal slave labour a living wage? Most perplexing is how he plans to make America great when it was never great to begin with.
The American Mindset
History is interesting and if you want to understand the American mindset you need to do a bit of wandering down the years, to discover all those moments from the past that inform contemporary thinking in the land of the free.
The spectre of Communism has been replaced by that of Islamism and the potential for un-American activity still haunts every waking hour for the dark operatives as they listen to a million conversations daily in their quest for banned words.
De facto segregation is still a daily reality but foremost is the appeal to a God, who justifies every righteous act. Paul's Epistle to the Romans asks, "If God is for us, who can be against us?" And Bob Dylan responded 19 centuries later, "... you don't count the dead When God's on your side". America convinced itself that it had a God on its side and so, they don't have a clue how many Iraqi civilians they left face down in the sand.
Exceptionalism
In America, God is big business. But the God notion really comes to the fore in support of the evangelical right's unending fight against social disintegration; principally against any threat to family values. Second only to the gun lobby you find the family lobby and heading the fight, organisations like Focus on the Family, the Family Research Council and the Family Research Institute. These people will have no truck with homosexuals, abortionists, evolutionists and masturbators. Their main focus, reaching young minds through the school curriculum.
And it's at school that all good Americans learn about the fight for Independence, the Boston Tea Party, the Alamo and Davy Crockett and Custer's Last Stand. Although, they perhaps do not learn of the 7th Cavalry's darkest hour, when it aided the massacre of refugees attempting to cross Naktong River in 1950 at No Gun Ri, during the Korean War. Indeed the whole incident was covered up until Associated Press broke the story in 1999. And it's certain that War Plan Red is not on the school curriculum, detailing US plans to launch an attack on Canada, as a first strike against the British Empire in the late 1930s. And it's without doubt that they do not celebrate the abandonment of untold numbers of Americans to the Soviet Gulag system.
In 2011, following nationwide tests in history, the New York Times reported that students were, "less proficient in their nation's history than any other subject". Generally, knowledge was found to be partial, with answers grounded in the notion of exceptionalism. Well, if you are exceptional then everything you do must be right and the past really doesn't matter.
Enter Mitt
One time Republican presidential hopeful, Mitt Romney, provides us with a helpful and unintended glance inside the mind of these crazy people. He told a room full of GOP fund raisers that he couldn't care less about 47% of the US population, they were poor, dependent victims and would vote for Obama whatever. Mitt told his audience that he had no interest in anyone who wouldn't take personal responsibility for their own circumstances.
In the Tea Party mind, poverty, and all its attendant ills, are the product of indolence, not the failure of economic organisation and executive governance. For the US elite, poverty is an individual not a social problem and knowing this you know more than enough to live a happy and blissfully ignorant life. Unless of course you are poor in America, in which case, you will need to sort yourself out because the Tea Party spurn the Welfare State.
Democrats: Poor people vote for the democrats, in the hope that something will change, it never does. Barack Obama is now enjoying his second term in office, achievements, zero. The further along his so-called ObamaCare health reform goes, the worse things become. Although it is difficult to imagine how you can make a situation in which 50 million Americans have no health insurance worse - Obama has managed it. He says that he 'fumbled' the roll out of the so-called Affordable Care Act. Now, he has a fumbling mess on his hands, with more people without adequate health cover than before he started.
You may recall that Mr President was going to close Guantanamo Bay down - he hasn't managed that either. He was also going to sort out the over the counter derivative cowboys, who played a major part in the 2008 banking crash - he hasn't done so. His main and only achievement has been killing thousands of innocent villagers in Pakistan and Yemen, using drones, piloted from Virginia, to hunt down Al Qaeda fighters.
Power: Barack Obama may be the president but he does not run America. The Republicans are in charge, the Federal Reserve is in charge and the corporations and banks are in charge. Mainly, power in America resides with special interest groups like the National Rifle Association. The NRA is not the only gun lobby group in America, it's just the biggest, with millions of dollars to spend buying politicians and promoting its core message: individuals have the right to bear arms. The NSA claim this a constitutional right, they cite the Second Amendment, overlooking that this amendment is aimed at the State, 'which has the right to form a militia and arm its citizens', it was never intended as an individual right. However, the gun lobby somehow managed to persuade the Supreme Court to pronounce in 2008, it did refer to an individual's right to bear arms.
To underline the impotence of Mr President, recall how, following the carnage at Sandy Hook elementary school, in December 2012, Obama wept and pledged to stop the sale of automatic assault weapons to the public - he didn't and couldn't, the gun lobby is just too powerful.
Demonstrating global power: After the US used nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki the Second World War was definitely over and the 'cold war' was started. For some odd reason President Truman felt impelled to justify the action as follows:
"The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base, that was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible the killing of civilians."
Perhaps someone should have told Truman that 100,000 civilians died at Hiroshima. The second bomb on Nagasaki killed 40,000 outright but Truman said nothing of this since Nagasaki was not the original target on the day. It was chosen due to poor visibility at the primary target of Kokura. Also, this second bomb was different to the one used on Hiroshima, which may cause one to wonder if the Americans were not engaging, on the one hand, in a continuation of their nuclear development programme with some 'live' testing and on the other hand, in demonstrating their technical superiority to the Soviets.
Sticky Fire aka Napalm: The US used other opportunities to explore new killing technology during the WWII, in fact, the use of sticky fire was made after the war in Europe was over. The French town of Royan was treated to this demonstration, German troops were hiding out near the town, US bombers dropped 400,000 gallons of napalm on the town, 1,000 of the town's civilian population were killed. This was a war crime if ever such a thing is possible.There were also civil crimes....
The Tuskegee Syphilis Experiment
The Public Health Service, working with the Tuskegee Institute, began the study in 1932 and ended in 1972.. Nearly 400 poor black men with syphilis from Macon County, Ala., were enrolled in the study. For participating in the study, the men were given free medical exams, free meals and free burial insurance. They were never told they had syphilis, nor were they ever treated for it. According to the Centers for Disease Control, the men were told they were being treated for "bad blood," a local term used to describe several illnesses, including syphilis, anemia and fatigue.
By 1947 penicillin had become the standard treatment for syphilis but the 'researchers' never used it? What on earth was going on in Tuskegee?
This socalled experiment was all about finding out about the long-term untreated affects of syphilis. The question is why did it continue when there was nolonger any need to continue with the experiment.
Revelations about the Tuskegee experiment led to a whole raft of legislation to protect human subjects.
In October 2010 it was revealed that during the 1940s in Guatemala, the project went a step further: American doctors deliberately infected prisoners, soldiers, and patients in a mental hospital with syphilis and, in some cases, gonorrhoea. It transpires that a key player in this crime was none other than John Charles Cutler, a government researcher involved in Tuskegee.
President Obama let it be known that he was regretful.
The Red Menace: Americans would definitely like to forget Vietnam and the My Lai massacre. They would also like to forget the Korean War and Ho Gun Ri massacre. Once they could rely on Hollywood to retell history and keep the national soul in one piece, they did this in the case Colonel Custer's 'Last Stand'. The film industry managed to turn a rout into a celebration of heroism but the fantasy factory could do nothing for the Empire's failed attempt to hold back the red menace of communism.
Once upon a time every rooftop along the US eastern seaboard had a citizen with a pair of binoculars on top, on the look out for Soviet missiles. Quite what this was expected to achieve, apart from a heightened sense of citizen fear and panic, is unknown. For certain, if a missile had come up on the citizen radar only the warm glow of thermonuclear melting would have been felt. There would certainly have been no time to tell the children to 'duck and cover' under their school desks, to protect against the blast.
As panics go, historically, the insanity that gripped the whole of America, particularly in the 1950s and '60s has no parallel. The Duck and Cover civil defence films from the period are testament to the madness of official thinking that introduced paranoia to the school curriculum. Everywhere citizens were searching for commies.
Leading the search was FBI director J Edgar Hoover, who for a long period became so rapt up with his pursuit of communists that he began to deny and ignore the criminality of the Mafia. There is a suggestion that his denial over organised crime was due to the fact that he was being blackmailed over to his own cross dressing gay activity.
Un-American Activities: Spearheading the fight against the red menace, well before J Edgar got in on the hysteria, was the House Committee on Un-American Activities. This committee was something akin to the Spanish Inquisition. It was set up in 1938 to investigate alleged disloyalty and subversive activities among citizens, especially among those labelled communist. The House committee survived until 1975, when its functions were moved to the House Judiciary Committee. A change of name for a more dishonest time.
Although not a member of the House committee, Senator Jo' McCarthy was also a central player in the anti-communist purges. This man was madder than a box of spanners, mad enough to have an ism named after him, i.e. McCarthyism, institutionalised scare mongering targeting government employees, actors and writers, educators and union activists - anyone with lefty tendencies. McCarthy himself spent all his waking hours alerting America to the subversive communist threat, his activities ruined thousands of lives through false allegations that destroyed characters and robbed people of their livelihoods. The Hollywood Blacklist put 300 actors, directors and producers out of work, loyalty-security reviews saw 3,000 seamen and longshoremen lose their jobs.
However, the McCarthy purges went beyond the hunt for communists, it literally included anyone deemed subversive, particularly, homosexuals, and anyone in education or the media who spoke out against American foreign policy. The red devils were everywhere, this was democracy under siege.
Lost in the Gulag: During an earlier time in America, that historians call the 'first red scare', around 1920, developments in the newly formed Soviet Union were gaining much attention among American workers looking for a better world. Conditions in America for the workers, particularly in the motor industry were not good. Many workers, perhaps up to a million, left the US to start a new life in Russia. At first they were welcomed with open arms and treated very well but once their propaganda value was used up their lives in Russia took a less rosy turn. Their passports had been taken away, so return to the States was not an option, many were disappeared into the Gulag system, no one knows how many ended their lives as slave labour in Russian mines. When their plight was brought to the attention of the American government, their pleas for help were ignored. Any action would be deemed interference in Russian affairs and at the time America was keen to boost trade with the Soviets that they so despised and so they were prepared to abandon their own countrymen.
Jim Crow Must Go: It's interesting to note that those gun toting, God loving, constitution worshipers were silent when it came to the rights of black Americans, like rights to freedom of speech, freedom of assembly and equal protection under the law. Indeed the Southern Confederate states introduced laws in 1890s to restrict black rights in every sphere of social life. The so-called Jim Crow Laws were ended in 1965 but as in the North, de facto segregation continued.
Most of white America looked the other way while civil rights' activists were being brutalized by the segregationists. Those preferring not to look included those nice Kennedy boys, JFK and his brother at the Department of Justice, Bobby. As for J Edgar, well, he was more concerned with the communist connections that the Freedom Riders may have had - why else would they be going down south disturbing people with all that talk of equal rights.
The segregation and race hate tendency has a long history but it's still alive and just as putrid as when a member of the White Citizens' Council or Ku Klux Klan without the sheets killed civil rights' activist Medgar Evers. The death of Evers was one of a multitude of killings designed to keep the blacks out of the white eating houses. In popular culture we are sold the idea that these crimes are the exclusive province of sub-normal rednecks, hardly able to tie their own shoe laces.
However, consider the case of Dr Drew, a black doctor, an expert in blood transfusions and a key innovator during WWII, he was invited by Britain to organise the Blood for Britain campaign in 1941. Drew went on to head up the American Red Cross blood bank in New York and when the US entered the war, he was the key organiser for the blood supply to the US troops. Drew was told by the army to segregate blood by race. He pointed out that black blood was identical to white blood and refused to carry out the order, he was sacked. Clearly, the army's high command were keen to safeguard the morale and preserve the prejudice of all those white boys laying their lives on the line.
Rapture Day: You may recall that the world should have ended on May 21st 2011 but due to a mathematical error the end did not transpire. Ah, but Harold Camping, high priest of doom, recomputed and told his followers that October 22nd was definitely the day.
It transpired that May 21st was just a selection process, to decide who would be 'elected' to the clouds. Mr Camping said that "doomsday would not be marked by natural disasters or blasts of hellfire" - well, not a few people were disappointed. If there's no hellfire, how are they supposed to know it's the end of the world? Harold's followers were becoming a trifle weary; selling all your worldly goods, as instructed in advance of the big day, leaves you looking a bit silly in the neighbourhood when nothing happens.
The Rapture Day fiasco typifies the American search for answers to life's bewilderment and missing inner peace that charlatan gurus may provide, ever on the look out for gullible suckers like Madonna, John Travolta and Tom Cruise.
Programming: beyond the weird appeal of zany religious cults, Americans are much taken with the idea of self-improvement and a willingness to subject themselves to various forms of programming to gain happiness, creativity, and fulfillment.
Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) and the Human Potential Movement (HPM) sum up the constant striving for personal betterment, the striving to cultivate that extraordinary person inside, just waiting to have all that hidden potential liberated.
And what a clever sales pitch, selling the notion that you are actually an exceptional person but you will need a course of treatments to bring out your exceptionalism.
The appeal of such nonsense is easily explained since you can't remain inadequate (and sane) in an exceptional society.
"Your security is crap"
That was the message that Scots computer hacker, Gary McKinnon, left for the US military after he deleted and downloaded files from up to 97 of their computers, using a dial up connection. Gary was looking for evidence of UFOs and free energy, he was convinced that the Empire was keeping this evidence from the public gaze.
The Americans claimed that McKinnon's bedroom antics had cost them $700,000 to correct the damage done by him.
The Americans were not happy and wanted to have McKinnon extradited to face US justice. They wanted to put him in prison for 75 years. They refused to accept that McKinnon had done them a favour by revealing how useless their computer security was. They also refused to believe that a lone individual, with a diagnosis of Asperger's, using a PC and dial up modem could make them look like monkeys.
McKinnon's hacking took place between 2001 and 2002 and after 10 years of legal wrangling, they didn't get McKinnon. To the British public he was a hero, to the US Empire he was guilty of causing nagging concern and doubt to the core of its belief system. They were found wanting and foolish in the eyes of the world, indeed, quite unexceptional.
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