Are American
Chickens Coming
Home to Roost?

by Joel Fluker

Henry Kissenger once remarked that Donald Rumsfeld was the most ruthless individual he'd ever met. This from a man who knew Mao, Marcos, Qaddafi, all of the bad guys. And he thought our present secretary of defense was the hands-down worst of all.

How did we, land of the free and home of the brave, get to a place where such a person occupies such a position of power? That queasy-making question leads directly to the older question:

Do nations get the government they deserve?

Or is even that question just another futile, weak-minded human grasp after meaning in the universe?

It is so tempting to look at despised regimes and and their cowering citizenry and say, "Ha! Y'all are just getting your just deserts!" How we glowered at the Germans and, after the fact, delighted in pointing out the many ways they had planted the seeds of their own destruction (Wagner, Nietzsche, Bismarck, von Clausewitz, etc.). How we glared at the Russians for allowing the planting and unchecked growth of the Great Marxist Experiment. And today many of us go around treasuring malicious thoughts about how the notoriously private, family-oriented Chinese are really getting their governmental comeuppance.

Meanwhile, back at home: As Bush II revs up and really gets its creaky old Cold War gears turning, the gnashing of American teeth becomes louder and louder. How can this bunch of dinosaurs do this to us? These reprobates not only didn't win the election, they stole it, and now they're running the government as if it belonged to THEM! Stomping around at home and abroad, crushing all kinds of just causes and just people as if the world were their little playpen!

Arsenic in the drinking water? No prob. A tax cut to give 50% of the benefits to the richest 1%? No prob. Oil wells in a pristine, fragile far north environment? No prob. A little saber-rattling here, a little more saber-rattling there? No prob.

Kings of the hill, cocks of the walk, and the poor, the weak, the impoverished take the hindmost.

Oh, the howls of rising protest that come now from the American intelligentsia (oops, sorry for the oxymoron). Howls? I don't think so. More like: tiny yelps, and even those weak complaints are confined to the fringe media. Because the mainstream guys and gals are just too beholden to their conglomerate masters to risk real protest.

Think about it: AM radio is gone: hysterical screeches of expedient right-wingers plus news-talk-sports plus corporate Christianity. FM radio, except for small, low-power pockets at the far left end of the dial, is devoted to the various kinds of fast-food music doled out to the masses by the selfsame media conglomerates which in turn control the broadcast and cable TV frequencies.

So the content of information in the country and culture that gave the world the Information Age turns out to be pap. P-A-P, pap. Gruel. Garbage.

Serious political discussion and analysis is nowhere to be seen in America. Oh sure, you can seek out it if you really look hard on the Internet. Distant, faint voices in the wasteland. But significant mainstream consideration of important issues is long gone.

And now we're complaining because we finally got an unashamed government of retrograde numskulls all too eager to strut their macho stuff on the world stage?

Is this not precisely the government we deserve? "Elected" by less than half of the half of the citizens who found time to vote.

The danger signs of voter apathy and indifference have been with us for a long time. But adults have a certain callused reaction to the cries of other adults, no matter how severe the exploitation and suffering of various minorities.

The one true canary in the American coal mine is the children.

FOR YEARS THE CHILDREN HAVE BEEN SHOOTING EACH OTHER IN THE SCHOOLS, and what has been our response? Metal detectors.

FOR YEARS THE CHILDREN HAVE BEEN TURNING TO DRUGS, and what has been our response? In our alcohol stupor, we sagely advise them to just say no.

The children have not used words to express their pain. They have used deeds, often terrible deeds. Have we listened? No. Are we listening now? No.

Do we deserve the brute, violent insensitivity of the government we've wound up with? Yes. Do we have any idea, still, of the level of public and private terror that that government is about to unleash on us and the world? No.

Is it too late to do anything about it? Probably.

Who, after all, in a nation of indifferent affluent sheep, is to stop them?

END

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