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You must trust those of us, whom God has blessed with great wealth, wisdom and political power, to do what is best for America. We are God's true believers, who have only this nation's interests at heart, which is why we love and believe our noble, born again president. You must obey him also, because the Cosmic Creator personally selected George W. Bush, giving him the awesome political, financial and spiritual power needed to save our land from ruthless liberal enemies who cannot be trusted. Even wounded veterans such as John Kerry, Max Cleland and John Murtha, who dare to challenge God's anointed leader, lost the respect that shedding their blood in the service of the United States gave them.God called we the power elite to lead the United States back to righteousness through religious traditions and secular values from a glorious age when women were dominated as housewives and broodmares: While minorities sang Old Man River in four part harmony, as they cheerfully dug ditches, chopped cotton and hewed wood for those stronger and more ambitious than they seized the land. Trust us as we replace the messy processes of political and religious democracy with more efficient methods from business and industry, where one right thinking executive has the power to make decisions. Every ambitious person understands that a chaotic Republic must be replaced by a carefully organized empire if America is going to profit ultimately from globalized capitalism. Trust us, even though the creation of a democratic Iraq, while the American Republic is replaced by an empire only appears to be mutually exclusive.Trust them? We are relentlessly propagandized to stoically accept thousands of American kids bleeding to death in a land wracked by ancient tribal hatreds, hobbling home on artificial legs or babbling incoherently with ghastly head wounds. The first rule of warfare is that soldiers suffer and die in combat. The second rule is that their parents and relatives can do nothing to change the first rule -- not when selfish power players of our society delude themselves into believing they are God's chosen rulers of the peasants. This delusion of righteousness brings the narcissistic triad of manipulators face to face with a current dilemma. Even though the oil barons and media moguls, virtually all of them card carrying members of the self-serving aristocracy who are supporting the slaughter, most American men and women have finally seen through their scams.
More than two thirds of Americans now realize that George Bush has stupidly blundered into a bloody quagmire of unintended consequences. Three fourths of us understand that the Congress has abandoned any pretense of making responsible decisions. Even as proto-fascist propagandists trumpet every minor success as proof that the Iraqis are winning the conflict, those of us who lived through the Nixon Vietnamization scheme of the Indio-china war, remember how futile a shift to conscript soldiers who hate their corrupt aristocracy, becomes in the face of world class warriors. Although the inconvenient body count from Iraq is now buried on the inside pages of newspapers and disastrous reports are routinely spiked and reported casually by television news programs, resistance to and revulsion with Bush's war is widespread across the country. Obviously, the proto-fascist plan has shrunk to a getting decent interval between our withdrawal and the complete collapse of the Iraq society so the spin doctors can recast our withdrawal as a great and glorious victory. A great many people see that our kids have become bloody sacrifices to a world wide financial scheme that the neo-cons fantasized during a hash pipe dream when the Cold War faded and the Soviet Empire was no longer an opponent to their reactionary dreams of world conquest.I have said all of that to make this point. The only antidote to the abuse of power, whether in interpersonal relationships, in financial institutions, in political organizations or even in religious denominations -- is the application of counter-power. Powerless man and women are by far the most likely to be used and abused by the powerful. The often culturally neurotic or psychopathic manipulators of the world neither hear powerless protests nor respond to complaints, until they are hit between the eyes with a fence post. Or what do you think the American Revolution against the British aristocracy, the French Revolution, the Russian Revolution and the Chinese Revolution against their elites was all about?
Of course, because no privileged class willingly surrenders power or wealth, because our proto-fascists are too narcissistic to surrender their illicit advantages, they continue operating under the pretense of protecting us from whomever they can sell to us as evil enemies at a given time. Manipulators understand that fear always sells better and more immediately to anxious persons than hope does. Actually, the public's fear of terrorism is the only firm grip the Bush administration still has on has on Americans who do not share his scheme of world conquest or at least the creation of a religious theocracy dominated by fundamental clergy and reactionary politicians. Obviously power-brokers who are psychopathic enough to sacrifice thousands of dark faced ghetto and white faced rural farm kids, have their own neurotic reasons to rationalize and justify the slaughter.Nevertheless, their motives are often more complex than simple financial greed. Most high end abusers compromise so much while grubbing for wealth and power that they lose the ability to distinguish between right and wrong, among decent decisions and evil choices. As George H. W. Bush once muttered, it's a good thing the people don't know what we are really doing or they would hang us from the nearest street light. Of course, this neurotic eagerness to force innocent persons to suffer for one's own wealth, prestige and power, isn't limited to a few aristocratic users and abusers. Narcissism appears to be a near universal aspect of human nature, as it was during slavery, share cropping, segregation of the races in order to insure cheap labor, the wage slavery enforced by robber barons and the schemes of virtually every powerful politician. As the British scholar, Lord Acton observed -- Power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely. The more unrestricted powerful many individuals and most groups acquire, when the people they dominate are powerless to resist them, the more dangerous users and abusers become to society. I am convinced that the only antidote to narcissistic behavior is a personal lifestyle that includes spiritual virtues, positive attitudes, high expectations, mature beliefs and responsible choices.
For example, a generation or so ago a pair of college psychologists recruited a group of college sophomores to role play prisoners and guards from a Friday afternoon until the following Sunday evening. The researchers had set up a mock prison in the basement of a campus building and in order to avoid any self-selection by the kids chose about twenty prisoners and twenty guards in a double blind random process. The newly selected guards were given control of the prisoners by the professors who offered a few guidelines and then faded away to let the kids determine the outcome without any interference. The experiment produced a real revelation about the use and abuse of power. Almost immediately the good kid guards began to tighten the screws on the bad kid prisoners, who actually were their boy and girl friends, team mates, lab partners and etc. with whom they interacted often on the campus. The guards elected a hard nosed football star as their captain and developed a set of rules to control the prisoners. They first prepared a simple document -- the prisoners were instructed to call the guards boss and stand at attention when they were receiving instructions. But -- the use of power didn't level off with those rules. The list grew longer and more restrictive as the guards acquired a taste of power and invented new methods to dominate the prisoners. Soon, they could speak only if spoken to, must obtain permission to eat or get water and could not speak among themselves unless a guard was present. Only with a guard's approval could they sleep, shower or use the toilet. By Saturday noon, permission was being given erratically and capriciously. Prisoners weren't allowed to read or play cards or study for their exams, as the professors had originally planned. The situation became a nightmare of group dynamics gone bad. The guards seemed to have no insights into what would happen in their campus relationships once the exercise ended and they returned to their daily activities. Their hubristic behavior continued to increase swiftly. Many quarrels occurred and several fights broke out and the guards started restraining prisoners physically in their cells in order to maintain law and order. The violence escalated until the appalled professors cancelled the program late Saturday afternoon rather than continuing it for another day.Then, a more revealing lesson was learned a few weeks later when the professors developed several safeguards and resumed the research with reversed roles for the previous guards and prisoners. The psychologists soon discovered they had not chosen an aberrant group of students through the luck of the draw, because the new group of guards, formerly the prisoners, also behaved badly. In other words, the research revealed the conventional wisdom that Lord Acton was right -- Power does indeed tend to corrupt. And this occurs more often when groups assume power, than when individuals interact, because of competition for status and a desire for prestige. A competitive mob mentality really can develop during times of stress. During the thousands of Negro lynching from 1880 to 1950 across the south, many polite and mild manner men and some women ran amok when hidden within the anonymity of a mob. And the vast majority of lynching occurred, when the price of cotton was low or the temperature over a hundred degrees for weeks without relief. Groups give aggressive persons cover and concealment that are not available to them when standing alone to be judged and challenged. A majority of groups that take political, religious or financial control over men and women who are powerless to defend themselves, move step by step, pausing between increments to consolidate their power before making more egregious demands when they discover they can get away with them. American slavery created great wealth for two centuries as financial, political and social control over the helpless laborers grew ever greater. Floggings, emasculations, amputations of runaways' feet, brandings of lazy workers, lynching and sexual assaults became more frequent as abolitionists encouraged slaves to rebel. Virtually no teen age Negro girl was safe from sexual coercion by her owner or his sons. Or where did you think so many light skinned slaves came from? During the civil and gender rights movement of the nineteen sixties and seventies, many politicians and virtually every southern police force grew more violent with black citizens who tried to vote. Many cops escalated their attacks from psychological abuse, to the physical use of fire hoses and police dogs, through blowing up churches with children inside and executing voter registration workers. In other words, an escalation of violence is almost inevitable when psychopathic power brokers dominate people who cannot cause them pain in return.
Obviously, that is where we Americans currently find ourselves, given the financial, political and religious situation that currently exists in our country.A financial, political and religious band of true believers have seized control of the Presidency, the Senate, the House of Representatives, a Justice Department that refuses to enforce inconvenient laws, a Supreme Court overrun with reactionary justices and even a national health establishment that interferes in our bedrooms. When it was announced that a vaccine had been developed to block the growth of deadly cervical cancer among women, several organizations of fundamental clergy called for it to be suppressed. They claimed anti-viral protection would lead to greater promiscuity among women who would think they were getting a free pass. Evidently, they decided that the death of some thirty thousand American women annually from cervical cancer was more acceptable to God than the unlikely possibility of increased sexual activity due to the vaccine. Not one man or woman in ten thousand, while in the throes of passion, is thinking about a vaccine and only an ideological idiot would think so. Obviously, something beside the health of women is roiling around in the unconscious aspects of such men's souls. Sigmund Freud was absolutely right when he observed that there is something about menstruation, ovulation, intercourse, pregnancy, childbirth and lactation that drive many fundamental preachers and orthodox priests into neurotic attitudes and activities. Really, those who don't play the game have no right to make the rules!
Because the Supreme Court is now dominated by political reactionaries, who are appointed for life with no real recall process, they are free to reward the manipulators who have placed them in so prestigious a situation. Neither they nor the power elite have much motivation to deal honestly with the ordinary people of the world who are helpless before them. Quite the opposite occurs as power players take more advantages by consolidating their power through better and better technology. One need not be a psychologist or psychiatrist to understand that a rough reactionary senator of an oil state who insists: Global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetuated on the American people -- is a creature of his state's oil barons to whom the concept of global warming is terrifying to sat the least. Obviously, the neo-con has made so many self-serving compromises that he can no longer distinguish between fact and fiction. Our youngsters continue to die in a war of Imperial conquest, the world's distrust of the United States increases apace, the middle class is withering away and our children and grandchildren shall be forced to repay a criminal national debt. If the administration's eagerness to repay oil barons, manufacturing moguls, and banking plutocrats, increases global warming exponentially through polluting power plants, automobiles and factories, the unintended consequences may well submerge every coastal city on earth. After all, we have no way of knowing how much damage is already built in the system, even if we stopped the warming processes tomorrow. Global warming along the equator could scorch every crop from the Tropic of Cancer to the Tropic of Capricorn. Then too, the melting of Greenland's fifty thousand year old glaciers could block the flow of the warming Gulf Stream and start another ice age that would destroy European agriculture for ten thousand years. Not only do the users and abusers of society become more and more domineering as they subdue resistance, they and their spin doctors invent better and better lies in order to convince naïve men and women that black is white, that evil is righteous and that the disastrous decline of America are the natural shifts of capitalism, rather than their systematic betrayal of our nation for their own vested interests. Now do you understand why Thomas Jefferson wrote that America was going to need a political revolution every generation? Narcissistic individuals and their groups grow to powerful and manipulative unless they are thrown down from time to time. The current bunch is firmly in the saddle, and to change the analogy, with the bit in their teeth, there has been almost nothing frustrated citizens could do about the continuous abuse of power.Because of the anxiety that gripped Americans after the attack on 9/11, most citizens gave free rein to the Bush faction in order to protect America -- while the neo-cons seized the opportunity to harness that fear so as to finalize their power first in the United States and then across the world. They understood there would be swift military victories in Afghanistan and in Iraq. Unfortunately, they also convinced themselves that our troops would be accepted as liberators rather than as infidel occupiers. It was the worst display of unintended consequences since the Vietnam debacle when about two hundred thousand Americans were slain or wounded for all the wrong reasons. Of course, it is never the aristocracy's boys and girls bleeding to death in the sand. Every war is a rich man's war but a poor boy's fight. The smoke from the 9/11 attack was still rising over Manhattan when his decades long plan to invade Iraq was dusted off by Dick Cheney. His scheme was use the attack as an excuse to create an American financial and military center in an oil producing nation firmly under our control in the Middle East old patch. From those bases the oil companies would be able to dominate Middle Eastern petroleum production. Of course, since that scheme wouldn't persuade the voters, the spin doctors invented a search for fictional weapons of mass destruction. Fear is always more persuasive than hope in threatening situations. Then, when the U M D's proved to be a spurious scam, the propagandists switched stories -- gracefully or otherwise, to sell a Jeffersonian democracy plan more to American voters than to tribal Muslims who have been at one another's throats for a thousand years. Surely, you can see the declining cooperation between classes as our citizens lose more and more power to the proto-fascists who are manipulating us without fear of retaliation because of their financial and political clout. But, the longer we stay in Iraq and the more the three warring factions there battle one another, the greater shall be the influence of the Iranian mullahs. They are just as convinced as fundamental Christians are of their creation of an American theocracy, that they have been called by God to establish a vast Islamic empire that stretches from Syria and Turkey to Malaysia and Indonesia. Of course, Bush and Cheney et al are completely capable of commanding another invasion, against Iran now that it is far more powerful than Saudi Arabia, Iraq and all the smaller oil nations lumped together. This is why the administration is so determined to block the enrichment of weapons grade uranium by Iran. Not even a mad president would dare attack a nation that could detonate nuclear weapons in half a dozen American seaports from innocent appearing freighters.
Everything vicious the narcissistic Bush proto-fascists concocted for foreigners, has potentially devastating consequences for ourselves. The elitists and their violent hatchet men see no difference between Muslins who challenge them overseas and Quakers or Methodists who oppose them at home. Many of the manipulators have become global in attitude and behavior -- they'd as soon live in Monaco or London as in America. Abusers may begin their battles against dark skinned Arabs but they seldom have great spiritual epiphanies that turn them into saints. This slippery slope downward leads to constant electronic surveillance, the obscenity of secret courts without legitimate charges, imprisonment with no evidence required, a lack of legal counsel and with torture cells in lands where state sponsored terror is the rule and midnight redaction is a way of life and death for anyone who annoys the power brokers. Only the most naive of Americans would accept this from our home grown users and abusers, in order to punish foreigners, if they understood that the shift of abuse from foreigners to themselves is but a single vote in the Congress away. Even so, most of the politicians who almost automatically vote against their constituents, have so artfully redistricted the states that it seems doubtful they can be unseated in time to save our democracy from deteriorating into a world empire that intends to fight countless wars and may destroy our civilization through global warming.Lord MacCaulay was the leading historian of the First British Empire. He wrote that of the twenty-two civilizations that left their footprints on Earth, all but two of them collapsed from internal pressures created by their aristocratic groups. He concluded that virtually all civilizations, empires, kingdoms, nations, corporations, cities and clans commit suicide because they create so many selfish vested interest groups that they cannot adapt when they must change their values, assumptions and practices or perish. When the Confederacy was running out of manpower late in the Civil War, Robert E. Lee tried unsuccessfully to have his Rebel Congress offer freedom and small farms to several million male slaves if they would enlist and fight in his Army of Northern Virginia. The vested politicians dithered and dallied for a year, arguing about a plethora of excuses, including the fiction that Negroes were too cowardly or too ignorant to become soldiers. Actually, Lee's plan was blocked because the Congressional slave owners were unwilling to admit their slaves really were men who could fight for their freedom and of course, resisted the changes that would put their property in harm's way. The United States Congress on the other hand, decided that since the war was being fought to free the slaves, Negroes could form regiments and fight alongside white Union forces. The young black men whom the southern political and financial aristocrats assumed wouldn't volunteer and were not brave enough to fight, formed seventy or more infantry regiments of a thousand men each and fought like tigers to defeat the slave holders from whom they'd found another avenue to freedom. History might have turned out differently, had another seventy or eighty thousand courageous men been fighting for their freedom with Lee, when Grant came south to Richmond in July of eighteen sixty-four.
Perhaps General Hayden is an honest American whose only offense when creating his secret telephone surveillance system was having played the bureaucratic power game well enough to satisfy George Bush's fear of strangers coming into his administration. I do indeed hope he is a patriot who can resurrect the C I A after a viciously reactionary Goss almost strangled it. It could be that Gonzales is an unrecognized legal eagle rather than a Texas lightweight who invented justifications to torture prisoners who may or may not be guilty by cleverly parsing definitions. Perhaps Cheney didn't intend to give the store to the oil barons with his energy policies -- and then planed the invasion of Iraq in order to plant the emerging American Empire in the center of the Middle East's oil reserves. It isn't impossible that Chief Justice Roberts will lead the Supreme Court toward a commitment to justice for all Americans once more. It isn't his lack of intelligence or his charm that comes to mind, but his proto-fascist rulings that determined who would win the spoils of globalization. Perhaps Rumsfeld actually planned a brilliant victory in Iraq -- one that his ignorant generals botched. Then, just maybe, George Bush isn't selling the middle class down the river into the cane fields of globalization -- in order to enrich the aristocracy that already controls almost ninety percent of American wealth. Just possibly, a bit of those vast American riches the Administration's pet economists boast so much about, shall trickle down to the people. Perhaps, but with the almost universal collapse of morality by self-centered power brokers who have seized unlimited reactionary political, proto-fascist financial and fundamental religious control over the United States, only naïve idiots and the wannabe abusers who share their ruthless mind-sets, believe them willing to do what is right for America.To trust these narcissistic power players with something as precious as the future of the American Republic -- who are you kidding?
