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Suddenly millions of Americans have awoken to seeing themselves in the same critical light that people all over the world see a United States of fools and falsehoods pretending to be the most important, successful, intelligent, righteous and superior people on the face of the earth.
Though always having been pretty easily fooled into accepting lies as justification for their country's bloody foreign adventures, in their present personal finances fright, just as during the the Great Depression, Americans are far from being accepting of being taken advantage of by fraudulent and unfair domestic economic policies that hurt and directly threaten their pocketbook and their families' well being.
For it is quite easy to discount the suffering of Iraqis, Somalis, Afghanis, or earlier, the Vietnamese, along with the poor half of mankind who live on less than two dollars a day, but quite difficult to stomach discomfort of Americans in America. And so this complete bailout of corporations and banks becomes a 'real damn shame'. Its just too close to home.
However there is something silly about Americans belatedly directing their outrage solely at its elected government leaders and their corporate finance buddies, as if Americans nationwide were pure and innocent children victimized by a big bad world; if America is big and bad, it is Americans that have made it that way.
This elderly writer is weary of hearing blame for financial absurdities and military atrocities ascribed to this or that particular varmint in office, as for instance, the current occupant of the White House, or the alternating colluding two political parties in power in Congress.
Am tired of reading criticism blaming the nation's and the world's woes on this or that elected gang of fast talking criminals; even fed up with hearing the obvious pointed out, that the conglomerate owned media has the poor bamboozled electorate as well as most of the non-voting majority of citizens convinced that black is white, white is black, up is down and down is up regarding almost every issue and carefully selected news report.
Grown-up Americans have had the weakness of character to have let themselves be suckered in to commercial media promoting a cheap culture of childishly self-centered consumerism and pride in having an ignorant disinterest and disdain for the 94% of humanity that lives beyond U.S. borders - even though they all their ancestors, excepting Native-Americans, originally arrived from out there.
Long being sold on tax breaks for the rich and any and all overseas wars of occupation, the jerked around average lightly educated American on Main Street is finally blinking his or her eyes a bit.
But how many are really aware of being played the fool by a slick conglomerate owned entertainment/news industry cartel, ever more monolithic in its propaganda and slant, ever more frenetic in jingoistic false patriotism and feverishly dramatic in low class appeal with mesmerizing enticements to be egotistic, playing on irrational fears concocted by the spectacular and grossly inconsiderate of any sense of honesty in disinforming the nation on the nature of and purpose of wars of occupation, the profits being made in the prosecution of war and in the deregulation of mammoth financial corporations betraying public investments for the benefit of their now desperate private controllers and CEOs?
It is still very much a population that avidly follows, enjoys and allows its commercial media to calculatedly abuse its licensing of the nation's air wave frequencies to dis-educate and demean ethics and culture as the mouthpiece of that conspiracy of the wealthy against the rest of mankind that is capitalism; a capitalist system which needs the acquiescent indifference of self-centered millions in order to be able to continue to lurch forward in the deception that it is in favor of free markets while actually inhumanly increasing the most powerful elite multi-national coterie of investors global grip on important markets and natural resources.
In centuries preceding America's present world dominating financial empire, the British, French, Spanish, Dutch and Portuguese empires also needed many preposterously selfish-minded greedy adherents to go along with its wealthy oppressing their countrymen at home and to go forth, to conquer, enslave and exploit overseas.
Present day American led imperialist globalization's quick-step march forward toward the edge of a cliff below which lies an abyss of suffering, oblivious to worsening conditions for the majority of the human race, is dependent on the willingness of a large mass of American citizens to think like apathetic non-citizens in individual consumption. Consuming without assuming responsibility for the unkind and unethical behavior of their government toward even their neighbors.
Many of us are frustrated and bored with progressive writers solely pushing the blame upstairs in order to avoid mentioning what is plain for the rest of the world to see; namely, that Americans in general are in the main either socially irresponsible or knaves lacking little sense of planetary ethics, camaraderie and a sense of fair play regardless that their tyrannical president fatuously brags of how generous and good Americans are.
Richard Shenkman, Editor of History News Network out of George Mason University has suggested in his article The Left's Blind Spot that we
"admit the obvious: that the ordinary people ... have often turned a blind eye to what their government's leaders through the years have done in their name.
