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The hydra-headed monster of USreal has been murdering democracy--in the name of democracy!--for about as long as I've dwelled on this sad planet. Because, like the Melanie Griffith character in "Something Wild," THEY made us do it! THEY compelled us to go into Korea and Vietnam and kill millions! THEY compelled us to go into Iraq and Afghanistan because" well, Saddam Hussein's soldiers were throwing babies on the floor, dashing their heads! Right? Er, right?
There never seems to be enough time for questioning, for cross-examination! "Facts" are presented as indisputable, and in the words of that consummate liar, Colin Powell, we are simply told, "Trust me."
As Imagination dies, a culture dies, the Arts die, and a people die. The people enclose themselves in a fraudulent world, from which they lack the imagination to break out. They fail to see a "siege" for the act of war it really is. They fail to see the malfeasance of their elected officials as the criminal offense that it is. ("O, my offence is rank," too-late awakened Claudius tells us in Hamlet; "it smells to Heaven!")
In Orwell's other brilliant book, Animal Farm, he shows us how a collective of pigs has taken over from the other rebellious animals, killed off former leaders of the restive, idealistic group, and now amend the original declaration thus: All animals are equal; but some are more equal than others!
Too many in our "advanced, modern" world think they are "more equal than others"! They are "privileged," "entitled," "chosen." In Madeleine Albright's not very bright phrase: "the indispensable people." Refusing to tell the whole story, failing to contextualize, to provide the essential background, they scarify Truth and disenfranchise the people's right to know, to imagine, to feel deeply!
Two bits of truth did leak out while I scavenged among the rubble of the MSM: one news clip showed a Palestinian girl of ten who had awakened paralyzed in a hospital after her family had been killed by Israeli bombs. When she could not feel her limbs, she thought she had died.
Actually, she had died" the life she might have had, had died forever.
Another bit of truth showed another Palestinian girl, also ten. She had just witnessed her grandmother and three uncles being blown apart by Israeli bombs. She held her palms to her head and kept crying, "Enough! Enough! Enough!"
Gary Corseri has published novels and poetry collections, his dramas have been produced on PBS-Atlanta and elsewhere, and he has performed his poems at the Carter Presidential Center. He has taught in US prisons and public schools, and at US and Japanese universities, and his work has appeared at Opednews, Counterpunch, Village Voice, The New York Times, and hundreds of periodicals and websites worldwide.
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