Wherever one cares not to look is where this new slave works, hidden behind the periphery, squeaking out a clandestine life, becoming a shadow of a human being, marginalized and blamed by the ignorant and fearful for the Empire's ills, doing all the work the gluttonous citizenry has become too arrogant and lazy to perform, laboring so that the populace can retain their ravenous standard of living. Indeed, they have been allowed to enter the domain of the Empire undocumented with a wink and a nod, for the Establishment, as well as the intelligentsia and the corporate world, know that they are vitally important to the short and long term economic vitality and increased standard of living of America and its people, injecting new life and energy, as well as new ideas, into the Empire, regardless of what the ignorant, uneducated and fearful masses may think and notwithstanding the political spin so-called lawmakers give.
Over the last several decades it has been the Empire's society itself, those hundreds of millions residing inside the only land blessed by the Christian god, that has raised the specter of worry among many who think that America has begun its eventual decline and fall. It is the Empire's hubris and mentality of ignorance among its people, along with its materialist and consumerist addictions, bred from birth and through nurtured brainwashing, that has indeed launched the Pax Americana's decline into orbit. Today's citizenry has become lazy and complacent, with the absolute hypnotizing trance of television helping to morph normal human bodies into the obese creatures of gluttony. Television monitors have become the sun Americans revolve around, inside their little solar system the small moons of remote controls hover close by, with meteorites called crumbs landing and dotting the surface of the torso, the family couch becoming the Jupiter to our Uranus, the glow of our all powerful sun feeling warm and cozy and hypnotic to our brain dead thoughts.
The population has fused itself with the always-expanding vehicle, one becoming part of the other, with humans dependent on the driving and power of the car to transport them even to the nearest store, one block away. It is for those who drive and gorge on gas every week that Iraq is being destroyed by the Empire's military. No longer walking or exercising, only doing snack and junk food aerobics with the wrist and fingers, Americans and their waistlines have exploded outwards, showcasing symptoms of the diseases of greed and gluttony, much of it the result of both laziness and the chemically-laced, hormone-full, preservative-saturated, sugar-coated garbage we call food.
The Empire declares itself the land of the free, yet its population works the most of any developed nation, almost becoming automatons in need of no rest or relaxation. It becomes sacrilegious to take time off work and cherish one's family; it is heresy to take time off in order to take care of personal duties. Americans either become addicts to work and slaves to their bosses or one becomes an unwanted pariah. The pressure to conform and remain complacent while the system shackles one's life is omnipotent; its effects on stress and life become extreme burdens on one's psychology. Every year hails the arrival of more police powers, more autocratic rule, less democracy and civil rights and liberties. Every year sees the government of, by and for the People transformed into one of, by and for the Corporate World.
The Empire leads the world in psychotropic, sedative and anti-depressant drug prescriptions, as if its populace is suffering extreme forms of mental disorders, with stress and depression rampant, unhappiness continuing to rise and the overall feeling of well-being eroding with the passing of the seasons. People are overworked, underpaid, struggling to make ends meet, even with two jobs, fearful and made insecure by the same government created to protect and defend them. Television has become teacher, parent, babysitter, best friend and role model for children whose brain waves are being rewired thanks to the rapid imagery and fast sound bites seen on the monitor, their behaviors being conditioned to suit the interests of the corporate world, in time becoming one more serf to the corporate master. Reality cannot offer perfection and so Americans seek the fictions of television, becoming glued to the shows that offer the greatest beauty, the best fantasy, the happiest ending, the joyful perfection that humanity always seeks yet can never achieve.
Every year that passes the decimation of education by government can be seen and felt, with students falling behind world leaders in the sciences, liberal arts, mathematics and in reading. Americans no longer have knowledge of the world outside their immediate bubbles, understanding little about other cultures and even less about history. University tuition and costs have seemingly continued to rise on a per year basis thus having the effect, along with the slashing of funds for both student loans and financial aid, of making college unattainable to millions of otherwise qualified individuals. Elementary and secondary schools now teach to standardized tests, besides having funds slashed across the board, creating entire generation of robots and automatons, thereby helping to erode free thought, reasoning skills, logic and critical thinking, in essence preparing children for a life as unthinking drones, engineered for obedience and blind loyalty, not one full of knowledge and free thought. This might be, in fact, exactly what leaders have had in mind all along, for an uneducated mind is easier to control and manipulate than a thinking, knowledgeable one.
In the most powerful and wealthiest nation on Earth, one that considers itself an Empire, superior to and above all other states on the planet, pregnant with a myriad number of colleges and universities, it is incomprehensible that inside its borders exists a level of fundamentalist religion that beckons the days of the Dark Ages, a time when humanity turned backwards in time, doing its best to declare open warfare against science, reason and logic. Where one would expect renaissance and enlightenment, because of education levels, wealth indicators and standards of living, instead one finds open hostility to knowledge and an uncompromising love for ignorance. Where one would expect secular thinking and scientific reasoning instead one finds religious conviction and archaic, primitive thought.
Indeed, the religious fanaticism prevalent among large segments of society is a symptom of the disease called under education, of the state purposefully creating millions of ignorant, unthinking citizens, the easier to control and dominate them. For if they can be brainwashed from youth to place blind faith and loyalty in an entity never seen or heard, thinking this hollow fantasy an Anglo-Saxon white man with a white beard hovering in the sky above, then how easy can it be to condition them to place blind faith and loyalty in a tangible, visible government creation that is manufactured to be the only human entity capable of protecting and securing their person and family?
Where one would expect common sense to prevail, such as in the use of contraception and in the reality of evolution and global warming, instead one finds the idiocy of abstinence, of creationism/intelligent design and of the Rapture, all based on the thousands-years-old, primitive, archaic and fantasy-laced fables and myths. Only in America, among developed nations, can scientific fact be challenged by theological ideology, making science fit the religious beliefs of the nation. Only in America can the obviousness of evolution be ignored and discarded, to be denied its teaching in a 21st century classroom. In America, pro-life means saving pin-size zygotes, but not the life of the diseased or of the suffering through stem-cell research. Pro-life would rather have a woman and child suffer in indigence and lost opportunity for life rather than giving the woman a chance at a better life down the road. It would call the destruction of microscopic cells murder but stay silent on the mass killing by America of over 250,000 innocent Iraqis.
It is in this religious zealotry that one can see the xenophobia, indeed the boiling hatred, that millions of Americans possess for the Empire's new enemy, the dreaded Arab. Combined with the rabid patriotism, blind loyalty and love of the red, white and blue - betraying the high level of testosterone inherent in America's tribal fascination - evangelical belief loves to hate dark-skinned enemies, bomb innocent heathens and wage war on the descendents of the New Testament people which, naturally, like Jesus himself, are Arab. Unlike Jesus, however, whom they hold in very high regard, they have no qualms unleashing state sponsored terror on the innocent, on children, babies, grandparents and women. Such is the culture of life.
In this frenzy of manufactured and conditioned hate we see the engine moving the pistons and spark plugs of America's Middle East disasters, with blind loyalty to flag and cross, confident that the infidels will be brought under the boots of the great American military. In the mammoth churches of the evangelical cults can we see the grease lubricating the American military-industrial complex, granting it the green light needed to eradicate the lands of ancient Mesopotamia, where the Euphrates and the Tigris meet, where Babylon once stood, where civilization itself first breathed life. The fear and bigotry against those they do not know or understand, against those they are told are the enemy, are a corrosive and dangerous belief structure, one based on ignorance and blind faith. Millions of ethnic minorities throughout history have been exterminated for less hatred engendered.
War as the Health of the State
With the rise of the Industrial Revolution giving her the strong winds needed to maintain Empire's momentum, America soon found herself growing exponentially, rivaling European powers, yet confidently knowing that her endowed resources, both natural and human, combined with her rivals' lack thereof, would eventually allow her to supplant those she desired to become. All that was needed was time and perhaps even a little luck. Coincidentally, it would be the unlucky disasters of World Wars I and II, both of which devastated America's European rivals, that would grant America the ascendancy, as well as the opportunity, she had been waiting for. It would be through war that the health of the state would be assured.
After the end of the Second World War, with her rivals decimated and in desperate need of both reconstruction and peace, America became the world Empire her masters had always envisioned. Not only would America rebuild Europe's and Japan's battered infrastructures and economies, not to mention Western Europe's militaries, resulting in an immense shift in the balance of world power, she would also go on to usurp Europe's colonies in the Middle East, with their vast petroleum fields, as well as those of Asia and Africa whose natural resources the western world coveted.
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