"Violence Is the Last Refuge of the Incompetent."--Isaac Asimov
As Hannah Arendt points out above, "Violence appears where power is in jeopardy." The plutocratic oligarchs' plans to reinstate the "good old days," at least for them, of America's Gilded Age, required their instituting an economic meanness, and secretive system of doing things, which did subtle violence to not only their workers, but their customers and the general public as well. In this manner, they hoped to deceive the rest of the world into believing that they had fully regained their power and prominence, even though it was actually only violence and propaganda. Movies and television have become increasingly violent in the last thirty years, and the borderline psychopathic loner has been increasingly presented as the new American hero, to be revered and emulated. To quote Lewis H. Lapham in his 1985 essay "Citizen Goetz" (Harper's New York, March 1985), "A society that presumes a norm of violence and celebrates aggression, whether in the subway, on the football field, or in the conduct of its business, cannot help making celebrities of the people who would destroy it."
Glen Ford got it more right than most of us would care to admit in his 20 December 2012 OpEdNews article, "The Ultimate Logic of a Society Built on Mass Murder." In it he stated:
"Mass murder is at the core of the American national religion, which is a celebration of a genocidal march across a continent filled with other, doomed human beings. America's contribution to European culture was to invite 'all the nations of Europe' to come to these shores and become fellow 'white' citizens, whose status was defined by the enforced inferiority of Blacks and the remnants of the Indians."
Mr. Ford forgets that those "white" citizens have always been used as pawns by America's elites: cannon fodder in times of war; cogs of the money machine in times of peace, and shock troops for maintaining the elite in their positions of power. If we tried to rise against our "betters," then, as Jay Gould stated, the elites would hire half the poor whites to kill the other half. We "whites" happily killed the blacks, the Native Americans, Orientals Hispanics, and anyone else who stood in the way of the railroads, the mining and oil companies, and the manufacturing concerns in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Afterwards we died, by the numbers, working ourselves to death for those self-same plutocratic concerns; secure in our "knowledge" that we were somehow better than the blacks, the Native Americans, Orientals, Hispanics, and fellow whites we had killed, in order to receive the scraps from the tables of the wealthiest Americans. These plutocratic oligarchs look upon us--their fellow Caucasians--with the same disdain that they would dog crap on their expensive shoe. The wealthy made sure that we were kept divided into tribes--racially, religiously, politically, culturally--because they knew if we united, we would put an end to their power.
We need to remember that "Once Upon a Time," we were part of a nation where we were more than mere pawns in the games of the wealthy; we had Presidents who started their speeches with the words "My Friends," and made us believe we were; every American had a reasonable expectation that the lives of their children would be better than their own; where we accomplished great things, not because they made us money, but because America does best when it is working towards a magnificent goal that may prove impossible, whether it is curing polio or walking on the Moon.
In those days, we were all more than numbers: we were Americans. We had union brothers who would go out on strike with us over unjust treatment in the workplace. We had college students and other activists, who marched against segregation, an unjust war in a foreign land, and for the rights of every disenfranchised American, no matter their race, creed, color, gender, or sexual orientation. We had the power to bring down a President, make Congress investigate wrongdoing, and make the Supreme Court guarantee that an abortion was a private matter between a woman and her physician, not a matter for government interference at any level.
I believe that we can return to those halcyon days, when all of our lives had meaning and purpose. I believe that we still have the opportunity to turn back the clock and cry to the world, "I am not a number, I am a free human being: I am an American!"
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