Rob asked if dog training is analogous to the way in which our culture trains us. These are my thoughts on his question.

::::::::

Where the Wild Things Are

The dominator enforces control, instilling obedience to his commands from the top (dominator) to the bottom (dog), or top down.  Come.  Sit.  Lie down.  This is ALWAYS backed up by a system of reward and punishment, one punishment being the withdrawal of approval/affection/love.  Dogs are animals who naturally travel in packs.  They want to belong.  The withdrawal of love devastates them.

Using this insidious psychological manipulation, of course for the dog's own good and the dominator's pride and convenience, the basic repertoire of commands is expanded in an INVERTED pyramid, as more, and more intricate orders/commands are applied on top the original commands until the dog can find a person trapped by an avalanche, be the eyes for the blind, detect cancer, sniff out drugs and explosives, protect police and soldiers and terrorize the prisoners at Abu Ghraib.  They are just following orders, all for love and approval and in an effort to avoid the pain of the withdrawal of love and/or abandonment. They are the willing, conditioned instruments of the dominator, the perfect manifestation of Stockholm Syndrome.

Why should it work any differently with human babies as opposed to puppies, albeit by an even more insidious psychological acculturation due to the complexity of the child's human psychology itself.  Basic control, obedience, however, is achieved in exactly the same way, administered by the CHILD'S OWN PARENTS, on whom the child depends for its very life, and who themselves have been indoctrinated in the same subtle, sadistic and manipulative manner. 

It begins with parental demands, at first backed up only by disapproval and the withdrawal of affection.  Not many parents stoop to corporal punishment of infants.  The child learns to sleep through the night, is toilet trained, learns to speak and to sit in a high chair, eat with a spoon and not throw food all over the kitchen - to the parents' insufferable pride and self-centered convenience.

As the infant becomes a toddler, parental demands increase, and may now be backed up with force and the use of more sophisticated punishments like "time out" and the denial of sweets or toys, or more blatant, verbally-administered demonstrations of the withdrawal of approval, e.g. love, which to the helpless, totally dependent child signals abandonment.  Remember, the child's VERY LIFE is dependent on the continued approval of the all-powerful parent.  In addition, that approval is often THE ONLY REWARD for good behavior, or virtue, which is supposedly its own reward.

The child will be further, and more complexly conditioned as he grows, and in the process inculcate obedience into the very fiber of his being, as second nature, an involuntary reaction, an almost instinctual genuflection to power and authority.  And while this is going on, the child is almost invariably introduced to the big, punishing, patriarchal talking head in the sky who will fry him for eternity if he does not obey.  The big talking head reinforces the indoctrination the parents have been administering from birth.  The big talking head knows all, sees all and is the final arbiter of good and evil, which will be transplanted, along with parental proscriptions, into the child as a terrible, punishing part of his superego, and supplant natural conscience, that "little voice" that tells you when you're doing something wrong.  This transplant will serve too direct the desired action in the child for his entire life and condition him to "eyes down" obeisance in the presence of perceived authority.  In addition, the child is relieved of the burden of independent, deliberate thought, since right and wrong has been predetermined by the big talking head.  This process, when successful, transfers all semblance of self-authority, of conscience, of weighted thought to an entity outside the sovereignty of the child's unalienable right to decide for himself.  The sovereignty of self has been transferred to the dominator, first in the form of the parents, then to a religion instilled into those parents in the self-same, near inescapable way.

As the child moves on to "phase three" of being "civilized", he is sent to school.  Sit down.  Shut up.  Raise your hand and ask permission.  SALUTE THE FLAG.  So to blind obedience and the adoption of an outside authority's pre-selected, no-thought-needed method for determining right from wrong is added jingoistic nationalism, my country right or wrong.  Voila!  And why wouldn't the child accept this?  This is, in fact, one of the ends of which this conditioning is the means - an obedient, unthinking instrument, much like the dog, who will protect, to the point of his own death, the civilization into which it was civilized.

And in the meantime, ALL THROUGH THIS PROCESS, the child has been conditioned to violate those very same bonds of approval and love on which he is so dependent by the betrayal of "the other" in the form of the beloved animals initially used to teach him not only to speak, but to read - those unique tools of human existence.  What does the cow say?  C is for cow.  C-O-W spells cow.  Read the word "cow."

At the same time the child is exploring the bonds of friendship and loyalty with a dog or a cat, using many other animal friends to learn to speak and read, as examples of moral behavior via fairy tales, Aesop's fables, etc, he is chowing down on that same, doe-eyed friendly cow in the form of hamburgers.  When this becomes apparent it must be denied and hidden, repressed and forbidden from discussion.  Ask an adult if he knows how chickens and cows are "processed" in slaughter houses.  You'll either hear the denial that that's just the way things are, they're "only" animals, we "have" to eat meat or they'll plead "Don't tell me about it.  I don't want to know."  As long as they don't THINK they can ignore the atrocity and the agony of the slaughter they continue to consume.

AND THIS IS SUPREMELY USEFUL TO EMPIRE.

Children also care for animals in farm programs like 4-H.  They shampoo them, feed, groom and name them.  They raise them as if they were their own babies.  Then they're told they have to betray them, selling them for slaughter to the highest bidder, but that they can take comfort in the money they'll earn from it.  The child knows this is betrayal, a shameful act that goes against any definition of friendship and loyalty.  But the natural conscience will be denied, stuffed down deep inside in an ever-evaporating oasis of personal integrity, which is itself, anathema to capitalism.  And since obedience has already been instilled, it is now not only permissible, but laudable to betray friendship and loyalty for money - which will eventually merge with the big talking head and become god itself.

Many children are also given high-powered weapons and sent out into the woods to hunt down and kill their essentially defenseless animal friends, cutting off their heads as trophies and having communicated to them, if they are boys, that this is somehow the essence of masculinity.  This betrayal of "the other" will come in very handy in places like Iraq and Afghanistan when turned on "others" demonized especially for the occasion.  They can even work with their fellow indoctrinees, dogs.

Underneath all this domination and indoctrination by parents, religion and schools, and the usurpation of the unalienable sovereignty of self achieved by instilling obedience to the point of obeisance - especially in relation to the big talking head - and the outsourcing of morality to an outside authority, swirls an ugly river of advertising propaganda in the service of profit-seeking uber alles transnational corporations which hire the best minds in the field of human psychology to create psy ops designed to BRAND children for life. 

There is a TV channel strictly for babies.  It's on 24 hours a day.  Children believe the blue Ford oval is part of Blue's Clues.  Every sugar-laden cereal on the supermarket shelf is flogged by a co-opted animal friend.  Don't even start to tell me that the market is consumer driven.  If corporations must CREATE a need for their product and slavishly spend billions of dollars a year to convince people they want it, the market is not driven by needs naturally arising within consumers, who used to be citizens, but by the needs of the corporations themselves, in an effort to drive former citizens, like cattle, right where they want them, to the cash register.

So, how much of the individual is left for himself after parents, religion, schools, nationalism and consumerism have their way with him?   80%?  50%?  20%?

Let's go back to the animals part.

A happy horse is gentled, not broken.  And when it comes right down to it, I've always preferred a horse I couldn't really control, except by her own good grace.

I once went to the Florida Keys to swim with dolphins.  They were actually wild, and could come into and go from the "facilities" as they pleased.  They seemed to enjoy people.  At one of two facilities I visited, dolphins "worked with" autistic children.  At the other, among my group of dolphin swimmers was a deaf gentlemen, whom the dolphins treated with kid gloves, as if they knew he was deaf, and could not, like the rest of us, hear their whirrs, clicks and chirps as they playfully "charged" us, pretending they intended to sideswipe us. 

They would also swim along the edge of the lagoon as we walked on the boardwalk, stick their heads out of the water to be stroked (they felt like hardboiled eggs) and open their mouths because they wanted us, their "handlers" told us, to put our hands in their mouths to show we trusted them.  We did.

My favorite part was just swimming with them, though the rest of the group "rode" them, holding on to their dorsal fins.  I gave up my "ride time" in exchange for others' swim time.  Though the dolphins allowed and seemed to enjoy the riding, I have never liked it when animals "jumped through hoops" for me.  They LOVED to swim in the wake of our swim fins, to swim just below us in tandem with us, along side us, or to rush in front of us, suddenly stop and "stand" on their tails peering straight into our faces as if to ask "Where do you think you're going, Legged One?" and then swim off laughing their little radar clicks.

I was so awed by these benevolent "wild things", so intoxicated by their freely-distributed charm, even convinced that they could tell what I was thinking and feeling about them as they swam beside me while I walked along the boardwalk, their left or right eye-side up, following me, "reading" my thoughts.

In addition, I have always preferred cats to dogs.  You can beat a dog bloody with a chain and he will come crawling back to you on his belly.  Not so a cat.  He's out of there.  Someone once said, "There's no use calling a cat.  They screen their calls."  And I have always admired dogs who turn on those who beat them.  It seems to me that those who prefer dogs to cats prefer dominion, to be dominators, and those who prefer cats prefer democracy and negotiation.

Natty Seidenberg says "...our most basic relationship of survival - our relationship to the natural world - is based on exploitation and alienation." To paraphrase Seidenberg, greed, control and ownership are values to be cherished, virtues which are rewarded, and which bring with them not only privilege, but are necessary for survival under capitalism, where the "free" market passes for freedom.  Social order and cooperation, e.g. control, governing the behavior/relationships of groups of individuals to something else, are institutionalized, such as the institution of monogamy by church, state and society, and the behavior is reinforced and enforced at every level of society as the only, the natural, the moral way to live.

I might add that your best lover will be one you "convince", perhaps seduce with their freely-willed participation, but certainly not one you have raped.

When you lose the love and awe of "wild things", when you lose respect for "the other", it is yourself who is lost in the arrogance of being you.  It takes a VERY small man who can only feel big by standing on someone else's neck--bell hooks refers to our society as a "white supremacist capitalist patriarchy."  That's a triple whammy of striving for domination, not freedom.  Obedience for obeisance via objectification.

I have foregone a discussion of our genocide of Native Americans, the abomination of enslaving Africans, the subjugation of women, the exploitation of labor, the demonization of gays, as well as the slaughter of fellow humans by the millions as "collateral damage" in our continual wars of US imperialism.   And I do realize that my willingness to ride a horse and not a dolphin is my own hypocrisy, perhaps rationalized by the fact that horses are no longer  "wild things."

Please refer to my postings "The ABC's of Atrocity", "IMPEDIMENTA (or Buried Alive)", "Anathema" and "The Frog and the Scorpion"  posted here at Op Ed News (which I have "attached" to this article) for further thoughts on society's role in individual behavior.  Also, please read any of Alice Miller's books on child psychology or Arthur Silber's posts on obedience at his "Once Upon a Time" blog. Thank you.

The ABCs of Atrocity

sow the seeds of future perversity.
Animals are the means we use to teach
our children not only the basics of speech,
but to give them the tools they're going to need
to begin elementary reading.

We ask "What does the cow say?" 
"P is for pig" we tell them
while their animal friends scream in agony
as we mechanically and mercilessly slaughter them,
renaming their dismembered body parts
beef, pork, mutton and poultry
in order to distance the abattoir
from the innocence, the purity, of the nursery.
 
And as children learn that they are complicit
with their nuggets, wings, ribs and cheeseburgers,
they lock it down deep in denial,
repressing interfamilial murder.

Further, children learn god has given them
"dominion" over all other animals
and some of them practice what's termed
"animal husbandry."  The 4-H is an example
of the indoctrination of impressionable children
into support of this hypocritical debacle.
 
It teaches children to care for an animal,
to feed her and groom her and name her,
grow up with her, win a blue ribbon,
and sell her to a restaurant in a stone cold betrayal.

In another perverse twist, we take kids into the woods
and arm them with deadly, high-powered weapons
and teach them to hunt down their animal friends,
who are essentially defenseless against them.

And since we no longer need them as food,
having made factory farms a mass murder industry,
their desecrated bodies are abandoned,
their stuffed heads prove their killers' masculinity.

Thus what were once
bunnies, Bambi and myriad birds,
cows, sheep, chickens and pigs
who taught us our very first words
are changed into "game", trophies and edible commodities,
which are undeniably tasty and outrageously profitable.

The point, however, is not sport,
not animal husbandry, nor even macho display,
but to inculcate in children that the value
of friends, love, loyalty and especially fair play

may be dispensed with in simple self-interest,
in particular with regard to "the other",
thus turning them all into Cain, that they may
more easily make money off and murder their brothers.

It divorces the force of children's emotions
from the consequences of having a conscience
in the service of their Financial Masters,
for whom they are willing to perpetrate violence

and from responsibility while feeling entitled to rape,
slaughter, plunder and excuse mass atrocities
with not an inkling of compassion or compunction
for either animals or the rest of humanity.

(END)

IMPEDIMENTA
(or Buried Alive)

Cordoned off, physically, from Nature
by concrete, electronics and oil-based plastics,
their food, water and even air saturated
with pharmaceuticals and the chemicals of petro-agriculture,

children lack connection
not only to The Source,
but the source of SELF
within themselves.

Imprisoned behind the barbed wire of religion,
which claims a patent on rightness and wrongness,
the one Great Gift given us all, free will,
the arbiter of an intrinsic ethics, conscience,

is short-circuited in service to the purveyors
of greed, lust, fear, envy and hatred

who are themselves granted absolution and given free rein
to market these to children at their most impressionable age,
indelibly imprinting them with unthinking obeisance,
brand loyalty to products as well as to a nation,

and the willingness to put the bit in their mouths,
wear the saddle, and be easily ridden
by the status quo at the behest of an "elite"
which has nothing but contempt for them.

Children are made so afraid to trust themselves 
that they early give up the power to make decisions,
and submit to an authoritarian Father Figure
who takes this frightful responsibility away from them

and the choices that children have left,
if that's what they could be called,
are all of them pre-arrayed and made
in the safe, sacred space of the mall.

And like the unwanted excrescences
of too-long tails and ears on "purebred" dogs,
extraneous on purebred, bio-engineered consumers
are the interconnections of human bonds
which are then prevented from reforming
by the application of cultural shock collars
which let children know they're straying from convention
and prompts shopping in which to find solace.

Children are taught to speak
by mimicking animals sounds,
"What does the cow say?" and to read
by rattling off their names.  "C is for cow."

They're given pets with whom they bond,
but learn love and promises can be exchanged.
Should a more pleasing specimen come along,
the original is easily replaced.

Children also bond with animals in Farm Programs,
then sell them for slaughter, betraying them,
and take comfort in the profit they earn,
learning money trumps loyalty and friends.

Some children are sent out into the woods,
armed with high-powered weapons
with which they then hunt down and kill
their essentially defenseless animal friends.

This template for the eradication of feelings
via the extermination of beloved animals
is covered with the bandage of denial
and purges children of much of their humanity.

And this cold, cruel, callous psychology
is the epitome of American masculinity.
Love, friendship, fair play and promises,
gratitude and empathy are strictly for sissies.

And since mothers now work to make up
increasing profit taken from wages of fathers,
children are often left alone and unguarded
to sit alienated, anxious and wanting

getting much of their nurture by nursing
at the ubiquitous TV tit,
which disperses only the addictive milk
of corporate ejaculate,

driving small children back
to the sacred, sacrificial mall altar
where they give up the rest of their SELVES
to the holy corporate Uber Father

SELF silenced

in the quest for eternal youth,
to gain the illusion of status,
for the refuge of sedatives or stimulants
to create an artificial happiness

to get what they're told they deserve
to relieve the quiet desperation,
to find love in the acquisition of goods,
for the reward of instant gratification

for the waxen mask of faux beauty,
to transfer loyalty to brands,
to compete in the search for identity,
to amass enough feel like a man

for products as opposed to friendships,
for the feeling of being included,
to keep them amused as they're being abused
making sure curiosity is neutered.

Thus market needs supplant personality
by strip mining children of all that is personal,
implanting needs created by advertising
making them vassals of all things commercial,

clamoring to be filled with what the market purveys,
but these false needs can never be satisfied.
The constant effort to do so creates profit,
and that's the whole point of the enterprise.

There are more TV drug-delivery systems
in American homes than there are residents.
Hundreds of channels inject it 24/7
promoting non-existent TV characters as friends

to be imprinted on, bonded with and emulated
in the purchase/pursuit of the American Dream,
prompted by longings both real and created,
but both of which fulfill corporate needs.

Children are sitting ducks for the sale of junk
sold as a way off the island of solitary confinement
on which the perfect consumer, cut from the community,
lives a faux life that he is resigned to,
built on maximum conformity via pre-selected choices
of identical products that ensure profitable uniformity,
since mass production creates massive profits
in the futile struggle to buy style and identity.

And rather than educate, schooling trains children
to take their place in the assembly line of those seeking
the elusive and non-negotiable American lifestyle
as if it were worthy of achievement.

Children are schooled to
sit down
shut up
ask permission
and pledge an unquestioning oath
to xenophobia and imperialist aggression

in service to the enrichment of the already rich
disguised as life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness
as they provide the fodder,
both consumer and cannon,
which makes possible empire,
both military and financial.

No deviation is allowed from this rut
dug by consumers on the conveyor belt of debt slavery
into the financial furnaces of the American Mirage,
divested of reality and devoid of the context of history.

This focus on the OUT side, the vehicle,
rather than the IN side, The Driver,
creates a vehicle careening, directionless, through life,
oblivious of its blatant denial

that diverts the creation of character
and creates a socially-engineered emptiness
that eases the transfer of wealth from the worker/seekers
to the idle manufacturers of meaninglessness

who profit when compassion is ousted by competition
and empathy is eaten up with envy,
when addiction to lust is more important than love
and acquisition is more attractive than friendship
when winning brings more approval than fair play
and promises are temporary constructs
gratitude is seen as humiliation
and profit the sole desirable object.

The guard towers of religion and education,
psychology in advertising and public relations,
patriotism and control of information
are the bricks and mortar of this prison's foundation.

They make up the impenetrable wall
guarded zealously by corporate capitalism.
It encloses Americans' individual cells
and they don't know that THEY ARE THE KEYS to them.

"In our dreams, we have limitless resources and the people yield themselves with perfect docility to our molding hands.  The present education conventions fade from their minds, and unhampered by tradition, we work our own good will upon a grateful and responsive rural folk.  We shall not try to make these people or any of their children into philosophers or men of learning, or men of science.  We have not to raise up from among them authors, editors, poets or doctors, preachers, politicians, statesmen, of whom we have an ample supply.  The task we set before ourselves is very simple as well as a very beautiful one, to train these people as we find them to do in a perfect way the things their mothers and fathers are doing in an imperfect way, in the homes, in the shops, and on the farms."  - John D. Rockefeller's General Education Board's "Occasional Letter #1"

"Ours must be a leadership democracy administered by an intelligent minority who know how to regiment and guide the masses...The voice of the people expresses the mind of the people, and that mind is made up for it by the group of leaders in whom it believes and by those persons who understand the manipulation of public opinion.  It is composed of inherited prejudices and symbols and cliches and verbal formulas supplied to it by the leaders...It must be enlightened propaganda through the creation of circumstances, through the high-spotting of significant events and the dramatization of important issues."  - Edward Bernays, architect of Woodrow Wilson's Committee on Public Information, nephew of Sigmund Freud and the Father of Public Relations

(END)

Anathema

No matter how much we amass
we go immediately in hot pursuit
not of happiness, but
... more ...
which we believe is happiness,
running
just to stand still,
balanced on the knife edge
of failure/success,
financial security,
fame and power,
the "hedonic treadmill"
of the American Dream System,
capitalism
is based on the promise,
not the delivery.
If we were to achieve
we would no longer need
to play the game.
 
Do the math.
 
Since the 1950s, Americans
have twice as many cars
houses twice as large
eat out three times more
their divorces doubled
suicides tripled
violent crimes quadrupled
a million a year drop out of high school
diabetes, obesity and depression
are epidemic while we are free
to pursue our whims and while
we are inundated with stuff
most Americans feel
they don't have enough.
And since this makes them feel
things are scarce, wall themselves
off, especially
from the have-nots.
 
As materialism and misery
have multiplied, happiness
has plummeted.  We spend
our lives making and selling
things including ourselves,
pulling away from "we"
because there's no short term gain,
like lab rats pushing a lever
for another hit of cocaine
to acquire things we do not need
and neglecting those we do.
 
Happiness is the absence
of striving
for it.
Happy
people have their minds fixed, not
on the pursuit of happiness,
but a pursuit followed not as a means
to an end, but an end
in itself.
Happiness is a byproduct.
By not seeking, we find it.
It is a road,
not
a destination.

The American Dream promises
that regardless of circumstances
of birth and within the law,
anyone can pursue his version
of happiness which has been reduced
to the pursuit of money.
Three of four college students hijacked
by capitalism, insist it's "essential"
to become "very well off financially."
 
To feel fully alive you must find
and follow that "little voice"
which says
"This is who I really am."
 
Capitalism's fetish for individualism
is actually a fixation on alienation.
From the first moment we're plopped
in front of corporate-sponsored
children's TV now available 24/7
with a booster shot when we enter school,
our square pegs are carved down
to fit capitalism's round,
cookie cutter holes, caricatures
of actual individuals encouraged
to develop our marketability
rather than our individuality,
sell our "selves" for a corporate identity
uniform in its conformity
supported by a multiplicity of meaningless choices
marketed as a means to individuality
as we each sit home alone
with our TVs -

capitalism's perfect couple

an alienated individual,
divided and conquered, alone
with the most perfect delivery system
for propaganda's hollow promises
ever invented.
 
Authentic individualism
skepticism
making one's own decisions
- happiness -
is anathema
to
capitalism.
 
 
 
Sculptor Henry Moore to poet Donald Hall - "The secret
of life is to have something you devote your entire life to,
something you bring everything to, every minute of the day
for your whole life.  And the most important thing is -
it must be something you cannot possibly do.

(END)

The Frog and the Scorpion

A frog and a scorpion met on a stream bank.  The scorpion asked the frog to carry him across on its back.  The frog asked, "How do I know you won't sting me?"  "Because if I do, I'll drown, too" answered the scorpion.  So they set out across the stream.  Halfway across, the scorpion stung the frog.  As the frog started to sink, he knew they'd both die.  With his last breath, he gasped to the scorpion, "Why?!"  "It is my nature.  And you knew I was a scorpion."

Americans do not want the facts.
They do not want to hear how many countries
we've invaded for power and money
nor the number of proxy wars
financed in our name for the same.

Americans do not want to talk
about slavery, the Native Americans
or our rape of "Third World" nations
for necessities like bananas or coltan for cell phones
via the IMF, the World Bank and "free" trade.

Americans do not want to see
that compliant puppet governments
and dictators are America's best friend,
that anywhere real democracy rears its unwelcome head
it's put down by demonizing it and its leaders and/or killing them.
(See Mossadegh, Hamas, Allende and Hugo Chavez .)

Americans do not want to admit
that terrorism is not caused by hatred
or envy of our "freedoms", but by our invasions,
torture, exploitation and slaughter,
or that the US sends three billion taxpayer dollars
to Israel yearly to test white phosphorus,
J-DAMS, DIMES and GBU-39s
on the captive population of Gaza.

Americans will not even TRY
to understand that depressions and recessions,
repetitive bubbles and Wall Street's speculative gambling
are planned in advance by the shameless fat cats
of the plutocracy and the "Federal" banksters.

Americans will not entertain the idea
that American business uses human shields it calls "illegals"
to stave of the threat of paying a living wage
and if they ask for one the boss just calls la migra.

Americans do not want to know
that Main Street was murdered by Wal-Mart and Wall Street,
or that prisons are plantations where the process of manufacturing
is just business carried on by other means.

Americans do not want to hear
that health insurance is a middle man
designed to bleed them into medical bankruptcy,
or that credit is just debt with a fancy name
created to rob them of their homes and their property.

Americans do not want to believe
that plastic is strangling the ocean,
that petro-agriculture is poisoning their food,
that the rain forest's been razed for cheeseburgers,
and that climate change, misnamed "global warming",
warms the "heart" of Big Energy's shareholders.

Americans do not want to be reminded
of the animal holocaust in "farms" that are factories,
which in addition to terror and agony
causes stroke, heart disease and obesity,
or that the runoff makes drinking water a toxic cocktail
of hormones, antibiotics and feces,
that most of the ocean's big fish have been fished
and commercial trawlers scrape the ocean bottom lifeless,
that continual solitary driving of their personal vehicles
helps strand polar bears on the remnants of ice flows.

Americans don't want to look at the fact
that sex, fear and envy persuade them
to buy products that kill them for profit -
alcohol, tobacco, meat and dairy, food additives,
prescription drugs, corn syrup and plastics.

Americans do not want to admit
that love, family, friendship and sexuality
are now no more than profitable commodities,
that wars, sports, TV, shopping and celebrities
are designed to keep their minds off the rape of democracy.

Americans cannot be bothered to discover the political priorities
of people they vote for in the electoral extravaganza,
to look for alternative info though newspapers, TV "news" and talk radio
are talking points and sheer propaganda,
or to acknowledge that the people who "represent" them
have not the people's, but their own, interest in mind,
due to campaign funding's lucrative bonanza.

Americans refuse to see
that schools don't educate for a reason.
An educated public is 300 million dangerous threats
and schools are used to defuse these

by a pre-emptive indoctrination of children
with the wisdom of dog-eat-dog competition
which creates the divide-and-conquer infrastructure
that allows oppressors to blame their own victims.

And since kids might stumble into cooperation and empathy,
those in social programs are deemed weak and pathetic
in an effort to get the victims to agree and accept
that they're the primary cause of the system's effect.

The plutocracy exercises increasing dominion
via consolidation of capital at the people's expense
concentrates it periodically, ratcheting up its intensity,
during engineered crises like wars and depressions.

The United States is no longer the home of the free and the brave
where life, liberty and happiness are pursued,
but of people living in fear of financial and physical terrorism
and co-opted by the carnival of consumerism.

It's a cauldron of inequality, poverty and misery
where lives are lived in quiet desperation,
in free(dom of) speech zones and the pursuit of stuff
in a marked down and militarized nation.

Americans refuse to believe that they've accepted to live
under a system that subjugates, denigrates and infantilizes them,
and that the many creating the wealth at the bottom
are engineered as ignorant, obedient and defensive.

And as the money is funneled up to the few
the many are bought off with shiny oil-based objects -
I-pods, X boxes, PCs, plasma TVs, SUVs,
McMansions, Mickey D's, boob jobs and botox -

strung on a charm bracelet/slave chain
of the non-negotiable American lifestyle
constructed on the ashes our foreign trade policies
have made of other people's rights and their lives.

Americans seem not to notice
that nature has been reduced from The Source
to a package of exploitable resources,
and that citizens are relegated to being consumers
who, in turn, are eaten up by their choices

or that a not-so-invisible hand signs the legislation
that makes foreign and domestic American policy
and turns what started as participatory democracy                   
into a Donner Party version of economics.

Americans don't want
to hear, to see, to speak, or to feel
anything
about what's actually happening to them
or being done in their name,
but most of all they don't want to
THINK
because thinking leads to
cognitive dissonance and confronting the pain
of knowing how the American lifestyle
is, and has been, maintained.

But the aversion therapy administered in schools
and cultural reinforcement thereafter
keeps them safely away from
the TRUTH,
imprisoned like dogs
with electronic shock collars.

And besides, they're so busy with their shopping,
which is Americans' ultimate function,
that they don't have the time to tune into
what that "little voice" has been trying to tell them

that this system relentlessly perpetuates itself
by means of infinite, unlimited growth,
which it carries on by any means necessary
like a parasite that strangles its host.

It HAS to kill the goose (that's us)
who lays the Gross Domestic Product Golden Egg
because it's a no-holds-barred, winner-take-all,
every man on his own for himself free-for-all
until there are no eggs left to take.

It's not 'til they're drowning in hubris and debt
and the system turns around and stings them
that Americans are willing to hear what they already knew -
the scorpion is corporate capitalism.

"Observance of customs and laws can very easily be a cloak for a lie so subtle that our fellow human beings are unable to detect it.  It may help us to escape all criticism, we may even be able to deceive ourselves in the belief of our obvious righteousness.  But deep down, below the surface of the average man's conscience. he hears a voice whispering, "There is something not right," no matter how much his rightness is supported by public opinion or by the moral code." - Carl Gustav Jung

Authors Bio:
Vi's works appear widely both in print and online. She conducts Poetry Workshops and gives readings in Central New York. Her latest chapbook is "Sine Qua Non Antiques (an Arcanum of History, Geography and Treachery).