ONE WICKED WORLD
DON’T LOOK BACK or you’ll be turned to salt, whatever that means. A bad as it gets though there’s always a light at the end of the tunnel. As politicians juggle constituents against ideologues, police battle bad guys and good guys alike, industrialists move in on developing countries for profit and tax dodges, the tripartite 545 in DC plot to maneuver the Arab Spring to advantage, the military might satisfies the shock and awe doctrine paving the way to US suzerainty, debt and deficit strangle the country, weather patterns go berserk, outer space is impacted with space junk in orbit, infrastructure is crumbling, pollution is a NIMBY project, Recession and inflation continue unabated, prisons for profit prosper, whistleblowers are convicted of espionage, middle class is shrinking, free-market capitalism crowds out social programs – still we survive in multifarious ways and means.
While drone bombs snuff out lives around the world people still attend college classes and have vacations on the Great Lakes. Never mind that there are still torturous activities going on at Abu Graib and Guantanamo, that’s just collateral damage in this business of war. Your neighbor the cop needs your dollars for the county coffers as he tickets and arrests you for infractions of law, saying “have a nice day, Mrs. Fogarty”. We can still shop freely, find entertainment in smoke-free establishments, navigate our tipsy ways home however. It’s not as drastic as Nazi Germany or Communist Russia.
The famous saying that the price of liberty is constant vigilance has been superseded via the process of outlawing vigilance through homeland security court and legislative decrees, malfeasance, inexorably, phase by phase, until automatically negated. What has transpired and continues to do so is the coordinated empire building process which sets controls in place and ready troops and equipment to take over any situation that crops up, even such benign acts as security leaks and peccadilloes of statute trumped up to alleged pejorative of “aiding the enemy” or “espionage”, non-sequiturs and out of context. All is in readiness for military dictatorship. Yet life goes on here even as it does in Baghdad because the empire wants only acquiescence and not total annihilation. Fast and furious onslaught being the method, the aftermath is left to the populace and troops surveilling the conquered peoples. Imperialist conquerors want the natural resources first and foremost with no resistance possible. Any populace is of course taxable and available to market to for commerce. Unto this closing network go we in pseudo-freedom. Resistance, however, is not futile. Resistance is essential simply because without resistance the power mongers take more interminably. Balance is only achieved at the point of what works. Americans are malleable but the strain is felt albeit not enough to create dissension but for the few who feel compelled to disrupt the order and are dealt with accordingly in harsh attempt to quell insubordination before it influences others. This is the state of affairs just now in the US. There are dissenting groups, therefore the great crackdown attempts.
In the Arab bloc the US has pinpointed its target spots as indicative of takeover one blighted location at a time. The Arab Spring is but a ploy to prepare the region for democratic incursion, nation building in a capitalistic way after knocking the wind out of established cultures leaving them malleable when once commerce and infrastructure are reestablished. All the Middle East under capitalistic control is the goal. Terrorism got in the way, it is true and still is, yet keeps the armament manufacturers and military contractors busy. It was the catalyst wanted by the bush administration and carried forward by the Obama administration to continue the orchestrated imperial empire plan. It was the capitalistic surprise that worked as bush smirked and cheney nudged his contractual buddies to submit bids. That’s how war works.
Meanwhile here at home in the USA the knowledge of all this is like a canker sore spreading yet mildly enough for most to go about life as usual since in BRAVE NEW WORLD style the authorities have learned that rewarding desired behavior is an easier way to rule than the long-established NINETEEN-EIGHTY-FOUR method. Not to infer that force is no longer employed, options are granted to avoid conflict if the populace learns the tactics and plays by those rules, liberties withdrawn incrementally. Walk in enfilade and unison is the basic premise, carry out your prescribed regimen whatever it may be without making waves. The classes of workers and other hierarchical divisions fall in line according to each subdivision of status. It’s an ordered world which employs measured disorder – Naomi Klein’s “Shock Doctrine” – to bolster its premise and prowess. It is the Roman ideal at work once again, promulgated of old, carried on by European powers and now rests primarily in American directives. The so-called NEW WORLD ORDER is near in session unannounced.
It is not a pretty world and not to be long lived. It is the culmination of millennia. History is but a chronicle of warfare and negotiations. The power bases are learning to cope with the detractors because of public opinion in a worldwide communications system. We still have that voice, those who find imbalance odious. There is always a point of divide that resists crossing and although a movable fulcrum has resilient properties based on human needs. The core is rotten but amenable to social order in its evolving demands so long as the leaders are getting what they want, which they assuredly are. The push for more is a given and this is why vigilance is mounted even when made illegal. Protagonists will always arise right on time. The flack feedback from the Bradley Manning affair has caused some adjustments already for the power base finds itself disgraced from both the leaked information and the retaliatory tactics -that leverage factor which shifts the fulcrum of preponderance incrementally. In the Frederick Douglass litany the power base, the power and money elite, take it to the limit until stopped at the borderline whereat the human spirit says it must go no further. Passing that line drawn in the sand results in total annihilation such as Hitler begot, hence his own annihilation. This equation is known to the rulers if not the myrmidons and homunculi, those dispensable troops in any timeframe. This wicked world is doomed in any case. They can only go so far nonetheless. Why bush, cheney and co. were not indicted for their crimes against humanity is an anomaly when lesser ranking beings are routinely raked over the coals as scapegoats. Leakers and whistleblowers are ironically outlawed by the very persons perpetrating the illegal acts revealed.
This is the end of a very long era in any case. It is chronicled in multiple reports. The powers of evil have one last shot at their totalitarian state which they are assuredly taking full advantage thereof. Just as the almighty automobile has allowed for comfort and convenience yet hastens its own demise by diminishing energy to propel it, the New Imperial Roman Empire rushes to its demise in a final cataclysm of rapturous Armageddon, the final battle which is in its penultimate stages now. Biblically or scientifically, spiritually or historically, the end is the same, the world is changing. The plains of Megiddo are metastasizing throughout the world even unto the heartland of America. All are caught up in the battle now. Few are looking back.
The New World has been tamed and regimented. Australia is a civilized nation grown from out exiled convicts, far from a prison island’s distant and dismal beginning which as usual ignored or displaced and mistreated the indigenous people. Africa is undergoing its upheaval, no more the dark continent but translucent. South Africa has been modernized, enlightened, somewhat de-apartheid-ed. Europe West has been tamed of imperialism; Europe East emerges as Western-oriented and a convenient locale for internet scams. Asia undergoes capitalistic changes that ameliorate communistic Buddhism. Russia is decommissioned though still a very large force. The One World Government impulse springs into action, precursor to the final conflict. All is nigh. All is revealed as wicked. Yet goodness exists too, the eternal battle now transpiring between good and evil, sometimes hard to differentiate in legal-social terms but automatically clear in moral-ethical terms.
Still and all in all, you can enjoy life here if you can manage to stay out of the scrambling lanes and you can afford the price. There are ways to survive without a lot of money and ways to avoid the hubbub of law and surveillance. That’s what it’s come to even with the incredible technology now available, perhaps largely because of it, i.e. stay out of the warzones unless you’re a protagonist of honor and integrity, Constitutional law (the original Constitution, not the emendated), conscientious objector, or just irked by the hypocrisy of it all. We’re all being monitored, of that there is no doubt, which actually many do not seem overly concerned about. For most it’s a dichotomous position of making one’s perceptions known whereas not too vociferously, stay within the lanes but resist repression intellectually and professionally, or at least in decency and respect for other’s rights.
In the 60s there was a sense of it being fun to be a revolutionary. Now it’s a lot more drastic. They play much rougher now. Rumor of drone surveillance in Homeland Security terms, that is, right here at home, is circulating, which means more 4th Amendment violations, even spying through residential walls. The potential for abuse is obvious. Random glimpses could lead to voyeurism or arrests depending on what is observed surreptitiously. Imagine uniformed personnel watching your bedroom from their monitor stations’ televised screens and discussing the particulars.
Here we are in this incredibly complicated circumstance which reduces to despots versus the rest of us as usual. If we could get rid of them – there’d just be more to take their places. There is a sense of urgency visceral to the sensors. C’mon, let’s get this over with, seems the ethereal and material message.
Iniquity rules this world. Why this is so comes down to physical matter, these bodies that we inhabit that may be coerced through pain and pleasure to do the bidding of others. Who wants to be a martyr? It is only the mind that replicates ethereal consciousness beyond the confines of matter. Conscience rises above. Depravity sinks below. Wickedness always seems to win the battle but only in the context of earthly life, a fleeting moment of time. Who will win the fight over whistleblowing, for instance? In the immediate the condemners; in the longer term the leakers, of course. The truth must always be told; it can be none other. It is clear that exposure is the correct way, that hiding the truth is the false way, yet the legitimacy is reversed in immediate earthly terms, namely legal, patriotic, which are always proven to be averse to right and righteousness in the ultimate historic terms. These are the very terms that the authoritarians do not want to hear and actually legislate and decree against to protect their iniquity. History tells it differently. Bones and artifacts cannot lie. How could they? They’re bones, dry bones, rocks, architecture. They tell of our iniquities and our fates. Forensic science now knows how to read those bones and building blocks for their always intriguing messages.
Yes, it’s a wicked world, no doubt there. Humankind is by temptation iniquitous. The animal kingdom is less so but still brutal and instinctive to a fault. Humans try to emulate that instinct and have gotten rather astute at that at times, lately quite efficient. Humans do not torture one another because the social order condones it; humans torture because they are inclined toward the perverse. Never mind the deficiencies of eminent domain, the game goes on regardless the inefficiencies for it does not bother the proponents that their plans do not always work out, the rewards are transient but gainful anyway if only for the fleeting moment. Such is the mentality of earthlings. It’s a lowdown premise, yes, to be sure, but one that seems to work anyway for the most part. Power will risk future admonition for its immediate ego trip.
The housewife in her kimono, the male in his gentlemanly smoking jacket attire, the kids grown and adjusted to life such as it is, the world goes on accordingly war and peace and all things assimilated. The newspapers, often censored, have not been commandeered yet; they fail on their own terms. Police do not quite randomly break down doors in pre-dawn twilight. Citizens are not often gunned down for congregating although they may be gassed, hosed or tasered, certainly arrested. Though there are vestiges of these indicators of totalitarianism the country still functions as it did hitherto at least to the casual observer. The undercurrent of unease is mollified by the placid veneer of cultural heritage. Yet there is a certain suspense hanging in the air as if a poltergeist figment ready to pounce as he suddenly makes himself visible like a rabid Cheshire Cat. These are the feelings we now live with, the feeling that you can be arrested at any time and placed in dingy dungeon squalor with odious cellmates and surly insolent guards and charged with God knows what offenses legally justifiable or not. That is the sense we all live with now, our middle class existence but a slim dimension away from that of outright oppression and slave labor.
Yes, slave labor. Whether slaving for the incarceration system or the commerce system it acquires that demeanor. Since the constitutional guarantees have been phased out there is no Bill of Rights anymore. It has become as “quaint” as the Geneva Accords. There’s no denying that this country’s gone to the dogs of war and usury; they’re just not about to broadcast the news just yet. Like Hitler they’re holding their cards tight to their vest pockets. Then when they finally feel ready and able to reveal their true plans they’ll be cut down even with their hands on the gold bullion. That’s how it always works though the despots never relate to the relativity of the syndrome. It’s coming true again though the steps must be taken again as always to connect the dots. The inevitable will transpire once again, this time rather momentously. This is the advent of THE FIRE NEXT TIME.
I personally lost respect for this country’s patriotism at an early age, something like 1957 or thereabouts when I was but still a youngish teenager. I found out. I found that all is falsified, that America is just another imperialist opportunistic bunch of Vikings on the make, Spaniards on the take, European history revised but with same intentions. Nothing has changed since then, has only grown in reviled intensity as values slip to substandard. Take what you can for they will surely take what they can from you. That is the extreme bottom line to American idealism, the profit margin hedonism. America is nothing but usury tempered with sensationalism and sentimentality. All data supports this, whether law or custom; nothing else matters to the controllers and the followers, law being malleable and double standardized.
The metaphorical fireplace is aglow. Autumnal temperatures pervade. The semblance of order maintains regardless the sinking feeling of oblivion. This little planet is unique in its miseries: they entice as if pleasures. Schadenfreude is allowed and even encouraged. Terrorists do not hate us for our freedoms: they hate us for our subjugating arrogance. The fireplace embers dim, the heat is gone, nothing lasts. We can still exist in comfort and relative prosperity albeit under a sinister cloud cover that demands labor and obeisance. It has been said that “It’s hard to grow older without growing bitter”. The wickedness of this world cannot be assuaged with Pollyanna euphuisms. Acknowledging iniquity and the futility of mediating it seems the prudent realistic way. Pleasures and happiness, even sardonic humor, then acquire a fleeting but gratifying contentment. We can’t win; we sometimes breakeven; but eventually we do leave the game. Those are the ground rules on this precarious yet immemorial world.
mjmackay 