Quite a rant here.
http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/5865In the reign of the one-nutted king
by Joe Bageant | Mar 4 2007 -
---Janked rats cried for blood as the prosthetic hand of love waved goodbye to reason
By Joe Bageant
Not long ago protesting Danish construction workers won a historic victory against workplace tyranny---they retained their company sponsored on-the-job-beer breaks. Heartless employers being what they are, had asked workers to pay half the cost of the beer. Oppression is ever boundless.
About that same time last fall a couple hundred American protesters gathered in a Washington D.C. parking lot. Chronic liberal malcontents, they had the gall to ask why our government was slaughtering hundreds of thousands of abysmally ordinary folks in Iraq, people moreover like themselves who, even under Saddam Hussein, whose reign was so infamously marked by his penchant for black velvet paintings and the most sordid kinds of torture, nevertheless managed to do what most common folks do in the world---send the kids off to school every morning, cursed the Baghdad traffic, and perhaps a little fudged on their taxes. So why are they being wiped out at great public expense, and for no apparent reason?
This being a free republic, the American protesters stood in the parking lot, packed butthole to belly button inside one of our fatherland’s designated Free Speech Zones (a bad case of branding if ever there was one), and though they are no longer called that, the function is still the same. Jabbing their signs upward, the protesters tried to wedge their message into the wavering thicket of signage above their heads. Between rather strangely meterless chants, such as “One, two, three, four, end the war!” the evil librul protestors were left to contemplate just what those the Plexiglas faced squadrons of police ninjas might do, should one of the dissidents make a cautious move toward the Porto Johns, which were placed slightly over the yellow painted line that assumedly marked the outer boundary free speech in America. Was it better to ease over into the Porto John, or to hold it until the “designated hour of disassemblage”? However ineffective state supervised dissidence may be here, protesting is hard going in America. No Dane’s beer wrecked bladder could survive it.
Pity the poor American left, (who would be considered right wing moderates in most of the world, but in America being against any war makes you a leftist.) Any time American leftists start pointing at the root causes of our national disease, they are neatly handed a fresh bloody war to oppose. Each new generation of the left gets its energies sapped, gets locked into the position of continually opposing one war, then another and another. Ever since World War I (when they came up with the novel idea of world peace, a notion now considered completely goofball in America today) they’ve been standing on the street corners or in the parks---or more recently, inside the Free Speech Zones way the hell out at the edge of town. At any rate, they can never come close to naming the dark and profitable tumor at the heart of America, the economic system under which we all live. To survive and grow, the American system needs war, making war inevitable. To keep up the pretense of freedom it needs harmless dissent.
America has a long record of stifling dissent exactly when dissent is most needed. Democracy American style means we get free speech for trivial matters but not for life-and-death issues. When an election is stolen, the very party from whom it was stolen refuses to protest the theft because well, “Nobody likes sour grapes, do they?” thereby assuring future electoral thefts. When America supplies Israel with cluster bombs to kill Palestinian children and grandmothers, you don’t see rallies against Israel or American arms cartels. You see yet another exercise of free speech on behalf those things the politicians and corporations could care less about, and thus grant us permission to “dissent” upon. Issues such as gender and identity, or just about anything related to sexual freedom: “Go ahead, parade and rant about your own penises and vulvas. Just don’t challenge the banks, the war machine or the fraudulent democratic process by which we manage the people. Remember, fucking with these things is called terrorism. So stick to your own narrow “issues” like sexual freedom and nobody will get hurt. Got it punk?”
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