It's not an original idea, but one could certainly make the case that the rabid supporters of George W. Bush have become a large and very dangerous cult. Let's take a look at just a few of the warning signs that a group has become a cult:
-Cult members are focused on a leader with zealous, unquestioning commitment.
-Questioning, doubt, and dissent are discouraged.
-The cult leader generates a polarizing "us-versus-them" mentality.
I've encountered these traits over and over again when speaking with Bush supporters. As the evidence simply continues to pile up that Bush lied us into an unwinnable war, in order to solidify his own power, the cult members turn facts and figures upside down in order to remove blame from the leader and place it instead on the party who dares to question. They will repeat the leader's statements, which are clearly not true, in the belief that the repetition will make them so. That's not patriotism; that is a pathology of sociopathic behavior.
When does a cult become a culture? Maybe a better question would be, how has our American culture been appropriated and turned into an enormous cult--the cult of mechanized death and technologically advanced destruction?
I'll take some heat for saying it, but our glorification of military power and the soldierly lifestyle is just wrong-headed. Our soldiers have become pawns in a game of aggression; something that should never have happened. They've been lied to and used up for the desires of the few, against the greater good of the many.
The military, as it stands now, is no longer an honorable profession. The mechanization and technology of the process of inflicting death in vast numbers and from a distance has changed the paradigm. Our military has transformed from a defensive, measured, and appropriate last resort into a force of aggression, death, and a living culture of racism and hatred. But I do not place the blame on the young men and women who were deceived into giving up their lives by the hollow chanting of a cruel leader. They simply were, and continue to be, in the wrong place at the wrong time.
No, the blame for this culture-shifting misuse of military power lies at the feet of of George W. Bush and his secretive inner circle of neo-fascists.
Bush has capitalized on our existing culture of destruction by playing on our fears and taking advantage of our inherent tendency toward violence, to instigate a war of aggression against an abstraction, a "war on terror". And since it is impossible to fight a war against an ideology (where do you aim?), our war will go on forever, or as long as it takes for our cult leader to cement his position in history.
The culture is bad enough; the cult is the face of evil itself.
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