Advancing on the second almost-final edit of the book at a steady pace.
As is typical, while doing this, a plotline and a situation emerged unexpectedly from me – and now I’ve also finished writing a 45 page story which is inconveniently too long to be a short story, and too short to be a book. But I’m busy editing that, as well. Another two or three works of this length and I guess that’s a short little book.
There are advantages to being an ‘outsider’ to American society. It allows one to see things that the citizens raised within the country are generally unable to. Something like those who live beside the sea, and who don’t hear the roar of the waves anymore, because they’ve become so accustomed to it.
(Perhaps that’s why cinema artists like Wim Wenders and Werner Herzog have each been able to create such fascinating dissections of US culture.)
I find the single most important aspect to me, of America, is how the citizens perceive ‘politics.’
Politics is seen as merely the equivalent perceptually, of ‘another channel on the TV’ – something distant. A thing to be groaned over, or seethed about, but ultimately – its removed from direct impact in citizen’s daily lives. A whole culture of phrases and cliches have been allowed to develop within western society, like a form of etymological mold, in order to describe, minimize, and shrug off the doings of those with political power.
And as the status quo remains the same, and human liberties decrease, and the profit motive for warfare continues to crouch unnoticed behind the raggedy shit-stained torn flag of ‘patriotism,’ in order to keep justifying mass murder – a thinking person has to pause and wonder…
But politics in America is that distant thing, requiring just a click of the remote control to change the channel, to something less complex or more pleasing.
Whereas the rest of the world knows that ‘politics’ is what killed their mother, or father, or friends, or family. It was politics that dropped that bomb which killed those children, including the neighbors toddler. It was politics that made mom have to do those things with soldiers in order to find food for the family.
Politics, for the larger world beyond America, is personal. Its not a well-framed distant channel of happenstance, hanging over there on the wall like a banal cheap desiderata praying to a nonexistent deity. Its what blew your fathers head off and smeared his brains along a wall, and every day as you trudge to school you can still see the smear.
America has a new President, and to those who naively base their judgment on the color of a person’s skin, rather than the content of their character (thank you MLK) – this was a new day dawning. There’s a vast sound of a hundred million people slumping back on their sofa’s and figuring all’s right with the world. No deeper attention need be required.
‘Change’ has come.
Its not surprising that citizens might seriously believe that, given their disconnection to the reality of what ‘politics’ means. They weren’t looking too closely to begin with, and the general education level – well below many other nations, means they lack the reasoning skills to perceive the complex web unfolding around them.
Change doesn’t seem to include the stopping of torture, or the death squads roaming the world and assassinating whoever appears to be ‘an enemy’. ‘Change’ doesn’t mean stopping of kidnapping of people and secretly transporting them to countries who like using power drills on human skin. Change doesn’t mean the withdrawal of the tens of thousands of paid thugs and mercenaries from a country invaded for no valid or legal reason.
On the contrary, ‘change’ seems to mean even more people will experience a personal view of politics, as new countries are invaded in a global imperialism which shows no sign of stopping. (The only positive, is that the expansion in genocide is much like that of any animal whose head has already been cut off, but whose limbs continue to move mechanically.) Change in this semantically-twisted version of democracy also seems to mean forcing citizens to have no choice but to ‘volunteer’ to work for the State, wear uniforms, chant slogans. Change also doesn’t mean justice and public trials for the war criminals who caused more than a million dead. Change doesnt mean justice for those men, women and children trapped in a prison-sized country, being blown apart, burned, and melted by US-supplied chemicals.
Change, I would have thought, is also not about continued, retarded excessive printing of worthless currency, and continuing to bully the world into accepting that these worthless slips of paper represent anything of meaning, value, or currency.
‘Change’ (the last time I looked) doesn’t mean ‘continue to think you can expand fake colonial wars of aggression on countries weaker than you, in order to steal their wealth.’
‘Change’ is not carte blanche to continue with the unmitigated greed of consumerism and capitalism.
Its cold comfort to know that History repeats itself. And those who do not learn from history, are condemned to repeat it.
I think of the Mussolini line, defining Fascism. “It is the merger of State and Corporate power.”
Naturally, disconnected from what ‘politics’ really is, the citizens here will most likely think they’ll know how to behave around it, as it rises, spreads, and scoops them up. They’ll admire the flags, try and outdo each other to prove their ‘patriotism’. Citizens will almost certainly want to ‘talk reasonably,’ and argue, debate, discuss – and ’share’ what they feel…all the way to being sealed in the cattle trucks-
when ‘Politics’ in America, finally becomes personal.
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