Who's The Fairest of Them All?
Is it...
America The Beautiful?
Our wonderful Merica?
...that stretches
from sea to sea?
Is it us? America? Are we really the fairest nation of them all? Could it be? All that bright and shiney technology we have costumed ourselves with over the last hundred years sure has dressed the hillbillies we once were up. Bright and Shiney Things. Gagets. Trinkets. The Jewelery of Technology. Just the same jazzed up junk we gave the indians for manhattan isle.
Technology? It's just cosmetics. Under all that makeup beats America's Savage Heart. She's really only a teenager by world standards...she's still wet behind the ears...impulsive...a yougin...just three hundred and some...with all the myopia and self obscession that goes with it. Just a madeup teenager playing adult over the phone. Looking in the mirror. All the time. That's us? Right?
We are The Best. Aren't we? Better than all the other countries in the world...at least. Where did we get this Idealized Self Image? Who made us the defender of freedom in the world...or the world's policeman? Who said that we were The Best?
I'm afraid we did. We nominated ourseves. It's all in our heads. We have technically mutated into some kind of Porno Cult of Personality where people we'll never know dance in our heads and tell us who we are and want to be every day. We have been conditioned by the TV...which begat the Computer and it's enchanting tenticles and webs of control. We don't look into mirrors...but...into screens of images...to discern...who we are. It's like we're on drugs or something.
So it's through The Looking Glass...baby. We don't believe in genocide but where are the American Indians? We are the land of bounty but where are our old growth forests and where do the buffalo roam? We don't believe in torture and concentration camps but what about the ways we dealt with the WW II American Japs and the current day Towelhead Terrorists? Who starts the wars these days? Who has more WMD's than anyone else? We have poisoned the life of many a nation though CIA dirty tricks and hardball politics. We don't even believe that it is our corporate excrement that is polluting the planet...driving 100 species a day into extinction...and warming the entire globe...changing the climate. Oh what a little makeup will do! But it takes more than the makeup that technology delivers to warp a nation's consciousness into such recesses of denial...and...doublespeak.
America looks into the mirror...but...doesn't see. She's just another junkie high on the drug of True Belief...just seeing the caked on makeup spun of False Idealism and The Imagery of Illusion...all supported by snorting the straw god supply side jesus...how can any nation in this condition even begin to see reality?
Take a good look in the mirror America. Do you see any pimples? Any blemishes? Any problems?
America goes out most every night to work her corner of the world. She's hooked on false religion. She's hooked on oil. She's hooked on the corporate buck. She's caked with makeup and wearing a whole bunch of shiney jewelery. Her eyes are glazed with True Belief...the best drug of all. She's a working girl...
A Whore for Oil.
A Whore for Money.
...but she thinks 'jesus' and 'democracy' make her
smell nice. Hunter S. Thompson said this is
how history will judge us. Just Whores.
Who are we?
Can we even take an honest look?
To see things as they actually are is the only way to change. Personally? I don't think we ever will. To actually see what it is that we have become...is too shocking. We are too far gone for that.
Uh oh...Plato's Cave Metaphor comes to mind.
But I don't mind.
You can kill this messenger.
What America needs the most is A Little Humility.
...and a new president would help too.