What do you call this slow motion national train wreck? You have to call it a sad slide into fascism.
I often wonder how things have devolved to the point we currently find ourselves in. What gross error in judgment has allowed this once great country to fall to its current low state? Unfortunately it wasn't a one grievous error, or even just one person's fault. The American public's apathy and concern for their own personal welfare was partly to blame, but that apathy and greed was built up and instilled by the forces behind our national disgrace.
Dana Froomkin pointed out the LTE of Truman Vice-President Henry Wallace on the subject fascism. Its eerie prescience speaks volumes to the advance warning we had of what could happen. I'm struck that Dwight Eisenhower also warned us of what awaited those who were less than vigilant. Both men, Eisenhower and Wallace were forged in a time when fascism wasn't just an abstract political concept, but a real, flesh and blood enemy. Their America answered the call of worlds oppressed to fight against fascism; my America is becoming what they fought against.Guantanamo Bay, the Iraq invasion, the Patriot Act, Electronic Voting all add up to an erosion of those values and Freedoms that made up the America we all desire, the America that was the legend.
George W. Bush's America is one of stinking corruption, pungent and ripe. His America is one where the privileged reap more while the deserving and those in need are left to fend for themselves, like those roof-top refuges of Katrina.
While America's wealth is sucked up to the very top and the jobs of her working class are outsourced overseas to increase the rate of transfer to the top, our President uses fear, hate and religion to keep American's in check.
The founders of our republic built a system of checks and balance into our government's structure to prevent what they feared most, a king. They couldn't and didn't conceive of a merging of corporate and governance that would come to be called fascism. Even if they had the foresight to build in safeguards against such a pernicious merger, then the current crop of "conservative" thinkers would have found fault with it as they have with the safeguards against government and religion.
They had expected that some part of our government to stand up for the people of America as was their intent. Unfortunately we don't see the opposition party doing any real opposition. Oh, there are a few moments and few, very few individuals, but when it comes right down to doing what is important, there is nobody home.
(Just one word to the Democratic Party, bipartisan means bend over, we're driving and you're catching.)
I'll be posting more on the transformation to fascism in the coming days and weeks.
I'd like to leave with a quote from Mr. Wallace,
"The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn democracy"
Henry A. Wallace, Democracy Reborn (New York, 1944), edited by Russell Lord, p.
http://secretary-of-irate.blogspot.com/