Tumbling into yet another seemingly inevitable scenario which finds America off its course, and the solution to its woes in the capable hands of those who created the catastrophe in the first place. And once again, our reality is an illusion perpetuated by a network of corporatized operatives in both high and low places.
Oh, the pleasure they must take as they observe the public -- gormless fools -- twitching and leaping at their merest command. Terrorism! Twitch. Depression! Twitch. Erectile dysfunction! Twitch-twitch. In spite of all the available information which can be accessed by said gormless herd, information which is all mixed in with the electronic dross until it becomes a random scattering of snowflakes in a cyber blizzard, they still respond with the mindlessness of brine shrimp. In the hands of an activated populace, however, such information would be the manipulators' undoing. But fat and happy and thoroughly deluded are the masses.
Plainly put, this country simply is not what people think it is. The America we go around spouting impassioned and woefully misinformed opinions about is a gaudy facade, a storefront shielding the ruins of what it once was from the eyes of consumers. It is not the place evoked by tremulous intoning about freedom and the Founding Fathers, its fate always in the hands of intrepid voters, ever proceeding on a course which is democratic and true to the spirit of liberty.
Far from it.
And while certainly nowhere near the bleak farce of many other countries whose citizens are strong-armed and impoverished by openly corrupt juntas, America has been nonetheless hijacked by more sophisticated forces, ones which would go down the aforementioned route themselves were it not for the fact that blood would be shed -- possibly their own -- and that that's bad for business.
How else to explain the failure of the health care overhaul? When everything in our senses indicates the soundness of the concept, yet through sheer overloading of those senses with distraction and static, it hovers precariously near death?
How also to explain the taking-candy-from-a-baby banking debacle, a Monty Python sketch if there ever was one, where a robber points his gun at a victim and decries the crime wave sweeping the neighborhood while the victim happily turns out his pockets and nods in cork-brained agreement?
Wherever people can be hurt the most, hit the hardest, you will find profiteers. The government and other corporate controlled entities, utterly lacking imagination and creativity, knowing that their schemes if seen by an enlightened majority would never take hold, settled for the easy, easy money: make people scared, hungry and dependent.
And then charge the shit out of them.
As plain as it is appalling, one must only follow the money, as William Goldman wrote so aptly about Watergate but which rather presciently describes an even bigger scandal: Americagate.
The joke -- one of many -- is that Obama's failure to assert his own political will and policies, as well as that of the majority of Americans who elected him, along with those issues which are, sadly, confoundingly, direct continuations of Bush policies, have been shrilly decried by his disloyal opposition, proving that the only thing that the opposition (read: Republicans, one and all) care about is Obama's defeat. Other than that they have no policy, no legislation, no plan for Americans to figure a way through the dysfunctional morass their lives have become. The opposition is only that. If he goes left, they move right. Up, down. It makes no difference. This is large scale insurrection, large scale, organized treason. It is a thousand points of darkness, a rain of splintering shards of hate, a murder of small coups which have taken root in the nation's very nerve system.
So this is the state of the union as it is today. And not even an able, talented president can fix it.