Power .....

September 6, 2021

Patrick Lawrence asks some pertinent questions of the American people.

Are Americans going to sit around indefinitely eating potato chips while the State Department and Treasury starve Venezuelan children? Are Americans going to play video games while Israel fires U.S.–made missiles into Damascus from Lebanese airspace—two violations of international law?

Are Americans going to sit around watching corporate sports while the Pentagon drone-murders entire families and Congress votes to increase its post–Afghanistan budget? Are Americans going to sit on their sofas while the United States condemns several generations of Cubans to lives of desperation because they have chosen to live in a socialist republic?

Are Americans going spectate on their sofas while the CIA and other rogue intelligence agencies subvert the Republic of Nicaragua, the Syrian Arab Republic, and any other nation that resists American hegemony? Are Americans going continue stuffing their faces with Cheetos, Hot Pockets, and Bac–O’–Bits while the Saudis use American–supplied bombers and bombs to drive Yemen into a state of famine and reduce its people to  Dachau-like skeletons? 

Are Americans going to sit around silently while no-neck generals push the U.S. relentlessly toward military confrontations with China and Russia, two nuclear-armed nations? Are Americans going to shop on Amazon while The New York Times, CNN, and the rest of the monstrous propaganda machine cultivate their ignorance—purposefully, knowingly, and with malign intent—by way of gross omissions and outright falsehoods as to America’s international conduct?

Are Americans going to sit around worrying about their lawns while climate change burns half the country, floods the other half, and a federal judge tells the Biden administration it is obliged by law to auction new oil– and gas-drilling leases on hundreds of millions of acres? 

Are Americans going to read The New Yorker and The Nation while mainstream journalists cheer the creeping suppression of independent media and post-adolescent know-nothings in Silicon Valley are authorized to censor their speech, what Americans read, and—it will come—what Americans think?

Are Americans going to sit around dribbling on their shirtfronts while Julian Assange, Daniel Hale, Steven Donziger, and other courageous people acting in their behalf are made victims of extravagantly corrupted judicial systems? 

Are Americans going to remain silent while millions of them are malnourished and evicted from their homes in the name of the market god? Are Americans going to sit around while millions more get sick because they can’t afford perfectly ordinary medical care and those who could remedy this crisis are paid by insurers, hospitals associations, and drug companies to refuse to do so? Are Americans going to sit around while Big Pharma treats a global health crisis as if it were simply an eternal profit center?

Are Americans going to sit around stuffing their faces with chlorinated chicken, Velveeta, and Pepsi while corporations colonize every minute of their lives and every cell in their bodies? Are Americans going to sit around soporifically watching television while Rachel Maddow takes home $30 million a year for turning news into a Barnum and Bailey circus? 

Are Americans going to sit around watching Walt Disney movies while Alexandria Ocasio–Cortez and other such “progressives” betray every voter who got them into office? Are Americans going to sit around talking about their IRA accounts while a dense web of mind-manipulating institutions, corporations, corrupt pols, and the national security state totalizes its grip on power?

Not one year into the Biden presidency, the mind regurgitates. The mind dreams of exile in the way all those principled anti–Cold War people expatriated during the 1950s, having had enough. 

And the mind wonders.  When?

When are Americans going to stand up? When are Americans going to clear the litter millionaire bums have left on their village greens and reclaim their public space? When are Americans going to stop indulging the weak-minded fiction that they are powerless?

When are Americans going to transcend the atomization of American society systematically inflicted upon it since April 30, 1975, and learn again to speak and act for the commonweal? When are Americans going to present themselves with dignity to show they have regained their self-respect, their respect for those who have to look at them, and their respect for their reawakened civic selves?

When are Americans going to figure out that a global class war rages and that race is a subset of class and not the other way around? When are Americans going to stop bickering about pronouns, gender preferences, bathroom doors, bronze statues, identity politics, and all such distracting rubbish?

When are Americans going to read the scholarly definition of fascism and then look at themselves in their mirrors? When are Americans going to dismember the scam economic “model” that produces and reproduces billionaires and an ever more impoverished majority?

When are Americans going to admit to ourselves that America’s nuclear weapons, chemical weapons, biological weapons, drones, bombs, and landmines are the root reason all these weapons proliferate globally? When are Americans going to tell the Pentagon, “That’s our money.” When are Americans going to demand radical action to counter the climate crisis and change their lives—joyfully and with commitment?

When are Americans going to impose civilian control over the CIA and the other appendages of the “national security” octopus? When are Americans going to say, No!” to subversive “democracy promotion” interventions in other nations? When are Americans going to reject the Russophobia and Sinophobia their “leaders” and their clerks in the press malignly stir up? When are Americans going to object that the U.S. started and prolonged the Cold War because the Pentagon needed it and defense contractors profited from it? 

When are Americans going to turn off their televisions? When are Americans going to stop eating Fritos? When are Americans going to stop bothering to write their congressmen?  When are Americans going to stop pretending their political process is intact and voting matters?

When are Americans going to stop pretending Joe Biden is mentally competent? When are Americans going to stop pretending Joe Biden is the second coming of FDR? When are Americans going to stop pretending Antony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, and Ned Price are anything more than programmed robots? 

When are Americans going to recognize that The New York Times is now a propaganda organ and the future of journalism lies in independent media?

This article by Patrick Lawrence who is Salon's foreign affairs columnist, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, a columnist, essayist, author and lecturer, he authored several books.

My usual many thanks to all.