Imus, Mangum, Illegal Aliens, Mr. Cheney's Threat - What Does It All Tell Us?

A few days ago, someone sent me a video of a song. “If I Should Die Before You Wake” is powerful. Very. It includes pictures like one of a U.S. Soldier “offering five” to a little Iraqi boy. Like one I posted on my website some time ago, that of a soldier holding a sleeping little Iraqi girl who without him was otherwise traumatized by fear and disconsolate, it’s powerfully emotive stuff.

Yes, I told the missive’s sender, it put a lump in my throat, too. But, I added, perhaps not for the same reasons.

You see, I said, I've fought for this country, too. I've killed for it, and I've felt bullets and shrapnel pass through my flesh. Some of the latter worked its way out of me just the other day, matter of fact; and a couple of years ago, I recovered some of the hearing in an ear after digging out of the ear canal a piece of shrapnel that must have been in my head (yeah, that might explain some things, too) for years.

I've been there. I've also been the mouse in the corner where the planning for things like Iraq was and is concerned.

I’ve been there, but don't LIKE to destroy anyone's illusions, especially about a thing like this, and I certainly don't like to offend anyone, either. But I was raised to be a man of honor by a man I might otherwise consider a saint, and I can do no other than point out that to say our soldiers, these supremely brave and decent young men and women, are NOT fighting for our freedom.

And that they think they are fighting for their country and its freedom makes only the difference that they are fighting for what they believe. They, like most who hear this song, are simply deceived. They are the victims of the most modern and most powerful propaganda ever devised (of course – why would a nation as advanced in science, medicine, technology and all the rest be otherwise?)

In fact, a federal (CIA) program costing the parents and grandparents of these soldiers millions and intended to do just that has deceived them and us. That program, the predecessor for others more technical and state-of-the-art, was Operation Mockingbird (you can google it, or go to my website www.judoknighterrant.com).

I assure everyone who reads this that no one agonizes over this war more than I. It is the only reason I endure the maddeningly commercial-mutilated scheduling and programming or watch the execrably bad entertainment and political punditry of today’s television. More, I search the internet newspapers daily in my effort to stay current – somebody should show that much interest, goddammit – on casualties and events in Iraq and Afghanistan. The frustration and fury of having to watch the networks juxtaposition blazoned, yet inconsequential nonsense like the recent Imus Affair, with a flow strip across the bottom announcing irregularly and rarely the deaths of our soldiers in a war beggars description.

It probably tells anyone elsewhere in the world who sees it everything he needs to know about us, too. In the nation who professes to the world its respect for the individual and his rights, this is what we actually do.

The totality of my frustration includes the obvious fact that the nation is so decadent, so stupidly stultified and political ideological, that it permits the government to spend the lives of their neighbors' children on what amounts to little more than satisfying the ambitions of the military industrial complex corporations and their scion, George W. Bush.

There are so many examples of the Operation Mockingbird propaganda lying being leveled against us all that it would be impossible to pick one representative of the rest. FoxNews expert Col. David Hunt came pretty close this morning. He said that inasmuch as there were more people being killed in Iraq (more attacks being made, is the way he actually put it), the "surge" in the number of troops being committed must be "working."

If you have to read that again, by all means do it. More killing by our enemy means we're doing better. If there remain any people who don’t recognize that as Orwell’s Newspeak, I’d like to know what they do see.

You do remember “Newspeak,” don’t you? Newspeak was designed to remove all connotation and shade of meaning from language, to leave remaining only simple antonyms or dichotomies – happiness and sadness, pleasure and pain, good thoughts and bad thoughts (i.e., “thought crimes”). Rendered simple-minded in effect by Newspeak, the public could do nothing but submit to the total dominance of the State. You don’t recognize that today? Really? Operation Mockingbird has been even more effective than even I realized.

Folks, get it through you heads that you were lied to, that you're being lied to, and that this war is deliberately being drawn out to the greatest length and extent possible. The reasons and motives are obvious, demonstrated relentlessly every day by the same television being used to addle your brains. More, take any other offense from stealing cookies to murder, and show me a prosecutor who couldn't win a conviction against a defendant who put forward as a defense the same arguments being made by the military industrial complex, their media, and their president.

This is ridiculous and it is criminal - and no amount of beautiful lyrics and melody, in a parody of a child's night time prayers, can change that. We, the people of the United States are responsible.

We have the duty and responsibility to either commit everything we have to "victory" (and, as I've already written elsewhere on my page here, that means killing - killing everyone who stands or might stand against us), or leave. Everything else is immoral, and immoral in the highest possible degree. History, including that the memories of all the families whose sons and daughters we are spending, won't forget.

Neither will affiliation with a political party expiate individual responsibility and guilt for what is going on. It won’t do to simply say, I’m a Democrat, or I’m a Republican in answer to being questioned about one’s support for or tolerance of this war.

It won’t do, either, to say “It’s my country.” That was the “Good German Excuse” that permitted madmen to murder millions of people a few decades ago. I concluded my answer to the lady who sent me the song by saying that I was sorry, truly sorry, to gainsay the lyrics of a song as beautiful as this; but, I said, honor demands it. This is wrong!

Meanwhile, the monumental success of federal government programs like Mockingbird goes on being demonstrated by things like the incredible Don Imus Affair. Already, the government co-opted media has moved into the “erase by media silence” phase of its damage control operation concerning the Duke University Lacrosse Team. There will, of course, be a blizzard of lawsuits – most, if not all, against the several television networks who pilloried the players from the beginning of the matter, and you can bet that as I write this the master propagandists and “spin-doctors” of the media are lucubrating night after night.

Damage control will have begun long before news of rape charges having been dropped, matter of fact.

One might – obviously, I should think - expect that the several patriarchal corporations owning the several television networks involved not only drew all the same conclusions rational people did once having learned of the total absence of evidence in the matter, it is also certain that the corporations choice to permit pillorying of the young men by such feminist hatemongers as Nancy Grace and Wendy Murphy was based on the now infamous Ford Pinto Rule. Defense of the lawsuits, that is, would cost far less than profits to be realized by the media assault on the lives of three young men.

Hate sells, after all, and hate like that of the sexist feminist or racist Afro-American sells in proportions irresistible to an “American” capitalist.

Even people the caliber of Grace and Murphy, were their minds not riddled by the dementia of feminist sexism, would have known from the outset that prosecution was impossible. Not even our legal and courtroom procedure having to do with rape, gutted as it is by feminist sexism, is that bad. The conclusion for the candid observer from outside the affair is obvious; and I, for one, said so from the very first.

That conclusion is also instructive where other matters are concerned.

Take the matter being used to provide a smoke screen for the Duke case, the Imus Affair. Consider what any rational individual, unaffected by decades of federal Operation Mockingbird propaganda would think of the assertion that college-age women, women already awash in the language of our black and “Hip-Hop” culture, wept over what Imus said. That’s almost the definition of absurd, certainly a metaphorical paraphrase thereof.

But, there it is. A direct, mirror-image parallel of the way Cuban expatriates in the U.S. have twisted political arms to keep the nation in its equally absurd posture toward Fidel Castro, the ability of black U.S. citizens to do the same kind of arm-twisting in regard this latest example of self-defeating bigotry is most revealing and indicative of things like our national foreign policy and matters far more important. I return momentarily to that flow strip I mentioned at the outset here.

Among the matters it sheds great light upon is the safety of the individual in a nation whose people and government have that kind of priorities. A few days ago, for instance, the Vice-President made the threat that if we pull out of Iraq, “terrorism” – his word – would be brought home to the United States. To those who will immediately bridle at that, I point out that in the light of the now thunderously obvious foot-dragging by the Bush Administration where the flood of illegal aliens from Mexico is concerned, to say nothing of literally dozens of additionally examples of federal disdain for the safety of our citizenry, there is only one way to take what Cheney said.

We all remember, moreover, the government watchdog that didn’t bark prior to 9-11.

If the borders are to remain open and unguarded, for government to say that it has knowledge that terrorists will follow us home – to say nothing of the world-wide announcement – is a threat, not a warning.

But I digress somewhat. The question before the individual U.S. citizen today is this: what do you think our government, indeed, your fellow citizen, would or will do when you are in any kind of real danger, distress, or pain? What will government and your fellow “American” do, if we - you - are attacked by a foreign enemy, by terrorists?

Well, what would you do? Won’t your fellow “Americans” do just what you’re doing about the maiming and killing of their neighbors’ fathers, sons, and daughters? Pedophiles, kidnappers, rapists, and murderers from Mexico are doing that now. What's happening there? Just what you’re doing about a president who has made a mockery of our Constitution? Just what you’re doing about a U.S. Congress cynically dithering over matter after matter critical to our safety?

Here it comes again. Another “Good German Excuse.” “What can I do?” What can you do? About fifty things, but one that comes to mind today, the day before the citizen will be dragged in for his annual shearing and humiliation, is this: imagine what would happen were every taxpayer to file for an extension of the time in which to pay his income taxes. Imagine what kind message would result were ninety million or so of us to file for an extension. You can begin writing a letter daily to your congressman, senators, and the White House. Every day. You can do the same where all the television networks are concerned. You can ask all your friends to do the same, networking the action to as near a nuclear chain reaction is possible.

As I write this, the radio announces that the Air Force (!) has begun training it airmen and airwomen for ground combat.

When will enough be enough? Your neighbors’ fathers, sons, and daughters are being maimed and killed, goddammit. You are sleep-walking, hypnotized by a government media owned by the military industrial complex corporations. Wake the hell up!