Liberals are notorious for believing everything they hear from the government. Like dogs at raw meat they swallow down whole chunks of government press releases without breathing. At the risk of editorializing, I'd have to say that the only difference between dogs and liberals is that dogs digest what they take in.
The media is often painted as a bastion of liberalism, so it's worth taking a look to find out what sort of creatures these liberals might be.
Liberals are excellent at tasks that don't require the hazards of comparative thinking. As long as they stick to what was told to them in school, they excel. Best of all they can be paid mostly with stories about America during the Dreamtime. Instead of demanding cash or respect they search for this special America, rumored to be somewhere in the suburbs.
Meanwhile their employers endure the messy responsibilities of shifting around mansion-clogging amounts of money and of christening buildings with their names, duties that are far too complicated for mere liberal dreamers.
Liberals who value lasting careers in journalism have only to recognize who's The Chief, and to acknowledge that only The Chief gets to draw lines in the sand and tell stories that are believed.
The Chief also gets to remember things His way, or not at all. Best of all, He has the right to spend taxpayer money to get His word out through His disciples who have exotic names, like Ephbee Eigh, C. Aye Yay, and Dee Aiyay, to name a few. These people are really liberal journalists' pals, because they protect their careers and lighten their thinking load. Given a lifetime pass from the messy world of issues and tear gas, liberals can use their weekends to pursue The Good Life, a sort of hunting-and-gathering recreation that involves family excursions to glassy lands where shiny objects may be procured with mere promises to work harder in the future.
As an alternative, liberals who pick their facts carefully may be rewarded by The American Market with relaxation on white beaches where they are spoon-fed all sorts of delightful substances.
The only cardinal sin liberal journalists can make is to discuss non-existing qualities called "color" and "perspective". Those who have are reported to have been forced to live with people with strange skin tones who carry around an odd emotion called "anger."
Fortunately, keeping the outsiders at arm's length is relatively easy. There's a tried-and-true practice that does the trick every time: Just label those outside of Pleasantville as "terrorists".
Terrorists are easy to spot -- they confuse each other with talk about a mythical past that existed prior to The American Market. They're obviously deluded because they can't see how great The Market and The Chief are. They are hell-bent against the Chief-given freedom to put up fences. They even lie about reality itself, contradicting the fact that capitalism equals democracy. Worst of all, they spread their delusion to our children, confusing them with alien ideas about living life without free trade, another Chief-given right.
Scientists have proven that one cry of "terrorism" is all it takes to restore order. It acts like the bat-signal in the night sky. As soon as the Exotically Named Ones hear "terrorism", they spring into action, using their weapons training for everyone's good. Also, The Chief loves the Exotically Named Ones. He knows that they're always eager to do the right thing for The Market by cleansing America from the terrorist influence of ancient cultures and weird ideas.
Once The Market is temporarily made safe again for decent shareholder folk, the liberals breathe a sigh of relief, knowing that they can resume their hallowed duties of producing offspring and reporting objective American truth.
Thinking About Revolution
by Geov Parrish
Our country was founded by a revolution. Yet the notion, in America, that our government must be replaced is a curiously rare one. The Republican Party can steal power, but it never occurs to ordinary citizens to steal it back.
Activists, throughout the eras of Clinton and Bush, could and did produce a steady, systemic, and seemingly endless litany of the number of ways in which the American people--along with the rest of the world--were being robbed and in many cases terrorized by a fundamentally and steadily more undemocratic form of government, a corporate-controlled plutocracy that now dominates public policy across the planet.
Regardless, in the US, almost completely without exception, serious activists and organizers focus on reforms--and sometimes dizzyingly trivial reforms at that. Not only many people in the United States, but most people in the world are being disenfranchised by a stunningly exploitative economic system. That system also threatens such fundamental changes to the planets' biosphere that life on earth could itself be threatened.
Most of those public policies have been championed, if not originated, by the United States government. They operate directly against the self-interest of most US citizens, who never approved them (or approved them without being fully informed of their consequences). It is truly taxation without representation--and government as a menace. Yet the word "revolution" is generally confined to a few sectarian nut cases. It connotes, in America, either a quaint and foolish notion of '60s anti-war radicals, or a militia nut's flatly impossible fantasy--the violent overthrow of the best armed and most violent regime in world history.
Curiously, we have all lived through an era of instance after instance in which some of the world's most repressive governments have been brought down, essentially nonviolently. There have literally been dozens since 1989. But we see these as curiosities or historical flukes--not lessons and inspirations from the overthrow of Communist and Third World despots that will help inform the even bigger First World task that lies ahead.
The Bush team is calmly enabled by the Democratic Party, which is mainly only too happy to cooperate or only offer token resistance to the rapaciousness of people who are literally employing millions of surrogates in their single-minded pursuit of practices that will enrich them, enslave us, and, eventually, destroy life on our planet. Many of us know that our government doesn't answer to us--that both major parties are fundamentally corrupt. Less widespread, but widely suspected, is the reality that neither party will ever willingly allow America's globally destructive course to be meaningfully altered. It will require a change in the structure of American government that, quite simply, removes them from power.
The scale of our problems, locally and globally, demand so much more than letter-writing campaigns and a few hundred people holding pointless rallies in scattered cities that most concerned citizens recognize these actions as--at best--dike-plugging activities, and--at worst--sheer folly and naivete.
What we need is not "a plan" so much as an enormous movement--a movement with the determination and self-discipline of a military or corporation but the love of an extended family, a movement dedicated to inserting family, community, and environmental values into economic and political decisions, and dedicated to creating genuinely democratic self-government for all peoples--including ourselves. For one weekend, during FTAA, the militance of what that sort of movement must look like (and the reaction it will necessarily provoke from the police state) was on display--on a small scale, in Quebec and a few other places.
In much of the world, such demands already exist--but they have been largely flattened by the political and social engineering of the American juggernaut, a juggernaut that can only be weakened--and then dismantled--from within.
This is the scale we need to start building for. We must stop thinking about the Endangered Species Act, or the War on Drugs, or the Pentagon budget, or the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, or the prison-industrial complex, as isolated issues. We must start thinking about toppling the system that makes these and countless other issues so frightful, and that will generate far more destructive initiatives than our weak, fragmented responses can ever address.
When I am holding a stick and waving it to keep it away from my dog, she does not lunge for the stick to get it; she goes for my hand. We need to go for America's arm, its body, its head.A quick death for bushit.
