Terrorism Is in the Eye of the Beholder -or- Liberals at the Trough
Chris Kaihatsu | 09.05.2001 07:00
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.
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.
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.
Chris Kaihatsu
e-mail:
ckaihatsu@yahoo.com
Homepage:
ckaihatsu.blogspot.com
Comments
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Neo liberalism or crony capitalism
09.05.2001 08:52
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.
proffr@fuckmicrosoft.com
Spikies - full of shit, or what?
09.05.2001 19:23
It seems to me that 'spikies' - like the commentator above, are chock-full of shit. They call for 'revolution', and say that armed struggle is the only way, mocking those who believe in peaceful action / non-violent civil disobidience.
So what the fuck are they actually doing?
How many times do you hear about any of them doing more than mouth off about the need for 'action'? Let me see if I've got this right - corporate headquarters firebombed recently = zero. forceful invasion of shareholder AGM's recently = zero. I could go on, but why bother, you know the score.
The 'spikies' (Personally, I see violent protest as a reaction to oppression, not a concious decision, therefore there is no division), don't seem to realise the factor that was present in all succesful revolutions - popular support. One man/woman, twenty men/women can be as violent as they like in trying to overthrow the system - it doesn't mean jack shit to those in charge. But ten million working to end inequality and change the system - I think that has a good chance of succeeding. But, if you disagree, find an example to prove me wrong.
So, all you angry and hyped-up spikies out there - don't be a blowhard, put up or shut up. Why do feel you need the cover of peaceful protestors? Fuck off and form your own group. Changing the public mind is where it's at. Look at how capitalism achieved its ends. Violent strike-breaking was dropped in favour of winning over public opinon. Get real.
Would the state employ people to try and push a movement towards self-destruction by engineering splits? Surely not.
So, where are you spikies?
Wat Tyler.
Persons unknown
09.05.2001 20:23
bloody revolutions
funny thing about 'ecowarriors' ....
09.05.2001 20:46
Force, anger, oppression, these are quick easy, selfish, pointless unproductive fixes.
The social system is bigger than any one individual can fit into their heads. People who think they know it all, who have all the answers, who are RIGHT - "Can't you all SEE, you're so Fucking STUPID" - are invariably wrong. It is easy to have a simplistic world view and to see that it is absolutely correct, if that's the only view you every look out from.
There are vast tides of people out there who are benevolent, who see the symptoms of corporatisation in its many guises. What is needed is NOT retorhic, or tantrum throwing, but clear arguments and HARD WORK that tie together existing interest groups on equal terms. Almost every activist I know (Iknow many) are unbelievable self-rightious and arrogant. Most started from political naivety, become suddenly polarised, and are now nothing more than direct action sheep playing into the hands of politicians who use it to divide and conquer any movements which actually have half a chance of gaining public support. The amount of activists who get off their arses and actually put the effort into leafleting, meeting community leaders, organising intra-group meetings etc.etc.etc.- usefull things, are very slight indeed.
Spikies, you don't hold all the answers. Getting down to practicalities with you people is always a big fucking joke. Yes, somebody has to embody the big ideas, but what a crap way to do it.
bob
Re. "persons unknown"
10.05.2001 12:31
"we're hiding in the shadows where people like you can't see us , always to remain ...persons unknown"
You really get off on this Ninja shit don't you?
You may well be 'hiding in the shadows' (Oooo, scary!) but you're not exactly doing a friggin' lot are you?
Jane Austen.
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