In my
dream I am looking out over the edge of a vast cliff,
searching the infinite distance for a word. How to describe
the great divide between these two warring factions of the
American psyche?
In the
distance I seem to see two people standing back to back,
staring off in different directions. Their teeth are clenched
hard. Both are certain of their
vision.
One, wrapped
righteously in his beloved flag, figments fearscapes of
terror, exploding skyscrapers, dead relatives ... and in his
anger, seethes for the chance to lash out, like some vampire
vigilante, at those he has been told did — or might do — these
demon deeds.
The
other, wracked by an inner pain of fruitless frustration,
hears the screams, too, but they are the agonized death spasms
of those who are the targets of America’s retributive rage. He
mourns for those who were nowhere near the scene of the crime,
yet simply because of their language and their appearance,
they have been deemed guilty and consequently are blown to
pieces — bloody fragments of little children in the dust — by
high-tech weapons that we all paid for.
This
willing blindness that enables America to commit serial mass
murder with no second thoughts is not entirely caused by media
spin, although that plays a significant part. But there really
are two different kinds of American people. And right now
there is no communication between them.
Those
who see and those who won’t? Those who care and those who
don’t?
No,
that’s too simplistic.
Those
who oppose America’s grandiose slaughter in Iraq are called
naive by those who support it. After all, there are acts of
terror to be avenged, fair trials be damned!
Those
who applaud the widespread killing by Americans in Third World
countries are called heartless maniacs by those who oppose it,
and try desperately to make their brothers see the slick men
on TV are lying to everyone about practically
everything.
Two
men, back to back, countrymen yet enemies. Two factions,
paralyzed by an enraged silence. One, bloodthirsty and
implacable. The other, witnessing, perhaps, the end of
civilization as we know it.
Those
who think the world is a bank to be robbed, and those who
think it is a garden to be tended? Those who are in on the
scam and those who are victims of the heist?
Again,
tending toward too simple. More and more, the weight that
tilts the see-saw tends to be the media.
People
make their decisions based on what they hear. What they hear
tends to be from TV, or from those who still read, newspapers.
More and more, TV and newspapers are owned by large
corporations who are connected, by boards of directors of even
larger corporations, to the companies who make the
weapons.
Those
who believe America is right to exterminate an entire nation
tend to get their information from television, which
reinforces their choice by showing nothing of the suffering of
foreign peoples, ordinary families who speak other languages,
being burned to death by napalm, or ravaged by flesh-piercing
cluster bombs, heads blown apart like pumpkins by special
ammunition designed to do just that, all the while, American
boys, laughing at their high scores, in the time before they
realize they will kill themselves for what they’ve done, if
they don’t first perish from the poisons their government told
them it was safe to handle ... facing one
way.
And
those who believe the American government is a criminal
corporation that fixes its own elections, kills its own
citizens, and has plans for billions of unfortunate souls that
are simply too demonically tragic for most to even
contemplate, screaming into the icy silence of the cadaverous
heart the American political conscience has become .... facing
the other way.
Those
who believe, against all logic, that innocent people in
Afghanistan and Iraq were somehow a threat to the United
States and should be killed with inhuman impunity, and those
people educated in excess of the standard American public
school brainwashing who realize that people are the same
everywhere, and that the worth of a person is not dependent on
the language they speak, the color of their skin, what they
wear, or what religion they prefer.
Fact
is, on a daily basis, Americans are killing innocent people
who never did anything bad to us, and some people think that’s
a good thing, while others, including most of the rest of the
world, consider it an unforgivable abomination, a needless
display of public insanity that has suddenly and regrettably
befallen all of America.
How
does one conduct a dialogue between two groups so certain of
their observations?
Why
this polarization is significant is that there seems to be no
basis for communication between the two factions. And that’s a
very bad sign.
Because
when there is no talk, there is only war. And when there is
war, as the people of Afghanistan and Iraq know so well,
nobody wins, really.
Or, the
only winners are those who are not involved in the fighting.
Perverted billionaires who control the media and military
contractors may be wringing their sweaty hands in a kind of
pederastic glee, but everybody who’s actually in the war,
whether they are on the winning side or not, they’re all
losers. Big time.
Just
ask the bereaved fiancee who just wrote me about her true
love’s untimely death while attacking Fallujah, who begged me
to support the U.S. war effort. I had to tell her, hard as it
was, that her future husband died for nothing, nothing more
than the ill-gotten gains of Halliburton and Bush’s other
criminal friends.
I asked
her to imagine her own town being attacked by high-tech
savages who were lying about the reasons they were there, but
she just couldn’t, understandably enough, buried in the rubble
of own grief.
In the
same vein, much has been made about the religious pretensions
of President Bush as he orders the mass murders of innocent
people for reasons that have been long revealed to the public
to be blatant lies.
So the
character of the great divide in the American psyche becomes a
little clearer. And oddly, the religious perspective is now
identified with the side of evil. What justification could
there be for killing innocent people for reasons everyone
knows are lies. Yet George W. Bush says God told him to smite
Afghanistan, and then Iraq.
The
philosopher A. C. Grayling of the University of London noted
exactly that a few weeks back.
“Why
are the churches given a privileged – almost, indeed, an
exclusive – position in the social debate about morality, when
they are arguably the least competent organisations to have
it?” he asked.
“ ...
religious morality is not merely irrelevant, it is anti-moral”
Grayling argued.
“The
great moral questions of the present age are those about human
rights, war, poverty, the vast disparities between rich and
poor, the fact that somewhere in the third world a child dies
every two and a half seconds because of starvation or
remediable disease. The churches' obsessions over pre-marital
sex and whether divorced couples can remarry in church appears
contemptible in the light of this mountain of human suffering
and need. By distracting attention from what really counts,
and focusing it on the minor and anyway futile attempt to get
people to have sex only when the church permits, harm is done
to the cause of good in the world.”
“Asking
them to take an especially authoritative line on moral matters
is like asking the fox to set the rules for fox-hunting.
Churchmen are people with avowedly ancient supernatural
beliefs who rely on moral casuistry which is two thousand
years out of date; it is extraordinary that their views should
be given any precedence over those that could be drawn from
the richness of thoughtful, educated, open-minded opinion
otherwise available in society.”
Could
anything be clearer? Could there be any clearer advertisement
for religion than George W. Bush, who goes to war on the basis
of lies, commits genocide, kills his own citizens, fixes
elections, and lies about everything .... and says he takes
orders from Jesus? Could it be any clearer?
This
impenetrable divide that separates Americans who say they are
religious and yet violate every known teaching of Jesus by
cheering the mass murder of innocent people from those who see
the higher law of human compassion and honesty being violated
on a daily basis by the pious psychopaths who have hijacked
the American republic may not be crossed, except by bullets.
The
words necessary to close the gap and heal this grisly wound
that threatens the very life of America are lost — drowned out
— by the constant war chants of the corporate TV fools and the
echoing, approving chorus from the pulpits of most of the
Christian churches and Jewish temples in America. You can’t
talk sense to psychopaths and that it what religions have
become — a pathetic psychopathy that causes otherwise rational
humans to suspend their belief in honesty and justice and
believe things that are not true ....
Number
one, like Muslims had anything to do with 9/11. That’s the
biggest lie of all right now, and it has caused hundreds of
thousands of deaths, all unnecessary. Those who are cheering
these deaths are American churchgoers. And their cheers, their
hosannahs to mass death, can be heard all over the world, in
the stories of the bloodbath in Iraq.
Listen,
right now, in the silence of the canyon of your heart — you
can hear it. America’s righteous religion. God tells George W.
Bush what to do. Kill all those who oppose you. Take what you
want from those who have what you want. Hey, it’s in the
Bible, which is also the Torah. Leviticus. Deuteronomy. All
over the place.
Listen
to the sound. The American sound of mass death. It is evil,
and it is religious. In the silence of the canyon of your
heart, it is all you can hear, and no words can blot it
out.
John Kaminski is a writer who lives on the Gulf Coast
of Florida whose Internet essays have been collected into two
anthologies, the latest of which is titled “The Perfect
Enemy.”
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