(2 pm. – promoted by ek hornbeck)
I am back to work, and actually excited about being a wage slave once again – the pay is good, but the training hours are brutal. 60 hour weeks are not what they were when I was 21. 51 is a whole ‘nother ball game. I mention this for two relevant reasons: 1) It may make you forgiving of any errors found within, since I am penning this an hour before deadline, and much more importantly 2) Yesterday I took a nap and had a fairly lucid dream in which I ended up explaining to a teenaged girl why “Americans are so dumb…”
I whipped it off as a short story of almost the same title to keep the epiphany I had fresh in my mind for today’s missive.
I want to offer the idea in a more cohesive manner to this esteemed audience, rather than the off-the-cuff explanation my sub-conscience offered the little girl.
I also am asking you to check your historical preconceived notions, and consider the possibility of what I am thinking, as well as offer your thoughts on it.
“Lily, think about it. France had a long time to grow up. Wars, revolts, leaders and kings, assassinations and like most of Europe, has had time to try and balance between what is ‘good for the people’ and ‘what the rich want.’ Its not so hard to convince the French after hard times, that all Frenchmen – something they all hold in common – deserve to have nice things. Not just a few.
The same for every Country in Europe, they have an identity that binds them. The US not so much. There is no sense of countrymen for people from so many places. Each identity group- primarily the white anglo-saxon capitalists think they are the ONLY face of Americanism.
Its not just that though. Because in Europe they have fought hard – I mean the richest that rule – to make sure that Socialism only goes so far. Far enough to keep them from revolting, bonding against the power. They worked hard to make sure Capitalism was always in charge and to this day paint Russia as a demon.
America, the US? I think, really was a new experiment in Capitalism.
Why do you think that so many in Europe are multi-lingual like you? And we are not? Europeans can ride a train and be in another country in an instant – quicker than we can go state to state, and realize how cool other people are and never want to war on them. USers are isolated.
If you were making a new country and wanted your rule to be unquestioned; create a belief that the elites know whats best, and that Capitalism, English and the cycle of working and buying to make you rich, what would you do? You certainly wouldn’t want to have to share with the poor. Socialism is painted as helping ‘others’ not ‘USers’ I mean, they aren’t helping you get rich, so why would you allow people to think helping them is good? You wouldn’t want too good an education to happen, then there would be no one willing to work for nothing. You certainly wouldn’t want them to know too much world history – only American History which you make sound like we were the best place with the best way on Earth.
That’s why socialized medicine that everyone else has hasn’t been allowed in the States. They tell us its bad, and won’t work. And for a while? Most Americans had more “stuff” than other people, but to get it, and having known nothing else, they don’t realize the actual quality of their life sucks compared to most places. They don’t have TIME, they don’t have community and a feeling of belonging, beyond “I got a new Iphone too!” They have no sense of pura vida. We have become convinced our only value is not in how we live, but what we have.
Americans aren’t stupid, they just were raised in a system that isolated them from reality. If they knew other languages, they would know what other people thought or said. If you don’t know what they are saying, you trust the so-called smart guys when they tell you that they are evil. That they have bad intent.
So, really, if you were planning on starting from scratch, and wanted to be the new rulers, and untouchable? You would plan a country exactly like how they made the US.
They made sure that we wouldn’t get any ideas, right from day one, and if we did? The McCarthy era cinched it.
In fact, if you remember nothing else – the US’s real motto is – “Don’t give them any ideas.” In the rest of the world, the ideas are already there in their history. We don’t have that. Our history is only one system period. Rule of the rich, by and for the rich. ”
The first premise is that as a population of the United States has a cultural identity crisis. For the most part – Europe and Asia do not. (The Ukraine’s ethnic Russia aside for the moment)
Cultural identity is a very grounding thing. “Remember the potato famine?” Is something every person in Ireland can relate to. It is more than just the tragedies, or victories that any country in Europe can name, it is also something more. Their own language. Their music. Their architecture. Their heroes and musicians, and all the things that make a Spaniard Spanish, a Frenchman French, and a Greek Greek. They have ties to the land, literature and verbal storied that go back millennia. Americans have 200 years, of mostly whitewashed history, only two wars fought on our soil and one government, ever.
The melting pot myth is exactly that. My family held some Polish traditions, yet none of the Irish ones from my Mother’s side. If you ask most Americans, there are few things that they bring forward from generations past – everything is in the NOW to them. This leaves many feeling like they belong nowhere, something I believe humans crave. It also makes them cling ever more dearly to whatever “American” traditions that may have been created to replace our lost disparate histories with fervor. It makes them defend the 4th of July, a ritual of drunkenness and fireworks, Labor Day – which was stolen from May Day not to commemorate the gains organized labor, but as a day off to “end summer” and has become nothing but an extended barbeque. It makes them appropriate and bastardize other people’s traditions too. From once a year Cinco De Mayo celebrants, to white women who want so badly to be “Indian Shamans.”
I feel like we carry the scars of a homeless child who never knew its parents, but now that we have some power; we are the bad ass bully who speaks the loudest, because deep down we will never feel at home.
Do any of you who live abroad see what I am trying to say?
Lack of empathy – othering, and including – is my second premise.
I have touched upon this before. It is harder to get a poor white man in the South who lives on social security to not vote for a tea-partier who wants to cut all government assistance than it is to push a dromedary through the millimeter opening of a piercing device one uses to sew. Why? Because in their mind “they don’t want their tax money to support n***ers.” We are a racist nation, a xenophobic nation and a classist nation. More on that later.
How easy is it to say to an Italian, “Italian children aren’t getting educated, because there is no money for books?” and have them immediately become incensed? The feeling of “that is one of mine” is so naturally evoked. Right now, all of Europe is struggling because of the banking crisis, and it is not being taken lightly. They are cutting what the PTB like to call entitlements, and people are taking to the streets.
I believe that we in the US live primarily in ethnic enclaves until we are absorbed into the greater population; once Americanized we lose our empathy for others at all – since no one is “ours.” This is why most of the civilized world have far better social programs than we do, from health care to subsidies for housing, up to and including a guaranteed income in Switzerland. In Europe, it is taking care of extended family. In the US it is giving an edge to a competitor.
I don’t think that this has happened in a vacuum. I think that from our very outset, we were brought into a system that makes us natural enemies to one another as competitors. I think that racism and xenophobia are encouraged by the media, which is owned by a handful of think-tank member elites. Divide and conquer, et all. But it WORKS better here, because we share no history.
Premise three is that we are mis-educated intentionally. I am sure you are all well aware of the Trilateral Commission, in which after the Social Gains of the 60’s, the Civil Rights movement, and Anti-War movement were addressed. Higher education had become “too available” to the masses. By allowing kids of all backgrounds to come together, they began to see their similarities more than their differences, bond, and stand up for one another. In order to prevent this, they pretty much said aloud, they needed to dumb us down, and quell the excess of Democracy we had gained.
I think it goes back much further than that. While a common language is imperative to National Communication, language instruction has always been furthest from our National Priority. In fact, few are bilingual (while most in Europe are) and access to news in other languages was all but impossible before the net. (wonder why they are trying to restrict it now?)
We are geographically isolated. But we are mentally isolated too. The educational system pushes American Grandeur with a vengeance – but teaches little of geography, and almost nothing of world history, save the wars in which the US was involved. European high school children know far more about American History than even post-graduate students here know about European history.
Is this just a gross oversight? Exceptionalism? Or exceptionalism planned to make us unquestioning ideologues who have no idea of how many systems have existed, failed, and met with resistance by their populations? In our minds, there is only one way, and we have done it best.
Finally, I could easily call it, “Its the Capitalism, stupid.”
Our founding fathers, no matter how many grand ideas some of them had, were all wealthy land-owners. They wanted to get out from under a Monarchy – hell, in a world with Kings and Queens, there is no upward mobility, ever. Their idea was a meritocracy in many ways; but only among the gentrified. Come as an indentured servant, no vote. Female, no vote. Black, hell, you are only a fraction of a human.
In the end, it was about Capitalism. How to get rich. Once rich, how to stay rich and in Power. The laws are written by the Lawyers, and only the rich could afford that Degree. The Sedition Act alone, showed that the elites decided to stay above criticism.
You could not PLAN a better system for ensuring that one Class of People stayed in power forever than starting with the blank slate of a New Nation, made of immigrants, each wave entering as the newly despised class (read WOP, Mick, Polacks, etc) and making them forget their language, roots, and indoctrination them with only “the American Dream” as their inner narrative. This John Wayne, boot-strap lie of rugged individualism would forever block any idea of collectivism. You could not create a better permanent underclass without the racism that has kept African Americans as a systemically abused group.
The divisions are intentional. The lack of communication and understanding of the outside world is intentional. The pathetic levels of communication are intentional.
IDEAS themselves are the most dangerous thing in planning a country where people are programmed to never feel unity, and always be subservient to the idea that THERE IS NO OTHER WAY. THIS WAY IS THE BEST WAY.
Basically, there has been no greater experiment by the ruling classes ever.
I believe in bars. As in Bistros, more than I believe the Illuminati bullshit. I believe that rather than a master plan, over martinis somewhere…. but by bit, each part of the fabric of our narrative was crafted with levels of intent.
I believe, sadly, that they need to make us believe that we are winners for being the pawns of trillionaires – that what we are doing is noble.
I believe this is all a lie.
I do believe, more than once, over a cigar, two hundred times over two hundred years, someone said,
“Do NOT Let Them Get Any Ideas…..”
and that is how it worked. That is the untold story of why the US Elites have managed to empower themselves, enrich themselves and become the World Power they have become…. without our citizenry ever standing up to what they do to others, let alone us, in our names.
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