The death of American Chauvinism?

Editor

Editor@TheIndependentDaily.com

Not that many years past America was deceived into believing that we were the intended victims of a massive Terrorist Plot intent on destroying the very fabric of all we hold sacred (i.e., Facebook, Consuming Chinese-made products, Pornography, Jesus Christ, etc.). In reality the true conspirators were those who held our highest government offices: Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, et al. Now, in the wake of that deception and fraud, as perpetuated by Obama, Biden, Clinton and Kerry, and elements within Congress whose interests are aligned with US Intelligence agencies, both for domestic and foreign concerns, we continue to live under continuous surveillance and threat of imprisonment for “Un-American” activities, although categorized less reminiscently of a bygone era.

Little noticed is Facebook’s involvement, as an example: Not really any longer a “Backdoor” for intelligence gathering, they’ve put out the Welcome Mat on the front stoop guaranteeing that anything you post will immediately find its way into the NSA grist mill further building on their understanding of who you are and what you do. Very private things, in fact, because it appears that people who post to Facebook seek to establish validation of their existence in an otherwise anonymous unattached world wherein Materialism has failed them miserably. Sharing the mundane details of their existence with others whose lives are of tantamount mundanity seems to be uplifting for them. (All lives are ordinary and commonplace…only the Universe has something exciting and lasting to say.) Pictures of themselves by themselves taken by them, with or without clothing, and publicly posted for all to see, relieves the angst of existential non-being. It is a way of saying, I’m here. I’m alive!

Facebook no longer alone, Google, through their Gmail function, has now become an Internet snitch “dropping a dime” on pedophiles and Child Pornography freaks. “Rightly so!” you say, and we probably agree except as we’ve found in the past several years, It doesn’t stop there…

Many years ago I recall reading Milan Kundera’s, The Joke. Strongly reminiscent of Kafka, the story’s message was clear: Be careful what you say, even in jest. For Kundera’s character it was the Secret Police, the KGB, imposing order on the USSR’s “annexed” citizens. For us it’s Google and the US Government who are listening and working in concert to be certain that your activities are not Un-American.

“But I’m a good American and don’t have anything bad to say about our government.”

Maybe not today, and perhaps not tomorrow. In fact, maybe you never will, but what about your children? Might they have reason to be critical at some point of, say, America’s growing Militaristic intervention in many of the world’s otherwise benign societies whose direction fits their needs exactly but may not be consistent with to whatever state America has by then evolved?

Think of Cuba as an illustration: We go through extraordinary effort to support Communist economies in both Vietnam and China without hesitation. Our government actively promotes our commercial relationships with these two (recently former) enemy countries, yet continues to actively exercise an economic embargo (notwithstanding a 70% popular opinion to the contrary) against Cuba, a small self-proclaimed Socialist country (and probably less Socialist than we are today) whose leadership has survived Eisenhower through Obama, and at the same time brought literacy to her citizens to the highest point, worldwide. Far in excess of to where America has fallen.

According to an April 2014 study conducted by the U.S. Department of Education and the National Institute of Literacy, 32 million adults, or 14%, in the U.S. can't read at all. An additional 21% of adults in the U.S. read below a 5th grade level. That is, 35% of our population is functionally or completely illiterate.

At least 90% of Cuba’s citizens read at the 9th grade level. Cuba ranks in the top tier of Medical Care worldwide, as well. Castro and the Revolution did everything within their power to make good on those promises they made shortly after taking the US-and-mafia-backed Batista out of power. Yet, we have continued to wage a deadly war against the people of Cuba for no good reason, other than as a result of the political influence of a group of psychotics in both Miami and New Jersey, of all places…

What will tomorrow bring, and how will your children react? As an example, What laws will the above two paragraphs abridge in ten or twenty years, or even next week? When government runs unrestrained forgetting to whom it is responsible, everyone else becomes the subjugated.

In 2003 France was a little less militaristic: They are far more leavened today in their approach to Mali, as an example, than they were then. Recall that they were not so enthusiastic and, in fact, critical of our seemingly unified stance against Iraq, contrived to be the collective mastermind behind the 9/11 attacks. Some of us at the time knew this charge was completely fallacious, but our voices were overwhelmed by the Chauvinism du jour foisted on us by the media hand-in-glove with the US Government. In fact, it was inferential that those Americans who opposed the invasion of Iraq were the 21st Century equivalent of McCarthy’s Communist scourge working from inside to bring down the house of cards.

But, things change quickly in the world today - too quickly. By all accounts public displays of Chauvinism are on the wane: There’s not as much flag waving; Country-Western singers have thankfully reduced their Patriotic song output; The only people who continue to make repeated Patriotic references in their advertising are car dealers. We appear to be in retreat from the fevered pitch of 2001 where the USA was “Number One” and the French sucked. (We’ve even united military forces with the French in Nigeria and Mali.)

Yet, are we better today? Nothing has changed: Surveillance has multiplied. The Patriot Act remains. In 2007 the Posse Comitatus Act, which in 1878 was enacted to prevent the US Government from ever again using US troops against its citizens, was virtually stripped allowing our government to do whatever it deemed necessary to contain its citizens. The recently inaugurated Department of Homeland Security continues to grow in resources and scope of mission, permeating every aspect of our lives. Financial data, telephone communication, email, conventional mail, real-time satellite observation, warrantless phone taps, and countless other (what ought to be intolerable) intrusions into our lives continue to metastasize throughout our society. Unchecked.

We know better but we do nothing about it: It’s like the Environment. Right now, we all need to take a long, fuel-burning drive to the mall to relax, and let tomorrow’s Americans figure out what to do about the Oceans and the Air and the Climate.