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February 5, 2008

The Year of Living Dangerously: Part Two

of Two
By Manuel Valenzuela

Read Part One

An Absence of Will
Under constant manipulations, lies and propaganda, a nation of courage has become
a nation of cowards. A nation that once questioned its leaders now falls lockstep
behind them, blindly following criminality and corruption. A nation that once stood for
protests, strikes, marches, sit-ins, challenging the government and seeking
accountability now prefers sitting comfortably on couches or chairs, watching the
world pass by through television sets or laptops, some becoming arm-chair activists,
most simply rotting away their lives, preferring the life of a couch potato, passively
ignoring the destruction of rights and freedoms, silently acquiescing to myriad
number of crimes against humanity, and obediently shopping, purchasing and
consuming according to the dictates of the corporatist world, their new god the
Almighty Dollar commanding them to congregate at the Cathedrals of Consumerism,
the Malls of Materialism, told to do their job and be good consumers, spending what
little they have, even consuming with money that they do not have, and must
therefore borrow.
What dreaded dark skinned bogeymen could never achieve Bush, the Congress and
the mainstream media have succeeded marvelously at implementing. Under the
constant threat of terror, we have failed to see the fusion of government and
corporations, now more than ever, as well as the mutation of government into the
instrument of profit, revenue and the bottom line. We have failed to see who, in fact,
the true terrorist entities are, what the true threat to our way of life, our liberties and
our rights is. We have become blinded to the political duopoly, the two-headed hydra,
working in synergy and collusion, not in the interests of the people, but for the
corporate world.
We fail to see that there is no choice, that elections are predetermined, and
oftentimes orchestrated by the Ministry of Truth, that an opposition party is but a
façade, that only the Corporatist Party exists, its two hands simply performing a
juggling act, each taking its turn running the three ring circus we know as
government. In our delusions of grandeur and exceptionalism we have become
blinded to the reality that democracy is a sham, that real democracy is a threat to
the corporatist element, that America has done more to destroy real democracy
around the world than any nation on Earth.
“Democracy,” it turns out, is a synonym for American imperialism, a disguise to ram
neoliberal devastation down the throats of billions, a method of controlling
populations through puppets disguised as leaders. It is only democracy if our
corporatist elite approve of its victors, only if they pledge allegiance to the Empire, at
the expense of their populations. Hypocritically, the nation that espouses freedoms,
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rights and democracy tolerates and supports dictatorship and tyranny if it protects
our interests, but libels and slanders real democracy if it audaciously protects the
interests of the people. Thus, in the halls of smoke and mirrors only illusions do we
see. In the desert of delusion only mirages can be reached.
The dark recesses of fear have made us forget that the Constitution is not just a
piece of paper, that its principles are the foundation of the nation, that in its words
and meanings are the cornerstones of what and who we are as a people, and what
we as a species aspire to reach. Its contents are the eternal spring that secures our
liberties and rights and freedoms, yet we have forgotten that it exists, and thus, have
allowed its meanings and principles to be castrated. Today, the Constitution gathers
dust in the annals of history, now a forgotten remnant of humankind’s past,
becoming a relic reserved for a museum, its words no longer read, or understood, or
defended against the agents of tyranny who have always tried to destroy what it
stands for. Sadly, the Constitution has been disappeared, both in practice and in the
imagination of the very people it was designed to protect and inspire.
Unfortunately, in our euphoria of comfort, mass consumption and materialism, in our
concern for security and protection, in our myopia of short term happiness at the
expense of long term vitality, in our hatred of those different than ourselves, in our
haste to seek revenge and deliver wrath on those scapegoated for our suffering and
emotional train wreck, in our complete abdication as informed citizens and
knowledgeable human beings, and in our demonstrated cowardice and silent
acceptance as American-style wickedness is delivered to millions of innocent human
beings, we have forgotten who and what we are as a people.
We have allowed ourselves to fall hypnotized for the myth of egoist-induced
exceptionalism, basking in our perceived greatness, claiming ourselves the greatest
country on the planet, as if it is true just because heavenly deities make it so, even
with our complete ignorance of the world outside our borders. We have used our
unchallenged, unrivaled power, which we have simply chosen to abuse and
mismanage, to arrogantly destroy our standing in the world, in the process eroding
international relations, international law as well as the sisterhood of nations.
Our unquenchable hunger for imperialist expansion, which the masses nonchalantly
approve of through our indifference, is conveniently excused by our historical call
from the heavens above to a manifest destiny seemingly promised us by
humankind’s gods. If we ever looked deep into the mirror, we would see that America
suffers from narcissistic personality disorder, bordering on megalomania, becoming
an insecure, paranoid, schizophrenic nation that must resort to allocating military
budgets that annually exceed all those of the entire world combined. In our reality,
might makes right, peace is secured through perpetual war, we are made safer by
creating enemies, not alleviating their grievances, and talking to your enemies is
seen as cowardice. In no other country on the planet are the teachings of Jesus Christ
so hypocritically preached, but never practiced.
In our view, happiness is secured, not through living life, but by consuming and
producing in ever-increasing and unsustainable levels. In our reality, slavery equals
freedom and work will make you free. We are so happy, in fact, that we consume the
most psychotropic pharmaceutical drugs in the world. Depression, stress and feeling
unfulfilled, it seems, are keys to nirvana and heavenly bliss.
We continuously fall for the lies and the propaganda, the manipulations and deceit,
believing ourselves blessed by unseen deities, living in a city atop a hill, showing
ourselves off as a beacon of light upon the world to behold, and aspire to become.
We have been blinded by a false patriotism that condemns those questioning the
state while celebrating those sheepishly following its every command. We have been
entrapped by jingoism and xenophobia laced in blatant bigotry and racism, thinking
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ourselves superior to all other people on Earth, even when we are comprised of
representatives from all peoples of Earth. We are sheep, lemmings and followers,
always mesmerized by talking heads, pundits and the so-called “experts”, never
thinking on our own, always doing what media propagandists spit out.
We have done nothing to stop aggressive wars, the ultimate crime against humanity,
resulting in the death of well over one million innocent souls, all of which we could
care nothing for. Only American dead, of course, need to be mourned, counted and
considered human. Only we are worthy of life, and death, and recognition. The
suffering we have allowed our government to inflict is not of our concern. We have
shamed ourselves in our passive acquiescence to torture, executions, gulags,
extraordinary rendition, untold levels of suffering and the disappearance of
thousands. We bask in indifference at the war crimes and crimes against humanity
committed in Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, Bagram and at countless other secret
prisons worldwide.
We did nothing in the abandoning and discarding of the Geneva Convention, the
Constitution, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, international law and in the
trampling of the Bill of Rights. Yet the very nature of what we have chosen to ignore,
to erase from our beautiful minds, is rapidly coming to our own land. We ignore what
our nation has done to the majority of the world at our own peril. For the tyranny so
pronounced, today and in recorded history, where America has vital interests to
protect will soon reach us. We have taken the bait, almost continuously swallowing
the hook cast by the corporatist world of profit and state, falling for each dirty trick
reeled our way, assiduously falling for the propaganda of the corporatist media. We
have allowed corporatism to run rampant, allowed ignorance to prevail and America
to be altered, forever. Perhaps, then, we deserve what we get.

The New Normal

As we followed the tunes of the Pied Piper straight into the river of megalomania, as
we slept through violence and destruction, as we sleepwalked the Constitution to the
incinerator, as we dreamed the impossible dream, as we basked in the vices of greed
and the Almighty Dollar, as we dined on denial and delusion and deception, our
nation has been stolen from under our feet, transformed into a nation that has
clandestinely spawned a growing police state, with a burgeoning surveillance society,
becoming an authoritarian enclave, reared by indifference, nurtured by ignorance,
protected by jingoism and xenophobia.
America is slowly, yet inevitably, becoming a country of repression, suppression,
oppression and persecution; of perpetual fear and perpetual war; of growing
militarism and fascism, of the entangled fusion of state and profit; of an absence of
rights, freedoms and liberties; of so-called democracy that is today but a sham, a
concoction of snake oil and farce where choice is but a fleeting illusion, where
candidates are selected through the manipulations and illusions presented by the
Ministry of Truth, where elections are but a mechanism of control, and of deception,
where decisions are made not by those who cast the votes, but by those who count
them; and so-called representation of the people a mirage to hide the selling of
government to the highest bidder by a two-headed hydra whose dual purposes of
expanding power to corporations and unleashing further imperialism for the empire,
both at the expense of the people, have furthered the steady decline of the nation
into the grips of corporatism.
The corporatist war against the American people thus continues unabated, its slow,
yet assured, manifestations and reverberations crisscrossing the country like an
invisible tsunami. With giant clandestine waves crashing ashore, the tsunami of the
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last seven years has eroded, with reckless abandon, the foundations of the
Constitution and of the nation itself. All that is needed for authoritarians and
corporatists to complete their project, all that is needed for America to descend fully
into the depths of Big Brother and complete surveillance and a thriving police state
and martial law and tyranny and a final shredding of the Constitution, and thus our
freedoms, rights and liberties, is another shock to our senses, whether it be economic
or societal collapse, whether a depression or through another false flag operation or
yet one more preemptive war in the Middle East. All that is needed for this evil to
triumph is for good men and women to do nothing, just as has been done for the past
seven years, just as has been done for the last several decades.
For without so much as a protest or a whimper, the blood of liberty and freedom is
hemorrhaging from the soul of every American. Paralyzed by corporatist-induced fear
and ignorance, catatonic to the clear signals of an approaching cyclone of American
style-fascism, hypnotized by the warmth and comfort that consumerism and
materialism provide, the American people have become blind to the war being waged
against our interests, and our lives. Yes, the crusade by corporatists, neocons,
neoliberals and natural born authoritarians against the citizens of the nation has
gone largely unnoticed, albeit with a few clusters of informed patriots desperately
trying to sound the alarm of the coming storm.
The infrastructure of tyranny has meticulously been built, deeply embedded within
the system itself, under the radar from the majority of the people, in complete
collusion by the political duopoly and all three branches, its foundations created by
the decimation of the Bill of Rights, the destruction of civil liberties, the construction
of draconian laws and regulations – sometimes birthed in secret or in full openness
– ,the insertion of precedence or opinions validating criminality and tyranny, and by
the conditioning of the populace, in order to insert the “new normal” into the
consciousness, of propaganda meant to indoctrinate us into accepting all levels of
wrongdoing and criminality both by the state and the corporate world acting in
unison, from torture to executions to mass murder to the need for constant
surveillance of our streets, of our communications and our daily lives, and to the
refusal to prosecute mercenaries guilty of crimes against humanity.
The new normal has penetrated our nation, and our psyches, since that dreadful day
in September 2001, making sure that the political pendulum shifted further to the
right, further to the tendencies of authoritarianism, making the Democratic Party a
reincarnation of yesterday’s Republicans and mutating the Republican Party towards
a full embrace of the tendencies of fascism and authoritarianism. Gone, perhaps
forever, is a valid progressive ideal in politics, a left of center belief that was once
evolving and leaning towards the social democracies of Europe, with an emphasis on
doing what was best for the whole, not just the individual.
Shifted, too, are the political leanings of tens of millions of Americans, away from the
values of progressiveness, and hence those of Jesus Christ, Gandhi and Martin Luther
King, Jr., turning instead towards the comforts of security and protection, albeit false
comforts, finding solace in extremist and predatory theology, in the scapegoating of
the different and the unknown, in the groupthink emotions of nationalism and
tribalism, in the ignition of flames inherent in jingoism and xenophobia, in voluntarily
placing blind, loyal faith in media and the state, in embracing Big Brother security, in
welcoming authoritarian false promises, and in freely, and gladly, giving up freedoms
and rights in exchange for protection by the state.
Indeed, sacrificing an entire nation’s freedoms and rights, both in the present and
future, in exchange for a false sense of security -- born and bred by corporate and
state propaganda, of an enemy concocted and over-exaggerated – and purposefully
looking the other way as the country becomes more and more corporatist, in essence
abandoning our citizen role in preserving to our progeny what we inherited, will
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forever denigrate our generation’s legacy. In history’s future volumes, today’s

American generation will be forever recorded as having fulfilled a complete and utter
collapse in the face of cowardice, ignorance, indifference, fear and materialistic
comfort, becoming incapable of preserving and fighting for the foundation of the
nation, namely, the principles embodied in the Constitution.
For the generation that so easily gave away the rights, liberties and freedoms that
had been preserved for centuries, fought in blood, sweat and tears, in bravery and
courage, in wars and battles, and instead allowed itself the pleasure of getting raped
by American corporatism, only negative connotations will be recorded. America,
sadly, has devolved from the Greatest Generation to the Coward Generation, – or the
Failure Generation – in only a few short decades, in only a few mutations of the gene
pool, in the span of nothingness in the realm of history’s vast plethora of sad stories.
With the arrival of the next shock to the system, the next catalyzing and
transformative event, the next preemptive act of aggression, the next Gulf of Tonkin-
like staged event, the next false flag act of terror to scar our psyches, or the next
economic strangulation designed to pillage ever more wealth from the working and
middle classes, the elaborate and carefully implanted infrastructure of authoritarian
rule will be allowed to awaken.
All the laws that have been put in place validating martial law and a surveillance
society and Big Brother and warrantless wiretapping and intrusive invasions of
privacy and domestic spying and dissident arrests and torture and a police state, as
well as those laws that have destroyed habeas corpus and due process and the Bill of
Rights and the Constitution and all freedoms, rights and liberties we used to hold
dear will emerge like a malignant virus that has laid dormant inside a body for years,
cautiously hiding and buying its time until that day when chaos reigns supreme,
when fear induces stress, suddenly springing to life with the onset of a weak immune
system, launching an onslaught against antibodies made impotent to fight off its
orchestrated and calibrated assault by years of conditioning, brainwashing, gluttony
and fear.
All that separates America from Amerika is one shock, one event, one opportunity for
those whose enemies are freedom and democracy to orchestrate the Amerika of their
sinister dreams. Most do not know the seriousness of the threat, nor the perilous
danger roaming among us, nor the sinister ideology of our so-called leaders, nor how
imminently close we are to a vastly different America. For this cabal, this domestic
enemy, the people are the obstacle, the real, and true, enemy. It is this group that is
our greatest threat, our real enemy.
Until we realize that we have been led to believe for the last seven years is but a
charade, that the “war on terror” is but yet one more method of control, that our
pursuit of terror has led us in the wrong direction, that the real terrorist entity is
domestic, not foreign, that we have been unleashing hell on Earth on the wrong, and
innocent, people, and that it is this internal threat that hates us for our way of life, we
will never stop the hemorrhaging of our freedoms, rights and liberties.
One day we will awaken to a nation we will not recognize, a nightmare on a hill, a
beacon of tyranny, a land of the meek, a home of the slave. Every day that passes is
a day corporatism advances, and we retreat, a day it grows in power, and we lose
strength. Every day that is allowed to transpire in favor of the corporatist element is
a day the People’s chains of bondage grow stronger. Every day we let pass is a day
we slide further down the corporatist black hole, allowing our minds to become more
ignorant, our reality to be created by the Ministry of Truth, our lives to be further
shackled to the invisible dungeon of Amerika’s tomorrow.
One day, in the not too distant future, we will awaken and open our eyes only to see
that what we once took for granted no longer exists, what we assumed would always
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exist has been made extinct, what we forgot even existed has been washed away,
what we failed to study and understand has been revised, and what we failed to
cherish and defend has been destroyed, forever.
We will finally realize what our fathers and mothers and grandparents and great-
grandparents found out only through the spilling of blood, sweat and tears,
experienced through many years of activism, bravery and the uncompromising
power of the people united. We will realize, after it is all too late, that those in power
give nothing and, if given the chance, take away everything; that everything the
people at present have, that every freedom, right and liberty embedded in the
foundations of America have been sought, demanded, struggled, fought for,
defended and protected.
It is only because of generations of Americans past that we enjoy our privileges, with
each successive generation safeguarding what was once gained, and fighting for
what needed to be attained. This trans-generational wall of solidarity built the
accumulated freedoms and rights we had at the beginning of the twenty-first
century. Sadly, if we fail to act, if we fail to wake to the sounds of alarm, the wall will
come undone, eroded by what we have become as a people, the unbreakable brick
and mortar, constructed over 200 years of struggle, crumbling and succumbing to
the powerful tsunami of corporatism and authoritarianism fast approaching our
shores.
The Year of Living Dangerously is upon us. The sorrows of empire have arrived. In
this struggle, America entire is Ground Zero. The clock is ticking, the time is wasting.
Would we rather live in tyranny, or fight for freedom? Live in our America, or the
corporatist Amerika? In this fight for our way of life, which citizenry will show up:
yesterday’s version of the People, or today’s? The choice, as always, is ours.
Read Part One
Authors Website: www.valenzuelasveritas.blogspot.com
Authors Bio: Manuel Valenzuela is a social critic and commentator, international
affairs analyst and Internet essayist. His articles as well as his archive can be found
at his blog, http://www.valenzuelasveritas.blogspot.com as well as at other
alternative news websites from around the globe. Mr. Valenzuela welcomes
comments and can be reached at manuel@valenzuelas.net. Mr. Valenzuela is also
author of Echoes in the Wind, a novel made available at most online book sellers and
at Authorhouse.com