By MORT PERSKY
Good morning,
America, my old friend, land that saved me and my family from Old World
fires! What's become of our "free country," anyway, and doesn't anyone care?
What in God's name is going on in Washington? Is there anybody left who answers
to the name "American," as in the meanings "American" and "America" used to
have?
Or is it all over for
freedom of the press and all kinds of dissent, just like in Mao's China and the
present China, which our apparently unembarrassed government continues to rebuke
unself-consciously for behaving the same way we ourselves have apparently
learned to behave, perhaps from the Chinese. Did we really like their model?
And if not, why don't we
behave as if we notice we've made the change and who we now resemble? Why can't
we see how we look in our self-ignorance as we arrest and/or intimidate
people as the Chinese do, exactly the people we need to wake us up and point
that out? Because it's high time we began turning back from wherever we've
strayed, and suppression of free speech is the worst possible place to start,
but we're already there.
Yes, of course the way
we're treating Manning, Snowden, Assange and now Greenwald is exactly what we've
always reproached totalitarian countries for doing. We've succeeded far too well
in turning these rareties -- four people willing to take huge risks to tell us
what's wrong -- into criminals in the public mind, just as the countries we
rebuke did and still do, while we annoy them by lionizing their Snowdens.
Good Lord, is this real? Has anybody looked at our "logo" lately, the flag
of this once-great nation, great because it didn't do such things, or which once
upon a time didn't appear to do them knowingly? And even our diaphanous excuses
then were a noticeable improvement over what we've worked out for ourselves
during our most recent presidencies.
What's up, Washington?
Where's the country our Founding Fathers took the trouble of setting rules for
in a document called the U.S. Constitution, the same rules that one of our
political parties is even now cancelling out line by line, according to its own
wishes? We still call it our rulebook (even in its ominous absence), the one
that almost made it to age 200 in reasonably presentable condition, but for
those nagging and oft-ignored complaints from citizens of a different color or
sexual preference -- complaints from which a big segment of the citzenry
apparently learned that not all rules must be followed, those based on fairness
to be regarded as particularly onerous. Those based on shooting people to be
most lightly and tenderly enforced.
And now breaking the
Constitution's rules on the nation's highest court has become a political sport
and pastime played by uncaring "justices" in black robes, enough of them with no
consciences to speak of and no thought of imposing real justice, but
unequivocally devoted to obliterating one step at a time the document on which
they claim all their decisions rest.
Can we cure this
self-destructive, self-aggrandizing gamesmanship while also doing the opposite
of curing anything, harassing those whose careers require them to tell us
the whole truth in their media, though they currently don't. And there's
government aid to bolster their shirking! We've still got the Constitution, but
like the flag, it's treated like a dead or obsolesced symbol with only a few
downgraded humans to speak out for it loudly enough to be heard. This turns out
to be their problem and ours, though most forcefully claimed as a problem by the
harassers and jailers. And some of us actually expect the poor beset few to
awaken their country to what's become of it.
No wonder we ask
ourselves if we can have any effect on our government beyond the votes we cast,
making our choices with full confidence as if we had no clue that our political
parties, particularly the Republican one but the Democratic one not excepted,
were lying to them. So one might call it sheer luck that those who make an art
of lying and fact-distortion keep pulling the least educated voters to their
polls, provided they are also white. Thus professional legislators and
office-holders have become an aristocracy of know-nothings, the persons least
able to recognize the truth were it to pour down on them from the skies. As for
voters who know the truth, whose TV commercials do they like this
year?
And in this
mendaciousness and inability to recognize truth when it shows its face lies the
truest essence of our downfall, more than in our self-spying programs, our
phony, thoughtless (and undeclared) wars in foreign countries, our idiot love of
"better" weapons programs, and our war on dissent here at home.
"Dare we open our
mouths?" hints at an un-Americanness so deep that no "Un-American Activities"
investigators ever considered the question. And it cries out to be asked harder,
more often & right now, remaining a bad bet to be uttered by non-risk-takers.
Alas, the question of
opening our mouths was no total stranger even in the much better America, the one I don't
have to break a sweat to remember. That America must be caught by the tail and
hoisted onto dry land before it becomes a memory -- keeping the question
ask-able, not accepted fact about the USA, version 21.0.
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