'Americans for at least the past seven years have been
stricken with a collective trance.'
Carolyn Baker -- World News Trust
[The political is personal -- and painful. This article is an update of an earlier version published in 2006 at FROM THE WILDERNESS --CB]
Feb. 17, 2007 -- It
seems to me that Americans for at least the past seven years have been
stricken with a collective trance such as I have never witnessed in
this country in my lifetime.
Psychologist, Paul Levy, in his superb
article Spiritually Informed Political Activism
speaks to the necessity of waking up from the spell and speaking the
truth about the criminal insanity that is running our nation and our
world. He takes this “waking up” many steps further by the end of his
article, but for now, I’d like to address the questions: “Why such
seemingly impenetrable denial in the American psyche these days? Why
are some people almost incapable of awakening?”
On
the one hand we can argue that the economic system is arranged in such
a manner that people are required to work two or more jobs in order to
survive and are overwhelmed with work, family, and keeping their heads
above water. In which case, who has time to read alternative media,
research current events, or even read a book? We can also attribute the
societal stupor to the remarkable job of dumbing-down that American,
so-called, education has done in the past two decades so that the
current generation can barely read, let alone, concentrate long enough
to engage with even the most basic works on current issues.
But
what if there were something even more fundamental and more human at
the root of the collective coma that inflicts American society? What if
“my government” in some part of my psyche, has come to represent “my
family”? What if it’s easier to walk around in glassy-eyed roboticism
than feel the pain resulting from comprehending at the deepest level
what my government has become? What if recognizing that I live in an
empire that is making war on me as well as my neighbors and the rest of
the world is too reminiscent of the family I come from?
Dysfunctional Government/ Dysfunctional Family
So what might be some similarities between my dysfunctional government and my dysfunctional family?
First,
a family’s job is to protect the kid. Maybe it doesn’t always pay
enough attention to the kid and isn’t always there for him when he
needs it, but the family doesn’t target him as an enemy. When the chips
were down, they are the kid’s ultimate ally. If I look at what my
government is actually doing, I will have to own that it has become my
enemy, and that I am its enemy as well -- that my safety is the last of
its concerns, and that Homeland Security isn’t about protecting me, but
about waiting in the wings to implement martial law or confine me to a
forced labor camp for not paying my debts.
Furthermore, a healthy family provides basic necessities for a child
and doesn’t take food out of her mouth. Yet what we have witnessed in
the last seven years is all-out warfare not only on the indigent, which
really has not changed since the Great Depression, but a concerted
effort to obliterate the middle class in America. The daunting,
inevitable realities of Peak Oil, global warming, and worldwide
recession are likely to make all of that much worse.
As agribusiness is allowed to genetically modify foods and ultimately patent all forms of life, as Congressmen introduce legislation to gut all state safety laws
that conflict with toothless federal safety laws, as pollution is in
the process of annihilating the human race and the ecosystems, as
nearly 50 million Americans endure illness without health insurance, as
big pharma insists on medicating everything that moves, as every
semblance of privacy and individual civil liberties guaranteed by the
Constitution are shredded -- your government, my government is indeed eating the chosen people.
Its sole intent at this point in history is to devour its citizens and
anything that threatens to obstruct its voracious expansion of empire.
Well,
OK, but even if my government/family isn’t my ally, at least there is
the rule of law which keeps things from decompensating into utter
chaos, right? The best answer to this question comes from former
insiders -- people who have worked within the centralized systems of law
enforcement, finance, the media, and intelligence for example. Mike
Ruppert and Celerino Castillo
will tell you that the United States government has gone and continues
to go to extraordinary extremes to bring illegal drugs into the
country. Former San Jose Mercury journalist Gary Webb, told us in great detail how such operations worked during
Iran-Contra. Catherine Austin Fitts has written extensively about her
experience in finance and government and has specifically addressed the myth of the rule of law in relation to some $4 trillion dollars currently missing from the U.S. government and how narco dollars are laundered through the U.S. stock market.
America’s Love Affair With The Mob
Curious,
isn’t it, how fascinated Americans seems to have become with organized
crime? How many seasons did they live for their weekly “Sopranos” fix,
cluelessly unaware of how life imitates the Department of Housing and
Urban Development or how HUD imitates the Sopranos?
It’s “safe” and somewhat titillating to watch “Godfather” re-runs as a
series of mafia hits unfold while Michael Corleone (Al Pacino), who
ordered them, piously presides over the baptism of his son. “Gee, I
don’t know anyone like that. It’s so “far” from my world,” says the
wide-eyed viewer, sucking up the sop of corporate media which has
become just one tentacle of the globalist leviathan whose rapacious
extremities comprise the other major institutions of our society:
education, government, the intelligence community, the military,
centralized financial systems, and organized crime. How fortunate for
the criminal enterprise that this government has become so
surreptitious that its citizens are mesmerized by fictitious mob bosses
rather than the murderous racketeers that that actually run the
world -- the world of most Americans -- the one they imagine is hermetically
sealed by the “rule of law.”
Recently,
it seems that network and cable TV channels have become awash in prison
voyeurism. On one night, MSNBC’s “Lockup” airs three solid hours of
life behind bars in various state prisons. In ghastly reminiscence of
Rome’s “Bread And Circuses,” the antics of tattooed, pierced, bad boys
and girls are sensationally displayed -- human beings whose incarceration
insures that the stocks of Wackenhut and Corrections Corporations of America remain bullish.
Healthy
caretakers set limits and model fairness. To open one’s eyes to the
reality that the United States government is one of the most corrupt on
earth is to risk the anguish of feeling unimaginably violated and used
by a government/family (crime family?) which holds only contempt for
its citizen/offspring.
You’re As Sick As Your Secrets
One
hallmark of a dysfunctional system is secrecy. The Bush administration
has been labeled by some members of the media as the most secretive in
the nation’s history. The mind reels at what information
it holds on a plethora of issues that it is not disclosing, but in my
opinion, the most egregious are the realities of global warming and
Peak Oil -- issues of which it has been extremely aware for a very long time and has worked hard to suppress. To be intimately familiar
with the disastrous consequences of climate chaos and the end of the
age of hydrocarbon energy and do nothing is heinous criminal
negligence.
History
will indeed record that in the late twentieth and early twenty-first
centuries, a small group of ruling elite in the most powerful nation on
earth, which consumed the largest amount of hydrocarbon energy on the
planet, were well aware of the natural phenomena of global warming and
Peak Oil, and knowing full well the catastrophic consequences of those,
bunkered their own homes with solar panels and infinite quantities of
food and water, yet failed to disclose information vital to the health
and safety of all life forms worldwide and the ecosystems themselves
and intransigently rebuffed all attempts to create viable solutions to
issues which ignored and neglected, inevitably result in cataclysm.
Any
caring parent, aware that a tornado was approaching and about to
obliterate his/her home and family, would inform the children as
quickly as possible, immediately gather them, and take them to a safe
location. To move oneself to safety and leave one’s children fending
for themselves is nothing less than criminal neglect, indeed
manslaughter. But the “children” (citizens) of America who may have
some inkling of energy depletion and climate chaos and their
consequences, blithely assume that the election of a new “mommy” or
“daddy” president in 2008 will make everything “all better.” Like so
many neglected children placed in foster homes, those citizens may get
a new “parent” in 2008, but it will be another neglectful one, equally
invested in guarding the secret that catastrophe is rapidly
approaching -- equally committed to his/her own political and economic
well-being at the expense of the innocents.
Don’t Go There
I
am convinced that one’s personal family history plays heavily in how
deeply one can look into the black maw of evil that now runs this
nation. As I have stated in earlier writings, I have repeatedly
encountered hundreds of individuals who simply cannot assimilate, let
alone investigate, the voluminous research regarding September 11,
2001. Frequently, they confess that they simply do not want to know
that their government orchestrated the attacks
that murdered 3,000 people in one day. They freely admit that they
cannot bear the possibility that their government annihilated its own
citizens, nor can they tolerate the sense of powerless they feel in
relation to that possibility. Some individuals will never be able to
dig deeper than the official story; others will be able to do so, but
slowly, gradually, as the layers of their psyche absorb the anomalies
that not only linger, but grow more blatantly incongruous with every
passing day.
Mommy And Daddy And The National Melodrama
True to his scathing cynicism, James Howard Kuntsler in, Mommy And Daddy,
says that, “Politics is the way we work out our collective national
psychology,” and that, “American politics have fallen into a gothic
family melodrama, and the theme is the same one being played out on the
micro level all over the country: failed parenting.” Kuntsler asserts
that the Republicans have made themselves into the Daddy Party, while
the Democrats have become the Mommy Party. The Daddy Party is a stern,
rigid taskmaster, while the Mommy Party wants everyone to feel good and
wants all outcomes to be fair.
While
I don’t agree with everything in his article, I do agree with
Kuntsler’s projection that as the Daddy Party becomes more of a
terminal failure, more eyes focus on the Mommy Party and its dazzling
“supermom,” Hillary, who will most certainly persist in keeping the
family secrets and as Kuntsler says, “keep the corporate flywheels
spinning, and even look after the family’s security from the thugs
coming into the ‘hood’.”
Allowing
oneself to enter the deeper layers of history and current events is to
open oneself to transformation in the depths of one’s own psyche. I
believe that on some level, we all know this, and our readiness to
engage or not engage with realities in the external world, which may
alter the internal, calibrates our individual degrees of denial.
Carl
Jung once said that human beings cannot bear too much reality. We
prefer to assume that our government is incompetent, inept, and
wasteful because it is not as excruciating as the reality that we are
its next meal. Each day upon awakening, we have the option of
continuing to perpetuate this delusion, or dig deeper. While the
incompetent/inept/wasteful fantasy “feels” better, it is ultimately
more dis-empowering, for as Larry Clow writes in his fabulous System Breakdown article, “…the
thought of a malicious government that’s actively out to manipulate us
is an enemy we can fight, which is somewhat more comforting than the
alternative -- a series of bungling, incompetent institutions that have
failed us, and will fail us again, just when we need them the most.” In other words, denial is more soothing, but so is heroin.
Still another way of putting it might be: Ignorance is bliss -- until it kills you.
***
{mosimage} CAROLYN BAKER, Ph.D., manages her website, Speaking Truth To Power -- CarolynBaker.org, and is a professor of history and author of a book in press, COMING OUT FROM CHRISTIAN FUNDAMENTALISM: Affirming Life, Love, And The Sacred. Her recently published book U.S. HISTORY UNCENSORED: What Your High School Textbook Didn't Tell You may be purchased at her site. She is available for speaking engagements and author events and can be contacted at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..