Festering in our midst like a toxic cloud of pollution the army of good Americans exists, living and working among us, inhabiting our neighborhoods and cities, co-existing peacefully with us, though perceiving an utterly different conception of reality than the rest of us. Their numbers, though dwindling more every day with the almost weekly revelations of corporatist lies built upon corporatist lies and government deceptions meshed with corporate criminality, remain high, thanks to those unable to escape the clouds of 9/11 and the manipulative propaganda of the corporatist media. The Kool-Aid drinking brigades remain strong, still ardent supporters of frivolous, fictitious and diminishing deceptions, still hypnotized to the dim-witted, slurred speech of their great Commander in Chief, still spewing the talking points they hear emanating from the corporatist media and still clinging to the ingrained and unenlightened selfishness that permeates their existence.
Today they are harder to recognize than in previous years, their once proud bumper stickers and car magnets on pickup trucks and SUVs praising their Dear Leader now nowhere to be seen, evaporating like a morning fog, thrown into trash bins or stored inside closets, lest they be fingered as part of the ignorant legions of automatons that helped steer America directly towards its present predicament. Gone are the large W's emblazoned on their vehicles, that blue "Wastika" showcasing blind loyalty to criminality and fascism, while advertising mental fragility and propensities to be the followers of incompetence. Missing from the giant trucks and monstrous SUV's masking quite apparent deficiencies below the belt are the plethora of patriotism-laced and nationalism-filled slogans that reeked of machismo yet betrayed delicate insecurity, now conveniently hidden from view as their precious war for fictitious democracy and freedom continues its decent into quagmire and debacle.
Yet this vast army of sheeple lingers throughout the American landscape, for they have not quite surrendered to truth or reality, two concepts as unfamiliar to them as reason and logic. They have simply retreated back to the canopied forests where barbarians live, crawling under rocks and boulders, returning home only to await the beckoning calls of further war through the trumpets of fear and hatred. Like fair-weathered fans, hiding at the first sign of defeat, rising with the arrival of victory, wanting only to be seen with winners and associated with success, this army of followers abandons ship when trouble can be seen and defeat smelled, forgetting that a war and quagmire exists in Iraq, evading their complicity in furtherance of criminality, finding it easy to whitewash from their minds war crimes and the murder of over 120,000 Iraqi and American lives.
Their legions, marching lock step behind their Dear Leader, filled to the rafters with the fear, hatred, xenophobia and patriotism needed by authoritarian regimes to thrive, have become the conduits of destruction, violence, rape and murder, the co-conspirators of illegality and death. Easily they answered the call to scapegoat and hate that which they did not know, their fear magnified and manipulated by their puppeteers, becoming the pawns of expendability and the tools of power, their emotions abused, their religious beliefs manipulated, their vote exploited, their majority numbers used to invade and occupy foreign lands and pilfer the treasury at home.
To them 9/11 was their call to arms, that transcendental moment where imploding towers falling birthed trance-like obedience and blind faith to criminals, though preferring the cowardice of chicken hawks, the timidity of yellow elephants and the comfort of armchair warriors rather than the bravery of enlistment and deployment. After all, in the demented mind of the army of good Americans, those less fortunate, those relegated to the lower castes of society due to the weaknesses espoused by the failed theories of social Darwinism are destined to become the cannon fodder of America, returning either dead or maimed for life serving their role where "survival of the fittest" governs.
Sitting comfortably on their couches, engorging themselves with microwave dinners, watching reality television and the latest exploits of sensationalist news reports while thousands of innocents die in order to appease their thirst for vengeance, the army of good Americans pretends to support the troops through car magnets and ribbons, hiding behind the red, white and blue, hiding insecurities through the bravado of tough talk, yet in reality sacrifices nothing both for a war they asked for or for the soldiers their loud voices sent to hell on Earth.
Instead, they bask in the glow of American comfort, kneeling down and praying nightly to the monitor in the center of their households, becoming the obedient drones of propaganda, absorbing and taking as their own the cocktail of talking points spewed by corporate media and its clusters of lackeys and hacks. On weekends they can be spotted playing with the many adult toys purchased through maxed out credit cards, thinking themselves beneficiaries of the mirage called the American Dream, not realizing their role in exponentially increasing the debt they will forever be enslaved to pay. After work they can be seen visiting the famed cathedrals of consumerism, those monstrous malls of materialism surveying suburbia, teeming with the products of overindulgence and the goods of escapism, sadly having become the center of American society and culture.
It is this army of good Americans that will, upon the next happenstance bogeyman atrocity, once again rise up in a fear-induced, hate-engendered frenzy, waving Old Glory, hiding behind its colors, its xenophobia metastasized to a rabid-filled, vengeance-seeking wickedness of blindness of reason and deafness of wisdom, asking, begging government and its corporatist masters to further usurp its civil liberties, freedoms and rights, gladly sacrificing the future of their children for the chance to be protected and be made secure from evildoers, both real and concocted, demanding, in its infinite ignorance, the full spectrum of the American police state.
Bubbles of Comfort and Fantasies of Deception
The army of good Americans would rather live in the slavery of ignorance rather than the freedom of knowledge, preferring shackles of fiction to the liberty of reality. Loyal followers to lies and deceit, easily manipulated and corralled, addicted to being misled and loving the exploitation of their emotions, they would rather not know truth than stop believing in fantasy, choosing to remain inside the bubble of comfortable deceptions rather than sit atop the mountain of concerns. Merrily they drink the Kool-Aid that enables them to remain unknowing, unconcerned and unrepentant sheeple, wishing to remain embedded into the same system that abuses, exploits and subjugates them. They would rather subsist in ignorance than thrive in truth, preferring to maintain the illusions and fictions manufactured by propagandists that allow them to escape the reality that is the human condition.
In the fantasy conjured up by their masters they see only the reality they want to believe in, the altered existence that they would much rather be part of. Weak minded in character, needing to be dominated and led, searching for a master to guide and exploit them, more likely to believe in the fables of archaic stories and fictions of metaphysical gods, and searching the periphery of the world for answers they do not know or understand, they will forever be made to believe any lie or manipulation or deception thrown at them, for they crave leadership, whether malignant or benign, and are in desperate need to place blind faith in fictional leadership, whether that of invisible gods or incompetent presidents. For this army follows, it does not lead, it relies on commands, not its own internal minds, and it appropriates the thoughts of others, incorporating them as their own, regurgitating them as if they have even a basic comprehension of the much broader issues.
The army of good Americans, like their counterpart in 1930's Germany, blindly follows and seldom asks questions, always with a wink and a nod turning a blind eye to criminality, rapidly forgetting morality and humanity, pretending not to know the actions of their government and later, when the consequences to those actions finally arise, saying they did not understand, denying complicity and accepting ignorance. Yet purposefully they cover their eyes when it is convenient, but not when it is suitable to their wants and needs, when their fears and hatreds have fed on the vicarious crimes against humanity committed by their leaders. Through quiet acquiescence to the crimes of their masters they become complicit actors to the actions of madmen, their psyches becoming a vacuum devoid of virtue and morality, their failure to speak out or act against the crimes they allow to continue making them as guilty as those committing them.
Since 9/11 the crimes of the Bush administration have been known to all, yet to the army of good Americans, rabid with a hunger for Arab blood and entangled with the enraptured desire to inflict pain on that which is unknown and most feared, the crimes against humanity and the war crimes committed in their name are free to continue, allowed to permeate the conscious of America and enter the imagination of our once innocent children. The use of malevolent torture, false imprisonment, cruel and unusual punishment and dehumanization are seen as virtues that must be inflicted on Arabs and Muslims, lest the debauchery of American culture be laid to waste. The infliction of collective punishment, mass bombings, destruction of homes and lives, assassinations, shootings and suffering is seen as a necessary means to achieve victory, regardless of the amounts of innocent blood spilled and the level of misery spawned, for the full might of America's military must be shown off and utilized.
To the army of good Americans, many of them undereducated and unenlightened, many filled with the hatred and fear becoming of all great pawns, unwise to long-term consequences and possessing the myopic lens of short-term satisfaction, war against brown-skinned peoples is a consequence of deep rooted racism and xenophobia, a chance to unleash the mightiest army in the world upon third world sub-humans who have conveniently been made scapegoats by those who decide reality. Lacking the fundamental precepts of humanity, empathy inside them as rare as underground fields of oil in New York City, unable to place Iraq and the Middle East on a world map, made unaware of alien cultures and of history itself, good Americans epitomize the ugly American, that creature molded by America's degraded education system, reared by television and not parents, reprogrammed through fiction and not reality, unable to comprehend the world outside its bubble or the existence of cultures different than its own.
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