Or…On the Outside Looking In
Was it just 2-years-ago that I departed Pacific Lodge after a 9-and-a-half-month stint to return to Camp Gonzalez – because I can’t tolerate settings where the inmates are running the asylum – particularly on the tax payers’ dime? Yes. It must have been 2 years, because one-of-my former students – who also happened to become a counselor at Pacific Lodge (after my departure) – asked me why the U.S. Army and National Guardsmen weren’t in the streets yet (as I had suggested that the U.S. would have martial law in-the-not-so-distant future [I think I said in-at-least-2-years-time during the class he took]). I replied to Big R that it still hadn’t been 2 years – but that I might have been a bit off-on-my-timing.
Let’s face it folks: we’re being held together with bubble gum (the tattered American Dream); smoke and mirrors (propaganda and Wall Street juggling); and, my new favorite…avatar money.
I watched “Green Zone” on-the-return-flight from Dubai to Los Angeles – and the movie certainly made its point: we really fucked up Iraq. And now we’re poised to hit Iran – another evil empire that’s probably years away from successfully deploying a nuclear bomb, but gosh, they’re flush with oil, and, probably won’t sabotage their oil supply as successfully as the Iraqis did – robbing Dick (I need a new heart) Cheney — of the means to pay for the Iraqi invasion…and the American tax payer got stuck with this war bill as well. At least “Green Zone” did allude to-one-of-the-reasons the U.S. went to Iraq: for the oil – but it never touched on the other reason we were there – because Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction were his Euro millions – with which he was poised to bring down the U.S. petro dollar.
And how about that U.S. dollar? Word outside of the U.S. is that everyone is trying to unload that U.S. dollar – and grab a currency that might outlive the dollar – like the Swiss Franc for instance. Meanwhile, we continue to live in our ethnocentric cocoon – that breeding ground for extreme myopia (and I doubt that some beautiful, enlightened butterfly will emerge): not when the larva has been subsisting on conspicuous consumption and greed – fueled by the blood of others (has Ecuador’s lawsuit against Chevron really been going on for-17-years-now?).
There has to be a finite number of promises one can make (and then break) before no one can believe you anymore. With the queen’s salary now cut – as the Brits attempt to tighten their belts – I’m pretty sure that not even God will be able to save them. And Irish Tony (a retired banker from Ireland, whom I met on my World Cup travels) said that all money is merely a confidence game: kind of like religion…you just gotta have faith – even if there is nothing there! Which scared the beejeebees out of me – because here I thought that England’s adherence to the gold standard (along with Switzerland’s) would be enough to bail us out.
Elsewhere I have questioned whether or not we truly won our independence from England way-back-when – consecrated by our Fourth of July holiday and our national anthem. But with progressively more-of-the-world hating US – perhaps it’s time to look in the mirror and determine who the enemy of US really is. Perhaps we are the evil empire we’ve been telling everyone they should be worried about.
When the Iraqi characters in “Green Zone” referred to the occupation forces, they never referred to them as the “coalition” forces – which our national propaganda machine continues to do. The Iraqi characters simply said: the Americans.
Let’s not fight them over there so we don’t have to fight them over here…let’s not fight. Because as Stephen King suggests on HIEROPHANT’S “Black Ribbons”: Killing for peace is like fucking for chastity. And hot-off-the-press comes major austerity cuts in Germany…