Fabulous 40 year Historical Overview Gonzo Swift Sword

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Fabulous 40 year Historical Overview Gonzo Swift Sword

 

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Thu, 19 May 2005 17:07:46 -0700 (PDT)

 

 

The United States of Infantilization

by Gary Corseri

This is how it felt 30 years ago:

Saigon had fallen and Nixon was out.

We weren't so much pleased about the ultimate Viet Cong and North

Vietnamese triumph over the South (and our troops), as we were glad to

be purged of the whole sordid affair.

And it did feel like an affair gone horribly wrong: the fatal

attraction of Wilsonian messianism trying to make the world " safe for

democracy " one more time. The weapons-of-mass-destruction issue of the

day was " falling dominoes. " If South Vietnam fell, then Burma,

Thailand, the Philippines, Australia­the whole panoply of the world,

piece by piece, must fall to monolithic Communism.

Of course, it didn't work out that way. To get us into full-scale

crusade-mode, Johnson had lied about the Tonkin Gulf Incident, the

same way George W. Bush and Tony Blair would lie about Saddam's ties

to Al-Qaeda, 9/11 and imminent threats of nuclear destruction. Nixon

kept the lie going and his C.R.E.E.P. (Committee to Re-Elect the

President) staged an inept burglary at the Democratic Headquarters of

the Watergate Complex in D.C.­one more attempt to subvert the

electoral process. CREEPS's " plumbers " justified the break-in in terms

of National Security; it has been a catchall phrase to justify

incompetence, illicit wars, racist repression and ideological

smut-peddling for quite a long time now.

But those were heady days. A Cultural Revolution of students,

teachers, working people, women's-libbers, artists, journalists,

professors, housewives, blacks, gays, Hispanics, Old Left and just

plain folks had mobilized and organized their disparate, not-always

convergent, energies to unseat Tricky Dicky­the faithful servant of

the ideological Right who'd done his misconstrued duty for God and

Country. (Dicky assured us he had a plan for " peace with honor, " but

you wouldn't want to buy a used car from him, nor a used-up rationale

for war, either.) Spewing Spiro, our alliterative and dismissive Veep

( " nattering nabobs of negativism " was my favorite Agnewism) toppled of

his own loopy mendacities and the stumbling, self-confessed mediocrity

Gerald Ford­ " I'm a Ford, not a Lincoln " -- was brought in to heal our

nation's rifts. To seal the deal, to re-play the end of Reconstruction

almost 100 years earlier, the nation brought in the toothy, smiling

Jimmy Carter and his bibulous brother

Billy to show that we were really re-united, one smiling, happy (if

folksily dysfunctional) family again, north and south, ready to put

behind us all that nasty business in that faraway little yellow

country. (But just to keep the myth alive, John Wayne made a movie

about it; in one memorable scene of his " Green Berets, " the Duke has

the sun setting in the East­precisely the kind of foolishness that had

lost the war.)

The 70's ended with the " Me Generation " screwing its brains out,

toking and smoking its way to Nirvana, and, not incidentally, getting

into the touchy-feelyness of Tim Leary, Yoga, Zen, the Beats, LSD, and

whatever else came down down down the mystical highway. We were " On

the Road, " and swelling and wallowing in our liberation--

" California-Dreaming, " and out to reinvent ourselves, our country, our

world. " If it feels good, do it, " we cried, without a thought of

consequence, one eye closed to history, the other closed to the future.

One of my gods was Dylan Thomas. It seemed no one had captured the

exuberance of youth so well as he had in " Fern Hill " :

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs

About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,

The night above the dingle starry,

Time let me hail and climb

Golden in the heydays of his eyes …

And, no one had sounded the nascent note of warning better:

In the sun that is young once only,

Time let me play and be

Golden in the mercy of his means …

In the sun born over and over,

I ran my heedless ways …

We were the privileged sons and daughters of generations who had

struggled before us. (Let us have celebrations, John Adams had

declared, to mark our Day of Independence. Fireworks and parades….)

And celebrate we did, as our forefathers had: Thomas Paine's vision of

democracy and universal kinship transmuted into Adams' Alien and

Sedition Acts, Jefferson's compromise with empire and slavery, and

Monroe's Doctrine of expansionism, and we who had stopped the war in

Asia settled down and got serious, married, had kids, got mortgages,

traded tie-dyed T-shirts for Reaganomics' suits.

The Draft had pulled us together, and when there was no longer the

threat of it, no longer the danger to our personal right to materially

enrich ourselves and pamper our mates and offspring, we forgot Hesse

and Kerouac, Ginsberg and London, Janis and Steinbeck, Levertov and

Lennon … and, like some alien creatures to ourselves, slunk into our

sloughs of despond to continue the business of empire-building. A

diamond-clad, gap-toothed Madonna sang the anthem of the 80's: " We are

living in the material world. "

We were like those creatures in the movie about Dr. Oliver Sachs­the

ones who wake from aphasia, thanks to a miracle drug, discover the

dazzling world--nature, people and ideas. Then, as the affects of the

drug fade, they fall back into dreamless, waking sleep.

We hadn't learned our lessons well­or we'd learned the wrong lessons.

We didn't know that revolution is a lifelong journey with numerous

pitfalls; and, like the little fox of the I-Ching, just when we

reached the furthest bank and felt ourselves safest, when we let down

our guards, we were most likely to fall back in the river of

forgetfulness.

We did not study and we did not remember. We crammed before exams and

got by with " Gentleman C's " just like the Impostor-in-Chief now in the

White House (named for the little white lies cranked out of it daily;

or for the Brobdignaggian whitewashing that constantly

metamorphosing). The first mass generation to enjoy the opportunities

of a college education was also the first TV-generation to be cobbled

from childhood with ADD-afflicting ads. Our teachers were always

competing with the narcosis-inducing Idiot Box of easy answers and

instant gratification. Schools necessary and sufficient to produce

Cold War-winning scientists and engineers, were deliberately

undermined in terms of raising social consciousness. It was

astonishing that we'd ever pulled together, because the whole point of

our schools was to pull us apart: to fragment knowledge among

specialists; to destroy social cohesion with cutthroat

competitiveness; to inculcate authoritarianism and the accepted

" facts " and

" principles, " while denigrating the twin spirits of inquiry and

challenge that are the hallmarks of true democracy. The coin of the

realm was cunning self-advancement; community be damned!

" I saw the best minds of my generation, " Ginsberg had written in Howl,

" starving, hysterical, naked. " It was the struggle for wholeness,

personhood and community that Ginsberg elicited. But now our best

minds genuflect before the billionaire powers of a vainglorious fool

like Donald Trump, or pull the strings of our puppet Boy-Emperor who

shucks and aws his way through dismantling the social structure that

has kept us intact as a people.

" Mankind cannot take too much reality, " Elliot wrote, and we see it

proven true each day, as a disenfranchised electorate wields SUV's

around traffic-clogged, polluted interstates to slog its way home to

the latest fix/installment of Reality TV.

We are infantilized. The snake-charming despots who rule America­who

endeavor to rule the world­have succeeded in maintaining us in a state

of suspended animation­not quite adult, not quite human. They can lie

us into war and tell us they love freedom (like George W., the

cowardly draft-dodging warmonger). They can torture in our name for

the sake of our oil supplies and their profits. Cynical Congressmen

and Supreme Court Justices collude in the fabrications, shake their

heads, blame the U.N. A Murdoch-fearing, kowtowing media pimp the lies

and bury the information that replenishes democracy. Freedom without

wisdom is a tree without roots. Intent to impose our brand of

" freedom " abroad, we allow it to wither in the home of the brave.

Electoral politics cannot succeed in this kind of climate, where a

sleeping, narcotized public is deluged with mis- and disinformation.

Our Constitution defines treason as the levying of war against our

nation. With its policy of preemptive wars, this Administration is

guilty of instigating wars against our nation. Every other nation must

now seek to defend itself against our PNAC - (Project for a New

American Century) professed hegemonic machinations. This

Administration is guilty of treason and must be brought to heel. For

the sake of global security and our nation's survival and integrity.

Back in '75 there were attorneys like William Kunstler who could make

the case for impeachment and prosecution for treason better than I

have here. We still had a Democratic Party with vestiges of the spirit

and integrity that had stood up to Capitalist bosses, steeling itself

with the Progressive message of solidarity and equality. The country

was not held hostage to the crusading fanaticism of religious zealots

and jingoists. Our writers sang " the body electric " of the human

family and did not first and foremost advocate for personal grants in

the name of the identity-politics of race, creed, gender, sexual

orientation. There were moments when we all came together and sang the

possibilities of a glowing, new dawn.

What will it take to waken from slumber; to cast off the shackles of

infantilization; to rise above the cheap sentimentalism of

pseudo-patriotism; to reclaim the vision of Paine; to do our duty to

ourselves, our progeny, our planet?

And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows

In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs

Before the children green and golden

Follow him out of grace.

Gary Steven Corseri's dramas have been published, and broadcast over

PBS-Atlanta; his prose and poems have appeared at CommonDreams, The

New York Times, Village Voice, Redbook, Sky, Georgia Review,

CounterPunch, AxisOfLogic, DissidentVoice and elsewhere. He has

published two poetry collections and two novels, edited the

Manifestations anthology, taught in public schools and prisons in the

U.S., and at universities in the U.S. and Japan. He can be contacted

at corseri

 

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" Oppression can only survive through silence. " Carmen de Monteflores