{"id":69710,"date":"2016-02-15T12:00:29","date_gmt":"2016-02-15T12:00:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=69710"},"modified":"2016-02-13T16:32:49","modified_gmt":"2016-02-13T16:32:49","slug":"abcs-of-the-us-empire","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2016\/02\/abcs-of-the-us-empire\/","title":{"rendered":"ABC\u2019s of the US Empire"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cA\u201d Is for \u201cAsininity\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

That\u2019s a particular kind of stupidity.<\/p>\n

All of us can be stupid at times. (Ever see that picture of Einstein with his tongue hanging out like an aardvark\u2019s, clowning\u2014one supposes\u2014for the camera?)<\/p>\n

It\u2019s in our genes to be stupid at times. Looking back on the Vietnam War\u2014which ultimately took his own son\u2019s life\u2014Secretary of Defense McNamara attributed his own stupidity to the \u201cfog of war.\u201d<\/p>\n

I would rather call it \u201casininity.\u201d<\/p>\n

Asininity is stupidity that is stubborn as a jackass; stupidity that insists on itself in spite of all contrary evidence.<\/p>\n

The US has been guilty of asininity for a couple of centuries now. We insist on telling ourselves and the world that we are a democracy, that \u201cWe the People\u201d are running the show. (It\u2019s in our sacred document\u2014our Constitution, consulted about as often as Donald Trump consults his Bible. We pick out phrases like \u201clife, liberty and the pursuit of happiness\u201d the way Mr. Trump picks out a phrase from \u201c2 Cornthians,\u201d and we insist that we\u2019ve gleaned the whole\u2014all 1291 pages of my Gideon Bible, with all its contradictions, amassed over centuries by men (and probably some women who snuck into the writers\u2019 den) of varying capabilities with often divergent viewpoints.<\/p>\n

But, our \u201cleaders\u201d assure us that they know Truth–with all the asinine surety of George W. Bush standing on a pile of rubble after 9\/11, proclaiming that \u201cwe know who did this,\u201d and Big Sheriff is coming after them!<\/p>\n

(But how could that fool know anything, when all that rubble and \u201cforensic evidence\u201d was about to be shipped to China for burial (talk about \u201coutsourcing\u201d!).<\/p>\n

With murderous fools like Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Rice, Madeleine Allbright we went after our former ally, Saddam Hussein, and destroyed what was probably the most progressive country in the Middle East\u2014certainly, in terms of the way women lived and worked there, far better than Saudi Arabia!<\/p>\n

A few years down the bombed-out road, and we\u2019re destroying Libya\u2014probably the most progressive nation in Africa\u2014no real threat to us except that Quadaffi wants to institute a new kind of currency throughout Africa, pay for goods with gold, not dollars, and besides that, he has rather outlandish tastes in men\u2019s clothing! Caught between rehearsed speeches during a TV interview, informed that the former leader has just been sodomized with a sword, asinine Hillary Clinton chortles, \u201cWe came, we saw, he died.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cB\u201d Is for \u201cBelligerence\u201d <\/strong><\/p>\n

For most of my \u201cschool years\u201d\u2014from 1st<\/sup> grade through Grad School, I heard that the US was a \u201cpeaceful\u201d nation whose \u201cGod-fearing\u201d citizens only fought when attacked.<\/p>\n

Somehow, Jefferson\u2019s epithet of \u201csavages\u201d for the Original Peoples of this land sailed over my highschool boy\u2019s head. There it is in our Declaration of Independence, a few paragraphs after \u201clife, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.\u201d It seems befuddled King George had supported the \u201csavages\u201d when the Colonists tried to expand into their land!<\/p>\n

In fact, our Revolution had much to do with our not-so-peaceful \u201cpilgrims\u201d and the newcomers wanting to \u201cmigrate\u201d beyond our borders.<\/p>\n

Our little cities had become fairly crowded with newcomers\/immigrants. Between the end of our \u201cFrench and Indian War\u201d and the beginning of our Revolution, a scant 13 years or so, the population of the colonies pretty much doubled. There has never been so great a period of growth in North American history! This was pre-Industrial Revolution, of course, so there wasn\u2019t much for all these farmhand-\u201cmigrants\u201d to do except look Westward lustfully to the lands of the undeserving \u201cred-skin\u201d savages. The migrants couldn\u2019t subsist on already subsisting farms, increasingly crowded with post-war kids and babies. (Our first \u201cbaby boomers!) One way the Revolutionists convinced the \u201cexcess feeders\u201d (as asinine Kissinger might have it) to enlist was to promise new land in the West. The fact that this \u201cnew land\u201d was already occupied by old tribes really did not matter.<\/p>\n

\u201cFour-score and seven years\u201d later, we\u2019re still lusting Westward\u2014especially after the discovery of gold in California and our annexation of Texas from recently independent Mexico! Our Civil War is mostly fought over who would control the new territories gained from Mexico\u2014about 1\/2 of their country becoming about 1\/3 of our continental land mass! Who would master our expansionism? Would it be the slave-holding plantation barons of the South or the Corporate barons of the Industrialized North?<\/p>\n

During the Vietnam War, I heard news anchor David Brinkley wonder that we seemed to have a major war every 20 years. It has actually been much more often than that, and if one considers our racist wars on non-whites, our drug wars, Nixon\u2019s \u201cWar on Cancer,\u201d etc. our hotheads have been at war perennially.<\/p>\n

\u201cC\u201d Is for \u201cCupidity\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

Cupidity rhymes with \u201cstupidity,\u201d but like Asininity, it\u2019s special\u2014a special kind of greed!<\/p>\n

You\u2019ll find the word \u201cCupid\u201d there\u2014the Roman god of Love!<\/p>\n

But, this is not soul-love, or hearts-and-flowers-Valentine love.<\/p>\n

This is love of things; materialism; love of luchre–billions and billions of dollars.<\/p>\n

Donald Trump epitomizes such love, and he has convinced a fair number of the asinine among us (which is a pretty fair number anyway) that more and more will make us \u201cgreat again.\u201d<\/p>\n

It doesn\u2019t matter that we are poisoning our once pristine skies and we\u2019ll all soon be drinking Flint water!<\/p>\n

\u201cC\u201d is also for Corporatism\u2014that system of government that replaced our shaky \u201cRepublic\u201d about 200 years ago when our less-than-Supreme Court declared that corporations were \u201cpersons.\u201d (Okay, they didn\u2019t say that outright.\u00a0\u00a0 Crimes, especially corporate and government, crimes are seldom committed in an outright manner. The culprits and plotters hate \u201cconspiracy theories,\u201d but love to conspire! They fashion laws and \u201camendments\u201d that are \u201copen to interpretation.\u201d \u201cYou have a Republic,\u201d wily Ben Franklin told the charwoman\u2014\u201cif you can keep it.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cC\u201d is also for all-embrasive Culture\u2026 and ours is sinking rapidly.<\/p>\n

Last weekend, I watched \u201cSaturday Night Live\u201d because I heard Bernie Sanders might appear. I like Sanders almost as much as I liked Rand Paul\u2014Paul for his anti-war\/\u201dfiscal responsibility\u201d stance and Sanders for his egalitarianism. (I wish he had called it that from the beginning!) At this point in this belligerent nation\u2019s history, it is probably too much to expect a candidate to be both anti-war and a \u201cdemocratic Socialist.\u201d<\/p>\n

I turned the TV off soon after Larry David\u2019s opening monologue. David said that he used to be a \u201cpoor schmuck,\u201d but now he was a \u201crich prick.\u201d It seemed he liked that vocabulary because he kept repeating himself like a bad can of beans.<\/p>\n

No subtlety, no wit, no greater connections. (Oh George Carlin of the \u201cBig Electron\u201d\u2014so sorely missed!)<\/p>\n

I thought\u201d: Whatever happened to \u201cOzzie and Harriet,\u201d or \u201cThe Waltons\u201d or even \u201cSaturday Night Live\u201d of the days of Gilda Radner or John Belushi? I thought of the time decades ago, when I was in Golden Gate Park in San Francisco and a park-ranger was talking about the bison and some pre-teen kids were climbing trees dangerously and the adults were chattering among themselves until the ranger called loudly: \u201cWho\u2019s watching the kids?\u201d And attention was paid!<\/p>\n

What about the kids? Surely there are prepubescent and young kids gorging on this TV junk-food and concluding: anything goes now; you can say anything\u2014it\u2019s on TV and the adults are saying it!<\/p>\n

You can say that we can now torture our enemies in IS\u2014never mind \u201cdue process,\u201d of course\u2014just as long as you really-really suspect them!<\/p>\n

You can be Bill Clinton who accoutered his young and foolish aide with \u201cPresidential knee-pads\u201d in the Oval Office, and now declares that voters who shun his wife must be \u201csexist\u201d!<\/p>\n

You can be a repetitive Rubio-bot or an earnest \u201cBridgegate\u201d critic like Christie because nobody\u2019s checking the facts, \u201chistory\u201d is \u201can agreed-upon myth\u201d (as Napoleon had it), and \u201ctruth\u201d and \u201cbeauty\u201d (which Keats equated) are disappearing in our chem-trailed skies.<\/p>\n

Lector, si monumentum requiris, circumspice! <\/em>Reader, if you seek our monuments\u2014look around!<\/p>\n

_________________________________________<\/p>\n

Gary Corseri <\/em>has performed his work at the Carter Presidential Library, and his dramas have been produced on <\/em>PBS-Atlanta and elsewhere. He has published novels and collections of poetry, has taught in public schools, prisons and universities, and has published work at <\/em>TMS (Transcend Media Service)<\/a>,\u00a0The New York Times, Village Voice, Redbook Magazine and other publications and websites worldwide. Contact: gary_corseri@comcast.net<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cA\u201d Is for \u201cAsininity\u201d
\nThat\u2019s a particular kind of stupidity.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-69710","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anglo-america"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69710","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=69710"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/69710\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=69710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=69710"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=69710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}