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Society + Culture,  Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a slave!
Roy Batty, Nexus 5, Blade Runner
It is not power that corrupts but fear. Fear of losing power corrupts those who wield it and fear of the scourge of power corrupts those who are subject to it.
Aung San Suu Kyi
We are a nation ruled by fear. Our handlers play us as deftly as Paganini reportedly played his violin. Great chords of dissonance fill the air about us, created by the energetic members of our National Orchestra of Disinformation. WMD’s! Sarin in the subways! Taepodong-2s over Los Angeles! Mushroom clouds over Des Moines! The sheer scale of this mass hysteria – this atmosphere of fear - points to the existence of some orchestrating agent beyond the relatively tiny number of actual terrorists in the world. Perhaps, a Skull and Bones cabal, or the board of Halliburton or WalMart, or the Bilderbergers, or maybe the 700 Club plot away in their secret rooms? Doubtless, there are groups of “special” people with extraordinary influence over the minds and wallets of common men, but the real problem is not our puppeteers. The real problem is you, and I, and our neighbor next door. Flag burners. Neocons and neolibs. Bible-thumpers and Bible-stompers. Gays in veils and straights on Queer Eye. It was a July 4th dinner guest who helped crystallize my thoughts regarding the state of fear in early 21st Century America. Catching up on old times with my retired physician friend over a beer and barbeque, I finally turned discussions to the state of dysfunction in our land (people are loathe to talk about anything of gravity, I have discovered!). Though he is a longtime Christian – serves as an elder in his church – I was dismayed to come to the realization that fear underlies much of his thinking about worldly issues. He had absolutely no sympathy for the hundreds of thousands of innocents killed in the Middle East in illegal wars – “they hate us and want to kill us, so I don’t care if they are wiped out.” This type of response followed virtually every discussion topic. I found this to be very disturbing, for here was one of my peers – an educated, well-read, traveled doctor – a man of faith - who appears to be manipulated by fear above all other influences. His advice to me: “Robert, you need to read for entertainment and avoid serious books!” 9/11 and 7/7! Cocaine. Heroin. Crystal meth! Armies of illegal aliens threaten… Stealing landscaping jobs and welfare checks! After reflecting on this Independence Day encounter. I began to recognize a pattern. Our dear President and his minder, Mr. Cheney, Mr. Rumsfeld, Dr. Rice, Mr. Bolton, Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Pat Robertson – pick a talking head of your choice – are all fearful! Yes, they are - to a person - fear-mongers, but they are also afraid! ...Of losing power, of having their nefarious and illegal acts uncovered, of being ridiculed, of being proven wrong, of losing their fat pensions and stock options, of losing their donations – in short, of becoming historically irrelevant. It dawned on me that what I had been viewing as bravado and self-assuredness, hubris and conceit, is in reality all a thin theatrical veil manufactured to hide souls that have literally scared themselves into irrationality while attempting to manipulate their constituencies with fear. My confirming epiphany was discovering (courtesy of Wayne Madsen’s July 4th posting at www.waynemadsenreport.com) that our President – Leader of the Free World – Champion of Liberty and Democracy - Defender of the Faith – travels the world with his own special toilet and toilet paper so that his bodily excretions will not fall into the hands of Enemies of the State! Additionally, his food is flown to him from the United States when he travels abroad and undergoes “chemical testing” to assure that it is not poisoned (perhaps, we can persuade Mr. Rove to be the official taster and save us taxpayers a few dollars)! Our intelligence services and the Mossad have been intercepting the wastes of various “foreign dignitaries of interest” for many decades, as it turns out. Needless to say, this type of behavior indicates a serious corporate psychosis of longstanding duration – one that becomes particularly disturbing when you realize that the people involved are armed with nuclear arsenals and that they are committed to unilateral “pre-emptive” war based on the whims of the Great Decider! If enough principled psychiatrists could be found to sign commitment papers, I am certain that the entire lot would quickly be institutionalized in the name of public safety. Reds. Greens. Asses and elephants. White supremacists. Zionists. Islamists. Black gangs, Hispanic gangs, Asian gangs, and… Transvestite gangs in New Orleans. We have acquiesced to – indeed, aided and abetted – the rise of a particularly nasty corporate neo-fascism dedicated to nothing less than world domination by Amerika, Inc. We have bought into the corporate culture of endless lies (each more fantastic than the one before) and surrendered our reason and our freedom to manufactured fear. Admittedly, we were softened up for the assault on common sense by the mass hypnosis induced by our culture of excess. Diversions that include mindless consumerism, entertainment that includes such cultural achievements as Fear Factor and MTV, and our own, peculiarly American, brand of neo-Christian fundamentalism all serve to “corrupt our reason and rob us of our common sense”, to paraphrase the anarchist hero, V. It is fear that the Great Decider and his fellow travelers have used to mold us into the unthinking herd that we have become. Our Ruling Elite is only able to maintain control over us little people by creating and promoting ever more outlandish threats. Hide your kimchi and pork sandwiches! North Koreans, Iranians, Cubans, Venezuelans, Bolivians… All are headed our way, intent on subverting the American Dream Unfortunately for everyone concerned, this constant game of boogeyman has had unintended blow-back effects on the promoters, too! Consequently, the entire nation – including our Elite handlers – becomes evermore irrational in the way it acts and reacts on the world stage. More fear. More terror. More hysteria. Without a constantly escalating stimulation of this primal survival mechanism, the chains begin to loosen and people begin to glimpse freedom and hope apart from the Corporate State. They begin to think. They begin to open their eyes and notice that there is something wrong and it is not what the Elite claims. That, of course, cannot be permitted. HIV! Anthrax! Smallpox! Bird flu! Spanish flu! Terror, terror, terror! Klingons in the attic and bats in the belfry! Who exactly benefits from all the fear-mongering? The list is long and many faced. Most obviously, the politicians that rule this land are benefited by the promotion of fear and unrest. At the merest hint of some convenient “emergency,” people rush to offer up their fortunes, their freedoms, and their children to this privileged mandarin class. It matters not how specious or suspicious that emergency may be. It matters not if the fingerprints of the Elite are found all over the emergency of the moment. Our “elected” public servants use fear to sell us a wide selection of nostroms – from a neocon concept of “pre-emptive” nuclear war to a Total Surveillance program that would make Himmler envious. The great Corporatists that control our land (and most of the planet – including the politicians) are also committed fear-mongers. It is just good “bidness”, after all, to use such an effective marketing tool to help the bottom line. Whether pumping up the bank accounts of the military-industrial complex or of Big Oil or of Big Pharm or of all of the pimps and pushers promoting our insane consumerism, our latter-day capitalists are adept at utilizing fear and its twin children, greed and envy, to “sell” us a vast array of trade goods – from A-bombs to NASCAR tickets, from Happy Meals to Viagra®, from face lifts to butt implants. The mind boggles. Perhaps most distressingly, the highly visible - and verbal – Holy Men of American televangelism trade in fear, too. What better way to prod the faithful into giving than the threats of Moslem hordes in the Middle East or Communists in the Caribbean or the Vengeance of a Wrathful God? These paragons of virtue (and they are legion) use their bully pulpits to pervert the Gospel message of love, tolerance, forgiveness, service, and mercy into a flag-wrapped neo-Mosaic legalism which promotes the very opposite of those virtues. Instead of redemption through the one-time shedding of God’s Own blood, we see the endless shedding of oceans of blood by the loyal followers of our High Priests of Slaughter. The priests of Baal and Moloch would be hard-pressed to compete. Amazingly, avowed Pro-Lifers who contend avidly for the unborn call for the assassination of another country’s elected leaders and dismiss the murder of hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women, and children in the course of illegal and unjust wars as “collateral damage.” These same individuals are quick to condemn any and all transgressors of their interpretation of God’s Law, while rejecting the application of that same code to their own lives. With Shakespearean cries of “horror, horror, horror” our Holy Men don their “happy-happy-joy-joy” masks of imbecility and gather the faithful to fight the removal of Santa Clause and Decalogue from public places throughout the land. Sadly, they seem blind to the serious problems about them – the poor, the homeless, the disadvantaged, the aged, the whirlwind of destruction loosed on the planet by political leaders and policies of their own picking. In fits of patriotic religious zeal, they contend bizarrely for an anti-Christian Zionism while promoting an apocalyptic plan for the earthly triumph of American Imperialism. So what can one do about all of this? The answer is surprisingly simple – just say “NO!” to fear! When the threat du jour is trotted out, we need to ask ourselves: “who benefits?” The answer, of course, will inevitably be some member of the Elite – captains of industry, power-hungry politicians, religious zealots. It is within our power as individuals to break their grip on our lives by not being scared by their lies – by not surrendering our freedom and happiness to the designs of evil men! We should quit electing and re-electing the same self-serving, power-hungry fools to government office – at all levels. We should vote with our wallets by spending our hard earned dollars at those businesses which are devoted to the betterment of man and not just the enrichment of an elitest group of neo-robber barons. We should guard where we place our faith (and our money) and flee from any spiritual leader that preaches hate and intolerance. Those of us who come from a Christian tradition should be the least threatened by invented fear. We, in particular, need to stop and think about how America’s Ruling Elite has perverted a Gospel of Hope, Peace, and Redemption into a narrow, mannish, spiritualized patriotic nationalism. It is certain that the Lord did not instruct his followers to “evangelize” the world with depleted uranium tipped munitions! We live with fear because we permit and empower it. It is time to quit being afraid. Only when we are no longer afraid do we begin to live.
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