Do we have to laugh so as to not cry?
Unfortunately, the US corporate PR machine is again triumphing. The naked emperor shoots the little boy trying to yell the truth. About 70% of Americans, misled by their politicians, now declare that ignorance is bliss and they want to see Assange assassinated and WikiLeaks taken out. Only a tiny fraction of critical-thinker-Americans recognize that what they don't know can hurt them.
The last time an administration got 70% of the country to believe a false proposition (that Iraq was behind 9-11), we launched an unending war that has already killed over a million and, in so doing, we shot ourselves in the foot. So unless Americans are willing to take their heads out of the sand, that's about to happen again. We find ourselves in such an Orwellian tragedy, that if we don't laugh, we'll cry.
Note: I agree with the realists that neither those in the White House nor in the Congress are listening. The elected in Washington DC operate in a kind of sound-proof SKIF that encloses those inside the DC Beltway like Maxwell Smart's old "cone of silence". (So the politicians are truly unable to hear anyone outside that bubble and they are deaf to all except their own corporate and special interest funders, which include the powerful Military Industrial Complex war profiteers and also includes the neo-con aligned Likud branch of Israeli warhawks.)
Although a segment of the peace community continues to try, try, try, so as to not be complicit with the war crimes and in order to keep hope alive during the playing out of this tragedy -- and I will be part of a new Veterans for Peace group doing so in Washington DC on December 16, some of whom are going to commit non-violent civil disobedience in front of the White House -- there is a seeming futility of protest, no matter what form it takes. (For more info on the December 16th event, click: StopTheseWars.org/ .)
Our repeated attempts to convince Congress to stop funding have failed over and over in these last 9 years despite all the polls showing a high percentage of Americans want the wars to end. Obviously Congress is well aware of the trillions of dollars going onto the national (now deeply in the red) credit card, bankrupting the U.S. to the point where there is near unanimity in both Congress and the Obama administration to try to "balance the budget" by cutting social security, other social programs including education, and everything else (except wars). Still there are only a small number of congresspersons in the House willing to vote against war/military funding that is consuming half of every tax dollar or make the corporations or "the wealthy" or any American taxpayers pay for it. The anti-war vote in the House has ranged between 30 and 100 and an even lower relative number in the Senate, depending upon the party in power in the White House, not the party in power in Congress. The largest number of anti-war votes came (ironically) when Bush was in power.
Obama made campaign pledges that we would not keep the war funding on a credit card but he quickly reneged on that promise too.
Here's the underlying problem with the suggestion about getting Congress to finally vote to make corporations or the wealthy or just regular US citizens to pay for the wars -- and I've heard that the war debt comes to over $50,000 per each US family at this point. It would require Americans to recognize that their Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and other government services (even education, transportation, public safety services, etc.) are now being cut and sacrificed on the altar of war. If the people recognized that their leaders' decisions to continue to fund war was bankrupting the U.S. and making it impossible to fund their "entitlements" and services, then there might arise more pressure on Congress to vote to end the war funding, but right now there doesn't seem to be a way to make people understand the horrible situation they are in. The mainstream media merely transcribes the Pentagon and Obama press releases and fails to investigate as old Woodward and Bernstein once did and tell the harsh truth to the American public.
For the most part, the media seems to view a WikiLeaks truth-telling mechanism and government whistleblowers as trying to upset their easy job of transcribing leaders' press releases. Not surprisingly, much of the press helps shoot the little boy calling the emperor naked. The corporate media is funded by the corporations and wealthy Americans who don't want to pay higher taxes or even pay any taxes and who are largely profiting off the continuing wars.
No one remembers that in the summer of 2001, Richard Clarke was unable to get anyone to pay attention to his plan to stem Al Qaeda terrorism. It seems incomprehensible as we bankrupt ourselves (which, by the way, is and always was Osama Bin Laden's stated goal) that Richard Clarke and others were repeatedly put off during that summer of 2001 when "all their hair was on fire", being told that there was "not one dollar available" for anti-terrorism efforts.
So that's the current horrible situation we find ourselves in at the present moment. The current quagmire devoid of truth on every level is a vortex sucking us all down. A truly independent media mechanism like WikiLeaks and more government whistleblowers would be a huge part of a root solution and that is why those in power are in the process of somehow (whether through assassination or prosecution), taking them out. WikiLeaks had given me a flicker of hope of perhaps getting a sufficient number of Americans to take their heads out of the sand at least long enough to see the danger all around them, their children and grand children; but sadly the Propaganda Machine already has 70% of Americans in agreement that they would prefer not to know the Sorrows of Empire that will befall them (as Chalmers Johnson termed it).
Americans continue like the lemmings in that Apple ad that flopped during the 1985 Superbowl. They are being led blindfolded up to the edge of an abyss and then are, one by one, falling off.
The ad was so stark that it flopped. But if no one takes their blindfold off and stops this insanity, we will all simply fall over the cliff.
(Originally posted on Op-Ed News.)