Stop Trying to Save America‚Ñ¢

[tyrannosaurus vex]

I KNOW THIS IS TL/DR MATERIAL, but if you're bored have at it. I might submit it to some publication with ridiculously low circulation numbers or something.
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In his Gettysburg Address, Abraham Lincoln described a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the ideal that all men are created equal.  He said the soldiers who gave their lives on that battlefield during the Civil War* died to protect Freedom,Ñ¢, so that government of/by/for the People wouldn't "perish from the Earth."

160 years later, we should recognize that kind of rhetoric - it's the same language used, however ineffectually and incompetently, by the current Republican President.  And it was used then, as it is now, to mask the motives of tyranny with poetic soundbytes and newspaper-friendly sloganeering.

Nowhere in his speech did Mr. Lincoln allude to actual facts.  He didn't mention that the South had seceded by democratic process, or that the "nation conceived in Liberty" had never been described as such until his own war against self-determination in the South.  He didn't bring up his political prisoners or that he sent federal agents to shut down newspapers guilty of the most undemocratic practice of actually questioning his judgment or sincerity.

I say we should recognize that kind of rhetoric, but we don't, do we?  We have immortalized Abraham Lincoln: almost two centuries after he pulled the biggest swindle on democracy in American history, he is tantamount to a god in our textbooks.  And maybe that is as it should be, since the America we live in today, with its culture of federal hegemony inside our borders and its concept of a single nation divided into provinces rather than a band of separate nations unified by common interests, is more a product of Lincoln's federal aggression than of the Declaration of Independence or even the Constitution.

Just as Lincoln exported his own adulterated brand of Freedom and Liberty to the South by force of arms, the modern state of America breathes Empire and distributes it globally, wrapped in empty rhetoric and billed in broken promises.

America only ever existed in the minds of its citizens: Freedom was the goal, and the Constitution was supposed to have been the vehicle to get us there.  The Founding Fathers never attempted or expected to create an immortal system of government.  They were concerned not with the status of their federal government but with the status of the people who signed on to the Revolution, however imperfect and flawed their original vision may have been.

Today, the concept of America, as a place where people can be free, takes second place in the public's mind to the concept of America,Ñ¢, the brand-name.  We are more concerned with defending the Map and forgetting the Territory.  We export America,Ñ¢ throughout the world, regardless of how soiled and infected the real America becomes because of it.  We are Americans first, and Free People second (if at all).

Because a free society can only exist so long as its people are fully aware that their government is only a necessary evil, and because Americans seem to have instead chosen to believe that their government is some kind of Messiah, America is dead and has been for at least 100 years.  So stop trying to save America,Ñ¢ - the brand, like your favorite toothpaste, now exists in name only and is produced by people who were, to begin with, its most formidable enemies.

[B_M_W]

Wow.

Thanks for making me think Vex.

[P3nT4gR4m]

Amen!

[LMNO]

I might have to dust off the old Podcast machine...

[Payne]

I might have to dust off the old Podcast machine...

to vex and :mittens to LMNO if he does podcast this.

I remember how weird I thought it was that Lincoln was a Republican (back in the day, I bought into the two man con) until I actually read up on some of the actual history. Seriously, the rhetoric would make any cabbage believe he was a libertarian (in the wating liberty for all sense) a democrat and a Democrat...

I would seriously recomend LMNO's dulcet tones to this this rant.

[Triple Zero]

very well written, vex!

usually takes me quite a bit longer to read such a large slab of text, but this one went right through

[Jasper]

No-one's ever been trying to save America.  America isn't some idealized free promised land and never was.  It's only difference is that we're all a lot more money-grubbing than many other westernized cultures.  We're money-driven, and our government officials exemplify this.  We're bean counting, coffee achieving, overtiming, thieving, conniving slaves to the convenient buck and that's America.

[P3nT4gR4m]

Here's a question that's been bubbling around in the back of my head for a time now - Vis a vis 'the machine' (which I see this rant as highlighting a facet or example of)

Did the machine create demand or fill a niche based on existing demand?

So often I take this metaphor as being something imposed upon us, since that's how I came into being, in the middle of it if you like.

But did the morass of humanity actually want this? To not have to think or act for themselves? To have their life handed them on a plate and who gives a fuck about the taste?

Is pure fucking laziness the real curse of humanity and the blame of the machine?

[AFK]

I'd say it is one of the head operators and architects, but I don't think it's alone.  Greed and powerlust are strong components too, I think. 

[Jasper]

These are all byproducts of our Program to achieve high status with little effort.

[Triple Zero]

Did the machine create demand or fill a niche based on existing demand?

(insert big IMO here*)

filling a niche, mostly.

filling a niche competing with other machine-like structures.

because, the Machine is not one machine, it's a whole jumbled mess of high-level human structures competing with eachother. it's just that, in the heat of the competition, they have forgotten* about the individual human and just play with Big Numbers now. which is why it sucks for the invididual who wants to be free.

but, as this obviously constitutes "filling a niche" on the high-level supra-human view, actually implementing and doing it often requires creating a demand. like the demand for security or democracy or safety or sugar puffs or fairness or whatever.
though, in an evolutionary view, all these things are not as "clean" as they seem, everything is intertwingled with everthing, because everything makes up the ecosystem which determines what counts as "the fittest". it's a tangled strange feedback loop. "survival of the fittest" may sound like a clean system, but it's a mess. simply because everybody (yes, also the Machine) tries to cheat the fuck out of it. only it's not cheating, it's all part of the game.

so the answer is, as usual: both. but one thing on one level and another thing on another level.

this long thoughtful post was made possibly by ~1.5L Grolsch Premium Pilsener

* does that actually work, as a standard lack of e-prime disclaimer?
** or maybe they never even cared, and just grew into existence uncaring. same difference IMO.

[tyrannosaurus vex]

I could be wrong about this, but I think maybe there was a time when ideals could turn into true action.  Maybe the Machine has always been around, but I don't think humanity has always been as poisoned as it is today.  It's always been poisoned in some sense to some degree, but it seems to me that at least where I am, people are so full of shit they don't even know what they're actually feeling, let alone thinking.

When the US was conceived, I'm sure a lot of it was as empty and pointless as some of the more cynical people around here say -- and maybe I'm just nostalgic for a time that never was -- but some of it had to be real.  The people behind that revolution were often the people on the front lines of the fighting, too.  That was before the days of "send the troops in and, win or lose, I'll be at my desk if you need me," at least for the revolutionaries here.  The King of England was in that position, but the American leaders were in physical danger most of the time.

I don't mean to get all "let's bring back the Revolution" on you.  But what is different about Americans now -- with illegal wiretapping, near-total surveillance, and innumerable other injustices -- from Americans 250 years ago, who threw a revolution for what amounted to fewer transgressions against them by their government?

We've lost something.  Is it the Machine slowly dissolving the Individual?  Is it the easy life we're used to now that blocks our desire for justice?  What do you think it is?

[Cramulus]

The early Americans were in constant danger. They were seriously oppressed by a monarch that was a month's boat ride away. So they thought they could get rid of him, and it was a reasonable, achievable goal.

They had hope that they could succeed
and that hope made them idealistic.

the difference between them and us?

There's no way to fight the system anymore. You can't fight bureaucracy without fighting the innocent people its composed of. There's no evil king to rebel against, just a stack of forms and lines to wait in.

It was also a do-it-yourself kind of time. In such a small country with a weak government you were really on your own. I think about pirates (all the time). Now THOSE were some liberated people! You don't buy into that "productive member of society" scam? Go sign aboard a pirate ship, live outside the law, and sail around killing people and having fun. A merry life, but short. There's no similar option anymore. The bureaucracy is too pervasive.

[The Littlest Ubermensch]

It was also a do-it-yourself kind of time. In such a small country with a weak government you were really on your own. I think about pirates (all the time). Now THOSE were some liberated people! You don't buy into that "productive member of society" scam? Go sign aboard a pirate ship, live outside the law, and sail around killing people and having fun. A merry life, but short. There's no similar option anymore. The bureaucracy is too pervasive.

So why are we sitting on our asses, not making a similar option?

[Jenne]

Payne's point is a truly valid one...I think nothing good came to any of the signers of the Declaration of Independence--they had horrible deaths/incidents after signing that.  However, the spirit of what they believed they were conceiving is what we are taught in school as fact.  Easy to distort, and easily made into a religion, where you throw out what a "real" human being is and what heroes are truly made of.

The hard part is where you know all this, throw it aside and are still proud to be an American.  Or an Estonian.  OR a Papua New Guinean.  Nationalism, to me, is just so much bullshit in the main.  Culturalism, I can see...Nationalistic ideals, however, are fodder for men of war and their corporate junkies who fund them.