This is One Whacky Gameshow

by Crom

I was brought into this world in the year of our lord nineteen hundred and seventy nine. I was healthy, aside from some trouble keeping warm, and I was loved. The year I was born the Shah of Iran was displaced by an ayatollah. The year I was born, John Wayne died. Three Mile Island melted down; the walkman was released for sale. Lloyd Wright fought and conquered hepatitis C, one of the first people to do so. Bob Dylan released his “At Budokan” album. Karen Silkwood, through the foolishness of her employer, died of radiation poisoning; she was awarded, posthumously, 10 million dollars. The United States Department of Defense released a report stating over 300 crimes, related to Animal Rights activists, and had gone unpunished. I grew up in a world that teetered ever closer to a time when the only reality was bomb craters and fallout. I watched the Berlin wall crumble. We heard about the demise of the Soviet Empire, we heard we’d won the cold war. And, like so many others, we sighed in relief to know that a nebulous threat that we could barely comprehend had been neutralized.

That breath we all took. That moment of joy when we thought, together, that the horrible possibility of all out world war had been crushed, was like fresh air after hours of suffocating stuffiness. We reveled in the knowledge that we, the free world, had remained diligent to our values and vanquished our commie “enemies”. The world thought it was all up after that. No more living hard, barbecues everyday. Freedom was the drink of a new generation. Everything was in Neon; we were the new world order. Yeah.

And now, everything has become a state of apprehension again. People walk around their daily lives, afraid. Afraid not only of a threat of terrorists and dictators, but of their own government. The media has blitzed everyone with the thousand facets of the war on terror, its various avenues for advance by the US. Is it about nuclear disarmament, is it about oil, or is it to divert attention away from home. But, the sad reality is that it’s all these things. It’s the political Christmas present! They get to smash their enemies, steal their oil, subvert their government, make the big touchdown and come back to the home land a bunch of fucking heroes. Does it get any sweeter then this? But, everyone can see through it. Well, at least anyone with the IQ god gave a termite. So many people that live in the US are totally off the back. Their confidence has been eroded by the obvious political maneuverings of the President, the farcical attention to pressing issues, and the out and out ignorance displayed in the face of overwhelming social outcry.

Satirical television makes light of the absolute head in the sand approach to North Korea, and the obvious attempts to make Iraq the focus of our attention. Despite the fact that nothing seems to be happening there. Conspicuous armament reports, supposed attacks, all a shadow play in a thick headed effort to gain support to blast Iraq off the map. To start yet another conflict, that doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Not only that, but what does the US hope to gain from this conflict? Another case of a propped up government switcheroo, which falls to pieces 10 years from now and allows yet another Taliban to shift in and fuck up the lives of another 20 million people? So what does that tell us? We all feared the Russians because we barely understood the threat, but now we see that there’s almost nothing to this “enemy”. Oh sure, he’s got soldier, weapons, blah blah blah. We’ve all got a cache of c-7’s stashed somewhere for the rainy day. But the problem is that it’s not them I fear. I fear ourselves.

Our governments lie, kill and destroy in order to create the illusion that we need to destroy someone, when the obvious economic shadows loom. So we can’t even say this is about upholding our values, because by definition this suggests we have no values. Other then the value of the almighty dollar. So what will those who’re born now have to say? When they were born we sold our values for oil. When they were born we killed our neighbors in order to facilitate a war. When they were born we shucked off what little moral high ground we managed to retain and fucked off to a place where we didn’t have to think about it anymore. When they were born…we lost.

Crom