I've been busy

Beginning immediately after 9/11, George Bush and his cadre began incessantly dwelling on, and harping repeatedly about, FEAR They have used this emotional flash point to stir up the ire and angst of the American people to justify military actions and many extensive rights abuses. All of their empty rhetoric, the slanted vocabularies, made-up, goofy, catch phrases (Stay the Course) and impassioned “speechifyin’”, as W would say, have been aimed at making people afraid . This has all been done to generate and sustain support for the war on terror, the (now civil) war in Iraq, the ongoing conflict in Afghanistan and the mauling of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. But recently, identification and recognition of fears in this country has taken a new turn for the worse. The upcoming election and the sloganeering that has come with it have sought to obfuscate fears and ignore them more than ever before. Tragically, the new rhetoric being used by the presidential campaigners and amplified by the MSM has severly muddied the waters of concern, and this in turn has bred a sub-strata of loathing and resentment in the cultural conscious which no one is openly discussing. And that aforementioned mainstream media can be held almost completely responsible for most of the issue-dodging and general confusion.

In the last eight years, Americans have become so accustomed to constantly being told (by the government, government mouthpieces and the MSM, what to fear, that they aren’t exactly sure what they are supposed to be in fear of, anymore. We have grown numb and largely insensitive. Most of us don’t give much thought to Bin Laden any longer, and the continued bungling and ineptitude of the hastily assembled DHS, according to what we read, should make us grateful that the threat Bin Laden once posed is no longer imminent. We couldn’t handle it anyway. By all accounts, we haven’t really fought many terrorists “over there” and it doesn’t look like they will be “over here”, anytime soon. Mostly we seem to be slaughtering innocent Iraqi civilians and getting our own military forces blown up by the side of the road. But the incessant generation of fear-fostering rhetoric, i.e., lies and MSM dithering, continues. Most recently, the simultaneous appearances of .Bush and the Pope on the same platform in Washington, both spewing platitudes (lies) surrounding the feigned morality and humanitarian qualities of the institutions they both represent, simply masks over the many real fears that Americans harbor and wrestle to the ground every day. In the best and most honest moments, people know that the Catholic Church and the United States government, both on scandalously worldwide scales, are neither moral nor humanitarian. If they were, given their size, money and power, the entire world would not be immersed in a continual bloodbath. But if you listen only superficially, the fears are mildly subdued, momentarily, and people go on. But so do the lies and duplicities but soon then the underlying fears resurface. And the campaigners go on mostly missing the point until they are forced to address a fear and then the MSM makes sure we go back to talking about flag pins and Bosnian sniper fire or McCain family recipes. The MSM of course covered the Pope meticulously.

In reality, fears exist in abundance in almost every aspect of American life. The foci of our fears are both large and small, male and female, and of course they are either well-founded or based completely on wild disinformation or specious claims .Even two lines plucked from a sermon by Rev. Wright can cause fears of perceived raging anti-Americanism in America’s heartland. It doesn’t take much to start a brush fire, but they can burn for days.

If you believe the television, radio and newspapers, American men are for the most part in fear of hair loss, not having a good set of ABS, erectile dysfunction, some quarterback’s torn leg muscle and not owning a red convertible. Also reported on TV, women live in fear of gray hair, wrinkles(Botox, please), weight gain (and loss), weight loss(and gain) equal pay, great legs and an equally fast car. Both men and women, according to lesser read sources, fear for the economy in general, their mortgages, Social Security, immigration, some privacy rights, the growing national debt, sexual repression, the ecology of waste management and global warming. And the price of gasoline. And the price of gasoline. And the price of gasoline. (That repetitive noise you hear in the background is Fox News)

Fear can also be hastened by having (or losing) a child in this senseless war, losing your
job or having Enron steal your entire retirement plan. It can be caused by a pointless furor over your own brand of patriotism, an unnecessary blow-up over that ugly word “bitter” or an off-hand reference to guns or religion. An op-ed in the NYT today, by Bob Herbert, says that, in America right now, “ignorance is not bliss, it is widespread”. There are staggering numbers of high school dropouts every day, making up a huge percentage of the population that seemingly knows nothing about our history, culture or politics. This one very disconcerting fact alone doesn’t help much if we wanted to wage a war on “fear”(which we ought to). Even many educated people are confused about immigration and the economy. And not even being able to know who is President right now, doesn’t help the cause. I wonder what these drop-outs fear? Not much, I fear.

And fear, justified or not, can run deep, down below the surface of what we are able to speak about, aloud . We are fearful and afraid when we sense that we can not trust someone or something, but are not always able to articulate that thought. To bring this discussion back to the current political conundrum, the other night, on The Daily Show, Jon Stewart had the “audacity” to come right out and ask Barack Obama, were he elected President, if he would immediately “enslave white people”? The audience roared but you must wonder how much of it was nervous laughter. Along those same lines, there must be some readers here for whom Hillary Clinton reminds them of a stern, scolding mother. Do you let that image pass, or swallow that dark fear, warranted or not, and go on? (In addition to worrying about the risk of having her disapprovingly slap you alongside the head, there is the fact that, as President, she would also have her finger on the button for the bomb. She has already threatened Iran.)

And just to keep everything balanced, how many people are perhaps reminded of their drunken Father or crazed Uncle when they see an aging John McCain and worry about his reported predilection for rants, tirades and name calling? He would have the bomb, too, remember. Even the Washington Post admits he has a “temperament problem” which is a rare occurrence of the MSM reporting a salient fact.

I have to stop here for a moment: the most glaring example of how badly skewed the MSM has made the political debate was almost the entirety of the ABC democratic debate coverage, which dozens have written about and decried over the past week. Nearly the entire first hour was devoted to the “fluff” issues, in the midst of which a woman voter from PA was allowed to ask Obama about his patriotism. If you read the follow up accounts of this woman’s family situation, you now know that she has major employment, financial and health issues facing her, including the possible imminent death of her husband. Did she ask about any of those real issues? Those fears? No, she asked about Obama’s dedication to the flag. This is just how confused the MSM and the rhetoric have made the American people. We don’t even know which fear is important anymore. Baffling but true.

Other fears, of course, have a more obvious grounding. It is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid four-letter expletives when describing the damage Bush and Cheney have done to this country, our international reputation, or the damage of all manner to other countries around the globe. There are blogs and web sites every day that forecast a coming revolution, warn that the current government will suspend democracy in this country, that we all need to think about moving to Canada or Bolivia or that express the open and real fear that Cheney will manage to drop a bomb on Iran, either very soon or soon after McCain would take office. Will we be shortly overrun by Mexicans? Do the Chinese really own most of us? Is there a real need to embrace Islam in Kansas? What’s with Wal-Mart, anyway? Fear is here, every day. But other than Keith Olbermann making fun of it every night, on Countdown, no one is talking about it much. And the MSM? Well, they can barely get around to revealing that Cheney has been flying around the world, inside a stainless steel camper trailer, strapped down inside a military cargo plane. I wonder what he is afraid of?

Fear is posted in the title of this essay as an acronym. Perhaps now is the time to examine how many other and varied emotions and images the word generates when taken
apart. “Fear” is an “F” word, and Fear can come, for instance, from the nearly overwhelming sense of fragility that seems to surround us. We never know how long
any entity will last, hold up, survive, or when, like a pension fund, it will just collapse. Fear is the response when the job of the average American is about to be shipped to India and the CEO of that same company gets fired and receives millions in severance compensation at the same time. Fear arises when the fragile nature our lives is swept away by a Katrina event, our health coverage is abruptly cancelled or we get old and our teeth fail with no way to address the problem. Fear arises when you realize that government officials are addressing the fragile aspects of our existence with only facades or appearances of caring and action, rather than anything akin to the real effort and attention actually required. The words and rhetoric are all facetious, we can not trust them and then we are beset with fear. We become fatalistic in our vision of the future and hence become more fearful. The next calamity just brings more fallacious official responses and a total lack of real action or resolution, and the circle of failure remains unbroken.

Politicians and public spolespersons have an entire tableau of phoney excuses and one-liners to deny the existence of the basic fears that are harbored by all Americans except the very rich. W and the Pope can stand on the podium all day and blather, but they have not and will not change anything. What reason have we NOT to be afraid or fearful? We have just been lied to again. Trust is out the window. Maybe this is when some people chose to cling to religion. I can’t say I blame them.

There are many words beginning with “e”which the e in the word fear might elicit, but the two that speak the loudest are ennui and entropy. Ennui is that human characteristic that enables a person simply not to care at all. Ennui is an emotional and intellectual vacuity that allows one to ignore the obvious fact that the world is falling apart around them and it simply doesn’t matter. If the article I cited earlier about ignorance and bliss is even partially true, then it follows that at any moment we may be surrounded by sheer masses of people who just don’t care. Period. And they will do nothing about their circumstances or surroundings until all is lost. They outnumber the rest of us and that makes me afraid. You should be fearful as well. You are either one of them or one of us. Hmmmm….sounds familiar. Something about “with us or against us”? Rhetoric. Phraseology. Lies. Speechifyin’.

Entropy, that slow and certain, deliberate and obnoxious deterioration of the brain, that malady that affects the faculties and the reasoning abilities of all humans, is one of fear’s greatest enablers. We can’t stop this but we can be aware of it and curtail it somewhat as a predictable ocurence in our society. When entropy affects the masses, as it did it in the collapse of Rome or the rise of Nazism, collective thinking turns into a puddle of ooze and widespread atrocities and human degradation follow. Whenever ennui and entropy are on the horizon, and hand in hand, fear is not only warranted but mandatory.

For perhaps the first time in the 200+ years of this country, the contributors of fear are everywhere, and in greater abundance than ever before.

The “A” and the “R” in fear just take us down many of the same literary avenues , with
more and different inferences and explanations. But this method of exegesis gets old, so I’ll stop at these relevant terms: Anger, antipathy, angst; rancor ,restlessness ,reactionism. Somehow they seem all to relate to “bitterness”. How odd and timely. While much has been said, claiming that people are in fact not “bitter”(angry), but that Barack Obama mis-spoke terribly (that is apparently Hillary’s personal option), the opposite is much more likely the case. At a small gathering not long ago, I casually mentioned to someone that everyone seemed to recognize that we were in a recession except the President and his financial advisors. Once again the (small) crowd roared. What came forth was anger, rancor, bitterness and the fact that everyone was afraid about the future. That is to say, what gripped them most was FEAR of what might lie ahead. And, as I recall, no one was wearing a lapel pin. No amount of faux patriotism was going to mask this deep-seated discomfort. It wasn’t outrage, but it was full enough of fear to prompt just that. Canada, again.

Mankind, it seems, will only tolerate living in total fear for just so long, then something must happen, something’s got to give. At some point, the recognition of fear becomes a loathing of that fear and its consequences. (The consequences, of course, are almost always some kind of misery). We all know what it means when someone says, “I’m really loathe to talk about that”: it means the topic is disgusting, vile, unpleasant and distasteful. But it does not deny its existence. When we say we loathe a person, we are making it clear that we dislike them (and usually what they stand for) immensely. We’d rather not talk about them, but they are there, their existence is reality and it must be dealt with out in the open.

America is loathe to talk about our fears, at least much beyond those that the government and the MSM are willing to offer up about terrorists on the front page of the newspaper… although much of that is now in doubt, as well: the Pentagon seems to have its own op-ed people on staff. But you may not find that story in the NYT. We should be loathe to pay any attention to the MSM, at all, after that revelation.

But we seem to be waiting…for something. Of course, the world was waiting while it loathed what it thought it knew about the Nazi Holocaust, and when we opened the doors at Auschwitz, we stopped loathing and became horrified; we were loathe as a nation to address the plight of African Americans until Dr. King was shot, civil rights legislation was brought to the foreground and we unearthed a few dozen dead bodies.; we have been loathe to work on equal rights for women, in this country as well as around the world, until the inequalities and human atrocities became so obvious and unavoidable that they can no longer be ignored; we are loathe to talk about or act upon the indignities and intolerable cruelties of our inept VA system for injured war veterans until one of them is our son or brother or cousin; we have been loathe to address the inadequacies of our educational system until we find out our nephew can’t read; we complain about gas prices and ignore the relatively small taxes we pay for it, then loathe any discussion of
the crumbling highway infrastructure; we tolerate subsistence wages for farm workers but loathe any real discussion of meaningful immigration legislation and minimum wages and then complain about the price of milk and tomatoes. And then there is the administration’s lip service to global warming and greenhouse gasses: we’ve just come to loathe having to listen to him. Should I go on?

It is time to stop feeling loathe to talk about the real fears in America and listening to the MSM. Fear and loathing in America must stop. Ennui, fallacious platitudes and patriotic symbolism as false cover-ups for inaction must end. We do not need to live in fear. We do not need to go on loathing that we actually do live amidst those fears. We don’t need to listen to lies and specious substantiations and justifications for national or worldwide miseries.

Stand up, talk about your fears, stand up on the street corner, tell the truth, tell people you really are bitter and VOTE. Stop loathing and don’t be afraid. Our current generation of “leaders” have been deaf and blind to the real fears of America. Urge the campaigners to start talking about the real issues and fears and loathing BEFORE they get elected (and tell the MSM to listen), so that they may act on those fears AFTER they get elected. Other wise, we may be just washing another eight years of our civilization down the drain. Be afraid. Be VERY afraid. And whatever you do, don’t watch Fox News.