E.G. Note -- ok, so most of my blog has been lifted from other people's stuff lately. Whatever. There has been some good shit out there lately. Maybe the country is waking up to the fact that it elected a fucking fucktard AGAIN! Dissent is cool again. This little piece is pretty cool... and I guess I am not completely unable to see the irony in a guy who drives a Porsche shitting on people who drive Hummers... I had a lot more moral authority when I drove a Ford Focus. Of course, I still blast by H2s at 90 mph and 26 mpg.HOW WE DEFINE OURSELVES
The Hummer or the Communist?By Avery Walker | RAW STORY COLUMNIST
We’ve all, by now, noticed a Lincoln Navigator or Hummer adorned with about twenty American flags. That kind of irony has a tendency to jump out at you. But the other day, I noticed a 9 mpg monstrosity that took it to a new level: “Freedom isn’t Free” glared at me from the mammoth protrusion that would, on a standard size 1-ton truck, be known as a bumper.
Could you imagine an American during World War II driving a Hummer? Could you imagine, in 1944, any state in the Union electing a Governor who not only drove such an affront to the war effort, but was himself responsible for its commercial distribution? Of course not. I know it sounds trite, but during World War II, Americans all pitched in. They used rations, they participated in dim-outs, they planted victory gardens, they walked. Yes, they even resorted to public transportation. During that war, people seem to have had some concept of personal responsibility, of the fact that they would need to sacrifice if America were to survive. In order to preserve their freedom, they would have to give up some of their luxuries. Today, we think of luxuries as freedom.
The word freedom has two definitions. Don’t worry; I’m not going to quote Webster’s. I’ll make up my own (or just paraphrase). One (the “American” definition) is a right and responsibility to control your own actions without external restriction. This is the form of freedom granted by the United States constitution. The other is an exemption from an obligation, duty or rule (or the “Fuck you, I’m free,” definition). At some point between 1945 and the energy crisis of the late ‘70s, Americans ceased to define freedom the way the Bill of Rights did, and began to define it the way car commercials did — “Screw you, I can do whatever I want, and if I want to fund terrorism, take up two lanes, pollute, and make everyone wait two hours while I fill up in the morning, too bad, Pal! I’m free!” Freedom began to mean “fuck you.”
Something happened between the end of World War II in 1945 and the energy crisis in 1978 (during which a revolution would have broken out if Americans were asked to unplug their toaster ovens) that changed America’s idea of what freedom really means. But what was it? Baby boomers? Cars? Those awful Elvis Presley musicals? It’s always popular to blame Nixon… I, myself, tend to believe that it was the Cold War that most horribly warped America’s idea of what freedom means. We are still so hung up about Communism that we think it’s unpatriotic to even imply that one should stop consuming—even if it could cripple our enemies.
The Cold War was never made to be about Communism vs. Democracy (or at least by Reagan’s day it wasn’t). It was about Communism vs. Capitalism. Had we made it about Communism vs. Democracy, perhaps people would have learned to value their civil liberties more than the blue light special or a free Pontiac from the Oprah show. But we didn’t. So today we celebrate that the former Soviet Union is “Taking the lead in space advertising” without giving a second thought to their “on again, off again” relationship with Democracy. “Who cares if they can vote? Even the cosmonauts get to see Ford’s new rollout!”
Communism was presented to Americans very, very simplistically: Government ownership of business, and social engineering. The true evil of Communism — totalitarianism — was completely overlooked, perhaps because it so closely resembled fascism. The only freedom that was valued in the propaganda war against Communism was the freedom to consume. After all, it’s called the land of opportunity, not the land of political representation!
With this mindset, one gets the idea that an afternoon at Neiman Marcus is the best line of defense when it comes to our freedom. Truly, has there ever been a lower moment in the any Presidency than when, just days after the 9/11 attacks, George W. Bush was asked what Americans could do to help? His answer: Shop til you drop! And don’t forget to “Get down to Disney World in Florida.” Even to the President, freedom cannot be won; it can only be bought. Either that, or he was just afraid that if he asked something from voters for this war, they wouldn’t be so passive when it came time to hit Iraq, and he figured he could plug his brother’s swing state while he was at it. But that would be unthinkably crass and horrific, so we’ll just pretend it was only stupid.
While the Cold War in general kept America unendingly to have all 31 flavors at their disposal, this still does not explain how it instilled in our collective psyche disdain for all what is most great about Democracy: the freedom to disagree with authority. To truly warp the American mind in the way that it has over the last sixty five years, we had to convince ourselves that exercising the most American of liberties was actually un-American. This idea that dissent is unpatriotic (if we define America by the civil liberties granted in the Constitution,) is the most un-American thought that one could harbor. We had to be frightened into thinking that, and there’s a reason that the Cold War’s nasty little brother was called the “Red Scare.”
One needs look no farther into the origins of this thought (or rather, cease-and-desist order on free thought) than the McCarthy era. The Red Scare taught us that anyone who ever favored a social program, questioned war, or thought that our government might have been wrong about anything could very well be a Communist. In short, it scared Americans into valuing the real evil of Communism—totalitarianism, while rejecting the very philosophy that defined America.
Many in this country still somehow buy into the fact that if you disagree with the United States government, one can (and should) be labeled a Communist. Just read through the comments on a week’s worth of Raw Story columns; you’ll see that there are people out there who, passé as the term may now be, label anyone who’s ever questioned this President a yoga-doin’ “Commie.” And these are people with a skill level at least great enough to muster use of a computer.
After 9/11, the Bush Administration sent out two messages loud and clear: 1) Don’t question us, or you’re a terrorist; and 2) Spend, spend, spend! These would have gotten a President impeached (or worse) in 1945. Thanks to the pioneering work of Joe McCarthy, however, these ludicrous and self-defeating war cries seemed down right patriotic. And patriotism is, remember, “The last refuge of scoundrels.”
The Cold War, of course, was not the only thing to drastically change our idea of what America was over the last half of the 20th century. There are other things to consider, too. I just don’t think that any are so significant in and of themselves to be considered the biggest reason we decided to give our country the finger while simultaneously putting our flag “under God.”
The rise of the car culture seems like an obvious answer, if we’re using the Hummer as our only example. After all, a Hummer doesn’t just say “Fuck you”. It also says, “Conspicuous consumption,” “My car could beat up your car,” “Don’t I look cool?” and “This may be a deathtrap, but I feel safer.”
Today, any mention of a switch to hybrid automobiles is met with contempt by the elected officials most actively portraying themselves as the ones who’ll keep you safe. If just one in six cars on the road were hybrids, we wouldn’t even need Middle East oil, anymore, but that doesn’t seem to matter to our President as much as getting everyone to agree that invading Iraq made us all safer.
Why should they make us feel bad by telling us that our gas-guzzlers are funding terror when it was so much easier for the government to lie about pre-demonized “Bad guys”—drug dealers (no connection to al Qaeda) and Saddam Hussein (also no connection)?
General laziness, and idyll in the glow of much bread and circuses, also deserve a lot of the blame. People don’t care, because it doesn’t affect their daily life. Why should they help the war in terror? It’s not like they’re targets, right? It explains the Hummers, but not the bumper stickers.
Fuel thirst is also only one sign of America’s unwillingness to help in the war effort. After racking up trillions in debt, we’ve actually cut taxes in a time of war. Do we really believe that this “tax cut” means we’ll never have to pay this debt off? Of course, this is just our “war President’s” way of exploiting America’s thirst for instant gratification. He can “cut” taxes and generate an enormous amount of debt that someone else will eventually have the unpopular duty of paying off. It’s rather like giving someone a credit card, in their name, and calling it a gift card with no limit. We’ll be sorry when the bill comes, but the bearer will be long gone.
The Baby Boom generation is also a popular target for those who feel America’s trip in the hand basket is just about over. But one can’t say, with certainty, that they were not simply a product of their times. In fact, it looks to me like they were a lot more active at one point, even if it was for selfish reasons (nothing really hit the fan, we young-ins are told, until the college deferments were lifted).
The younger generation gets much of the blame, as well, but their problem seems to be one of apathy. Also, they can’t afford a Hummer yet, so we really can’t tell.
In the mean time, we have plenty of other evidence that their parents were totally blown over by Communist paranoia. Even if we ignore the war (as most of us have), there is still plenty of other evidence that most older Americans value only the freedom to Supersize.
Otherwise good human beings have consistently supported morally reprehensible and fiscally unsound policies that Gore Vidal best summed up as, “Socialism for the rich and free enterprise for the poor.” Since most Communist governments were the result of an uprising of the poor, it was determined by many that any government aid to the poor was Communist in nature. “Universal Healthcare? Betty, go get me one of them bumper stickers where Clinton is spelled with a Commie sickle!”
This country actively moves wealth from the poor to the rich through taxation. Ask not what your country can buy for you, but what you can buy for your country! And yet the poor somehow support this. It is Communist, you see, for the government to take from the rich and give to the poor (even in instances when that keeps the economy moving), but it is somehow Capitalist for the government to transfer wealth from the poor to the rich.
Why? Because unlike a Communist country, in America, we naively believe that anyone who works hard can one day be filthy stinking rich. And then you can also profit from the pain and suffering of the poor!
Only through a long-lasting and at this point completely irrational fear of Communism could this possibly have been achieved. It’s a form of philosophical hypocrisy I like to call Communophobia! Most just call it stupidity.
