Say What

Ari Fleischer has told Americans they better watch what they say. As ominous a portent as this may be, coming from the White House, for the freedoms Americans hold dear, it really is good advice when looked at in a broader perspective.

What happens in the political world other than assassinations and mechanized mass murder is words. Just words. The nutzo fascist right, as incoherent as their dicta may seem when evading pointed questions or rationalizing their insane deeds, actually have taken word management to an extreme degree of sophistication. Realizing the average American only has enough attention span for a bumper sticker, their agitprop phrases are couched very effectively in that format. One of the best is Just Say No! Another potent one is God Bless America! Buy War Bonds! Loose Lips Sink Ships! Support The Troops! United We Stand! the list goes on. Even less complex than haiku, they have a punchy rhythm, they deliver their message efficiently, and they evoke visceral response in the teeming masses that have been preconditioned to certain key words. 

The challenge that presents to the loyal opposition is they are very hard to deconstruct even with lengthy prosaic dialectic, however well reasoned. And their converse is never as effective, obviously playing a losing game of catch up. Just Say Yes! simply doesn't grab people the way Just Say No! does, eventhough it might make a lot more sense in the context of political progress. Progress is not what they are after. The bumpersticker sloganizing of the idiot right is so effective in fact, that even progressives, alternatives and radicals feel compelled to parrot them back, as if chanting the catechisms of the CONspiracy will somehow shield them from retribution as antis. 

We Support The Troops, Bring Them Home! makes literal sense, but by reiterating the rightist dogma, the very protest supports the dogs of war too. It is self evident the public support the troops; that is where all the tax money goes. We couldn't NOT support the troops if we wanted to, so why state the obvious? 

Saddam Is A Vicious Tyrant. Once again, true enough in a geopolitical sense, but why give the fascists the airtime? You can look around your own neighborhood for tyrants and find them under every rock. Not all that rare! Tyrant is an archetype in human culture. Some have even proposed that tyrant is a genome of human DNA. Not us, but among us. Maybe we can eliminate them by carpet bombing the neighborhood, but typically they escape with the cash moments before the bunker buster hits, and the only casualties are collateral. Saddam is probly sipping iced tea in an air conditioned penthouse in Miami right now, laughing at how he and Osama and their CIA handlers have pulled another wooly one over the eyes of the working, paying, suffering multidudes of the world. 

We Toppled A Dictatorship. Toppling a dictatorship isn't that hard, in fact they topple of their own weight all the time, eventually. And if that were really the agenda proffered by the rightists, there wouldn't be dictatorships in a hundred countries in America, Africa, Europe and Asia. THOSE dictatorships are "friendly" regimes. That doesn't mean they are nice to people; No! Far from it. What that means is that they obey memoranda from the U.S. Department of State. In other words they are friendly to the interests of the military industrial corporate new world order, even while they murder their citizens by the thousands or hundreds of thousands, clear cut the last remnants of the world's tropical rain forests, or beggar their economies with purchases of weapons while billions starve in terror. Besides, countries the U.S. has liberated tend to fall immediately under the sway of new dictatorships of warlords, drug cartels or the chaos of desperate mobs released from totalitarian restraint, gleaning the ravaged landscape of demolished infrastructure for subsistence. Afghanis and Iraqis, as oppressed as they were in 2000, are far worse off today than before being "liberated" by Anglo American militaries.

We Won. That is a good one. If Saddam or Osama can't be located, if there are no weapons of mass destruction, if there is no improvement in the lives of the denizens of lands the U.S. has bulldozed, if there is no mitigation of the threat of terrorist attacks against Americans, at least, in the sense of utterly overwhelming by sheer weight of metal a supine, backward, fourth rate country that had been inspected for weapons and come up empty, yes we won. As if winning were the reason to go to war in the first place. Well, it is! After the horrors, and humiliations of the "loss" of Vietnam (a country we never "had"), the U.S. military establishment regrouped and formulated a policy of demonstrating U.S. power by waging winnable wars against much weaker enemies to minimize commitments of time, limit expenditures, reduce casualties - at least among U.S. personnel - but particularly to forestall the revulsion of feeling in the American public, and consequent momentum of the peace movement. Even though the Baby George administration has promised a future policy of endless warfare, eternal conflict has been and will be compartmentalized as neat, affordable, low risk, "winnable" multiple wars, each showing of which will be over before you know it, undermining any effective protest. But by the time protesters have kicked off their shoes and cracked a beer after a long, fruitless day at the barricades, the troops are already being boarded on flights to the next mini war theatre half a world away from, or right next door to the last. So, we win the war? So what? We always lose the peace.

It seems so frustrating, that nothing can be done to stop the all consuming juggernaut of global war while bridges and schools everywhere crumble from lack of funding, and the Bill of Rights is balled up like old chewing gum wrapper and tossed in the trash can of history. There are plenty things that can be done, but one of the first things that can be done by the billions of people worldwide who do not want, need or abide war is to stop mouthing the moronic words of the vampire warmongering elite. You never hear Cheney or Rumsfeld say Peace is cool, but we just don't think that open negotiations and the rule of international law is the way to go about it. No! So why should peaceniks repeat their stupid sayings? The only people who support war are either stockholders of Halliburton, GE, Bechtel, or utterly duped by the potent, if simplistic slogans of the warniks. New slogans are needed to seduce couch potatoes away from mindlessly applauding the mayhem. Here are few examples:

Lay Off the Troops: No War Today!

Saddam Was "Elected" Too!

We Lost The War - For Respect!

9/11 - The Hoax

U.S. Out Of North America!

Say No To Wargasm!

War On Terror: Tyrants 1; People 0

Divided We Stand - For Peace!

Balm Iraq!

Wake Up And Smell The New World Odor!

I Sleep With Peaceniks!

A Minute Without War; The Way Life Should Be!

Toppling Dictatorship Begins At Home!

Warniks, Take A Ba'ath!

God Bless U.S.! For We Have Sinned!

DARE To Stop The War Drug!

Let's Grow!

Braise "BoB"!

Reverend Doktor C. Sarian

Mid Coast Sub Church of Paranoia

Church of the SubGenius

052815