America’s cultural autism
BY DENIS A. CONROY
President Trump visited the Boeing hangar in South Carolina on 16 February, hours after it was reported he was considering using the National Guard to round up undocumented migrants and had this to say: “We are going to build up a military might so great that no one will dare to challenge it. None!”. Needless to say, the media honed in on his words as if this was the very first occasion where imbecility du jour had raised its ugly head to defile an American presidential narrative.
Talking off-the-cuff, the President…as is his wont…expressed himself candidly in a manner that had the gall to rile an ‘intelligentsia’ essentially mute on the question of America’s inability to comprehend much beyond its own navel. The mess America made in the Middle East falls on the shoulders of the entire American community and the President allows no sensitivities to interfere with his passion for tweeting twaddle concerning the Foreign Policies follies of his predecessors.
Nobody can pretend to be unaware of the carnage America has engaged in abroad. It has gone on for decades, yet amazingly little was said about the subject in the recent presidential elections. The media along with academia may consider it expedient to adopt discretion as the better part of valour, but these instrumentalities at best, merely exist to hoodwink the masses into believing that there is just-cause behind the aggression its government and war profiteers engage in.
Think of it! Presidents and war criminals retire to ponder the nature of love, mathematics, the value of their assets…some even paint pictures… while consigning the history of their imbecility as commanders of one kind or another to their diaries…and the rest of us are expected to merely tag along…it’s the power of the brand that keeps people unfree, coaxing them to get behind that most unholy patriotic narrative that fronts for the armament industry.
Have we come to accept permanent war as the norm? The images of cities destroyed and the ever mounting toll of human collateral damage hardly penetrates public consciousness anymore, because we are told that the ‘other’ had to be destroyed before they became the clients of an alien hegemonic force that could damage our free trade arrangements. Hegemonic masculinity works in mysterious ways; it is resilient and incorporates an autistic dimension so to avoid explaining itself to Main Street.
The American penchant for growing hegemony vis-a-vis expediency began with the covered wagon and quickly spread across that vast continent under the protection of canon, musket and the protection of the military. The genocidal slaughter used against the native peoples to achieve hegemony over their lands was of little concern to them. They were a people who spoke different languages, dressed strangely and had a skin colour that identified them as near subhuman in the eyes of the occupiers.
So, did the cult of the boys-in-uniform find fertile ground in the belief that slaughtering the indigenous population was necessary in order to supplant them with virile American stakeholders attuned to the wiles of colonial exploitation as it was a sure-fire means of thieving from the native people? After all, awareness was something that only occurred in the minds of sissies.
From its inception, America managed to blindside interpretations of its actions by demonising the people it wanted to eradicate. It was through misinformation that it sought to portray its intentions as morally sound, while vilifying all resistance to its cause. In reality, American history has more to do with false-flag misinformation than truth.
The challenge facing America now is its lack of any real self-awareness…or lack of awareness of values outside of its known sphere of limited knowledge, for that matter. The world has become suspicious of an American brand of capitalistic-democracy that continues to impose…by military means…its authority on the rest of the world…hence the blowback against the loud mouth devoid of diplomatic skills.
At home, the media and the intelligence agencies continue to expunge truth from the public narrative by virtue of their ability to distort reality. Technology is the tool that gives them this advantage. By virtue of this advantage, security apparatuses in the service of government manipulate public perceptions so as to inform the public whom they should regard as friend or foe.
The elites who control the system instil fake news and fake values in the media in order to control awareness. The interests of the establishment are served by expedients that come in the form of binary perspectives that feed off the fear of blowback. If the rule of the elites is threatened in any which way, the patriotic card is the one that is automatically extracted from the deck.
There is little concern for facts on the ground when corporate-minded capitalist expediency vaunts its interests in, and plans for, free trade agreements. The global business trade-cycle ‘in-question’ is nothing more than a scam to eliminate points of particularism that claim the right to retain multiple centres of activity as the healthier way of conducting trade. Neo-conservative capitalism adheres to the myth that one size fits all. American hegemonic enforcement as implemented by the military-industrial-complex will have to inevitably roll back as alternative means of negotiating trade come into existence.
To date, the history of America has been one where hegemonic masculinity appears to have triumphed militaristically over reason. But with the establishment of an army of intelligence agents, another layer of ‘macho power’ was added to the gun-ships of state. It should be noted that having chosen ‘agro’ as the gene of choice for the State, the skills of diplomacy were stifled very early in the piece. Thus did brawn manage to smother America’s better self and consign its ‘dream’ to the isolation of the autistic ward.
Americans are now struggling to comprehend the thought processes of their Commander In Chief. They sense that the Commanders at The Pentagon, Commanders at Wall Street, Commanders at NATO, Commanders at Fleet Street, Commanders at AIPAC, Commanders at the CIA and the FBI are actively part of a genome chorus of imbedded interests seeking to retain as much power in the chain of command as possible in ways that corrupt the democratic process…which leaves it to the jury to form an opinion.
The jury is the American People and they are slowly becoming aware of the duplicity that has corrupted them from the very start. But wait, the centre is no longer holding and the people might come out of their long coma yet to discover that it is high time they freed themselves from the fake news and fake values that represent the current American brand? Clearly, the existing American brand of governance is the product of straw-men!
