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About The North Coast times-eagle. (Wheeler, Oregon) 1971-2007 | View Entire Issue (Jan. 1, 2005)
P A G E 14 CHILDREN OF DARKNESS BY MICHAEL McCUSKER I have long thought the original Liberty Bell cracked the first time it was rung because it refused to be a part of deception and hypocrisy. There would be no liberty so long as black families were enslaved by the very men who proclaimed free dom and equality for themselves but not for women. No liberty so long as Indians were being exterminated. No liberty so long as economically deprived whites were forced (and deceived) into giving up their bodies and minds, their lives, to substitute one form of aristocracy for another.The divine rights of freedom and pursuit of happiness nearly two and a half centuries ago were only for the privileged; the Washingtons, the Jeffersons, the Hamiltons, landed aristocracy, slave owners and merchants. Put to its first internal tests of principle, an important and enlightening implication of its external purpose and method, the United States of America failed its citizens from the start — soon would begin the elaborate deception through propaganda and eulogy justifying the considerable inequities within the burgeoning society, the subliminal anesthetizing, the subjective manipulation through a maze of rigid values and social control; dreams of brother/sisterhood, liberty and equality used as sops given word as a pacifier but seldom granted form or practice; political truth and radical ideals abstracted to a point of vanish ing, if not mutated or harshly erased; until, finally, the state would be god and father and such haughty groups as Daughters of the American Revolution devolved into paragons of prejudice and intolerance. Too maladroit to deal with the dissent of free citizens guaranteed Constitutional rights (and obligations) for peaceful protest against government, government agencies local, state and national generally threaten obvious and overwhelming violence against dissent, spreading fear through other troubled citizens to justify the forces arrayed against the dissenters, insinuating vast conspiracies when there are none, the structure itself amenable for a Caesar-like takeover, a faltering sham of democracy the victim of its own intrinsic delusion. The success of revolutions, violent or bloodless, quite often depends upon the proper moment. Perpetuation of the institution of violence, generally considered the prerogative of the state is quite unpopular as a method of challenging the state and brutally repressed. Our ancestors had about a third of the population behind them when they started their revolution; the ideological/political split in the country today is virtually down the middle; however the force for revolution is considerably smaller and probably much less popular. It must also be understood that the violence the state is capable of, especially this monolithic war machine, cannot be matched by any assemblage of revolutionary-minded heretics. From a political angle, revolt is not an option. Urban guerrillas make good horror stories for newspapers and TV, but the great majority of Americans will regard any such actions as terrorism despite their degrees of disagreement with the government. However, the majority in this country does consent to terrorism in regards to other countries. They justify the extermin ation of other peoples because they are told they must be afraid, accepting the carnage as it is patriotically portrayed, allowing themselves to be misled, harried about like befuddled sheep. They allow the most abominable acts committed in their names under the mistaken assumption (continually planted there in the most fearful, demagogic agitprop) that they are protecting the American Way of Life, which of course everyone else wants a part of and will take away from us given the chance. Americans have always been a contradictory people, advancing liberty and civil rights while simultaneously eroding them and denying them to others foreign and domestic who are considered unworthy to share the American Dream. Those who repudiate the gluttony exemplified by the American Dream are ostracized as heretics and defectors if not actually traitors to the American way of life. Politics are a tone and expression of a culture, reflecting all its manifestations — its arts, its music, its sciences, its philo sophical and spiritual approaches to life, its basic functioning as a social organism within its environment, essentially for the purpose of amicable cooperation between its members. Throughout history politics have been perverted and manipulated into becoming entities within themselves, counter feit and repressive, separate from their mother cultures, not only contrary to them but preying upon them also. Governments formed to handle changing stresses and wants become instead self-preserving and inflexible, repressing progressive change. Institutions we have created, whether political or religious become corrupt and unresponsive to our needs. Institutions are maintained by subjugation and fear. The rule of law is a substitutive modification of overt violence, a gloved fist bared against its malefactors, often responsible through repression and deprivation for the desperate crimes committed against its authority. Such institutions have perpetuated themselves by forcing their detractors to adopt similar methods of rebellion — the faces may change every so often, the priorities and spoils realigned, disguised even, but the very utilization of actual and On *7fa HORACIO FIDEL CARDO And yet, living with this terror, justifying for perhaps sanity’s sake this truly insane madness, the average New Millenarian American, whose job generally depends in one way or another upon perpetuating the great war machine, condemns out of hand voices raised against it. The American military, for all its public pretensions, is American society stripped of its pretenses — its dehumanizing, its repression, its racial and ethnic prejudices, its channeling and pummeling of its members into robotic functionaries seldom questioning higher authority except through impotent grumbling and consumption of the working class soma, booze. The usual response to critical questions is not rooting out fundamental flaws to correct them; instead, elaborate contrivances and deceptions are superimposed to so conceal and disguise these defects that even the swindlers themselves become duped by their own prevarications and illusions. It becomes apparent such flawed institutions are able to survive despite their baffled and superannuated exploiters. No matter how artificial or intricate the fabrication, they yet remain resilient enough to endure varying amounts of strain up to the point of blowout — which of course guarantees their continuance. Of all the enemies of any particular institution, secular or religious, the most dangerous are their founders, however sincere or humane their goodwill and purpose. In general, the founders were against institutions to begin with, understanding their depersonalized, almost inhuman nature, and the last thing they wanted to see was still another one created with their names on it. Such prophets as Jesus, Gautama, Sam Adams, Karl Marx were anti-institution, spending their lives defying them. But after they were safely dead and buried, they were warped into institutions themselves, airless and forbidding. Once given shape an institution — which can range from a few men or women held together by hardening concepts (an embittered guerrilla cell) to a sprawling octopus of immense proportions such as the Roman Catholic Church or the United States’ economic/military/political mafia — develops sovereignty of its own independent of its creators. To survive as an entity, any institution must eulogize and institutionalize its creators at the same time effectively destroying their very rationale for establishing it. These manmade structures must become cannibalistic if they would continue to exist, if their managers and eunuchs would profit from their eminent status, if their laborers maintain ing functional operations are to enslave themselves for the false security and prominence they believe worth the sacrifice of their minds and bodies (as well as the years of their lives). Institutions must obliterate human taint and become gods and fathers (certainly not mothers) to the men and women spending their lives within them. Instead of serving humanity, they reduce humans to enfeebled slavery, demanding servitude and absolute loyalty from their vassals. Paradoxically, there are no such things as institutions, only human beings indoctrinated from birth to venerate and perpetuate institutionalism. conceptual violence against such a system only sustains the institution’s violent legacy. The American Revolution serves as an example: there was no other way to create change than through war. Liberals who would only modify the colonial institution were compelled into becoming radicals determined to violently overthrow that institution because imperial Britain would have it no other way, incapable as it was of satisfying liberal demands, thus radical izing them through frustration and repression, capable only of oppressing an issue to its exploding point, then meeting it with its armies. After its stubborn vitality kicked out the archaic and weary British (with a little help from the French), the newly created revolutionary institution, for the most part aping traditional standards in its laws and concepts (with the radical exception of the Bill of Rights), became the oppressor, putting down the so-called ‘Whiskey Rebellion' (or 'Shay's Rebellion’) a few years later with an overwhelming use of force designed to serve as a warning to future rebels. Created through rebellion, the institution would not tolerate it further, turning the violence of its inception against its own people, preserving itself at all costs, congenitally as incapable as had been Britain of fundamental change. The Whiskey Rebellion had not even been a conceptual or philosophic challenge, it was simply economic. Virtually everything leading to the birth and formation of American society, and everything since to maintain it, has been drenched in blood. The United States is a warlike nation, heir of Imperial Rome, the British Empire and Nazi Germany; even so, we are a superficial, blundering and often imitative regression, spiraling human hopes and reason deeper into a black hole with our immense, impersonal death factories, an extreme and shallow culmination of three thousand years of Western logic. America’s presumed Manifest Destiny' has been a problem long before now — it was the rallying cry that nearly exterminated native inhabitants in the nation’s westward surge, decapitated the head of Mexico, threatened Canada and seized an island empire from moribund Spain. And that was just the beginning. The United States contemptuously uses its unparalleled capacity for mass death as blackmail for superiority, not through equal understanding or reasoning on complex issues. We did this at the end of World War 2 with the world’s first nuclear explosions over Japan when it was probably unnecessary — they were desperately seeking peace negotiations — except as a bludgeon to force unconditional surrender. The world lived a half century under the shadow of nuclear blackmail following World War 2. Both the United States and Soviet Russia incessantly flexed generations of ever dead lier missiles and bombs, both rushing to build more destructive weapons in an arms race that made nearly every person in the world fearful of obliteration — Are hopes and dreams able to withstand such pressure of instant incineration for half a century? How will the psychological damage to every person who lived through this age be determined? Might this be an explanation for the frenzy in which we conduct our lives, the imagined powerlessness against monstrous insanity, the rising hunger and fear for now, tomorrow already dead? The United States' arsenal still maintains the capacity to destroy the planet several times over. We also have at our disposal, other than thermonuclear specicide, various biological agents of numerous quantities and diversity, each of which is able to infect and wipe out much of humanity, if not every other living being, plus assorted nerve gases and like horrors outlawed by international law, which can accomplish on differing vertical scales the same effect, also many times over. N O R TH COAST TIMES EAGLE A JOURNAL OF ART & OPINION PUBLISHED IN ASTORIA, OREGON 757 27TH STREET 97103 MICHAEL PAUL McCUSKER EDITOR & PUBLISHER 1 0 89 MARINE DR. ASTORIA, OREGON /
