Is it Just Me?

    One of the essential requirements to translate from youth to functional American adulthood is the ability to intelligently accept hypocrisy. If this skill is not acquired you are doomed to spiritual and material failure.

    

    Firstly, you must not be deceived by that first instinct and assume that in “human” society humanity is prioritized. No, all the laws, social stratification and good opinion of mankind are based on the primacy of ‘property’. Your entitlement to the so-called “necessities of life” is directly proportional to the amount of property you possess. And the forms of property are “real”, “personal”, fiat money, and the labor of others. So, one of the first hypocrisies that must be thoroughly accepted in American society as suggested by the flowery language of our founding documents, is that “human rights” are superior to “property rights”. In actuality, “human rights” are only the dividend paid after property rights are secured by the agency of “democratic” government, and again, are by degree as “unalienable” as the appraisal of possession and amount of property endows them. This is why one can be employed by one of the largest and most prosperous corporations on earth and ‘labor’ (fundamentally a reversion to peasantry) will not return the most basic human right – a livelihood. And why others can commit self-aggrandizing un-punishable financial crimes!

   

    Secondly, it is the unquestioned obligation of our citizenship to internalize the fantasy of “American Exceptionalism” and cling to the belief that this culture engaged in “manifest destiny”, imperialism, and perpetual warfare since the first permanent immigrant settlements on this continent – is “peaceful”. This requires an intellectual gymnastic beyond mere hypocrisy. That being the case, it shouldn’t be necessary to review our American history replete with the various and sundry mendacities that have accompanied the imperialist agenda to illustrate willful dissimulation bordering on psychopathology. Instead we can turn to current events to reveal our cultural sanctimony.  

   

    Yesterday a national budget was proposed in which one-half of discretionary spending will be directed to the military. One-half! This at a time when tremendous personal wealth is being created and centralized, food for the hungry programs are being cut, and public schools are literally disappearing for lack of funding. Why, it may be asked, does the richest, most powerful, sole superpower even need to expend half of its discretionary spending, an amount slightly less than the combined military expenditures of all the nations on earth, for “defense”? If no nation or group of nations is spending even a fraction of what we’re spending to defend themselves from ‘us’, it would seem to follow they’re not spending huge amounts in order to attack us; which begs the question, what is our huge defense expenditure defending against? It cannot rightfully be called “defense” spending. It can only be “offense”, empire building spending. Yet in our bizarre cultural narrative, our empire is the historically unique outgrowth of “peace” – despite the in-progress torrent of flowing blood directly attributable to American military foreign adventures on-going in 139 countries that goes unexamined and unexplained by “peaceful”, secure  Americans.

   

    Is it any wonder then that today, Jan. 17, our President, a lawyer and constitutional scholar, can twist his mouth to tell us that “our friends and neighbors” in the NSA may be forgiven the abrogation of the Fourth Amendment, because “friends and neighbors” are not constitutionally constrained when confronting the consequences of our national decision to wage war against the world. After all, war is peace. And Americans are “free” notwithstanding any recision of supposedly protected, unalienable rights, and appearances to the contrary. To say otherwise would make the President a hypocrite.