And So it Goes

I've been gone from blogging since June of 09. Not much has changed personally since the blog of June about myself. Depression and all it entails remains pretty much the same. Or worse.
Much has changed since the election of Obama. Or has it really just stayed the same? There's an argument to be made for both thoughts.
Obama the new fresh face of democracy has turned out pretty much as I expected. He's really like Abu Jamal Mumia suggested; just a black face doing the bidding of the masters at the plantation. He'll be tagged with all the political and economic disasters of the Neo-Cons and then they'll return espousing a "new" direction for America. It's already happening as shown by the election of a neocon in Massachusetts to replace the Senate seat of the late Ted Kennedy.
Obama came into the Presidency with the hopes of the world that thngs would change but quickly showed it would be the same old thing of the banksters and corporate icons running the show. He continued and expanded the war in Afghanistan while making believe we have reduced our presence in Iraq. Whenever someone asks why we are in either place the terrifying reply starts out with terrorism.
But does terrorism really justify us bombing and strafing villages thought to have the Taliban or the ever elusive Al Queida roaming around in them? How does the drone rocket attack on a wedding party or the home full of children endear the American people to the people of these nations we occupy?
Just as Dubya continually raised the level of risk everytime his ratings seemed to fall, Obama has continued to use terrorism like we used to use the term communism during the war in Vietnam. And just like that war turned out, so too will these wars turn out. We might as well start the memorial wall for the dead Americans duped into thinking they were protecting democracy when in fact the mission they were given has had the opposite effect.
I know a little about being duped by my government. I am coming up on the 42nd anniversary of the 1968 Tet Offensive this weekend on January 30-31. I learned one month after my arrival in Vietnam as a combat infantryman in the Marines what insanity I had volunteered to be part of. JFK and his charismatic oratory along with his martyrdom at the hands of an assassin made it seem I must give up my life to "protect" our country from the scourge of communism.
Instead, what we did in Vietnam was occupy a nation that really didn't want us there except for the Westernized dictators who ruled the South. We terrorized by day and night with the mightiest display of weaponry the world had ever seen. We kicked in hootch doors and insulted and bullied villagers from Saigon to the DMZ. We did all this in the name of democracy. We insisted the Vietnamese wanted our democracy. Like Iraq and Afghanistan, what the Vietnamese people wanted was security from the insanity of war so they could live in peace, work in peace, take care of their kids in peace and live free of violence. We provided none of this for them. Nor did the armies of the other side. What we did was put the general population of Vietnam in the middle of a violent game of power. They couldn't win if they supported the Americans or the North Vietnamese and NVA.
Sure this is a simplification of Vietnam and the current wars but we still must ask ourselves why we were ever there and why we are still there (in Iraq and Afghanistan)? What have we accomplished by importing violence to nations already overwhelmed with violence? C'mon, the truth is we went to these nations to demonstrate our power and to have strategic control of areas in the world we could exploit for natural resources and the fear we could bring to our perceived enemies such as China, Russia and Iran.
Our presence on their doorsteps and the control of oil fields, deep water ports and other vital resources was meant to intimidate. We have become the class bully and in classic Orwellian terms classified our actions as fighting for freedom and democracy.
Why is it we Americans trail all the other industrialized nations in literacy and the knowledge of languages other than our own? Why is it the rest of the industrialized nations have better infant mortality rates and can manage to give all their citizens decent health care? We have slowly descended into the depths of stupidity and ignorance while all around us see our emperor has no clothes while he marches in his pompous parade of oligarchic power.
Just this past week another Orwellian twist has occurred. The justices of the Supreme Court voted 5-4 to designate corporations as being individual people, having the same rights as an individual. This concept has been fought against for over a hundred years to prevent coporations from further buying off our elected officals. Now that the justices appointed by Reagan and the Bushes have opened the door to this personhood of big businesses we are offically without true democracy. Money talks, poverty walks. If we close our eyes and imagine Wal-Mart is a person do we see a predominately American or Chinese person? Where will the campaign funding come from, American tycoons or the centralized government of China, a nation once called our greatest enemy?
If we have become sickened by the lies, the innuendoes and distortions of campaign ads in past years, wait until this election season. Big money willl flood the airways with attack and counter-attack ads. And ignorant Americans will buy into the lies and distortions without finding the truth for themselves. Any attempt to hold a conversation of original thought will be difficult to find. Buzz words and talking points will be used to counter any rational argument against the lies of America, Incorporated.
So, yes, the more things change the more they stay the same. Who will break the cycle? Certainly not the "greatest generation" of my father who have gotten theirs but don't want anybody else to have the same. Certainly not my generation who claimed they would change the world but instead copped out and cut their hair and became "the man".  My progressive friends like to believe the coalitions of the Vietnam moratorium movement changed the course of the war but conveniently forget after 1968, the bombing and deaths increased rather than decreased. Nixon used the war for four years to ensure his reelection. The genocide in Cambodia occurred because Americans refused to stop the war.
Who will break the cycle? I don't think my sons' generation will do it because they are the result of my generation's pampering and infantilzing. They became self absorbed and so materialistic they couldn't escape the debt trap of the corporations. They failed to understand the death trap of the military.
And so it goes. Welcome back to my cynical and disparging blog about the country I try dearly to love but become repulsed by every day. Like the old folk song asks, "when will they ever learn, when will they ever learn?". I ask myself that almost every day and can't come up with a hopeful answer.