Dateline: The Heart of the Matter, November 27th, 2008.
The trenches aren't very deep. It's tough digging them in concrete. In New York City the police have suddenly come up with a terrorist threat. This time these superslick figments of evil we are all led to believe are al-Queda-trained terrorists out to destroy the United States and especially New York City this time are threatening the New York City subway system--mad bombers; crazed Islamics; insane Muslims; antiAmerican demons; the mujaheddin of Satan himself, one of the greatest military leaders in fictional history. Satan was the military leader who led his armies against the God (Yahweh, Allah, Jehovah) of the desert religions. Yes, he lost and was thrown out of Heaven to fall to earth and of course he fell to earth in Babylon, today's modern Baghdad, where the surge has worked so well the proud people of Baghdad are in the streets in throngs again not showering rose pedals on our peace-loving troops but burning our "president" in effigy. And, too, burning American flags.
Burning Bush in Baghdad
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Again, as usual, this terrorist threat against the New York City subways is vague. It just happened out of the blue. Homeland Security says it doesn't know much about it. This, however, doesn't stop the New York City police from bringing out their automatic-weapon-carrying troops and ramming them down the throats of the millions of riders who depend on the subway system to get them to and from their jobs.
And in India, in the financial city of Mumbai, alleged Islamic madmen (terrorists) started firing their automatic military weapons in a fancy hotel restaurant after coming ashore in speed boats (Swift boats?) from an "al-Queda Navy" ship situated conveniently offshore. Their terrorist objective seemed to be taking over the city itself, though their more-focused objective was eventually the 5-star Taj Mahal Hotel. Media reports kept emphasizing just how powerfully rich Mumbai is. How it is the financial heart of India (sort of the World Trade Center of India one might dare say), and how all the hotels in the area are multistar luxury hang outs of the rich and famous, the Taj Mahal being the 5-star giant in this full-bellied and drunk-with-wealth area of otherwise impoverished India. The Caste System is still very much in place in this city as the Power Elite still rule India there in rich splendor and glee, in imitation of the old Rajah royalty that ruled India for centuries before the British invaded them and occupied them and taught them how to be 5-star hotel operators.
Could this world be dancing on hot coals kept Hellishly hot by the Power Elites of the world vying for territory and the natural wealth that territory represents to them? The Islam Power Elite versus the Mumbai India Power Elite versus the Power Elite Militarists versus the Power Elite Priests and Imans versus the nosey Power Elites of Russia, the USA, China, Great Britain, and Communist/Capitalist China.
I study Barack Obama. He's the greatest political upstart of the new century. He's got the right charm. Though really not a great speaker, he knows how to sound like great speakers are supposed to sound, especially those great American leaders who have impressed him the most, Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan.
I see how gracefully he moves through crowds. I see, though, too, how monoexpressional his face seems to always be, cocked and ready to either smile brilliantly or frown with dedicated seriousness. His face is molded as though still encased in a mask; a mask that stays serious and charming at the same time. A mask that is talking change yet the change it is talking about sounds so familiar. Going one way, a "yeah" way one day, and reversing himself and going the opposite direction the next day. For example: his stance on taxing the wealthy. He made great grandstanding statements about how he was going to tax everybody making over 200,000 a year--then he changed it to 250,000 a year--and give tax breaks and rebates to the middle-class and poor. John McCain called this "a redistribution of the wealth" and Governor Sarah Palin called it Socialism. And McCain and Palin harped on this socialistic aspect of this Southside Chicago black boy who then we found out hung with the Weather Underground when he was 8 years old and living in Indonesia or somewhere like that--Governor Palin then informed us that this Bill Ayres who was by then Barack's best pal, the man who had pushed Barack into politics, was a DOMESTIC TERRORIST. Barack became a Socialist and Domestic Terrorist all due to his plan to tax the wealthy--and rather than standing up to these charges like a changed man, Barack backed down. He's not going to tax the wealthy afterall; which means he's not going to give tax cuts or rebates to the middle-class either.
The taxing-the-wealthy idea had gotten him a huge following--just as his early-on saying he was going to bring the troops home from Iraq got him his initial political surge. At first it was like he was bringing the troops home immediately--then that immediately gradually increased to 90 days, then maybe a year or two, then after Barack went to Baghdad and seemingly fell in love with General Petraus, he changed his mind again. Yes, he was going to reduce the troops in Iraq--yes, he was going to do that, but then Petraus had somehow convinced him that the surge had worked and the withdrawal of troops had to be slower than anticipated--and then Barack started talking about reducing our troops in Iraq--YEAH! the people were applauding and hollering at his packed rallies when he made that statement--BUT NOT bringing them home but rather deploying them to Afghanistan where he said he intended to use the surge method there to go after Bin Laden--even if it meant sending our troops into Pakistan.
Yet the young people, including hundreds of thousands of first-time voters, educated whites, all blacks, Latinos, Asians, even Jews and Midwest blue-collar workingclass, the jobless, veterans, flocked to this man's clarion call for CHANGE. And then this massive following swept this at one-time totally unknown Southside Chicago politician into the office of the President of the USA. The first BLACK president of these United States! (Though note how our political system is still so based on racism. McCain carried, with the exception of North Carolina, Florida, and Indiana, the slave states, the Deep South states, the border states, then up the backbone of the Midwest, the self-abusing Conservative strongholds of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Utah, Wyoming, North and South Dakota, Montana, Idaho--McCain carried them all--even Missouri, Tennessee and Kentucky. Talk about backlash! And there naturally will be a white backlash. Of course there will be. Yes, Barack Obama is a full-fledged Biblically declared black man to the Deep South still hidebound racist states where the White Power Elite still rules with a Mister Charley iron hand in spite of states like Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, Georgia being predominantly black in terms of population.) But to most Americans, Barack Obama is a Great All-American, a symbol in both name and genetics representing all of those of us who call ourselves Americans (and that includes Latin Americans--even Canadians are Americans), a charming, tall, boyishly good looking man who seems to be saying what the majority of Americans want him to say. And they want him to DO, too. To carry out his campaign offerings.
That night in Grant Park in Chicago when Barack Obama gave his acceptance speech, at that moment he had the whole of the country--even those who down-deep hated him for whatever reason--ready to follow this man into a whole new USA--that New Frontier John Kennedy had promised us--that Great Society Lyndon Johnson had promised us.
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From Johnson's "Great Society" Speech, 1964:
The purpose of protecting the life of our Nation and preserving the liberty of our citizens is to pursue the happiness of our people. Our success in that pursuit is the test of our success as a Nation.
For a century we labored to settle and to subdue a continent. For half a century we called upon unbounded invention and untiring industry to create an order of plenty for all of our people.
The challenge of the next half century is whether we have the wisdom to use that wealth to enrich and elevate our national life, and to advance the quality of our American civilization.
Your imagination, your initiative, and your indignation will determine whether we build a society where progress is the servant of our needs, or a society where old values and new visions are buried under unbridled growth. For in your time we have the opportunity to move not only toward the rich society and the powerful society, but upward to the \cf2 Great Society\cf0 .
The \cf2 Great Society\cf0 rests on abundance and liberty for all. It demands an end to poverty and racial injustice, to which we are totally committed in out time. But that is just the beginning.
The \cf2 Great Society\cf0 is a place where every child can find knowledge to enrich his mind and to enlarge his talents. It is a place where leisure is a welcome chance to build and reflect, not a feared cause of boredom and restlessness. It is a place where the city of man serves not only the needs of the body and the demands of commerce but the desire for beauty and the hunger for community.
It is a place where man can renew contact with nature. It is a place which honors creation for its own sake and for what is adds to the understanding of the race. It is a place where men are more concerned with the quality of their goals than the quantity of their goods.
But most of all, the \cf2 Great Society\cf0 is not a safe harbor, a resting place, a final objective, a finished work. It is a challenge constantly renewed, beckoning us toward a destiny where the meaning of our lives matches the marvelous products of our labor.
So I want to talk to you today about three places where we begin to build the \cf2 Great Society\cf0 -- in our cities, in our countryside, and in our classrooms.
Many of you will live to see the day, perhaps 50 years from now, when there will be 400 million Americans -- four-fifths of them in urban areas. In the remainder of this century urban population will double, city land will double, and we will have to build homes, highways, and facilities equal to all those built since this country was first settled. So in the next 40 years we must re-build the entire urban United States.
Aristotle said: "Men come together in cities in order to live, but they remain together in order to live the good life." It is harder and harder to live the good life in American cities today.
________________to read complete speech: coursesa.matrix.msu.edu/~hst306/documents/great.html
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Instead of a Great Society, Lyndon Johnson gave us the VietNam War, based on his lying about the Gulf of Tonkin incident.
Talk is easy; action is where talk becomes reality. Change isn't change when you are talking about change. Change demands continuence. If you say you are going to change something it doesn't mean you simply rename the same old cogs in the ruined wheel.
Unfortunately, in his choosing the men and women he did for his transition team, Barack Obama is doing a total 360 from the change he was promising that got him elected miraculously President, a legitimately elected president I might add. The men and women he has positioned around him as advisors, spokespersons, cabinet members...well, I'm sorry to say this...do NOT represent change!
Barack Obama is simply trying to tacitly tell those of us...who so hoped this man would be the man to really and truly bring about a change for the better in this country, for peace, for the pursuit of life, liberty, and happiness, for grace, honesty, and serious wisdom to be finally installed in our heretofore totally corrupted government...this man who was elected by the best of the American people, this man who was elevated to champion status by this multitude of honesty-seeking, accountability-seeking Americans is simply trying to tell us now that he's sorry but he was all along simply a puppet--a puppet under whose facade you will find the working arm, the controlling arm of the Democratic Party--the same-old-same-old political Power Elite that has controlled this country since the time of the American Revolution, the revolution in which the conscripted common man and freed slave fought to become free, to gain liberty, to gain separation from divine royals and dukes and earls and a pompous lord and master class--
But these will remain lusted-after ideals. Barack Obama is not going to change anything. He's going to play by the Democratic Party book. The Power Elite of Washington groomed this man, tested him against Bill Clinton's wife--saw him win big in IOWA! And then they really kept their eye on Obama after Iowa. And he continued to beat Hillary Clinton in every state and even in the states Hillary Clinton won it was by a close margin. And then Obama began to receive more money than Hillary Clinton and all the Republicans and then John Edwards had to go and have an affair right in the middle of the chance of his lifetime and with a wife dying of cancer! Oh what careless mistakes politicians are used to making and getting away with. But the people turned on John Edwards and then Bill Clinton committed a political faux pas in South Carolina defending his wife against Barack Obama! And then all eyes turned on Barack Obama and he wiped out Edwards and Hillary Clinton and he wiped out the Fundamentalist Christians and he wiped out the Conservative fools and he wiped out the racists!
Yesterday Barack Obama announced he was keeping Robert Gates (creator of the 1 trillion dollar Pentagon budget) as Defense Secretary. Robert Gates is so much more powerful than Barack Obama. And Obama's embracing John Brennan as an advisor.
I don't see any change so far, do you?
bylinebillputzfor The Daily Growler
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