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duckspeak patriotism (10-27-1)
United we stand.
God bless America.
Right?
This is, allegedly, a place where we have free speech. But, God forbid we waste any breath on unpopular speech. God forbid we not pretend like being attacked suddenly makes our 285,437,071 (as of this writing) citizens all brothers and sisters. We're not all the same. We're not united behind the "war on terror." Some of us even think?don't be too shocked?that terrorism will never end as long as humanity continues on its current path. And, no, I don't mean that we'll all discover God and all live in some blissful "world tomorrow" paradise.
Truthfully, I don't think we have much chance of fixing the path. Our cultural evolution has come to a stand still. And, our various subcultures have no choice but to war against one another.
It's 1984, people.
Big brother is watching. He watches through traffic cameras on stoplights. He watches through nosy neighbors and camcorders. He watches through "live team coverage," an omnipresent media. And, he offers us a celebrity pool of gods to worship. He offers us dreams of getting rich hand in hand with the knowledge that most of us will be lucky to get by, and we should thank god and country (not in that order, of course) for that luck.
The giant nation states have yet to clarify their borders, but it's clear what one of them is. America. The United States. Its citizens too ignorant to notice or care that the continents of America involve more than just our specific nation, more than just our ideals. This land is not our land. We stole it from people who understood that we don't own this land. And, we aren't this land. We aren't even one people. And yet, we are part of one nation state, one empire. And, whether or not our empire was attacked first (which is arguable), we are the aggressors here. We are the aggressors, and we have the United Nations begging to join us.
It's sad in a way.
United we stand.
God bless America.
"Newspeak, indeed, differed from almost all other languages in that its vocabulary grew smaller instead of larger every year. Each reduction was a gain, since the smaller the area of choice, the smaller the temptation to take thought. Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centers at all. This aim was frankly admitted in the newspeak word duckspeak, meaning 'to quack like a duck.'"
United we stand.
God bless America.
Consider this. Consider Saudis having a military base in California, or New York, or Pennsylvania, or Oklahoma, or wherever you live. Ridiculous, right? What possible reason could they have to build a military base here?
Now consider this: the United States has a built in military presence in more than one hundred countries, outright bases in many of those. And the media reports that one of the great evil one, Osama bin Laden's reasons for acting against us is that we have violated the holy land by having our troops based on Saudi soil.
The media reports this, sure. But, there's always a tone to it like it's the ravings of a madman saying we violated anything. We're America, for god's sake. How can our presence anywhere be a bad thing? We are the ends all be all of history. It all was leading to this: America. All history was just a prelude to us, billions of lives driven by the, until recent centuries, unnamed American Dream.
We are the height of arrogance. Hell, we're so arrogant that we believe our arrogance to be a virtue. And, we have business being anywhere we want to be, trying to make everyone live like we want them to live. We actually think a worldwide America is a good idea.
Nevermind the increasing trade off of freedom for security.
Nevermind the exponentially increasing population.
Nevermind the rise of poverty and crime.
United we stand.
God bless America.
America is Mother Culture's favorite child, not her firstborn, not the cherished runt of the litter, just some middle child a little too bright for his own good. They used to say, "the sun never sets on the British Empire." That's still true in a way. The thing is, we're the empire now. We didn't fight England for our independence. We didn't revolt. We didn't rebel. We staged a mighty coup. We let them keep the name, but we took on the role of leading the empire.
And the sun never sets on the American Empire. We've got troops all over the world. Our movies distributed everywhere. Our culture broadcast to anyone with a television set. And, we think we have every right to it.
United we stand.
God bless America.
And God bless the world for suffering us.