I started this for Grassroots Press but never finished it.
I used to consider myself quite the all-American boy. I was born in Texas, for crying out loud. I went to public schools five days a week, and Southern Baptist church every Sunday. I loved everything military – my friends and I refought World War II over and over again in our backyards, and I drew war pictures in school while the teacher droned. I watched way too much TV – Howdy Doody, Mickey Mouse Club, Bonanza, Ed Sullivan, and countless cartoons. I listened to rock and roll radio constantly, ate Pop Tarts, sucked my milk through Flav-R Straws, and combed by hair like Edd "Kookie" Byrnes. My family saw the USA in our Chevrolet. We cooked hamburgers in our back yard. My every cell was American. My very DNA was American. My brain played American music back to me day and night. My feet tapped out an American rhythm. I thought I sort of understood this country. I thought "freedom" actually meant something. I thought that Americans had some innate level of decency and common sense.
By the time I was 16 or so, things were starting to, like, not quite add up, you know? Something was terribly wrong that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. Then came the Vietnam War, and I began to see through the glass darkly. I became radicalized. Power to the people, make love not war and all that. But the war eventually ended, and like many others of my g-generation, I found that I was very good at doing my own thing. Smoking my own pipe. Following my own drum. Life went on. Despite Reagan and Bush I, life in America was nothing to get hung about, or so it seemed at the time. It wasn’t until 1995, when I read an article by Noam Chomsky in The Nation which described the true power dynamics in this country (the rich want it all!), that I rediscovered that yes indeedy, I was still very much a radical... which is to say, I still believed in peace, justice, saving the Earth, power to the people, making love not war, and dancing in the streets whenever possible. Some things never change.
Life continued within me and without me. Ace Ventura, Pet Detective... Slick Bill Clinton, Stealth Republican... Monica Lewinsky... impeachment... the dot com boom and high tech bubble... is this country screwed, or what? I was appalled by the 2000 coup d’etat and the subsequent hard-right governance of the Bush regime and their Democratic enablers. On 9-11 I realized as soon as the planes hit the towers that Bush had been handed almost unlimited power. I was saddened in 2002 when the Republicans took control of Congress with a plurality of less than 100,000 votes. But what finally did it for me was when 70% of Americans supported the Shock&Aweâ that so many of us peaceniks had worked so hard to prevent.
You know, I realize that half of all Americans have IQs of less than 100. But invading Iraq was beyond dumb and dumber; in fact, it was so far beyond stupid, it was pathetic. Americans are famously clueless, but with the invasion of Iraq their cluelessness reached a new quantum level. I bet if you took a poll, very few Americans could tell you what "Pandora’s Box" means. Further, I bet a high percentage wouldn’t be able to tell you what the old saying, "Fools rush in where angels fear to tread" means. How could the progeny of Davy Crockett and Daniel Boone get so dumb? I don’t recognize Americans anymore. Which leads me to suspect that a critical mass of Americans have morphed into something different... "Murkans," citizens of a new country, Murka, with a new faith-based culture, simultaneously high-tech and medieval.
One aspect of our ongoing American tragedy is that intelligent people have been systematically excluded from real power in this country. As I used to say at Peace Vigil, referring to the Gandhi and Bush puppets people brought for dramatic effect, "They make policy, we make puppets." What a waste.
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