Columnist – John Sammon
America is a country of illusions, or like a desert mirage, what you think you see is what you don’t necessarily get. This extends from the watered-down Obama health care package that in reality is so weak it isn’t a national health package at all, and will likely be repealed by Republicans anyway, to the idea that the country is fighting a war on drugs when epidemic drug use in this country fuels demand, to the recent government-promoted notion that the country is in an economic recovery.

America is a country of smoke and mirrors, one of the reasons we were so successful at founding Hollywood and Disneyland. Both are mythological kingdoms.

America is a country of ideas, often the false kind, that for reasons of our own we’d like to believe, or we need to believe. In other words, the truth is whatever we say it is. This really took off under Bush and unfortunately, despite the initial promises and good feelings, still holds true under Obama. Here are 10 examples:

The withdrawals in Iraq and Afghanistan are withdrawals.

The president announces the withdrawal of 10,000 troops out of 100,000. Some actually come home, but thousands more stay. Five years goes by and you forget all about the promises. Five years later, there are still 50,000 troops in those countries. By now you can’t remember how it all started anyway. The government created for you a successful illusion. It’s the withdrawal that isn’t.

The government honors and takes care of veterans.

Every July 4 veterans gather with flags to honor the fallen. Every year television channels like the oil-company-corporate-backed History Channel run movies showing the glories of war and bumper stickers on cars proclaim how we owe our freedoms to these sacrifices. And every year veteran’s health care for disabled veterans is abysmal. An airline charges returning veterans huge fees to ship their luggage. The government fails to provide flak vests for soldiers going into combat. The G.I. Bill no longer is gifted to veterans for their loyalty, but is instead taken out of their paychecks while they are on duty. Representatives on Capitol Hill and especially the Republican Party, who have never served in the military (neither have their children), always threaten to cut benefits. Civil War battlefields are lost to the development of Walmart stores and school children don’t know what World War II was. The sacrifices except among a few old men are forgotten.

America is the patriotic country that really isn’t.

America is a democracy, or a republic, or whatever.

Americans traditionally love to believe this is a free country, even though the founders with the exception of John Adams owned other human beings as slaves.

Take down a pad of paper and with a pencil jot down the things that you as a citizen have any say over with your single vote in the off-year and general elections. You can vote for a local school bond. You can vote for a mayor, a senator, even the president. You can vote for many things. But there are many you can’t vote for, whether or not to go to war, or extend forever war, the space program and its billions spent, the amount of federal tax you pay. The basic premise of the country was that an elite cadre of representatives (Congress) needs to make decisions for you, because you’re not smart enough to, and chaos would result. In fairness, there is some truth to this. But look up the definition of democracy in the dictionary, “government by the people and through elected representatives.” Go ahead and try to vote to repeal the Patriot Act.

America is the democracy that isn’t.

America is not a racist country because Oprah Winfrey has a television show.

Using television to pacify African Americans has a long history after networks got the message in 1962. The theory is, like giving beads and trinkets to natives in the old days, picking representatives of the race for glorification on the TV tube convinces members of the race that progress has been made. Though it is better than seeing African Americans only portrayed on TV as butlers and maids, jails are still full of black men, inner city schools still lag behind, and most whites if they were honest would admit they don’t want to live in a black neighborhood. Most whites still associate black people with crime, poverty, ignorance and violence.

America is the racist country that isn’t, but still is.

Our elected officials represent us.

During his recent announcement of the troop withdrawal that isn’t, Obama used the usual vague terminology presidents use to describe what has been accomplished in Afghanistan, and what our exact goals are, by not doing those things. It’s kind of like a shell game, which shell is the pea under. In other words, he stated the accomplishments and goals in such a vague off-hand way as to not state them. Nothing concrete. Iffy words like “be patient,” “light at the end of the tunnel,” their “influence has been weakened,” are used to convince you. Convincing you is what’s important. Recently, the American public found out in a surprising revelation that negotiations are in progress with the Taliban in Afghanistan, the announcement not disseminated through our own government, but because of a public statement made by the corrupt puppet ruler we set up in Kabul.

Apparently, all we’ve accomplished after 10 years, millions of Iraqi and Afghan lives lost, billions of dollars bankrupting the economically tottering U.S., and over 6,000 American dead, is to kill bin Laden, whom we set up in a leadership role way beyond his actual influence in the first place.

You’ll never learn the truth unless a fluke like Wikileaks happens or until documents are declassified sixty years from now.

The case of Wikileaks and the government’s apoplectic response proves that the government believes the less you know the better, for your own good. In other words, ignorance is bliss.
Here are five more:

China is our friend.

Corporate America is concerned about the extinction of the American middle class.

Mexican immigration is a threat to the U.S.

This is curious in light of the fact that the entire Western part of the country was once owned by Mexico and was taken from them by war, and that Mexican immigration has been a factor in the country for over 100 years, and that the American economy absolutely depends on Mexicans to do the work Americans won’t, flipping burgers, making beds, mowing grass, landscaping yards.

Rich white businessmen and government bureaucrats, those who complain the loudest, use low-paid Mexican laborers the most.

I guess that ties into the next one.

Americans aren’t hypocrites.

And lastly.

Americans are better than other people.

Whether it’s Teabaggers chanting “USA” “USA” like rooting at a football game, or intoning “God bless America,” asking God to bless only about five percent of the world’s population and ignoring the rest, there is plenty of evidence that we think we’re better. Because of money and power, we look down on other lesser peoples, people with less money and power. Money and power are what matters, not integrity and morality. My favorite is still the old Vietnam-War-era saying, “America, love it or leave it.” In other words, if you see wrong, ignore it.

That is truly a mark of superiority.

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Reenactment of Paul Revere’s Famous Ride: Stephen Colbert “proves” that Paul Revere could have ridden a horse while ringing a bell and firing multiple warning shots from a front-loading musket — as claimed by Sarah Palin. LOL!

Meanwhile, Palin’s supporters have been busy trying to cover up her ignorance — by invading Reveres page on Wikipedia and attempting to edit it to reflect Palin’s wrong version of the “midnight ride“.

Preamble

Reenactment: Paul Revere’s Famous Ride

The Best of Sarah Palin — By Stephen Colbert

Sarah Palin’s Bus Tour

Sarah Palin Visits the Times Square Applebee’s: Sarah Palin joins Donald Trump at one of New York’s historic monuments, the Times Square Applebee’s.

Sarah Palin Uses a Hand-O-Prompter — Sarah Palin uses a hand-o-prompter and defends Rush Limbaugh for calling liberals “retards.”

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   Columnist – John Sammon
I pose this question to readers of Politicalarticles.net.

If you had to pick which America is America, looking at the America of today, and if you had a choice between the America of Richard Nixon, secretive, dishonest, undermining the Constitution, as opposed to the anti-Vietnam War counter-culture, including hippies, pot-smoking, often irresponsible and selfish, hedonistic, socialistic, but at least with a concerned sense of ethics.

Which would you choose between the two? Which America won? Which America today is America?

Nixon or the counter-culture?

Remember, George Bush is walking around a free man and even praised after launching an unnecessary war in Iraq under false pretenses that killed a million Iraqis. The current president, Obama, has broken almost every campaign promise he made to get elected including continuing two economy-draining wars, keeping Guantanamo Prison open as an American Bastille, promoting nuclear power despite the catastrophe in Japan, and on and on.

Remember too, the moron Tea Party movement is alive and well.

Given this, clearly, Nixon won. Nixon’s America is America. Nixon was just 40 years ahead of his time. If he had committed the Watergate break-in today, not only would the timid press of the kind that never questioned George Bush let it slide. Nixon never would have been caught. But even if he had, he would never have been impeached.

HE WOULD HAVE BEEN PRAISED. AS A TRUE PATRIOT.

He’d probably get his ski nose face carved on Mount Rushmore.

Honesty doesn’t mean anything to Americans, most of them. Look at Barry Bonds and his steroid home run record. The majority of Americans, Nixon in his day celebrated and praised as the “Silent Majority.” What Nixon meant by this label is that the majority of Americans had the same values that he himself supposedly had, hard work, perseverance from humble beginnings, law-biding, church-going, war-supporting, uncomplaining, noble.

Instead of ruthless disregard for decency which is what he really was.

The silent majority. In other words, the kind of people who will turn a blind eye and go along with what is wrong simply because the president said it’s right. This is what Bush and Cheney did. The ovens at Auschwitz were supported by another “silent majority.”

Nixon has been vindicated, not from wrongdoing; what he did is enormously wrong. He’s been cleared because he had the right idea. Honesty is for suckers. A sucker game. Nixon would himself tell you so in secret with a laugh and a sneer and an accompanying dirty joke. From the corporate board room with its scheming executives who would steal $50 off their mother if they could get away with it, to corporations shipping jobs overseas to take advantage of slave labor, to Donald Trump with his pompous bellowing trying to cover the fact that he’s only a little man, to suave Obama with his broken promises.

Dishonesty is as American as apple pie. So is greed and avarice. All three are Nixonian. I wonder what Nixon thinks about all this right now. I don’t believe he’s in hell. He can tell God that he loved his mother and that he did what he did for the American people.

God would probably buy that. I think God probably placed Nixon somewhere between heaven and hell, possibly Detroit.

Nixon is saying, see I told you so. Nobody protested the Iraq or Afghanistan wars and they’ve dragged on longer than Vietnam. I was just ahead of my time. Look at what Bush got away with, lying to the American people. Nobody says peep. Look how the press badgered me and today they don’t do anything.

Why did I have to suffer when Bush doesn’t?

Why did they pick on me?

The mythology of America, that it’s a country run by honest people, has to be preserved. And that it’s a democracy, or republic, or whatever you want to call it, in which people have a say. They don’t have a say, in Afghanistan, or a hundred other issues, nor the secret rocket that was launched the other day carrying into space what nobody except the Pentagon knows.

Nixon won. Since that’s the case, maybe it’s for the best that Americans don’t have a say. Perhaps it wouldn’t make any difference if they did.
I’m sure Nixon is happy. I know I’m not.

Copyright 2011 Sammonsays.

A principle shareholder of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.(Corpse), the parent company of Fox News, is Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, the nephew of Saudi Arabian King Abdullah, and one of the world’s richest men.

Through his Kingdom Holding Co., Alwaleed owns about 7% of News Corp., or about $3 billion of the media giant. He also owns 6% of Citigroup — to which he was introduced by the Carlyle Group — or about $10 billion of the giant bank. He’s a part-owner of the famed Plaza Hotel in New York and has invested in many other prominent companies. (At one point he invested in AOL (AOL), the parent company of DailyFinance.)

   [ ENLARGE ]

Saudi Arabia, which is ruled by Alwaleed’s uncle King Abdullah, is, of course, an authoritarian petro-monarchy that actually is governed by Sharia law and is known as one of the top global sponsors of terrorism.

Alwaleed, like Imam Rauf, professes a desire to build bridges of peace and understanding between the Islamic world and the West. One man is a multibillionaire, with far-flung investments around the world, and the other is a religious cleric, whose congregation happens to be in downtown Manhattan.

Many Fox News pundits seem to have a big problem with the idea that a foreign government or entity with ties to terrorism could help sponsor a mosque in lower Manhattan — a legitimate concern. But as viewers listen to Fox News pundits rail against Rauf — and question his center’s funding — they should keep in mind that Fox News is part of a company, News Corp., that has extensive business ties with the Muslim world.

It’s just part of running a multinational media giant in today’s global, interconnected economy, where alliances and business relationships are more nuanced than the black and white — good and evil — viewpoint that many Fox News pundits espouse. [ Source ]

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So, if Fox News wants to play a game of guilt by association with Imam Rauf, — then we can justifiably conclude that Rupert Murdoch’s has questionable ties to terrorism, and therefore Fox News is a “Terrorist Command Center,” — operated by Roger Ailes and “Osama Bin O’Reilly“.

   [ FOX IS NOT NEWS -- IT IS PURE MEDIA TERRORISM! ]

TheDailyShow: Aasif Mandvi fights for Team Mohammed in Michigan, while Wyatt Cenac represents Team Jesus in the rest of America.

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   [ By: Howard Fineman ]
You can still buy an American newspaper at the kiosk in Rome’s Piazza Colonna, but you have to ask the lady behind the counter. She turns from the window, paws through a stack on the floor, and produces an International Herald Tribune, holding it at arm’s length like a day-old fish. It’s the same availability and tone in Venice, the Greek islands, and Istanbul. The implicit question in the transaction is always the same: why would you want to read that thing about that place at this time?

And when you read about America in European newspapers, what you are likely to find is a tone bordering on pity. The U.S. is depicted as a fraying empire of obesity, ignorance, debt, gridlock, stagnation, and mindless war. Sure, the iPad is cool, but it is evidence of what America was, not what it will be again. The stories are not angry, accusatory, or even ideological. It’s worse: they are condescendingly elegiac.

European disdain for the United States is centuries old, of course. But over the course of decades of traveling in the U.K. and on the continent, I have never gotten the sense that I got on a recently completed three-week trip to Italy, Greece, Turkey, and the Black Sea. America is no longer admired, imitated, or feared. We remain–for now–a safe haven for dollars (of which there are too many in the world). But we increasingly are seen less as a model or as an empire than as a cautionary tale of national neglect and decline.

Some Europeans can’t quite hide their schadenfruede. The British–whose publications and personalities are increasingly (and annoyingly) influential in the colony they lost 227 years ago–are global leaders in condescension (think Simon Cowell). But for America they add a special twist of bitter lemon to their analyses. It’s the triumph of the doddering older brother who no longer has to be grateful to his junior. Memories fade, and the Brits no longer feel they have to be kind out of homage to our having saved them from Hitler.

[ How Charisma Changed the World ]

A couple of examples from the genre. Writing in the Guardian, Timothy Garton Ash sees a Third World shabbiness when he visits the United States. “Every time I come back to the United States,” the Oxford don writes, “the airports, the roads, the public spaces look more tattered, battered, old-fashioned. Modernity is no longer self-evidently here.”

Edward Luce, a brilliant and diligent reporter for the Financial Times, surveyed the American landscape and came up with a mournful portrait that echoes, in equal measure, Diane Arbus, Walker Evans, and Robert Altman. Citing incontrovertibly bleak statistics about the struggles of middle-class Americans, and the growing disparity between the really rich and everyone else, he concludes that the U.S. is losing its essential character: it is no longer the land of opportunity and upward mobility; no longer the place where the future will surely be better, and more prosperous, than the past. Luce rues that a middle-class home is crowded–only 700 square feet–and “cluttered with chintzy memorabilia” and heartbreakingly defiant messages on refrigerator magnets. He ends the long piece with the scene of a much-beloved autistic son in a struggling family. The lad loves to sing, and launches into a “flawless rendition” of “The Impossible Dream” from Man of La Mancha. And that, in the author’s view, is evidently America today: an impossible dream.

And why, you might ask, does much of the rest of the world see us this way? I have a few suggestions:

The post-post-9/11 world. After an initial burst of sympathy, the world has lost patience and stomach for the “war” we launched against Al Qaeda and its allies. It’s cost the U.S. $2 trillion to $3 trillion or more, but Europe doesn’t agree with the premise or, even if it does, doesn’t want to pay for the cost. It would rather look away from our struggle, and, increasingly, would rather blame us than Al Qaeda.

The euro. In spite of all the talk about the euro’s demise, and the problems of Greece and Spain and Italy, the currency is surviving, as is the economic union it represents. The euro is back up.

Asia and Arabs. Turkey is turning east, both for investment money from the Gulf and for construction projects (the Turks are master builders) in Asia. As the U.S., burdened with mounting debt and structural political and economic sclerosis, is facing the possibility of a double-dip recession, most of the BRICs (and I would add Turkey) are moving ahead.

Obama fatigue. I talked to numerous businesspeople and others in Europe who had lost the awe they had–briefly–that we had elected an African-American, and a cool global guy at that. They are aware that he has lost his popularity in the United States, and, even though he managed to enact some massive legislation–on health care, stimulus, and finance services–they increasingly view him as ineffectual. “He’s hollow,” said one leading businessman in Istanbul.

World Cup. Three of the four FIFA finalists were from Europe. Landon Donovan, are you listening?

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