Land of the Puppet People
by Manuel Valenzuela
http://www.opednews.comAmerican Heroin
It oftentimes boggles the mind to try and understand the ease with which the Establishment can manipulate the American citizenry into another warmongering escapade, this time an ominous foray into the Persian lands of Iran, a nation rich in history, culture, location and most importantly to the Evil Empire, oil and gas. Yet upon further inspection it is easy to comprehend this phenomenon, for we live, as Gore Vidal has labeled it, inside the United States of Amnesia, a country where all semblance of the yesterday becomes but a haze of blatant forgetfulness and convenient whitewash, a black hole of Alzheimer’s-like darkness from where no recollection of past lessons, mistakes, errors or history can be seen or touched.
We live in a nation of gluttonous stupor and comfortable surroundings, easily distracted by the cocktail of materialism that lines our homes. We are trained to live to work, not work to live, sacrificing love of life for love for the Almighty dollar, becoming worker bees and soldier ants, selling our souls to the demons of capitalism in exchange for the happiness and stress-free lives of yesteryear, needing pharmaceutical drugs to escape the depression of our daily lives, willingly choosing to indebt our present and future in order to possess the vast array of adult toys marketed to manipulate our emotions, wrongly thinking this or that product will reincarnate lost happiness. America is the land of plenty, where waistlines expand, stress increases, mental problems grow, work hours increase and vehicles get bigger and bigger, a land addicted to the devil’s excrement, like a heroin user injecting black gold into its ever thirsty veins, becoming a violent, warmongering junkie when the perpetual case of cold turkey arises.
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It is the television, that drug of mental escapism and intellectual erosion, the invaluable purveyor of fantasy and fiction, that serves to distract, distort and alleviate the stresses of a life made exceedingly harder by the continued growth of the corporatist state, where profit will always supercede people and the interests of the corporation will always trump those of the People. Yet in the television we also see the greatest tool of mass manipulation ever created, in the last few decades discovered by government and corporate interests for the incredible power emanating from its warm glow. In the span of a couple of decades it has transformed human society, acting as the corporate and governmental invasion of our homes, and into our brainwaves, affecting both the innocent and the old, indiscriminately penetrating the minds of black and white, male and female.
The propaganda emanating from its waves and the fiction produced by its owners has mutated American society into one of slouching couch potatoes, dumbed down ignoramuses, lazy and indifferent citizens, unthinking drones and brainwashed primates, turning a citizenry of creativity, vision, imagination and intelligence into one devoid of each, eroding the minds of experience and altering those of innocence, slowly catapulting America into the precipice of intellectual and knowledge collapse. It is the television that has created the amnesia running rampant from Pacific to Atlantic, saturating us with the brain manipulations of the corporatist world, creating a population needing the sensationalist programming designed to dumb down and distract, feeding into our minds senseless garbage of celebrity adoration and idol worship, introducing us to wave after wave of scheming advertisements and the thoughts and opinions the Establishment want us to incorporate as our own.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/opedne_manuel_v_060215_land_of_the_puppet_p.htm