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news monopoly propaganda machine, WITHOUT a tinfoil hat. They are one gigantic conspiracy, with a lot of subplot conspiracies. I mean, that's what they do. Lies. Secrecy. Spying. Massive thievery. Mass murder. Stealing elections. Stealing our wealth. Sending our young people off as cannon fodder. Enslaving and impoverishing the rest of us. Assaulting our best achievements and virtues--assaulting us where it really hurts--violating our sense of lawfulness and ethical behavior, our sense of having progressed as a people; sneering at and destroying our community and civil infrastructure; despising our creativity, our ability to solve problems, our sciences; defiling our desire to help others, by murdering others by the tens of thousands, torturing people, abandoning the poor to die in a natural disaster, and actually foiling all the help we wanted to give.
Making mistakes is one thing. Invading another country without cause, and looting us blind with no bid contracts, and hijacking our laws to favor the rich and the corporate--these are all bad enough. But attacking our country's SOUL, as they have done, really does fall into the category of evil. I hesitate to use that word, because it has been used for witchhunts and scapegoatings and pogroms. The "evil" that is seen is all too often in the eye of the beholder. Thus the Ancient Goddess and her cohorts were turned into devils--which once were worshiped as deities of fertility and life cycles. And how can anyone say for sure what is in someone else's heart? Even really bad people sometimes have good motives. So I am very careful with that word: evil.
But this clawing at our very identity, as a people, this assault on our best progressive instincts and ideals: torturing people, assaulting the life careers of good military professionals who have defended the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice all their lives (that one really gets to me, for some reason), rewarding yes-men and toadies; deliberately not helping people, abandoning the poor not just during Katrina but in every way; giving our children models of our country's leaders who are callous and greedy and illiterate and stupid; treating Arabs and Muslims as "ragheads" and as less than human (a low minded bigotry that can be aimed at any group, at any time); robbing black people of their votes (in Ohio, for instance)--civil rights and voting rights for black citizens having been one of our proudest achievements as a people--and on and on. They seem to want more than our blood and our money and our military machine and control of our laws. They want us to be degraded. They want us to become mean and ego-centric, like they are. They want to sully everything that is good about our country.
And there is only one word for that, and it is evil.
By "they," I mean the fatcat Bushes and their junta partners--from Halliburton and Chevron to Prince Bandar and the Neo-Cons--the fatcat CEOs who control the news media, and fatcat rightwing billionaires like Howard Ahmanson who fund election theft companies (ES&S, the spinoff of Diebold) and fascist think-tanks like the Chalcedon Foundation (capital punishment for homosexuality, among other things).
They will never have popular support, so they MUST engage in conspiracy in order to gain and keep power. They ARE a conspiracy. And so, every move they make must be presumed to be conspiratorial--fatcats joining together to rob and kill, and to destroy the soul of our democracy.
We're all tinfoil hats now--all of us peons. And there does not seem to be any evil that this cabal will not stoop to.
One caveat: I still think it's true that the impulse to thrust the word "evil" on others carries with it the presence of evil in oneself that needs recognition, perhaps in the case of us peons, the willingness to benefit from this corporate/militarist society, to ignore the harm that it is inflicting, and to be lazy and yield to depression and powerlessness. Being uninvolved citizens; wasting paper, trees, gas, water, food, buying too much, purchasing items made in China or Saipan where we know that workers is terribly exploited, while our fellow citizens here go jobless; not caring; being inward and selfish. We're all guilty of being part of this great US planet-destroying machine that the Bush junta has seized hold of. Our lack of vigilance as citizens and Americans has allowed the fascist coup to occur. We may not have wished it, but our indifference contributed to it. In terms of ourselves, that's the evil we need to purge: our uninvolvement and willful ignorance.
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