What the hell happened to us, America?


by Underground Panther in the Sky, Unknown News

Sept. 12, 2005

I've got to tell you an open secret, psst, America ... and listen, you people on the Right...

We are all in deep shit because morally inferior people are in control.

Morally inferior people are using the world's people for their selfish gain. They're using our mothers, brothers, cousins, children, and us.

We do not question things, develop our minds, or relate to one another anymore. How do you think things got so cold? Corrupt people are manipulating us, are using our stolen trust, stolen power, sincere beliefs, confusion, ignorance, conformity, insecurity, uncertainty, our hopes, obedience, work ethics, fears, ideals, deferred dreams, traumatic experiences, petty prejudices, regrets, anger, experiences, miseries, deprivations, wants, needs, sicknesses, resentments, love, attraction, body image, self-esteem or lack thereof, our desires, creativity, ingenuity, etc.

And they are getting away with it.

Generally, most people who become leaders of their countries are the kind of people who do not care about us, or about anything else but themselves. They might not begin their career so callous, but they get that way. They are consuming everything of what we are to get what they want, which is to win the game of ruling. Such men rule the world, control wealth and power, and they have made the world's people believe and accept that they are meant to be willing victims of their rulers, under their domination and control, and basically be slaves to this stratified empire.

They use the most trusting, sacrificing, loyal, desperate, uncurious people to feed upon. The use us, to make themselves fabulously wealthy, politically powerful, and immune to accountability, scrutiny, and danger, immune to the hardships of life, and to be exempt from the mutual social contract required of each of us living in a shared world and human community.

These master manipulators live their lives as pampered, lionized children running the show. But in reality they share a cancerous kind of consciousness that all bullies everywhere share, feeding upon the good hearted and trusting who are trying to cope with the facts of natural violence, death, and loss. We share an intrinsically flawed or broken reality, and our self-appointed 'leaders' manipulate us to make our lives worse and their lives better, because they can.

These overweening ambitious greedy would-be rulers of the world are the least noble and benign people among us. They're the most clever of the psychopathic parasites that exist, and they walk the halls of our government institutions and financial places looking so esteemed. These pigs have convinced the morally superior people, the truly compassionate,
the tender-hearted people with conscience and caring
... that relying on one another is a weakness, that losers are poor, and that we are on our own in a dog-eat-dog world. They've gotten good people with a conscience to believe that we ourselves are the moral inferiors of these sick morally-inferior people -- the "I always must win" types, the narcissists, liars, con men, flatterers, authoritarians, insincere believers, the fakes and manipulators of perception and the engineers of consent ... have made people of true character, peaceful, respectful, "live and let live" people out to be monsters.

These consummate con men have convinced those of us who have a conscience and would not do what they do, that they are somehow not morally dangerous sociopaths, that they can be trusted with all this power, money, the law-making apparatus of nations, the media, and the weapons to destroy the world in their greedy uncaring "win at any cost to everyone else" ways. We have been duped to put it all in their grubby hands. How did it happen?

And because we trusted them without questioning our own motives, without the cynical mistrust that one aware of a con would have with a con man selling them a lot of pretty promises, we chose to let the con men lie and elected them anyway. We fell for it, partly because of the "American dream," which is a HUGE coercive lie that leads millions into slavery willingly (yes, work or starve is COERCION, pay or suffer is COERCION).

Being brought up to think COERCION is normal, we never know what life without it is. We are taught to trust the faceless institution, more than we trust each other. Impersonal institutions were safer than petty rivals, but silently the sociopaths got themselves in control of the institutions, the institutions that taught us to revere the "leaders" and heroes of a nation ... while we forgot what a leader and a hero means to us, personally.

The switch to trusting in PR presidential illusion occurred generationally, and technology helped it along. Newspapers, then radio, then TV ... and as symbolic leaders became less 'people' and more of an image, they got more powerful, manipulating the process. PR is now isolated from the people's reach, and politics has become super-secretive, unaccountable, and these celebrity like "bubble people" became both actors and politicians.

They're like characters you only see in a sitcom on TV, they seem like trusted buddies ... but you will never meet these fictional characters. You'll read about but you will never share coffee with them. And in this vacuum of social disconnection to each other, we forgot how to detect the moral inferiors living among us. We trust the image, the mask of a person, if they look like we are told to think we think they should look like.

Potential candidates for the job or the presidency have to have a nice haircut, a good tan, they have to be attractive but not too seductive, with all the symbols of a happy nuclear family, mature-looking, manly enough that the woman is behind him as his accessories, dressed just so, and with a dog and two adorable children ... just like most of us, or just like the image of "most of us" that most of us see.

So the candidate appears to be a regular guy, as he panders to us as if he cares about us personally, as he makes promises that tickle our ears, so we believe in him ... and we voted for the PR image as if it was the person. And he was hired, and became "our leader."

We never even question why we do this. It's like impulse shopping. The shoes looked cute, so we bought them. When we talk about a candidate we talk more about haircuts and stuttering than about POLICY, his beliefs, plans, and moral ethics. We separate a person's character from THE HUMAN BEING that is before us. We disconnect his character and motives from his words, and his words from his actions. Presidents break promises while looking sincere, and we don't care, when we are comfortable enough...

Soon as the culture became more impersonal, disconnected, consumer preoccupied, symbolic, and atomized, the sociopath became someone else. His mask was seamless ... on TV. Sociopathic people became violent, romantic, exciting movie heroes, desirable role models, successful persons, an icon of success and a symbol of worldly thrills. With proper PR, they exude normalcy, professionalism, class, a cool persona, a tough guy attitude, becoming a symbol in a suit, representing the good father/savior. But such phony leaders are really just abusers of good-hearted people.

America for a time ignored the abuses of power, because we wanted the good father PR image more than the truth. Many of us chose to see a 9/11 hero, not a scared boy made "president" in a classroom sitting on his ass as 3,000 people were dying ... But soon in the trauma we became more confused about what having 'judgment' or 'character' is about, we started substituting other things for real trustworthiness, like titles: Priest, Ph.D, or Senator, words worn as uniforms, as proof of earned "authority" and goodness.

The business suit, the lab coat, the cop's blue shirt and badge. We looked at the way these people spoke, dressed, and believed their lack of cussing, their invoking of Jesus, and how neat their hair was, and we learned to use that appearance as a sign of good character. Being "normal" became the seal of approval, shorthand for a decent-hearted person. But all this is a sham, a lie we tell orselves when we don't know a person but have to trust this person anyway.

Images are so easy to rely on, in a world that seems too big, too complex, too busy, with too many strangers, too overworked, too disconnected in a sea of individuals, all struggling for a piece of the pie that never seems to come to them. Lost in our individual lives in our own houses, we have distracted ourselves from our own suffering, with hobbies, pursuits, working, buying shit we don't need ... all to fill up the hole inside where a warm community and sharing of life once was. We've forgotten how to judge a bad character in our midst because we're so disconnected from each other. We've stopped seeing others as relations.

Work and chasing jobs all over the country separated us from family, friends, familiarity, so we became individuals, and others around us became objects to fight, overcome, beat, or use. Very few bonded with us to become deep companions. We've forgotten to relate, to care, to touch, to experience and share what is inside each other freely, we forgot we are vulnerable, we need love, we forgot intimacy and community solidarity.

We wanted to be self-made men like the rulers pretend to be, successful and aloof and in command of our lives. We aped them so well, we believed the dream so much, it put us into a trance of work, shopping, TV, home, most days of the week and on weekends we'd hit a club with music so loud conversation is impossible, get drunk and get up to go to work and stand around the coffee pot with hangovers.

We got elections full of rhetoric, but rhetoric is only useful to PR people, and rhetoric only works when people forget what rhetoric is. rhetoric
n. 1: using language effectively to please or persuade
2: high flown style; excessive use of verbal ornamentation [syn: grandiosity, magniloquence, grandiloquence]
3: loud and confused and empty talk; "mere rhetoric" [syn: palaver, hot air, empty words, empty talk]
4: study of the technique and rules for using language effectively (especially in public speaking)


When Rumsfeld or Bush say a whole lot of nothing in a speech that sounds pleasing and makes you go ??? and forget about it, they are speaking rhetoric. Also known as bullshit. It is a gift of gab from the Skull and Bones deity, Eulogia, the Goddess of clever words and public relations. PR is lies, but easier to swallow to a mind not used to critical thoughts about 'nice guy' 'leaders' that act like your daddy. Charisma in the speaker makes nonsense appear to make sense. It makes perfect sense if we just switch off our critical
thinking, stop doubting, and stay focussed on the charisma and optimism without grounding, as if Bush as a guy that would be so fun to have a beer with.

Gradually it happened, so slow as to be imperceptible, the more powerful sociopaths over generations have quietly consolidated their power and kept it in the family, and in certain circles, behind closed doors, in boardrooms and 'private' functions, and later in" think tanks." We ignored this insidiousness, and the right especially ate it up as they helped their masters spread well-crafted PR propaganda that seemed so believable. They created a culture that looked so 'grassroots', it made doubting their sincerity a social faux pas. It was in lockstep with their leaders, without even realizing it.

That questioning and speculation and alternative thoughts, if ever voiced in public around these true believers, gave rise to the humiliating denouncement of CONSPIRACY THEORIST, or COMMUNIST, or some other derogatory claim for thinking outside the current political limits, boundaries of thought set before us as "appropriate" or 'credible'.

And the bullies among us took advantage of the animal phenomena of social rank in humans, and perverted it so that they always looked cool-headed, reasonable, professional, and normal, masters of plausible deniability and verbal assault, like every sociopath does. And we had our suspicions and kept our mouth shut, until the bodies under the crawlspace next door are stinking and the cops drag them out on the lawn ... And because we believed their lies their false image of WHAT and WHO they were, more than we believed what they did and said, because we did not want to admit this dissonance and that we were losing, we did not question their greed fully, because to do that would incur disdain from our peers and calls of RADICAL, and LIBRUL!

This seductive switching of language occurred because most Americans never wanted to believe their leaders were sociopaths, and decided to trust a false image. They put so much stock in it, so much faith, and gave it so much of their POWER, they changed the meaning of words to suit the neocon agendas. And now it is hard to face reality.

Americans have been wounded by charismatic soulless parasites who warped the system, who coerced us without letting on that that is what it was, teaching us to learn to be dependant on their corporate decisions and social control system, and to accept their hijacking of the world's resources and our lives, to work for their gain, to exist on a planet that once fed us all for free.

Because some people fancied themselves better than "those people" (blacks, poor, gays, tribal people, freaks, liberals, hippies, etc.) and had inflated pride with this never clearly defined idea of patriotism, that morphed into "WITH us or AGAINST us."

Some Americans decided to get comfortable with self-deception, with inequality, poverty, loyalty to fakes, acting as willing victims, because they were SO insecure and in denial and it felt GOOD to not think. It was easy, they felt justified, almost mainstream. We were willing also because we all, to some degree, all of America went along with a game of make believe and a destructive con man with irrational beliefs, call it social Darwinism or laissez faire economics, or welfare queen myths, because it made a majority of people in this country feel good in the EGO to feel superior to someone else....

America became segregated classist, racist, cluster of acquaintances, without admitting we were sick, shallow, and ignorant, pretending racism is gone while it still was being promoted by the leaders and wealthy of this country and the media, in a hush hush sly way, and while we pretended life was good (even when it sucked and we ran up credit debt to make the illusion more realistic). Our sociopathic "leaders" stole our country from under us, corrupted our laws, bought our senators, our presidency, the constitution was rewritten, our way of life was ruined, our lives and our community changed, the environment poisoned, and our ability to care about others not exactly like us was dulled. In effect we were transformed ... and became too much like them.

But we accepted the lie without ever seeing the perks of wealth, status, and power they got at our expense, with their callous ambition and coldhearted greed and ability to lie about what they are.

Because we morally superior people cannot really become "them" enough to be as "successful" as them, we can only imitate them to a certain extent. We have a conscience, and can't kill it totally. Sociopaths do not have a conscience, so any depraved act and taking advantage of others' misfortunes for self-gain is fine with them.

We apparently need these shocks of death to stop us from trusting these charismatic soulless madmen, because we cannot recognize bad character now until WE fear him personally. So New Orleans is a big death shock, because the whole disaster hit close enough to home it's inescapable. It highlights our vulnerability to the corrupt powers in Washington, and nature's capricious destructive force. Now the willing, trusting, obeying sheep begin to stop pretending that things are OK when they are NOT. Better late than never.

They wake so late, because THEY finally realized they could be dead next and NOBODY would be there from their trusted faceless institutions or neighbors they don't trust.

Rightwing America right now is just like a quiet neighborhood ... in shock, discovering that their nice quiet normal neighbor next door Jeffery Dahmer was murdering people. The police drag the bodies onto the lawn before their shocked eyes. Murder RIGHT under their oblivious trusting unconcerned noses, and THEY could have been dead NEXT and nobody in the neighbor hood would have SUSPECTED a THING was wrong with nice normal looking Mr. Dahmer. A man that nobody knew personally, but all had aquatinted and judged by appearances was a normal guy!!! Nobody would have HELPED them or SAVED them, because nobody knew what Dahmer WAS!! All sociopaths do this, Dahmer and Bush all rely on a well-crafted fakery, a MASK of SANITY to hide their lack of morality.

Scary to think Abu Ghraib did not stir Americans to question Bush's character flaws, nor did the Iraq War, the Plame case, or Halliburton, or Enron.... Only massive gruesome deaths, in their FACES, up close and PERSONAL, with no faceless institution to help, and no father figure symbol to tell them all is fine standing on a pile of rubble with a blowhorn on TV. They saw they could be vulnerable personally. It took the entire ruin of New Orleans, and TV cameras recording the rotting and wreckage and the nightmarish Superdome.

Only horrors up close got the "rugged inDUHvidualist" "pull your bootstraps" true believers on the right hell-bent on suppressing their human tenderness to wake up and realize they've been taken. The Iraq war didn't matter to them, because they aren't "towelheads," the poor in America didn't because they aren't "irresponsible crack heads."

A selfish realization of their own VULNERABILITY is what got some Republicans to stop mouthing talking points and listen to their own conscience, without a political agenda coloring it in. And this time they saw with a HUMAN conscience, and their compassion stirred again.

In some it shook them hard enough to get some guts to speak up on behalf of humanity, compassion, honor, justice, and sanity, and finally say NO I do not want to live in a country dictated by social Darwinism, tyranny, theocracy, and an abusive father sociopath president lording over a dysfunctional population playing make believe. They wanted that lie, until it occurred to them they really may be next one to be eliminated from the game of life, if society was based on the rules of Neocons they once admired as pillars of society.

Yep, the sociopaths leading this country go terrorizing people of conscience in every walk of life, for fun and personal gain (1 in 4 people are sociopaths looking to win, con and control others for pleasure and ego trips). The most clever of sociopaths get in power, and like their less-clever counterparts they also wanted to make us to be dead to our own conscience, and just like THEY are, but as obedient fawning believers, accepting their demands without the wealth status and power and authority. They wanted America to be willing, submitted, trusting, complicit victims to abuse of power. And it is SCARY to think how much SUCCESS they have had in doing us over.

Just like Columbine got people to realize school bullying scars kids' lives, Hurricane Katrina and FEMA revealed the dark soul of the Neocons as their mask of social respectability falls away, showing the heartless con underneath the PR. Perhaps it has made some of Right-wing America realize that sociopaths do NOT belong in the White House, destroying us and ruling the world.



© by the author.