The Sludge Report

2005-08-28T22:56:00.000-07:00

We have a drug problem in America and it's called television. We have a nation being turned into a bunch of fucking droids and getting so fat that pretty soon Americans are going to start oozing into each other's protoplasm. We'll just be giant globs with several feet and several heads probably wired straight into the television. This is the future I see.

Someone asked, How do you explain what we do next, and I said, Dance. Fuck. Fight. Make yourself indigestible to the system so that if you are ever swallowed up, you will be vomited out. I really think so. Make yourself unemployable. You'll never get an interesting job if you're employable. Get arrested, form a punk band and go to Indonesia and fall in love with someone who doesn't speak your language. I'm not kidding.

-Greg Palast

Sorrows of Empire

"Four sorrows ... are certain to be visited on the United States. Their cumulative effect guarantees that the U.S. will cease to resemble the country outlined in the Constitution of 1787. First, there will be a state of perpetual war, leading to more terrorism against Americans wherever they may be and a spreading reliance on nuclear weapons among smaller nations as they try to ward off the imperial juggernaut. Second is a loss of democracy and Constitutional rights as the presidency eclipses Congress and is itself transformed from a co-equal 'executive branch' of government into a military junta. Third is the replacement of truth by propaganda, disinformation, and the glorification of war, power, and the military legions. Lastly, there is bankruptcy, as the United States pours its economic resources into ever more grandiose military projects and shortchanges the education, health, and safety of its citizens."

-Chalmers Johnson, Sorrows of Empire

More:

"I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws of our country." Thomas Jefferson

"There is an evil which ought to be guarded against in the indefinite accumulation of property from the capacity of holding it in perpetuity by... corporations. The power of all corporations ought to be limited in this respect. The growing wealth acquired by them never fails to be a source of abuses. It's one of the reasons why the word "corporation" doesn't exist in the constitution - they were to be chartered only by states, so local people could keep a close eye on them." James Madison, Father of the Constitution

"In this point of the case the question is distinctly presented whether the people of the United States are to govern through representatives chosen by their unbiased suffrages or whether the money and power of a great corporation are to be secretly exerted to influence their judgment and control their decisions." Andrew Jackson

"I am more than ever convinced of the dangers to which the free and unbiased exercise of political opinion - the only sure foundation and safeguard of republican government - would be exposed by any further increase of the already overgrown influence of corporate authorities." Martin van Buren

"As we view the achievements of aggregated capital, we discover the existence of trusts, combinations, and monopolies, while the citizen is struggling far in the rear or is trampled to death beneath an iron heel. Corporations, which should be the carefully restrained creatures of the law and the servants of the people, are fast becoming the people's masters."

-Grover Cleveland

"Behind the ostensible government sits enthroned an invisible government owing no allegiance and acknowledging no responsibility to the people. To destroy this invisible government, to befoul the unholy alliance between corrupt business and corrupt politics is the first task of the statesmanship of the day." Theodore Roosevelt

The liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. That, in its essence, IS Fascism.

-Franklin Delano Roosevelt

Bush has one of the emptiest faces in America. He looks to have no more depth than spit on a rock. It could be that the most incisive personal crime committed by George Bush is that he probably never said to himself, "I don't deserve to be president." You just can't trust a man who's never been embarrassed by himself. The vanity of George W. stands out with every smirk. He literally cannot control that vanity. It seeps out of every movement of his lips, it squeezes through every tight-lipped grimace. Every grin is a study in smugsmanship.

--Norman Mailer

There will be in the next generation or so a pharmacological method of making people love their servitude and producing dictatorship without tears so to speak. Producing a kind of painless concentration camp for entire societies so that people will in fact have their liberties taken away from them, but will rather enjoy it, because they will be distracted from any desire to rebel by propaganda, or brainwashing, or brainwashing enhanced by pharmacological methods. And this seems to be the final revolution.

- Aldous Huxley

Political Swirl...Political Swill

In spite of the model lesson of water down a drain, dominant American politics spins in a dyslexic wrong-turn vortex independent of truth, dependent on a reversal of the planetary whirl to change. Nothing short of alchemy can alter this. Physics is beginning to show that we choose our own reality, and we have chosen this one. May God have mercy on us all...and like it or not, He is firmly entrenched in this - now more than ever.

Nothing is more mystifying, to the losing side of the equation, than how this perplexing path found its way under our feet and how we arrived at this peculiar place upon it. This will be the topic underlying all the rancorous bickering and backbiting that guarantees to reach levels inversely proportionate to the depths we've sunk.

How many buckets of blood will it take? How many foreclosures, bankruptcies, broken families, homeless children, men gone postal? How much stark reality will it take before the light of truth forces its way into the fogged notions and delusional perspectives that dominate the picture our leaders portray?

We have become a land guided by propagandists, charlatans, and dangerously misguided fools. Pumped up by the smoke they send up our shorts. Inflated and full of false bravado, preaching fear and the false promise that salvation lies in hating in superior ways. Pretending to love, all the while. But, hating has never been the long suit of true champions...has it? Certainly not fear? And pretending to love is the coldest chill of all. We know that much...don't we? Somewhere deep within the soul of the people, THIS, surely, has not been lost. If THIS somehow has been squandered, in our heady side trip through this ornate yet vacant new wilderness, we truly do have something to fear. And we are, in fact, lost

RUNNING AMOK...in the finest of shoes

Is there no more perfect phrase for the psychological climate in America than "fear and loathing"? That patented phrase is from the fevered genius of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson and all rightful credit is his. An ugly but necessary preamble in this land of litigation and hustle and profit at all cost, etc...but things like that must be said or risk be taken down by the snarling dogs of legal recourse. Regardless, and all apologies aside, let the point be made: America is lost and searching. Despite the trumpeting of the tired nonsense that America is great, and sound, and will return to its brief and sparkling glory, the brutal point and ugly truth is that America has lost its way... America is no longer America. When every dollar that is spent to annihilate our "enemies" is equally invested in trying to coexist peacefully...when other cultures are respected and embraced and regarded as important and not just strange and different and in need of 'Americanizing'....when lying and deceit lose their currency...and, when depth of spirit is as valued as depth of bank accounts...maybe THEN, the original promise of this country will have a chance of being realized. The world is watching...and loathing.

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Something's happening here,
But you don't know what it is,
Do you Mr. Jones?

- Bob Dylan
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In an old "Hey Rube" column, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson referred to this Dylan lyric and offered his astute psychosocial commentary. http://espn.go.com/page2/s/thompson/001120.html While I couldn't agree more, I see things a bit differently and would offer another perspective: This is a subject that has been a personal preoccupation for decades, and just when an analysis begins to make sense it ratchets up to a whole new plateau. One aspect of American culture has become clearly paramount: The widespread acceptance of an ethos of personal survival and personal welfare at all cost - 'me-ism'. Truth matters only when it is personally beneficial. Plausible deniability, a modus operandi of the ruling elite that grew out of the dark age of Nixon era Washington and found full bloom under Reagan, has now become solidly rooted in the fertile compost of America at large.

Nobody, it seems, will take responsibility for anything. Not only is there ubiquitous denial of anything compromising, there is an odd counter-phenomenon of a willingness to accept unwarranted credit. People everywhere are pretending to be talented and famous, and, oddly, accepted as so. Up is down and down is up. What IS happening here? We fell down the rabbit hole a good while back and it is, collectively, just now beginning to dawn on us. The tragic consequence is magnified by a sense that the cultural tools to cope with this sort of problem have eroded as well. We have come to embrace bullies and demagogues and are loath to listen to hard truth. We want a yellow-brick road to candyland and don't want to recognize we are lost in a pointless forest.

This ethic of survival at all cost is in striking contrast to the indigenous American philosophy that "..today is a good day to die..", an elegant and zen-like reverence for divine will. Without this kind of acceptance and desire, on a broad scale, for an authentic existence, the world will grow ever uglier and more vulgar. Fights regularly break out in the stands of high school football games, men are killing each other over little league baseball, soccer moms are arrested for assault and running amok...on and on. Look at the recent presidential election...sheesh...it all has the same smell: "...my dog's badder than your dog...even if I have to cheat to prove it."

Are we doomed? George Harrison thought so, and considered naming his last album "Your Planet is Doomed, Part One". He declared:

"The world is going mental as far as I'm concerned...Basically, I think the planet is doomed."

George went on to say that things are speeding up because of technology and "...everything that is happening". "Everything" paints it with a bit of a broad brush, but he was certainly onto something.

Fat-cats grow fatter these days, while poets and painters starve. White collar criminals retire to gated communities, sometimes after a short stay in a country club prison. Vile toxins bubble up not only in the culture, but also in the landscape and in the drinking water, with those growing wealthy from it dying and passing on their ill-gotten wealth or living out their years in quiet well-feathered obscurity.

It is all finally coming home to roost, and while some might agree, it does little good to don a sandwich-board and take to the streets proclaiming "THE END IS NEAR!". Yet, it's way past time to pay casual regard. The signals have become too evident, too blatantly obvious. Clearly the message is on the verge of filtering down to the mainstream. When that happens, it will be, as usual, too late and entirely out of our hands. Perhaps it is too late already. But what is there to do? There is no easy remedy for the self-indulgence that plagues America. It is so reinforced by our impatient ways, and so woven into the fabric of our culture. Until this black tide is turned by soul searching and self-realization on a mass scale, nothing will change. If and when it does, it is probably too late anyway, things are that bad. Why bother? Life as it is will go on, at least for a while, and the ethos that 'anything that enhances the bottom line is good' will continue, and the storm clouds will continue to gather.

Oh, and now there is this "war"...

2004-05-10T08:02:00.000-07:00

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