What have we done?

'What have we done?' I do not believe that there is a worse feeling in the world than to believe what you were doing was the right thing, only to find out that you contributed to the spread of misery and destruction."

Regret is the seed of a compassionate consciousness: it is an emotion which requires the courage of awareness and the humility of accepting responsibility. It is served cold and once tasted permeates every other flavour in life. Those who know this meal often have nothing for dessert but more of the same; actions have consequences and many cannot be undone or forgiven.

Regret may be the only hope for changing the world which we ourselves have created, if that is even possible at this point. But first, there must be the courage to look at what we have done, the courage to tell the truth and to admit it in front of all those we wish to receive admiration from. And those people must be listening.

So once again, the Winter Soldiers tell their truth. It is but one truth from which regret grows: there are many others which will become painfully obvious to even those who have buried their heads in the sand. Sometimes looking at truth requires the most courage the human sould can muster. Yet from such bravery, compassion and morality grow.

Winter Soldiers Speak Out in Europe

US veterans march from Philadelphia to Valley Forge before

the Winter Solider hearings last March. (Photo: Susie Husted)

Tuesday 17 March 2009
Maya Schenwar
Source
Last March, a group of soldiers and veterans gathered in Washington, DC, to recount their experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan. They spent three days testifying, confessing and mourning. They revealed atrocities never before spoken of - the brutal murders of civilians, the destruction of homes and villages, the rape and sexual assault of both civilians and US military women - and displayed photos and video footage to back up their claims. The event was titled "Winter Soldier," harkening back to the 1971 Winter Soldier Investigation, in which veterans gathered in Detroit to give testimony about war crimes they had committed or witnessed in Vietnam. Both Winter Soldiers zeroed in on the US military policy's devastating effects, straight from the mouths of those charged with carrying out that policy.

On Saturday, March 14, a third Winter Soldier conference unfolded - this time, overseas. In the leadup to NATO's 60th summit next month in Strasbourg, France, Winter Soldier Europe took place in Freiburg, Germany. Iraq and Afghanistan veterans from Germany, the UK and the US testified, revealing the impact of the occupations on civilians and service members alike. The event was organized by the nonprofit Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW), in an effort to amplify the voices of soldiers - voices that are often drowned out by military leadership and political commentators, according to Zack Baddorf, one of Winter Soldier Europe's organizers.

"We've all heard American generals on TV," Baddorf told Truthout. "We've all heard the talking heads. We've all heard the politicians. But by hearing voices of troops who were on the ground, who experienced the reality of combat, the event hopefully inspired resistance and true change. We've served our country by joining the military; now, we're serving our nation by opposing this war."

For Chris Capps-Schubert, head of IVAW's Europe chapter and the originator of Winter Soldier Europe, the event represented an intertwining of the personal and political effects of the "war on terror." The testifiers' words issued a vivid warning to the leaders converging in Strasbourg in April, urging them to consider the human toll that inevitably follows militarized policy decisions. On a broader scale, the event called out to the international public, reminding them that even though the global economic crisis has shifted attention away from the "war on terror's" consequences, the bloodshed continues. And, on a personal level, Winter Soldier Europe allowed service members to bear witness to the shocking, sad, sometimes torturous experiences with which they wrestle long after returning home.

Capps-Schubert served in the Army in Iraq from November 2005 to September 2006, then went AWOL, refusing to deploy to Afghanistan. He now lives in Germany and counsels prospective deserters.

"The idea to have a Winter Soldier in Europe came about soon after I learned that President Obama would be visiting the French-German border region, and using the NATO meeting as a possible opportunity to pressure European allies in NATO to commit more troops to Afghanistan," Capps-Schubert told Truthout. "I couldn't easily accept that, and I thought it was very important for the public and hopefully world leaders to hear the truth of what is going on in the 'Global War on Terror' before they decide to commit more fully to it."

Thus, the testimonies focused on eyewitness accounts: the intimate details of war that often go unnoticed by the general public, though they best convey its horror. Testifiers ranged from a former Guantanamo Bay prison guard, to an active-duty member of the German armed forces, to a clinical psychologist who specializes in post-traumatic stress disorder. American veteran Andre Shepherd, who worked as an Apache helicopter airframe mechanic near Tikrit, spoke of his agonizing deployment to Iraq, followed by a decision to go AWOL.

"It is no secret that the Apache is a devastating weapon," Shepherd testified. "When I looked at the videos of suspected insurgents being shredded by machine guns or blown to bits by the missiles, I [saw] the results of my handiwork. After combining that with the damage to the infrastructure, widespread poverty and disease, accidental deaths and millions of refugees, I thought to myself, 'What have we done?' I do not believe that there is a worse feeling in the world than to believe what you were doing was the right thing, only to find out that you contributed to the spread of misery and destruction."

Shepherd described his change of heart, and of consciousness, his realization that he could no longer continue to go about his "handiwork." Now, he speaks out against the war and has made his choice to leave the military a public example of the deserter's cause.

"We set down our stakes, and proceeded to run the country like it was a colonial property even to this very day," Shepherd told Truthout. "We have killed, tortured and bombed the civilians into submission, so much so that many people have fled their homes. I made up my mind to never again support the evil mechanisms of our foolish leaders there, and in April 2007 I made good on that promise."

Shepherd is currently seeking asylum in Germany, and is the first Iraq War veteran to apply for refugee status in Europe. His application cites Nuremberg Principle IV, which states that a person is not exempted from international law simply because he or she was following orders while committing crimes.

Christian Neumann, a member of the German armed forces who served in Northern Afghanistan, testified about the German role in the war - a topic, he said, that few Germans know much about.

"I will get new information from the testifiers to tell our German soldiers," he told Truthout previous to the event, pointing out that elections are coming up in Germany, and Winter Soldier Europe's revelations could prove eye-opening to German voters. "Although a majority of our inhabitants don't support violent military operations, our governments - European, federal and state - try strongly to keep the foreign military missions out of the election campaigns."

Neumann mentioned that the German government hopes to legalize the use of security contractors like Pretoria, which he compared to Blackwater. Contrary to the wishes of the German people, prominent forces in the government hope to "involve the Germans more and more in the fight against an enemy, who we can't see," he said.

The testimony of former Guantanamo Bay prison guard Chris Arendt, an American, touched on a similar theme of underinformation. Arendt testified that he and his fellow guards - mostly young, low-ranking officers, who'd received very little training - operated on the principle of dehumanizing the "enemy" as much as possible. He described the process used to "extract" prisoners from their cells for interrogations.

"First they're going to get sprayed with ... an oil-based irritant, like Mace, but military grade," Arendt testified. "Then five men in riot gear storm into the cell, and are free to beat this detainee for however long they want to, however they please. This happens multiple times daily, this is something the soldiers in Guantanamo Bay oftentimes take pride [in]. This is something we mark on our helmets. This is something we talk about when we get home. This is something people look forward to - it's a sport; it's a score; it's a number; it's something that you've chalked up while you're down there. We didn't ever think that these people were human beings. We were told that Muslims wiped their asses with their left hands, so we shouldn't touch their left hands, and that was our cultural training for dealing with detainees."

American Eddie Falcon, who served in the air force in Iraq and Afghanistan, described the dehumanization process further in his testimony, noting that diminishing Iraqis' and Afghans' humanity not only makes individual acts of violence more palatable; it also makes the war as a whole easier for soldiers - and the public - to digest.

"If you don't identify with your enemy as a human, it makes it easier to kill them; it makes it easier to torture them; it makes it easier to raid their houses, to blow up their communities," Falcon testified. "People would be saying things like, 'These people are crazy around here; they're Muslims; they don't even have Jesus, you know.' They'd be saying, 'We should just blow the whole fucking place up.'"

In exposing the distorted thought processes and misinformation that both governments and soldiers live by in the "war on terror," the Winter Soldier Europe testifiers challenged the official picture of a morally sound and strategically necessary mission. Their stories painted a scene of confusion and uncertainty, in which destruction happened in response to dehumanization and faceless orders, not out of patriotism or an overarching sense of purpose.

As he relives his experience in the US Army and waits for the verdict on his asylum plea in Germany, Andre Shepherd hopes that Winter Soldier Europe's message will reach both of the populations he is tied to.

"Too many people have the misconception that these conflicts are something noble and just, when the exact opposite is happening right under their noses," Shepherd said. "Our aim is to shatter those myths, tell the people what is really going on down there and to ask them to help stop this madness. I pray that our efforts will not be in vain."

The Scorpian of Corporate Capitalism

This article will be difficult to read if one is from the United States mainstream culture. Perhaps it has too much truth for those whom it describes. The rest of the world will mostly agree with most of this poet's description of the system which destroys even those who would not read his poem. My own experiences verify the impressions of this poet for the vast majority of those I meet on the net from the States, but certainly not all.

The Frog and the Scorpian

Image by TinyPic

By Vi Ransel
2/14/09
Souce
A frog and a scorpion met on a stream bank. The scorpion asked the frog to carry him across on its back. The frog asked, “How do I know you won’t sting me?” “Because if I do, I’ll drown, too” answered the scorpion. So they set out across the stream. Halfway across, the scorpion stung the frog. As the frog started to sink, he knew they’d both die. With his last breath, he gasped to the scorpion, “Why?!” “It is my nature. And you knew I was a scorpion.”

Americans do not want the facts.
They do not want to hear how many countries
we’ve invaded for power and money
nor the number of proxy wars
financed in our name for the same.

Americans do not want to talk
about slavery, the Native Americans
or our rape of “Third World” nations
for necessities like bananas or coltan for cell phones
via the IMF, the World Bank and “free” trade.

Americans do not want to see
that compliant puppet governments
and dictators are America’s best friend,
that anywhere real democracy rears its unwelcome head
it’s put down by demonizing it and its leaders and/or killing them.
(See Mossadegh, Hamas, Allende and Hugo Chavez .)

Americans do not want to admit
that terrorism is not caused by hatred
or envy of our “freedoms”, but by our invasions,
torture, exploitation and slaughter,
or that the US sends three billion taxpayer dollars
to Israel yearly to test white phosphorus,
J-DAMS, DIMES and GBU-39s
on the captive population of Gaza.

Americans will not even try
to understand that depressions and recessions,
repetitive bubbles and Wall Street’s speculative gambling
are planned in advance by the shameless fat cats
of the plutocracy and the “Federal” banksters.

Americans will not entertain the idea
that American business uses human shields it calls “illegals”
to stave of the threat of paying a living wage
and if they ask for one the boss just calls la migra.

Americans do not want to know
that Main Street was murdered by Wal-Mart and Wall Street,
or that prisons are plantations where the process of manufacturing
is just business carried on by other means.

Americans do not want to hear
that health insurance is a middle man
designed to bleed them into medical bankruptcy,
or that credit is just debt with a fancy name
created to rob them of their homes and their property.

Americans do not want to believe
that plastic is strangling the ocean,
that petro-agriculture is poisoning their food,
that the rain forest’s been razed for cheeseburgers,
and that climate change, misnamed “global warming”,
warms the “heart” of Big Energy’s shareholders.

Americans do not want to be reminded
of the animal holocaust in “farms” that are factories,
which in addition to terror and agony
causes stroke, heart disease and obesity,
or that the runoff makes drinking water a toxic cocktail
of hormones, antibiotics and feces,
that most of the ocean’s big fish have been fished
and commercial trawlers scrape the ocean bottom lifeless,
that continual solitary driving of their personal vehicles
helps strand polar bears on the remnants of ice flows.

Americans don’t want to look at the fact
that sex, fear and envy persuade them
to buy products that kill them for profit -
alcohol, tobacco, meat and dairy, food additives,
prescription drugs, corn syrup and plastics.

Americans do not want to admit
that love, family, friendship and sexuality
are now no more than profitable commodities,
that wars, sports, TV, shopping and celebrities
are designed to keep their minds off the rape of democracy.
Americans cannot be bothered to discover the political priorities
of people they vote for in the electoral extravaganza,
to look for alternative info though newspapers, TV “news” and talk radio
are talking points and sheer propaganda,
or to acknowledge that the people who “represent” them
have not the people’s, but their own, interest in mind,
due to campaign funding’s lucrative bonanza.

Americans refuse to see
that schools don’t educate for a reason.
An educated public is 300 million dangerous threats
and schools are used to defuse these

by a pre-emptive indoctrination of children
with the wisdom of dog-eat-dog competition
which creates the divide-and-conquer infrastructure
that allows oppressors to blame their own victims.

And since kids might stumble into cooperation and empathy,
those in social programs are deemed weak and pathetic
in an effort to get the victims to agree and accept
that they’re the primary cause of the system’s effect.

The plutocracy exercises increasing dominion
via consolidation of capital at the people’s expense
concentrates it periodically, ratcheting up its intensity,
during engineered crises like wars and depressions.

The United States is no longer the home of the free and the brave
where life, liberty and happiness are pursued,
but of people living in fear of financial and physical terrorism
and co-opted by the carnival of consumerism.

It’s a cauldron of inequality, poverty and misery
where lives are lived in quiet desperation,
in free(dom of) speech zones and the pursuit of stuff
in a marked down and militarized nation.

Americans refuse to believe that they’ve accepted to live
under a system that subjugates, denigrates and infantilizes them,
and that the many creating the wealth at the bottom
are engineered as ignorant, obedient and defensive.

And as the money is funneled up to the few
the many are bought off with shiny oil-based objects -
I-pods, X boxes, PCs, plasma TVs, SUVs,
McMansions, Mickey D’s, boob jobs and botox -

strung on a charm bracelet/slave chain
of the non-negotiable American lifestyle
constructed on the ashes our foreign trade policies
have made of other people’s rights and their lives.

Americans seem not to notice
that nature has been reduced from The Source
to a package of exploitable resources,
and that citizens are relegated to being consumers
who, in turn, are eaten up by their choices

or that a not-so-invisible hand signs the legislation
that makes foreign and domestic American policy
and turns what started as participatory democracy
into a Donner Party version of economics.

Americans don’t want
to hear, to see, to speak, or to feel
anything
about what’s actually happening to them
or being done in their name,
but most of all they don’t want to
THINK
because thinking leads to
cognitive dissonance and confronting the pain
of knowing how the American lifestyle
is, and has been, maintained.

But the aversion therapy administered in schools
and cultural reinforcement thereafter
keeps them safely away from
the truth,
imprisoned like dogs
with electronic shock collars.

And besides, they’re so busy with their shopping,
which is Americans’ ultimate function,
that they don’t have the time to tune into
what that “little voice” has been trying to tell them

that this system relentlessly perpetuates itself
by means of infinite, unlimited growth,
which it carries on by any means necessary
like a parasite that strangles its host.

It has to kill the goose (that’s us)
who lays the Gross Domestic Product Golden Egg
because it’s a no-holds-barred, winner-take-all,
every man on his own for himself free-for-all
until there are no eggs left to take.

It’s not ’til they’re drowning in hubris and debt
and the system turns around and stings them
that Americans are willing to hear what they already knew -
the scorpion is corporate capitalism.

Vi Ransel is an anti-capitalist poet of exceptional caliber.

A Commodity Called Misery

The fabric of American consciousness is an enigma to most Americans: they have been trained to see the Emperor's new clothes and questions concerning how they came to be sure of who and what they are, are taboo in mainstream media. Yet the culture which suckles them has been deliberate in isolating their lives from those of their neighbours and from the rest of the world. It is impossible for them to see another way of being, for the most part.

That is why conversations with Americans usually focus on one of three topics, me, me or me. I feel a certain amount of pity for this zombie like mentality while simultaneously loathing it. Yet they have not gotten to be denizens of the US Twilight Zone without the help of many professionals who have given them a sense of reality which serves the system entirely. An excellent exploration of the American psychosis that serves its masters below.

A Commodity Called Misery

By JOE BAGEANT
Source

Our authorized sanities are so many Nembutals. "Normal" citizens with store-dummy smiles stand apart from each other like cotton-packed capsules in a bottle. Perpetual mental out-patients. Maddeningly sterile jobs for strait-jackets, love scrubbed into an insipid "functional personal relationship" and Art as a fantasy pacifier... And we all know this… Slowly, very slowly we are led nowhere.

---San Francisco Digger Papers, 1965

HOPKINS VILLAGE, BELIZE.

Sitting down here in Central America happily abusing my health, occasionally, between the hangovers and the bouts with sand fleas and mosquitoes comes an insight or two, or at least what passes for insight in my lowbrow take on life. One of these is just how damned lucky the Third World is that it cannot afford a sophisticated mental health system. By that I mean the kind in the “developed countries,” where murder and suicide rates are quintuple what they are here in this village. Not that we are without own village resources. My Garifuna buddy Eljay, was in what we would call a depressed state a few months ago, and went to a local “spirit doctor.” The wizened old spirit mojo man cured Eljay with a single utterance: “Quit smokin’ da ganja for one month.” It worked. Total cost: About $2.50 and a pound of red beans. They say the old spirit doctor also treats such things as sexual dysfunction, though I sure as hell cannot detect much evidence of dysfunction, judging from the noises in the village cabanas and under beachside palms at night.

In any case, it causes me to wonder why is there enough pain and alienation to sustain America’s umpteen billion dollar mental health business and its 400-plus specialties, not to mention the inner self-help industry and Deepak Chopra’s royal court. Why is it that during the months I spend in America I meet so many obviously sick fuckers, some successfully practicing law or politics, others homeless and schizophrenic?

You need not be Marcus or R.D. Lang to feel the stress, depression, boredom and loneliness permeating everyday life up there in Gringolia. But to get an overview it does help to be a couple thousand miles outside the place. Kind of like being high in the stands at the racetrack with binoculars rather than down at the rail next to the paddock. Matters seem especially acute of late, with the entire American anthill in turmoil as its common god, the almighty economy, waves bye-bye while being noisily sucked down the global gurgler. Hell, twenty years ago mental health problems were already being described as “epidemic,” despite the joys of Facebook, iPod, and the consumption of some 25 million pounds of hot wings on Superbowl Sunday. A place where “normal” life includes Viagra, all the fried chicken you can stuff, round the clock televised crotch shots and HDTV as national mandate.

I used to think it was just some melancholic germ of my own that made me see a slowly increasing American alienation, anxiety and inner sadness over the span of my 62 years. Now however, I’m pretty convinced there is a national pathology at work, one which author Arthur Barsky called the “pathology of American normalcy.” Sounds accurate to me. In fact, this psychic poverty has been around so long it has become something of a norm. Despite that we have not resorted to cannibalism, single payer health care, or god forbid, socialism, we long ago passed into the realm of what we like to call an “unhealthy society.” Might not America’s psychological malaise be the result of knowing deep inside that life can hold more meaning --- be more joyful? More emotionally rewarding and fulfilling? In a word, healthier?

Americans who can afford to be, are obsessed with health of any kind. The rest of us chain smoke in despair. All of which makes tosses fresh red meat to the politicians, who offer “plans,” all of which come down to the same thing --- we pay for corporate expansion of both the insurance and “medical industry,” but through insignificantly different methods. Interestingly, despite our pursuit of constant medical attention and the construction of the planet’s largest, and most profitable health machinery, treatment factories for every real and imagined or industry manufactured ailment, surveys show, Americans do not trust doctors. They feel physicians are primarily businessmen or businesswomen who happen to practice medicine because that’s where the real grease, the big bucks are. This may or may not be true, but we see little evidence to counter their suspicions. Even the closest physician friend I have in the States insists on a $125 office visit --- cash at the front desk on the way out, please --- before he will refill a blood pressure prescription I’ve been taking for 15 years. He knows I do not have health insurance, but hey, what’s a bill and a quarter between friends? Well, it’s a month’s grub for some of us, or dinner and drinks for two at the country club for others.

By comparison, my doctor in Jalisco, Mexico, Jim Jaramillo, who practiced in Albuquerque for 30 years, invites me to ride into the surrounding ranch country and have a dawn drink with the Mexican cowboys, simply because he regards all his patients as friends. And “Nurse Judy,” who runs the main clinic here in Hopkins, whoops it up with the rest of her patients on Friday oldies night down by the beach. The village’s Dr. Anya, a Mayan-mestizo lady trained in Mister Castro’s famous Cuban institution, dropped by my cabana to examine the local kids on my front porch. For free. Then we played guitar together. I asked her if she could teach me any local folk songs. “No,” she said, “I’m into Iris Dementh.” Go figure. Anyway, none of these doctors require appointments.

But we started out talking about the psychic pathology of Americaness, didn’t we? So without going too far over ground well enough covered by better and more authoritative writers than I, the pathology of Americaness is entirely about human consciousness, a taboo subject in our declining industrial super state. The subject has been officially smothered, or even demonized by authority since it was first openly broached in the Sixties. However, those running the industrial government complex learned a few things too in the process. Particularly about the efficacy of dope. Being authoritarian and capitalist, they of course preferred downers over the mind expanding drugs. And ever since then corporately produced biochemicals, tranqs, mind numbing anti-depressants and the like, have been successfully used privately on individuals to squelch the psychic anguish produced in the Darwinian workhouse America has become. Not that I’m entirely opposed. As I’ve said before, if this officially sanctioned dope were a bit more ecstatic and colorful, I’d be right there in line for my share. Hell, I’m an American --- instant gratification works for me too. But an anesthetic to workhouse burnout just ain’t enough incentive. Beyond that, the street drugs are crap these days. So to our King Kong pharmaceutical industry, I say: “Work with me here guys!”

Seriously though, back in the Sixties, along with LSD, nature and Buddhism, I looked to psychology for answers. Sure, psychology was very much a bourgeois affectation and fad at the time. But it looked damned promising to many of us, including a redneck hippie with tons of cultural and family baggage to unload and an allergy to mindless toil --- especially those aspects of psychology that dealt with social realization.

But who’d have guessed it would become a massive and officially sanctioned ideological control arm of the state? A form of social control and containment of the citizenry through a governmental and corporately sponsored “mental heath system? And the way it does so is this: It refuses to acknowledge that our aggregate society holds any responsibility for the conditions it produces in our fellow individual members. Now collective societal responsibility is common sense for, say, a Dane or a Frenchman. Most of them anyway.

For Americans though, it’s an explosive issue. Because if we acknowledged collective responsibilities to the individual members of our society, then we would have to deal with the issue of class in this country. Some gestures are now being made in that direction, thanks to Obama, but it’s still America’s longest standing hot tater I doubt even he will hold very long. Every successful, well-off American, or even so called middle class Americans --- we seem to be unable to truly define them; even uninsured households earning under $25,000 most often define themselves as middle class, thanks to our national denial of our class system --- succeeds at the expense of some other American. Or more accurately at the expense of an entire unacknowledged underclass of them. Consequently, we get the “self-determination” and “individual initiative” stuff as an excuse and cover-up. An attractive one too, given that it implies some sort of superiority of effort or talent. And there’s no denying that life requires some of both from everyone. But that does not reconcile our larger than ever class discrepancies, much less the alienation one feels when he or she cannot trust that his or her society is operating on their behalf.

Whatever else can be said of capitalism, it is miraculous stuff, pure alchemy. It can privatize and corporatize any damned thing under the sun, turn a profit on it, and then make it a bulwark of corporate state control to boot. Even human misery and oppression of soul and mind. Psychological practice and its institutions benefit greatly from this. After all, they are in the alienation business. It is entirely in the profession’s best interests that it treat us as if our lives are lived in a vacuum, our loneliness and despair are entirely our own, as if there were no such thing as context, much less American society’s corrosive and toxic environment in which so many of us live out our lives. Put another way, it acknowledges our misery, then privatizes it, then administers lonely alienated “treatment” for our emptiness in a private void, one among tens of millions of like emptinesses in similar voids that are in no way supposed to be societal. No matter that there are enough sufferers to constitute an entire society in themselves. The result, whether or not by design, is to perpetuate the most venerable of American myths, that of the completely autonomous self. Which denies us the power and beauty, not to mention the healing and efficacy, of human unity. In the big picture, much of the U.S. mental health industry, and its associated systems, perpetuate and even propagate mental sickness perhaps as much as it alleviates, through its paradigms. In any case, for the most part, psychology as an institution has hardened into part of the national ideology, thanks to the catalyst of gobs of dough from the state. The American Psychological Association’s initial refusal to condemn member participation in the Bush regime’s torture told me all I needed to know about U.S. psych-officialdom.

This somehow reminds me of the old Soviet Union’s psychiatric handling of dissidents. If you did not display state defined norms, then you were deemed nuts, and needed medication, behavior modification or institutionalization. It was deemed impossible that those very norms may have been driving your condition. The similarities are there, particularly when you consider the massive growth of the U.S. prison industry and its reliance on pharmaceutical and behavior modification control. The entire machinery of education, social work, psychology, and medicine are meshed (though the practitioners would stoutly deny it) and help hold firm the class line in this country. Many of them do so unknowingly, of course, and are dedicated to helping fellow beings through the methods they have been taught --- and and are accredited through state sanctioned institutions of course. But the overwhelming majority seem to draw their paychecks and health insurance happily enough, Ever spend much time with the average mid-American social services psychologist? The kind who make recommendations in our juvenile courts, etc? On the whole they’re a sorry assed bunch if ever there was one, bureaucrats wrapped in the smug piety of social work. Others are far more aware, but fearful of calling bullshit on the system that pays the mortgage and sends the kids to college.

Given the economic and societal breakdown now underway and accelerating toward completion, Obama or no Obama (What is this thing of ours, this national obsession with saviors, elected or otherwise?), it’s bound to be interesting to see if they can indoctrinate, dope, counsel, and lock up or medicate the dissidence, and perhaps outright resistance that will occur. Whether the final American collapse takes four years or forty years is anybody’s guess. But it’s gonna take a passel of behavioral management experts, whether in psychological institutions, university research centers, or on Madison Avenue, to keep the lid on this puppy when she blows. However, I’m not ruling out the possibility that they just might help do that --- keep the lid on --- because they are state authorized and accredited to do so. The infrastructure of industrial strength administration of psychology is there. And has been ever since sheepskins were issued to “industrial psychologists.” Nobody in the Western World seems to see the irony and conflict in that term. But the fact is that even if 50 million Americans exploded tomorrow, they would have “snapped” alone, particulated and atomized in a very large and spread out country, and ultimately be administered treatment or institutionalized as “individuals.” Of course if they if they were more concentrated, which would put them in a situation to act in unison, then god help ‘em because they would then be a national security problem, the last thing you want to be in a security state.

Obviously, I’m no psychiatrist, and am sure to get plenty of email offering certain proof of that, plus proof that I am a paranoid nutcase with authority problems (I’ll gladly admit to the latter), though in more polite professional jargon. To which I say less politely, “Fuck ‘em all!” I see what I see.

And what I see, based upon my own experience and watching that of others, is that alienation and the pain of utter aloneness, is in the rootstock of nearly all psychic malady, excepting the clearly organic. If when we look around us in the world, we do not see ourselves in society, nor does society see itself in us, we eventually come to feel the sustained, unutterable pain of aloneness. This would seem the appropriate response for a member of our highly social species of flesh, and does not necessarily deem us ill, but often rather more human.

Unfortunately, Americans get laughed off the map for being overly human these days, dubbed emotional pussies, part of the Kumbaya crowd, unrealistic utopians …and if you are sincerely human enough, get your ass kicked by the system. To be so makes us the bane of the super rational, technological production driven society we have come to be. We got there partly through our weakness, shallow greed and mindless consent, but more so by the orchestrated world machinery benefiting powerful elites, both corporate, governmental and financial (is there a difference?) which have always been among us, though never in such strength.

Many years ago as a much younger man, I went through a couple of major depressions, the second of which brought me to the brink of suicide. In the first instance I was somewhat helped, through medication and “talk therapy,” by a psychologist who eventually killed himself. They found him in a tree in his back yard with his beeper going off. This is not to disparage the man in any way. Dr. John Farley was a man of good will, good intent and great compassion.

The second time though, I walked out of the abyss by myself. And along the way I encountered, sought out really, others on the same path. And I saw that together, in open sharing of our personal truths, most of not all of us were nowhere near mentally ill. Just sick. Sick even to the point of death in some cases, of our spiritual imprisonment within the Great Machine, but strong enough to refuse under any circumstances to dwell under its spiritual humiliation.

Contrary to what one might think, in the many years since I’ve not much thought about those experiences. Just moved on. But in this new and strange era in which we find ourselves, they’ve returned as subjects of contemplation. And --- judge me as you will --- like many others these days, I smell the breath of Thanos in that machinery of the system unto which we supplicate in our fear, denial or intentional obliviousness.

Still, it is only a system. Systems can be changed. In any case they inevitably crash entirely of their own entropies. Doubtlessly, ours will take down with it the hardening privatization and institutional control of the human spirit. I won’t be around to see it.

But I would be damned pleased to see such a once noble attempt at elimination of suffering as the American psychological profession rise to the choices before us --- liberation from our collective societal darkness, and psychic death within the machine.

Meanwhile, here in Hopkins Village, darkness has come and brought with it good old Eljay, ready to split a bottle of the local bitters on my porch. The night winds are rising and with them comforting assurance that The Machine is not everything ... indeed, not anything by the light of these indifferent stars.

Joe Bageant is author of the book, Deer Hunting With Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War. (Random House Crown), about working class America. He is also a contributor to Red State Rebels: Tales of Grassroots Resistance from the Heartland (AK Press). A complete archive of his on-line work, along with the thoughts of many working Americans on the subject of class may be found on ColdType and Joe Bageant’s website here.

All the Baby Ps

by Sheilnagig November 17, 2008
This week a mother and two adult males living with her, were convicted of the horrifically abusive death of 17 month old Baby P. The citizens of Great Britain, outraged, are calling for the blood of the social service workers who were responsible for the monitoring of Baby P.
Children dead as a result of parental abuse is nothing new anywhere in the world: in 1986, the case of Eli Creekmore rocked the USA.

Back in 1986, while the Vezzutos were waiting for the child who never arrived, another human tragedy was unfolding 3,000 miles away in Everett, Wash., outside Seattle. Three-year-old Eli Creekmore was absorbing one beating after another from his father Darren, an ex-convict. There were repeated complaints to authorities by many people who knew -- Eli's grandmother, doctors, child protection workers, even a waitress who saw the boy bleeding from his mouth as he tried to eat ice cream. His day-care teachers said he screamed in fear when his father came to pick him up. Still, authorities placed him in foster care only for brief periods and then returned him time and again to his father and to new beatings. On Sept. 26, 1986, Darren, angry that Eli was crying, kicked him in the stomach, beat him with a belt and left him wedged in a toilet bowl with a ruptured lower intestine. Eli died the next day. Darren was later convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 60 years. Eli's mother Mary, who said she was too afraid of Darren to help, got 10 months.

This list of child deaths by their carers and others is desperately long; and it would serve no purpose to provide more details here. In many of these cases, a public uproar at the death of a single child has been deafening in developed countries,drowning all other news stories from view. People pour their outrage, condemnation, empathy and vengeance into protests of the savage torture and neglect of a single innocent, thereby cleansing themselves of responsibility and then sinking into the deep relief of catharthis, as they return to their daily lives. Nothing is unusual about this; most people are either mothers or fathers or someone's child and it is natural for people to feel visceral outrage and empathy when they hear of such things.

But there is a deep and sordid irony here.

Googling 'iraqi child fatalities' will yeild thousands of urls which decry the effects of suicide bombers on Iraqi children, child fatalities from UN sanctions, the disruption of education facilities for Iraqi children etc. But you will search far and wide to find the total count of children maimed, dead and missing due to the USA invasion of Iraq, Afghanistan, Africa or Palestine; or any of dozens of other countries where the USA and Great Britain has been complicit in bombing, starving or orphaning children to further their interests in controlling the oil resources and corridors of the world. Searching Google to obtain the number of children suffering because of USA and Great Britain imperialistic activities in the above countries will be a frustrating task; most media attention is directed at the loss of lives to the children of Westerners.

Perhaps the conclusion is this: if the media does not report the suffering of a child at the hands of adults, it does not exist and need not be thought of again. Or maybe a question is more appropriate: Why is maiming, bombing and starving children of the world to satisfy the voracious appetite of the USers for oil not child abuse? Does an Iraqi child whose arms are severed because of a US bomb qualify as less important than a child in Great Britain who dies because he is thumped in the head by the mother's 'evil' boyfriend?

The deaths of millions of children worldwide are financed by the outraged parents of the USA and Great Britain who object to the abuse of Baby P and Eli Creekmore, who pay taxes that are used to kill some other mother's child in a bid for imperial control of oil. Is this irony or am I just crazy? This sad contradiction is apparently lost on most Western folks; out of sight, out of mind.Moreover, it is a revelation of the extent to which Western people have become powerless over their own responsibilities as citizens of the world. If people can weep for Baby P, they need not weep for the maimed and orphaned children of Iraqi mothers.

Perhaps the neocons of Britain and the USA are correct: people are sheeple. Their compassion ends with their self-interest. Although the suffering of so many women and children, vanquished and permanently crippled, can be blamed on the leaders of superpowers, the irrational and inexcusable ignorance and denial of the masses to recognise these victims' of our tax monies used for war, must be laid squarely at the feet of the common person.

Until this happens, Westerners will be murdering hypocrites with the malleable minds of sheep; exactly what the Masters of the Universe think they are.

Countries that USA has bombed since the end of World War II:

• China 1945-46
  
• Korea 1950-53
• China 1950-53
• Guatemala 1954
• Indonesia 1958
• Cuba 1959-60
• Guatemala 1960
• Congo 1964
• Peru 1965
• Laos 1964-73
• Vietnam 1961-73
• Cambodia 1969-70
• Guatemala 1967-69
• Grenada 1983
  
• Libya 1986
  
• El Salvador 1980s
  
• Nicaragua 1980s
• Panama 1989
• Iraq 1991-99
• Sudan 1998
• Afghanistan 1998
• Yugoslavia 1999
• Iraq 2001