Just where along the way did this country become a total fraud?

[Syrinx]

I was just channel-surfing and came across "Reefer Madness" on IFC. This bullshit was used in the thirties, by Harry Anslinger, and J. Edgar Hoover, and the rest of the federal government, to marginalize and demonize certain segments of society by hyping manufactured and (mis)-perceived threats to public safety.

Sound familiar?

We like to think that today's Americans are too sophisticated to fall for things like the laughable propaganda presented in that stupid black-and-white movie, in which honest, God-fearing, All-American youths are enlisted into a debauched subculture of wanton sex, and mindless murder, by a simple puff of a funny-looking cigarette.

Many accounts of the making of that movie would have us believe that it was produced by a church-backed group, in an effort to "keep kids off drugs." It is clear, however, that the film was in fact a federal-government sponsored piece of propaganda, aimed at sowing seeds of hatred against Mexican-American and African-American minorities.

Anyone that has ever taken even one inhalation of marijuana knows that the claims of pot-induced violence are ridiculous, if not hilarious.

Personally speaking, I once hit my uncle after he said something bad about Jimmy Carter. That involved consumption of beer. My personal experiences with marijuana tend toward the hilarious, rather than the violent. I remember once challenging a friend to a drum-off, regarding the relative merits of Keith Moon and Neil Peart, even though neither of us could drum our way out of a paper bag.

This post isn't about marijuana. I don't use it anymore. Somewhere along the way, I quit liking it. Reality got too weird, and I didn't want to enhance that effect.

Reality, nowadays, is just too fucking weird.

It is about the dishonesty of our society.

I just saw a story a couple of days ago about Bush and company raising the "terror alert" to red, or orange, or something, for between now and the middle of next year. Just in time for the election when it looks like the Democrats are going to sweep into power, including the first black president of the United States. Be scared of something new, or something will surely kill you! You better watch your back!

This post isn't about Reefer Madness, though I do think pot should be legalized and many thousands of non-violent prisoners should be freed.

This post isn't about Reefer Madness, but it is about COINTELPRO, and all the illegal wiretaps, and illegal prosecutions that happened under that program. And it is about the new COINTELPRO that is underway now, under the criminal administration of Cheney and Bush.

It is about the lies that we have been told. It is about Armstrong Williams and all the people that have been fingered as being paid to lie for the Bushes. And it is all about the "talking points" that McClellan admitted sending out to Fox News for wide dissemination.

It is about the grip that the oil companies, and KBR, and Blackwater have on our country. It is about the corporate grip that Newscorp and General Electric have on our mainstream media. And don't even remind me of Disney/ABC.

Exactly when did our country become a total fraud?

I don't mean to be sacrilegious. And I don't think I am.

The talking heads, dressed in red and blue, and with their white faces, say we are the most free, while we lock up more people than any country in the world? Explain that to me.

And they say we are the land of the brave, but they pull chickenshit psyops that make us surrender our rights?

Even the fucking Democrats won't stand up and say "you've gone too far."

Where will it end. Will it end?

[ixion]

1. perhaps our path to fraud started with the Native American Genocide

although there are probably instances where you could make a case for fraud prior to this. However, off the top of my head, that's where we started downhill.

[patrice]

5. I agree.

Ordinary people "Just following orders" or not rocking-the-boat.

This is the banality of Evil. It added up to generations and generations of people who did or didn't do "small" things and refused to take responsibility for the important ways that you and I affect everyone else, preferring instead the mind altering religious, commercial, and corporate myths about how exclusively good "we" are.

It ISN'T that we aren't Good. It IS that our Good and Bad are at least 50:50, if not something more like 40(Good):60(Bad), which MAY be harsh, but my real point is that people refuse to even consider the notion that we are not 100% good. They refuse to ask the question of what this ratio is for us as individuals. It's as though our very valid shortcomings don't matter at all!!! I lay the fault for this primarily at the feet of religion, religion aided by corporate and government factors that prefer sleep-walkers.

There are too many cognitive dinosaurs who insist upon thinking in terms of false dichotomies in big and small instances, even though many know that isn't real. They do so because they are poisoned by their/our own History of refusing Reality.

[OneBlueSky]

18. on my more idealistic days, I've often thought that the way to save this nation . . .

is to listen to the Native Americans . . . following the wisdom of native traditions and their cosmic views of life may be the only thing that can save us in the end . . . and it would bring us full circle, from the conquering hordes who almost wiped the indigenous peoples off the map to students of what they have to teach us about life -- and about forgiveness . . .

"To those who followed Columbus and Cortez, the New World truly seemed incredible because of the natural endowments. The land often announced itself with a heavy scent miles out into the ocean. Giovanni de Verrazano in 1524 smelled the cedars of the East Coast a hundred leagues out. The men of Henry Hudson's Half Moon were temporarily disarmed by the fragrance of the New Jersey shore, while ships running farther up the coast occasionally swam through large beds of floating flowers. Wherever they came inland they found a rich riot of color and sound, of game and luxuriant vegetation. Had they been other than they were, they might have written a new mythology here. As it was, they took inventory." Frederick Turner

"The earth does not belong to people; people belong to the earth . . . This earth is precious to the Creator and to harm the earth is to heap contempt upon its Creator . . . Our dead never forgot this beautiful earth, for it is the mother of the red people. We are part of the earth and it is part of us." Chief Seattle

[tularetom]

2. IMO it was when corporations began being treated as "people"

The door was opened at that point to a highly stratified society where ultimately, corporations became a privileged class of "people" with special rules that applied to them and tax structures that favored them.

Actual "people" have been devalued to benefit these bogus people.

[patrice]

9. That is when the trend "became of age" and started replicating itself in "new" self-sustaining forms

the moral monstrosities birthed by Ron Reagan.

[MrScorpio]

3. America runs on bullshit

That was apparent from the git go

[KharmaTrain]

4. 1995...

That was the year of two landmark actions. First, Gingrich and the wingnuts took over the House...and the year broadcasting and cable was deregulated leading to the rise of the 24/7 "news" channels and hate radio. Civil discourse was cooked...government shutdowns, contracts on America, dittoheads and Faux Noise were the new "norm".

[zanne]

6. It becomes a fraud when we become old enough to realize it. nt

[Virginia Dare]

7. It probably always was..

every form of government operates at a certain level of fraud. Everything we learned about our history is a fraud.

[formercia]

8. Te the greatest page wi' ye'

K&R

[mopinko]

10. we went wrong as a species when we descended from chimps instead of

gorillas or bonobos. of course, it was the chimps abilities to band together and make war that gave them what they needed to evolve. all a war really needs is a simple, you are clan, they are not. let's kill them.
the real question is-now that we know this about ourselves (might be why some people refuse to believe) are we going to use our highly developed coconuts to move away from war and fear voluntarily, or are we going to evolve from the survivors of the armageddon we seem so intent to bring on.

[formercia]

11. How many lifeless planets

have been home to species that understood this point too late in their de-evolutionary cycle?

[mopinko]

13. good question.

i suspect none in our "quadrant" of space, or they would be here taking over this planet.

[formercia]

14. Perhaps they alredy have.....

http://www.geocities.com/newworldorder_themovie/dragoncourt.html

[maxsolomon]

20. point of order:

bonobos are chimps, and they're our closest relatives.

did you mean orangutans?

[samsingh]

12. nixon, reagan, bush 1, and the 2000 stolen election

[European Socialist]

15. When what was good for GM was actually good for America changed

to "winner take all". It was just a partial scam back before Raygun.

[FiveGoodMen]

16. The Root Cause (IMO): Religious indoctrination

Church sermons, get-togethers, Sunday school classes -- start at a very young, impressionable age and condition people to feel a sense of pride, acceptance, and righteousness whenever they affirm certain "truths" despite any evidence to the contrary (which was obviously created by the Devil to fool them!)

Once trained to believe certain authority figures rather than their own lying eyes, people are ripe for this kind of manipulation.

It's worse in America right now because our fundies have been ramping up this type of indoctrination for decades.

[LostInAnomie]

17. To be honest, there probably never has been a country that hasn't been a total fraud.

Some may start out with good intentions, but eventually the ideals fade and the idealists sell their souls. Money and power will always corrupt. We just seem to be more guilty of it than most.

[EFerrari]

19. Manifest Destiny was not a good idea. It was probably before even that

but that is an early example of a media pitch that got taken as truth and took us down the road to cognitive dissonance.

[maxsolomon]

21. Let's ask William S. Burroughs:

Thanksgiving Prayer


Thanks for the wild turkey and
the passenger pigeons, destined
to be shit out through wholesome
American guts.


Thanks for a continent to despoil
and poison.


Thanks for Indians to provide a
modicum of challenge and
danger.

Thanks for vast herds of bison to
kill and skin leaving the
carcasses to rot.

Thanks for bounties on wolves
and coyotes.

Thanks for the American dream,
To vulgarize and to falsify until
the bare lies shine through.

Thanks for the KKK.

For nigger-killin' lawmen,
feelin' their notches.

For decent church-goin' women,
with their mean, pinched, bitter,
evil faces.

Thanks for "Kill a Queer for
Christ" stickers.

Thanks for laboratory AIDS.

Thanks for Prohibition and the
war against drugs.

Thanks for a country where
nobody's allowed to mind the
own business.

Thanks for a nation of finks.

Yes, thanks for all the
memories-- all right let's see
your arms!

You always were a headache and
you always were a bore.

Thanks for the last and greatest
betrayal of the last and greatest
of human dreams.

[FKA MNChimpH8R]

22. It appears that we are contemporaries

and I think it was the 1980 election and the landslide of right wing sewage that followed.

I remember the 1970s as a rather sane time, once Nixon resigned. I too spent much of the decade in a pleasant haze of pot smoke and rock n roll. It was a good, more innocent time, culturally. The Ford and Carter years were a tolerant time; Anita Bryant's querulous anti-gay "crusade" was treated more or less as a joke by the then independent mainstream media. You could believe what Walter Cronkite or John Chancellor told you on the evening news. Cronkite worked only for Bill Paley, Chancellor for David Sarnoff, or whoever owned NBC at that time. The networks were independent entities, not divisions of some gigantic conglomerate. Same for local TV stations and newspapers. Integrity was paramount in news organizations then and they were subsidized by the entertainment divisions, not a part of them.

Reaganism was all about bluster, big money and show. Gaudy greed and materialism became the order of the day and still are. Entertainment was progressively dumbed down to a lowest common denominator. Clinton was, in retrospect, merely Reagan-era policies (deregulation, the Telecom Act, welfare "reform" and NAFTA) with a more human face. He was a useful tool for the people who have brought us to where we are now. And as always, the usual suspects are the investor class and the military-industrial complex.

So that's my take on it, but you could just as easily say the day the country jumped the shark was November 22, 1963.

[Kickin_Donkey]

23. As other posters have said ...

this country has always been a fraud, starting at least with the genocide of Native Americans.

In the last half of the 20th century, the veneer covering the fraud was held up by aspirations toward middle-class prosperity, essentially a populace being bought out by materialist goods.

The fraud punched through the surface on December 12, 2000, when the Supreme Court decreed Bush the winner, overturning all the democratic mythologies of he country (rule by the majority, a government of the people ... etc.). The fraud was realized on December 13, 2000, when the silence in the streets and the complicity of the media made it apparent that nobody gave a shit about the stolen election (except a few of us).

And now even the hallowed middle-class, so-called bedrock of democratic, modern societies, is being eaten alive.