Voting For Death

Voting For Death

By Linh Dinh
Counter Punch
October 08, 2012

America, you have become a nation of enablers and apologists for
tyranny and mass murder.

You condemn the Nazi and gulag guards of times past even as you
celebrate your own mercenaries and torturers, even as you explain
away, if not outright cheer, the unspeakable crimes committed by
your sons and daughters.

You don’t care who you kill, as long as your soldiers are paid,
and your munitions, bomb and tank factories are humming.

Safely ensconced in academic luna parks, your leading intellectuals
lean slightly right or left, but never enough to rock this blazing
gunboat, lest they sour the cocktail parties or, god forbid, have
their tenure revoked.

Mouths stuffed with antipasti, they’re expert at sidestepping
Israel’s prolific crimes, 9/11, Bin Laden’s faux death or the
parasitic Federal Reserve, and as another joke election nears,
they’re all gung ho about candidates who back illegal wars and
banking frauds, since each is supposedly the lesser of two evils.

For the past five presidential elections, winning candidates have
won 52.9%, 50.7%, 47.9%, 49.2% and 43% of the popular votes
respectively.

So there hasn’t been an overwhelming mandate for any of them,
but with the runner ups from the other major party often close
behind, and in 2000, actually ahead in the popular vote count,
the two-party system has gotten a stranglehold on our public
life and pocketbooks.

As for our senators, only two are not Democrat or Republican.

An American election, then, is basically a rigged referendum for
this thoroughly corrupt and murderous system, and simply by
voting, you will give it the green light to go on killing and looting.

Every four years, we’re railroaded into sanctioning endless war
and bottomless corruption.

If disappointed, we’re then steered by our brainwashing and
dumbing down media to a near clone of our current rapist.

The Good Old Party spooks the upper and middle classes by
threatening, If you don’t vote for us, the Dems will take your
hard-earned cash and give it to the freeloaders, crackheads
and other miscellaneous losers.

While the Democrats, in turn, scare the lower rungs by snarling,
If you don’t vote for us, the Republicans will let your retired,
diapered ass rot under a bridge, on a piece of cardboard, but
lordy, lordy, lordy, it is already happening, but let us not sweat
the details.

It is fitting that as our most important vote has become nearly
meaningless, we’re offered myriad opportunities to vote for all
sorts of irrelevant acts and personalities, from singing oafs to
dancing buffoons, to steroid-charged sluggers.

Americans have never voted so much for so little.

Each party paints the other as the greater evil, though both are
equally whorish to a military banking complex that has wrought
so much grief and destruction worldwide, including here.

As they offshore your job, they may toss you a free cell phone
or allow you to wed your same sex lover, but isn’t time, seriously,
we demand that our money be spent responsibly, for our benefits?

But no, we can only beg for small change, instead of real ones,
and must vote, again, for proven liars and criminals, and hope,
against all evidence, that they won’t impale us this time.

So how does it feel to have so much evil, deceit and betrayal
hardening through the entire length of your being?

But what’s worst about this is that you yourself have allowed it to
happen, have enabled it, if only symbolically, by voting for one of
the two parties that are pro war and pro corruption.

They will likely get 99% of your votes, in fact, so America will have
endorsed overwhelmingly, again, an openly criminal agenda, and
the world will again be aghast.

With his cartoon dynamite, Netanyahu’s recent UN speech brings to
mind Powell and his phony chart before the Iraq invasion, but Bush
at least tried to convince that a war was necessary, whereas Obama
hasn’t even bothered.

Ignoring congress and the American public, he simply ordered
a massive bombing campaign against Libya, which he mockingly
dubbed a “kinetic military action,” unleashed lesser strikes
against Somalia, Yemen and Pakistan, and sent terroristic proxies
into Syria, all without significant protest from our dozing public
or groveling intelligentsia.

Pumped with nonstop propaganda from our corporate media in this
mad house of mirrors, we neither see nor care how others perceive
us, for even as international protests mount, our flags burnt, our
soldiers killed by supposed allies and poll after poll shows us among
the most despised nations on earth, we still believe we’re loved
and admired worldwide.

Our politicians are only too glad to pander to this vanity.

Romney, “We have a moral responsibility to keep America the
strongest nation on earth, the hope of the earth, the shining
city on the hill.”

Obama, “Never bet against the United States. The United States
has been, and will always be, the one indispensable nation in world
affairs.”

Only children believe in everlasting anything, but that’s how our
daddy and mommy politicians talk to us these days.

So the world will again be aghast, as will posterity, unless we can
prove that we’re not behind the winning criminal.

Already, nearly half of Americans don’t cast ballots in any election,
but we must make this abstention purposeful, as a clear sign of
protest and not an act of apathy.

The world must see that Americans aren’t all deranged and
hypnotized as those who cheer and vote for one lying criminal
after another.

We’re better than this, so let’s prove it.

Imagine thousands in public places, declaring, “NOT IN OUR NAME!”

The sooner we can effect a divorce between us and our rogue
government, the sooner we can get rid of it.

If nothing else, to resist this electoral farce is to wash our hands,
partially, at least, of the innocent blood being spilled.

It is the only moral decision.



Linh Dinh is the author of two books, five poems, and a novel,
Love Like Hate. He’s tracking our deteriorating socialscape
through his frequently updated photo blog, State of the Union.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2012/10/03/voting-for-death/