Deranging America

Deranging America

By Linh Dinh
OpEdNews.com
February 21, 2013

The coarsening of a people doesn’t happen overnight. When I came
to the States in 1975, the Gong Show was about as rude as it got on
television.

Some earnest sap would get bumped for crooning, “Feelings, nothing
more than feelings,” but no one ever got screamed at, had their wig
knocked off or made to sob in public.

No tune ever urged murder, and even a group named War only sang,
“Why can’t we be friends?” The year’s top hit was The Captain and
Tennille’s “Love Will Keep Us Together.”

Compared to now, it was a cheesy time, for sure. American cheese.

Then came Howard Stern, Rush Limbaugh and Jerry Springer, etc.
Before Stern made it nationally, he was only big in the DC area,
where I happened to live at the time.

In 1982, an airliner crashed onto the 14th Street Bridge, killing
78 people, so Stern called Air Florida the next day to book a flight
from National Airport to the 14th Street Bridge.

Many kids at my school, Jefferson High, thought it was brilliantly
funny, and I’m not sure now if I laughed along, but even then, I could
sense that not only Stern, but the country itself had crossed a line.

If 78 corpses in a freezing river is an occasion for any kind of
collective mirth, then we’re certainly fucked. Stern’s reputation
has been built on such jokes, remember, and he’s no fringe
character but one of our most popular radio personalities. Ever.

By 1989, I was standing on a ladder, house painting while subjected
to my boss’ radio always tuned to Stern in the morning, then Rush
Limbaugh in the afternoon.

It’s a miracle I still have live brain cells.

A Limbaugh show would start with a sustained burst of gunfire and
hand grenades exploding. Now, I have nothing against “shock” per
se, or black humor, but we’re not talking about Celine, Artaud, Henry
Miller, Charles Bukowski or Andy Kaufman, but simply crass idiocy.

Loutish Limbaugh became so popular, he was asked to be a
commentator on Monday Night Football.

Violence, always violence. From infancy, Americans are conditioned
to enjoy violence, then lured or pressured to support it at every stage
of life.

Merely by voting, Americans sanction carnage against foreigners,
and to have a healthy stock portfolio, one should also invest in mass
murder.

Even holding on to a job can mean implicit or explicit participation
gratuitous violence. Let’s say you’re an honest and mild-mannered
cop, but if your colleagues were kicking a prone suspect, LAPD style,
you’d arouse suspicion and ridicule for not joining in.

What are you, a snitch? Who do you think you are, Christopher
Dorner?

And in war, massacres and mass rapes are initiation rites and
bonding rituals, what bona fide heroes indulge in, for to abstain
is to be a queer or a pussy.

What are you, a snitch? Who do you think you are, Bradley Manning?

With preemptive wars, drone hits, extrajudicial killings and torture,
illegal violence has become institutionalized in the USA, and as we
normalize such outrages against humanity, we become more corrupt
on every level, for if one can justify greed-driven, random or even
recreational or therapeutic killing, what Limbaugh called, “letting
off steam” in regard to Abu Ghraib, then one can justify any other
immorality.

In all spheres of our public life, governmental, media, entertainment,
sports and even academic, violence and corruption have taken over.

CEOs bankrupt millions, while TSA flunkies lift cash and electronics
when not fingering nuts.

To watch bouncing balls, we must thank the troops repeatedly.
Our jocks are lying junkies. Gotta gain that edge, you know.

To keep their jobs, even elementary school principals and teachers fix grades.

In such a foul swamp, the honest man or woman is a fool, at best,
and may soon be out of a job, if not already.

Corroding individuals and nations, corruption weeds out the honest vand competent, while abetting the ruthless yet servile, towards
inferiors and superiors, respectively.

With so much corruption in high places, even the bought media
must acknowledge that there is unprecedented mistrust in the
entire system, but feeling impotent, all the hoi polloi can do is
cheer when one of their own fight back.

Seventy-year-old private contractor Arthur Harmon was hired by vFusion Contact Centers, and when it tried to stiff the old man after
he had done his work, he shot its CEO, Steve Singer, and Singer’s
lawyer, Mark Hummels. Harmon then committed suicide.

With public trust plummeting, poor Capitalism will suffer, the media
lament, but what about the contagion of so much lying, cheating and
unchecked violence?

Our grinning Prez continues to kill so casually, so often, after joking
about drones.

Our Secretary of State gleefully chirped, “We came, we saw, he
died!”

It should come as no surprise, then, that hardly a week goes by
without at least one multiple shooting where innocents are killed
for no reason, beyond the fact that the shooter may have had a
bad day, week or life.

And as the heavy-weights steal big, us straw-weights shoplift, filch
from work or barter our boss’ merchandises. Gotta supplement those
starvation paychecks.

Barista, I’ll give you a free cappuccino, smart blonde-blended amaro
joe, in exchange for a frankenchicken enchilada from your minimum
wage shack of employment.

Or take this schmuck working at Ross, the Dress for Less store. For
a while now, he’s been sneaking shirts, wallets and belts into the
trash, to recover then peddle for cheap.

Last May, 47 U.S. Marines and 21 civilian accomplices were charged
with stealing assault rifles, bullets, night vision goggles and $800.00
flash lights to sell on eBay and Craiglist, at garage sales and through
direct meetings.

Buyers included domestic gangs and foreign agents. Since the country
itself is, by far, the world’s biggest arms dealers, why shouldn’t its
lowly grunts get in on the action?

Last April, six US Army soldiers were arrested for selling stolen
weapons, trafficking cocaine and offering murder for hire, “wet
work,” with a hit costing $50,000, plus five kilos of coke.

Your gang’s initial could be carved, free of charge, into the deceased
individual.

In an AT&T commercial, a suited guy asks a bunch of kids,
“Who thinks two is better than one?” All the kids shout, “Two!”
Suit continues, “Now, what’s better, being able to shoot two
lasers out of your eyes at the same time, or just one laser out
of one eye?”

A kid then explains, “It’s just fun. One beam, OK, it does a little
bit of damage. Two beams, it makes something explode!”

So there you have it.

To sell a gadget that allows you to bungle two activities
simultaneously, they use cute, goofy kids to gush over a
futuristic weapon, as fired by a cyborg.

We subject our children to maddening, nonstop and inhuman
stimuli, then wonder why they’re suffering from attention
deficit hyperactivity disorder. With them going apeshit inside
their No Dummie Left Behind cages, we drug them some more,
as if there weren’t enough toxins already clogging their veins.

Our media push violence and stupidity on us, then justify it by
saying this is exactly what we want, since we are belligerent morons,
more or less, but it’s clear we haven’t always been this way, and
don’t think I’m just using the cheeze whiz 70’s as a benchmark.

In 1927, “I’m Looking Over a Four Leave Clover” was a huge hit,
and you don’t have to understand its lyrics to know that it’s not
about banging some ho.

In 1929, Fats Waller scored with “Ain’t Misbehaving.”

Even as Al Capone’s boys were mowing them down in Chicago,
Americans were singing along to, “I don’t stay out late, don’t
care to go / I’m home about eight, just me and my radio / Ain’t
misbehavin’, I’m savin’ my love for you.”

Compare that with 50 Cent’s “remember the good times, the chips
we stacked / the clips we packed / and all the bricks we cooked
from coke to crack.”

Or, “Y’all can love me, or hate me, or suck my dick / I like my hoes
just like Summer, no class.”

Good Lord, and I thought smoking unfiltered Camel, drinking half a
six pack or making out with a girl outside the 7-Eleven (after working
eight hours at McDonald’s) was badass. Forgive me, Ice-T, for I’ve
wasted my corn syrupy teens.

A question worth asking: Who benefits from a more compulsive,
hence more violent, population?

Well, if you’re pushing eternal warfare, which we are, you’ll need
a pool of nutcases who are willing to shoot anyone for any reason,
or none at all, and more deranged oafs at home to go “Rah! Rah!”
over any bombing run or drone hit.

Are we going into Mali next? Why not? Where is it, by the way?

There has never been a country fighting so many wars without a
serious debate about any of them.

And if you want people to buy first, think later, to rack up life-
wrecking debts to satiate all ephemeral cravings, then you ply
them with poison, flickering television and thumping music.

You don’t want a population capable of deliberating, reflecting,
thinking clearly or even listening attentively, much less reading, but
one that can be jerked around by any sexy come-on or dumbed down slogan.

In Allentown, I saw a hand drawn sticker featuring a large, “HAPPY”
pill, with this caption, “POLITICS IS THE ART OF CONTROL. GO BACK
TO SLEEP.”

Americans are the most drugged and indebted people on earth, with
the highest rates of teen pregnancy and childbirth among developed
nations.

We don’t think much about the future, nor can we envision what it
might bring.

With no universal health care, many of us don’t even dare to think
about our own bodily decline or vulnerabilities.

“Kicking the can down the road” has become our mantra.

Each speech by the President is a vapid pep talk with no correlation
to reality, yet, clouded by virtual or real narcotics, many of us still
clap and cheer.

Others mumble that it’s time we fight back, but with our enemy
ill-defined or out of reach, we’re reduced to shooting innocents or
ourselves.



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

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