Nothing is more American than Thanksgiving (except the Fourth of July and Superbowl Day and….), and so on the last Thursday of November, families gather, ruminate over the last year, share a turkey or something similarly grand, and mostly forget. They forget where their blessings came from, and how. They forget that the Indians who gave the pilgrims the wherewithal to survive were shortly thereafter exterminated. They forget that the wealth they extracted from the earth was at the outset done with slave labor. They forget that the current wealth was accrued by an economic imperialism, carefully masked, that raped large parts of the world so the riches came to America while those far away were left in poverty. And they forget how this largesse was made then, and how it is made now.
In another few days it seems our President, elected on a mandate for “change you can believe in ™” is going to give a speech to the nation after his dithering deliberate compromised brave thoughtful rigorous contemplative exhaustive thoroughgoing cowardly indecisive middling or whichever of a slurry of other descriptive addendums will be used to taint the writer’s viewpoint, and will let us know what he, and therefore “we” have decided to do about the Afghan situation. My bet is that the decision will be dictated by that old American axiom, Money Talks and Bullshit Walks, and that money, located in our perverse manner (though in keeping with collapsing empires) is here:
This pentagram is located some some 7000 miles from Afghanistan; it is claimed that this structure was attacked by forces emanating from Afghanistan on Sept. 11, 2001. Being honest we must underline the “claimed” as much of the evidence as to the alleged attack is at best dubious, and at worst, points towards conspiratorial falsification on the part of American authorities, as did the behavior of the Bush administration regarding the WTC attack.
So, citing the customary “national interest,” it seems President Obama – obeying the dictates of the military-industrial complex which appears to determine United States foreign policy, largely in the interests of major corporations which happen to make weapons, run the media, and are hand-in-glove with Wall Street – will likely order another 10 or 20 or 30 thousand more US troops be dispatched to Afghanistan. There they will do as the US military does normally, despite the purported new policies outlined by General McChrystal – the fount of honesty who orchestrated the fraud surrounding All-American football hero Pat Tillman’s death – who admonishes that we must be conscious and considerate of our host Afghani’s, lest we fail to win their hearts and minds to our cause, which naturally is also theirs, so the mantra goes.
So for the moment the numbers will escalate, more visits to Dover will be needed, hand-written notes to young soldiers who have committed suicide – stressed by bearing too much war too long in numbers too small and selected by poverty mostly – will be solicited of the White House. And American soldiers, out to do good in the name of democracy and freedom and the good old Red White and Blue, will do what they always do, as any warriors do. They will do as they did in Falluja, and as they have done where ever they go, wielding America’s superior fire-power, the most advanced weapons known to man, and they will lay waste to whatever is before them. All in our name. For which we give Thanksgiving.
Our former President serving up a Thanksgiving meal to soldiers in Iraq
Naturally, in the United States of America, being the world’s greatest democracy, we all voted recently and chose this policy, even if polls suggest most Americans would prefer some other course, and the man elected President carried the basic slogan “Change You Can Believe In ™”. Well, hell, it was just a PR thing, a campaign slogan, and nobody actually expects….
Just as America, being America, naturally has the best health care system in the world, and anyone wanting to fundamentally change it is crazed, or Commie, or Socialist, and should go live and suffer the disgraceful health-care systems of France, Denmark….
For these things those who pray do so in America today to give profound thanks that we’re Number 1. You bet.