JUNE 1, 2017
The Good Americans
Photo by Jörn Schubert | CC BY 2.0
The Pink Revolution of 2017, better known as Russiagate, is now more or less a fait accompli. Whether the corporatist ruling classes and their servants in Congress formally impeach him or force him to resign in disgrace, Donald J. Trump is being regime-changed, or at the very least effectively neutralized until he can be replaced with a grown-up, i.e., someone who will serve their interests without getting the masses all riled up about “taking the government back from the elites,” putting “America first,” and, well, just generally making an ass of himself.
At this point, not even a war will save him. Even if he could somehow manage to convince the boys in the Pentagon to back an invasion of Iran, or Syria, or wherever, the corporate-owned press would crucify him, and you can’t arbitrarily invade other countries without the support of the corporate media. No, the simple fact is, the Corporatocracy has decided to make an example of Trump, to remind folks who is really running things, and what happens when you attempt to defy them, and there’s nothing Trump can do about it, other than rant and rave on Twitter.
The United States of America being a profoundly authoritarian society (whose citizens have been conditioned from childhood to follow orders, go through channels, submit to a host of humiliating rituals devised by an ever-expanding range of government and private “security services,” and to worship leaders, police, soldiers, and, basically, anyone wearing a uniform, or a Giorgio Armani business suit), this ruling class soft coup is cause for celebration. Good Americans up and down both coasts are already dusting off their vuvuzelas. It isn’t quite time to use them yet, but they want to be ready for the moment Trump waddles across the lawn of the White House, boards Marine One for the final time, and is flown away to exile in Florida, or to Leavenworth to be hanged for treason. At which point they, these Good Americans, will pour en masse onto Lafayette Square, hooting, hollering, and waving flags, as they did when Obama sent Seal Team Six to roust the former CIA asset, Osama bin Laden, out of bed, shoot him several times in the face, and then dump his body in the Indian Ocean, or whatever it was that actually happened.
Good Americans, as a general rule, are not overly concerned with what actually happened. Or what is actually happening now. Or at least they’re not too concerned with the details. History, politics, economics, not to mention the inner workings of the media, are complicated subjects best left to experts. Good Americans trust such experts (not implicitly, they’re not dupes, 
after all) to explain what happened, or what is happening, to them. They have no choice but to trust these experts, and government officials, and the mainstream media, and the general consensus among the members of their privileged socioeconomic circles, as they do not have the time or the energy to go digging through reams of declassified documents, or to check the facts of the stories that appear in The New York Times or The Washington Post, or on their National Public Radio affiliate, or to read a book about history or politics, or the dissemination of propaganda, written by someone who isn’t parroting the official narrative of the ruling classes. What with all the demands of work, family, Facebook, Twitter, yoga, shopping, keeping up-to-date with the latest dining trends, not to mention the new season of House of Cards, there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to scrutinize everything their leaders are doing, or the “information” the media is feeding them.
after all) to explain what happened, or what is happening, to them. They have no choice but to trust these experts, and government officials, and the mainstream media, and the general consensus among the members of their privileged socioeconomic circles, as they do not have the time or the energy to go digging through reams of declassified documents, or to check the facts of the stories that appear in The New York Times or The Washington Post, or on their National Public Radio affiliate, or to read a book about history or politics, or the dissemination of propaganda, written by someone who isn’t parroting the official narrative of the ruling classes. What with all the demands of work, family, Facebook, Twitter, yoga, shopping, keeping up-to-date with the latest dining trends, not to mention the new season of House of Cards, there simply aren’t enough hours in the day to scrutinize everything their leaders are doing, or the “information” the media is feeding them.
This does not make these Good Americans accomplices to any alleged atrocities perpetrated by their elected government. The United States isn’t Nazi Germany. OK, sure, we wiped out the Native Americans (and sadistically named some of our sports teams after them), but that was hundreds of years ago. The same goes for slavery … ancient history. And, alright, so the United States, and the indigenous death squads we have trained and funded, have murdered millions of men, women, and children in places like Indochina, Indonesia, Central America, South America, and the Middle East, and we’ve bombed and invaded a long list of countries that posed no threat to us whatsoever purely to advance the interests of the corporations that own the government, and their ongoing quest for global hegemony … still, it’s not like Nazi Germany, where people went blithely on with their lives, pretending they had no idea what was happening.
No, these Good Americans, who at the moment are shrieking for Donald Trump’s head on a pike because the CIA and the corporate-owned media told them he’s a Russian operative, or that the Russians somehow “hacked” the election, are not at all like the Germans back then. Parroting the mindless propaganda pumped out by a global network of corporate media that Joseph Goebbels would have given Hitler’s other nut to control, and otherwise collaborating with the intelligence agencies, financial elites, and other deep state players intent on making an example of Trump, is … OK, admittedly, pretty pathetic, but it’s not like looking the other way while your government methodically kills the Jews. On top of which, Trump really is a bad guy, and Good Americans traditionally support, or at least don’t raise a major fuss about, the summary removal of government leaders the mainstream media tells them are bad guys.
Coincidentally, a lot of these bad guys, in addition to being hideously evil, have been, circa the time of their removal, interfering with the vital interests of the corporations that own our government. Bashar al-Assad, Muammar Gaddafi, and Saddam Hussein are the most recent examples, but we’ve been doing this since the late 1940s. A partial list of CIA ops, including assassinations, torture, election rigging, coups, and so on, stretching back to the post-WWII period, when we re-installed fascists in Greece and Italy and smuggled Nazis like Reinhard Gehlen, Klaus Barbie (a/k/a “the Butcher of Lyon”), and Eichmann’s good buddy, Otto von Bolschwing to America to help us defeat “the Communists,” is available for perusal online, and in any number of books and articles. It’s not like this stuff is secret or anything.
But whatever … no government is perfect, right? And Good Americans are grown-ups, after all. So they understand that all that crap about democracy is important to teach the children, and to put on the masthead of your newspaper, or whatever, but the real world doesn’t work like that. In the real world, where the Good Americans live, safely insulated from the abject poverty they are not in any way responsible for, sometimes you have to hire a few Nazis, or support a couple of fascist regimes, or sell a few buttloads of arms to the Saudis, despite the fact that they’re a brutal theocracy and the primary sponsors of the Terrorism we claim to be bombing the Middle East to stop, or bankrupt a few hundred thousand Americans to bail out your pals at the Wall Street banks that bled them dry with their Ponzi scheme, or support an Apartheid state like Israel, or sell Americans some convoluted corporate-friendly healthcare plan as if it were somehow completely impossible to provide a universal healthcare system like every other developed country, or lead the world in mass incarceration, primarily of the lower classes, who are already mass incarcerated in ghettos patrolled by militarized police, which of course bears no resemblance at all to the ghettos in Nazi-occupied Europe, and is regrettably just a permanent feature of the grown-up reality the Good Americans are utterly powerless to ever change.
Alright, I know you’re probably thinking that sounds a lot like the rationalizations the Good Germans used to excuse themselves for not resisting the horrors of the Nazis, but it isn’t the same kind of thing at all. The Good Americans are resisting … they’re resisting Trump, who, after all, is the one responsible for all that stuff, all those wars of aggression, the CIA coups, the torture, the death squads, the ghettos, et cetera … our entire seventy-two-year history as Enforcer of global Capitalist empire and all the incalculable human suffering and irreparable damage to the planet it has caused … all that is somehow the doing of Trump and his puppet-master, Vladimir Putin. Or at least it’s not Obama’s fault, or the fault of any of his Democrat predecessors, those champions of the poor and downtrodden who never need to be resisted.
So please join the Good Americans this weekend as they do their part to help the corporatist establishment make an example of this monster (whose evil outstrips that of Hitler, and Pol Pot, and Stalin, and, well, pick your monster) and discourage any future billionaire ass hats from screwing with their simulation of democracy. They’ll be staging huge rallies all around the country to whip up support for the Pink Revolution, and possibly even all-out Blitzkrieg against our bestial Slavic enemies before they “influence” another election, or hack another rural power grid. They’re calling it the “March for Truth.” It’s a totally grassroots volunteer effort that has absolutely nothing to do with David Brock, Peter Daou, or Shareblue, or the Democratic Party, or any of its neoliberal backers. This one probably won’t quite match the Nuremberg rallies for flat-out hysteria, but give the ruling classes some time … “Resistance Summer” is just getting started.
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