The Sameness of Change

Dear George,

To be powerful is to be hated. This is particularly true of the United States because we bring more mythic baggage to the table than the other great powers that have made such a charnel house of history. We cling to the myth that we are the “city on the hill” and a beacon unto the world. And if that beacon has turned toxic, it is because power, once acquired, must turn nasty to survive. We trash our morality that it may grow and spread.

We have been able to continue living in our fantasy world because, to the American public, history is a tabula rasa upon which our elite inscribe their fairy tales, while pretending that our sins never happened. As one writer explains it:

It is this control, this organized forgetting, that has always intrigued me both as a film-maker and a journalist. Described by Harold Pinter as a great silence unbroken by the incessant din of the media age, it assures the powerful in the west that the struggle of who societies against their crimes is merely “superficially recorded, let along documented acknowledged…It never happened. Even while it was happening it never happened. It didn’t matter. It was of no interest.”


This amnesia is aided and abetted by the timidity of the Democratic Party, which has been thoroughly cowed by the right. Another writer, speaking of the Obama campaign, tells us that, “There are nuances of liberal thought in the Obama campaign, but that is overshadowed by the ‘though police’ in his campaign that don’t want to give the McCain people any ‘talking points’ that they can use against him.”

By denying a vigorous public debate that might bring into sharp relief the folly of our empire, Obama’s hacks are guaranteeing the continuance of the historical amnesia that is keeping our the elite in power as our elite.

Pray to God, George, that the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) never suffers an epiphany in which they would deliberately provoke outbursts and attacks from McCain so Obama could tear him to shreds, because the truth is that Bomb-Bomb has little to offer other than warmed-over Neocon rhetoric.

If the Cold War warriors of yore beat the bass drum of communism, our new-age warriors are tapping the tin can of terrorism. They has only succeeded because the American public is so conditioned to fear and hate that it will buy into any Manichean fantasy, no matter how vacuous it is.

The truth is that the more a politician speaks of change, the more things will stay the same. Don’t you just love the madness of it all?

Your admirer,
Belacqua Jones