The corpse
of American culture
Where all the heroes are fake
and the icons are revered for their lies
By John Kaminski
skylax@comcast.net
My secret is herein revealed — I'm an old sportswriter who has been
playing the same game for nigh on half a century.
In this Internet incarnation, my subject matter has changed
considerably, though the general purpose of my writing really has not.
It has always been my intention to get people to reflect on the folly
of the their own behavior, and these are lessons that can always be
drawn against any background.
My first bylined newspaper story hit the streets in 1957. It was about
my grammar school baseball team. Not so ironic that this my latest
effort should be partly about the same game, beloved baseball, which I
once, in my eagerly optimistic youth, regarded as a ritual of cosmic
significance.
Now, at a time when shuffleboard would probably be the more appropriate
game for me, I realize that baseball may not be the Zen-like avenue of
transcendence I once imagined it to be, but it nevertheless is an
appropriate sociological barometer of this pathetic hoax that is
American popular culture.
So I thought when I watched canonized slugger Mark McGwire testify
recently before a Congressional panel investigating the use of steroid
drugs in professional baseball. His voice crackled. Tears welled in the
corners his eyes. It soon became obvious that here was a man who had
reaped the highest adulation of the unwashed masses and now was about
to commit the public suicide of his glorious reputation.
"Based on what my lawyer tells me, I cannot talk about my past
history," McGwire told the puzzled committee. Rep. Charles Lewis asked
for a clarification. "Does this mean you're taking the Fifth?" the
Congressman asked. McGwire squirmed in his seat. His squeezed throat
quested for air as he uncomfortably nodded his assent ... and watched
his lifetime achievements evaporate in a puff of guilt-ridden smoke.
The refusal to answer meant the great slugger had cheated and couldn't
talk about it. He had used chemical substances to improve his physical
performance, which helped him break baseball's most hallowed record,
the single season home run mark.
It was perhaps the most shattering moment in baseball history, equaled
only by hit king Pete Rose's lifetime ban for gambling and the 1919
Black Sox scandal, after which eight players were banned for life for
fixing the World Series.
But McGwire's case, devastating as it was to his own previously
hallowed reputation, was even more ominous in the future revelations it
foreshadowed — specifically, the implication of fellow slugger Barry
Bonds in the same seamy and dishonest practice of boosting one's
performance with drugs. And with the future of Bonds, a seven-time
most valuable player and the dominant icon in the game today, soon
expected to take a similar turn to the bleak, McGwire's silent
self-destruction seemed to augur the impending destruction of America's
national pastime itself.
Another nail in the coffin of a contrived and superficial culture.
In my mind, I tried to contemplate a comparative demoralization in the
history of American culture, and all I could come up with was when U.S.
troops had to bail out of Saigon by helicopter definitely with their
tails between their legs.
Egotistical America had finally lost a war, and Americans didn't know
what to make of it. It turned out we didn't learn our lesson.
Of course, comparing the relatively trivial issue of an ultimately
meaningless form of entertainment to a major conflagration in which
almost four million people lost their lives is a dubious example. But
it's safe to say that a larger number of Americans care about baseball
than care about the lives of innocent foreigners its Army arbitrarily
snuffs out.
So in the sense of the debauched and misplaced American social focus,
the two events actually are comparable.
But the collective American psyche is not likely learn the lesson in
this new baseball tragedy, either.
That lesson would be that cheating and not competing fairly always
catches up to the cheater, even if the scam undertaken seems
undetectable at the outset of the attempt.
The comparison to the new fascist American government storming around
the world and obliterating all who oppose is an obvious similarity. We
all may only pray that this Pentagon adventurism comes to a similarly
ignominious end.
But I wanted to linger a little longer on the entertainment level in an
attempt to show how robotized and thoughtless America has become,
because when you talk politics these days, most Americans just shut
down and polarize along the border between compassionate consciousness
and mindless dogma.
Toronto Sun columnist Eric Margolis used one of my favorite examples
the other day to demonstrate the decline of American awareness (and
intelligence and compassion) when he wrote about the ’60s movie “Seven
Days in May,” which was based on a bestselling novel written around the
time of the Cuban missile crisis and worldwide fears of a nuclear war.
In that black-and-white classic, Burt Lancaster plays the demonic
General Scott, a right-wing lunatic who is frustrated by the humane
agenda of a liberal president, played by Frederic March. Kirk Douglas
plays the role of the hero, a subordinate of the demented general who
alerts the well-meaning president about the coup that is about to take
place, and the plot is foiled.
But the salient feature of the movie is Lancaster’s (the general’s)
behavior. He is a classic Patriot, focused on enemies and without
compassion or understanding. Even more astounding from the perspective
of forty years later is that he sounds exactly like our current
criminal president, George W. Bush.
In the early 1960s, Lancaster’s role was excoriated by both reviewers
and audiences for its over-the-top portrayal of an obviously compulsive
maniac. Yet today, President Bush’s virtually identical performance is
depicted by today’s prostituted media as a legitimate leader with valid
religious convictions.
I find this observation to be a perfect description of the difference
between the conscious culture of the 1960s and the comatose culture of
the first decade of the 21st century, as well as a confirmation of the
trend in American movies that principled heroism is no longer a trait
to be practiced.
Through its movies, America has descended into a sewer of viciousness.
Speculating on how this pathological and regrettable degeneration of
American culture occurred leads inevitably to the question of who owns
both the media and the educational processes that led to this
diminution of consciousness, this decommissioning of traditional moral
boundaries, this death of the American good guy.
Who owns the process that has destroyed the America we hoped to love,
the America for whom we now feel only contempt, mistrust and fear? Do
you care enough about the answer to find out, or are you OK with the
idea that both your livelihood and your life are about to be destroyed?
Let me know your answer at some later date, if you care enough to
answer at all.
And let me sketch just one more example of the degeneration of American
culture, this drug-induced deflation of a once-honest populace, this
bogus, superficial patriotism that has been converted by insincere
jingoism into a murderous, emotionalism fascism that now threatens to
turn the whole planet into a radioactive cinder.
It’s the music. In case you haven’t noticed, it’s dead.
As popular culture of the Sixties mobilized to oppose the senseless war
in Vietnam, numerous popular artists earned vast followings by standing
up to the government’s sadistic slaughter of those who were called
“gooks.”
Recently, I listened one of the many antiwar mantras that dominated the
airwaves in about 1970. “Ohio,” by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, was
about the National Guard murders of four antiwar students at Kent
State.
“Tin soldiers and Nixon coming.
We’re finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drumming.
Four dead in Ohio.
Gotta get down to it.
Soldiers are cutting us down.
Shoulda been done long ago.
What if you knew her
and found her dead on the ground?
How can you run when you know?”
When I listened to this shortly after September 11, 2001, it seemed
pretty inconsequential compared to what had just happened? But at least
the attempt was there, the attempt to inform the world that something
was wrong.
What I want to know is this?
Where are the songs about the World Trade Center, the greatest crime in
American history, in which our own government staged a fake terrorist
attack and killed three thousand of our own citizens?
Not a peep on the radio. After three years, not even a single syllable.
Where are the songs about Fallujah that could rival Gil Scot-Heron’s
great classic “Johannesburg,” a riveting lament about the black fight
for freedom against the oppression in South Africa?
Fallujah. The place braindead American zombies gunned down old people
and children to the smiles of their superiors, and American newspapers
covered it up. Covered up the gas, covered up the napalm, the
destruction of hospitals, the prevention of medical care, then covered
up the soldiers going back in and destroying the evidence that they
used gas and napalm, and God knows what else.
What I want to say is this?
WHERE’S THE FUCKING SONG, ASSHOLE?!
And I’d like to address that question to every musician in America, in
the world. I’d especially like to ask it of so-called legendary icons
like Bruce Springsteen and Bonnie Raitt, Bob Dylan (you nihilistic
twit!) and Eric Clapton (you simpering wimp!), Eminem (don’t fall for
that Democratic crap) and Doctor Dre (abandon your mansion and step up
now!).
The whole music scene, and all the retards who think they’re cool by
following it, are nothing but robotic moral cowards who have abdicated
their responsibility to the world. Who will have the courage to step
forward, like all these brave folks in the 9/11 skeptics movement have
done?
And when you try to escape into the pleasing triviality of sports, and
confront the reality that baseball’s two greatest sluggers have both
cheated to achieve their accomplishments, you should get some
depressing inkling that the whole enterprise is a lie meant to distract
you from the even more unpleasant fact that your government, through
its controlled media apparatus, has stolen your life, fed you with
falsehoods, and deliberately murdered your children with poisoned food,
toxic drugs, and phony wars.
So I think it’s time you checked the scoreboard, and find out what the
score really is.
America is dead, and the international bankers are getting ready to
pick its carcass. Anybody still walking around is now a willing zombie
waving that flag of mass murder and injustice, the Stars and Stripes.
But hey, it’s the perfect cloth to drape over your coffin, although no
photographs will be allowed. And hey, what’s that sound, everybody look
what’s going round ... due to the condition of both the corpse and the
culture, why, that sound is the out-of-control ticking of a Geiger
counter, which may be the real song about Fallujah that nobody
apparently has the guts to write.
John Kaminski’s Internet essays can be seen on hundreds of websites
around the world. They have been collected into two anthologies, the
latest of which is titled “The Perfect Enemy,” about how the
Zionist-controlled U.S. government created the terrorist group known as
al-Qaeda. His booklet “The Day America Died: Why You Shouldn’t Believe
the Official Story of What Happened on September 11, 2001” was written
especially for those who cling to the government’s false explanation of
the events of that tragic day. For more information go to
http://www.johnkaminski.com/
