Dreaming

I awoke with a start last night. I had been dreaming that we lived in Nazi Germany and I was trying to get a letter of transit and a ticket to escape. I was surrounded by Nazi troops, one of whom was a doctor, and I was pretending to be a doctor also, so as to gain his empathy to help me leave. Then, I awoke, suddenly. Whoa . . . what was that all about? In a stupor, I arose to find the bathroom, less because I had to relieve myself than to escape from the dream.

In thinking about the dream, it seems clear that I am being drawn slowly into an awareness that our Nation is beginning to fail. What we once had as a nation was a sense of community, being part of this great country. It is not that we had no faults when I was young, and the world was new. Rather, we were trying to deal with them, while simultaneously working together to fight off our enemies, which were legion. That was then; this is now. Now is a time when everyone is panicked about something, and nobody is willing to engage in civil discussion or debate about anything. Everyone seems to prefer yelling, as though everything is broken and there is no longer any hope. Contributing to this all-panic-all-the-time mood in the Nation is the Faux News Network, Rupert Murdoch’s attack team attempting to bring this nation to its knees. Rupert’s face should be on the FBI’s Number 1 Enemies List. But Rupert is exploiting that little chink in our armor called the First Amendment. Freedom of the Press is one of our most precious assets in this nation, but it turns out that it can also be used as a weapon to destroy us as well.

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

— The First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution

The First Amendment was crafted to protect citizens against the tyranny of the state—our government. I doubt that the authors considered the possibility that, when fueled by endless cash from unscrupulous barons, it could be used as an engine of attack.

We are witnessing now the inevitable result of almost 30 years of government deregulation, beginning with St. Ronald and continuing through George I, William of Clinton, and greatly expanded under Dickie Bird (Darth Vader) Cheney and his talking dummy, Little George. The last eight years prior to the arrival of President Obama, saw the almost total dismantling of any attempt at regulating private business in the interest of the public. So, of course, the financial system collapse, Great Depression II, and now the destruction of the Gulf of Mexico were entirely predictable effects of these hands-off policies.

The private sector, when left to its own devices, will always head toward the extreme edge of sanity, diving off that cliff like lemmings, mainly because of two factors: 1) the Peter Principle; and 2) Greed. Now, having produced this orgy of destruction, one might have imagined that the Nation would be moving towards a more cautionary stance, seeking to control the worst instincts of private sector robber barons. But no, instead, we have the Tea Baggers, and the likes of Sarah Palin and her colleague in destruction Lisa Murkowski, pressing for more oil drilling in sensitive regions and less regulation. The Tea Party seems especially weird, given that they seem almost anarchic, yet display signs of hysteria when the Government fails to do something, like fix the oil leak currently destroying the Gulf. They of course also famously demanded that we keep the government’s hands of their Medicare.

These groups would be mostly laughable, except when amplified and fueled with huge cash resources by Rupert Murdoch and his Faux News Actors like Glenn Beck. For reasons beyond my ken, a very large percentage of the voting public seems to have abandoned whatever thinking faculties they possess and actually appear to believe the curious twisted line of drivel gushing out of the Murdoch pipe-of-lies. Faux News motto: “We make stuff up, so you don’t have to.”

So, what does any of this have to do with my dreams about living in Nazi Germany? Well, I think that I am seeing in the Murdoch-created crowd of hysterical anarchists a similar kind of culture as we witnessed during the 1930s in Germany. There is within this group a substantial element of jingoism mixed with racism, a near fury at our Black President, and at other things foreign—Mexicans and their illegal forays into the US, Muslims who did after all attack us, and even those nasty socialist Europeans.

Whether this group continues to be fueled and amplified by Murdoch, and whether it avoids imploding on itself, may well determine the outcome of our next election, a fateful one indeed; because we are being told simultaneously by many credible sources, that unless we act quickly and intelligently on reining in our mountainous debt, credibly transforming our financial system, and dealing intelligently with the global climate issues, our political problems may be overwhelmed by global crises that are out of our control.

Lastly, we know for a certainty that the world will run out of petroleum. Unless we begin investing in new technology that transcends petroleum, we will in the not too distant future be literally running on empty, and Hummers may become curious museum artifacts.

So, while I dream, and awaken in a cold sweat, the Murdoch fiddlers continue to fiddle, while our modern day Rome burns merrily away.