THE ROLE AND CONSEQUENCE OF RACISM & VIOLENCE IN TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY AMERICAN CULTURE
It was during the G.W. Bush administration that America began to lose its strength and tenacity having once stood as a nation of fearless pioneers for freedom and reason. For the first time in over 200 years Americans allowed apprehension of the unknown to cripple and render them helpless. As sure as a monument stands at Plymouth rock Massachusetts the nation took its fateful leap from a veritable mountain of confidence and dove hook, line and sinker into the abyss which has become the fear/terror bandwagon of our times. America’s cocky, short-lived confidence was actually a hard-earned prize gleaned from our involvement in both world wars including a few earlier victories from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century. In hindsight many of these earlier debacles were no more than vicious manifestations of a misguided sense of manifest destiny driven by a faulty philosophy of racial superiority. They left massive genocides and human scarring that has not healed to this day.
America has evolved somewhat from a nation that embraced the barbarism of slavery but has continued the dark practise of racism rooted in a culture of sociopathic violence and fear. Racism and racially motivated violence in America has always been about the fear that black men, given the ability to compete fairly would pose a formidable threat to the bankrupt concept of racial supremacy. This was evinced in the 1936 Summer Olympics when Jesse Owens demolished the absurd Nazi tower of racial superiority.
WWII allowed Americans to objectively witness the horrific mirror image of its own antebellum shame. We were justifiably proud of the brave rescue of our Jewish brothers and sisters in Europe and God bless them for surviving their struggle. Our humanitarianism paid the high cost exacted by a violent, unavoidable war but the cause of freedom is always justified whatever the means. Like the American Civil War the defeat of the Third Reich ended a terrible season of racially motivated violence that entombed all of Europe. It was a resident evil that had to end. The negative side of our confidence came from our involvement in unwise policies beginning during WWI revising the borders and leadership of ancient nations in the middle east and in eastern Europe. America profited from its political tampering while inheriting eternal enemies through its economic association with the Allies. Germany lay crippled by the implosion of the Nazi menace, Japan still reeled from Hiroshima and Nagasaki with the other Axis powers who fell with Hitler all temporarily removed from global economic competition after the fall of the Axis machine. This gave America a false and brief sense of economic strength and confidence. America was suddenly “In like Flint” but rested overlong upon its laurels. It grew lazy, greedy and failed to anticipate the insatiable hunger for economic revitalization which inspired those nations who did not come out of WWI or WWII on top. These nations admired, resented and envied Americas prosperity. America became a loud and voluminous red white and blue target for revenge.
America was then a truly great nation still young and curiously innocent. But it’s blind naivete would ultimately set about the task of composing its own eulogy. Throughout its short history those peoples who migrated to America after Columbus’ folly had survived through a lethal combination of luck and wit barbarity and pure brutality. Between the early colonial era and Pearl Harbor America had demonstrated a promise envied by the world. But that is only if the story is told from a Eurocentric view. The story if told from aboriginal Americans, enslaved Africans, imported Asian and Latino laborers would frame a different perspective of the evolution of freedom in the Americas. It was and in many cases remains a freedom jealously protected by the privileged few. I will still say optimistically that America has been and could once again become a great nation with a brilliant promise. Regardless of the parallax and seemingly in spite of it more than 500 years after Columbus managed the most ridiculous navigation error in all human history things have radically changed. Many Americans seem to have become transformed into a pitiable scream of scary, introverted, sociopathic time-bombs hoarding weapons and swaddling them in a bloody, impotent rebel flag, living vicariously through the violent and foreboding transmissions of the internet as if waiting for some inevitable slash of violence to sever them from the mirage of a safe and civilized America that ironically has not existed for decades. What better climate for the sale of products marketed to give the shivering American consumer a sense of security as inflated as its failing domestic economy.
Americans have got too soft, they have given up on truth, they no longer comprehend the extreme impossibility with which this nation was built and rebuilt many times over. In the face of difficult times Americans appear to have chosen to pack up, step back, disconnect and grab a big, virtual stick in the event the realness they fear happens to knock on the front door. There are many Americans who can see through the smokescreens concealing truth and they are not outnumbered only temporarily frozen with fear of the unknown…
Ronald Regan scorched the skies of late nineteenth century American futurism and optimism by introducing a magnificently impossible apocalypse-engine for which he plagiarized the name “Star Wars” from a 1970’s cinematic icon. The concept of the Star Wars anti-warhead missile he presaged was as primitive as a Johnny Sokko re-run but was a keenly graphic way of saying, “DON’T MESS WITH AMERICA OR ELSE YOU WILL BE VAPORIZED!”. From that moment there was no turning back… or was there?
In the interim the growing enemies of America opted to pull from a far less dramatic and “Hollywood-esque” cache of reprisals. They chose an in-your-face, up-close and personal, mom and pops, cottage-industry brand of terrorism over Star Wars.
Exploiting the already overstuffed bandwagon of commercialized violence and fear in our country foreign terrorists have managed mesmerize the American peoples beneath a pall of dread stealing recruits from our ranks to add to the despair… Their sarcastic but caustic answer to the buffonery of the Star Wars project is epitomized by the same guerrilla-war-tactics used in Asia during the 1960’s and 1970’s when America struggled in the bloody and horrifically violent Korean and Vietnam wars.
In a desperate and clearly necessary response to both foreign and domestic threats Homeland Security has actually done an impressive job of keeping America safe but one wonders how long their uncanny luck will last. In addition to foreign terrorist threats America is literally being eaten from the inside-out by the startling rise of internal violence. It is fair to say that the twenty-first century has finally bought a crippling multi-front war of violence and fear to America. This is a different kind of war than the idyllically ludicrous one envisaged by Nancy Reagan and Mr. T. The autosarcophagy that emperils twenty-first century America is largely the result of its refusal to rectify it’s patent history of racism and socioeconomic bias. A country such as America can no longer afford to fake egalitarianism and the global community is clearly no longer willing to pretend it doesn’t see the grossly profound contradictions between dogma, policy and reality. So America has finally used up all of its exemption cards and can no longer assume the role as an international policeman for human rights without reconstructing it’s own troubled nest. The process is actually playing itself out right now but the question is can we survive it?
One thing is certain, neither ADT or or our local firearms retailer is going to be of much assistance under the pathological and unpredictable weight of a large-scale terrorist attack. Kitschy security systems that blink, beep, beam and chirp in and out of our everyday lives are useful only to remind us of domestic crimes that seem to be increasing at a rate exponentially greater than foreign terrorist attacks.
We have to examine the clear relationship between a failing economy and the rise of American on American violence in America. In microcosm the phenomenon of black on black crime mirrors this national trend. Similarly the Black American community chooses to ignore this caustic and intensifying sydrome pitted against a dual front comprised of itself and the historic situation of American racism and related violence. Unemployment and underemployment, ignorance and disenfranchisement are the chief hallmarks of cultural failure resulting from racism and racially motivated violence in our world. The current problem with violence in the states may also stem from America’s weak post WWII economy diminishing the domestic job market and forcing many Americans to survive by practising occupational banditry, Piracy, drug pushing and a miscellaneous assortment of contraband occupations. All of these career paths require violence in order to thrive. Many Americans believe that our banking and credit systems and Wall Street are actually at the root. Some feel that corporate big business preys upon the delicate security of simple working folk and also provokes the weakness of our deteriorating economy forcing people to victimize others in order to survive. The ensuing panic is a stressor that drives the twenty-first century American way of life. Are Americans being programmed to live in constant fear and acceptance of dynamics they are not educated to understand? They are not meant to comprehend the structure of violence or defend themselves from it through policy because they are being programmed to consume products promising to magically insulate them from it. At the same time they are programmed to accept the inherent fallibility of these products by buying into the concept of product upgrades. Are Americans being taught to buy commodities they already know are faulty? This is hardly the economic theory that launched the mid-nineteenth century industrial revolution! Keeping Americans in ignorance, fear and selling them junk is big Wall Street business in the twenty-first century and it works! But foreigners won’t touch our domestic products abroad that is except for the the one thing we make better than anyone else… weapons…
This brings us full-circle with the chain linking economics with violence and bigotry. America is still legendary for its military capabilities. But arms technology design, development and sales does not trickle down to even the average American. The one thing we do best could still represent massive overseas outsourcing taking jobs away from these purple mountains.
Homeland Security was created in 2002 immediately after the tragedy of 9-11. Then as now the threat to American security was real as all outdoors. but a great deal of overzealous hype has nurtured a billion dollar security industry in our troubled society and economy.
Homeland Security is just fine in my book. To be more effective they need the strong, fearless American people of old. How do we get back that spirit? Americans need products that protect them from what has become a socioeconomic culture of fear, high-seas and terrestrial piracy! America has to get its MOJO back!
Today violence is a big player in the supply/demand curve. The result is that Americans are being manipulated through the cultivation of violence to enrich Wall Street.
If Americans are sitting ducks in a boiling pond we have honestly got to ask ourselves why? There is too much violence generated by Americans against other Americans. Racism, hate crimes, drug related homicides and social disconnectedness are boiling the melting pot over without any external heat.
But is it real? Is it another conspiracy theory? Is the graphic violence which has come to typify twenty-first century American culture real or has media magnified it out of proportion making it appear more voluminous than it really is?
A rise in American violence means more prisons. Privatization of penitentiaries means Wall Street profit. Since there aren’t enough jobs anyway people who commit crimes of survival get prosecuted instantly removing them from the competitive employee-field. Prisons and the banks that finance them make money off prisoners without making them work to create a product because prisoners are the product! We can look at prisoners the way Wall Street does as “Sham-Commodities”.
Americans are being farmed like cattle to be either consumers or sham-commodities. Most consumers work so they can afford to purchase products, services and commodities. Sham-commodities can include persons or other items that generate money by doing absolutely nothing save creating a demand for other services and products. They are raw materials society has chosen not to process into a useful product because they are sern to be more valuable in an unrefined state. When these people are detained in prison they become exponentially less marketable outside of prison. When released they become sociocultural misfits literally programmed to generate crime in order to survive. There is no intention to develop them to be competitive. The crimes they commit when released is free marketing for institutionalized fear. States and federal policies have been manipulated for centuries to ensure certain populations will not become economically viable competition. These racist policies continue to be tweaked so that the farmed and harvesters population of human sham-commodities increases. Incarcerated and imprisoned people relieve the crowded job market allowing employed taxpayers to fund the costly penitentiary system and to consume products of fear and mass hysteria, racism, etc. A bloodthirsty trend historically germaine to capitalism has been allowed to fester and ferment in America poisoning the spirit of freedom and of fair and competitive capitalism. Cheating the system of free-market competition in order to achieve economic leverage is not sustainable because it’s power is not based on actual outcomes. For example, Black Americans have been deliberately disenfranchised in America for centuries but as they gain in economic power myths fabricated to justify their oppressors violence are being exposed as false. Racists are discovering real competition from people’s they falsely marketed as inferior. The success of their victims so challenges their unjustified swagger they now fear the discontinuance of policies that historically afforded them an unfair advantage. In the not so distant past black men were lynched when they demonstrated leadership capabilities and economic savvy eliminating the possibility they might inspire a soulful awakening to challenge the stereotype! Today they are eliminated from the competition before they can ever show promise. The penitentiary system has been customized to cultivate young, black felons transforming them into sham-commodities and wasting them away until the become nothing more than embittered old men… Likewise, the black community has allowed it’s black men to fall into this trap instead of cultivating generations of young black attorneys, judges, industrialists and politicians to inundate and purge the corruption from a system of institutionalized racism.
The role of violence in America has been to physically eliminate racial competition in every arena of this culture save the lowest echelons of servitude. By the twenty-first century this policy has crippled the potential productivity of America to the point that it has fallen behind other countries. The recent shift in population has caused the historical ruling class to fear their unjustly obtained power base will be eroded, challenged and wrested from them as the ethnic groups they imported as menials begin to build solid socioeconomic power foundations here. The cancer of racism will not allow them to see rationally. Fear of retaliation by those they have brutally oppressed inspires them to manufacture a declining civilization where imaginary and real competitors are stealthily rendered impotent. They fail to acknowledge that corporate America was historically built upon the backs of slaves which is why slavery has never been effectively incorporated in the educational curriculum at every level in America. Many Black Americans have grown bored of spurious racially biased education because it supports institutionalized racism by failing to include the cintributions of the men, women and children whose labor and inventiveness truly built the economic foundation of America. Unfortunately, as long as these lies are allowed to exist unchallenged the hate, racism and violence that has always so profoundly crippled these United States will continue to boil while the nation sinks deeper and deeper into the irreversible abyss of cultural, economic answer ethical decline… In order to rescue America from itself we must understand the role and consequences of racism and violence in twenty-first century American culture…
FIN
WRITTEN BY: BIGDADDY BLUES
