Levees made of lies

The unreality of the American Dream began in 1968 with the schemes of Nixon

by Phil Rockstroh

An entire American city has become an uninhabitable mire of fetid water, sodden ruins, and toxic sludge. Moreover, the destruction will not end there: the financial, political, and psychological spill-off will cause our nation to sink further into a morass of debt, denial, and despair.

How did it come to this? It begins with that watershed year of 1968.

By the fall of that year, it became increasingly obvious that the Vietnam War was neither a moral nor a winnable cause. At the same time, a sense of hopeless rage arose among inner city African Americans after centuries of racism and attendant disparities of wealth and equality, igniting urban riots. Richard Nixon, by promising he had a "secret plan" to end the war in Southeast Asia and vowing he would restore "law and order" to the nation's streets, was able to slither into the White House in November elections. Yet, within a few years time, we learned Nixon's scheme would prolong the war for years and cause hundreds of thousand of unnecessary causalities, and would in general screw over all concerned. As for his law and order policy, it consisted of a covert plan to take crime off the streets and put it back within the corridors of official power.

But an unwashed and unruly mob of sticklers for constitutional detail got lucky this time and they brought Nixon down. For our anti-American sins of self-doubt, we received Jimmy Carter, who delivered cardigan-draped bromides of thrift and Sunday school sermons on self-restraint and personal sacrifice. And that sort of thing drove people to cocaine and disco.

The high cost and banality of those activities left the nation susceptible to the platitudinous confidence-man assurances of “power and prosperity without sacrifice” promised by Ronald Reagan. All the while, throughout the nineteen-eighties, one George W Bush hid himself among mountains of the afore-mentioned disco marching powder and one Arnold Schwarzenegger brandished fists full of anabolic steroids creating for himself a body that is a precise metaphor for his adopted land—a nation that worships the appearance of strength, but whose interior life is as stunted as that of a narcissistic bodybuilder, a preening twit for whom the larger world serves no greater purpose than for the adoration of his over-sized, oil-lacquered muscles.

More and more, the American mind began to suffer from cocaine and steroid-induced psychosis. Worse, our self-absorption was only surpassed by our paranoia: The proxy armies of the Evil Empire awaited the command from their Kremlin masters to attack and enslave us; homosexuals plotted to destroy the American family, thereby leaving aimless children adrift and easy prey for conversion by skulking sodomites; civil liberty advocates employed legalistic weasel words to hamstring the police and thwart the legal system, giving criminals carte blanche to roam the streets and commit crimes with impunity; while their Welfare Queen mothers cushioned their posh asses on the leather seats of Cadillacs and cruised city streets trading Food Stamps for crack cocaine. That’s when matters grew far, far worse.

In the early nineteen-nineties came a threat to everything we hold sacred in Christendom: Bill Clinton. As it turned out, godly souls need not have worried—he turned out to be simply a Sybaritic salesman of global neo-liberal economic colonialism. Furthermore, Bill Clinton did Ronald Reagan one better: he bitch-slapped those Welfare Queens so hard their taxpayer-subsidized gold teeth rattled. Across the land, good Christians paused to listen to the satisfying thwap.

George W Bush has shown us an even more blessed path to salvation: He has revealed to us how we can ascend to heaven by climbing the stacked corpses of the poor. In the meantime, he will carry out Christ's admonition to give succor to the truly deserving—the members of the true welfare state, all those needy Haliburton contractors in Iraq, and other friends.

Meanwhile on the domestic front, with the intention of protecting us from rising rivers of reality, Bushco., a division of Cheney Inc., a subsidiary of JesusCorps/NeoConico have tirelessly labored to keep us safe from the possibility of ever being so much as touched by a droplet of truth. Therefore, they have constructed for us a shoddy levee system of lies . . . . It is behind those levees where we have been living inside flimsy structures built below the sea level of self-awareness, all the while choosing to call this misnomer made manifest The American Dream. And like the waters of the Mississippi River flooding into Lake Pontchartrain, the waters around us have begun to rise towards the tipping point.

Thus far, we Americans have risen to meet the challenge of these perilous times by dozing off before the television. With crumbs of Doritos stippled in the folds of our double chins, the garish glow of our sets flickers over our sleep-slackened faces, while the programming fare proclaims that "reality" is now comprised of the stuff of contrived competitions between corporately-neutered, would-be pop stars and of Weather Channel remote location feeds in which legions of blow-dried, sub-cretinous blathering heads are dispatched to hurricane-battered coastal regions to be blown about on camera for the amusement of viewers afflicted with a voyeuristic fetish for "live" disaster footage. Sure it’s all fun and games, until the appearance of floating corpses put a damper on everyone's festive mood.

Inasmuch as the reality of our waking life now includes crushing debt, runaway inflation due to diminishing oil supplies, global environmental upheaval brought on by global warming (including increasingly destructive cataclysms, such as Hurricane Katrina), and the enmity of nearly everyone in the world beyond our shores because of our bullying militarism and economic imperialism, we would have to be a nation of narcoleptics to have ever believed in the existence of this chimera called the "American Dream." For it's not a dream: it amounts to complicity in multiple acts of criminal negligence. And this is the actual criminal activity—the large scale looting—that contributed to the destruction of New Orleans.

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Phil Rockstroh lives in New York City. philangie2000(at)yahoo.com