A recent headline from Reuters read, "United States numb to Iraq troop deaths: experts." All human beings have a talent for denial, but we Americans have turned denial into genius. There is no need to burn books if the public is ignorant of their existence. On learning of the death of over half a million Iraqis, most have experienced a degree of regret comparable to their oligarchic overlords when topping off the tanks of their corporate jets with fuel purchased with plundered employee's retirement accounts. Sans conscience above, sans conscience below. Dante said Limbo (that quiet suburban community ringing Hell) was a place reserved for those indifferent to the world around them. But when we cannot connect the needless deaths of over half a million Iraqis with the oversized motor vehicles in our driveways, the situation is dire. We live in a nation dominated by salesmanship (commercial, political, religious). The salesman's credo is: a facile mendacity trumps a stubborn truth, because an honest mode of being would cause the buyer to become wary of the giddy lie of the pitch. Hence, complicity in lies is what the corporate consumer state demands of us. The salesman's counterfeit smile is camouflage. Beneath it is Dick Cheney’s joyless, thin-lipped, psychopath's half grin. A salesman's repertoire of manipulative enthusiasm and sham amiability fronts the whole criminal enterprise. Is it any coincidence that Las Vegas and prisons are the fastest growing population centers in the United States? We've become a country comprised of clip-joints and jails, a land of suckers and criminals with a cultural landscape peopled by corporate scam artists, congressional bagmen, and war criminals. But we’re not really victims. A mark is made the victim of his own greed. But we should be cautioned. What a nation inflicts upon the world, its own people will, sooner or later, inflict upon each other. We're already living in the midst of the angst and emptiness we have wrought. To have the verities of our inner selves twisted and distorted towards the selfish ends of corporate capitalism and the dishonest agendas of mass media-driven political discourse, is to become estranged from passion, empathy, and imagination; we grow inured to phrases such as preemptive war, collateral damage and acceptable losses, expressions that we should find repellent, if not flat-out mortifying. Try this: See how those statements sound when you substitute the names of your loved ones, or even the names of your pets: “Jennifer was an acceptable loss, was collateral damage.” We Americans have numbed ourselves in order to be able to live with our complicity in the crimes of empire. We have carpet bombed our rational minds into oblivion by the belief in chimeras such as "smart bombs." Reason tells us a truly smart bomb would be able to distinguish the innocent from the guilty. A smart bomb would have to be a Frankenstein Monster Bomb because, in order to exterminate the truly guilty, it would first have to kill its creators. Then it would go after the soulless bastards who ordered its use. Truly smart bombs would be flying into Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld's front doors, if they were so smart. It’s possible we fear our souls are imperiled by the Devil because, on some level of awareness, we grasp that we have forsaken our ability to experience a life full of meaning, depth and resonance, due to our systematic suppression of those vital aspects of our character that are capable of imagining, then creating, a future containing greater possibilities than the shriveled offerings of the present. We fear the licking flames of hell because, I suspect, we realize we have sold our souls at fire sale prices. philangie2000@yahoo.com.

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