[Have you ever seen a deer, for no apparent reason, leap out from the side of the road and hurl itself directly into the path of an oncoming car? Something similar happens to young men and women in the US whenever Washington decides to whip up a phony war against a foreign society that has every right to self-determination in its own land. Outside the US, it’s generally understood that these wars are created in Pentagon offices long before they happen, and are used as cover for unbridled corporate access to foreign land, labor, markets, resources, and to pump up the stocks and accounts of those who push weapons. The US population, however, must be hermetically sealed in a bogus information-universe of unreality in order to get the fake war off the ground.

The technique is formulaic, simple and puerile. Deeply entrenched in government offices, multi-national corporations, media conglomerates, rightwing think tanks, social and religious institutions; thoroughly corrupted by interlocking networks of high-paying jobs, sinecures, perks, pay-offs and privileges, the criminal ruling class first dose the population with repeated applications of lies, misinformation and scare tactics straight from the Goebbels school of propaganda (himself a boy-man). After many months of this, they unloose the war machine in all its fury, and send it like a monster truck careening out of control.

Predictably, the sons and daughters of families who represent the bulk of the country, driven to distraction by the dreadful noise and images of war, emerge from all sides of the road and throw themselves into the moving parts of the death machine. Many of them explode in a flash of red; many more suffer terrible wounds and injuries, disabled for life. At precisely the time when they should be joyfully discovering the potential of the human body and mind, they’ve been shattered to pieces by a hundred conspiracies perpetrated against them involving all sectors of society.

Why do they fall for it? Because they are young, yearning for meaning, craving connection and tragically ill-informed; because they are emotionally vulnerable, psychologically defenseless and devoid of viable economic and educational options; because they know little or nothing of the world and its history, and the enormous contempt and disrespect that power glories in vis-à-vis those who are required by necessity to do its bidding.

Such is the combined strength of propaganda made invisible by its own ubiquity, economic necessity and a cynical appeal to the warrior archetype: Easily it dislodges an otherwise hale and whole human being from hometown America, dupes him into waging war against people struggling to survive in a far-away land, and then returns him to the place of his birth, if not dead, a paraplegic, triple amputee, grievously insane or terminally diseased. To live in America since the ascendancy of the right is to live under a fumigation tent of total and permanent propaganda that covers the continent from coast to coast.

The poison is in the air when you are born. It’s in the food your parents feed you and the myths they tell you. Grown, if you never learn how to eat or think for yourself, it’s in the food you feed yourself and the myths you decide to live by. With few exceptions, it’s in every lesson teachers teach; in every sermon preachers preach. It’s in almost every product you touch and buy; almost every newspaper and magazine you read; every commercial, news and TV show you watch. It saturates the brains of almost every boss, manager, department head, politician, general, CEO, and subverts the intellect.

Education in America, since the creep of corporate ethics and influence into the public realm, consists chiefly in turning off the critical faculties of the mind and in stamping out the heart’s love for truth, equality, compassion – the very things that make a human being human. Career success, in turn, is often contingent upon how deeply one has been branded with all the logos of empire.

Every school day for thirteen years from kindergarten to twelfth grade, I had to recite, right hand over heart, the “Pledge of Allegiance” to the US flag. Thinking back on this exercise, designed to inculcate blind loyalty to a criminal ruling class, fills me with resentment against the culture that sanctioned it then and sanctions it now. The US flag no longer stands for what once it stood for (if it was ever sincere about standing for its proclaimed ideals). Though it’s but a tiny antidote against a venomous sea of propaganda, I decided to update the pledge that it might reflect more accurately what America has become and redirect my allegiance to what I feel I must be loyal to above all else: my own humanity.]

I pledge defiance
to the flag-
furled fascism
of the United States
of America,
and to all the mur-
ders for which it stands,
unconscionable,
market-driven hor-
rors under God
Incorporated
with coeval pro-
jects of internment,
misery and dis-
possession for select
peoples of the world.

little big pine
los angeles county
orion astride the late-night sky
january 2007

Little Big Pine: citizen, patriot, poet; may be reached at littlebigpine@gmail.com.