Struck by Silence

Returning to the United States in an election year, I am struck by the silence. I have covered four presidential campaigns, starting with 1968; I was with Robert Kennedy when he was shot and I saw his assassin, preparing to kill him. It was a baptism in the American way, along with the salivating violence of the Chicago police at the Democratic Party’s rigged convention.  The great counter revolution had begun.--JP

It is always nice to see Pilger's work appear at CP.  Few writers tell the tale of oppression as well, with such succinct clarity and pointed notice of fact over opinion.

Some lament his reckless "ideology," which appears to be a word on the rise among happy-go-lucky Americans who can't  distinguish between policy and a hayride.

As a descriptive word, "ideologue" now shines with the same modern abstraction as "liberal" and "conservative."  What do these words even mean anymore?

Have any three other words in the U.S. political lexicon lost their value so completely and thoroughly over time?  The further one probes into any issue not sanctioned by U.S. politicians and their huckster Post and Times media appendages, the less meaning these imprisoned words have, until they too are thrown down as dry cliches that cannot be made to breathe.

Have any other words, now formally skewed and embraced by economic elites, ever been so abused and misused by our body politic?

In the community where I live, a glance at the local newspaper's metro and national pages can cause the reader a headache. An utter neofascism (a truer word for where we are) is creeping into the daily comments there, and its abundance now is nearly overwhelming.

If all politics is local, where does that leave the rest of the nation?   Here, there and everywhere, you might say, a result of what used to be called the dumbing down process, but which is now the ordinary output of mindlessness.  The anti--intellectuals have won.

In a kind of quicksand of logical fallacies, the nation's political business--and that is what it is, business, not democracy--plays out like a bad TV loop that can't be erased.

Pilger places the genesis of the U.S. counterrevolution with the 1968 assassinations of King and Kennedy, and that year's chaotic Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

It goes farther back of course, with the killing of JFK, but in reality it started before the ink was dry on the U.S. Constitution.

It's been there all along in other words, a part of history too many choose to ignore.

Have an appropriate Memorial Day, all.


TS