SMOKING HOPE

So now American voters have the choice between a government that will destroy the nation quickly (“You Betcha”!) or one that will perform its controlled demolition of the economy and all its remaining institutions more gradually.
It avoids the embarrassing cowboy exuberance of Dr Strangelove
and instead lays out a point by point plan
with the overflown, platitudinous language of a precocious high school Valedictorian.
measure his “success”
has been significantly lowered since the reign of little King George when his universally discredited world view outlined the necessity of killing millions in order to avoid a “bloodbath” later on.
this crackpot notion is what the nation’s hope smokers are now stuffing into their pipes
It is enough for them that the president avoids the rhetorical gaffes of his neo-con predecessors, even if his actions mirror them precisely.
Bush gave away the Imperial game plan with his inept swagger, revealing the gulag casino state at the heart of his vision

of ‘freedom’ both in the US and abroad, while Obama’s more prudent delivery of the same talking points provides a bloodless analysis of his government’s equally murderous objectives.
Little King George
dispensed with any illusion of democracy, and made no secret of his servitude to the crude ‘oiligarchs’ who greased his way to office.
Obama made his allegiances clear in his first month of office, transferring the entire contents of the treasury to his bosses at Goldman Sachs, while adopting Bush’s global strategy to keep Wall Street coffers stuffed with the spoils of war
its empty, bellicose rhetoric simply mimics the cadences (rather than the content) of a beloved slain civil rights leader.
yet just another example of the Corporate State’s ability to subvert dissident thought and action into establishment enabling PR.
The same institutions
have now appointed a youthful former community organizer to head their global operations.
In Bono’s case,
the peace activism of John Lennon

was successfully reconfigured to serve the interests of the ruling class
“The Saviour of Hope” by virtue of being an African American man with much lauded oratory skills not so subtly evokes Dr Martin Luther King Jr in the same way a carbonated beverage laden with high fructose corn syrup can be associated with sex appeal. Image trumps substance in every political PR campaign and consumers can be relied upon to put wishful thinking ahead of common sense and reason. Where MLK’s Nobel acceptance speech was unequivocal in its denunciations of using violence to bring about peace and justice, Obama by contrast, used the Oslo stage to justify colonial aggression.
The most cringe-inducing part
was his perfunctory, condescending little nod to Martin Luther King Jr and Mahatma Ghandi
he went on to drone that unlike them, ‘He’ actually “governs” and therefore must deal with “the world as it is”.
In his pre-Oslo speech
he erroneously cited Al-Qaeda as a threat to the region’s security,

It should be noted that the Taliban
does not have a global agenda, but merely a domestic one. It seeks to remove US forces from within its borders, whereas Al Qaeda is a borderless, loose knit band
throughout the Muslim world
whose threat to global security is largely dependent on our fluctuating quotas for turbaned scapegoats.
to deliberately conflate these two entirely different entities
while insisting that US security hinges upon our ability to kill anyone who stands in opposition to our Imperial aims
is an unconscionable and egregious act of cowardice, right up there with Colin Powell knowingly making the case for the invasion of Iraq with false intelligence.
Any way you look at it, military occupations are doomed to fail by their very nature
Just as there is no correct or proper way to administer slavery,
or carry out acts of rape or torture
there is no “wise” or “judicious” way of using military force for non-defensive purposes.
Taliban’
ordinary people defending themselves

defending themselves against foreign occupation of their land.
we believe that the defeat of the gangsters and warlords overseas is a necessary and just cause, while ignoring the threat posed by our own criminal class to the economic, political and social well-being of our plundered “Homeland” as rogue banking institutions (enabled by their political and military counterparts) use global financial markets as incendiary devices to destroy competition.
we seem unable to summon similar outrage as thousands of our colonized subjects are mercilessly slaughtered,
closer to home, the American middle class is similarly ‘disappeared’.
We applaud
as the Dow Jones responds positively to a “jobless recovery”.
our leaders institute socialist safety nets for Wall Street’s money hemorrhaging casinos under the banner of “Too Big to Fail”. Now that Goldman Sachs has appointed one of their own to the nation’s highest office, its well-heeled Ponzi schemers
will never have to adhere to the rules

of a so-called ‘free market’ economy, unlike the rest of us fattened, slaughter-ready serfs who have to bear the costs of rewarding corrupt financial institutions for their failures.
Wall Street’s top tier risk takers won’t have to face the consequences of their greed-motivated acts of terrorism, owing in large part to their success in having their own profiteers serve as government appointed ‘watchdogs’ and ‘regulators’ to facilitate the smooth and endless flow of public funds into corporate coffers.
We have learned too late that the president’s much vaunted “O-dacity” is just another term for his jaw dropping displays of “unmitigated gall”, whether it’s accepting a peace prize while waging war, or overseeing the fraudulent bank bailout and comparing this act of government-led larceny to FDR’s New Deal.
We are a nation of hypocrites, cheering on acts of resistance and civil disobedience overseas in one of our branded color ‘revolutions’
while remaining fearful and compliant at home,

unwilling to take on the the dirty work required to maintain a democracy
Our apathy only ensures
we are beholden to a system whereby consumers can ‘choose’ between a Mccandidate who drives a fuel inefficient clown car or one who is chauffeured in a hybrid limousine; where one party belligerently institutes corrupt, wasteful policies and the other one entrenches them further under a subverted slogan of “Change”. By justifying our knee-jerk support for the President and his misguided policies with the excuse that our dissent would only empower the clown car contingent, we have become the Kool-Aid drinking alternative to the Teabagger Party.

Jennifer Matsui is a freelance writer living in Tokyo. She can be reached at: jenmatsui@mac.com. Read other articles by Jennifer, or visit Jennifer's website.