America Is Trapped In A Fever Dream And Can't Wake Up
No One Will Vote Their Way Out Of The Coming Nightmares Created By Government, Despite Promises Of Prosperity And A Clean Energy Future.
Photo by The New York Public Library on Unsplash
I’m not sure if it’s just my lack of awareness, but it seems as if, in the days leading up to the midterms of 2022, the dreamer’s voices have finally and purposefully been silenced.
The dreamers are the people that believe in humanity: that we can peacefully co-exist, that war spending is an abhorrent, parasitic drain on national wealth, that the hungry can be fed and housed, and that sick people can be healed.
Tragically, the literal antithesis of our current economic and political climate.
Martin Luther King was likely a dreamer until his last breath.
It’s remarkable, and a rare profile in courage, that King was able to deflect the adversity of the world, amplified by powerful people in the government and media, and turn the hate and physical violence thrust at him and the leaders in his Southern Christian Leadership Conference into an unprecedented, active movement of spiritual awareness and human empathy.
In the “Long Hot Summer of1967” I was visiting my grandparents on my family’s annual vacation when I got very sick due to what was subsequently found to be a kidney infection. I have vivid memories of laying on a chaise lounge converted to a bed, watching the televised, schizophrenic contrast between an idealized version of American culture on TV programs and sitcoms, and the real-life turbulent events of that Summer, all through the haze of a high fever that wouldn’t break.
I was finally hospitalized after the fever induced a vivid hallucination of a large, hawk-like bird that was eyeing me from its perch on an open window above the transom at my grandparents’ house. I fended off an imagined attack as it flew aggressively towards me, talons first, screaming for help and awakening my family in the middle of the night.
Dr. King was, in months prior, and through that Summer, dealing with his own nightmare:
“In December 1966, testifying before a congressional subcommittee on budget priorities, King argued for a “rebalancing” of fiscal priorities away from America’s “obsession” with Vietnam and toward greater support for anti-poverty programs at home (Semple, “Dr. King Scores Poverty”). King led his first anti-war march in Chicago on 25 March 1967, and reinforced the connection between war abroad and injustice at home: “The bombs in Vietnam explode at home—they destroy the dream and possibility for a decent America” (“Dr. King Leads Chicago”). A few days later, King made it clear that his peace work was not undertaken as the leader of the SCLC, but “as an individual, as a clergyman, as one who is greatly concerned about peace” (“Dr. King to Weigh Civil Disobedience”).
Although the peace community lauded King’s willingness to take a public stand against the war in Vietnam, many within the civil rights movement further distanced themselves from his stance. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, for example, issued a statement against merging the civil rights and peace movements. Undeterred, King, Spock, and Harry Belafonte led 10,000 demonstrators on an anti-war march to the United Nations on 15 April 1967.
During the last year of his life, King worked with Spock to develop “Vietnam Summer,” a volunteer project to increase grassroots peace activism in time for the 1968 elections. King linked his anti-war and civil rights work in speeches throughout the country, where he described the three problems he saw plaguing the nation: racism, poverty, and the war in Vietnam. In his last Sunday sermon, delivered at the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C., on 31 March 1968, King said that he was “convinced that [Vietnam] is one of the most unjust wars that has ever been fought in the history of the world” (King, “Remaining Awake,” 219). Nearly five years after King’s assassination, American troops withdrew from Vietnam and a peace treaty declared South and North Vietnam independent of each other.
Over 50 years later, America, stumbling towards disaster in a hallucinatory fever dream, is repeating a chapter of its troubled history by encouraging a nightmare that I suppose King would not have imagined in his darkest hour.
The beginning of World War Three is all but assured, our fate sealed in this self-destructive endeavor years ago. Just as King’s movement started to become fractured towards the end of his life, and the strength of its purpose dissolved, so it is in November of 2022.
It should be noted that despite Martin Luther King’s strength of character and unwavering moral conviction that war abroad meant suffering at home, he was, astoundingly, somewhat compromised by critics within his own organization and other outlier groups with similar goals. They wanted him to toe the line and thought his anti-war stance was undermining progress made through Civil Rights legislation on the domestic front.
President Lyndon Johnson and King, unlikely partners, had fought hard-core segregationists within federal and state governments to craft the basic components of civil rights legislation. It was major social progress.
Fast forward, and here we are, trapped again in the false hope and temporary euphoria of election year “salvation” in November 2022.
We have no one of Dr. King’s moral caliber speaking out, or guiding us to rise above and be better. Instead, we endure election-year lectures from vile and corrupted politicians about “saving democracy” allegedly being subverted by internal “fascists,” while we literally finance, to the tune of billions of dollars, the very fascists we’re supposed to collectively abhor. It’s a purposeful campaign of ignorance, confusion, and distraction.
“Disputing the existence of Nazis and fascists in Ukraine serves the purpose of constructing a twisted but simplistic narrative loosely based on WWII: Putin is an evil, Hitler-like figure intent on attacking the freedom-loving Ukrainian government and its innocent supporters. The goal of such a narrative is to foster blind and unquestioning support for the Zelenskyy government, NATO and the imperialist Western powers. A “humanitarian” war, meaning a brutal NATO intervention that would likely spark WWIII, is thereby presented as a viable option. In this context, any attempt to provide a sober and concrete analysis of the actual history of Nazism in the region runs the risk of being disingenuously labeled and dismissed as “pro-Putin” because it does not support this war-mongering narrative.”
The transformation of the corporate media into unabashed war propagandists, eliminating context and quashing debate, a trend that has been ongoing since at least the Reagan era, perfected during Bush’s Iraq war, is still shocking to see for its cumulative effect. The moral rot and abandonment of actual journalism continue with no peak point in sight.
In my youth, one of the three major networks, CBS, left an indelible impression as journalists Morley Safer and Walter Cronkite pushed back against the Johnson administration, questioning the purpose and validity of American involvement in Vietnam. CBS, as a corporate entity, was likely compelled to do its duty to the public, a public that was sending their sons and daughters to war as sacrificial cannon fodder. At the very least, there was still a semblance of the fourth estate standing for the rights of the public to be informed of what was actually happening.
Today, CBS “news” and information programs have devolved to become little more than slickly produced infomercials and sales presentations for the Military Industrial Complex. The proxy war in Ukraine is now, alarmingly, at a point where it could devolve into the nuclear annihilation of the planet. “Reporters” who have abandoned all pretense of objectivity, again embed themselves with the military like PR spokespeople, effectively becoming a cog in the machine. It’s all at once horrifying and ludicrous.
Grown adults tap into their inner child, the child that loved to play Army and war without consequences. You will not see a single mention of the existential crisis that could be generated by this action: the final global war and potential nuclear annihilation. The almost gleeful and excited attitude on the part of the reporter in the video below stands in stark contrast to the serious tones of his colleague Morely Safer 50 years prior. In that report, there was no excitement, but a serious consideration of the immorality of war.
Adding to the confusion, of course, are the impossible promises made by corrupt politicians who have either thrown in with the Military Industrial Complex to prolong their careers (or what is left of them) or, like Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, are now so cynical they mock the public voices for exercising their right to hold them to account.
What happened to the moral compass of America?
Specifically, I’m thinking about the populist energy that Bernie Sanders revived. Sanders, despite his failures in two Presidential campaigns, tapped into an undeniable desire from the average working-class American to build a better society: cleaner air, drinkable water, fair pay, the right to housing, food, and medical care, and an end to obscene amounts of war spending. This was true hope, not the phony hype generated by neoliberal centrists in the Democratic party like Joe Biden and Barack Obama, who actually was a loyal servant of corporations and an undeniable proponent of war.
“On January 23, 2009, just three days into his presidency, President Obama authorized his first kinetic military action: two drone strikes, three hours apart, in Waziristan, Pakistan, that killed as many as twenty civilians. Two terms and 540 strikes later, Obama leaves the White House after having vastly expanding and normalizing the use of armed drones for counterterrorism and close air support operations in non-battlefield settings—namely Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia.
”Normalizing,” in the new propagandistic context of the Orwellian language of government in perpetuating war, most certainly has nothing to do with a psychologically healthy “normal.”
Sadly, Sanders has tossed his morals aside and purposefully censored his own progressive voice, along with the remaining few “progressive” members of Congress. It would have been hard to imagine Bernie Sanders in 2016 or 2020 voting for billions to perpetuate global war, but the world as we knew it no longer exists, and no one is rising up to fill the void. Why does it no longer matter to them?
The current promises touted by the Democrats of a better world, arguably believable in the populist campaign by Bernie Sanders circa 2016 and 2020, are nothing more now than empty platitudes and false hope.
What sane, rational person could buy into a vision of an America that can simultaneously engage in the final global war, puffing out its chest in defiance of nuclear superpowers, taking on Russia, China, and Iran, bleeding off billions in national wealth and treasure, and remain prosperous domestically? Global war, even without a nuclear element, will leave no one unscathed at home or abroad.
A “clean energy future” and global war are as antithetical as oil and water, they can’t, and won’t, co-exist in practical reality, EVER.
That’s not just my subjective opinion, it’s based on science, mathematics, and complex systems theory. Chris Martenson is an example of a rare intellectual voice that understands the natural and man-made world as a series of interconnected, complex systems. There is no politician with the intellectual capacity to understand that damage or actions within one man-made system (energy, monetary) will result in the catastrophic failure of all systems. Like the human body, a collapse of one system ensures the collapse of other, interdependent systems and eventually, the entire host.
To be specific, a clean energy future, free of oil dependence, is a myth at best and a lie at worst.
The problem is that all the “Clean Energy” devices, specifically, Solar Panels, Windmills, ALL of it, will require an unprecedented extraction of precious elements and minerals to manufacture them, which is impossible, due to the fact that this will also require massive amounts of oil to extract them. It would take, at 2019 mining rates, Four BILLION tons of copper alone. Time-wise, it would take ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY-NINE YEARS to mine enough copper to actualize the “clean energy future”. So, as Taggart notes, do we use the oil to mine copper, conduct wars, or feed people through farming?
The starvation/austerity option is one that the US and NATO allied governments seem to be happily on board with.
Peak oil is here, now. It’s the real reason for American and NATO hegemony. All western military alliances are no more than enforcers for big oil and corporations, despite the myths of them as liberators and saviors of democratic ideals. It has no basis in reality. Taggart does an excellent job explaining it all and I highly recommend taking the time to watch this informative video.
Speaking of the lack of a moral compass, History, if anyone in the future is left to document it, will likely record the failure of the US and Western governments to deal with the spread of COVID as a key action that led to the collapse of empire.
Deaths and hospitalizations may have declined, but it’s actually impossible to know the real statistics, due to the CDC under the Biden administration purposefully cutting off data. The “solution” of multiple vaccines and boosters as the most effective “tool” belies the fact that none of the vaccines currently available stops transmission, yet, for appearance's sake, forcing normal also requires that any further mitigation be dropped. No one seeing another person wearing a mask can forget, as Biden insists, that “COVID is over”.
The long-term effects of COVID are now well documented, the most alarming of which is the destruction of the vital tissues, organs, and systems of the human body. This has resulted in an unprecedented number of people suffering a long-term debilitating illness, most of them still unacknowledged, and a spike in deaths amongst the very young and healthy.
The effects of failures of systems that maintain health in the human body also have effects on the man-made systems of the economy, currently in a downward spiral. The pretense that these effects are unrelated to COVID is morally reprehensible, but a compliant media, CDC, and a purposeful failure by the government to protect and inform the public have, like the new attitudes towards war, ”normalized” excess death. This can’t be without intent and purpose.
Probably the most alarming aspect of all these current events is the complete lack of awareness that the human species has as it faces extinction at the hands of a malevolent group of people, hiding behind cloaks of “respectability” and “rules-based international orders.”
The only thing that matters now, above anything else, is stopping the potential for nuclear war, insisting on peace, or at least diplomacy, and rerouting wealth, as Martin Luther King knew, away from the Military Industrial Complex.
All the people that are sleepwalking through this bad fever dream may be in for a rude awakening, sooner rather than later. Time has run out.
Stay safe, be kind and reach out to your neighbor.
Update :10/25/22: Relevant, breaking story on the Dem’s “progressive” caucus, led by Rashia Talib, sending Biden a letter, simply asking Biden to consider diplomacy and negotiations (not stop weapons or money being sent to Ukraine) as an option. The request was immediately refused. There is only one party, and that’s the war party, one war, and that’s class war.