"America Haters?" Uhh.....NO! System HATERS!

Am I an "America Hater" for posting this cartoon of a bellicose Uncle Sam on the rampage - to provide a simple caricature for the Republicans' bellicose approach to international problems? Of course not! It's the SYSTEM I detest and want to expunge, not the country!


A pervasive trope making the rounds now that Romney and the GOP has been exposed on multiple fronts as the cradle of the rich and entitled is that we who do so are "America haters" and if we don't like it we need to leave the country. "America: Love it or Leave it!"

Not so fast!

Those who spin this crap and repeat it until they actually believe it are conflating the country which we love (especially as recent genealogy research has disclosed that I am a descendant of Conrad Brumbaugh, who fought in the Revolutionary War) with a corporatocratic system that we HATE. It is this system we wish to dispense with, not the country, hence there is NO reason to "leave the country". It is OUR country, we just want the system dismantled! The System which generates so much inequality that 1 in 6 of our countrymen remain in poverty (because of all the good jobs shipped out by the vampire equity capitalists) and allows an abomination like 400 billionaires to own one eighth of the country's net worth! No way in hell could such a System be moral or worth preserving!

Perhaps the pinnacle achievement of the false consciousness creators in the media, has been to conflate the corrupt Corporatocratic 'System' and its blood brother gangster state with America, the country. This enables the power brokers to cast all critics as 'anti-American', 'anti-government', 'communist' or worse. But - as author Charles Reich notes (p. 202, 'Opposing the System') this is totally and completely false:
"The System is not America. It is not the land we love, and indeed not a land at all. It does not merit our loyalty, affection or respect. However much the System may attempt to disguise itself in patriotic trappings, or set itself up as a source of authority, or cloak itself in the vestments of 'the community', it is none of these. We should always be ready to fire the System if it does not serve us well."

And indeed we must if, as Romney recently revealed when he believed himself in a cosseted environment, it insists nearly half the country can flush themselves down the toilet.  But since those of us who caught out Romney and his enablers, it stands to reason it is our duty to stay in this country and fight to defeat him and his billionaire enablers and sycophants. Hence, it would be absurd to LEAVE the country to go anywhere else!

This introduces the question of : Who buys these absurd tracts and books on the 'Left hating America'?  (as some right bloggers do). Well, clearly those who've had their brains jacked and minds manipulated. Those who've been convinced by the corporate oligarchic media that their interests  that half the country's citizens are "terrorist loving, god denying, socialist worshipping" freaks. Thereby true discord is sown while civil society is undermined.

Sadly, those who demand we exit the country we love have no interest or sense of past history, hence cannot gauge the present against it. They are fallow and willing pawns for mental manipulation by the corporate media, because they have no extant bank of knowledge or history (divorced from corporate shaping) to which they can refer.

Meanwhile, their manipulation of consent proceeds apace, because most don't read or obtain information outside the corrupt, co-opted corporate-congealed media axis (especially FOX News). No, they just sit there and imbibe the sound bites from Rush, O'Reilly, Hannity, Glenn Beck or whorever.  Anyone who speaks outside the 1-dimensional sound bite world is pilloried. They can’t make sense of his words, and the words themselves aren’t easily translated without being violated by PR-speak.


No wonder that the opinion polls for the most part record NO authentic thoughts or opinions - but merely the regurgitated and recycled claptrap spewed out by the right-o-centric corporate media. Who, even as Romney's video mouthings were exposed as his true feelings felt it incumbent on themselves to sustain a false "objectivity" by digging up an Obama tape 14 years  old and playing it. Will these vile corporate hacks and whores ever learn? Will they ever process false equivalene?  Meanwhile, the clueless Reich extremists pat themselves on the back, believing that what they write actually embodies original thought.

TO the corrupt System, meanwhile, civil society - not characterized not by profit or wealthy mandate, but civic choice, is totally expendable. THis explains why so many of the working class remain duped that they have to hunker down from "welfare queens" and Romney's  economic totalitarianism can save the day and deliver jobs. In the form of letting 'markets' run amuck and the social, societal chips fall where they may so millions more jobs vanish.

Civil society - the mediating domain between big (and often intrusive government) and private markets is exactly what the corporate media and right wing hate-baiters seek to destroy. Destroy by their own abandonment of civil causes, and a pseudo-moralistic 'us vs. them' virulence.

It is thereby left to us, the TRUE Patriots and Lovers of Country to do the hard work: of not only fending off the Toxic System that has become a malignant cancer, but to reclaim the minds of its victims as well!