Waterworld: What'll Go Down the Drain? - Page 2

Let’s face it, we’ve got attention spans so short that collectively speaking, the national consciousness is a lot like that of the main character in Memento, who: “lives in the present tense. Unable to create new memories after suffering a head injury, he's left with fading images of his life before that point in time, and scrambles to make sense of events as they happen to him, moment by moment. Because he can't keep an idea in his head for more than a couple of minutes, Leonard writes notes … in hopes that when he looks at them, he'll know what he was telling himself. Trouble is, he tends not to remember what all these notes mean.”

This country has suffered a flurry of head injuries. 9/11 was a head injury, but Bush was already in office. I can see considering Election 2000 as a head injury, but that felt more like a blow below the belt. Besides, were things really so different before Bush landed in the White House? On the surface yes, but dig even a little bit deeper, and it’s not like Al-Queda only began playa hatin’ us in 2000. It’s not within the past five years only that minorities in this country have felt disenfranchised too.

I think we might be punch drunk from the assassinations of Medgar Evers, the Kennedy Brothers, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X right on through the trial and ridiculous verdict of O. J. Simpson; Watergate was one smack down, the events leading to the Star report was another. The imprisionment of Mumia and Leonard. Waco and Oklahoma City. The Patriot Act.

It’s been blow after blow for a really long time, and that’s just stuff we’ve delivered unto ourselves, though there are those who claim that Pearl Harbor and 9/11 were self-inflicted too. What better way to buy national buy-in and distraction than to take a near knock-out punch on the chin every now and then. Americans are infamously easy to rally once everyone’s on the same page, even if some people, like the Japs, Indians, or niggers have to be herded into internment camps, reservations, housing projects or jails, respectively. Or ignored altogether, like the 9/11 families or the Cindy Sheehans.

Article Author: mpho

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