[Newspoetry] rant of the day -- a security state is a penal colony

[DL Emerick]

News spins on new pens leading to penurious injuries.

 

http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/032907T.shtml

 

The story of America today is written in penal codes.

 

This is the idea that somehow we can have an ideal world if we can just round up
and lock away all the bad guys that we don't manage to kill during hostile
operations.

 

In this transmogrification, the word ideal has been downgraded to "safe".

 

The old isolationist complex, rooting in xenophobia, in the antique term
FORTRESS AMERICA, has found new outlets and deadening impulses, in all sorts of
authoritarian drives in the United States - all reflectively of the stern father
complex outlined by Geo. Lakoff, in his elephant books.

 

Of course, this exposes (or hides, depending on your point of view) the extent
to which the GoP has a partner the wealthy crime lords of the United States, the
mobster element.  Criminalization of anything makes control of the police and
the courts an important part of the mob's protection racket, by which market
competition, for all the stuff that is made illegal (criminalized).  In this
racket the police/courts function as the mob's unwitting allies (usually
unwitting, anyway: they just think they are doing the job assigned them, not
asking questions about the effects of the assignments).  The pens serve as the
criminal equivalent of universities - and the people who go there learn the arts
of social networking and the crafts of their "service" to society.

 

The world daily becomes less safe.

 

Republicans used to say "You can't solve social problems [merely] by throwing
money at the problem."  But, strangely, you never hear them say this when it
comes to Iraq war spending or "homeland security".

 

You just can't protect 80,000 targets, of all sizes - nor even large targets -
the way we are doing things here today.  You just can't, that is, unless you
turn the nation into more of a police state than it has already so rapidly been
approaching, in so many recent years.

 

Think of the millions officially in prisons in the US, today!  Think of how that
microcosm matches the entire society, under the guise of homeland security's
vaunted power to ignore altogether all the freedoms and the rights that were so
violently long ago established against the will of tyrants and despots.

 

Oh, this is just a rant - overblown, if you are part of the
straight-and-narrow-minded right wing crowd - for they have internalized,
sociologically, all of the cultural rules imposed upon a prisoner.  They are
free to live small undistinguished, quiet and quite pathetic lives, behaving
like small cogs in a giant machine.  And, as the movie SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION
reminds us, so vividly, "once you've been institutionalized long enough, you
can't imagine life as a free man anymore."

 

The codeword for proper conduct in the authoritarian society is OBEDIENCE in
conduct - following "orders" without ever questioning or disputing them.  Of
course, this is just what happens when law is held to be merely the will of the
majority, and subject to no other higher constraint than that of politics.  When
the standard is set so low, tyranny reigns.

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