The Age of Incompetence Chapter XXIX

Why John D. in Idaho can´t be heard in Washington
January 31, 2010

Rockwell´s version of John D. (1941)

Once again I am inspired by reading what some unknown American sent via their computer to The New York Times. Several days ago I read the following from a man called John D. someplace in Idaho. "What I don't understand is why most of your colleagues in the corporate media seem pathologically unable to understand what we mere vassals of the fiefdom are thinking and feeling..."

But John D. has a computer and in our age that allows him to connect to the world. So I can hear his voice here in the middle of Europe, but John D. wants to know why no one in his own government in Washington, D.C. can hear his voice? And he asked, is it pathologic?

That seemed to me the key to John D's cry in the wilderness for it must seem to millions of Americans that those who represent them and draw their paycheck from citizens like John D. are completely deaf and dumb when it comes to hearing their voice.

Patholgical suggests something organic has become diseased and dead at the cellular level. We all know if our nerve center, our brain, doesn't function properly, such as when one has MS, the extremities don't work right. John D. lives in an extremity called Idaho far from the nerve center called Washington, D.C. Not many years ago that distance marginalized persons like John D. but in the computer age that isn't true. If the nation's nerve center was healthy it could hear John D.'s voice and respond.

But our national nerve center, Wash. D.C. is not healthy, it's diseased and dead. It seems to me we've had a case of something like MS for a very long time.. It's not unlike the dashboard in your car. There's a reason the oil, water, and gas gages are hooked to a red light. If they get too low and you ignore them something bad is going to happen. You can even destroy an engine.

So the red lights on our car dashboards have been blinking for a very long time, decades in fact, and too many Americans ignored them. Now we've burned up an engine and it can't be restored with some cosmetic changes. It has to be jerked out and replaced. No tinkering with the valves or replacing the piston rings. It's shot.

When people start believing the dead will come back to life it's a form of necrophilia, which is a mental illness. Yes, it's a painful thing, even heart breaking, to see someone dear hooked up to a machine in a hospital and the machine shows a flat line from the brain. After a respectful wait we have to give up the dead and move on to the living or risk destroying even the living.

That's where we're at today. Barack Obama caused hearts to flutter by claiming he could revive the dead. That was his main appeal. It was a mantra in his campaigne speeches and once again in his Inauguration Address. "The challenges we face are real. They are serious and they are many. They will not be met easily or in a short span of time. But know this America - they will be met...The question we ask today is not whether our government is too big or too small, but whether it works...Where the answer is no, programs will end. And those of us who manage the public's dollars will be held to account - and do our business in the light of day - because only then can we restore the vital trust between a people and their government."

Nice words. But the words do not match the actions. Afghanistan is a sink hole in a narco state. Earmarks went on, that secret way politicians have to sneak pork spending for their district or state into a bill - with Obama's blessing. There was his secret deal with the pharmaceutical industry that gutted any chance for a health care bill to hold down spiriling costs. There is the continued bloat in the military-industrial complex's budget that drives the deficit ever higher. There was the obscene bailout of the banking industry where the public got nothing in return except the bill.

Those in Washington cannot hear or choose not to hear those like John D. in Idaho because money infecting the political system causes a pathological breakdown of the nervous system. It's well known that those who snort cocaine long enough lose the sense of smell because the drug destroys the nerves. We have a government addicted to money from lobbyists and corporations and they have lost their sense of hearing. In short we have a government of addicts. Year by year they need a bigger and bigger hit to keep going.

John D. might as well live on the moon. Except when election time rolls around they get some poor stiff from the fiefdom and parade him around like a poodle on a leash and claim they are working for him.

This style of living is what Alexander Solzhenitsyn once wrote, "It works as a petrified armor around people's minds." Solzhenitsyn was making a speech at Harvard in 1978 when he spoke those words and he was trying to explain to his audience the cause of moral breakdown in a society, mainly the communist system which he was imprisoned in, but also within the West. I took them out of context but they deserve full force. "I have received letters in America," he explained, "from highly intelligent persons, maybe a teacher in a faraway small college who could do much for the renewal and salvation of his country, but his country cannot hear him because the media are not interested in him. This gives birth to mass prejudice, to blindness...It works as a sort of petrified armor around people's minds. Human voices from 17 countries of Eastern Europe and Eastern Asia cannot pierce it. It will be broken only by the pitiless crowbar of events."

Barack Obama needs to hear Solzhenitsyn's words because he has become one of those elites who can't hear the voices of suffering Americans, as if he has petrified armor around his mind. But the pitiless crowbar of events which ultimately overtook Eastern Europe, will ultimately overtake the blind here as well. It's only a question of which side you will be on.

That particular day the internet carried hundreds of e-mail messages like that of John D.'s. Proxxy from Seattle: "The Democrats are corrupt and incompetent. The Republicans are corrupt and crazy." Revolted in Brooklyn: "I do not listen to Obama's speeches anymore. They make me angry. They are meaningless and empty." A.T. address unknown: "I am still in utter free fall from what has transpired this past year. I used to look forward to Obama's speeches, now I can't even bring myself to watch his State of the Union." Josam in Indiana: "Is it 2021 yet? Wake me up in 2012. No I won't be watching Wednesday night."

And so it goes. It could be true that it was George W. Bush who pushed the system over the edge. His assuming power through a fiat of a five to four split of the Supreme Court might have been the final straw. The nation by the time Obama arrived was in a hospital bed hooked up to the monitor but it revealed a flat line. The nerve center was shot and dead.

So like it or not America will have to re-invent itself. The longer it tries to keep bringing the dead back to life the more time and money will be wasted. A completely new political party has to arise out of the ashes. Both Republican and Democratic parties are dead. Only those with advanced necrophilia cannot see it.