Harper Lee's Passing: A Legend Dies, But Not Sa Raison d'Etre - Part 3

Harper Lee's Passing: A Legend Dies, But Not Sa Raison d'Etre - Part 3
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My last blog Harper Lee's Passing: A Legend Dies, But Not Sa Raison d'Etre - Part 2, shows how racial profiling, discrimination and oppression of, not only the black man, but of all minorities in America, is crushing the country, and world, economically, socially and spiritually.

However, any analysis of the Failed War on Drugs, and its effects on societies, would be sorely remise without an analysis on the Failed War on Terror, and how, once again, the American public (and even the world) is being manipulated by the failure of mainstream media to cover this issue with objectivity and transparency. As Susan Faludi explains in The Terror Dream: Fears and Fantasy in Post-9/11 America,

By mid-2007, long after the nation had passed the five-year-anniversary mark of the attacks, we were still sleepwalking. Virtually no film, television drama, play, or novel on 9/11 had begun to plumb what the trauma meant for our national psyche... In other words, [mainstream media] did precisely what it was meant to do, and what other American cultural presentation of 9/11 have done before and since: replicate, not delve.

We explained our failure to probe the same way that the Bush administration explained its failure to protect us: the attack was "unimaginable." Nothing like this had ever happened before, so we didn't know how to assimilate the experience... Most of all, no official moral leadership emerged to challenge Americans to think constructively about our place in the world, to redefine civic commitment and public responsibility. There was no man in a wheel-chair in the White House urging on us a reassessment of American strengths and weakness. What we had was a chest beater in a borrowed flight suit, instructing us to max out our credit cards for the cause.

Allusions to Pearl Harbor provided no traction, and we soon turned our attention to another chapter in U.S. history--the 1950s Cold War...

Justin A. Frank, M.D. in his book, Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President, provides further insight into how and why the American society, and societies in general, embraced a clearly dysfunctional socio-political situation much in the way family members of an alcoholic (or any dysfunctional Ruling parent/partner) walks on eggshells; doing everything in their power to avoid challenging the illegitimacy of the ruler, as well as their complicity in his "rule" and dysfunctional personality disorder, by their silence and apathy. The object of each member becomes conflict avoidance, as well as crisis management, of anyone with enough emotional intelligence and wear-with-all to try and hold the whole mess together.

(Now if this sounds like the present state of affairs in your country, home, or work-place, please "like" this blog.)

And, I continue to quote Dr. Frank,

The most common reaction is to walk on eggshells around the alcoholic... Family members become paralyzed, unable to confront his weakened power for fear of exposing its illegitimacy...

...motivated by fear--of being attacked or abandoned by the drinker--the family enables the perpetuation of the disease, whether it is expressed as active alcoholism or untreated abstinence; rather than upset an unhealthy power structure, they sustain it with their denial and collusion...

Like the alcoholic father who is threatened by the independence of his family members, Bush demands absolute loyalty and conformity, trying to freeze his national family in time--preferably a time before gays demanded their right to marry and women their right to abortion...

The behavior of a healthy family is patterned and predictable, committed to preserving its stability even in the face of dramatic change; any problems are solved using self-correcting behaviors and simple regulatory strategies. Similarly, our nation has been able to maintain its stability amidst so many changes and pressures due in large part to the rule of law, the force of the Constitution, and the power of tradition. In alcoholic families, in which uncertainty isn't tolerated and each threat is treated as a crisis, regulation is compromised and law becomes expendable; overreacting to minor challenges, the alcoholic head of household imposes his need for regulatory behavior onto his family. The alcoholic father is threatened more by dangers he perceives within the family than those outside, because he relies on the internal support to guard his status quo from any external menace. One way that alcoholic families accomplish both ends is to unite against a common enemy, setting aside internal divisions to focus on the peril out-side. Thus, the president enjoyed high approval rating surrounding the invasion of Iraq--until mounting evidence that the war was launched under false pretenses and was bringing a financial windfall to the vice president's former employer made it harder for the nation to keep ignoring its problems at home.

If we are a nation of enablers, allowing our president's untreated alcoholism to shape the national agenda, then special notice must be reserved for the news media. The most delicate eggshells of all have been those walked on by the members of the press. Throughout Bush's first term, the news media have followed a "don't ask, don't ask" policy, treading carefully and lightly around Bush's alcoholism--as evinced by their handling of the DUI revelation--and avoiding any tough question that might sound like a confrontation. Whether they fear that pressing too hard might send him off on a bender, provoke a tantrum, or simply get them excommunicated from further access, the nation's press has maintained a distance similar to what a child would accord an alcoholic father whom direct question might push over the edge into collapse or retaliation. Whatever its impetus, their silence rings loudest and clearest of all, like the stubborn denial of the family's most outspoken child; it doesn't prevent anyone else from speaking up, but it doesn't encourage it either.

The failure of mainstream media to cover the REAL issues, and instead distribute nothing, but lies and propaganda to the American people, is once again exposed by someone with enough emotional intelligence to "see" what is happening right under his proverbial nose.

However, as seen tomorrow in Harper Lee's Passing: A Legend Dies, But Not Sa Raison d'Etre - Part 4, the Bush/Cheney camp were not alone in manipulating the American press and people in their warmongering ways, for the simple reason that leurs raison d'etre knows no political divide or ideology other than that of violence, hate, and corruption.

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