by

JANSEN ESTRUP

 

Political parties in the United States are fractured, many pundits claim beyond any glue-gun's capability to repair the system. These factions shout that many 'voices', even dissenting, are needed. Others demand that everyone else should just shut up and obey. Much of that was happening in the  proto-Soviet Union during the  1917 (100 years ago) revolution and after. It was something akin to chaos and it led to terrible violence.

 

Upon her return from Russian exile in 1934, Emma Goldman expressed dreams not so different from other immigrants - but, no doubt because of her previous life in the USA, she noted, "Far from the Constitution  playing any liberating part in the lives of the American people, it has robbed them of  the capacity to rely on their own resourses or do their own thinking.  Americans are so easily hoodwinked by the sanctity of law and authority.  In fact, the pattern of life has become  standardized, routinized, and mechanised like canned food and Sunday sermons. Even songs are turned out like buttons or automobile tires-all from the same mold."

 

Historians will remember Goldman as the most vocal American anarcist, and despite Justice Department propaganda defining anarcists as bomb throwing criminals bent upon overthrow of  the USA, the ancient Greek root of the word anarchy means simply 'without government', a concept widely touted by extreme right wingers nowadays trying to reduce our own to a size in which it might be 'drowned in a bathtub.'

 

'No government' notions have wide appeal in certain social settings, yet in most cases involve an alternative, usually religious (or other wealth and power grabbing), arrangement. Virtually every example results in one form of tyranny or another. And, they want their 'subjects' (i.e., citizens) submissive, comfortably distracted, happy and fanatically loyal. They, these anachist 'rulers', demand that our women be Tielax-like baby factories. Those familiar with Frank Herbert's Dune phenomenon will recall that the Tielax species of humanity had over many centuries used genetics to turn their women into mindless breeding bags. No Eden in this desert. The military-financial-industrial-complex has been subsumed by a more insidious uberling - the fantasy industry.

 

True anarchy requires that each individual be of such character, substance and purpose as to be 'self-governing', i.e., not in need of overseers, policemen or jailers.  Such citizens need be of such high moral, educational and civic standards as to defy  credulity. They would also not be of such desperate circumstance as to require unusual care or sustenance. Each, in other words,  would mean that all citizens be healthy, wealty and wise. No ill, poor, or crippled citizens need apply. Eugenics, again? This would truly be an idyllic land. Fanciful, of course. But we are oppressed by our fantasies, those angels, deities, saviors and ghosts we expect to redeem and empower us.

 

So we Americans are far from anarchy, there being so many layers of government around and  over us--city, county, state  and national, not to mention the hundreds of wanna-bes; commissions, religious institutions, school boards, police and fire regulators, all the way to international congresses, and corporate megalyths.  

 

We more closely lean toward chaos, a dissarray loosed upon us by the current administration, one which daily proclaims itself to know all the answers and begs us to watch while  someone, some miracle-man or woman, installs 'greatness' around, and upon us. Andrew 'Bright'bart thought of it this way - "not news, truth, facts or even opinon, but weaponized information" to be used to lull and  bludgeon Dodo America into submission and extinction.

 

And so Emma Goldman passed Ayn Rand crossing the Atlantic to and from  Russia, and in the cenutry-long aftermath  Vladimir Putin and Donald Trump stirred pots and blended potions of unearned wealth, subversion and violence into a modern Tzarist version of Caligula  - or so they seem to imagine, so righteous outwardly, so  corrupt and bloated within. 

 

Each morning some new edict arrives from the swampy Fantasyland place and invites us to howl with either laughter or derision, and eventually, should we wish to reclaim our very real nation as something other than a vast prison, out-rage and action. 

 

We, meanwhile, laud ... at least tolerate ... a leader who refuses to even read, let alone understand our founding document, the U.S. Constitution, or listen to anyone who could properly explain it to him. He does not want to know because it is about governement, about  We The People.

 

The longer we tolerate deceit, racism, corruption and  collusion with our enemies the more certain our slide into ruin - not anarchy,  but certainly the chaos lack of  leadership causes.  Once there, and renewed warfare begins, it will hardly be possible to tell the difference between the United States and Syria or Somalia or Burma or Phillipines.

 

A huge part  of our current Fantasyland mythology is having unfounded faith that it cannot happen here.  So dream on, pray on, salute that banner and sing that song while you and yours are being bled-dry and told the most incredible lies; lies intended to funnel you down the chute to alt-existence.

 

Hasn't the "American Dream" always been a fantasy - at  least for the majority  of  us? We are going to have to start seeking, finding  and demanding truth, rejecting those manufactured substitutes and diversions, blissful as they might be - or else watch ourselves disappear into that dusty remnant of history, singing and pledging as we go.