PSYCHICBABBLE^SM

     Introduction

     Greetings loyal readers! These days just reading the headlines is chilling, especially since the power structure is unfolding its mad plan, just as predicted. This month's column examines some of this madness.

     Are They Reading My Dreams?

     Last fall I wrote a song called "Capitalism Is War." This song contains the following verse:

Bombing Afghanistan is about oil
Drugs and gun-running, slave labor toil.
And when you're through you'll do Pakistan next
India, Bangladesh all to annex
With your war on the poor
What's it really for?
Capitalism, capitalism is war.

General Suggests Extending U.S. Campaign to Afghan Neighbors
http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/08.27C.franks.extend.htm

     There may be much to demonize Sadaam for, but from a feminist perspective there is also much to praise him for. Iraq is the only Arab nation where women can go to college, where they can wear whatever they like and pursue a career of their own choosing. Contrast this with some of our allies in that region, such as Saudia Arabia and Kuwait, where women are legally chattel and can neither drive nor vote, much less go to college and obtain careers. And let's not forget that Saudi and Kuwaiti women must be covered in cloth from head to toe, lest they be raped by their sexually-repressed countrymen. Which do you think is better, a place where women have civil and intellectual freedom, or a place where women are totally subjugated, repressed and controlled?

     Meanwhile, a person would have to be completely brainwashed and/or brain dead not to notice that the Bush "war on terrorism" is nothing more than a pretext to get control of the entire world's oil supply on behalf of the Bush family and their cronies in massive criminal enterprises. The current corporate scandals roiling the media ALL lead back to the Bush Administration – but you're not going to see that in the mainstream media that serves these criminal enterprises.

     Speaking of criminal enterprises, doesn't Martha Stewart make a great scapegoat? After all, she's a woman and the massive criminal enterprise running the planet is distinctly patriarchal. It's almost enough to make one forget Harken Oil! It is, however, comforting to note that the Bush gang has eliminated the "glass ceiling" in their choice of sacrificial lamb. Ah, the levels that women can rise to in this administration! By using the word "scapegoat" here I am not meaning to suggest that Martha Stewart is somehow innocent of wrongdoing or that she doesn't deserve a cozy prison cell. Far from it – Martha Stewart is a former stockbroker. She knew full well that what she was doing was illegal insider trading. (Whether she knew it was morally wrong is subject to debate, as she does not appear to possess any actual morals.) In fact, Martha is a classic example of someone who is pathologically greedy. After all, if she had held her stock until after Imclone's public announcement (that the government had failed to approve Imclone's cancer drug for market), her losses would have been about $45,000. While this number sounds large to the average working person, it is peanuts to a person worth hundreds of millions of dollars, as Martha Stewart is.

     The fact is, however, that Martha Stewart's larceny and insider corruption is no different from former Enron-exec and current Army Secretary White, former Halliburton CEO and current VP Dick Cheney, former Harken Oil director "Dubya" or their numerous illicit corporate and mafia cronies. The difference is that the rich and powerful periodically sacrifice one of their own to appease public anger, then go right back to doing what they've always done. History has demonstrated this time and time again. For example, some readers may be old enough to recall the "payola" scandals involving the recording industry and commercial music radio stations back in the 1950s and early 1960s. Some people were busted and went to jail. However, payola is as widespread today as ever. Record companies bribe radio stations to play their music. The more a song is played on the radio, the more people buy it and the higher it rises in the charts. The music business has not changed at all from that standpoint, yet many people think that because publicity about the scandals has ceased that therefore the illegal activity has been eradicated. It hasn't.

     For a good laugh (and a good cry), take a look at http://www.dubyaspeak.com. This hilarious site documents and editorializes the President Select's mangling of the language, while sending common sense and clear thinking into a collision course with the nearest star. While the Fool in Chief rambles on about freedom, his attorney general John Ashcroft (who, in his last re-election campaign for the US Senate lost to a corpse), continues his crusade to shred the U.S. Constitution, lock up all clear-thinking people and pave the way for total fascism in this land of the depraved and home of debris. He seems to be succeeding, as this chilling Truthout headline suggests:

More Than 6 Million People Behind Bars or on Probation or Parole
http://www.truthout.org/docs_02/08.27.6M.in.jail.htm

     Countless school districts throughout this allegedly great nation of ours lack textbooks, classroom space, art and music facilities, sports programs and teachers while the federal and numerous state governments seem to have endless funds with which to build and staff police stations, courtrooms, prisons and jails to incarcerate uneducated and undereducated members of our populace who cannot find decent jobs or who are driven insane with envy by their inability to afford the luxuries whose images are constantly thrown in their face through ubiquitous advertising. Why is it that we live in a society that values competition, physical appearance, material wealth and consumption far more than cooperation, content, spirituality and community? Why are schoolchildren given awards for academic and physical achievement, but not for compassion, sensitivity and generosity?

     For a good send-up of our superficial, money and image-driven society, go see the movie "Simone." This movie renders a scathing critique of Hollywood, while at the same time reinforcing all of the racist stereotypes that the vast majority of Hollywood television shows and movies engage in. First of all, there are hardly any people of color in the movie. The few black women who appear in the movie are light-skinned, and the film's "heroine" is a platinum blonde – another reinforcement of extreme whiteness as the dominant image of beauty and the reigning cultural aesthetic. Despite the overt (and covert) racist messages, this film is nonetheless a brilliant piece of social criticism highlighting the superficiality and emptiness of our modern corporate consumerist superficial Hollywood entertainment culture.

     Is There Any Good News?

     The most frequent critique I get from my peer reviewers is that sometimes these columns are too depressing, so this month I would like to counteract the recitation of negative truths with a note of encouragement. Pluto went direct in September. Pluto is the planet of transformation, restructuring, reorganization and rebirth. Transformative energies that were held in check during Pluto's retrograde cycle are now free to move forward and find their equilibrium. As our greed and destruction obsessed leaders sound the drumbeat towards war with Iraq (while lying about the existence of justifying evidence which they will never produce because it doesn't exist) expect the voices of the antiwar movement to speak ever louder, grow ever stronger and take to the street in ever-growing numbers. Change is possible, so keep hope alive!

Copyright 2002 Marcy J. Gordon. All rights reserved. The author wants you to know you are free to copy and distribute this article for noncommercial purposes, provided you reproduce it in its entirety and credit the author. For quotation permission, please contact the author at mgordon@pipeline.com.

      In addition, the author wishes to thank those peer reviewers who responded with comments and suggestions for this article. Extra special thanks this month to Dan Utevsky.