Jason Miller: 'An evolution that would blow Darwin's mind'

Of Moral Regression, Heartland Extremism, and Solidarity against the Wicked
Witch

Jason Miller

Forget the exploits of John Brown and Carrie Nation. Their violent efforts
for virtuous causes are but distant memories in the Land of Oz. Here in
contemporary Kansas, many socially conservative uber-patriots fastidiously
and "peacefully" adhere to an American sociopolitical system which is
becoming increasingly hostile to science, peace, human rights, the
environment, and minorities. Yes, the "American Way" has become rife with
many of the truly vulgar and destructive aspects of humanity.

Since 1998, pro-Evolutionary forces have been grappling with
anti-Evolutionary forces for control of the Kansas State School Board. In
the recent election, power changed hands for the fourth time in eight years
as Darwinists reclaimed a 6-4 advantage on the board. It is virtually a
foregone conclusion that the board will again re-write the science standards
to restore Evolution to its proper stature. Thankfully, reason will again
prevail in science classes from Overland Park to Dodge City.

Those of us who believe in the validity of scientific inquiry, draw a
distinction between faith and science, and recognize the dangers of
state-validated religion are celebrating the progress manifested in the
election results.

Yet as I pondered the situation more deeply, I realized that Evolution
represents but a minor skirmish in a much broader conflict. And at the same
time, reflecting on the notions of evolution and change conjured thoughts of
how, in many ways, the United States has followed a plummeting moral
trajectory as it has evolved over the years.

While it is reassuring to know that our Kansas public school children will
learn one of the most widely held and accepted theories in the biological
sciences (and at least for now, their spiritual education will be left to
their parents and clergy), there are much larger stakes to consider.
Stepping back and examining human existence from a global perspective
reveals countless disturbing images of unmitigated suffering thrust upon a
majority of the Earth's inhabitants.

Ohio, Georgia, and Pennsylvania are still struggling to inject religion into
their science classes under the clever guise of the "theory" of Intelligent
Design. Recent legislative initiatives, amendments to state constitutions,
and actions by a variety of activist groups (like the Minutemen) clearly
demonstrate that many of the Western European immigrants to Turtle Island
still suffer the spiritual diseases of homophobia, xenophobia, hubris, and
racism.

Preying upon these spiritual maladies, the opportunists in DC and on Wall
Street (who reside at the peak of the capitalist pyramid) blitz us with
propaganda readily disseminated by their partners in the corporate media to
fuel "culture wars". Like a blacksmith with bellows, they super heat raw
emotion to a white hot state that leaves human reason in cinders.

As we wage slaves run the rat race, fighting over the scraps so "charitably"
tossed our way in America's "ownership society", we claw each others' eyes
out over issues like Evolution, homosexual rights, and abortion, enabling
those leading our depraved social and political institutions to plunder the
world's wealth with little or no constraint. Aside from the numerous
seductive distractions they provide through television and consumerism, what
better way to manipulate the masses than by perpetually thrusting
contentious issues into their faces that splinter them into warring
factions?

Remember December? When Iraqi and American body bags were filling up faster
than Santa's elves could pack his sacks of toys? And Christians in the
United States were beside themselves because some stores weren't saying
"Merry Christmas" to customers? It boggles the mind!

It is widely known that the Bush Regime has heavily courted radical
Christian elements in the United States to garner much of its political
support. Ostensibly bearing the cross of the Christian God who blesses only
America, George Bush is on a sacred mission to fulfill Manifest Destiny
around the globe.

With the backing of Diebold, Katherine Harris, the Supreme Court, and a
heavily mobilized base of extremist Christians who stampeded to the polls to
support Bush's eagerness to fulfill their apocryphal prophecies in the Holy
Land, elect a degenerate individual many apparently believed was an
Evangelical who manifested the virtues of Christ, and to empower a group
willing to proclaim that Christianity is the official state religion, George
Bush and his cronies blatantly subverted our Constitutional Republic by
taking office twice without winning the electoral or the popular vote.

Astoundingly, now that Mephistopheles has revealed his true identity, he and
his fellow Neocons, Zionists, Fundamentalist Christian leaders, and
plutocrats still garner support from amongst their subjugated masses.
Admittedly, he has been on shaky ground lately, but Bush still has enough
adherents that he has avoided impeachment and prosecution for his crimes
against humanity.

Through its denial of civil rights to Gays, opposition to abortion and stem
cell research, unwavering support for Israel (and its heinous ethnic
cleansing and war crimes), dedication to preserving the dominant role of
White America, and creation of a nationalist furor that is beyond being
obscene, the Bush Regime has garnered the support of enough Americans to
empower them to unleash Hell upon millions of human beings to further the
interests of US multinationals, the military industrial complex, Israel, and
the rest of its cohorts.

Strauss's disciples learned their art well as they are clearly demonstrating
with their virtuoso performance. And Kansas is a microcosm of the stratum of
American society that is entranced by the Neocons' euphonious symphony. A
symphony they brilliantly composed to drown out the sounds of their abuse of
power, exploitation and murder.

As 60 Minutes revealed this week, the Bush administration heavily edits the
findings of its own scientists to minimize public awareness of the dangers
of phenomena like Climate Change. Employing lawyers to water down
admonitions drafted by NASA and EPA scientists, the Bush Regime seriously
limits what would be well-founded citizen and Congressional concern about
abusive environmental practices by the amoral profit seekers of corporate
America.

Capitalizing on their paranoid belief that they are somehow facing
persecution by evil secular humanists, the wealthy elites are steering
Dominionists and other Christian extremists down a path to the tyranny each
group craves. Removing prayer from public schools was not about abolishing
Christianity. Eliminating mandatory prayer was to prevent our government
from endorsing and potentially mandating a specific religion. State-imposed
religion is a powerful element of virtually any despotic regime worth its
salt.

In blaming Hispanic immigrants for "stealing" benefits from tax-supported
social programs while providing "nothing" in return; perpetuating Black
American poverty, under-education, and crime by isolating many of them in
inner-city ghettos or warehousing them in the prison industrial complex; and
vilifying Gays for "destroying the moral fabric" of the United States, our
de facto oligarchs abuse vulnerable populations already despised by many
other Americans and scapegoat them for the ills plaguing our nation. Another
block in the foundation of a "successful" fascist state.

[Note: Fascist states are generally characterized by authoritarian rule,
extreme nationalism, corporate domination, anti-liberalism, and militarism.
Starting to look and sound awfully familiar, eh USA?]

In granting federal money to tax-exempt religious entities for "faith based
initiatives" to aid the growing numbers of impoverished in the Twenty First
Century Gilded Age, the plutocracy gains the dual advantage of currying the
favor of its Fundamentalist Christian base amongst the "commoners" and
creating a subterfuge for eliminating "wasteful" federal spending on public
social programs to benefit the poor. Many of those resting comfortably atop
the financial summit, whose wealth exists thanks to a deeply corrupt system
which impoverishes billions of human beings, despise the elements of
"liberalism" which serve to limit their boundless greed and visions of
unrestrained, Dickensonian Capitalism.

Reducing taxes and privatizing have become the mantras of the Bush Regime's
economic policy. At the end of the day, who doesn't want to pay less in
taxes and see a reduction in poorly managed government bureaucracies? The
problem is that the tax cuts are providing massive benefit to the super-rich
(like the Walton and Mars families) while putting very little money back
into the pockets of the working class. Meanwhile, military expenditures
continue to rise to more insane levels as programs to benefit children, the
elderly, the sick, and the impoverished are reduced or slashed rather than
redesigned or improved.

What was that definition of fascism again?

Not even public education escapes the rapacious attacks of the ruthless
wolves at the top of the food chain. The No Child Left Behind Act furthers
their goal of strengthening the Fourth Purpose. John Taylor Gatto defined
the Fourth Purpose in an interview about his book, Dumbing us Down: The
Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling:
Throughout the 19th century, a new Fourth Purpose began to emerge, tested
thoroughly in the military state of Prussia in northern Europe. The Fourth
Purpose made the point of mass schooling to serve big business and big
government by extending childhood, replacing thinking with drill and
memorization while fashioning incomplete people unable to protect themselves
from exhortation, advertising and other forms of indirect command. In this
fashion, poor Prussia with a small population became one of the great powers
of the earth. Its new schooling method was imitated far and wide, from Japan
to the United States.
Some conjecture that the ultimate goal of social conservatives is to
eliminate public education. I disagree. The ruling class realizes what a
sacred cow they would be slaughtering. Besides, as Gatto's insight
indicates, the most effective way to control human beings is through their
psyches. And what better time to capture human minds than when they are
young and malleable?

Profits, property, and power trump humanity in the sociopathic value systems
of the vicious malefactors at the helm of the United States. Witness the
willful neglect leading to the tragic death and diaspora of tens of
thousands of Black Americans in New Orleans. Consider the slaughter of over
100,000 Iraqi civilians, the liberal distribution of depleted uranium
throughout Iraq's countryside, the wanton destruction of much of Iraqi
infrastructure, the death of over 2600 American military personnel in Iraq,
the sacrifice of almost 3,000 American civilians in the Neocon's Pearl
Harbor on 9/11, the torture of human beings, and the suspension of basic
justice for those suspected of "terrorism".

Their willful refusal to employ the power the United States clearly has to
enforce an immediate cease-fire in Lebanon provides yet another overt
example of Neocon moral bankruptcy. The United States has deliberately
stymied UN intervention efforts to give Israel time to finish destroying
Lebanon with funding and equipment we furnished. Israel has displaced a
million people, killed over 600 innocent civilians, and destroyed over $2
billion worth of infrastructure through its invasion of a sovereign nation.
This in retaliation for the capture of two of its soldiers by Hezbollah, a
powerful group of militants over which Lebanon has virtually no control. In
contrast, Israel has suffered the loss of 26 of its civilians. While tragic,
these losses pale in comparison to the devastating horror the Israeli war
machine has inflicted upon Lebanon

A sane government concerned with human welfare and justice would have put a
stop to these blatant crimes against humanity long before the situation
escalated to this point. But the Bush Regime has justified and encouraged
the Israeli atrocities. They obfuscate well, but it does not take much
critical thinking to see the true agenda of our malevolent leaders.

Virtually all citizens of the United States have been deceived by their
government to some extent. While I remain a tenacious dissident against many
of the United States' political and social institutions because of my
passion for social justice and human rights, my choice to manifest my
dissent through writing and publishing burdens me with a degree of
complicity in the schemes of the Bush Regime. As I research, analyze, write,
and publish, I serve humanity as writers have throughout history. I educate,
inspire both support and opposition, amuse, comfort, provoke thought,
agitate, anger, and in some cases, win hearts and minds. Yet at the same
time, by asserting intellectual arguments which are mostly opposed to the
American Empire because of my personal beliefs, I participate in the
intellectual civil war the ruling elites love to perpetuate to keep those of
us in the "lower classes" from achieving solidarity against them.

Contrary to our patriotic programming, dissidents in the United States are
not free to exercise their First Amendment rights because millions of poor
wretches fought and died in wars of imperial conquest under the pretext of
"protecting" or "spreading freedom." For now, our leaders allow domestic
dissent because they want to keep their populace at odds with one another,
they know that their strangle-hold on the psyches of many of their citizens
is virtually unbreakable (if people start to see through the Reagans and
Bushes, the ruling elite come up with a "liberal" Democrat like Bill Clinton
to pacify the "Soccer Moms" yet still maintain the status quo of de facto
plutocratic rule), and they are not ready to shed the thinning veneer that
they govern according to the Constitution.

Yet despite my unintended contribution to the intellectual wars our
overlords use to distract us, if I stop writing and publishing, I will
surrender a significant means to contribute to the struggle for social
justice and human rights and to counter the lies of the corporate media,
government propagandists and history revisionists.

The answer is not to stop thinking, debating, or writing. Regardless of how
we contribute to the struggle or how much we differ in opinion, we of the
poor and working classes need to "agree to disagree" and unite against those
who prey upon us.

230 years ago, the United States was founded by valiant rebels who shattered
the manacles of colonialism. Sadly, the nation they predicated on
Constitutional limitations of government power with significant emphases on
the rights of individual humans (admittedly marred by the denial of rights
to Blacks, women, and Native Americans), has evolved into one of the most
violent, narcissistic, and oppressive empires in the history of humanity.

Sorry Dorothy, but the Wicked Witch of the West is alive and well. But don't
despair. Human beings possess an uncanny ability to Evolve, especially for
the better.

Jason Miller is a 39 year old sociopolitical essayist with a degree in
liberal arts and an extensive self-education (derived from an insatiable
appetite for reading). He is a member of Amnesty International and an avid
supporter of Oxfam International and Human Rights Watch. He welcomes
responses at willpowerful@hotmail.com or comments on his blog, Thomas
Paine's Corner, at http://civillibertarian.blogspot.com/.

--
NOTICE: This post contains copyrighted material the use of which has not
always been authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material
available to advance understanding of
political, human rights, democracy, scientific, and social justice issues. I
believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of such copyrighted material as
provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright
Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107

"A little patience and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their
spells dissolve, and the people recovering their true sight, restore their
government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are
suffering deeply in spirit,
and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public
debt. But if the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have
patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning
back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at
stake."
-Thomas Jefferson