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 Posted: Sat Nov 07, 2009 6:30 pm |
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America The Betrayed
Walt Whitman: "Poet of the People"
By Richard C Cook
URL of this article: www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=15952
Global Research, November 6, 2009
Richard C. Cook
If you want to get an idea of what America once was like, read the
poems of Walt Whitman. Whitman was born on Long Island in 1819 and
grew up in Brooklyn, N.Y. His family was poor, but even though he left
school at the age of 11 he gave himself an education by reading and
working in the printing shop of a newspaper until he gradually became
a published writer. He worked as a teacher and news reporter and owned
his own newspaper by the age of 20.
In 1848 Whitman was a delegate to the founding convention of the Free
Soil Party. During the Civil War he worked as a nurse in Union
military hospitals and held several government jobs, including
interviewing Confederate prisoners for pardons. Some of his greatest
poems came from his war experiences, including his famous elegy upon
the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln, “Oh Captain! My
Captain!” His great collection of poems, Leaves of Grass, was self-
published. He died a national hero in 1892 in Camden, New Jersey,
where thousands of people came to pay their respects.
Whitman has always been viewed as a poet of the people, in contrast to
the pretentious dandies from academia who have controlled official
American culture for much of our history. He wrote of workmen,
farmers, sailors, soldiers, lovers, criminals, and prostitutes.
In the text of the first edition of Leaves of Grass, he wrote of
himself as, “Walt Whitman, an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos,
disorderly, fleshly, and sensual, no sentimentalist, no stander above
men or women or apart from them, no more modest than immodest.” He had
discovered a great secret, one that is known to everyone who is young
at heart: that the free individual, always potentially a “kosmos,”
stands at a much higher level in the scale of creation than any man-
made collective.
Thus was Whitman a hero to the Beatniks of the 1950s who tried to
rediscover an authentic American voice in the streets and on the roads
and highways of this great land. The spirit of Whitman was surely
present through the rebellion of the 1960s, when America's young men
and women rose up and fought the Establishment to stop the Vietnam War
and bring civil rights to racial minorities.
The Establishment fought back with a vengeance and, through the most
egregious betrayal in history, reduced the world's greatest industrial
democracy to the pathetic shadow of its former self we are today.
The first thing the Establishment did was destroy the industrial job
base by shipping millions of good jobs to China and other Third World
nations, where slave laborers could be forced to churn out consumer
products at a fraction of the cost of similar work done by American
workers.
Acting through the CIA and organized crime, the Establishment flooded
the cities and college campuses with illegal drugs in order to rot the
minds and souls of our youth.
They dumbed down education to the point where young people who
graduate today know little and can do less of a practical nature.
Vocational training is dead. A high school graduate is worth virtually
nothing in the job market, and many college graduates are semi-
literate and self-absorbed, often lacking backbone, skills, or
initiative. Some high school and college graduates are even drug
addicts or alcoholics.
They turned the economy over to thieves from Wall Street and created a
military machine that turns youth into murderers and assassins whose
job it is to conquer the world for the fat cats of global capital.
They ruined the arts, literature, and music through crass
commercialization, making it almost impossible for any real original
creativity to be produced or communicated. The one bright light in
this darkness is the internet, which is being threatened by
commercial suppression of freedom of expression by the ambitions of
big communications companies. Thank goodness too for the rare creative
genius like Michael Moore who has the courage to hold up a mirror to
this deeply diseased society.
Then they wrecked people's health with processed food and constant
inducements to a sedentary lifestyle while pumping us full of
dangerous vaccines and prescription drugs. They drummed it into
everyone's head that we are basically weak, ill, helpless creatures
who can only survive by taking pills and making constant trips to
doctors, hospitals, and clinics.
They induced us to fight over our possessions and freedoms in law
courts with the aid of greedy lawyers in front of rapacious judges who
have built up the largest prison population in the world.
They pulled money and credit out of the inner cities and rural areas
leaving those segments of the nation and their populations to rot.
The list could go on and on and on.
Today we are in the midst of not just a recession but a terminal
depression. Getting the banks to lend again so people can buy homes at
what are still over-inflated prices or so they might compete with
immigrants to get construction jobs through building of more useless
office buildings or military bases is not a recovery. The “greening of
America” is a myth. There is no resurgence of alternative energy
investment or new public infrastructure apart from a few highway
projects.
American family farming is practically dead and is under a new assault
from speculators who are undercutting prices and forcing foreclosures.
The local manufacturing sector never came back after the calamitous
decline produced by the Paul Volcker recession of 1979-1983, when
interest rates were deliberately raised to over 20 percent to kill off
family-owned businesses so that global corporations could step in and
take over. Since then we had the “Reagan Revolution” when the banks
took over the economy, the Clinton dot.com bubble of the 1990s which
crashed in 2000, and the George W. Bush/Alan Greenspan housing bubble
which blew up in 2008. Now Main Street lies shattered and shuttered as
a result of the crimes and treacheries of the last 30 years.
True, there is a rebellion brewing, including a monetary reform
movement that has attacked the power of the Federal Reserve, as well
as a few progressive voices that call for a much larger economic
“stimulus” than the Obama administration has seen fit to implement.
But is there any practical plan on the part of either political party
or organized movement to restore America to what it once was–a place
where ordinary people could live, work, learn, and flourish? The
answer is a resounding “No.” Not a chance. And “Change You Can Believe
In” hasn't changed a thing. All it has done has been to produce
another financial bubble, this time using huge amounts of public debt
through the sale of U.S. Treasury bonds. Business is not growing and
jobs are not coming back. The only thing that has gone up has been the
meeting of military recruitment quotas.
This latest bubble will fail too, because money created through
lending to float the prices of assets is not wealth. Rather wealth
consists of goods and services produced by labor applied to natural
resources. Those who provide the labor must be recompensed fairly.
So what is to be done? The answer is that nothing can or will be done,
if by that you mean whether a political savior is going to come along
to rescue our nation and its people from destruction.
In fact, what they are planning is to continue to throttle and enslave
us with a predatory financial establishment and a military policy that
is preparing the groundwork for World War III. The war will be fought
with American troops against Russia and China, after which China will
take over as the world's policeman while this country disappears from
the face of the earth. It's the ultimate plan of the New World Order,
the ones American politicians, financiers, military leaders, and
academics bow down to.
It is time for each and every individual who values his or her own
life along with the creative potential of the human spirit to begin to
work with others to create a new nation and world. The government
isn't going to do it for us. Please believe me. This is not a system
that can be reformed. It is a system that must be replaced. And it
must be replaced by the ordinary working men and women who have been
crushed, used, and abused during the past ugly half-century.
Americans, get to work. Call your friends and family together today
and begin to figure out what to do. Start with 15 minutes of prayer
and meditation. You will be shown the way from within yourselves. My
own view is that setting up local currency systems, as many
communities are now doing, is a good place to start.
Richard C. Cook is a former federal analyst who writes on public
policy issues. His latest book is “We Hold These Truths: The Hope of
Monetary Reform.” His website is www.richardccook.com. |
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| Don Stockbauer... |
| Posted: Mon Nov 09, 2009 10:02 am |
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On Nov 9, 9:13 am, ZerkonXXXX <Z... at (no spam) erkonx.net> wrote:
Quote: On Sat, 07 Nov 2009 20:30:46 -0800, Moderator wrote:
But is there any practical plan on the part of either political party or
organized movement to restore America to what it once was–a place where
ordinary people could live, work, learn, and flourish?
Everything goes along fine until this.
I am not sure at what point "ordinary people could live, work, learn, and
flourish" certainly after the Civil War. Whitman, like his historical
brother Mark Twain, saw the end of a America, the final chapter of a
first volume entitled "America's founding". This America is dead. It will
never and can never be restored. Betrayed by time.
What is not dead however is a -ism behind that past America. No mistake,
America was and is an -ism. There is such a thing as Americanism. Not
Capitalism, not socialism but specifically Americanism.
It rests on exactly what is described in this essay. Human beings, people
be they ordinary, sub-ordinary or extraordinary.
What has invaded this system of people ever since the Civil War is the
non-human thing called the Corporation or "judicial person". It had grown
into a disease and has permeated federal, state and all local governments..
Everything spoken of here can be attributed to this thing either acting
private, semi-private or through open government or in closed and secret
government.
This thing has amassed power to the point of now fighting wars. The US
military now being a minority and secondary armed force in it's own wars.
This is not a system that can be reformed. It is a system that must be
replaced.
Put Ralph Nader and Ron Paul in a room together and persuade them to come
out with a combined vision. Proceed from there.
America contains only 5% of the global population. |
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| ZerkonXXXX... |
| Posted: Mon Nov 09, 2009 10:13 am |
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Guest
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On Sat, 07 Nov 2009 20:30:46 -0800, Moderator wrote:
Quote: But is there any practical plan on the part of either political party or
organized movement to restore America to what it once was–a place where
ordinary people could live, work, learn, and flourish?
Everything goes along fine until this.
I am not sure at what point "ordinary people could live, work, learn, and
flourish" certainly after the Civil War. Whitman, like his historical
brother Mark Twain, saw the end of a America, the final chapter of a
first volume entitled "America's founding". This America is dead. It will
never and can never be restored. Betrayed by time.
What is not dead however is a -ism behind that past America. No mistake,
America was and is an -ism. There is such a thing as Americanism. Not
Capitalism, not socialism but specifically Americanism.
It rests on exactly what is described in this essay. Human beings, people
be they ordinary, sub-ordinary or extraordinary.
What has invaded this system of people ever since the Civil War is the
non-human thing called the Corporation or "judicial person". It had grown
into a disease and has permeated federal, state and all local governments.
Everything spoken of here can be attributed to this thing either acting
private, semi-private or through open government or in closed and secret
government.
This thing has amassed power to the point of now fighting wars. The US
military now being a minority and secondary armed force in it's own wars.
Quote: This is not a system that can be reformed. It is a system that must be
replaced.
Put Ralph Nader and Ron Paul in a room together and persuade them to come
out with a combined vision. Proceed from there. |
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| John Stafford... |
| Posted: Mon Nov 09, 2009 9:09 pm |
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Guest
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On Sat, 07 Nov 2009 20:30:46 -0800, Moderator wrote:
Quote:
But is there any practical plan on the part of either political party or
organized movement to restore America to what it once was–a place where
ordinary people could live, work, learn, and flourish?
In no period in America whatsoever could all citizens enjoy those rights.
It is a fight, constantly.
Grow up. |
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