AMERICA at TWILIGHT (1)

The birth of the United States in 1776 served to reflect a hopeful future for the world because France, coincidentally, was slipping from the ENLIGHTENMENT to the AGE of REASON, a soul destroying trip into the French version of Dante’s Inferno. The hope America was bringing to the world was Freedom. It was a nation built on the separation of Church and State. That’s a concept about which 18th century Europeans knew nothing. Europe was not to emerge from the blackness of civic totalitarianism driven by the Papacy for another half century, by which time America was well along welcoming the tired and the poor, the downtrodden, and the persecuted of many nations, all yearning to breathe free! These huddled masses and all who arrived with them seized the concept of America and built the most powerful nation under God that the world had seen since the time of King David. The halcyon days of the Israelites. Remarkably, for the next one hundred and 80 years the United States grew in wisdom and power and freedom. Of course there were problems. Slavery triggered a Civil War, booms and busts dotted the economic landscape, two world wars dramatically changed US society while the bomb ushered in a Cold War. In spite of these challenges, or maybe because of them, America prospered. There was the Great Depression-not fun, Prohibition-a mistake, the hemp and cotton lobby-brouhaha (the banishment of hemp until recent acceptance of cannabis). Late to the party was women’s suffrage. For some reason America had the toughest time giving women the right to vote. The nineteenth amendment of the U.S. Constitution was finally declared law August 26,1920. By contrast, New Zealand 1893; Finland 1906; Iceland 1915; Canada 1918. Through it all Americans were not to be denied. Citizens in the 48 worked hard and played hard. There was Jazz; Basie, Hawkins Young, Webster, swing; Miller, the Dorseys, Goodman, Armstrong and when they weren’t swinging, swaying and jitterbugging, Americans were at the movies. Hollywood dominated with a thousand stars and the long history of Broadway-style shows made its way to New York City. Non-stop showstoppers: West Side Story, Oklahoma, Sound of Music, Call Me Madame, Guys and Dolls, Bells Are Ringing, The King and I, etcetera etcetera etcetera!! By the time the 60’s arrived Alaska and Hawaii were on board. Americans had it all – the cockiness, belligerence, the bravado of the main man on Broadstreet. But storm clouds were taking shape.

The lack of congressional oversight set the stage for a major change in the US character. To that end, while sharing incrementally their work with oversight committees in Congress, the newly incorporated NSC (National Security Agency) began spying on US citizens at unprecedented levels. The CIA, while very much engaged in foreign adventurism, was also using private Americans and Canadians in “secret brainwashing methods”, all part of the CIA’s,”MK ultra mind control experiments”. And J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI was out of control. The spy game coincided with the establishment of a permanent American armaments industry and a military to meet the challenges of the Soviet Union and China. The combination would grow into what some call Deep State. The first alarm about this growing juggernaut came from U-S president Dwight Eisenhower. January 17, 1961. In his final address to the nation that he served in peacetime and in war, he worried about the impact that this immense military establishment and large arms industry would have on every town and city in America. He said, “…in the Councils of government we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the Military-Industrial Complex.” “The potential,” he warned, “for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”

Less than three years after Eisenhower’s unambiguous warning, America would suffer the Shock and Awe of that misplaced power engineered specifically to re-route the American Dream. Over the next two decades Americans were forced to travel a road of death, destruction, body bags and humiliation.

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