Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid, Be Perpetually Afraid

[unhappycamper]

http://smirkingchimp.com/thread/jaime-oneill/58412/be-afraid-be-very-afraid-be-perpetually-afraid

Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid, Be Perpetually Afraid
Pop Culture
by Jaime O'Neill | September 19, 2014 - 10:12am

Ok, people, we know you’re scared. There is that ongoing all-out war on Christmas, and there are those Koran-reading Mexican Muslims streaming across our border with the intent of doing something or other we really worry they’re planning to do. We’re told that we’ve got to shut down our economy because the environmental nuts are worried they might get a little sweatier, Scientists are putting God-only-knows-what in our food, and the homosexuals are trying to make their lifestyle mandatory. The liberals are looking to deny loving parents the right to beat the devil out of their own damn kids, and politically correct feminists are trying to make it impossible for healthy American males to have sexual relations with people of the opposite sex. We’ve got a Muslim mongrel in the White House, and Fox News can be depended upon to give us something new to worry about on a daily basis, all of it sandwiched in between commercials that are, themselves, designed to ramp up our fears of everything from the heartbreak of psoriasis to four-hour erections.

And if all that weren’t bad enough, now we’re told there’s a really scary bunch of guys in Iraq who are even scarier than those al Qaeda creeps who have kept all our panties in a bunch for well over a decade now. They’re so rotten, this new bunch, that one name for them isn’t even enough to encompass all the fear they generate. They’re known to our media and our politicians as ISIS, ISIL, or the Islamic State, but they even have their own names for themselves in Arabic, and they inhabit that neighborhood of our nightmares where people cut heads off other people and hold them up in gleeful display of their willingness to do wickedness. They, too, want us to be afraid, very afraid, and there are lots of people who ain’t even Islamic terrorists who are anxious to abet their efforts to scare the shit out of us. A scared country is a distracted country, after all, and a distracted country is one where foxes can ransack the hen houses when everyone’s looking the other way.

So be afraid, people, when you’re waking up, or when you’re drifting off to sleep, because ninja-looking men in black are coming for you bearing sharp knives, and they’ve got your heads on their minds.

Meanwhile, half a world away, millions of people who are a lot like you—child rearing, anxious, hopeful, dyspeptic, scraping by on not much, often bewildered by the world—are scared, too. They’re scared of those same crazy bastards in black, and they’re also scared of the men in uniforms who meet in dark rooms in the Pentagon to discuss how to kill those men in black in ways that so often result in the lamentably accidental and incidental deaths or dismemberment of innocent bystanders killed by drones, or air strikes. Those people, who flee from country to country in a region benighted by fear-generated religious bullshit dreamt up hundreds and hundreds of years ago, are harried by men with weaponry that floods their region. Those products of factories in the U.S., Russia, France, and Great Britain have transformed sectarian enmities that were once merely awful into killing zones that are now truly Godawful abattoirs, no matter what God you might choose to blame for all that death and terror.

[awoke_in_2003]

1. As long as we are scared...

the war machine keeps turning and Americans don't ask questions.