Triage on Uncle Sam

As is clear to any doctor, new age healer, medicine man or back alley quack, Uncle Sam is in terrible shape. Though his organs are barely vital, save one, his head remains strangely swollen, and his priapic condition is more steely than ever, to the world’s dismay. Like a hybrid dipstick and divination rod, it always shoots straight for the oil, usually Muslim-owned. America’s current motto, LEAVE NO SHI’ITE OR SUNNI UNTURNED.

Long overweight, he has always sought to expand his eating horizon. Starting with the blasé turkey, he moved on to spicy Mexican, Cuban, Puerto Rican, Filipino and Okinawan, etc. Lately he’s been stuffing his face with all-you-can-eat helpings of hummus, sharwama and sheikh mahshi. Yummm! But no earth is big enough to satisfy this infinite growth appetite, so with his overseas options dwindling, the fat man is consuming his own body. America is eating up its own young and future.

What to do? When a country is this sick, how do you go about curing it? And what should we tend to first? Among presidential candidates, the only one with anything like a sensible platform is Ron Paul, who insists on bringing all the troops home, restoring our raped Constitution, and lopping off the Federal Reserve, thus castrating our thieving banksters, but since Paul threatens the beast so directly, there’s no way our military/banking complex will allow him to win.

American electoral politics is modeled after game shows, sitcoms, professional wrestling and Jerry Springer, with everything well orchestrated and media sculpted, but should the masses fail to cheer, laugh, tear up or become indignant on cues, there’s still the Diebold voting machine to yield a preordained result. Even with a fair shake, however, voters may still reject Ron Paul because of his opposition to social programs and abortion, as well as his laissez-faire stance towards big business.

As for third party candidates, the last one to have even the remotest chance of winning was Ross Perot, in 1992, but he ended up with zero Electoral College votes! As for Ralph Nader, his best showing was 2.74% of the popular vote, in 2000. In short, we don’t have a viable candidate to lever us from this quicksand. The system simply won’t allow it.

It won’t allow it because it’s not there to serve us, silly. This is no government for the people. Where have you been? While we had a brief moment occupying a few plazas, dusty lots and parks, they continued to occupy everything else. With their nonstop media pollution, they occupy your very mind. So what are you going to do about it?

Many of us just want to get off this death train. In 2008, a Zogby International poll revealed that 22% of Americans believed that “any state or region has the right to peaceably secede and become an independent republic.” A growing number would rather be a citizen of the Second Vermont Republic or Cascadia, etc., and in Wyoming, lawmakers just narrowly voted down a “doomsday bill” that would have prepared the state to function independently of Washington. Though it was posed as an emergency measure, it sounded suspiciously like a secession plan, what with the state having its own currency, army and even aircraft carrier.

Aspiring Cascadians chafe having “to put up with indifference and condescendence from distant seats of power,” but you can live in Washington DC itself and feel exactly the same way. Just ask the many homeless sprawling on the sidewalks within sight of the US Capitol, or the people of Adams Morgan or Anacostia. Like those in Bagdad or Kabul, they are not being served by the war criminals who huddle daily on that hill. So the distance is ideological and not necessarily physical. In the latest poll, released three weeks ago, 86% of Americans disapprove of the job Congress is doing. Some may see their “representatives” as incompetent, but many Americans already know that they are being ruled by an alien government that only got elected through a rigged system and lying.

The more illegitimate they become, the more flags they display, and the bigger the flags, though they care nothing about what the flag stands for. To them, the American flag is just something to drape over your coffin, after they’ve sent you to commit mass murder for Big Oil, Big Banks and Israel, after they’ve used you thoroughly to enrich themselves. Isn’t it time we bury this grotesquely corrupt and bloodthirsty cabal? The big question is how?

Strategies, strategies. Recognizing that one-day protests accomplish nothing, the Occupy Movement sought to disrupt the system by occupying Wall Street. It didn’t happen that way, of course, because hundreds of cops were brought in to protect the New York Stock Exchange for months on end.

Thwarted, the occupiers moved to a park, and that became the model nationwide, but you can occupy as many parks as you want and the system will not change. As you sleep outside and become symbolically homeless, your sneering masters will continue to ruin lives by starting wars and ripping people off in plain sight.

And so the first stage of our rebellion is over, and though I fully applaud the courage and sacrifice of those who endured prolonged discomfort or police brutality to rouse America from its slumber, we must now aim for tangible results and not symbolic victories. Since time is short, we must get deadly serious. No more hedges.

Linh Dinh is the author of two books of stories, five of poems, and a novel, Love Like Hate. He’s tracking our deteriorating socialscape through his frequently updated photo blog, State of the Union.