The Black Commentator: An independent weekly internet magazine dedicated to the movement for economic justice, social justice and peace - Providing commentary, analysis and investigations on issues affecting African Americans and the African world. www.BlackCommentator.com
 
June 2, 2011 - Issue 429
 
 

The Invisible Hand: "You’ve Been Took"
Represent Our Resistance
By Dr. Lenore J. Daniels, PhD
BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board

 

 
Madness has become [human’s] possibility of abolishing both [humans] and the world - and even those images that challenge the world and deform [humans]. It is far beyond dreams, beyond the nightmares of bestiality, the last resource: the end and the beginning of everything.
Oh, I say you've been misled, you've been had, you’ve been took!
-El Hajj Malik El Shabazz, Malcolm X, “The Ballot or the Bullet

When the government’s State media announced that the U.S. Navy Seals shot and killed Osama Bin Laden, Americans did not have to be prompted to take their “Two Minutes Hate” session. Cameras panned the country: Blacks, whites, Republicans, Democrats, Tea Partiers, and even socialists affirmed - Unity!

Down with the Enemy!

The man who claims responsibility for Change and for the capture and death of Enemy Number One announced three weeks later that the U.S. will strike “Al Qaeda” in Pakistan!

Americans must be protected from terrorists!

But who protects Americans from Tyranny?

The revolving door of politicians, corporate lobbyists, CEOs, and military generals dissolved the government by, for, and of the people: legal rulings and “public” policies written for and by the corporations denounce global warming and environmental catastrophes, increases in poverty and unemployment, and actively promote union-busting and education to sustain corporate interests and train a future class of corporate clones.

In the meantime, the Corporate-State media makes disinformation look like freedom and democracy: from the people who brought you Oprah and Jerry Springer, we now give you “Right-wing” Glen Beck and the “Liberal-wing” Rachel Maddow - neither of which are permitted to inform you that a coup has long been underway, that the American people have been overthrown!

So what entity protects Americans from Tyranny?

Tyranny?

If the Invisible Hand is as visible as your own hands, and intertwined with it, depended on it, you help it dig your grave!

What makes power hold a good thing, what makes it accepted, is simply the fact that it doesn’t only weigh on us as a force that says no, it traverses and produces things, it induces pleasure, forms of knowledge, and it produces discourse. It needs to be considered as a productive network which runs through the whole social body, much more than as a negative instance whose function is repression. (Foucault, “Truth and Power,” Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977)

Unity is a deception! If your own speech perpetually acknowledges your alliance with corporate capitalism, it is tyranny that rules and not democracy. Sitting in the palm of the Invisible Hand you ask, “We sick, Master?” (Malcolm X).

Yes! Master is sick, deranged, disturbed, unstable, grotesque because Master is Bechtel, Monsanto, GE, Viacom, Halliburton, KBR, Xe, and no amount of “healing” or “compromise” or “bi-partisanship” - to play with the sanity of your mind - alters the corporate-collective’s desire to imprint its morbid obsession with material accumulation and profit on the world. Master has dispossessed the American citizenry of its imagination, so that the citizenry’s ambitions and desires become one with the corporate mindset. “We sick, Master?” “Are we recovering, Master?”

We are the “us” verses the foreigner and the immigrant, the Arab, the Chinese, the African, the Puerto Rican, the Haitian.

We are the “shock and awe,” the drones, the Tomahawk missiles, the Navy Seals.

We are Americans who praise other sovereignties for not engaging in pre-emptive wars, for not using Tomahawk missiles, Apache helicopters, drones, and for reflecting on their history of repression, enslavement, genocide, imprisonment, and torture.

We remind these sovereignties that we produced a “non-violent” civil rights movement and a martyred (assassinated) Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., and we praise ourselves for being beyond racism.

We are the Zionist and the anti-Palestinians.

We are the torturers, the keepers of “prisoners” in Guantanamo, in State and in Federal prisons.

We are the builders of nuclear plants and gated communities.

We are the producers of Genetically Modified food, Prozac for us and Ritalin for our children, and the launderer of “illegal” drugs.

We are the ones with health insurance, children in private schools or charter schools.

We wiretap and eavesdrop even on our fellow citizens, neighbors, family members.

We turn a blind eye to the royal regime in Saudi Arabia (love is oil and oil is love), but we suspect “dictators” Hugo Chavez and Evo Morales of being enemies of democracy.

We are Barack Obama and he is us, with the right to order the killing of any citizen of the world, including the killing of any American citizen and with the right to declare war on any nation in the world without a hearing from us - the American people.

We are the Congress and Supreme Court for BP and Exxon, and Chevron.

We are all things that destroy, maim, contaminate, blow up, and implode because we are the world’s superpower, and in God we trust, and we trust our government without question.

Daily we chant our motto: Power is money, money is power.

American flags wave at the grave sites, among Tea Partiers, Republicans, Democrats, among the separate various ethnicities, races, and religions denominations, separate but increasing equal in death, chatter can be heard: We have made the necessary adjustments to recognize the logic of the market: God strikes down the politically conscious and promises to raise the materially conscious. All wait.

But Lazarus will not rise no matter who calls for a resurrection.

We sick, Master? Bet we are! We have been had, took - and still Obama’s Two Minutes Hate sessions fool no other nation of politically conscious people, except U.S. citizens.

The Enemy has been the American citizenry all along.

So who will save the American citizenry? Only the American citizenry, if one day it wakens up, from the graveyard corporate capitalists are constructing, to realize democracy never had a chance. Capitalism’s dictators are on the throne in Washington.

We sick, Master?

You been took!

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member, Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has a Doctorate in Modern American Literature/Cultural Theory. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.