What you remember is this: It was your home. The television has announced that your home has been selected. They are coming for the head of household. You try to communicate with those who have designated themselves the saviors and developers of democracy to you and your children. Your family appeals to the media itself. But the tanks and planes are coming. Special Reports bulletins increase in number until every television screen is announcing the imminent arrival of the saviors. It will be fantastic! Lights, cameras, action - footage from Hollywood producers like “Stanley Motss.” [1] Look at him working feverishly! Get a look at that mug shot with the dark, mustached, barrette-wearing figure hovering behind the talking heads!

They are coming. We are coming to you! You try to prepare the children but how do you prepare for B-1 Bombers and F-16 Jets flying overhead or for foot soldiers pushing at your door? Imagine - there’s no escape.  Neighbors are mesmerized by the animated, 3-D images of the attack to come. The talking heads are saying it will be better than any sporting event! Your destruction brought to the world live. What technology! You feel helpless. Your experiences, your humanity is of no importance to Motss. It’s his job. His reputation at stake! The show must go on.

The planes and the troops arrive “right on time.” The head of household killed and your young adult son is pulled from your arms, hooded, and dragged away. You look around; the home is destroyed. No water, food, bedding. Personal family mementos, gone. School texts for the younger children, gone. You look beyond the ruins of your home to see the homes of neighbors destroyed as well. Collateral damage. The men are conspicuously absent or dead. You and the other women begin to work together to restore a semblance of home. You have kept a close eye on your children, subject to bombings or suicide attacks. You have had little time to absorb the shock because you have to deal with the aftermath of living without basic needs.

Now, now, the saviors, the delivers of “democracy,” and above all “freedom,” tell you to be responsible for cleaning up your home! The delivers will of course help with private contractors, building a home in the middle of your destroyed neighborhood and guarding against any form of retaliation on your part. Take responsibility for restoring order! Head of homes (and gov’t) have been replaced with clones of the saviors. They sound like your people and look like your people, but their interests lie not with the devastation you and others experience but with the saviors and their needs to obtain oil, and build an embassy, bring contractors from their lands and other foreign lands to yours, to build, to profit from what has been a blatant violation of human rights. In short, global dominance is the only thing real on this earth as long as the U.S. corporate capitalists exist! Destruction of your home boosts the profits of oil companies and security contractors. Elected Republicrats have kept their capitalist cronies quite happy, for it’s all about corporate capital.  Real democracy, real freedom can’t exist anywhere without the threat of corporate capitalists, world bullies, cold and calculating, doing what they do best - conquer and destroy human life!

So Republicrats, speaking with that air of superiority and arrogance urge you to “take responsibility for the destruction of your home, for the mess that is your home!" Take responsibility? They’re in the language of post-production. Hollywood or Washington D.C., Washington D.C. or Hollywood? It can be confusing, but back in D.C. with the elected politicians and their spin masters shouting TAKE RESPONSIBILITY, the average American who has yet to believe the racist structure of capitalism, is nodding his or her head in agreement with the “saviors” of a “free world.”

This is not a comedy if you are at all human and really human (not another Hollywood produced pod thing). If you are human, you are with the people in Iraq. You’ve been with them since the spin began. Motss’ production only convinced you of the insanity of this government’s ruling class and its capitalist ideology. You have always understood you are witnessing a tragedy.

Unfortunately, the average American has a love-hate relationship with the corporate capitalists. They are in love with the rulers (brethrens) if shopping is a pleasurable adventure. These are the same people who interpret “struggle” as that battle to secure a place on the soccer team for their son or daughter or to secure a seat at one of the ivy league universities. Raised on “reality” television shows like Survivor, these young people treat mountain climbing and consuming live worms as the world’s greatest challenge in which they will conqueror! These are children for whom history is yesterday. Fearful parents and teachers have realized this is a generation of young people ignorant of U.S. history, for such a history would open their minds not only to genocide and slavery, but colonialism and imperialist practices that have maintained the privileges they enjoy as young, white Americans. The teaching of history in the U.S., Zinn writes, is still a matter of instilling “patriotism.” No thinking is required or appreciated under this capitalist regime for control of hearts and minds in the domestic sphere. Big Brother is all right with young people since Big Brother is real, isn’t it?

The average American adult, heavily in debt to the production of “innocence,” is committed to assurances that the U.S. Empire will continue to bulldoze its way from one country to another where it suspects people are in need of “freedom” and democracy from some despot, tyrant, or dictator. The silence of these average Americans exemplifies a “partnership” with the cheering mob! Homegrown tyrants here are free to roam the world in search of bounty for profit! And spin masters like “Conrad Brean” are a valued commodity now, since the days of Reagan Production, Inc., and people, particularly the young with no knowledge of yesterdays, like our Mr. Brean, have turned out pages and pages of narrative epiphanies about “evils” lurking “on the darkside” to defend the interest of the American Empire.

When the “economy” - easy on the conscience - rather than “capitalism” - (can’t think capitalism is the problem. That would be anti-American!) begins to hurt the pockets of these dear, precious average Americans, when they “economy” disrupts their banking arraignments, portfolio shares, 401ks, or, heaven-forbid, the road along the path to their children’s success starts to buckle, then the average American hates the government! Then, there’s life in the ho-hum! The world is coming to an end! They are hurting. How dare the rulers we elected to protect them from certain realities screw up! They begin to see the “little people” here and the “little people” there. Bombs killing more than a 100 million this time and torturing-made-reality on You Tube - so it must be real - becomes too much for those who want to remain in their roles, playing the “innocent,” hard-working, pioneer, all-American dreamer of good American values.

So what happened? It’s America, for heaven's sake! They’ll remember Reagan’s warning: look to the children. Look to family interests and feel betrayed. Naked and awake, they can see the words rolling down the teleprompter and the speaker, having a hard time keeping up, calls out the words as he catches tumbling down: terrorists… interests… 9-11… terrorists, again… change… more change…

The average American wakes up to wonder why you - the world - hates them! They hate us!

Put Brean and Motss to work again. America is kind and compassionate: It gives handouts in time for summer shopping! America gives gifts of drugs, weaponry, and “freedom,” oh, “democracy,” too, through pre-emptive war and the practice of regime change - all for the good of world “peace.” Well, what’s not to love about the U.S. domestic and foreign policy?

How will the globalization of a U.S. imperialist rule, with interests in its own growth, manage to keep you, literally, off your feet? 

With the all-purpose trump card!

Black Americans, I am sorry to say, who have undergone the ethnic cleansing ritual, ridding his/her heart and mind of any trace of racial and cultural heritage, any trace of his/her origin in opposition, will be a very useful tool in times of crisis - white crisis. Hand-picked Black Americans come in so handily just as they did as overseers on the plantations in the old days. They’ll oversee today’s “plantations” at home and abroad because they’ll not question what America represents then or now. They’ll remain “marginal” in the real sense of remaining “small,” as Mandela would say, unable to shine light on the “darkside” where they have turned in their souls.

I’m sorry. I cringe. It hurts me to hear and see some of us now echoing the imperialist creed - we are coming to get you! My people, descendants of the enslaved, are not just used as fodder for the wars but we are also being used now as “leaders” in the imperialist adventure against your resistance - against the historical resistance of Black Americans and our Ancestors. We are dealing with people, a white/black conglomeration of a Borg-like construction so hardened by their ideology of superiority that they are simply unable to relate to humanity except as the dominant entity. This very relationship represents to them a “gift” to the world - a divine gift for the “little people” of the world.

Malcolm and King are not comfortably resting at all. Our Ancestors are agitated. But this new breed of imperialist leaders are indeed dead, and as the dead, I can’t say they’ll not be less dangerous.

The masses of us Black Americans, descendents of the Maafa, the Black left are “disappearing” behind Motss’ footage of Colin Powell, Tiger Woods, Oprah, Michael Jordan in a new production of “We Are the World.” They are meant to be our “replacements” - these multi-racial this or that! These Black-colored multi-millionaires. We don’t care! Assimilation, please. We want to be loved by you, Big Brother! We want to be BIG BROTHER! Big Brother is one of the brothers - or sisters! Black big brother/sister will star in Motss’ next U.S. imperialist film. Watch carefully, if you dare, the spin masters at work at the behest of the capitalist politicians, reformers, centrists, sell-outs.

We, the proud to inherit the memory of our enslaved Ancestors, who remember that we are the Left and that we are the opposition - we will keep in mind El Comandante Fidel’s words and continue to fight as soldiers in the battle of ideas. Even if they say we are no longer to be taken seriously (the average American will speak up for you because they dare bother about us anymore) for we are “redundant” and of no use, we’ll be there to the end or to greet the change that will bring justice and equality to the masses of Black Americans. We have been betrayed by our own that look to annihilate you for the corporate capitalists. But we have the vision of our solidarity to guide us.

But soft - here’s King George on the world stage, listening to the voice of Motss in his earpiece. And he opens his mouth to repeat: “United States will help the Cuban people [little people] realize the blessings of liberty.” Yes, “liberty” will be sent on an F-16 or Stealth from Big Brother, maybe someone familiar looking - multi-this or that brother. But the side of the planes, bombs, and tanks will still read: UNITED STATES today UNITED WORLD tomorrow!

Snakes will be snakes!

Fighters remain fighters!

BlackCommentator.com Editorial Board member Lenore Jean Daniels, PhD, has been a writer, for over thirty years of commentary, resistance criticism and cultural theory, and short stories with a Marxist sensibility to the impact of cultural narrative violence and its antithesis, resistance narratives. With entrenched dedication to justice and equality, she has served as a coordinator of student and community resistance projects that encourage the Black Feminist idea of an equalitarian community and facilitator of student-teacher communities behind the walls of academia for the last twenty years. Dr. Daniels holds a PhD in Modern American Literatures, with a specialty in Cultural Theory (race, gender, class narratives) from Loyola University, Chicago. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.

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