- Part One
-
- In 1994 Pete Hamill wrote an article in the December
issue of Esquire magazine entitled 'End Game.' His premise was an overview
of a disintegrating society that was finding new ways to trash itself in
every area of social intercourse. And in his essay, one can easily see
the seeds being planted for the broken, and fearful cowards that we've
finally become. The USA which once took pride in leading itself out of
fear, has now become a nation whose leaders pride themselves on leading
us ever-deeper into fear, into paranoia, and into blind hatred of those
who are maybe-not Americans. Here below is part one of a segmented comparison
of part of what Pete Hamill wrote in 1994, with what seems to be happening
now. These are QUOTES from the article by Pete Hamill, with COMMENTS by
kirwan in 2002
-
- 1994: "All the moves toward decency, excellence,
maturity, and compassion have been made. They seem to have come to nothing.
Everyone talks and nobody listens. Boneheaded vulgarians are honored for
their stupidity. "
- 2002: Our sanctioned officials speak only of security,
of terror and of war. Nothing happens except the systematic destruction
of the Constitution, our personal freedoms and our way of life. Nobody
talks, nobody votes, and no one wants to look at the results of those two
inter-related actions. Meanwhile, the Cretin's global power grab proceeds
apace, with new targets added weekly to the national hit list - of both
countries and individuals who are now targets of American fanaticism in
our maniacal drive to steal the world's resources.
-
- 1994: "Politics is an ice jam of accusation and
obstruction, the hardest vulgarians honored for their cynicism, its good
men fleeing to tend private gardens. Pop culture both feeds and reflects
the larger society, and as evidence of collapse it is chilling."
-
- 2002 Politics has ceased to be contentious, there is
no longer an organized resistance to the edicts flowing from the White
House. The vulgarians once headed by Newt Gingrich have won. Admiral Poindexter,
a felon, is now in-charge of Total Information Access; which is a newly
proposed government seizure of all personal information on every citizen,
without regard for either criminal or terrorist culpability. The idea is
to acquire all personal and financial information, on every citizen, and
then match a crime to fit whatever pattern is potentially indicated by
the records seized. This one probably came directly from the pages of the
novel "1984."
-
- As far as culture goes, pop or otherwise - that has disappeared
into the vacuum created by the government mantra for War! War! Lots more
War!' There's simply no money or energy left in the population for any
other topic. The bad guys won, and they want to sell the public the idea
that because they've wrapped all this garbage in the flag - this is the
American way of the future - and it's all bullshit.
-
- 1994: "The greatest critics loved the subjects of
their examinations; literature, music, movies. They celebrated quality
and dismissed the fraudulent, examining each new object of art the way
a master watchmaker looks at another man's watch, admiring the accomplishments,
pointing out the flaws. There were always literary ax-murders among them,
but in a way the best of them were attorneys for the defense. They've been
replaced by prosecutors. And the penalty they demand for imperfection is
death."
-
- 2002: The above referred to artists and their creativity
in the pursuit of their crafts. That's dead now, and the only topic of
discussion before the American public is our new War on Freedom. This is
a total war, in which there will be no prisoners taken, no quarter given,
as Bush so often says to the world: "You're either with us or against
us." And that is the new state of the new millennium in 2002.
-
- 1994: "In all sports, grace is treated like a character
flaw. Athletes snarl and mock in triumph - and whine in defeat. But they
have one large excuse. They are only part of this America, this torn and
violent country where everybody plays for keeps. The nation approaching
Endgame. Everybody seems infected with the virus of argument and the need
for triumph."
-
- "Hour after hour, across the day and deep into the
night, talk radio spews forth a relentless message of contempt for democratic
institutions, from the presidency, the Congress and the Supreme Court to
the governors, the state legislators, and mayors."
-
- "Anyone with compassion is a target, Anyone with
a sense of complexity is scorned. Callers with accents are jeered. Complicated
issues are reduced to cartoons. Maybe it's an act, maybe it's just cashing
in on Limbaugh's success. But the drumbeat from these electronic kraals
is ominous: Hate Washington, hate the media, hate the blacks, hate the
dark-skinned and their babies, hate democracy. All disguised of course
as love for America."
- 2002: We've cashed in on this veritable 'Garden of Delights'
and now it seems we've transferred all our darkest hatreds to overseas
targets - at least for now.
-
- 1994: "In the freest country on the planet, democratic
political campaigns are a ghastly joke. The ideal candidate is a cipher,
devoid of personal history. The handlers write the scripts, build the drama,
concoct the spin, and get famous themselves. Nobody expects them to believe
any of this bullshit; oye compadre, get real. The job is done with a wink,
a curled lip, a bony cynicism."
-
- 2002: Pete Hamill hit this one right on the head - that
fits our mangled and stolen, national non-election of 2000 as well as 2002
to a 'T.' Since we were so sophisticated, so above the fray that we allowed
this cipher to steal the entire country right under our noses, it looks
like the whole world will be paying for that mistake for many years to
come. Not to even mention that this will cost most Americans vast sums
of money, and probably their comfortable way of life as well. We opened
Pandora's box, and let the demons out, and there's no one to blame for
that but us.
-
- 1994: "Even the conflicts of the so-called real
world-the non-fiction world of news an society-must be simple, easy to
follow through meals and other domestic activities, and preferably violent
.- Don't think is the message feel. In all media, the best-played stories
now are the ones that most resemble movies. Give us good guys and bad guys,
white hats and black hats, and for christsakes don't give us talking heads!
Action baby. Bang bang, Conflict."
-
- "Every day the American vision becomes cruder, narrower,
more parochial. In most newspapers foreign news gets little play unless
Americans are involved. The great newspapers still employ foreign correspondents
of immense gifts, but even the greatest reporters must battle for space
against the tremendous force of the general parochialism. The mass circulation
newspapers don't even bother. Unless Americans are concerned, most foreign
news seems to be about Princess Di."
-
- 2002: The stage was set then; the only topic now worth
discussing is ourselves, our wants, and our desires-everything else is
just noise. So when 911 interrupted our national romance with ourselves,
the outrage was two-fold. First for the lives lost and the harm done, but
then also there was rage for showing us how very small we've become in
the eyes of the wider world.
-
- 1994: "As we move toward Endgame, consider this:
We live in a country that has never made a movie about Leonardo da Vinci
and has produced three about Joey Buttafuoco."
- 2002: And so it goes on into a nightmare that is only
just beginning.
-
- End of Part One
-
- "Us Against Them"
-
- Endgame - Part Two
-
- 1994: "In the wider society, true to the principles
of conflict, an often bewildering variety of social factions batter at
one another for position and victory. - The goal is dominance. The goal
is vengeance: to take no prisoners and in Murray Kempton's phrase, shoot
the wounded."
-
- "The unraveling process can have many names: fragmentation,
disunification, atomization, balkanization, disintegration. Thoughtful
men and women - have looked at the battlefield from different positions.
They offer their own analyses of the causes of and remedies for the Endgame
psychology of permanent division and confrontation. But most agree about
the symptoms."
-
- Almost a hundred years after the last great immigration
wave changed the face of American society, vast numbers of Americans-including,
sadly, the best educated-are again being taught to identify themselves
with the qualifying adjectives of race, religion, ethnicity, and gender.
The idea of the melting pot is dismissed as cultural genocide, replaced
by a social worker's version of predestination. American identities state
the clerics of the dogma, are not shaped by will, choice, reason, intelligence,
and desire but by membership in groups. They are not individuals but components
of categories - And such categories they believe are destiny."
-
- 2002: The above redefinition of the American identity
is part of what has torn us into factions. And in that segregation we became
ripe for this further attack upon what was left of us as a people. The
War on Freedom, is a war on human rights, on personal freedom, and on a
way of life. This is the confrontation that lies beneath the power grab
by our world-dictator in waiting, Gee-Dubya Bush. As long as individuals
continue to resist this criminal behavior by this administration, there
remains some chance that reason might yet prevail, that military force
may yet be told - stand-down. So, that powerfully contrary force of the
American individual has of necessity become a major target, of the Bush
cabal, for 'elimination-with extreme prejudice.'
-
- 1994: "In America now it is always Us against Them
and Them against Us. And to display its anger, its righteousness, our side
must be in conflict with their side. It's not enough to be an American,
you must despise, attack, diminish, and empty the guts of those millions
of other Americans who are not like you. Every grave must be pried open
by scholarship, every smashed bone waved in triumph like a relic, every
ancient crime posted on the schoolhouse door."
-
- "The result is a society in apparently permanent,
teeming, nerve-fraying conflict: blacks against whites; straights against
gays; gays against priests; priests against abortionists; sun people against
ice people; citizens against immigrants; Latinos against Anglos; people
who work against those who don't; town against gown; blacks against Jews;
the orthodox against the reformers; cops against bad guys; lawyers against
cops; Crips against Bloods; Good guys and bad guys. Oppressors and oppressed.
White hats and black hats. And vice-versa. Us against them and them against
Us. And get outta my fuckin' face."
-
- 2002: Eight years ago this month - the above was one
version of the social landscape, but one that seemed to carry a lot of
weight. Now eight years on, what have we become? Apparently we ran out
of internal enemies and wars. We appear to have now transferred our hatreds
to other continents and other peoples - because there's more value for
the monetarily interested few in the dissension and the strife that has
replaced what was once shaped by will, by choice, by reason, by intelligence,
and by desire. This new American oppressor would seem to be a pathetic
substitute for any definition of what it once meant to be a human being.
-
- 1994: "But there are additional confusions. All
the victimized ethnic categories contain men. And feminist rhetoric of
the Endgame insists that men are themselves a group of oppressors-brutal,
insensitive, selfish, murderous. Catherine MacKinnon and others use the
word men, in the same generalized blurry way that women is used. This astonishingly
broad category-men-is defined all too easily by people who believe that
the same state of victimhood is endured by the Wellesley graduate and the
woman grinding corn in the hills of Chiapas, by Billie Holliday and Katharine
Graham - the existentialist philosophers of my youth insisted that existence
preceded essence, that you were born and then you forged your identity;
the philosophers of gender and ethnicity insist that essence precedes existence."
-
- 2002: Once the normal activities of the culture had been
trivialized and compartmentalized in the extreme, as cited above, then
where else could all the anger and hatred go? So when the general antagonism
reached it's zenith between groups - it would appear that the only option
left was to turn on the components of civility itself; those men and women
who are all there is of the human race, as we have come to know it. If
the nation were an individual, it would probably be perceived as psychotic,
if not suicidal.
-
- 1994:"The notion of education as therapy has led
to the distortion of history, the reduction of standards, and, in the new-fashioned
American style, the creation of enemies. The examination of the American
identity is made subservient to the word before the hyphen. Obviously the
accomplishments of American blacks, Latinos, other minorities, and women,
should be made known to all Americans, not to make them feel better but
to make them know more about their own country and the world of which it
is a part. Alas, that is not the goal."
-
- "The endless energy-sapping debate over 'multiculturalism'
is an example of the more general problem. The word itself is an oxymoron.
Every bookshelf is multi-cultural. Every library is multicultural. Every
educated man and woman is multicultural. Culture is multicultural."
-
- 2002: With this set-up, the population of the U.S. was
easily divisible into ever-smaller niche factions, further dividing the
body politic, and thereby emphasizing the differences between peoples over
the far more numerous similarities that we all share with one another.
How much of this multicultural dictum is still remembered today, and what
has it done for the liberation of any particular faction - compared to
the potential harm done by its heavy-handed introduction which destroyed
much of the commonality that once held the nation together?
-
- 1994: "In the raging battle over education-Literature
and history have common intentions: to discover the truth about human beings.
They can't be shaped by a creed, an ideology, or a thesis; they can't be
wrapped in the straightjackets of political fashion. Stalinist novels were
not novels: they were tracts. Hitler's movies were not art; they were propaganda.
Mao's poetry is the stuff of wall posters. There have been great Marxist
historians, including our own Eugene D. Genovese, but they didn't alter
the facts to prove the thesis. In the end history should be history, not
an alibi."
-
- "__As presented, there is no solution, because the
apocalyptic demand is for the alteration of the past or a surrender of
intelligence or an assumption of guilt by the living for the crimes of
the dead. But resolution isn't the point of all this sound and fury. Fragmentation
is the point. Segregation is the point. Conflict is all. We're Americans.
We have been conditioned to prefer conflict to boredom. We prefer violence
to talk. We prefer war to peace. We prefer lies to truth. Clear the board
citizen: We're reaching Endgame."
-
- 2002: It would seem to be too simple to assume that the
new American fundamentalists of the extreme right were bright enough to
have designed the above attacks upon society: however, they certainly seemed
to have employed the tenets outlined in the last paragraph to their full
advantage; at least in these last two years of the Gee Dubya nightmare.
It seems difficult to believe that it was only eight years ago this month,
that these topics were being written about so openly, and so well by Pete
Hamill. Today seems to be light-years away from the candor and the clarity
of Mr. Hamill's words from 1994.
-
- End of Part Two
-
- I tried in 2002 for several months to contact Mr. Hamill,
to ask him to revisit his article and to update his views based on the
new paradigm. I was unsuccessful, in finding him, or in finding the original
article so that I could simply send out a link.
-
-
- Kirwan is an independent freelance writer and illustrator,
who lives and works in the United States. He can be reached at: kirwanstudios@earthlink.net
-
- Copyright 2001-2004 AmericaHeldHostile.com. All rights
reserved.
-
- http://www.americaheldhostile.com/ed011904-1.shtml
-
-
- Comment
- From Jim Mortellaro
- 1-19-4
-
- This writer has been posting on Rense for years. I appreciate
truth. Sometimes, the truth does not set you free. Sometimes, the truth
sets it's fee. And speaking of freedom, this once great nation has become
the "land of the fee and the home of the knave."
-
- I am on this planet 60 years. I've seen and felt much.
But now, I feel the loss of our innocence, the innocence of the 1950s,
when I was brought up. With an extended family. With Mom always home. And
Gramma, too. And Grampa. We are of Italian extraction. Well, Sicilian,
actually. When some think of Sicilians, they immediately think of the Godfather
and his ilk.
-
- I've been active politically all my life. Beginning as
a Democrat, becoming an Independent in the late 1980s and a Republican
of late. Now, I see no value in belonging to any party. I used to believe
as a Patriot believes, that Americans had a force of will which precluded
their being ill used. I was wrong. Americans have lost their will. We are
a nation of demoralized lemmings. And nothing on this earth can save the
United States. Nothing. We are lost.
-
- We are seeing the beginning of the decline and fall of
a great nation. Of what was once a great society. Of strong willed, proud
people. We are now the antithesis of what we were. I mourn the loss even
now. Nothing is as is used to be. Nothing is as it should be.
-
- The stream of consciousness of this universe feels the
loss. Hears the death rattle. And it too, mourns. Who shall save us, when
we are unwilling to save ourselves?
-
- Jim Mortellaro
-
-
-
-
- Comment
- From George
- 1-20-4
-
- "The unraveling process can have many names: fragmentation,
disunification, atomization, balkanization, disintegration. Thoughtful
men and women - have looked at the battlefield from different positions.
They offer their own analyses of the causes of and remedies for the Endgame
psychology of permanent division and confrontation. But most agree about
the symptoms."
-
- Of course there is only one remedy and most refuse to
consider it or see the inevitability. When I propose the real 'endgame'
and remedy, I always get silence. They dismiss me and don't want to believe
they can't heal, cleanse or 'remedy' this mess, 'if only' the stupid majority
will cooperate with their dictums. They will believe, 'see' and understand,
someday. They won't be allowed to remain ignorant forever, as the ptb had
hoped.
-
- "Almost a hundred years after the last great immigration
wave changed the face of American society, vast numbers of Americans-including,
sadly, the best educated-are again being taught to identify themselves
with the qualifying adjectives of race, religion, ethnicity, and gender.
The idea of the melting pot is dismissed as cultural genocide, replaced
by a social worker's version of predestination. American identities state
the clerics of the dogma, are not shaped by will, choice, reason, intelligence,
and desire but by membership in groups. They are not individuals but components
of categories - And such categories they believe are destiny."
- "2002: The above redefinition of the American identity
is part of what has torn us into factions. And in that segregation we became
ripe for this further attack upon what was left of us as a people. The
War on Freedom, is a war on human rights, on personal freedom, and on a
way of life. This is the confrontation that lies beneath the power grab
by our world-dictator in waiting, Gee-Dubya Bush. As long as individuals
continue to resist this criminal behavior by this administration, there
remains some chance that reason might yet prevail, that military force
may yet be told - stand-down. So, that powerfully contrary force of the
American individual has of necessity become a major target, of the Bush
cabal, for 'elimination-with extreme prejudice.'
-
- 2004: Hardy har har! Look how we've resisted! Not at
all and the few who try are attacked and 'disappeared' into fear. Military
force was not told to 'stand down', but to crawl in on their bellies and
ride in on or in their tanks and humvee's, across and into Iraq and Afghanistan,
before Iraq. Bush didn't wait long, no, as soon as he stole office, he
planned the downfall of Saddam, the Constitution and the American people/most
sheople.
-
- 1994: "But there are additional confusions. All
the victimized ethnic categories contain men. And feminist rhetoric of
the Endgame insists that men are themselves a group of oppressors-brutal,
insensitive, selfish, murderous. Catherine MacKinnon and others use the
word men, in the same generalized blurry way that women is used. This astonishingly
broad category-men-is defined all too easily by people who believe that
the same state of victimhood is endured by the Wellesley graduate and the
woman grinding corn in the hills of Chiapas, by Billie Holliday and Katharine
Graham - the existentialist philosophers of my youth insisted that existence
preceded essence, that you were born and then you forged your identity;
the philosophers of gender and ethnicity insist that essence precedes existence."
-
- Essence does precede existence, in the mental and spiritual
realms. It's the consciousness within, not the physical body, it's genetic,
ethnic, racial programing, that is first, last and always.
-
- From Pete Mortello:
-
- "I've been active politically all my life. Beginning
as a Democrat, becoming an Independent in the late 1980s and a Republican
of late. Now, I see no value in belonging to any party. I used to believe
as a Patriot believes, that Americans had a force of will which precluded
their being ill used. I was wrong. Americans have lost their will. We are
a nation of demoralized lemmings. And nothing on this earth can save the
United States. Nothing. We are lost."
-
- I must agree.
|
