We are a blinded, despised, bamboozled people. To keep us so is the purpose and intent of the system that rules us. From its beginnings, America was a Capitalist racket run on manipulation and exploitation of its people. From Shea’s Rebellion to Citizens United it has jammed one vicious, rank perversion of justice after another down our throats. Lincoln knew better—as his letters reveal—than to laud a government of, by, and for the people.

The job of Presidents, Congress, and the nomenklatura of the Deep State has been to keep the great mass of Americans completely oblivious to the Capitalist Tyranny that owns them. Our “leaders” are trained to present a wholesome, ideal image of the nation, using the deep hunger of the ignorant and powerless to identify with a heroic, victorious force to bind their loyalty in the brazen face of their endless betrayal, feeding them poison exceptionalism instead of the nurture proper to a civilized state.

While their bought employees in elected offices composed and sang hymns of deception to the gullible people, the Capitalist oligarchs and combines devised and implemented means and methods to simultaneously steal and sell the natural bounty of the land that belongs to all for their gain, to create legal mazes to abuse, degrade and pauperize labor, and to kill its every attempt to defend itself with unified power. Labor history in America is a bitter saga of brutal repression and violent reaction by Capitalism and its legal and illegal military/police gestapos against the lives and well-being of working people. And Federal propaganda has schooled workers to bow and be grateful for it. And most are.

If that were all Capitalism had done, it would be a civilizational crime as massive as any in human history but it’s only one part, and a lesser one, of its dark and devious malignity. Beyond the crippling damage done to its own, it has enslaved and brutalized the world’s people with its raging, insatiable voracity, violated and destroyed the greater part of wild nature, and shattered whole countries of simple, peasant people with its diabolical War Machine. Perhaps as criminal as anything it has done is to have cauterized the consciences of Americans to the point that they view our rape and destruction of other peoples with indifference.

This is a short list of what the criminally deceptive dignity and decorum of our governmental process has covered. This litany of intentional, cynical evil is what generations of Presidents vetted and empowered by the Capitalist oligarchy that owns the parties have brought us. This is where those poised, genteel figureheads, from the cornfed, homespun Main Street lingo of Truman, who atomic bombed Japan, and Eisenhower, who sold us to the Military-Industrial Complex and then warned us about it, to the Oxbridge S’uthrun drawl of Clinton who oversaw the charnel house of Serbian race murder and the disease deaths of half a million Iraqi kids, and the elegant Harvard glosses and locutions of Obama, who lulled and soothed us through eight years of unrestrained mayhem and murder around the world.

So… good news? You goddam betcha! Because this sick farce, televised to the astonishment and consternation of any but the most hopeless morons, has shown by its ugliness, its vacuity, its sheer, unredeemed stupidity, the naked truth of the pit of human folly and incompetence into which American politics has sunk.

That these two contemptible specimens are standard bearers of parties jousting for our votes has ripped the decayed masks off the oligarchy and shown what a barrenly empty, dirty game American polity is, and how stupid, cowardly and false is the system and its owners, who put faith, trust, and money on these sorry, blowhard Punch and Judy puppets. And if this pageant of imbecility and buffoonery in its supreme vulgarity can awaken Americans to their reality there can be no better news than that.

Without a major revolution in this country—not minor eruptions in city streets, squares and shopping malls, which cuts no serious ice and invites its own defeat, but in the minds and hearts of Americans—this country cannot stagger on much longer before chaotic meltdown. What we still have is far too sick and rotten and moribund to continue. A new consciousness is the key to a survivable future.

The blinders are off now. The gruesome thing has shown what it is. And there are none so blind as those who will not see.

Paul Edwards is a writer and film-maker in Montana. He can be reached at: hgmnude@bresnan.net