'What have they done to our dear America?'

By Dennis Rahkonen

04/13/06 "ICH" -- -- My country, 'tis of thee, bittersweet land of diminishing liberty, of thee I weep.

Clowns still toss candy to enthused, imploring children, but the passing flag in today's parades brings little sense of pride.

Faded glory? No, it's more a case of degraded, severely tarnished ideals. And hurtful shame over what we've become.

Jefferson and Paine spin in their caskets, with their agitation seismically recorded in our saddened hearts.

There are countless dead innocents in Afghanistan and Iraq who heard of 9/11 on their transistor radios -- shocked and horrified by what had happened -- who were subsequently blown to bits by American ordnance launched in misapplied "retaliation" by our morally bankrupt president.

Pieces of babies' bloodied flesh in the desert sand don't make amends for office workers buried beneath World Trade Center rubble.

Like many others driven by conscience, I attended a local peace rally on the third anniversary of America's unpardonable descent into aggressor-nation status.

While speakers addressed encircling Iraq war protesters, a solitary figure silently stood off to the side, with his black shroud starkly contrasted against a concrete wall.

That exact replication of the Abu Ghraib photograph that brought our nation such awful infamy sent a shiver through my soul.

Like the Japanese and Germans of WWII, we Americans are now recorded in history as being torturers, and keepers in cruel detention of thousands of hapless sheepherders, farmers, etc., that somebody in high authority had the judgmental myopia to deem "terrorists."

Somewhere -- in secret prisons about which we're still learning sordid, leaked details -- terrified individuals are being sadistically abused at this very moment, in violation of international law and the teachings of gentle Jesus.

Had I been told, while a ninth grade civics student in love with this country's founding precepts, that America would one day abandon its democratic legacy to become perpetrator of Nazi-like transgressions against basic human rights, and simple decency, I'd have called them insane.

But now craziness confronts us almost every day, during White House press conferences at which a slightly overweight but colossally compromised mouthpiece for George W. Bush regularly stands truth on end, performing bad magic.

It's as if we're collectively driving into permanent darkness, having passed the last chance to turn around, when we come across a tawdry motel with a marquee telling us that "Scott McClellan, Illusionist" is playing the Tiki Room.

At the antiwar demonstration I mentioned were a couple of conspicuously different attendees that experience told me were FBI agents. They were doubtlessly noting that members of Grandmothers for Peace were present. I guess it's too much to expect them to devote energy to busting organized crime or political corruption instead of adding elderly women's names to "enemies" lists.

Good night, and good luck.

A government of, by, and for the people is perishing from this earth.

It's being replaced by abject greed serving monopolized corporate and financial interests. Capitalist profiteering is all that matters now, regardless of staggeringly deleterious consequences for public welfare and the common good.

We see successive wars of gratuitous aggression, the Katrina debacle, rampant racism, an Enron-corrupt/Fear Factor depraved culture, religion reduced to a font for harsh intolerance, workingclass living standards decimated for Fat Cat gain, millions languishing without medical insurance, schools in decay, infrastructure crumbling around us, and environmental catastrophe looming nearer because irresponsible industrialists save money by permitting lethal pollution.

The entire planet, and everything the lives upon it, is jeopardized because hierarchic mammon worship trumps devotion to righteousness and wisdom in the United States at this time.

Who'd have thought that dollar signs in silk-suited men's glinting eyes would come to define our country more than the names penned in quill on the Declaration of Independence, or the populist rights embodied in our Constitution?

Back in civics class, I was deeply inspired by such concepts as checks and balances, separation of powers, a "wall" between church and state, and guaranteed personal freedom. They were electrifying notions that gave emphatic credence to American goodness and greatness.

The whole world would surely want to emulate us.

But now international public opinion despises what America represents, under rightwing, global bullying and neo-colonial ambition.

A nation born in struggle for self-determination against colonial rule has become this world's chief imperialist, thwarting the definite right of others to freely order their own affairs, without our pious, violent impositions. Will Iran be the latest to painfully experience what Iraq still endures? Will nuclear weapons be used there, with radioactive fallout killing perhaps as many as a million innocents?

How do we go about taking back our country?

Ironically, the answer can be found in the titanic street upsurge that many conservatives demagogically portray as a grave threat to America.

The battle by immigrants to enjoy inclusion in Martin Luther King's Dream -- rather than be relegated to a second-class nightmare -- is the finest, most powerful, democratic impulse this nation has recently witnessed. We need to emulate their organizing tactics, and wake another sleeping giant.

Within America's wage-earning majority, an all-for-one, one-for-all outlook can bring about remarkable results.

And, once more, give us justifiable reason for feeling genuine pride when our parading flag passes by.

Let's not surrender to the defeatism that says it can't be done.

Dennis Rahkonen, from Superior, Wisconsin, has been writing progressive commentary for various outlets since the Sixties. He can be reached at dennisr@cp.duluth.mn.us

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