Photo via Wonkette

Here we are, on the made-up PR “holiday” called Black Friday, which follows the mythopoetic holiday of Thanksgiving, where genocidal murderers are celebrated as noble survivors and their future victims as noble “savages” and brotherhood and joy filled the New World.

White America embraced Thanksgiving because a majority of that population glories in the fruits, if not the unpleasant details, of genocide and slavery and feels, on the whole, good about their heritage: a cornucopia of privilege and national power. Children are taught to identify with the good fortune of the Pilgrims. It does not much matter that the Native American and African holocausts that flowed from the feast at Plymouth are hidden from the children’s version of the story – kids learn soon enough that Indians were made scarce and Africans became enslaved. But they will also never forget the core message of the holiday: that the Pilgrims were good people, who could not have purposely set such evil in motion. Just as the first Thanksgivings marked the consolidation of the English toehold in what became the United States, the core ideological content of the holiday serves to validate all that has since occurred on these shores – a national consecration of the unspeakable, a balm and benediction for the victors, a blessing of the fruits of murder and kidnapping, and an implicit obligation to continue the seamless historical project in the present day.

Both of these fairy tales are part and parcel of a system and a culture that revels in falsehood, that finds facts and honest debate to be suspect at best, and dangerous at worst. Look at the way half the population embraced and celebrated the Bush Administration’s crimes, and now the other half celebrates their own savior. The American pendulum will swing, we are told, and any errors will be naturally righted by the good sense of the American people. It’s an almost natural system, can’t you see, that drive to find the “right” over time, because like those sainted Pilgrims, modern Americans are “good people” and will find the right path, given time.

You know the American people, those sane and pragmatic folks who swallowed the ponzi schemes of Wall Street over the years, swallowing the promises of fictional people selling fictional schemes to make fictional wealth based on nothing but lies and promises. Since our currency is based on nothing, that has made some of them incredibly wealthy. The nothing could expand and expand forever, being nothing, and as long as no one pricked the bubble of lies and PR defining it, we could all share in the “wealth”.

Of course, the ability of Americans to believe all kinds of crazy stuff isn’t unique to us. People in general, across the globe and across history, have and do believe all kinds of silliness, of both the dangerous and the benign sort. What makes us unique is the very thing that has made our polity, our economy, or government structure unique … we swallow up and fold in beliefs and credulities from all over the world and make them our own. We don’t need coherent structures to hold together our systems of beliefs, and we revel in cognitive dissonance.

So while Bush is cleaning out the national closets and selling off the china and silver … and everybody wants to think that it can be “saved” … Obama appoints more of the same crooks who helped build the collapsing bubble. Now maybe we won’t totally collapse … there is too much basic wealth and money and ‘real’ goods for that to happen quickly. It won’t be Argentina, but it could likely be Japan. Actually, we have a lot in common with the Japanese … two nations of drones beholden to exploitive “leaders” WAAAAAAAY too willing to work too hard for too little.

There is little sign that there is any leadership in the offing, as those in positions of power are just as divorced from reality as the rest of us, even the ones who are enriching themselves from the mess. The real damage spreading across the country is as unreal to them as the general populations’ understanding of how completely they’re being screwed by the very people claiming to help:

My own opinion is that the single greatest problem we now face is the gross inability of those in power to contemplate or grasp the circumstances of the rest of us. Commuting, taxes, infrastructure, education, healthcare are all developed with no eye at all to the conditions of average citizens. Lip-service is paid. Heads are noddd. Grim faces adopted. But ultimately, even the erstwhile “good guys”, like Representative Charles Rangel of New York, today identify themselves with the privileged. They certainly lead privileged lives. So, too, do the leading figures of American media.

A combination of circumstances are now making impossible the practical indifference of “leaders”. That is, leaders have been rhetorically concerned, they say the right things (to the extent needed to get reelected). But in practice they do little or nothing to alleviate the crushing burden of regular expenses — especially in housing, energy, food and healthcare — the necessities.

Moreover, they frequently let slip the near-contempt (in not outright disdain) they feel for us. Witness Charlie Rangel’s initial response when his financial and housing shenanigans were made public. He was genuinely taken aback when his own constituents bared their rage in his presense — the sign of a man long divorced from any understanding of reality.

Maybe I’m wrong, but I seriously can’t see how Obama is any different, and even if he was whether he’d be willing, able or allowed to do anything about it. Mostly, though, I think he just doesn’t get it:

The US government has systematically and profoundly failed to serve the interests of the people. I, for one, am increasingly of the view that Obama merely did a great job of paying lipservice. His choices for high-level positions — particularly the total exclusion of progressive or really liberal opinion — are entirely in keeping with the utter indifference that has characterized Washington at least since the Reagan years.

Don’t worry, though … the Congressional ballot pendulum swings back by in two years, and the Presidential one only two years after that … the “good” American people will eventually find the right path.

Keep clapping, Tinkerbell will get up any second now, and isn’t that the sound of Santa tromping across your roof?