The Garden Path, page 1

All of our lives we’ve been fed lies, comforting and satisfying lies that we must never question. Anyone who refuses to accept the conventional wisdom will be shouted down and stifled by those who have developed a taste for sweet lies.

America, land of the free, home of the brave. Yes, there are plenty of people who still believe that story and will slap you silly (verbally at least) if you contradict them with facts.

The flag still stands for freedom and they can’t take that away. Except for the fact that so many freedoms people once took for granted have already been legislated and litigated away and what’s left is going fast.

We once had a very unCivil War, allegedly to free a lot of slaves, directly followed by the 14th Amendment, which re-enslaved the former slaves as well as everyone else living in the states on the newly chartered federal plantation. Sure that war was a bloody mess of Americans killing Americans, but Americans will tell you that we had to free those poor slaves, never noticing the velvet chains on their own wrists. So Lincoln’s decision to continue printing debt free national currency after the war ended with his assassination and the greenbacks in circulation were immediately recalled. But Americans blithely went on believing that they, and not the London bankers, won that war. Many still believe in that happy ending.

We had the Gay 90’s and the Roaring 20’s when easy money flowed like good wine and people reveled in the promise of a great future, directly followed in 1929 by the biggest stock market crash ever known to man, when the staunchest of believers and duped investors jumped off bridges and hung themselves in their barns becauswe they had stopped believing the lies.

We had WWI, which was the opening salvo in the absolute ruin of the Republic, giving rise to corporatism and fascism. On April 4, 1917 Sen. Robert La Follette, one of the leading opponents of U.S. participation in World War I, gave a speech on the Senate floor saying that he saw the war largely as “a scheme to bring more money and power to corporate interests.” www.wisconsinhistory.org...

Many others agreed with La Follette, probably the most well known is Charles Lindbergh, but the decriers were all summarily denounced as traitors, ostracized by their peers, shouted down and ridiculed by the media. And today people say, well sure it was a bloody mess, but those anti-war guys had it all wrong because it had to be done, even though it settled nothing and perfectly set the stage for the rise of the third Reich and WWII.

We got the Federal Reserve Act, which guaranteed to prevent all future booms and busts of the US economy. And today people say well yeah, maybe it didn’t work out as advertised, but we’ve still got our treasured (not treasury) dollars. Never mind that their worth has diminished 97% since that infamous Act was passed.

We got the internal revenuers, too, which over the following decades incrementally transferred more of the vast intrinsic wealth of the nation into the hands of the banking families in exchange for green pieces of paper. And today people still say, but we have to pay for all these wars and the sewers and see how much our taxes help the poor people, they’d starve if not for taxes. Meanwhile those who have told us the ugly truth about our “generosity” and “good heartedness” are excoriated and denounced and driven out of office like former representative Paul Findley, or railroaded into prison like former representative George Hanson and former representative James Traficant.

But we fought the good fight in WWII, didn’t we? The “good war”, the “war to end all wars”, which, of course wasn’t good at all and certainly didn’t end war, but instead managed to set the world up for interminable death by war and poverty on a breathtaking scale, along with even deeper indebtedness to international financiers. But many people still believe it was, in fact, a “good” war and that there was no other alternative, even though no alternative was offered besides boycotts and bombs.

We also had a cold war, which turned out to be more of a war of words than anything, but it sure frightened people into giving up more of their freedoms. Of course no freedom is too great to give up when experts start waving around words like “nuclear holocaust” and “mutually assured destruction.” And people today still believe the Russians were crazy enough to guarantee their own destruction by shipping a nuke toward the US, despite the fact that they did not.

Then fast forward to the ultimate “tearing down of that wall” when speculators literally popped out of the Russian woodwork and pounced on every remaining valuable asset for pennies on a dollar. And does anybody remember that “peace dividend” we were promised when the wall came down? No? Well that never materialized either, except as deposits and interest payments into the bank accounts of increasingly grasping international financiers. But apparently everyone fell asleep after we “won” that little skirmish and forgot about any dividend that might be forthcoming for the taxpayers. Sure sounded good when Ronnie promised us it was coming, though, didn’t it? And the US is well on its way to experiencing the tearing down of our own walls by the same mental midgets who caused Russia’s downfall.

We had all those frightful terrorist women and children who needed to be burned to death in a church. But of course we were told it was that crazy Koresh guy who killed them all by proxy. Janet said so, so not knowing what else to do, people nodded their heads in perplexed approval. And swiftly forgot all about it.

Another young mother was so dangerous to national security that she had to be shot out from under her baby daughter. The agents responsible for killing her, along with her 14 year old son and their dog were given cash bonuses and promotions for their “exemplary service to America”. Ruh roh.

In 1998 in Oklahoma, a bomb blast from a truck parked outside of a building blew the windows and doors out into the street. Wait, what? www.okcbombing.net...

On September 11, 2001 terrorists carried out the explicit desires of PNAC for a second Pearl Harbor, almost as if they were following a script, which granted the military industrial complex carte blanche to invade the very countries PNAC had painted targets on years earlier. Government experts, who on any given day cannot find their $#$eS with both hands and a flashlight, knew within hours exactly who did it, how they did it and why they did it, while those same experts can’t figure out, after long months of investigation, who was behind Fast and Furious. And yeah, people believe both stories.

So much of what we are told, even as we watch history unfolding on our tv screens, turns out to be a perversion of what really happened. So much so that concluding that the opposite version may be closer to the truth has almost become the default position for thinking people.

But the flowers are lovely along the garden path.

And that barely scratches the surface. Please feel free to scratch it some more.