In America, appearance is everything. Form over function in every sense of the word. Our leaders pride themselves on moral superiority, while many of them succumb to scandal. Our politicians stand for truth and justice, as more than a few spend time behind bars. Our chieftains glorify the almighty dollar, while our economy fails. America today casts a black shadow. Instead of using our vast knowledge and resources to nurture the world we once saved, our governments' policy of hypocrisy will doom it.
I often make the analogy of a "57 Chevy. Mint condition, stored for decades in someone"s garage. There's just one hitch, no engine. America today is a mirror image for this. We live in a country where images of war and death flood the screen 24 hours a day. Serial killers can become instant celebrities, with every detail of their crime plastered on the media whenever, wherever. Let one black breast stay onscreen for a few seconds however, and you'd think Lucifer himself came for a visit. Janet Jackson's faux pas at the Super Bowl became national news and debate fodder for weeks. Her career suffered, and she had to justify something she didn't have control of. Not enough of us scream about the unjust, illegal war currently going on in Iraq. We get live streaming video of the killing field that our leaders started, and that's just fine.
Another good example of current American hypocrisy is the Eliot Spitzer debacle. Eliot Spitzer is the now disgraced former governor of New York. This is a man who rose to power on the premise that he had banished prostitution from Times Square. Imagine the surprise when his Holiness was busted in connection with a $5,500 an hour call girl ring. Eliot lied to his wife, his kids, and millions of New York citizens. Elliot Ness by day, Al Capone by night. Spitzer is certainly not alone. Sex and war seem to be the popular sources for politicos these days. In the last year alone, 2 members of Congress, Mark Foley and Larry Craig both resigned because illicit sex scandals. One involved Congressional pages(Foley) and the other contained seamy male bathroom hijinx. All of these men represented the Republican party, a party married to the misguided religious right in this country. A party that campaigns repeatedly on its “seize the moral high-ground” approach to running our lives. More illustrious members of the religious right include: Jim Baker and Jimmy Swaggart. All of these men succumbed to parading around with whores at their end. I suppose the location of the moral “high ground” must be a subjective thing to our leaders after all.
Caressing forbidden flesh isn't the only hypocritical action in Washington today. Burning human flesh is just as acceptable. The Iraq war started on a lie. Both Bush and Cheney knew that the WMD stockpile Iraq supposedly had was a paper tiger. They also knew that Uranium being for sale in Niger was a ghost. Neither man cared. So, 5000 American dead later and still no weapons of anything but the improvised kind. To take the deception farther, they outted a CIA operative, Valerie Plame, who just happened to be married to one of the administration's sharpest critics, Joseph C. Wilson IV. Coincidence? I vehemently doubt it. Our leaders kill our sons and daughters for nothing more than greed. Im sure they sat in some dark situational room somewhere, and performed a cost-benefit analysis to see if destroying Iraq would be profitable for them.
The economy is yet another place where our government values appearance over function, often with disastrous results.
In the last two years, the housing market has collapsed. The sub-prime mortgage industry also exploded, compounding things. New construction starts are down 25%. One of our largest financial institutions, Bear Stearns, was just bought for 2 dollars a share, with help from our government!! All this tragedy and they still won't publicly declare a recession!! This baffles the mind. We are suffering the worst financial conditions since the Great Depression. The dollar is withering away. Instead of acknowledging the problem, our elected “leaders” hide behind facade and nuance. “Out of sight, out of mind” seems to be George W. Bush's leadership style. I guess he wont really care until the word recession is a memory. When the people seize control of Big Oil's assests to put food on American tables, then maybe he'll care.
In Conclusion, America is all about appearance. As long as it looks as though things run, they do. Unfortunately, this is never the case. Oftentimes it is the opposite. Instead of facing the tough issues of the day, our leaders settle for the inane. For example, with all the decay and corruption in Washington, the best our congress can do is investigate whether steroids exist in baseball. Baseball is a game! What about our vanishing economy? What about my home state's foreclosure rate up 90% over last year? Apparently as long as they look like their doing something our illustrious leaders must be indeed doing something. Whatever that something is, its certainly not helping us, the American people.
