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MANUEL VALENZUELA: Land of the Puppet People

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Tace Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Feb-15-06 05:58 PM
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MANUEL VALENZUELA: Land of the Puppet People
Manuel Valenzuela -- World News Trust

American Heroin

It oftentimes boggles the mind to try and understand the ease with which the Establishment can manipulate the American citizenry into another warmongering escapade, this time an ominous foray into the Persian lands of Iran, a nation rich in history, culture, location and most importantly to the Evil Empire, oil and gas. Yet upon further inspection it is easy to comprehend this phenomenon, for we live, as Gore Vidal has labeled it, inside the United States of Amnesia, a country where all semblance of the yesterday becomes but a haze of blatant forgetfulness and convenient whitewash, a black hole of Alzheimer’s-like darkness from where no recollection of past lessons, mistakes, errors or history can be seen or touched.

We live in a nation of gluttonous stupor and comfortable surroundings, easily distracted by the cocktail of materialism that lines our homes. We are trained to live to work, not work to live, sacrificing love of life for love for the Almighty Dollar, becoming worker bees and soldier ants, selling our souls to the demons of capitalism in exchange for the happiness and stress-free lives of yesteryear, needing pharmaceutical drugs to escape the depression of our daily lives, willingly choosing to indebt our present and future in order to possess the vast array of adult toys marketed to manipulate our emotions, wrongly thinking this or that product will reincarnate lost happiness. America is the land of plenty, where waistlines expand, stress increases, mental problems grow, work hours increase and vehicles get bigger and bigger, a land addicted to the devil’s excrement, like a heroin user injecting black gold into its ever thirsty veins, becoming a violent, warmongering junkie when the perpetual case of cold turkey arises.

Never before has a society been afforded the wealth and excessiveness that we possess, yet neither has a citizenry been subjected to the consequences invariably arising in order to achieve those ends. Unhappiness, depression, financial hardship, stress, inner demons, anger, dislike, psychological problems, undisciplined and unreared children are some of the costs of maintaining our standards of living. The escapism needed to forget the madness of these costs, accumulated year after year, in daily life, work, finances and society, stands like an idol ready to be worshipped in the middle of our homes, its dark screen awakened with the push of a remote control.

It is the television, that drug of mental escapism and intellectual erosion, the invaluable purveyor of fantasy and fiction, that serves to distract, distort and alleviate the stresses of a life made exceedingly harder by the continued growth of the corporatist state, where profit will always supercede people, and the interests of the corporation will always trump those of the People. Yet, the television is the greatest tool of mass manipulation ever created, in the last few decades discovered by government and corporate interests for the incredible power emanating from its warm glow. It has transformed human society, acting as the corporate and governmental invasion of our homes, and into our brainwaves, affecting both the innocent and the old, indiscriminately penetrating the minds of black and white, male and female.

(more)

http://worldnewstrust.org/modules/AMS/article.php?storyid=2389
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slor Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Feb-15-06 06:00 PM
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1. Thanks for posting n/t
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Tace Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Feb-15-06 08:24 PM
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3. I Enjoy Valenzuela's Stuff
Cheers
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Greyhound Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Feb-15-06 06:04 PM
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2. Cool, K & R
:kick:
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Tace Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Wed Feb-15-06 09:42 PM
Response to Reply #2
4. Shameless Self-Kick
cheers
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OneBlueSky Donating Member (1000+ posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Feb-16-06 02:52 AM
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5. "Never before has a society been afforded the wealth and . . .
excessiveness that we possess" . . .

we may "possess" it, but we don't own it -- because it's mortgaged to the hilt . . . our "wealth and excessiveness" has mostly been paid for with credit, which will eventually have to be repaid . . .

what we've done is rob our future (both as a nation and as individuals) for current comfort and extravagance . . . a true recipe for disaster, imo . . .
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OutsidetheBox Donating Member (103 posts) Send PM | Profile | Ignore Thu Feb-16-06 07:27 PM
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6. Excellent read! Brings it all home, doesn't it? n/t
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