Joseph Marohl

Twelve years ago, Ralph Peters wrote, “Contemporary American culture is the most powerful in history, and the most destructive of competitor cultures [called elsewhere “noncompetitive cultures, such as that of Arabo-Persian Islam or the rejectionist segment of our own population”—emphasis mine].

Peters, now retired from the U.S. Army as Lieutenant Colonel, writes novels (under his own name and the pen name Owen Parry), essays, and newspaper columns.

In the same article, Peters cites celebrities like Bill Gates, Madonna, and Steven Spielberg and television programs like Dynasty, Dallas, and Baywatch for inciting international unrest by purveying “America’s irresponsible fantasies of itself … a devilishly enchanting, bluntly sexual, terrifying world” from which the normal Third-World citizen is barred.

But Col. Peters is not altogether hostile to this devilish enchantment. For most of the article, he praises American mass media—particularly action movies—as effective in quashing ideologies (inside and outside the U.S.A.) that resist exploitation by American-style corporate capitalism.

“The genius, the secret weapon, of American culture,” he says, “is the essence that the elites despise: ours is the first genuine people’s culture. It stresses comfort and convenience—ease—and it generates pleasure for the masses. We are Karl Marx’s dream, and his nightmare.”

I might add that we are also Aldous Huxley’s nightmare in Brave New World—a culture titillated by “feelies” while rejecting actual sex and turning human reproduction into technology … for profit. A populace enslaved and intellectually enfeebled by its gadgets and incapacity for the independent thought and effective cooperation needed to resist its masters.

He continues, making a point that Noam Chomsky (on the other end of the sociopolitical spectrum) agrees with: that current labor practices exhaust workers, leaving them fatigued and incapable of research into and critical thinking about current events—thus the average worker is drawn to the seductive fantasies of mass entertainment, an American specialty.

He says, “Secular and religious revolutionaries in our century have made [a] mistake, imagining that the workers of the world or the faithful just can’t wait to go home at night to study Marx or the Koran. Well, Joe Sixpack, Ivan Tipichni, and Ali Quat would rather ‘Baywatch.’ America has figured it out, and we are brilliant at operationalizing our knowledge, and our cultural power will hinder even those cultures we do not undermine.” [Emphasis mine.]

Unsurprisingly, Col. Peters is taken less with Madonna’s “irresponsibly” open and assertive sexuality or the independent, neorealist stories of struggling masses or hapless individuals than with Hollywood summer blockbusters: “The films most despised by the intellectual elite—those that feature extreme violence and to-the-victors-the-spoils sex—are our most popular cultural weapon, bought or bootlegged nearly everywhere.”

Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Chuck Norris are, for Col. Peters, America’s answer to Tokyo Rose, Axis Sally, and Hanoi Hannah. Violence becomes the working man’s alternative to thinking about the information so readily at his fingertips—and his only tool in dealing with the reality of rising unemployment and poverty: “As more and more human beings are overwhelmed by information, or dispossessed by the effects of information-based technologies, there will be more violence.”

As highly individualistic, vigilante-style heroes begin to dominate the world’s imagination, Peters (rightly) predicts, nationalism will fail and terrorism will rise:

“We will see countries and continents divide between rich and poor in a reversal of 20th-century economic trends. Developing countries will not be able to depend on physical production industries, because there will always be another country willing to work cheaper. The have-nots will hate and strive to attack the haves.

“… Beyond traditional crime, terrorism will be the most common form of violence, but transnational criminality, civil strife, secessions, border conflicts, and conventional wars will continue to plague the world, albeit with the ‘lesser’ conflicts statistically dominant. In defense of its interests, its citizens, its allies, or its clients, the United States will be required to intervene in some of these contests. We will win militarily whenever we have the guts for it.

“… The de facto role of the US armed forces will be to keep the world safe for our economy and open to our cultural assault.” [Emphases mine.]

No wonder, then, that the attacks on September 11, 2001, so closely resembled—in their gaudy visual spectacle—a Roland Emmerich or Michael Bay film. No wonder, then, that the shock-and-awe bombings of Baghdad looked like a video game. No wonder, then, that President Bush found it expedient to dress up like a Top Gun cadet to boast about the U.S. victories in the Middle East.

But what do we do when the mass entertainments and independent (non-embedded) investigative reporters begin to sway in another direction—away from grandiloquent, corporate-inspired logos on the evening news (so effectively lampooned on The Daily Show and The Colbert Report), and away from multimillion-dollar spectacles of computer-generated stunt work and testosterone-fueled explosions?

What happens when new, inexpensive computer and recording technologies make it possible for Joe Sixpack, Ivan Tipichni, and Ali Quat [the stereotypes Peters so arrogantly calls on to denigrate working classes and “noncompetitive” have-nots] to make their own documentaries and narrative films—telling their own stories, not just the propagandistic fantasies of corporate-owned, corporate-controlled, and corporate-idolizing mass media?

What happens when blogging and YouTube allow unsponsored, not-for-profit expressions and analyses of current events? What happens if and when the public wants to see more humane, empathetic, and cooperative images of American life?

Writing in the Spring 2009 Journal of International Security Affairs, Col. Peters complains that, once undefeatable, we Americans no longer have the guts for military victories to ensure the success of our economic interests and “cultural assaults.”

For this, he apportions blame everywhere from “academic theorists” to the end of the military draft to atheism to fewer bloody noses in school playgrounds, jaundicing America’s backbone. Further, we have “cheapened” our respect for war itself—“our enemies view the home front as our weak flank.”

But the worst thing of all, he says, is the “killers without guns”: “There will always be a hostile third party in the fight, but one which we not only refrain from attacking but are hesitant to annoy: the media.”

So however bloodthirsty American media make us citizens of the world and however much their airbrushed images of wealth and glamour make us dissatisfied with our ordinary lives, pushing us to terror and despair, there are chinks in the empire’s best secret weapon!

What’s a good neocon militarist to do?

Col. Peters strongly implies a solution: “Win. In warfare, nothing else matters. If you cannot win clean, win dirty. But win.”

But, first, let’s kill the independent media … literally: “Although it seems unthinkable now, future wars may require censorship, news blackouts and, ultimately, military attacks on the partisan media.” [Emphasis mine.]

Given his uncanny (no, “creepy”) foresight twelve years ago, Col. Peters’ new report raises chilling prospects for American democracy in 2013 … if not sooner. A “democratic” nation that declares war on its “partisan media”! —By which, no doubt, Peters does not mean Fox News, CNN, or PBS, on which he regularly appears as an expert on military and cultural affairs.

And, as Jeremy Scahill reminds us, 189 journalists have been killed while on duty covering the Iraq war alone—at least 16 of which killed by U.S. forces.

But it looks like Peters, at least, is already thinking the “unthinkable.”

Joseph Marohl

Narcissism is a personality disorder characterized by grandiose posturing to disguise a weak self-esteem. Narcissists exhibit the following symptoms:

• thinking they are superior to other people
• assuming that others ought to automatically go along with their schemes
• believing they are exceptions to rules
• exaggerating their accomplishments and abilities
• expecting approval, never accepting blame
• failing in relationships
• ignoring feelings, needs, and values other than their own
• indulging in fantasies of their importance, power, and irresistibility
• insulting those whom they think are inferior, but overly sensitive to others’ criticism
• resenting others’ good fortune or success, but assuming that others envy them
• setting impossible standards and goals
• taking advantage of others’ good nature, weakness, or gullibility
• wearing a mask of toughness, coolness, or emotional detachment

If these sound familiar, the reason is that we Americans are a nation of narcissists. Yes, this is me in my apocalyptic mode. Sorry.

Not that there’s anything wrong with healthy self-esteem. But narcissism has nothing to do with healthy self-esteem, which is generous, cooperative, egalitarian, and not easily threatened or insulted; in fact, the two conditions are opposites. Narcissism is the exaggerated pretense of self-esteem to hide insecurity, guilt, anxiety, inner conflict, and fear. Narcissism is a mental illness.

We Americans chant, “We’re Number One!” because we feel like number two, a feeling that has escalated since World War Two. Our victory over fascism was indeed cause for celebration—but the Holocaust is a painful reminder of how long we dawdled before reaching out to help other people in desperate circumstances (our allies, no less), and the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is a reminder that we created a weapon with the potential for global destruction and our responses to aggression are not always proportionate.

What is more, we perhaps sense that the racism, lust for power, and exaltation of the will we saw in our enemies cut close to the bone of our own disposition.

Especially after the first war with Iraq, we Americans demonize France because, as a people and a government, the French have not been prone to jump when we say jump. Also, America and France are a case of competing narcissisms. France, after all, gives us the word “chauvinism.” Each nation is attracted and repelled by what it sees in the mirror posed by the other.

We Americans are blasé about accusations that we practice torture, imperialism, and unfair competition because, in general, we do not feel bound by the same rules and standards by which we judge other nations and governments.

We Americans go around the world tooting our own horn and wonder why the world doesn’t still give us a six-gun salute for saving its ass in 1945.

We Americans break our pacts and treaties—with the Indians who were on this continent before there even was an “America,” and with the rest of the world, too: Kyoto, Geneva, Vienna, the Platt Amendment, and so on. We imagine that our breaches of trust are rationally, perhaps even humanitarianly motivated, but we seldom offer evidence to back up our assumption that America is and ought to be an exception to the rule—even to rules we strong-arm others to follow.

Our mass entertainments—spectacular epics patterned on those of pre-WW2 Italy and Germany, not to mention imperial Rome—reveal the splendor and decadence of our self-imagination. Their manic yet phony optimism—glamor, happy endings, superimposed laugh tracks, bling, breathless color commentary—belie a fragile ego propping itself up with fantasies of exaggerated muscle, control, and allure.

We are easily impressed with the fantastic and the pretentious. We tend to under-value simple realism in film, art, and literature, perhaps because we desperately want to escape reality.

Likewise, we under-value character in favor of image. Where once we spoke of renaissance and revival, we now speak of makeovers.

If all this sounds like unfair America-bashing, keep in mind that I’m an American too, likewise subject to the nation’s cultural flaws and neuroses. But I think it’s time we seek help. We can’t expect others to stage an intervention because, despite recent calamities, we are still dauntingly powerful and, besides, many of those in a position to diagnose our mental illness look forward to the entertaining spectacle of our imminent nervous collapse.

Already, it’s been a pretty fascinating show—what with Bush dressing up as cowboys and fighter pilots, Obama clinging (like Bush) to the unconstitutional notion that the Presidency is somehow exempt from the nation’s laws against surveillance without judicial oversight, throngs of thousands protesting not so much for the moral wellbeing of the nation but for their own piece of the pie, corporations deemed “too big to fail” receiving massive aid even while persisting in snuffing out the little guys (not excepting even their employees), and frightened and superstitious bigots demanding that rights and legal privileges be retained by them and those like them—all accompanied by maudlin tears, hymns to liberty and hope and democracy, state-of-the-art production value and special effects, the waving of flags, and the thumping of sacred texts.

America is a nation of narcissists—alienated in our cubicles, gated communities, and narrow beliefs and cocooned in our thousand-dollar entertainment systems and the reverberations of deafening ghetto blasters. As a people, we have been practicing “social distancing” long before H1N1.

Thus, we are less capable of seeing and defending the common good (what is generally good for everybody). Many of us (though, thankfully, not all, perhaps not even a majority) have lost the ability to make sacrifices for the good of the collective whole.

Many of us have lost the ability to argue an issue without stooping to ridicule, name-calling, emotional acting-out, even acts of violence. We respond to criticism as if it were an attack. We respond to lack of conformity as if it were criticism.

We teach our children pride and entitlement, but not math, science, history, arts, logic, manners, and languages (not even an adequate grasp of the one language they do know)—thus equipping them with plenty of self-esteem, but few tools for achieving actual excellence.

We claim to be moral and religious, but most of what we know and feel is simple human prejudices, some of which are not even addressed in our sacred texts. We condone torture but condemn cleavage on TV. What the fuck?

We are a sick culture, and we have, in our century of power, infected the world with our sickness. We are on the verge of collapse. Right now the collapse looks inevitable. If and when it comes, we will need to be a people strong in character and honest, healthy self-esteem. We have mismanaged our wealth and power and moral high ground—and now, with these lost or steeply declining, we appear ill equipped to face the challenges that lie before us.

Right now, our best hope seems to be that collapse will be an impetus for the growth of character, integrity, and human decency.

What do we say to the collapse, any minute now, of a 400-year-old culture built on genocide, slavery, and the polarization of wealth and sustained by hypocritical fanfare about rugged individualism?

To quote a recent notably arrogant and narcissistic world leader, “Bring it on.”

Russell Means

(Original Video Blog) As we all sit awestruck in front of the television, the computer, or the newspaper, Mr. Means offers us a solution to the current Global calamity. In his own beautifully articulated words, Mr. Means, explains both how the World got into this mess and how we can move back towards sanity and wholeness. We must, as he says, return to Matriarchy, a balance, respectful way of life where we celebrate our differences, rather than stifle, or even, destroy them.

Allison Bricker

During the remaining weeks of 2008 amidst the front page news about the worsening economic situation and the ever growing line of companies looking to stick their faux-Capitalist hands into the T.A.R.P. money, what seemed to be a sudden rash of violent crimes perpetrated against the queer community, commonly abbreviated as LGBT, began to make headlines.

• In San Francisco on December 12th, a woman was brutally gang raped by four men and left naked in the street. News reports stated, that the two adults and two teens began approaching her shouting anti-gay epithets after spotting the rainbow flag sticker on her car.¹




• In Memphis on December 23rd, a transsexual prostitute was shot at point bank range in the face and critically wounded as she attempted to exit the vehicle of her john. She is currently in critical condition.²




• In Indianapolis on December 26th, a transwoman and her partner were shot to death in their home while they slept. Police reports indicate that after several internet chats with the suspect in custody, he was invited over to the couple’s home for an as of yet undisclosed reason.³




• In New Orleans on December 29th, two men and a transgendered individual all originally from Mississippi were gunned down in their 7th Ward home by several suspects which police have thus far been unable to apprehend.⁴

The aforementioned crimes are each horrific for the utter disregard for human life and liberty. Moreover, these perpetrators all need to be held accountable for their crimes, and thus brought to justice by law enforcement. However, adding insult to injury of these horrific crimes, are those charlatans, hacks, and shills who claim to be LGBT activists and allies solely seeking to push their political agenda and their own self-aggrandizing interest by calling for additional “Hate” crime legislation.

It has been ten years since Matthew Shepard was beaten, tied to a fence, and left to die in rural Wyoming. Since then thirty-two states have added penalties for crimes motivated by sexual orientation and eleven of the thirty-two have also added criminal penalties for crimes motivated by a person’s gender-identity. Yet in California alone which has had a statute regarding crimes motivated by a sexual-orientation since 1989, crimes against homosexuals have increased 680% over the last ten years.⁵

It is obvious, that these legislatively granted protections do little to nothing in keeping us safer from those biased against us anymore so than the death penalty has prevented murder in general. Furthermore, as a lesbian, can someone please tell me how the gang rape of of a straight woman would be somehow less traumatic to her simply due to her sexuality not being a factor? It is a brutal crime regardless of motivation as are all crimes committed against another person.

Additionally, words on paper offer absolutely no protection to the victim during the actual commission of the crime. While concurrently, our over worked and underpaid law enforcement officers more often show up after the fact to begin the investigation, take statements, and pursue the suspect or suspects.

This violence is indeed a hateful act, but it is a hateful act regardless of motivation. Victims of crimes are individuals, they have a name, a family, a life. The crime is committed against them, not the loose collective of which they share some character trait. Furthermore, and most importantly, Americans already have the best defense against becoming a victim of a violent crime. This ability is not granted by law, it is ours from the moment we are born; our inherent right to self-defense. There is an immutable truth to the statement, “Armed Gays Don’t Get Bashed”. Moreover, armed individuals don’t get bashed.

Yet socialists and the media have done their best to make us fear guns and to label self-defense as an untenable option, again solely for their political agenda. A study conducted by the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy subsequently published in the New York Times⁶, showed that higher gun ownership in European countries equated to far lower rates of violent crimes. Secondly, ask yourself this, when was the last time you heard of someone attempting to shoot up a gun show. Fact is random mass shootings are always perpetrated against populations known to be completely disarmed such as in a school.

It baffles my mind, why those of us who do indeed find kinship within the LGBT community would turn to the state for our protection? The state; the same entity with such a long history of egregious crimes against us that after years of beatings, imprisonment, harassment, and draconian confinement in mental institutions led to the community rising up in the Stonewall⁷ and Compton Cafeteria Riots⁸. Yet now we turn to this same entity and beg like chattle for protection from their snake-oil pens and empty promises?

Source(s): ¹Daily News “Arrests made in gang rape of San Francisco lesbian” • ² ABC News 27 – Memphis “Transgendered Woman Shot in the Face” • ³ Bilerico “Transwoman and Her Boyfriend Murdered in Indianapolis” • ⁴ Out In New Orleans “Three Black Gay Men Murdered in New Orleans, Police Hunt for Suspects” • ⁵ Hate Crimes in California – 2007 • ⁶ Harvard Journal of Law and Public Police/New York Times “Murder and Guns” • ⁷ Stonewall and Byond: Lesbian and Gay Culture • ⁸ Screaming Queens – The Riot at Compton’s Cafeteria