Well, as a baby boomer who has seen lots of instances of the empire using MY flag as their own private property, this newest one ‘takes the cake’. I mean, my generation went through the whole ‘America, love it or leave it’ rhetoric during the Vietnam debacle. Many of us, either old or new to activism just tossed that aside as Bullshit! Yet, a majority of my friends and neighbors unfortunately bought into the hype and spin that the flag, and our national anthem, were to be sacrosanct… beyond reproach.
Many anti war demonstrations actually had our flag burned, which this writer did disagree with as a tactic of protest. The more powerful and thought provoking protest was to turn the flag upside down to reveal the upside down manner of this empire. As with Alice in Wonderland, the opposite was usually correct in most instances. How it sickened me and many others when we turned on the boob tube to watch Bob Hope entertaining our soldiers in the Nam… as if this was WW2 all over again.
In Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) he has that scene, reminiscent of those Bob Hope ‘ visiting the troops with lots of tits and ass’, which revealed the perverted sense of what phony wars do to the soldiers.
Ever since the Cheney/Bush gang (yes, we who ‘knew better’ realized that Cheney was the controller and Junior the ‘idiot emperor’ with no clothes) lied and deceived us into this new ‘War on Terror’ , they held our flag hostage.
They had the suckers, saps and lollipops hang it over garage doors in my neighborhood, or on their cars and trucks (lots of pickups in Bushland), making it the phony symbol of patriotism. How many dead or wounded for life soldiers, and how many of the same, by a factor of 10times, Iraqi and Afghan civilians before our foolish neighbors realized the truth? Sadly, most of them never did! Thus, this phony ‘War of Terror’ goes on and on, always with new and more dangerous enemies… as THEIR flag waves on. This empire is so ‘smoothly diabolical’.
This coming July 4th, one again celebrating our ‘independence’ from Britain, is really counterfeit on many fronts. Researchers like Dean Henderson (whom I interviewed last week) can give interesting and concise accounts of how our nation never was freed from the influence of England and its infamous ‘City of London’, which together with Wall Street constitutes the banking bandit center of the world. His The Federal Reserve Cartel (2014) covers most of this information.
The second counterfeit point is that the celebration of not only our flag but our military in this current climate of empire is actually unpatriotic! No, to really celebrate our great flag and our military is to have this empire pulled back and save our nation from the fiscal and moral bankruptcy that is approaching.
To paraphrase the great Malcolm X, from one of his fine speeches, many of my good and decent friends and neighbors have been “bamboozled, conned and lead astray!” A true ‘Independence Day’ would be a great awakening from the greedy and evil ones who run this empire.. and the many who serve it!
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Philip A Farruggio is a son and grandson of Brooklyn , NYC longshoremen. He has been a free lance columnist since 2001, with over 400 of his work posted on sites like Global Research, Greanville Post, Off Guardian, Consortium News, Information Clearing House, Nation of Change, World News Trust, Op Ed News, Dissident Voice, Activist Post, Sleuth Journal, Truthout and many others. His blog can be read in full on World News Trust., whereupon he writes a great deal on the need to cut military spending drastically and send the savings back to save our cities. Philip has a internet interview show, ‘It’s the Empire… Stupid’ with producer Chuck Gregory, and can be reached at [email protected].
