More Like 59 Million

Amerikkkan illiteracy is NOT about Spanish speakers.
I've taught too many blond, bland Amerikkkan kids how to make change for my purchase. I've heard too many insensible, ill informed ramblings from native English speakers, seen too many Amerikkkans agog at Faux News.

No, it's about VALUES, this illiteracy problem.

It's about acquiring stuff and it's about stuff being more important than anything else in Calvinist Amerikkka, preoccupied as it is with "god's grace," meaning white, male, het, Christian values of violence, control and wealth acquisition.

It's about decades of screwing schools.

It's about millions plopping their kids in front of TV and video games rather than having a relationship with those kids, because parents are so stressed out and exhausted from their debt ridden pursuit of stuff lifestyle they don't have energy for talking to or reading to children, or understanding the world around them or learning the language of ideas.

It's about the baby sitter TV forging millions of minds who can't pay attention for more than 6 minutes at a time.

It's about denying civil rights to financially stable, committed gay couples, people who'd love to raise children and shower them with attention and love, in order to help inept boy kings like George Bush exploit the perverse imaginations of mind numbed Amerikkka to further drive a wedge into the nation, with the aim of getting in office to redistribute money from poor to rich, and always, always cut more taxes for extraordinarily wealthy people so public schools, and everything else, have fewer resources.

It's about racist disrespect and disregard for children who are not up the Calvinist standard. Hey, the genes that were smart enough to find a cure for cancer may have been lynched by Bubba and Beauregard and Trent Lott and Bill Frist generations ago, or left for dead along the stolen border of Texas.

It's the decline in the standard of living that been going on since repiglikkkan forces, resentful of The New Deal and Great Society programs, decided to bring back feudalism and wipe out the middle class and middle class values.

I love the fact that my Muslim, middle eastern, superbly kind neighbor has read more of the English literature canon, and then some, than anyone else I've met in this one horse town, and understands it, can discuss it complexly in a language he did not grow up speaking, can discuss other art, politics, science and anything else I bring up, while the self proclaimed intellectually and socially elite repiglikkkan forces I've encountered here during my exile in Bush territory, such as She Swine, can't create interesting conversation within any subject, can apparently think only in delusion and absolutes, discuss politics only after they've heard them distilled by donkey rectum Bill O'Reilly, know nothing of art and believe intelligent design is the key to understanding the universe. She Swine says thinking makes her tired and the kinds of films I like also make her tired, and she has never read a book she didn't have to read for school or work, not ever, not in her life.
And she's one of the smart ones.

She actually is "smart" which why she makes me so damn mad. She has chosen to be blind to the world. This choice makes me furious, but ultimately leaves me perversely sympathetic because I know she must be deeply damaged inside to make a choice like that, structurally weak, unable to withstand truth without being broken to bits by it.

I think this may be a native condition in many repiglikkkans, this interior weakness.

My lovely neighbor, of course, and his equally lovely wife are constant suspects because of their Arab ancestory. Amerikkka feels superior to such people, isn't sure it wants them, believes they are all killers, terrorists and ignorant son's-a-bitches.

The beauty of the ideal of America, the one I always believed in, believed in until the veil was torn from my eyes, is that this country is a vast multi-cultural wonderland, the Mecca of tolerance and truth, a place that offers opportunity to everyone, is so generous and large it can absorb and express an infinite number of ways of doing and being in and seeing the world and integrate them into itself, then pulse with the radiant creative energy of that joyful coming together. I believed America was moral, humane, truth seeking and loving, would always fight injustice and, while it had its problems, structurally sound.

But I was mistaken. America is not that.

It is George Bush; stupid and lazy and a cheat and liar, and it is She-Swine; rigid, incurious and self righteous, damaged deep down inside. It is denial of a history of genocide, slavery, racism, many, many wars of aggression and the great all-influencing vacuum of Calvinist greed....

If you ask me, this country is doomed.

It chose doom when it choose fear over understanding.
It chose doom when it chose to immerse itself in ethnocentric intolerance.
It chose doom when it chose to attack a nation that had been disarmed by a peaceful process of inspections, disarmed of weapons we sold it when we pitted it against it's neighbor, as we so often pit neighbors against each other, when it chose to believe the lies of George Bush and Condi and Rummy and the rest of the bottom of the barrel in Washington, when it chose to ignore the role Amerikkka has played in the middle east for DECADES. It chose doom when it chose to drive Chevy Suburbans and Ford Expeditions and giant pick up trucks with gun racks and pollute and degrade and waste and be the biggest resource pig in the world, starve children in Africa, irradiate them to death in Iraq, murder innocents in Latin America, oppress and murder people all over the world, hawk weapons of mass destruction like they're playing cards, yet proclaim itself morally superior and somehow special. Special indeed.