Editor’s Note: This is the first in a three part series on the death of the American Dream and the one last chance we have to save it.

Part II: The Early Days of the Internet – What Went Wrong

Part III: Government Regulations and Objective Journalism Redefined

Part I: Death of an Empire –

Q Takes the Capitol, a New American Journal graphic by artist Walter Simon, depicts this golden calf of the Shaman of Qanon in his bison horn headdress, flying a flag with the slogan, “Quo unus nostrum it, eo universi imus.” The saying is inspired by the coming of age at sea saga “White Squall” using a lame slogan from the Albatross ship’s bell, “Where we go one, we go all.”

“There are a lot of ways to practice the art of journalism, and one of them is to use your art like a hammer to destroy the right people — who are almost always your enemies, for one reason or another, and who usually deserve to be crippled, because they are wrong.”
– Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72

By Glynn Wilson –

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — The snow flakes are coming down thick and hard as I work on the third cup of coffee and finish reading The New York Times’ first draft of history on Trump’s Campaign to Subvert the Election. For good or ill, the snow is not sticking, since it’s 34 degrees outside.

We could use another couple of days snowed in with a fully stocked bar and a fridge full of food, although the green is running low and we could benefit from another trip to the nearby Fellini Kroger for brown sugar, half and half, bananas and another six pack or two.

The Times‘ piece is a pretty good summary of 77 days of sheer corruption, an attempt to unravel a riddle wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma — a bold, brash plan to steal an election by accusing the other side of bald-faced larceny. It’s something the American elite readers who can afford to pay for the Times‘ capitalist pay wall can consume in a few minutes and feel good about themselves again, now that the most dangerous insurrection against our particular take on a democratic republic form of government has been foiled, at least for now.

The Trump Insurrection on American Democracy, which started during his campaign for president and culminated in the violent attack on the U.S. Capitol Jan. 6, was a war fueled by Russian rubles and hacking and white man’s greed. The British came the closest to destroying the experiment prior to Trump, when they burned the White House in 1814. That was 31 years after the United States declared victory in 1783, when Congress ratified the Anglo-American Preliminary Peace treaty that ended the American War of Independence.

Many a historian will benefit from this first take on the story by The Times, and have long careers with tenure at what’s left of American universities after COVID renders them nearly obsolete by retelling it in great depth. It’s not exactly George Washington chopping down the cherry tree or Honest Abe Lincoln returning the penny. It is a story in a long line of them going all the way back to 1861 when the South seceded from the Union. It will live on in the same way when National Park Service rangers tell the story on the National Mall or on the Capitol steps, that is if tourists are allowed back in to visit the nation’s capital ever again what with all the new barricades and fencing installed too late to stop the Capitol insurrection.

Like everything else Trump said in his time in the spotlight, his campaign slogan — totally a ripoff of Ronald Reagan, “Make America Great Again” — turned out to be the opposite of the truth. It’s highly likely that what he did to this country will bring the downfall of the American Empire, and finally fulfill the prediction of the writer Hunter S. Thompson back when he thought Nixon’s tenure in the White House killed the American Dream once and for all.

An apology is in order if I seem a tad cynical this morning. I’ve spent the past couple of weeks reading previous stories about the death of the American Dream by writers who seemed to know what they were talking about. I’m finding it a bit hard to work myself up into a lather over an argument that it can be saved, again. But I will rally and try. Because you, the American people, deserve no less.

I won’t bore you with all the details or the links at this time. It’s a complicated story and we just need to focus on the big picture here. But there are some pretty serious scholars out there now reporting that Trump’s tenure in the Oval Office — and especially the lie that lives on in its aftermath in the minds of a third or more of Americans — spells the final doom of the experiment. They say China will take over as the world’s greatest Super Power in 10 years or less. Considering the rate of data mining of our DNA by the Chinese, it could be sooner rather than later (see CBS’s “60 Minutes”).

The American Empire is done, caput, over they say, like the last days of Rome, and there is not a damn thing we can do about it but drink heavily and smoke ourselves into a stupor and have fun at the final party. We can all mark the end of this world by producing our own videos on Facebook live, I suppose, if that’s any consolation. Of course we are still stuck at home having a virtual party, unless you are as idiotic as a Trump supporter willing to breath in the novel coronavirus in a crowd of dumb ass rednecks who actually believe Jesus will save them if they come down with COVID.

Survival of the fittest really is survival of the smartest in these insane times. Darwin had it right all those years ago. He just never imagined that human evolution and natural selection could happen in real time right before our very eyes live on CNN, as a microscopic virus weeds out the wheat from the chaff. There are still way too many stupid people on the planet, so the virus is not done yet. The experts tell us it is mutating in ways that may thwart the vaccine.

Will this be our asteroid, like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs? The coronavirus plus all the impacts of climate change just might do us in, and leave what’s left to the ants, the cockroaches and the mosquitoes. We can’t get back to the Moon and land on Mars fast enough.

Let’s Change the Narrative

Now I don’t have a lot of hope that the story I’m about to tell will make any difference. But to switch gears and try one more time to change the narrative — if I can find a law firm willing to take the case — we might give this a college try.

One thing I’ve learned in my 40 years of studying communications and practicing journalism is that very few people actually search out and listen to the real story. It’s far easier to sit back and watch it all go by on a television screen and live inside a myth and believe a fairy tale than to face the horrible truth of malevolent reality. Fifth grade level clickbait including a wild conspiracy theory will trump reality every time in popularity on social media.

But what the hell? It seems to be our charge to tilt and rage at this particular windmill, like many who came before, from Don Quixote to Thomas Paine, Henry David Thoreau and John Muir. John Steinbeck traveled all over the country with his dog Charlie in an attempt to find America, and Hunter S. Thompson wrote about the death of the dream high on LSD and rum in the days of violence in the Nixon years, when the Vietnam War had the White House and Capitol surrounded by hippies, and rock ‘n’ roll was new.

In the early days of the internet, other writers tried to document the death of the American Dream, perhaps most notably Matt Taibbi, who inherited Thompson’s seat on the National Affairs Desk at Rolling Stone magazine. He brought the Bush and Obama bank bailouts to life in the era of Occupy Wall Street. But he was ill-equipped to deal with the rise of the tea party in the Republican Party and the loss Bernie Sanders suffered in the Democratic primaries of 2016, so he seems to have wandered off onto Twitter and a little-watched podcast where they seem to drool and blather on about the death of American Democracy at the hand of Trump and his insurrectionists. Watch if you must. I can’t do it. It’s just too depressing and sad that it has come to this. Telling a story in 144 characters, and podcasting?

Fuck that. Writers write for readers, not for those who have to have it fed to them through a tube.

Sorry to say this Democrats, but those in the know on the left, the real democratic socialists, realize that the job ahead may be way too much for Joe Biden to handle, although we are going to give it a chance for a little while anyway. He’s got some good people working for him, and his administration will accomplish some of what we need in the short-term with executive action. But let’s face facts. The tea party Republicans, now the Trump Republicans, still hold the filibuster power in Congress, even though Mitch McConnell can’t set the agenda anymore. They are not going to vote to impeach the 45th president and prevent him from running for office again, which means we will still be dealing with his 2024 election campaign for another four years. And like his critics say, Biden may just be too old and white and stuck in the mainstream American past, back in the 20th century when the mass circulation daily newspaper was profit king and television news was considered a loss leader by the news corporations in New York.

It’s a pretty fantasy to hope that we can turn things around and be great again, to the extent we ever really were beyond the fairy tale. That’s what fired up Trump’s people anyway. They love a fairy tale. But the very idea of “unity?” Now? It’s not even worth kidding about.

I’m afraid the stink of death is just too great in those hallowed halls of the House and Senate now, pissed on by the golden calf Shaman of Qanon in his bison horn headdress, flying a flag with the slogan, “Quo unus nostrum it, eo universi imus.” That’s right, the stoned teenaged boys inspired by the coming of age at sea saga “White Squall” carry the day now, using a lame slogan from the Albatross ship’s bell, “Where we go one, we go all.”

Q, a New American Journal graphic by artist Walter Simon, depicts this golden calf of a Shaman of Qanon in his bison horn headdress, flying a flag with the slogan, “Quo unus nostrum it, eo universi imus.” The slogan is inspired by the coming of age at sea saga “White Squall” using a lame slogan from the Albatross ship’s bell, “Where we go one, we go all.”

So we all go to hell, then, and call it heaven? That’s what they want to replace the Statue of Freedom on the Capitol? Really? We may as well elect Fred Flintstone as Grand Poobah and curl up in a ball in front of the cartoons and wait for orders from Bejing.

Unfortunately, attempting to construct a new myth out of this apocalypse may be just too great a feat, even by the greatest experts in marketing ever to come out of Hollywood and Silicon Valley. Steve Bannon and Ridley Scott have them all stumped.

But I am willing to try, one more time. And as I’ve been saying for several years now, if we can find a creative law firm willing to file the complaint, we will start to get this truth out by suing Google and bringing this story to light. Dedicated readers are just going to have to suspend disbelief for a little while and hear me out. For once a story gets framed incorrectly, it is nearly impossible to go back and fix it in the public mind.

Walter Lippmann knew this in 1925 when he wrote his book The Phantom Public, in which he expressed his lack of faith in the democratic system by arguing that the “mass public” exists merely as an illusion, a myth, and inevitably a phantom, only three years after writing Public Opinion, which had a more hopeful take on the ability of the great American daily newspaper to act as the vehicle to educate the masses to be good citizens in a fully functioning democratic society. He talked of “pictures in our heads” as how people think about reality and try to understand it.

Trump painted our new picture with gold mud and orange crayons, potentially polluting the picture forever.

Example: From 9/11 to the Iraq War

An example of how a badly framed story can take hold of the public imagination is in order to demonstrate what I mean before I lay out the details of the case against Google. While I’ve already been branded as a conspiracy theorist by a few morons on Facebook who think they know more about this story than I do, simply for trying to set the record straight, let me assure you that there is no conspiracy theory here.

There is a theory, however, an academic theory, about the role scientifically objective journalism could play in perpetrating a story like saving American Democracy and human life on Earth.

For starters, and to demonstrate what I’m talking about, allow me to pose a question directly to readers. To this day, what do you think the story is on how we ended up in the war in Iraq after the planes crashed and brought down the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001? Search your brain. What’s the story you remember?

I suspect it is that Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein had something to do with it, even though it was proved later that he didn’t. The initial story was that he possessed Weapons of Mass Destruction and refused to let United Nations inspectors in, so the Bush administration and the United States military had no choice but to send a half a million troops half way around the world to disarm him.

Public opinion polls taken long after the main fighting war was over showed a significant percentage of Americans believed Saddam was responsible for 9/11. Similary surveys at the time showed a significant percentage of Americans also believed that humans once shared the planet with dinosaurs, and many of those thought that was just in the past 6,000 years.

If you didn’t think we were screwed before, how do you feel now?

What if I told you that Saddam had nothing to do with 9/11? That was the first framing. So that’s what most people remember. Unless you were a serious news junkie reading every alternative publication covering that story online, that’s probably what you remember from watching it all over and over again on CNN, which was still a news operation at that time with a sliver of credibility even after it was taken over by Time, Inc.

After we went to all the trouble and expense of invading Iraq, we found no WMDs, only Saddam hiding in a spider hole. Our presence there just started a holy uncivil war which rages to this day. Most of our troops are out of the action now. But the fantasy and the real reason for the war was revealed to be a horrible miscalculation, like most wars.

The New Yorker even produced a segment for a film clip short, which is now available on Amazon Prime Video, interviewing former CIA agents who knew that members of Al Quada were in the United States planning something. They just never shared the information with the FBI. So we could have prevented 9/11? And didn’t?

Watch to see the similarities with the Jan. 6 Capitol insurrection. We could have prevented it. But we didn’t.

The truth is that Washington think tanks run by what came to be called neocons or Neo-conservatives had a fantasy of creating a new, peaceful kind of democratic country in the Middle East, since Iraq at the time had a sizable secular middle class. It was foreshadowed in stories The Wall Street Journal, but no one paid much attention to that at the time.

President George W. Bush and even Secretary of State Colin Powell went along with the plan, endorsed whole-heartedly by Vice President Dick Cheney, who literally claimed that the Iraqi people would welcome the U.S. Army with open arms and shower them with red roses. He claimed the war would pay for itself because of all the oil we would find. Of course Saddam burned the oil fields as we were preparing to invade.

Bush had another incentive to go after Saddam, who had threatened his daddy’s life, George H.W. Bush, in the first Gulf War in 1993 after the Marines rescued Kuwait from the Iraqi Army. And then there was Karl Rove, whispering over Bush’s shoulder like the devil he was, reminding the 43rd president that all the great presidents were war presidents.

Now are you beginning to recall what really happened? The New York Times came back and apologized for its enthusiastic coverage in the run-up to war in Iraq, after it was revealed that its reporter Judi Miller was listening to the same source as Cheney and his aide-de-camp Scooter Libby, a crazy MoFo named Curveball, who swore up and down that Saddam purchased yellow cake uranium from Niger. Powell tarnished his reputation forever by selling that story line to the U.N.

We paid for that war until the global economy nearly collapsed in 2007-08, due to another set of idiotic policies by the Bush administration, cutting taxes for the rich and deregulating the banks. Then the BP oil spill happened in the Gulf of Mexico because the Bush administration stopped regulating the oil companies.

Then we thought we had a chance again when Barack Obama came along and bailed us out. Hey, I loved President Obama and First Lady Michell Obama, and celebrated like everybody else after the election of 2008. But it could be argued that his policy of “looking forward, not back,” and letting Bush-Cheney off the hook, in some ways led to the rise of Trump in 2016. I suppose he had no choice, like Lincoln and Grant after the American Civil War, and to try to heal the nation it was best to move on.

Are you bothered at all by the recent footage from Biden’s inauguration showing Michell and George W. acting all cozy and huggy and getting along like best friends? Bush may have been an alcoholic, C-student, frat boy rube as president. But doesn’t he look a tad drunk and stupid when he shows up in public now? He’s clearly taking those happy pills depicted in the satirical shows about him, or something. He’s seems down right giddy now that Trump has replaced him as the worst president ever in the public opinion polls.

Georg W. Bush post-presidency, George W. Rockwell, by Walter Simon

He can spend his retirement painting pretty little pictures, and tell himself he’s not such a bad person after all. That takes massive amounts of psychoanalysis and therapy. Good for him. Not so good for the country. That’s a tad appalling, at least to me, considering the place he put us in during his tenure in the Oval Office. But even many of my friends on Facebook seem to think Bush is quite cute now, no monster like Trump. I’m sorry but I have a hard time thinking of Bush in that way. He was the worst American president until Trump came along. Saying he seems like a Rhodes Scholar now next to Trump is just not helpful, in my humble opinion. In other words, it’s really not funny.

Existential Crisis

Starting the Iraq War as our response to 9/11 was the beginning of the end of the American Empire as we lost credibility all over the world. Obama brought us back from the brink and we hung on for eight tough years, clawing back from the economic recession, before Trump came along and set the charge to blow it up for good. He did so in constant consultation with Russian President and dictator Vladimir Putin, an expert in destabilizing a population in the throes of existential anxiety to convince a people to give up their freedoms for a chance at stability.

How do we fix the existential crisis we now face going forward? If there is going to be any chance, we must at least try to unravel the riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma, and point out how we went down this wrong path in the age of the internet to begin with. The ultimate failure is a failure to communicate. There is much confusion about this now. If we can get into the debate through a lawsuit or a Congressional hearing, we might set this story straight yet.

Not that there is much hope. It is what it is. But I will go down fighting for this narrative to my last breath.

***
Editor’s Note: This is the first in a three part series on the death of the American Dream and the one last chance we have to save it.

Part II: The Early Days of the Internet – What Went Wrong

Part III: Government Regulations and Objective Journalism Redefined