Meaningless slogans.

America has no culture.
None.
Nada.
Zilch.
Just slogans, and superstitions.

Mostly the slogans though.

Superstitions are the background white noise hiss of the typical destroyed brain, but slogans, they get you through the day to day.

They're the security blanket of bullshit that make you forget how awful your life is, and maybe even forget about the big pulsating corporate cock hungrily slamming up your asshole, hitting you in the back of your heart.

And they're not even GOOD slogans.
Scratch at 'em with even the slightest bit of logic, and they're empty, hollow, and full of cobwebs and nothing.

Bleak fuckin' bumper sticker bullshit.

The most empty headed drivel you'd ever want to come across, but no one questions it, because they beat 'em into your fuckin' head day after day like a railroad spike when you're a kid, when you're intellectually naked and helpless.

And they fucking count on that.
That's the whole core idea of school!

Let's look at some of this shit...

God bless America.

Really? Fucking really?
God blesses this country above all others?
Why doesn't he give a shit about the other ones?
Hey, look at the world, there's countries we KNOW he doesn't give a shit about if he's up there.
And what did they do to deserve that?
And what do we do deserve our..what?
Our malls? Our spray cheese? Our dumbshit Hollywood movies?
Is that God's blessing?
Or, is that what we did to impress him?
Either way, that's an unimpressive, and little God.
Fuckin' Mini-Me God.

But, that's the religious imagination for you.
Small, feeble, weak, an insular tribal culture with a petty jealous midget God with cheesey special effects.

Oooo! A burning bush! Ooo! Lots and lots of waaater!!

Meanwhile galaxies are crashing together and exploding out in the fucking universe.

Humans made this shit up, and humans made up "God bless America".

And it means about as much as "God bless you", after a sneeze.

A mindless perfunctory drilled in superstition.

Achooo!!!
God bless, America.

God bless the USA!

Variation on God bless America, but they made a country song out of this one.
Whenever you want to know if a slogan is empty and meaningless, check to see if they made a fucking country song of it, they usually have.

Proud to be an American.
Yeah, another country lyric, there's a stunner.
How are you proud of an accident of birth?
You can be GLAD to be American.
Shit, looking at some countries out there, you can be RELIEVED to be an American.
But, birthplace isn't an accomplishment.
Too much undeserved pride out there, we don't need to add to the pile with this one.

Now, you can be proud of your life accomplishments, and credit living in America with having the freedom to pursue them.

Maybe "proud to be an American", means something like that.
But, it aught to be constructed better so it literally SAYS that.
"Proud to be an American", as a phrase is just garbage language.
Meaningless as a literal sentiment.
Fuzzy moosh at best as a poetic one.
But that pretty much defines a slogan.
Feels good, means nothing.
But, so does masturbation, and unlike patriotic slogans, you don't see a bragging tone about discussing that.

My country right or wrong.

This one's just fucking despicable, I'm glad this one isn't in popular circulation anymore.
What a vile sentiment. Goes against everything the revolution that founded this country stood for.
The very embodiment of unthinking, zombie, conformist, fascist, nationalist, boot rally bullshit.
Let's gleefully piss on the grave of this one, and hope it never crawls from its coffin.


And then there's the fucking pledge of allegiance, what a bunch of fascist robot mind control bullshit this loathsome tedious time wasting ritual was.

"I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

Okay, first of all "I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America", really? Allegiance to a flag?
A fucking piece of cloth?
And is that why you have to look in its direction?
Are you saying the pledge TO the fucking flag?
Saying a fruity-ass little poem to a piece of cloth?
How imbecilic and meaningless a ritual is that?
And what bullshit superstition!
Who hears the pledge?
God?
The flag fairy?
Does a little soul live in the flag?
Is that part of that special God blessing towards America?
He brings our fucking flags to life, and they really love to hear the pledge?

No, the teacher hears the pledge.
That's who it's for.

But does he/she really give a fuck?
No, most times not.
Once in awhile, you get a nut-fuck who thinks it's really fucking important shit, but for the most part, the teacher makes you because they make him/her make you.

But, the bosses who boss the teacher to boss you don't hear you doing the pledge, so what the fuck do they care??

And this is where the logic breaks down for me...
What about when the teacher leaves the room...and you still have to say the pledge???

Who's hearing that shit now??

Which brings me back to God, and flag spirits...

"...and to the republic for which it stands,..", okay, that makes a little more sense, at least we're pledging allegiance to the actual country here, but why did we START with the flag?
What was that about?
Remember that shit back there?
Those logic problems are still begging for answers.

"..one nation under God..", okay, "under god", was added in the stupid McCarthy '50's, and I piss on his grave.
And it's clunky, and fucks up the rhythm, and I always thought so, and now that I know the history on this, I finally understand why.
What, they thought if a dirty Godless Commie said the pledge with God in it, their throat would burn?
What was the reasoning behind this shit?
If a commie could fake their way through the old pledge, they could fake their way through the new one.
Which proves it's a meaningless fucking ritual.

Let's try it without the God bit, see if it flows better.

"..one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."

Yeah, not bad, not bad....

You can see the post-civil war mentality behind the indivisible.
Liberty and justice?
What's the pledge for then?
Depending on the teacher, you were forced into that crap.
There's that old argument "liberty is a privilege for adults, not a toy for children".
Well then, if the choices of children are to be taken lightly, why beat a pledge into 'em?
And justice?
Please.
For all?
Please!!!

And the act of saying it, the joyless obligatory DRONING of it.
Has such a robotic mantra/chant quality to it.
You hear a whole classroom of kids mumbling it out, it gets eerie.

At least it was to me.
Stupid adults (which is most of them) think anything said in a squeaky kid's voice is fucking cute.

I tell you what, get some adults to say that shit, you and some friends try this shit out, say the pledge in unison like 20 times in a row to get a good drone going.
Ain't that fuckin' creepy?
Don't that give you chills?
Turns my stomach.
Always did.

And you couldn't rush it either, or they'd make you start that shit oooover and ooover.

S'like "ohhhh, let's get this out of the waaayy, I got pictures to colorrr!".
Sometimes you'd have to piss.
I can't count the number of times they forced me to say the pledge through needing desperately to piss.
That's child abuse.
Flat out.

Get the wrong teacher, and dig your feet in about it, you'd get in deep, deep shit.
In my parent's day, they'd probably beat ya.
Corporal punishment, another proud American tradition.
Ah, but let's not get ahead of myself...

And then think of this,....why did KIDS need to have a loyalty oath beaten into them?
What, are KIDS gonna sell secrets to the fucking Russians?
What the fuck!?!?

No, it was to make you accustomed to being an obedient servant of your corporate and state masters later on.
That's the theory behind it, anyway.
You wouldn't think it would work, but I fucking know people who thought that pledge was the greatest fucking thing, and thought it was "character building", whatever the fuck that means.
I can't deal with minds like that.
That's spooky shit.

I think ours is the only country that does that shit.
I dunno, maybe the Brits have a version.
We seem to have gotten a lot of our public school ideas from theirs.
Thanks, John Dewey, you fascist fuck.

And then, there's these nasty little un-killable Orwellian buzzwords that have been infesting the meme-sphere like neurological AIDS virii.

Family values.

Whose family??
The Manson family?

And what ARE these values?
No one ever tells me.
How can I have/embrace/practice them, if I don't have a list to follow?
And what sort of people DON'T have these values?
Maybe I can backtrack from there.

Well, people who aren't Jesus-freaks seem to be off the love list, so there's me out of the club.

And the gays don't seem to be invited, so there's a lot of my friends kicked out.

So...I guess homophobia and credulity are among these cherished values.

Well, I dunno whose family these values are coming from, but it sure ain't mine.
Glad it ain't.

And I love how it's used, the context it gets used in always sets up this false dichotomy between homophobic Jesus-freak, conformists, and mustache twirling, pagan, orgy having, baby fucking, baby eating, tornadoes of unadulterated wickedness.

Well...how many of those guys do we actually have on this planet?
A Jeffrey Dahmer comes along once in a blue moon, it's a teensy tiny fucking minority.
Surely a minority this tiny isn't dragging the country down to Hell.

And surely they (the family values crowd) don't care if the Hendersons are whipping each other's asses with straps behind the blinds.
Hell, the Hendersons are probably at the fucking "family values", rally.

It's the gays, face it.
"Family values", is code-speak for "no fags".

Have the courage of your bigoted convictions, and just say "no fags".

"Family values", is fucking meaningless bullshit language.
And we have mountains of that shit, we don't need any more.

And really, it's an insult to families everywhere.
If you're not a christian homophobe, you don't value your family?
You don't even count as a family?
Fuck you!
Shit, on this planet, there's more families with other religions besides Christianity than not, and even the nuclear family is a minority these days.
A statistical minority is going to tell the rest of the world what "family values", are?
Fuck off!

Family values makes my bile rise.

And I think the christian right knows it, because I don't hear it as often, they're shifting the goalposts again with softer simpler language, which brings me to...

"Family", period!
Everything wicked, and horrific, and trying to steal your freedom seems to cloak itself with "family", lately.

"Youth", and "concerned", and "mothers", are pretty big too.

But "family", is the one the yahoos at the rallies and conventions seem to gobble up like Pringles.
They never fucking tire of it.
It's like by reiterating it, they hold up a forcefield against perceived evils.
But, there's more superstition for you.
Has to be superstition, it sure as fuck ain't logic.

Ah, "traditional", there's another piece of homespun bullshit.
Traditional gets people hooting too.
Whose traditions?
What traditions?
Doesn't seem to me America has many traditions to be proud of.

Democracy, free press, etc, that stuff is good.

But, I never see anyone arguing against any of that.
Where's this contingency of people waving "totalitarian fascism now!!", placards?
I don't see 'em around.
So, who's the invisible army of enemies that are eating away at our precious traditions?

Gee, seems to me to be the "family values", crowd, actually.

And funny how "traditional", is often if not almost always stuck in front of "family values".
Y'know, to give it that extra oomph.
Like "we really fuckin' mean it!", y'know?
We're gonna family at you extra hard!

And if we're talking the traditions of the "family values", crowd...well, gee..those are the bad ones I spoke of earlier.
Bigotry, militarism, imperialism, nationalism, anti-intellectualism, anti-enlightenment, illiteracy, greed, ignorance, domestic violence, etc, etc.
Yeah, those are proud American traditions.
Homespun, and all-American.
Doesn't make 'em good though.

"Traditional", is meaningless.
It can invoke whatever you want it to.
And the ones who do invoke it, are usually invoking bad shit, for a bloodless, empty political agenda which boils down to gaining and keeping power, and not giving a fuck about you or yours.
Which makes the "family values", component so much more insincere and trite.

So, traditional and family values can go take a flying fuck off a rolling donut.

And then there's advertising slogans!
We seem to have a whole chunk of our group memory built up on this shit we're bombarded with from TV, and people internalize this horseshit, and it becomes a fond memory of your fucking life!

We're up to now, oh, 3, maybe 4 generations now that have been weened on the glass tit of TV.
And it shows.
It fucking shows.

It's fuckin' depressing.

Every one's just running around like a chicken, mindlessly parroting all this shit.
Your average dumbfuck on the street, anyway.
And there's hordes of these motherfuckers.
The getting in the way people.
The extras in the movie of life.
Their mom didn't use birth control, and now we've got all this extra meat running around with heads full of this slogan shit.

And that's our world, that's our culture.
These meaningless catchphrases.
This fucking drivel.
These empty sentiments handed down from the think tanks of the self-appointed elites.

Meaningless shit, smearing a skid-mark across the collective mind of the human super-organism.
Wasting our precious time of our finite lifespans, and destroying our potential as a species.

And we're proud of it.
This country has been bullshitted into being proud of its backwards, anti-intellectual, illiterate,
anti-curiosity, anti-reason, anti-logic, anti-science fucking atmosphere that this slogan mentality fosters.

And that's what the slogans say!

They say you're stupid, you're stupid, you're stupid, but it's GOOD that you're stupid!
It's GOOD!

It's GOOD that you're stupid, because it means you're patriotic, and you support your family, and you love babies, and puppies, and rainbows, and kittens, and whatever else bullshit you need to be happy, but just keep being stupid!

Why, it's ALL-AMERICAN to be fuckin' stupid!

Go run up some credit debt, you fuckin' morons!

Go sign a crooked mortage!

Go buy some Enron stock!

You're a fuckin' hero!
Yes, YOU! With your fuckin' grease stains, and lottery tickets!
You're the American fuckin' dream!
Family!
Mothers!
Values!
God!
Flag!
Family!
Family!
Jesus!
Family!

Now go buy shit!
And keep voting us crooks in!

That's what they're selling you.
That's the arsenic in the cocktail.
And still you all suck it down.
You know it, and you still step up to the bar for another bitter swig of this shit!
What the fuck is wrong with you people??

What the fuck is wrong with this country?
You've just been lied to for so long, you really don't know any better?
You don't expect any better?
Was the buildup so gradual, and insidious, it just seems like the air you breathe?
What fucking happened, America?
What corner did we turn?

Maybe it goes further back.
Maybe the game was up for our species the very first moment a king and/or clergyman convinced someone he was in charge.

Maybe I should be a good little fatalist, and selfishly focus on my dumb little life of numbing my pain with buying shit, and passively wait to die.
Maybe that's what life is about.
Maybe.
But I need it proven.
I need hard evidence, not circular arguments, and more slogans.

Cuz that's all that have been on offer.

So I won't believe it.
I remain incredulous on this point.
I won't give in to it, and I'll go down swinging if I have to.

I don't know what life is supposed to be about, but it can't be this.
It just can't be.
What a fucking waste of a remarkable species with near infinite potential if this is all it was.
A big fucking shit burger hawked by a cartoon clown.

No fucking way.
Not on my 80 year allotment of lifespan it won't.


(Audio version of this rant available)