Taser Jolts

Taser Jolts On The Road
Toward Mutiny

By Gaither Stewart

Countercurrents.org

This belongs to the quartet of essays, including Solidarity, Resistance, and Indifference

What if in the shaky super power in decline, the United States of America, tottering on the brink of disaster, just what if the next turn of events was a popular mutiny against the gradual, little-charted American Counter-Revolution that has been going on for decades?

In these times in which America’s leaders threaten the planet with Armageddon, the future of man seems precarious. The violence marking American civilization—the terrorism of the state directed against its own people, its citizenry armed to the teeth and taser-armed police out of control and the government promising nuclear wars to come—threatens the rest of the world.

The perception of the hopelessness and desperation in the American air today recalls the mood in post-World War II Europe expressed by the Existentialist movement. After the massacres of civilians in Iraq and repeated American declarations of preemptive war I feel something similar to that of European writers then who wondered what poets could write about after the Holocaust and 40 million dead. In the aftermath of the destruction of whole civilizations, the Existentialists held that individual men, not governments, have to create the meanings of their own lives. Many Americans should feel something analogous today.

The writers Albert Camus and Jean Paul Sartre depicted people as free and therefore responsible for what they make of themselves. In their view that responsibility was too heavy a burden for man to bear and caused in him desperation. The human condition, which the Existentialists described, marked by fear, boredom, alienation, the absurd and the sense of nothingness, calls to mind the prevalent mood in the USA and parts of West Europe today. More HERE