Jesse Ventura Wants You!

  

Jesse Ventura has apparently been busy down in Mexico learning how to wage a revolution.  That’s the topic of his new book “Don’t Start the Revolution Without Me“.  I have not read the book, nor do I really know much about Ventura (Other than that he was a pro-wrestler turned state governor), so this is not necessarily an endorsement of either.  I’m mentioning “The Body” because I agree with what I’ve heard him say publicly.  America needs a revolution!

I try not to get to involved in US politics.  I am Canadian after all.  But, it is nearly impossible to avoid completely.  Especially during election season!  The big reason I ignore US politics is the alternating waves of nausea and indignation that wash over me after any prolonged exposure.  It’s a similar feeling to what you might experience if you were forced to sit in a bathtub full of nuclear waste while watching, powerless, as fat men ate cheese burgers in front of doe eyed starving orphans.  Needles to say, I don’t like it.  But, as mentioned above, it is impossible to avoid.  So, why does America need a revolution?

 The two party system of U.S. politics amounts to a elitist dictatorship.  I know that everyone wants to believe that Barack Obama will change things.  Maybe he will.  I may be overly cynical, but from what I can tell you don’t get to be commander in chief of America if your ideas are significantly different from the status quo.  Consider Ralph Nader.  His candidacy for president is hamstrung by the media’s domination of the electoral process.  Because he is hostile to big business, and big business owns the mainstream media, he is marginalized and silenced to the vast majority of Americans.

 What’s wrong with the status quo?  Well, that’s a good question… pretty much everything.  The U.S. is now nine trillion dollars in debt, and they are still fighting an old school Imperialist War of Occupation.  John McCain has said that their troops will stay for a hundred years if they have to.  Seriously John, if countries like America don’t stop flagrantly disregarding the sovereignty of other nations in order to access resources like oil, for the profit of the wealthy minority, mankind may not see a hundred years. 

Ventura said in an interview with Larry King that a justified war is one in which you are willing to send your own son.  I don’t think it’s a stretch to state categorically that none of the candidates have children who stand to spend time in Iraq.

The great irony of it all is that the American ethos is strongly individualistic.  The dream of America is of the self made man, which implies a cultural reverence of the individual.  Once Rip Van Winkle comes down off the mountain, however, he finds the world drastically different than it was when he went to sleep.  I’m inclined to say that the reality of contemporary America is closer to what Ventura says, “a nation of lemmings”.

If you are an American, that should make you mad.  Good, get mad.  There is a lot to be angry about.  Your country was forged on revolutionary principals.  The vocabulary of liberty and fraternity has become a hollow rhetorical device.  Freedom of the individual was never meant to enable a privileged class to dominate and exploit unhindered by social conscience.  Your founding fathers were flawed in many ways, but the future they envisioned was meant to be free from the tyranny that reins today in corporate America. 

                                                                      There are alternatives.                                           

Take back your culture.   

America Needs A Revolution!