The Oligarchs forget a lot.

Possibly because denial, as Sam Clemens noted, isn't just a river in Egypt.

Africans became slaves because runaway "indentured" white could blend in so well with one aspect of the countryside, and native Americans could too with a different one.

But the Power that's rising now really sees no point of differentiation. The Power that's rising now seeks and is not far from being able to identify every single one of us all of the time. The Power that's rising now uses racism as a tool to estrange peoples, divide them, and swallow them whole into its belly.

What's left unsaid is that those rowdy brutal Tennesseans lived lives nasty and short, and that the Man Who Would Not Drink flattered the most intelligent among them like Crockett with words like Republic and Freedom as a way to control them.

Just like 9/11 was a call to the best and highest concepts of liberty in the minds of the young and impressionable, words that evoked a struggle against an evil oppressor, and sent the youngest and strongest and most idealistic among us to die violently, lose their will to fight for real Freedom, or become transformed into indoctrinated killers for the corporate masters.

The oligarchs have a sweet system, but forget themselves, which is why oligarchs always fall prey to other predators in the relentless march of time.

What troubles me is what comes next, and whether real freedom will ever be found on this crowded lonely world of light and darkness by a species one step away from both its own private wilderness or its own special collar and chain.

[crossposted in response to What the Republicans Forgot]