Recently, I received the following well-intentioned bit of humor, via email:

The three most powerful people in the USA now are named:

Bush, Dick, and Colon.

Makes you think, doesn't it?

Hmmmmmm—The three most powerful people in the USA?

Actually—No. They aren't "Bush, Dick, and Colon" as some wannabe clever emailer wrote and passed on from person to person. However, the tag-on "Makes you think, doesn't it?" deserves an honest response, because unlike the person who originated this, I'm among the very few who do pause to think...

The three most powerful people are more likely:

(Dollar) Bill Gates (Majority shareholder/ex CEO of Microsoft),
Arthur B. Levitt (Chairman of the New York Stock Exchange), and
Alan Greenspan (Chairman of the Federal Reserve)

Federal politicians in "power" are suck-up toadies to the super rich and the really powerful who raise the ad money campaign war chests and spin teams that put them in office and control the lobbyists of big business (who actually draft) the legislation that gets passed by senators and congressmen with zero input from "the masses". Only states have referendums for the "patriotic, flag-waving people", but "the people" don't write the referendum questions, the "special interest" lobbyists do. All a sham: The business of America is business and $$$, not government. That's just crap the media feeds the masses until 99.9% think it's true. Up is down, left is right and black is white—oh, there I go thinking/speaking the cold truth--I mean, being negative and cynical again! Well, since I doubt you're still reading, I'll finish my thought anyway...

"We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal...". Yeah. Right. Written and signed in the mid 1700's by powerful and rich, land-granted slave owners, each of whom lived in a palace surrounded by thousands of acres and hundreds of horses and servants more than 100 years before the issue arose of "the oppressed" (whose plight was served up as a divisive issue; they were in fact, used as political pawns, to fuel the fires of conflict) in what became a civil war--whose real roots had to do with: money, railroads and industrial development. Were money and power to flow into the family hands of Northerners or Southerners? As if it weren't proof enough, another 100 years later, in our very lifetime came the 1967 and '68's riots, setting every major U.S. city ablaze (as if that was all just anti-Vietnam war sentiment).

Today (as has always been the case), it is economic oppression, just more covert and subtle. Still, the average slob and high school history teacher tells children that the U.S. Civil War was fought for the emancipation of "the Negro slave". Zero reality. As if anyone but them, the disenfranchised (no vote) poverty-stricken menial labor force of the day, really cared—or still do, based upon the current dismantling of Lyndon B. Johnson's well-intentioned "Great Society" programs. The collective American memory is non-existent, kept perpetually ignorant and in a stupor by TV sitcoms, infotainment news, piss-poor, misinformed public education, booze, junk fast food, drugs and cigarettes.

That's what feeds the minds/bodies and creates a military fighting force. Well-to-do intelligent people would have nothing to with it (the military). In times of war, they have almost always evaded military service if they could, although certainly not as non-officers. WW2 was different--an economic depression made war look glorious in contrast to rotting away unemployed.

In terms of proportionate population, the media and government trot out token anchor people and politicos to pacify the masses, which create the perception of equal opportunity. The brutal fact people love to deny is that all poor people are created in equally opportunity-deficient circumstances and all rich people are created in semi-equally opportunity-open circumstances. Even among them there are huge variances in brains, looks, talent, etc. In between the rich and poor is squeezed the shrinking middle class and nothing is or ever has been/will be "equal" for them from ass-slap one. It's all been a vicious, cynical lie from the dawn of "civilization". No wonder people become alcoholics, turn into religious zombies and go otherwise phony/delusional through every waking hour.

In closing, and to say it all, this rare bit of news never saw the light of more media coverage:

(Wall Street Journal (7/29/99); front page, "World Wide" column, 10 stories down, sixth from the bottom)

...Not a single TV, radio network or magazine touched on this one, and I was searching and watching for it. The last sentence, which was laid out in plain daylight as a stark factoid, is breathtaking. Think about it. When there is a murder to cover, the media is all over the place and you get it from every angle in every color, even the f***ing trials. Yet suicide, (some 61% of the total) a social pathology symptomatic of a cultural challenge as serious as murder, gets ignored. Constitutional amendments such as "The Right to Bare Arms" could use a swift kick in the census, given these terrible, daily realities. When you take a good hard look at all this murder and suicide, it's not about having money, it's about not having the opportunity to honestly acquire it and the further opportunities that attracts:

Life and death in Capitalism/America is about money and money's power, not government's "Bush, Dick, and Colon".

Copyright © 2001 March Mulay. All Rights Reserved.

Marc Mulay is an accomplished musician and a regular contributor to *spark-online.