Criticizing the president is not a new conception.
That it is in the best interest of the people to support everything the president does is what they would think is best for us, what they think they can make us believe.
But they cannot do this to everyone. As persuasive as television and the media can be in cultivating minds and culture catered from the top of the capitalist system on down, perhaps they don't realize that as long as there is a 'God', there will always be the devil's advocate.
Many have called it the 'dumbing down' of America. There is no question that the majority of citizens think the president is a good person, who does good things for us and for the world and is always looking out for his people. Maybe this is why things like capitalism and fascism in other countries and not the U.S. is taught in schools. In school, I was taught about fascism in countries like Russia, Germany and H.M's Britain. The rhetoric I got from school about the U.S. is that we are 'a country with which freedom rings and opportunity calls from every corner'.
I work in a care facility. One of my coworkers is a man from South Africa. He came to America to find opportunity and work and money to bring his family here. He has a hard time getting the concept of a defunkt government in the most powerful nation in the world around his head, but I try to help him understand. I used to be like him, a sort of lumpen proletariat but that changed after our government sold us out and fear became the new clouds in the sky and not real clouds. We have had many politcal discussions about the validity of this administration and especially about G.W.B. We've had arguments about the 9/11 attack and what it has to do with Iraq (or really what it doesn't). I tell him about PNAC and their neocon agenda for geopolitical advancement in the world. Mostly he sits on the fence and says well, you can't say that they're all bad or that the president doesn't do this for money or for oil. I gave him books by Noam Chomsky to read, which he did read, and even after he still sits on the fence about it because he wants to believe that America is truly a good place that ALSO has a good administration.
Then he watches Farenheit 911 from our generation's greatest liberal soothsayer Michael Moore and it was that film which began to start to change his mind. I don't feel jaded nor resentful that he got it from that film and not from me, but I am glad that he's beginning to get it. I want him to get it. Getting it is like a newfound freedom which at once is arresting with feelings of helplessness yet, it ironically will set you free mentally.
I can remember never really trusting the president. I watched Reagan, Bush and Clinton on television thinking to myself, there is something else going on here that doesn't make sense. My mind would think back to the Kennedy assasination. Why kill a president? Why kill John Lennon for that matter?
