Land of the Lost: Part1

Are You a Good American?

“For years I thought what was good for our country was good for General Motors and vice versa.  The difference did not exist.  Our company is too big.  It goes with the welfare of the country.”

-Charles E. Wilson

April 10, 2023

This goes out to America, especially those who are Lost.    

Shown here are Will and Holly, two all-American teens from the original NBC show Land of the Lost, which ran during the 70’s.  That tense and perplexed expression is exactly how I remember them, having gone whitewater rafting with their father, only to plunge over a huge waterfall and wash ashore in an unknown Land.  Full of mysteries, dinosaurs, aliens, crystals, and the enigmatic Sleestak shown there in the background.

The same tense and perplexed expression is being worn by tens of millions of Americans today, as the country they remember slowly dissolves.  The signal is spotty, or there is too much static to get a clear picture on this device.  In those analog days we would adjust the antenna or slap the side of the TV.  Something ominous is just ahead, where Will is pointing, but Joe Biden stands over Holly’s shoulder saying, “Everything is alright, we got this.”  She is ignoring him.

Perhaps you are wondering why the last trust you had in sacred institutions has turned to dust.  Or perhaps you are working out why everything lately seems so Defcon 1.  Maybe Trump sitting before a judge makes you feel nervous, when you thought it would feel like victory.  Having lived a life that encompasses most of the forks in the road we have taken, I am compelled to shed some light on how things got this way; how America drifted so far into the unknown.  If the country survives, it may be up to you to put us back on course.  Younger-somethings, that is you, so I will lay it out as I see it.

First, no one generation was to blame.  This tale is multi-generational, and you’ll see why.  So let me start with some appreciation for the Boomers out there such as my parents, the only generation alive today who remembers America in her golden age.  They both graduated high school just as the cultural revolution in the ‘60s hit, and were raised in an America dominated by Eisenhower and the Kennedys.  Near as I can tell they pretty much had excellent childhoods, when America was at her peak.  Both came from solid nuclear families, raised on Christian traditions, like many millions of other families of the era. 

The Warmup:

Kennedy’s assassination was the turning point, but their wake-up call would not come until ’67, with a nice letter from the US Army.  God was shining on them that year; not only were they going to have a baby, but Dad would be sent to Germany rather than Vietnam.  They were two people who might have been scared silly, but who knew exactly who they were.  They were not Lost, not by any stretch, but things were changing dramatically.

Most GenX-ers my age have fond memories of the ‘70s, and I have even written about some of them.  But I remember equally well a darkness, the malaise that swept the nation like a kind of funk.  The young-me had no way of knowing America had given a green light to abortion, or left the gold standard, or that the PRC had started to represent China in the UN.  We had to “Give a Hoot, Don’t Pollute” and “Drive 55”.  Dad had a gold Delta-88 with a 455 and green brocade interior which could barely go that slow it seemed.  The Interstate Highway System was still being completed on certain stretches, even while vehicles were starting to downsize.  Odd little cars from Japan were starting to appear on American roads in regular numbers, a harbinger of things to come. 

The historic mis-steps of Vietnam speak for themselves, and I have often thought that the period between Kennedy and the end of that war are like a Ka-Bar in America’s chest.  My parents must have known it too… something was off.  America was starting to lose its way.  It was a war without a basis, unless you count geo-politicking of Asia.  It was built on lies since its inception.  It was the cloud hanging over every Amway meeting, and the reason I had an uncle up in Canada.  It is not a surprise that drug-use skyrocketed during that time, or the only things we could focus on as a nation were Watergate and industrial pollution.  Rather than rain on Jimmy Carter again, I’ll just say that the nation was glad to leave him – and the ‘70s – behind, when Reagan won the 1980 election.

The Setup:

The ‘80s blindsided us with awesomeness!  Or should I say blinded us with science?  Reagan was a firebrand, and rock music and MTV were exploding.  We had Space Shuttles, we had video games, and the US Military made a fine appearance at Grenada.  Hollywood was literally sculpting us GenX-ers, not that we noticed.  I cheered mightily during the bombing of Libya -- especially the French Embassy getting hit -- and cheered mightily again a month later when Top Gun debuted in theaters.  We were winning the cold war, and our President was the greatest since George Washington.  Gas was just $0.96 a gallon.  Maybe times were too perfect, if that is possible, because we didn’t question a thing.  That was our first mistake:  You should question everything.

My young wife and I were both too swept up in the times to recognize some of the winds of change, which the Scorpions would later sing about.  The Air Force had me out on the flight line with a toolbox and some Vietnam-era fighter jets, not a bad gig for a 21-y.o.  We had an innocent little plastic card that you could put into a bank machine with a 4-digit PIN, and cash would come out.  We found one of the new Praise-style churches that were gaining popularity.  We began to think of what we wanted for our lives.  We were centered; we knew who we were and where we were going.  But we were oblivious to what was going on under the surface, Readers.  Perhaps you can relate?

The Warning:

The first crack in the armor I can remember was the Iran Contra scandal in the late ‘80s.  It was rotten to the core, and probably engineered by the same man we had just voted for, George H.W. Bush.  We certainly didn’t know the evils of the CIA, now legendary, or remember that Bush was its former director.  We had no knowledge of what we now call the Deep State, or the cadre of people who would be running the show for decades to come.  The world as we knew it made perfect sense, and communism was falling. We weren’t even thinking about China yet.  Bush’s imaginings of a New World Order went right over our heads. To be fair, there were voices then starting to sound the alarm, a young Rush Limbaugh for example.  Bill Cooper too, but I didn’t know about him at the time. 

If my generation had paid attention, the world today might be a different place.

The Right Fake:

As we can see by studying Ukraine today, the end of the Cold War really was the moment where America had a choice.  Culminating an 80-year power struggle, we could have truly led the world into a bright future.  The politicians certainly talked about it enough.  Metallica was giving concerts in Russia with a million-plus people in attendance.  Humanity was so eager to come together we even had new words for it, like “perestroika” and “glasnost.”  Since the early 90’s I have always regarded the Russians as friendlies, which is to say, you may sometimes have differences but you can always share a beer on the porch. 

But it was not to be, as even a simple review of NATO and US foreign policy since then shows us.  The War Hawks were talking about America as a City on a Hill, while maneuvering to stab Russia in the back the entire time.  This is hindsight talking, but it absolutely underscores what came next, and every foreign policy initiative America has held since then.  The Soviet Union fell in early ‘91, and we were launching our War Machine into Iraq by the end of ’91.

The Sucker Punch:

Gulf War 1 was the start of my awakening, and it still reverberates through the Earth today.  I was out of the Air Force and had just started college.  There was widespread awareness that we had no actual cause to be over in Iraq.  And yet there was a lot of infectious bravado.  Familiar story?  It describes every desert conflict that I can recall for the last 30 years. 

Lord forgive me, but watching the Tomahawks fly right through Baghdad on CNN was electrifying.  It was a very odd, double-minded moment, being proud of our military while knowing it was being misused.  I could have been recalled back to the AF at any moment.  There was a palpable sense in America then which said this is how we redeem ourselves from Vietnam, as if we could redeem a lie with another lie.  If you were not around, try to imagine the conflicting emotion.  Most of my generation looked the other way after this, as most of the next generation did after 9/11, a decade later.  We were losing our way, and just coasting along as if everything was normal.  We were becoming the character Winston in 1984.

Other warnings began to light-up on the control panel.  The Twin Towers bombing in ’93, Oklahoma City in ’95, and Khobar Towers in ’96.  Had I known more back then, I would have been looking for the fingerprints of the CIA in these events.  I would have realized Hollywood was busy churning out movies about disaffected Cold War veterans upsetting the new democratic world order, stoking fears of terrorism.  As it was, most of my generation was busy starting to raise their families.  Christians were hyper-focused on the Clintons’ misdeeds, from the blue dress to most favored nation status for China.  Americans knew about China’s human rights record at the time, but corporations itching to offshore their factories were where our true priorities lay. 

Even then, we were selling out for big business and our 401K’s, recalling that mis-appropriated Charles Wilson phrase “What’s good for GM is good for America.”  Against this rising philosophical turmoil we welcomed a groundswell of conservatism via Fox News and a young Sean Hannity.  Radio hosts like Limbaugh and Michael Savage had been stoking the embers for a while, and now it became a flame.  By the time the new century dawned, we thirty-somethings were poised for an epic clash of ideas.  As it turned out, we were much too naïve and ill-equipped for the final round of the fight.

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The Knockdown:

As if God himself was showing us how lost we had become, America conducted its first Election Circus event in 2000.  If you remember that debacle, you know that elections have never been the same since.  It introduced the whole concept of armies of lawyers and vote harvesting to the general public.  It created a sense of the comical, in which reality began to be visibly divorced from the ‘show’, and I remember being embarrassed for how foolish we must have seemed to other countries.  America was de-facto leader of the Western world, but could not conduct a reliable election.  We often forget that, because of how quickly 9/11 took over as the defining moment of modern history -- 22 years ago now. 

The TKO: 

I watched September 11 unfold on my first Mac Powerbook, connected by wifi for the first time.  GenX going digital, while my Millennial daughter was starting school -- symbolic.  Other than nostalgia like VHS tapes and photo albums, she would never know the world I came from.  I was around for the entire transition, from the first quarter dropped into a Space Invaders game to the whole world now residing on the nervous system of the internet.  I can tell you that America was in a state of shock and rage as those months after 9/11 unfolded. 

While the spin-machine came up to speed, most people nodded dutifully as we were fed a steady diet of box-cutters, Yellow Cake, and the Patriot Act.  We didn’t seriously question the facts until later.  “OK, we trust you Mr. Powell,” we said, “Make it so.”  How many young men ran out and enlisted, I wonder?  By the time the Patriot Act was made law, America was on the ropes, and the TKO was called.  The Military Industrial Complex had won the fight, using the same techniques they had been honing for 40 years.  It would take until 2016 for them to face a true challenger.    

Foundational Lies:

I hope future generations can forgive us for being so colossally gullible at the time.  Younger readers should have an advantage over my generation, with the concept of False Flags already being in your lexicon, and ample historical evidence at your fingertips.  Thank God for that.  It took years for us to realize that so many critical elements of the official 9/11 story were fabrications.  Today, events can can be picked-apart in just hours. 

Amazingly, there is a large swath who still accepts the story at face-value, even prominent and well-meaning voices like Glenn Greenwald.  The alternative is too sinister to contemplate for many, many people, as I touched on here.  Can you see the conundrum this has created?  A national cognitive dissonance, whereupon we cannot even agree on the foundational facts from which to have a discussion.  In essence, we have become The Land of the Lost, outlined in every Wiki article and official narrative.  Every news program and official documentary.  Every museum and textbook.  History records those events and insists on their veracity with a straight face, creating something like a quantum reality, which I call the Hindenburg Uncertainty Principle.  Like many things, it is accepted as being true without being true.    

How can we hope to ever discuss Covid^TM, when we can’t even agree on what has happened over the last two decades?  Most of America will never understand the Obama birth certificate forgery, which I knew within five minutes of opening the document.  They have no remembrance of who Loretta Fuddy was, or why she was significant.  They will never connect the Podesta Brothers to Madeleine McCann’s disappearance.  We could go on and on.  Benghazi, Burisma, Euromaidan:  It is because Good Americans have taught themselves not to question, but to believe.  That is the crux of it.

Good Americans have placed their faith in the State, rather than in God-given discernment.  If they tug on that thread, and it all starts to unravel, they are going to lose their entire World View.  Maybe that is you, Reader.  It is a scary prospect, like Neo unplugging from his Matrix pod -- hence the psychosis that so many are still suffering from.

Of course Covid^TM turned out to be a lie, from top to bottom.  Truthfully, I gave it my due diligence in early 2020, until forming a rational opinion by that Summer.  The narrative-managers of this world have become very adept at creating such trauma, and improving their game each time.  It took 40 years for the truth of the Gulf of Tonkin to be revealed officially, the foundational lie of Vietnam.  Kennedy’s death still has not been fully revealed.  So the world has effectively been in a haze ever since 2001, falling prey to wild narrations of current events and foreign policies, while giving up our rights and freedoms for protection from terror -- all based on the lies of what actually took place that day. 

9/11 created the very basis for the War on Terror, the Patriot Act, and the Department of Homeland Security.  We see naked revelations of the lies, like the conflicting accounts of Osama Bin Laden.  Or the permanent silencing of SEAL Team Six, which you can ask Joe Biden about.  There are a thousand lies in between – how does one even begin to process it?  Most people have fact-checked their way into denial of reality itself.  Are you one of those people, Reader?  Have you just washed up on shore and can’t decide if the other survivors have a clue?    

In Part 2, I will hit you with some truth bombs, which will hopefully be very uncomfortable.  We need to rip the scab off of this thing and discuss what can be done.  Can anything be done?  Will and Holly never found their way home, but I know at least one way home.  Tune in next time, NBC is on channel 7 I believe, and you have to turn the antenna East a bit.     

Wishing you blessings and glory from the Philippines,

Visayas Outpost