Is the War on Terror a Cover for the War on the Working Man?

By Mel Carriere

No I haven't turned food blogger.  Even if I was a food blogger I could certainly find something more appetizing to write about than these disgusting smoked fish a la Euro that the English like to scarf down with their afternoon tea and crumpets.

No, the reason I included this pic of a Red Herring is because a blogging friend of mine recently wrote a post about the origin of the term "Red Herring" where it refers to "...something that misleads or distracts from an important issue (Oxford English Dictionary)."  Nobody is really sure where the term comes from.  I'm not sure that many people outside of a handful of Asperger's linguistically obsessed neckbeards like me really care, but the expression has become embedded in our language, and it rears its smelly smoked head at times to point to an insidious, equally smelly smokescreen that politicians and corporate goons use to hide something even more dangerous and malignant behind.

The Red Herring once again flopped out of its fine kettle of fish recently during the nuclear negotiations with Iran.  The politicians that oppose a peace deal with Iran are desperate to preserve this particular Red Herring they use to cover up their agenda to cut the pay, remove the jobs, and destroy the rights of working people and remove them far away from their luxurious Rhode Island mansions and into festering tenement houses a la 19th century, where perhaps the only thing the peasants will be able to afford to eat are these obnoxiously distasteful red herrings.

While we were busy fighting the Red Herring War on Terror the unemployment rate went up as more and more jobs were exported to Bangladesh and more and more engineers were imported from Bangladesh to design things on the cheap.  While we were busy fighting the war on terror wages went down, increasing the income disparity between the rich and poor to the highest level in recent history.  While we were busy fighting the war on terror Americans were convinced that Unions were part of the problem instead of the solution, so we allowed their power to slowly wither away as part and parcel of the plot to bomb Baghdad into oblivion several times over, because those darned Ay-rabs are obviously hiding boogeymen in every basement that will pop out of the shadows and somehow swim with all their goats across thousands of miles of ocean to destroy our freedoms if we let them.

The Corporate plot to destroy the working man doesn't work without a good boogeyman.  The boogeyman keeps children scared and makes them turn their complete focus to distant, unrealistic fears that really have nothing to do with the task on hand.  "If you don't clean your room the boogeyman will get you," we warn them.  "If you keep asking me to up your allowance the boogeyman will sneak out from under your bed in the middle of the night and grab you."  "If you don't keep your focus on Iraq, Iran and Taliban those boogeyman they will sneak out of your closet when you're not looking and trample your family values."  Meanwhile those boogeyman-baiters are the ones who sneak into our closets in the middle of the night and steal our stuff because they've got us all afraid to poke our heads in there to see what that strange noise bumping around in the middle of the night really is.

Enough of this smelly, smoky red herring.  I want a real piece of meat, but at $9 an hour who can afford it?  Let's round up the real boogeymen and let them eat their disgusting canned fish for lunch.



Image from:  http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Red_Herring.png

Here is the link to my friend Linda Crampton's article on the origin of the term Red Herring

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