Shriveled Heart Syndrome Damages Occupy America

Southampton, NY:  Conservatives Using SHS (shriveled heart syndrome) to Counter
Occupy Movement.

It’s not just for southerners, the shriveled heart syndrome, any more.  David
Brooks and other northerners are also susceptible to SHS: it appears to be
contagious.  Canadian born conservative Brooks considers all US citizens
southerners and he’s a Jew who used to be liberal.

During Reconstruction, doctors first described shriveled heart syndrome. It’s
becoming a powerful weapon for the 1% rich due to its history and its
devastating affect on the body politic.  Mostly liberal or progressive doctors
coming down with nurses to bind the wounds of our civil war, these physicians
began listing human symptoms of SHS, heretofore mostly confined to dogs.  In
dogs it is called heartworms.

Southerners often discount the existence of SHS due to its evolutionary
origin.  SHS can best be understood as a social disease evolved over several
centuries with roots in the early years of our nation’s history.

David Books, accused of spreading the disease when he pooh poos empathy as a
useful aspect of society, is an educated historian from the University of
Chicago, a well-known hot bed of empathy.  He should know better.

Empathy, Brooks certainly knows, was the key human emotion our founding fathers
and mothers had to destroy when they needed to simplify slavery by making it
hereditary only for black folks. This original sin, clearly recognized as a
moral compromise, cleared up the question of who were slaves and who were
servants.  It also defined white and black, an improvement over the former
confusion.  People became “white” who had never considered themselves white.
Class, heretofore the prime divider of people, suddenly discovered a twin named
Race.

Shriveled Heart Syndrome then went viral sweeping the body of America with
speed rivaled only by HIV.  It stands to reason that Americans, especially
southerners, where slavery persisted, were hit hardest.  They cultivated harden
hearts while unlearning empathy.  Farm boys and girls, already accustomed to
withholding sympathy and empathy from farm animals as they were exploited and
slaughtered, took the short step to withholding love and sympathy from certain
humans. You can’t stand on your brother’s throat, confiscating the fruit of his
loins, his woman, his labor, his soul without becoming an awfully mean person.
Slavery, defined as an act of war, could be maintained only by a garrison state
augmented by vigilantly terror in the form of the poor white (trash) “paddy
rollers.” This lasted from the early 1600s to the civil war, two full
centuries.

Following Reconstruction, a cruel joke on the freedwomen and men, federal
protection left the south.  Former slaves, told to return to the tender mercies
of their former owners were informed,  “You are not going to get the tools,
seeds and land we promised you as small reparations for years of free labor –
forget forty acres and a mule!  Get over it!  Go back with hat in hand to Massa
and work for whatever he is willing to pay. “
More hardening of the arteries shrunk southern hearts as new forms of slavery
were built - sharecropping and Jim Crow, then prison labor, where bodies were
bought and sold as of old.   As late as 1922 Claude McKay, offering a poetic
lesson in how Shriveled Heart Syndrome is passed down through generations and
from mother to son, wrote:

“The ghastly body swaying in the sun
The women thronged to look, but never a one
Showed sorrow in her eyes of steely blue;
And little lads, lynchers that were to be,
Danced round the dreadful thing in fiendish glee.”

He focuses on unrepentant members of the mob ensuring a continuing lineage of
white fiends.

Unfree labor persisted in the south through the New Deal, even to the present.
This year, for instance, the largest prison strike in our history opposing
slave labor, occurred throughout the state of Ga., home of vaunted CNN world
news.

Not a peep of it in the news.  A small article in David Brook’s New York Times,
soon squelched by the Obama administration, reveled the prison uprising to be
nonviolent and well organized, bringing together skin heads, Latino
gangbangers, Muslims, Christians, black folk, white folk - everybody.  Had the
prison revolt been violent, the roads around every private and public prison in
Georgia would have been covered with trucks sporting satellite dishes, dishing
out the thrill for the entire world to see.  But no, this was well organized
and nonviolent.  So get over it, no news here.  Our country can’t allow this to
spread – it’ll kill the cash cow cradle to prison pipeline.

The scariest thing to Wall Street about the Occupy Movement is that young
people are getting their own word out.  Social media along, with old methods
like putting out their own News Letter, allows circumvention of David Brooks
and the Times.  They’d like you to believe nothing will be done if you lost
your home and your job – just suck it up!

Dean Baker in his column, BEAT THE PRESS, asks why nothing will be done to help
the 26 million unemployed, underemployed or those giving up looking.  “The
reason,” Dean says, “is that people like David Brooks and rest of the 1 Percent
don't give a damn about you."

This is the shriveled heart syndrome in spades.

BOB ZELLNER
October 21, 2011