It's the Pancho Villa thing
I get confused. Is it Pancho Villa or is it Usama Bin Laden? Both very popular anti-establishment rebels, fighting the powers that be. Throwing off the yoke of the international oppressors for the sake of their beliefs. Their themes coexist in the same lexicon as the other “freedom fighters” throughout history. Not too long ago, we encouraged, funded and armed Bin Laden and the Afghanistan Freedom Fighters to rid their mountains of the Soviet tyrants.
For several years Villa spent most of his time in the Mexican mountains running from the law. Villa had an intimate knowledge of the mountainous terrain and knew how to survive on his own in the wilderness. “Villa underwent a transformation after meeting Abraham González, who opened Villa's eyes to the political world. Villa then believed that he was fighting for the people, to break the hacendados over the poverty stricken peones and campesinos (farmers and sharecroppers). At the time, Chihuahua was dominated by hacendados and mine owners. The Terrazas clan alone controlled haciendas covering 7,000,000 acres (28,000 km²), larger than the state of Maryland.”
But, as the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave follows the whited seplecurs into whatever grand exploitation they have planned, the rest of the world no longer seems to get our message. We have been kicked-off the moral high-ground. We are no longer the hero, the protagonist in the story. We have become the antagonist, hell-bent on having things go our way (or no way).
We are not fighting alongside Pancho as he champions the least-of-these, as he stands in the way of the oppressors torturing and whipping those who have no one to save them. We are not rooting for the underdog, freeing the oppressed from the pain and misery of aristocracy, standing up for what is right and just no matter what the consequences.
Sadly, we have become what Pancho was fighting. We have fallen into the trap(pings) of empire, and like Narcissus, we have fallen in love with the image of ourselves that we alone have created. But, are we not the Rough Riders, the “who was that masked-man” faster-than-a-speeding-bullet for truth justice and the American way? Are we not the champion of the oppressed? The guys in the white hats, angels with dirty faces, deriving contentment in helping those in need? No, we are not.
Bin Laden, like Salahadin, and very much like Pancho Villa, was/is a folk hero in the Muslim world. It doesn't matter if he died years ago from kidney failure, he's still very much alive to the tens of millions of young boys chomping at the bit to slay the Great Satan. Usama, like Pancho, has stood up to the power of the hacienda owners, and the Great Satan! And what white fundamentalist isn't silently fuming in envy that Bin Laden and his followers get to grapple with the Great Satan, while all they get to do is fight tur'ism [sic]??
The reason that all of this is so discombobulated to our scrambled over-amped brains is that we still think of ourselves as Panco Villa types, champions of the underdog and the oppressed . . . But it now seems that no one else on the planet shares our delusion.
