Eventually, absent a wooden stake through its evil heart, the government will suck us dry. From John and Nisha Whitehead at rutherford.org:
“But these weren’t the kind of monsters that had tentacles and rotting skin, the kind a seven-year-old might be able to wrap his mind around—they were monsters with human faces, in crisp uniforms, marching in lockstep, so banal you don’t recognize them for what they are until it’s too late.”—Ransom Riggs, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children
Monsters don’t always come wrapped in the trappings of horror or myth.
Most often, monsters in the real world look like ordinary people. They walk among us. They smile for the cameras. They promise protection and prosperity even as they feed on fear and obedience.
All is not as it seems.
We are living in two worlds.
There’s the world we’re shown—the bright, propaganda-driven illusion manufactured by the government and its corporate sponsors—and the world we actually inhabit, where economic inequality widens, real agendas are buried beneath layers of Orwellian doublespeak, and “freedom” is rationed out in controlled, legalistic doses by militarized police and federal agents.
We’re being fed a series of carefully contrived fictions that bear no resemblance to reality.
Tune out the distractions and diversions, and you run headlong into an unmistakable, unpalatable truth: monsters with human faces walk among us.
Many of them work for the U.S. government.
Through its power grabs, brutality, greed, corruption, and tyranny, the government has become almost indistinguishable from the evil it claims to fight—terrorism, torture, disease, drug trafficking, trafficking of persons, violence, theft, even scientific experimentations that treat humans as test subjects.
With every passing day, it becomes painfully evident that the American Police State has developed its own monstrous alter ego: the Vampire State.
Like its legendary namesake, it survives by draining the lifeblood of the nation—the sweat, money, labor, privacy, and freedoms of “We the People.”
One tax, one law, one war, one surveillance program at a time, it takes what it needs and bleeds us dry.
As in every great horror story, the most terrifying monsters are the ones that look familiar. Of all the gothic figures, Bram Stoker’s vampire—a cold, calculating predator bent on conquest—may be the closest to the waking nightmare unfolding before us.
Like its mythic counterpart, the Vampire State seduces its victims with promises of safety, comfort, and national greatness. Once trust is secured and access granted, it feeds slowly and methodically—just enough to keep the populace docile, but never enough to rouse them from their trance.
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