I was surprised to see last week,
though not really surprised, nobody pinned Scott Walker's win in
Wisconsin on Obama. And not just win, but a resounding triumph, as
far as the Right is concerned. Like a death knell for the Dem's this
cycle. Americans are such suckers. Obama, the constitutional law
professor who has signed some of the most unconstitutional law this
nation has ever seen, as if preparing to invade his own country,
killer drones like his personal play things, which the Democratic
party is morally and ethically incapable of calling him on, if they
can even see it. And then there's the Right. It would be comical, if
not so sad, when all those tea partiers lose their middle class jobs,
medicare, social security and 401K etc when the Austerity they seem
so to desire comes to America (and resource constraints and climate
changes they so resolutely deny, kick in ever harder), and America's
elite start heading for their off-shore compounds in greater droves
than they already are. Comical, except I'm sure more than a few will
continue to blame it on gay people, foreigners, dark skinned and poor
and weak people, the devil, and women generally.
Did you hear about James Cameron, the
mogul movie maker. He's getting together with Eric Schmidt and Larry
Page of Google, and a bunch of other hot shot billionaires, to invest
in off-site mining, which is to say, beyond the terrestrial:
asteroids and the moon and such. I mean, if you wrote the screenplay,
you'd have to make it a farce, because otherwise it would seem too
preposterous. Wasn't Avatar against off-earth mining? I thought that
movie was about not going to other places in the universe, in the way
of the rape-pillage-plunder, command-control-dominate-destroy of our
present treatment of the earth and each other? What precisely is the
meaning of evil genius? Are they reserved for fiction only? Perhaps
we are waiting for the Avengers to save us from our gullibility? Or
is that, culpability? What about learning to tailor the economy like
an ecosystem? That might be worth sharing, cosmically. Hey James,
Eric, Larry, et al? Will you gift me with a few million
dollars, to buy a thousand acres with a spring, to build a mostly off
the grid village with my closest friends and their kids? Some of my
friends are techie geeks too. I have the feeling the shit's commin'
down hard, and I'd like a safe place for myself and the people I care
about most, to model a post-collapse lifestyle. We'll plant fruit
trees and big gardens, ferment wine and beer, make music. We'll keep
chickens. You can come and hang out. We'll all dance with the kids. It'll be fun.
Meanwhile, high gas prices are destroying demand, while falling oil prices make all that fracking and tar sands removal uneconomic, which happens to be the only thing preventing a decline in supply: aka Peak Oil.
What about John Maynard Keynes? He's
that guru intellectual economist so dear to liberals everywhere. Not
only was the guy sure his economic policies were perfectly tailored
to maintaining totalitarian control, he was Director of the British
Society of Eugenics – during WWII, no less. Eugenics – that's
population control, and men like Keynes deciding who gets to make
babies, and maybe with whom. If you have any experience at all with
government bureaucrats, that might give you pause for a moment, if
you think about seven billion people, resource constraints, petty and
not-so-petty bureaucratic control issues, and the profound separation
between government policy and the actual effects of those policies.
(It's not like those devotees of the Chicago or Austrian schools are
any less fond of control, it's just their idea of eugenics is more
about handing control from bureaucrats to plutocrats and oligarchs,
population control by attrition, so to speak.) Paul Krugman, that
great Keynesian polemicist, may or may not be a eugenicist, but he
was given the Nobel by those bureaucratic Keynesian Europeans who are
doing such a fine job leading Europe toward peace and prosperity,
just like they gave that war mongering, Imperial hegemon Obama, the
ultimate institutional peace prize*. It's so perfectly appropriate I feel like
I'm living in a novel.
How about Bernanke? The Bernank. Did
you hear about Basel III? New rules for banks about capital
requirements. Liberals jumped on it like he was giving the big banks
da bizness – finally! Except, it isn't any different than any
other policy that has come from the Fed, or our government, the last
thirty years at least, insofar as favoring elite control at the
expense of everybody. I don't know much about Basel III (see
aforementioned Europeans), but I know enough to expect it to result
in many small banks being consumed by the biggest five, in the name
of limiting the systemic threat of global economic meltdown. If that
sounds like a mind-****, It's exactly analogous to federal farm
policy. Hand most of the largess to the biggest, most polluting
players, and then apply all regulations evenly across the board.
Blind devotion to faux free-market imperialism on the Right, chicken
shit liberal devotion to do-gooding, like giving all the kids the
same prize, except this prize prevents most small farmers from
raising, slaughtering and selling their own chickens, for want or
fear of the $100,000 in capital requirements demanded by the USDA, in
the name of making food safe. Like our treatment of “lesser”
nations generally, debt bondage as a means to pillage and plunder.
Now, instead of small, isolated outbreaks of food-borne illness, we
have 34 state-wide, increasingly anti-biotic defying e-coli,
cryptosporidium and staphylococcus outbreaks, there is fire retardant
and ammonium in your kid's sandwich meat, real, healthy, local
organic food is the most expensive on the shelf, if you can find it,
and most of the food is coming from a long way away. I don't think
The Bernank, or the policy makers at the USDA are malicious,
necessarily, just consider Hannah Arendt's description of the great
evil of Nazi fascism, that it's practitioners were in the main,
utterly banal.
How about all those prisons we are
building, here in America, particularly in Arizona. Most are
ostensibly to be filled with illegal aliens, otherwise known as
Central and South American people looking for a better life, often
running from the capital-infused pillaging, plundering and tyranny
where they live. If America's economy goes into full-on Seneca-style collapse mode, or even the catabolic, it's hard to imagine Latinos
continuing to cross the border looking for jobs, particularly if the
military is repositioned domestically (anyone remember the NDAA?) But
once you build it, your creditors and investors are going to make you
fill it – all around good for the economy, you know. Parts of
Arizona would make an excellent gulag archipelago, for, say, those
“terrorists” who talk and write about conspiracy theories like
peak resources, industrial decline, and advocate for things like
local economic autonomy and the health of ecosystems. But this isn't
Soviet Communist Russia; America is the light of the world, the city
on the hill, the home of the free and the brave. Arizona isn't
Siberia, either, but it might as well be, if you are a political
prisoner. It would be perfectly in keeping with conservative
America's obsession with hell. Half the people in the penal system
now, are non-violent drug offenders – it's not like we haven't set
a precedent for the sadistic, in the name of security, for profit. We
already have the largest prison population per-capita on earth. But
why worry about a domestic gulag when Obama says the military can
ship you to any one of our thousands of military and detention
facilities across the globe, and never tell anyone where you are, why
you were taken, or even that you were?
I check in to the Huffpost every day,
for a key barometer of American crazy. I could go to other mainstream
news sites, but most of them are like falling into a black hole, and
the Huffpost is at least capable of pushing some boundaries, however
slight, and mostly inconsequential. I like the three column
structure: the column on the left, social and political punditry,
most of it trapped in the dualism of Liberal/Conservative, most of it
oblivious to resource constraints; The middle column, mostly news,
much of it slanted to favor the idea of government control, and in no
way designed to seriously question Western habits of consumption,
American's especially; The column on the right, side boobs, fashion
fawning and faux-pas', links to the myriad entertainments, endless
examples of gruesome, ugly behavior. Cannibalism has been popular
lately, in all three columns. Consumerism, coming to it's logical conclusion.
Western Civilization as a paradigm is
like a psychological assault, from the moment of first consciousness,
demanding I participate in a system that makes some
multi-billionaires, leaving billions in abject poverty. It encourages
some appetites - the pursuit of money, the accumulation of wealth, the
consumption of resources and the exercise of power - while condemning
or subsuming into the greater consumer culture, any appetite that
might advocate for a simpler, more harmonious approach to living,
tailoring the economy to ecosystems, as example. The Western mind is
instead tailored for control, to administer or to yield, and every
institution operates according to that Western ethos, obfuscating
information in a way tailored to maintain the power of said
institutions. None has the true intent, nor are they in any way
capable of making this world a better place for everything in it, but
only exist to maintain whatever control they have, and to acquire
more. The institution exists to maintain control of resources, to be
consumed and controlled by the people dependent on that institution.
And just about every one institution is hostile to the existence of
every other, the vast majority are hopelessly corrupt, often in the
most banal sort of way, and they are equally, hopelessly intertwined,
domestically and globally.
I'm going to pick on the Catholic
Church and Christianity, in the next post, because the Catholic
Church and Christianity as institutions are easy targets, and I was
raised evangelical. But I reiterate, they are all, every institution
in the West, hopelessly corrupt, because they are hopelessly and
inextricably dependent upon hostile dominator/dominated dualism, as a
defining paradigm. Humans as dominator, nature as the dominated, and
it all pretty well efficiently trickles down from there, into just
about every relationship, into our very worldview - and the vast majority don't have a clue.
* The Nobel; the ultimate institutional peace prize, with the possible exception of the office of the Pope.
2 comments:
reads like you got some of that funk on you this time.
Waking up to the truth in America is like being a recovering drug addict who is continually forced to take another hit. He wants to quit but they just won't let him.
The prisons are my biggest fear. It should be the possibility of drug resistant critters finding their way into my body, or out of control climate change, but going to prison for no reason is my biggest fear. Not because I'm doing anything, but because it doesn't require any type of decision on my part. It just requires a pissed off, burned out, cynical, jack leg, ass hole cop pulling me over because he doesn't like my beard and long hair...and he's under paid and hasn't been laid without paying for it in over a year. He's probably a little hung over as well. Whatever he is, he can make me disappear and he makes less than 30,000 a year. Scary shit man.
luciddreams,
Can't get that funk off or out, if one doesn't know it's there. Just pointing it out.
As for cops, most I've met are just people, who have treated me with respect to the degree that I have treated them with dignity. Beware the Western disconnection of opposites. We are all connected. But then, I live in Minneapolis, not the Southeast where you live, where perhaps the cops are different.
I'm inclined to think we're all in this mess together. And every man and woman is to decide, how they are to approach the coming troubles, and what they are in service to.
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