In Celebration of Shooting Niggers

It's pretty clear that America's long love affair with shooting and otherwise killing and abusing black people has taken on new life. Call it a pastime. On the way somewhere today I saw two pickup trucks flying large rebel flags in celebration of the murders of those black people in Charleston.

This is a criminal culture with a deep streak of defensiveness. For decades Americans have made excuses for their backward, white brethren in Dixie when they couldn't be kept out of sight and dragged their knuckles around the yard, but they're altogether off the compound now and causing trouble.

And behaving more like apes and aborigines than any of their Darwin-loving fellow countrymen. Some years ago Hendrik Hertzberg wrote something fantasizing about the secession of Texas and all the things America could do without that ball and chain. It was too wonderful for words.

Sane and rational and humane, with plenty of PBS. Is it really too much to hope for? Oh, those rebel flags, they haunt us. We kill black people in denial of our destiny, our doom, because they are us, the better part of us, the part that is vulnerable and enduring and free. We, the white people, are in chains.

Any Yankee for President

Barack Obama is the first Yankee president since JFK. Every president in between was a Republican, and an honorary Southerner, since desegregation, or a Southerner: Johnson, Carter and Clinton. 

The South has been holding the country hostage over race forever. America itself will end before this shit does but I'd like to have another Yankee president, just to see their blood boil. And boil it will.

House of Cards

The Republican police state, typified by the NSA, is there to serve only one master, the wealthy elite: the wealthy, Republican elite. Their ruling beauracracy is a combination of Mad Men and House of Cards. The house of cards, though, is our state and society. There is no truth.

Not for them. No reality. No accountability. The marketing is the product: reality is something they make up so the product is irrelevant or nonexistent. They invent and advertise threats that aren't there. Fear is the unrooted, made-up, self-serving result. They love fear.

And they're very good at acting, creating that imaginary world of fear, with mercifully low taxes for them. Let the riffraff pay for their police state. They've got greens fees. The America we knew and loved doesn't exist anymore. There's a play in its place. The plot is simple.

We're the good guys. Lots and lots of finger pointing fills out the drama. The finger is never pointed back at them, but it could be. Whoa, you can't do that! They will not tolerate dissent because their new, invented and inverted America is a fragile fabrication, a house of cards.

The Decline and Fall of the American Empire

America was great, but a third of the country was run by terrorists. The other two-thirds, after decades of waffling and unconscionable delays, finally insisted that the oppression end in "Dixie," the terrorist sub-state, in the 1960's, and that the subjugated minority be free.

Capitalists and corporatists then seized power through an alliance with the disaffected inhabitants of "Dixie," anti-democrats, racists and reconstituted rebels (just add desegregation--and stand back). The tactic worked and the American state sank.

Into decline, that is, wanton consumerism and moral decay, marked by compulsion, recklessness, frenzied activity and denial, the sad drive to be as big a pig as possible before it all ends in an orgy of vicariousness, inauthenticity and second-hand experiences. 

Sex and money, though, are pursued first-hand. Empires usually last about 250 years. We were supposed to be an anti-imperial country and immune to this. Also it was thought that knowing the cycle of empires would enable us to avoid it, but we have succumbed.

Those who asserted that we are exceptional and insisted on it have doomed us to an imperial end. Boo, hiss. We're now on the path of "decline and fall" and not an exception. Exceptionally bad, perhaps, because of our power and the falseness of it.

We should say to the world honestly, like good imperialists: "We take what we want. Don't stand in our way."

The Partial Perspective Vortex

I have found a way of inducing and instilling the awareness of how interconnected everything is. Clearly there is a crisis here, brought on by selfishness and self-centeredness, so much so that the denial of reality is rampant. It is now common, for example, for someone to deny that they are doing something while they are doing it and in the presence of witnesses. 

The regimen involves both methods and machinery, and software and hardware, but assumes that the subjects are not entirely deprived of conscience and incapable of seeing the interconnections, that the subjects would feel something if you shot their mother in the head in front of them, that is, and understand that it really happened and can't be spun or undone or remediated. 

Virtual reality works both ways, that's what we have learned. It enhances the sense of connectedness in some people and dulls it in others. The limiting case so far has been George W. Bush. After weeks of effort there was no result so we finally shot Barbara Bush in the head in front of him--she was super-old, anyway--and, still, nothing: no sense of the reality of it.

It didn't work so we have incarcerated him at Guantanamo Bay as a menace to society. It does put a different face on the deaths of all those people, hundreds of thousands, who perished because of him and makes us think that he is an outlier. Guantanamo is pretty close to Florida and Jeb will visit, he says, once he forgives his brother for causing their mother to be shot.

 

People Who Think That Someone Who Doesn't Know Something They Know Is Stupid Are Stupid

Technical Support, are you there?

They're Invested

I have no issue with capitalism, per se, but it's the nature of my writing that I overstate the case to try to overcome the normal immersion of people in their everyday lives. You try to get people to step back and think: "My God, this is crazy." If it is, of course, crazy.

But what is crazy? Sometimes it's hard to figure out but there are rules: vested interest, unreason and religious fanaticism, for example, being important indicators. All three may occur at once and in a complementary way. Are they getting rich? Do they talk sense?

Do they think they have a special relationship with a deity? Ask yourself and you will know. When in doubt: follow the money. Societies create capital, not individuals, so societies have a claim on it. People who deny this are not trustworthy and only want more for themselves.

Human Preserves

Capital is human preserves. You boil people down and add sugar, or pack them in salt or brine them and there you have capital. One person can thus become the means to another's ends and the results not spoil. Natural resources are similar but meaningless without work.

People are preserved through labor and in other ways. This is the boiling and brining. There's no reason why a person shouldn't realize the benefit of their own productive activity but there are impediments to that, evidently insurmountable, in our society.

Capitalists are jealous of God. Their own lives aren't enough for them, but work itself is evanescent and workers are unmotivated when you take away their earnings and unpredictable as well, prone to injury and death, so you find a way to preserve them.

Discipline and deception are components in the preservation, with deception preferred because the human assets are less put at risk since the discipline may involve bodily harm, slavery being an extreme example. Studying it is the way to understand the process.

Wage-slaves are less obviously but more insidiously exploited since they may be convinced of their own autonomy when they have none or at best very little. Witness a worker in an Amazon warehouse. And then there is geofencing, worker site-monitoring.

There's no way to make the case that this kind of treatment is civilized or appropriate. It's an imposition on personal freedom and a violation of individual rights and should be illegal, as a form of intra-species predation, which is immoral by any normal standard.

The Silver Age

When I studied cultures I wondered if it wasn't more fun to live in a decadent age. Living in one now I think that it is more fun for irresponsible citizens but not others. Irresponsibility is rewarded and thrives. Here's where I was once an exceptionalist.

I didn't think it would happen to us. I thought that we were different. Even as we sink you can see it playing out. Those who caused the decline throw everyone else out of the lifeboats and sail away. I would rather go down and drown than be with them. 

Did we ever have a Golden Age? As golden as it gets, I guess. There is a strange brilliance to our technology but our morality is stale and increasingly retrograde. It isn't uncool to think morality matters. It isn't judgemental. Well, it is, but not personally. 

Nobody wants to judge anybody but it's implicit in everything. We make allowances, more so as people are further removed from us, but there must be standards that apply everywhere and to everyone or we are destined forever for failure.

Save Me the Watusi

Is it just me or does the 1960's look to you like the last great flourish of American creativity, openness, innocence and optimism? Man, I miss it. 

Picking Peaches in the New Jerusalem

The setting: a small town in South Carolina, 1960. There's a boy, 16, a country-club white kid from a good family of moderate means. Summers he has access to a flat-bed truck and uses it to collect black guys to pick peaches. He gets $1/picker and doesn't pick peaches. 

He can sit in the shade all day. This is the Republican economic model. You say anything and they scream that they worked for the money, which they kind of did, but the black guys worked a lot more for a lot less. Is it any wonder the white boys want it to stay this way? 

The story is true.

Offer It Up

I want to offer up my entire life, all of the unease and discomfort--not really suffering--to God through an intermediary, maybe James Gandolfini, hoping that some good will come from all the wasteful harm I've witnessed being caused by Republicans. It irritates me so much that they have had their way with our country for all of my adult life and ruined it.

The USA is not what it was. We don't see ourselves reflected in other countries with horrible, unresolvable sectarian shit but that is us and the crazy side has won, as it has in most of those other places. God, this is sad. The worst elements have won and it may never be fixed or I may not live to see it if it is, so I offer up the pain of it through the intercession of that good man, James.

He played a thug but he was a nice person. He must look down and see that the thugs are still in control and how good people--nice, responsible people--are unable to slow the runaway train of Republican madness. As of now, anyway. I do not give up hope but I offer it all up meanwhile because it's better than despair, which I have had enough of already. I am more at peace now.

The Great Repression

Clearly there's a cultural equivalent of repression, with all the bad consequences manifested on a societal scale, the main thing being denial and projection.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, whose the most fucked-up of all? Someone else, of course. 

Someone Stole Helen

The longer I look back the more I think that 9/11 was a pivotal event in our history, one of a few big ones, not that it had to be. It retroactively made the questionable election of 2000 very significant. Think of how it might have been different. Think of the things that could and should have been said, immediately after it happened:

We must grieve first, especially for those directly affected. Terrorists try to create fear. We must not give into it and the attack was easy, anyway. Free, pluralistic, open societies are easy targets. The attack was an attack on our values. If we shared their craziness they might not have attacked us. We must not betray our values because of the attack and become like them. This is what they want. 

It is losing. In fact we must renew our commitment to those values and look carefully to see if we have betrayed them already. We need our strength now and those values are our strength. We can make some good out of this terrible event by recommitting ourselves to our essential beliefs and deepening our understanding of those beliefs. It's also the best way to honor the dead.

And so on and so on. Sadly what we got, because of the utter thoughtlessness and lack of character of our leaders, was the opposite. May there be a shooting range in Hell for them where they are eternally the targets. We abandoned our values and lost our national sense of self and our identity. The terrorists have won. The world is now much more the world they wanted: primitive and uncivilized.

The world of the Trojan war, compulsive and destructive, over nothing, but maybe honor. Think, now, what our Homeric epithets would be. Wise or wily? Reactive or restrained? We have lost. We are not the people we claim to be. We stumble around trying to find ourselves but we're unhinged, a nation of lost souls seeking peace, holding to a self-image that doesn't apply, that we're independent and free.

Good luck to us in looking for peace. We have chosen the gods of chaos, mistakenly or unconsciously, in our insistence on simplicity and certainty. We have planted the seeds of discord everywhere thinking we won't be affected or not thinking at all. The terrorist attacks threw that back at us, showing that we're not immune, not a chosen people, perhaps, and not always right and always right with God. 

The Ronnies

There are all these awards: the Oscars, Grammys, Tonys, Emmys, Obies, the Clios, as we now know from Mad Men, etc. Ronald Reagan blazed a path of creativity that has many followers and has resulted in many adherents to the new Republican doctrine of unreality. Ronnie, in fact, blew clean through the distinction between reality and invention. He is said to have been unable to keep his memories of the movies separate from what really happened and his memory was reportedly outstanding in some ways, nearly photographic. 

Anyway it was probably very visual and, I would guess, correspondingly low on the reality-check scale, an amazing trove or repository of incoherent matter, scattershot images and streams of images selectively nurtured for their value on a personal vanity index. Ronnie's vanity project became the nation's, a parallel world of feel-good stuff, a virtuality, probably needed to soothe Republican souls in carrying the weight of Manifest Destiny and the White Man's Burden of being simultaneously wealthy and worthless.

The Ronald Reagan Awards, or Ronnies, should honor those who have excelled in this creative work, the making-up of a realm of happy-talk, free from the need to conform to any measure of verification or intelligibility. There would be an award for creating the most crippling debt, one for military malfeasance, one for depriving children of food, one for depriving people of healthcare and so on. All of these assume reverse spin, which is the point, and are guised as the opposite of what they are. Freedom is limitation.

Security is risk. Fiscal responsibility is reckless abandon and debt. Individuality is conformity. Respect is presumption. Ownership is enslavement. The statuette is a representation of a chimp named Chump, an iconic and ironic reminder of how easy it is to get people to believe anything and to mimic it, so the nonsense is repeated and believed and on it goes until there is a calamity, like a financial collapse. It is then that the best creative work is done, when it is most hard to deny the reality of Republican incompetence.

We are Utterly Defeated

How is it that the Democrats can fail to see how utterly defeated they are? If they did there would be some hope that, someday, progressive principles would be seen rightly, as the true American tradition and, voilà, the Democrats would be revered and consistently elected to run it all, with the privileged Republican class as a foil, which is how it should be.

But the Democrats have implicated themselves in the Republican mess. No one is effectively representing progressive principles. The system has gone so far right a progressive can't function within it. We need an outsider, someone charismatic, who can blow through all the crap and speak plainly to the American people, a real leader, like Franklin Roosevelt.

Born in the CSA

It hurts my heart that the rebels are misrepresenting America in the world. Rather than outlawing the Confederate Flag in those states that insist, duh, that it has nothing to do with racism I think we should adopt it as the nation's flag. 

And why not adopt the Confederate Constitution, while we're at it. Let them have it all and God bless their pointy little heads. Oh, those are hats, of a sort, and, below them, sheets. In the next Olympics we'll all be chanting: CSA, CSA, CSA!