613 Coup Cuck Clown
You know, where everything being said is exactly the opposite of what they mean? It's funny, I've heard humans have collective amnesia, and right up until inauguration day, I kinda forgot about this world.
Back in my school days, I managed to pick up two bachelor's degrees, one in art and the other in communications. These days I'm not sure which one is more useful, but this blog post is mostly leaning on the communications.
So what have I been seeing and thinking the past three weeks?
Self-censorship
I'm only your average shithead. A private citizen, not a journalist. What I write here is opinion, sadly, not fact. Like almost everyone else, I get my info from the news and social media.
Even better, nobody listens to me. This is Blogspot. It hasn't been relevant in 20 years.
And yet, I find myself nervous. What if they come after me?
That's intentional. So here I am. Not being afraid. At least not enough to shut up.
What business do I have shouting my opinion here, on the Internet, for the permanent record and all to see?
None. This isn't about business. Early on I had some hope this blog might make money. It doesn't.
No, this is mostly about another smart monkey writing his thoughts down so he doesn't have to think them any more. And maybe attempting to make some sense of it all. And possibly, hopefully, giving you another perspective to consider. Shining a light.
The Onslaught
The "onslaught" is what took Joe Biden out. He really wasn't that bad in the first (his only) debate, his failure was trying to keep up with the torrent of bullshit vomiting forth from his opponent.
You can't keep up. I can't keep up. If you try to, they'll just change the subject and lay on more bullshit. The Onslaught.
The only way around the Onslaught is to stick to your message. If you have one.
And with that, let's descend into the muck I just said we should steer clear of.
Doomscroll away...
Different propaganda
Left and right, we're under assault from propaganda.
If you're on the left right now, you're seeing a coup, a dictator and an oligarch (oddly, dear leader's billions aren't enough to make him the oligarch) disassembling government so they can profit. And sticking it to anyone on the left they can.
If you're on the right, you see a hero, and his brilliant sidekick, fixing government so it doesn't give handouts to undeserving people.
(Until your funding is frozen, at which point you understand it was all a big mistake, early days stuff, and you go personally ask for relief.)
Is it that bad?
Remember Bush#2? That's when we kissed our freedom goodbye.
Remember Obama? That's when we had a charismatic leader on the left who could have truly stood up to the powers that be, with broad support from the left and right. Instead, we got bank bailouts, and Occupy got shut down. And healthcare! Well, doctors appointments, at least.
Remember 45#1? Oh yeah, that's when we all got locked in our homes for several months, were told we couldn't go to work, had lines at the grocery store, and almost everyone was utterly reliant on government handouts to get through it all, creating crazy debt spending and running up inflation, which he blamed on the next guy.
Well, here we are in 47#2.
(The blue is the stuff for sale.)
1930s Germany or 1990s Russia?
A lot of the propaganda were getting these days is about fascism, a system of government we have been enjoying since at least Bush 2.
The basic gyst of the Shitler talk is: they're taking away our civil liberties and locking us up. It starts with trans people and the intellectuals are next. Oligarchs, big business and the brown shirts will march through and start WW3.
That might be accurate. I don't know. They certainly have me nervous, and seem to be punching down at a scary rate. (Maybe not post 9-11 scary, but as they say, "it's early days.")
From what I've seen so far, Dear Leader doesn't have the stomach for a fight. That's my favorite part about him. He truly seems to understand war is a crappy way of making money.
But, you know, that could change.
So far, yes, I'm seeing the scary culture wars stuff that might lead to concentration camps, or internment camps, or pogroms, or whatever history will call them.
But I'm also seeing something that happened in my lifetime: Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. When Rootin' Tootin' took over. When all of the Soviet people's riches were privatized, and a few Russians started buying really big boats.
What would that look like in the US? Oh, ShmaceX running the FAA and NASA. Or the BLM selling land. Or the National Forest or National Parks becoming, well, how was your visit to Grump's Grand Canyon this summer?
Fraud and abuse
Did you see the Coup Cuck Clown meeting? The one with bozo behind the resolute desk while a little kid told him to shush his mouth, and trenchcoat daddy spewed all kinds of brilliant, high IQ misinformation? The big lie that kept repeating that day was how they were looking for "fraud and abuse."
Which means what in opposite world?
Bingo, they are creating fraud and abuse.
Follow the money
What? No! The world's richest man, self-admittedly cash poor, who had to borrow most of the money to buy his own propaganda machine, he can't possibly be straight up looking to steal money from us, can he?
Maybe not directly by sending big checks from the treasury accounts he now controls to himself or his companies, that already happens, but watch this space. You don't get the most money in the world without taking it from someone. And you don't bankroll dear leader without expecting a payday.
How about the guy who bankrupted his own casinos, four times? Who has sold plane tickets, bottled water, bibles, crypto coins, fraudulent university courses, wine, watches, and sneakers?
Yes, he's staying out of jail, but he's also getting truly deep pockets in the process. The kind he never had before.
Privatization
Wreck it, say it's broken, then buy it to "fix" it.
This is the pattern to watch for.
Utilities, real estate, government services, banking systems, sovereign nations: it's all up for grabs.
Greg Palast
Back in 2000, there was a journalist named Greg Palast who shouted from the rooftops that Bush2 stole the election. Gore won the popular election by half a million votes, but lost the electoral college by 1 vote, as decided by 537 votes in Florida, as decreed by the Supreme Court. Palast had all kinds of evidence that the Bush team cooked up the results, but he was a wack-job and Bush2 was a funny guy defending the free world.
What is Greg Palast saying now? Oh, only that a few million voters got purged from various state systems before election day, and Dems would have won otherwise.
Giving us their more colorful, forward-thinking, mainstream, middle-of-the-road version of fascism -- the late-stage capitalist corporate fascist police state -- otherwise known as most of our lifetimes.
The 1000 billionaires
Who are the oligarchs running the show? We only have about a thousand billionaires in America, out of about three thousand globally.
We know lots of them by name. Musk, Zuck, Bezos, Walton(s), Gates, Murdoch (ok, he's Australian, but #1 is South African, so I guess borders really are disappearing in the new technokreptologarchy), Buffet, Koch, Bloomberg, Jobs, Swift, Jenner, Gomez (shoutout to the ladies!), etc and so on into the lesser knowns Ramaswamy, Thiel, Page, Brin, Ellison, Andreeson, Dorsey, etc etc etc. It's a long list, but not that long.
Are they all evil?
No. Personally, I don't go for "good" or "evil" talk. It's not true, life is messy and there are shades of everything. Most people I meet I find something to like about them, or at least empathize with.
The billionaires may not be evil, but they are obsessed by money. We all are, it's a truly wild invention. But I'm guessing they are all, to a man, or woman, or non-binary personage (are there any trans billionaires? That Jenner mentioned above is actually the daughter of one.), anyway, where were we? I got sucked into their culture war there for a moment...Right. The billionaires are all owned by their money. No matter how luxurious and leisurely their lives look, they wake up every day nervous.
About losing it.
And the power it brings.
That's the struggle we're in here.
We're nervous about losing our freedom. They're nervous about losing their money, which was once our money. Guess who is currently winning?
Ass-kissing
If you've seen an episode of The Apprentice, the "reality" TV game show that saved Dear Leader from the dustbin of douchebaggery, you understand the value of ass-kissing in our current political landscape.
For all of our civilized ways, human beings are remarkably still apes. Our base instincts often run the show.
Eating, shitting, these are important things. Sex? Procreation? Immortality?
What makes us wake up in the morning?
For dear leader, it's ass kissing. He really enjoys a good grovel. You know, fluffing him a little with frontal flattery is nice, but get down there on your knees, brown nosing and begging, with some real tears?
Oh, ok, you're not really fired.
Here's looking at you Justice Kavanaugh, for showing us all how to do it.
Ukraine. Russia bankrupt. Peace?
One narrative runs: The sanctions and fighting back are working. Russia is in economic trouble, a pariah state with 20% inflation and a military made up of embezzling yes-men. They can't win.
Another narrative says: 47#2 is compromised, a tool of Russia. He's looking out for Russian interests by giving away a country.
Another narrative says: Strong negotiator sees country losing war and gets best deal possible for them.
Another narrative says: Powerful pacifist looks for the way he can make the most money and get peace. Cuts a deal to end war in exchange for mineral rights. Total genius move!
Shit, dude, I honestly don't know. I want peace, too.
The enemy within
This one, I do know. We're not enemies, we're neighbors.
We help each other, learn from each other, and respect each other.
Working from home
So the guy that spends most of his time at his own resorts rather than at the office, plus the guy that has been volunteering for the past month and nowhere near his office are upset that other people are working from home.
News flash: the office building was the old IT network.
Sure, we lose a little bit in body language and spontaneity when we work from home.
Sure, there are lots of situations where a bit of face time is helpful.
But that's not what "back to the office" is all about. "Back to the office" is simply about feeling important when you, the boss, walk into the building.
Social democracy versus the global South
So here we are, at an obvious inflection point in US history. Is this the end of an empire? Is it the end of liberal democracy? Is it the end of capitalism? Is it the beginning of a techno-authoritarianism?
I don't know.
But wait, there's more that I don't know. Some things I've long suspected are becoming more obvious. One of them is the perhaps delusional idea that Social Democracy, the co-existance of a capitalist-democratic corporatist state with social benefits for all, like Northern European countries people on the left love to point out as having the best lifestyles on Earth, that perhaps these countries' wealth is actually underpinned by a history of colonialism, a protection racket with the big bad gorilla (that's US), and exploitation of resources and labor from the "global south." (Where, exactly, does our Ikea stuff come from? Not Sweden.)
So then we're left asking, how? How do we live nice lives, and have justice? Can we have our cake and eat it too? Do we just say "f-it" and embrace the reality of our imperialist status, and you know, carry on exactly like we have been, sort of upset and marching but mostly just doing as we're told? Or do we really embrace it, and go full shmazi?
Or, do we face the notion that we've been so badly propagandized against the "S" word that we're actually afraid to even think that maybe, just maybe, that shit might work?
Reasons for hope
If you're like me, you're not enjoying this experience. They're in my head. I don't want them there. I want my thoughts back.
That's part of why I'm typing this up. To get it out.
But also, I want to share some positive vision.
Ladies and gentlemen, contrary to our schooling and popular legend, the United States of America is not always the good guy. We are a country founded on genocide and slavery, who has dominated the globe with military might for three generations. We dropped the nuclear bomb. We've had Jim Crow and George Floyd, internment camps and homeless camps, Native schools and school shootings, leaded gas and oil wars, trickle-down and too-big-to-fail, libtards and shmazis.
And now, one version of us is coming to an end.
Meaning, something new is coming.
And despite all the doom and gloom, perpetuated by the device you hold in your hand, which is controlled by the billionaires, remember that, despite all the doom and gloom...
Humans are trending awesome.
We're going woke.
Yeah, there are retrograde shitheads, many with guns, hoping to go backwards. That's the "again" part. And they are trying. But you can't kill the future. Humanity has been trending toward enlightenment for a long time. We know a lot more today than we did two thousand years ago, when Saint Paul suggested Jesus was the son of God, or five hundred years ago, when Copernicus suggested to the pope that the Earth revolved around the Sun, and was burned alive, or even ten years ago, before we had AI that could talk to us.
Russell Brand
This British comedian with a love for big words and a long history of anti-war and anti-imperialist thinking, has recently embraced Christianity, Pucker Gnarlson, and #47.
It offended me. He upturned my sense of getting it. I thought we were sympatico, and now he's gone and sided with everything my propaganda is telling me is bad?
Ok, the god thing I can get. God is a word, a word that's a blanket thrown over a mystery. Christianity is one way of tapping into that mystery.
Pucker, honestly, I have barely given the time to consider. My propaganda says he's bad. I've watched a little bit and found it to be infuriating, or something, a bunch of blowhard baloney arguing about nothing they really know about. But my first hand experience is none, and my viewing experience is minimal.
And #47?
Oh who knows. My propaganda tells me to hate him. But if you put me in a room with him, hell, I like dancing to YMCA too. He's self-interested. I think he doesn't like war. We could probably have a conversation. He'd probably lie to me. I'd probably lie to him.
He might not do the best job of maintaining the country we lived in.
He might not do the best job of creating the country he's promised.
But he's sure got us talking, huh?
Comments
Post a Comment