Codified Narcisism

In honor of the "government shutdown" here in the U.S.A., I feel that it is only right that I share a few thoughts on a problem that underlies this once great nation. Years ago, if you were an uneducated fool, a psychopath or sociopath, the vast majority of our population knew enough to discount your ridiculous raving, your bad mouthing of "the system" or random attacks on innocent people trying to make a living around you. We actually had a level of compassion for people hurting so bad inside that they had to lash out at the world around them. However, we knew enough to not vote these bad actors into office. What we are facing down in the House of Representatives right now is a group of outliers so devoid of knowledge, skills and attitudes that are required to participate in politics that they cannot understand or adapt to the responsibilities that come with holding office.

We have used a series of tools to keep them under the delusion that they are not only worthy of respect, but that they are "God's" gift to society, even though their actions reflect ruthlessness beyond compare. I often harp on the ruling elite, the monied class and the oligarchy in general and this post, sadly, will not be much different. To even mount a political campaign for the House of Representatives in our nation is something only multimillionaires can afford.. Winning a House seat in 2008 was 1.1 million. Four years down the road, with the Citizens United case that made it through the highest court in the land, money and donations to political campaigns is now considered speech, allowing the campaign coffers to swell exponentially with less and less oversight. Winning a senate seat is nearly ten times as expensive.

This is the "cost" of our current system from a direct financial cost perspective.

With the advent of taking idiots and assholes seriously, our governing bodies have been hurt terribly. In our current system, as long as you pay to play, the media will point their cameras at you and "reporters" will flock to your press conferences and spread the "news" in your press releases whether there is substance behind your words or not. This is akin to babies playing with their own shit. If you continuously reward them each time they "make" it and tell them that they have made a great thing, they will never get over their creations. We have developed a new sort of system that rewards obstructionist rhetoric, bases entire campaigns on single issues, a system that demonizes those who cannot afford to defend themselves and unwittingly props up the cult of ignorance with million dollar graft and corruption.

Thinking that the uber-wealthy will be content to sway politics in a single district is foolish on the face of it. The billionaire class uses these fools whenever and where ever they find them, with donations from large donors crossing as many state lines as their ruthless tentacles desire. The minions (our supposed representatives) are thoroughly convinced that it is their ideas that are valuable, their "stance" against cooperation and their "moral" values that the wealthiest Americans are lining up to fund. This is akin to the person who has been bruised and battered in a car wreck wandering around in shock telling people "No, I'm fine, I don't want to go to the hospital." These people are so in love with their image of who they know themselves to be, that it is difficult to tell them anything different.

If one tries to inject a little truth into their swollen, ego-driven self image, it is easy for them to brand you as a heretic, a "taker" (as they like to call those who they call "the problem" with our nation) or a litany of catch words or phrases that exempt them from having to consider anything but their illusions as real. We can see the ignorant, bigoted, hateful , spiteful and obstructionist representatives behaving badly in nearly every political debate, each evening on the nightly "news". We can read about them in the papers, yet the idea of them being horribly destructive to our nation, our political system and the rest of the world economy never seems to come up. The self-love that they must feel, combined with the funding of oligarchs, has created a master class of self love, lies, deceit, corruption and vehemence that makes Ronald Reagan seem tame.

The vast majority are being beaten into submission by less than one third of the Republican representatives to the House of Representatives. That body is only supposed to hold one half of one third of the power of our great nation, the childish fit that they are throwing is harming not only our country but the world economic system. However, the wealthiest class, who own the media outlets are still telling us that 10% of us believe that the President himself is to blame for the recent government shutdown. To those of us who try to make sense of the litany of lies and pablum that get passed off as news, this hardly seems possible when only one in twenty folks polled think that Congress is doing a good job.

When our forefathers first stepped onto this great continent, those who were here already had made their peace with the land. Since that time, it seems, we have gone to every effort to rape and destroy this place. Virtually nowhere can we find a spot that has not suffered at the hand of "development", not been exploited for profit, not sustained irreparable damage for the sake of profiteers. Letting those same interests steal our elections will surely be the ruin of all that is left.

Looks Good From Far, But Far From Good

Who are the people who wield the cameras? Are they all mindless schmucks? It seems that the folks who are recording the images and soundscapes that inform our collective attention are either completely devoid of morals/ethics or are entirely motivated by greed. If it isn't vitriolic, invasive or prurient, it certainly isn't chosen by the editors to see the light of day, much less the overly produced shock imagery of the media as it exists today. With a tiny sliver of humanity, those on the ground floor of media-making, the camera people alone, could wield substantial power over the media's unethical twisting of imagery that i contend is equivalent to domestic terrorism. We all know the adage, X% of all statistics are made up on the spot. The lower number you substitute for X, the more you want the listener to consider your "truthiness" in a positive light, often making the point that you would never do the making up of numbers on the fly. The higher number you substitute for X, the less viable you want your listeners to think the numbers are. My problem is that I often use existing figures from reputable sources, but the hostile, hyper-mediated culture that we exist within makes my calculations seem impossible.

For instance, who has not seen relatives scarred for life in a foreign conflict that was ill-conceived and useless, except for corporate welfare for dubious corporations? One third of families have at least one member in the military. most people who speak plainly on their return from war explain that there are no good ones and that if you are not a mental case before you go (and it helps) you will be one when you get home. Why then do we continue to hear stories that somehow our "freedom" depends on doing that to them? My own family bears several scars of war and I can tell you plainly, we are perpetrating crimes against humanity each and every time that we glorify aggression. Every single dollar that we spend on defense is perpetrating destruction, of property, of lives, of our own economic interests around the globe. Power and control issues need to be taken on wherever we find them. This is 100% about giving massive government help to economic structures that, on their own, would collapse. We are funding the powerful at the expense of the weak.

In my personal experience, the first strike close to my heart, was the loss of a neighbor's son. I saw him outside, playing basketball and hanging out, riding his bike and playing board games. He never came back from Vietnam and his parents got a flag, the one that draped his coffin. In that war, we fought against people who had brought education, sanitation and health care to the impoverished people of the region. We poisoned vast acreages, forever, sterilized fields, firebombed whole villages, etc. We also snuffed out a vibrant life and forever handicapped a family, pruning off an entire family tree. When my mother married a vet, she did not know that he was addicted to the pain meds that he associated with his deliverance from the front lines. Let me tell you, the worst thing you can do with a pedophile is to send them to a place where conscience is a liability. Closer still to home, my brother has described his whole life "like living in boot camp." My eldest daughter has married a military man as well. Since the suspension of the draft, there is less corruption down at the draft board, but the bite that the military has taken out of society continues to be disproportionately out of the fabric of the poorest classes. The more dismal you make a person's life and the less vibrant their options, the more desperate for security people become. Even playing the lottery of death or dismemberment seems worth it when you look at the imagery that we are fed on a daily basis.

To appreciate the desperation fully, you need to imagine that there is a world out here that is full to overflowing. We have so much abundance that we throw away about 40% of our food supply in these United States of America, yet people go to bed hungry every night. We spend more on health care, than any other country (18% of GDP. the next closest spends 12%) and have worse outcomes than any other developed nation. Yet, we are told by our illustrious media that health care reform will cost "more". We are asked to turn our heads and cough while insurance companies are emptying our pocketbooks. That's not scarier than Obamacare? The mileage that the right has gotten out of the threat of "death panels" is only sickening when you realize that right now, today, there are rooms where non-doctors are deciding reimbursement rates for every kind and type of procedure and what they will and will not allow people to "have". People are dying each and every day because they have been denied coverage or have gotten the wrong treatments, simply because insurance would not pay for what people really needed.

The real world America has nearly 100,000 public schools. The average school year is 180 days. Even if we had one school shooting per year, there would be a one in eight million chance that your child's school would be the site of the attack. Within that statistic lies another, if twenty out of several hundred children got killed, the chances would increase exponentially. One chance, perhaps, in one hundred million. Now, there are companies selling "bulletproof backpacks". Only three hundred dollars or so can allow parents to rest easier when they send their children into harm's way. Please, people, let's try for one moment to get our collective head out of the sand. The facts will not lie, let's try to look at them! Let's try to get a grasp of the situation. The CDC (Centers for Disease Control) is lobbying the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) to classify motorcycle use as an epidemic, because of avoidable costs that are posed to our health care system by motorcyclists. Several hundred thousand people die in car crashes each year. Less than one percent of those deaths are people who were on two wheels, yet the motorcyclists are the problem. It seems that we are again having a hard time understanding the reality of our situation.

Interpreting data can be tricky, but for one minute consider the consequences of a myth, so firmly held by many motorcyclists as to be considered dogma. they even make bumper stickers and t-shirts that say: "Loud Pipes Save Lives". Many, most noteworthy, Harley owners subscribe to the belief that the roar of un-muffled explosions within the motor, somehow makes them more noticeable on the highway, or in traffic. In the jurisdiction I live, if you can hear music coming from a car more than fifty feet away, it is considered a ticket-able offense. I have heard Harleys from well over five hundred feet away, but no "crime" has taken place. Add to this the flinch factor when the same idiot blows by a blue haired old woman on the highway at eighty and you have potential for disaster. The damage done to both the rider's hearing and that of those around them in traffic costs society billions per year in lost hearing alone, yet the "liberty" of the idiot dishing out the damage is considered sacrosanct. I once again call Bullshit!

When we look from afar, like Disneyland, there is definitely a complete picture being created for us to sit back and watch. However, unlike an audience who has cued up and waited in line for entry, expecting a show, we think what we see is real. We often forget that the bill of goods that we are being sold as consumers of media, has been massaged to show us only what the producers, and ultimately the shareholders of media conglomerates want us to see. Clearchannel has helped put our local theater on the ropes and continues to pummel them into submission which in turn requires that I drive hundreds of miles each week to work in a distant market, plying a craft that my family has participated in for three generations. The wealth continues to concentrate in the highest echelons of our economic system, but somehow, because I'm a member of a union, I am vilified in the media. When we come in close and get a long look deep into the eyes of the beast who controls our very discussion points and vocabulary on these and other subjects, seeing the fires stoked by greed and fed with our children's future, it is both mesmerizing and stupefying that we continue to be taken in by their lie factory. I'm sorry to those of you who tire of me saying it, but lies need to be constantly propped up, but truth stands alone. When we start to see behind the mask of media, no amount of made up statistics can take away the scars and depravity that we see underneath. Whether of not demons can be tamed remains to be seen, but their time has got to come to a swift end if we are to reclaim any part of the American dream that was worth saving.