Kony(Clinton/Trump) 2016 -or- Kony Baloney

Remember the Kony 2012 thing?  “One thing we can all agree on”?  Critical observers met this with frustration since Joseph Kony was one of many in a line of disreputable characters and issues: it took slick production and deft social media manipulation to get people involved.  Why this?  Because it is the way of the world.

It is the same today with the presidential election.  The points to get involved before the election are legion – so many ways to get involved, so many topics to study-up on and make decisions about.  But it is the presidential election, with all its history and glamor that stirs people from their slumbers.  Like when white people protest, novel things happen each election cycle.  As with white people protesting, things get fucked up.  It seems with each prezzie election the wheel is remade again and again and again.

Kony was effectively (if not explicitly) condoned by our national security apparatus.  The aims of the movement would have helped move the American pieces on the chessboard in a beneficial way.  So too, the presidential election allows for beneficial manipulation of the American public.  It’s like: “This is your time to express yourself through your vote and don’t forget: your vote counts!”  With the subtext: “Oh yeah, and don’t do anything else.  Don’t pay attention to anything except the mainstream media.  Keep giving a fuck about sports.  Keep watching TV shows and movies.  And . . . vote!  Good job!”

With the election we have all come to the alert and are paying attention.  Let’s not talk about the Deep State.  Let’s not talk about leaving the world in a livable state seven generations from now.  Let’s not talk about the selling of our souls for Saudi crude. 

Extreme Metaphor: US Election Edition

Voting itself is a metaphor – I’m talking about the big one, the prezzie election held every four years.  (Local elections don’t dip their toes into metaphor to such a colossal extent.)  To start, e.g., Trump’s phrase “Make America Great Again” flies in the face of what the Presidential Election (PE) stands for: the election itself stands for greatness.  Voting stands for democracy since just about everyone gets to do it.  How dare you Donald for suggesting a return to greatness!  Indeed, Hillary has tapped into this narrative saying she thinks America is already great: greatness embodied by the election itself.

But let’s take a step back.  Let’s ignore the differences between the two.  In this anno domini 2016 let’s meld the candidates together and then we can look at the conditions that permit them to be there, the conditions that permit them to be there but are not discussed. 

In effect, what are the candidates metaphors for?

First and foremost they represent the idea that one man or woman can fix things.  The office of the President is sacrosanct.  The President is the leader of the free world, the captain of the great and gleaming ship that is America, the States so painfully and exquisitely United. 

The President is a fixed star.

And what about America rotates around this fixed point?  The idea that the United States is the savior of the world, no less.  To me this is the toughest code to crack: things have changed but we pretend to live in an unchanged world.  It ain’t the years after WWII.  A blind eye may so easily be turned to the US’s role in the world.  What am I talking about?  I’m simply talking about selling ones soul.  It is in our faces every day (well at least on page 2 or 3 of the newspaper, maybe at the bottom of the front page): our involvement in the Middle East.  Our involvement in Central America.  Our 800 bases outside of the United States.  The story seems so old by now, so banal.  “Yeah, we’ve propped up third world dictators but that’s how the game is played.”  “We need to support our allies overseas.”  Do people think about our past?  Do people think about our present?  That we are still doing shit like that today? 

I feel like there is a moral rule that I never learned and that rule is: you can do bad shit as long as you ignore the fact that you do it.  Done.  No biggie.  We support Saudi Arabia for oil interests, duh – but also for stability in the Middle East.  Get it? 

And this is not to be talked about in the debates.  And this will not come to a referendum vote come November.

It’s got to be something in the DNA of America itself.  Keep moving west and don’t look back.  Or things are so awesome in day-to-day life here that it is just too easy and convenient to ignore – or turn that blind eye towards – the fucked up stuff.

And that is the level that the candidates for President are approached on: they represent us and we are much more concerned with salacious sex-style scandals than the soul of America gliding inexorably down the halls of hell.

A vindication of the system

Recently the journalist/author Russ Baker was on the Tim Dillon is Going to Hell for a fun and insightful discussion.  The conversation focused on things that influence our government “behind the scenes”, so to speak.  Russ broke down historical information to the hosts, Tim and Matt, some information that has been known and some that has come to light recently.  One particular intelligence agency looms particularly large and the dad of the President during 9/11 was the head of it for a year (trying to be oblique).

Russ provided fodder for my perhaps Snarxist sensibilities – information that is not widely known or particularly cared about, but that is important.  Others pigeonhole me into being ironic because of what is permissible to talk about.  And this election cycle what can and cannot be discussed is revealing.  And goddam frustrating.

In the TDGH interview Tim asked if he gets annoyed when people get really worked up about what is presented in the dominant narrative: like the above-board discussion of the merits and demerits of the two (only two!) candidates.  Russ:

“This is a continuation of the distraction of the public from what actually matters and from what actually affects them.  They don’t really understand the extent to which this is some sort of entertainment, a spectacle, bread and circuses.  Yes these things matter in certain ways on certain levels but the fact of the matter is it doesn’t matter if it’s Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump: they would never be allowed to deviate substantively from the course of American policy over the biggest issues affecting the wealthiest people.  You’re talking about resource extraction, you’re talking about the constant use of the military to control much of the world, you’re talking about the dominance of the financial sector – these things are inviolable.  Where they differ is at least in the way they talk about hot button issues that get people riled up.  But there are even limits to what they can do in those areas.  Yes it’s important but should it suck all the air out of the room and make us so exhausted that come November we stop paying attention right when the real work begins?  No.”

Look, I’ve covered the idea of voting before.  And I agree that at the local level issues are clearer and change may be easier to institute.  The national elections are something else – a mass ritual, really.  The presidential election is a sanctioned event that allows each and every one to have their say – at least have their say about what is printed in mainstream newspapers.  Now is the time to express your feelings as long as it falls within the narrow purview permitted by the media and permitted by the intellect of your fellow fuckwit citizens.

What?  You think you’re better than voting?  How else are you going to express yourself?  This is it.  You get this one chance so you better fucking get involved.  How – well creepy is the word that first comes to mind – how creepy that Chris Wallace implored the TV/Web audience to vote.  I’m sorry but it came off as cajoling, manipulative:

Now the decision is up to you. While millions have already voted, election day, November 8, is just 20 days away. One thing everyone here can agree on is we hope you will go vote. It is one of the honors and obligations of living in this great country. Thank you and good night. 

By voting you say you approve of the system even if your morals have been fit into the Procrustean bed of “the lesser of two evils.”  I’ll just continue to shake my head and wonder why the world I live in is so different than the world that it is embodied by the debates and politics and people’s attitudes to this bizarre (but not if you understand it goddamit!) system/pageantry of politics.  To let Tim Dillon conclude (min 35): “By the way all you people that are going to be dancing and celebrating a Hillary Clinton victory: you are celebrating a vindication of the system, that’s it.”

Feeling numbers (Our too-Roman numerals)

The facts – as they pertain to our nation and its economy – stream fast in front of us.  A relentless torrent of good facts.  Knowledge, numbers and trends.  They say that some may see the stats of a baseball game and see the game played in their mind’s eye. The numbers tell the story.

And it is great that these facts are so readily at hand.  I mean, we don’t live in a totalitarian society, where one may not even have access to the numbers.  Do we take this for granted, this wonderful availability of tell-tale numbers?

E.g.: we have Piketty and his work.  Important numbers.  At what point do the numbers make one act?  What is the number in any given category that makes one go forth into the street with revolutionary purpose and fervor?  Piketty provides some eye-openers – and he was widely reported on.

Ah, the numbers must be felt.  The number describing inequality comes second to the lived experience of inequality.  Yet ghettoized in our “media enclaves and technological enclaves and geographical enclaves” (minute 55) our reactions are isolated, pigeonholed.  If we could read the common language of numbers we could perhaps overcome our insular states and realize our common potential.  In the end it seems another story of hope dashed by the unfelt façade of the too-Roman numerals.

Class resentment: debate edition

A provocation offered by our favorite Archdruid:

“[T]he affluent classes from which the leadership of the liberal movement is drawn, and which set the tone for the movement as a whole, benefit directly from the collapse in wages that has partly been caused by mass illegal immigration, since that decrease in wages has yielded lower prices for the goods and services they buy and higher profits for the companies for which many of them work, and whose stocks many of them own.”

Sacred cows, things tough to talk about.  He has his arguments for the idea that an influx of more folks corresponds with depressed wages, an idea of whose mechanisms I’ll leave alone.

But the idea that one class might benefit from the immiseration of another – what a powerful idea. This is a true zero-sum outlook.  Is that what is going on?  Are some jobs created by offshoring other ones?  Perhaps the jobs held by a more upper-middle class group?  So that lower-wages are experienced by what we would call a lower class?

And let’s map this onto the current (2016) national election (even though I continuously and, obviously, ineffectually swear off thinking about or spending any amount of effort on).  Do the candidates bases – the core group/demographic that supports each of the two candidates – match up with the two participants in a zero-sum game mentioned above?  I think this makes things just that much spicier.

Two classes that are not simply at odds with each other when it comes to, say, values but whose very existences rely one on the other.  A negative relationship that isn’t broached publically.  Not talked about in the debate.  A clear source of resentment that goes on not being expressed.  What benefits the elite impoverishes the poor.  The elite being those with degrees who have jobs that require degrees and the poor being those with zero post-high school education not making much money if not any at all.

How embarrassing!  Embarrassing?  Is that the right word?  That sounds weird but, man, it is an awkward relationship.  That link and the link doesn’t get talked about.  Not just free agents pursuing life in different but still unencumbered ways.  No.  What is going on in this case is an elite, the upper-middle class being in a position of power, holding sway over an underclass.  The two groups come to the table as un-equals.   But, as though some fairytale curse had been cast, they find themselves incapable of putting words to this idea.

But beyond the resort to storytime curses there are real structures and concept to apply here.  Resentment was mentioned above and perhaps that is a good way to look at how poor sees rich – and, heck, even how rich sees poor.  The sense of injustice that the word resentment carries with it is easy to see from the perspective of the poor.  What a shitty relationship to be in, being the one who has been wronged!  And those that wronged you have more power.  But flip the script and think of the awkwardness the rich must feel – I’m being serious.  They are in the position of feeling like their well-off existences is the product of greed – and then they have to (maybe occasionally) rub shoulders with those that they’ve wronged.  They must be all like, “Umm, sorry?  Suckers? . . .  I stole it fair and square.  You don’t know what it’s like”. 

So, for the elections . . . bring on more spectacle!

Bombs are good and I don't care

This article.  The impetus to write my thoughts down in a weblog.  The article a cause of ire and consternation.  Perplexity: this is acceptable now?  To casually claim that being an accomplice to murder is okay since the manufacturers of the armaments provide jobs?  Let me paraphrase the sentiment offered by the interviewer:

Mmm, okay, you mentioned morals.  So, yeah, that’s bullshit first of all.  I mean listen to the tone of my voice . . . morals do not concern me in the least and sure as hell do not come primary in my view of reality.  “We” need those jobs and who even really cares about what Saudi Arabia is doing with these weapons.  Jobs.  JOBS.  And I’ll go ahead and state what I’ve implied about these jobs.  These jobs are the best jobs ever.  The only jobs we will ever need.  Screw using this money for education or aid or rebuilding domestic infrastructure.  No.  Boom, boom, boom!  And when those bombs hit and those lives are ripped apart in every which way, I DON’T CARE.

How common this attitude?  Is it a belief?  Or is it just a sign of the absence of any questioning or concern.  And this cultivated understanding of the world and understanding of how our economy works is coming from the smart people.  Someone voting for either of the candidates for president thinks this.  Even someone voting for the “lesser of two evils” must think this.  Bombs are good and I don’t care.

Virtues are vices, the modern world is less than times past

Look at the modern world and consider that it is a de-evolution. A regression.  Examples of progress are mapped over the faults.  If they are not in fact themselves faults: technology, democracy, equality – go down the line.  Maybe some good.  What is good and great and is an exemplar of our modern world is, it turns out, unjust and perverted.

Perhaps this is manifested in the healthcare system of the US.  For profit (docs earn a pretty penny), big business, allied with the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.  Allied with the soft drink lobby.  All in cahoots.  This inversion is not to be fought against though it is meant to be understood.  These are the shackles that define the outlines of our slave status, a world where the slave permits the chains on one condition: that he may criticize anything but the chains, i.e. that he has the right to live in a fantasy, the chains untouched and ignored except for periodic perverse maintenance done on the chains by the wearer in acts called voting, consumer choice, patriotism, inclusiveness and the principled acquiescence to war.

That technology will deliver us from the ills that it created is “magical thinking” as James Howard Kunstler says – though, well, erm, okay I guess I don’t have a beef with term “magic”.  It’s true.  Magic itself is not inherently good.  It can, in fact, be used to influence people to consume, to “buy into” the status quo. We marvel at our own bedazzlement.  We laud our actors who entertain us into a state of distraction, whose fictions capture our imagination.  We believe, or suspend disbelief, in the ability of consumer goods to deliver a solid, seamless reality where product types are improved each year and “coolness” may likewise be perennially purchased.

A bad myth, a celebration of captiveness.  Everything is opposite.  Constraining our life energy into a safe standard conduit – it will never change; can’t I use this as a decisive argument that utopias – where all are equal – will never, ever materialize.  To help realize that those utopias by definition will never exist because their definition includes man, groups of men and women . . . therefore mass behavior will exist.  Might I use this definitive understanding to do away with the moral pangs that want to turn an idea like magic into an operative of some assumed good?  Might I still have compassion?  Do I have to scale the ideas of love, the good, and compassion into the redoubt of the family or of the tribe?

A small thought that pops up, I will welcome it into the circle as it arises and make peace with it in order to nullify it.