Zack Snyder was rightly criticized for changing the end in his film adaptation of the Watchmen comic book. But what real world humanity needs is the original ending. Lionized egos not by the global rumbling of nukes, but egos deflated by a global humbling of truth. We won’t be saved by keeping the bad guys from killing us because we will inevitably make more bad guys. That the biggest impact we may leave on the universe is removing ourselves from it, shows there is more to the universe than all of our egos combined.
Americans are robbed by their leadership, their superstars of brand loyalty and political partisanship and religious zealotry, and left too ashamed to admit it so foreign money is needed to compensate their lack of resource from production to sales. Foreign money which wants to see returns that are only possible when content can appeal to the paying audiences beyond US borders. This is fact. The twilight of Capitalism is making the jump from producing goods and services to meet existing demands, to manufacturing demand to meet preordained goods and services. Which limits profiteers as much as it limits choice of goods and services. Neither China or Russia has reached that slope yet, their forms of Capitalism are younger and thus healthier than in the states. The true point of contention between east and west, financial competition with billionaires everywhere selling out their own nations for cash cows. No other nation-state in world history has ever come even remotely close to owing as much as does the USA. God forbid more Americans ever realize that most of that national debt is owed to foreign governments and foreign businesses. Fuck a wall, and the glass house it divisively shelters. As a nation-state, the USA believes that any attempt to question its dominance is an attack on its rights. As individuals, its citizens conduct themselves in much the same manner, as noted by the crowding of online social networks to ignore and condescend the perceived lesser-thans more directly.
Nobody on either side of the aisle will ever dare to say it aloud, but this is the ultimate reason behind the resistance to “The Squad“. Americans see equality as a threat. When the majority of people prefer special privileges to equality, it will take a world of blood before Democracy is the status quo in the western world. Fingers breaking as gaming controllers are ripped away to trade for food. Nobody wants free speech rights to encompass unfavorable opinions, and everybody feels their rights are somehow being infringed upon whenever they are unable to infringe upon the rights of others. The fact that roughly half the country, the voters, fail to recognize the blatant commonalities between the two parties proves this. Their own shit don’t stink. Or to quote an old Job Corps buddy, they think their farts smell like lettuce.
It is never the guy across the street with opposing political or religious views who is making an impossible mess of your life. It’s no foreign country either.
We selfishly give power over ourselves away to any superstar promising a cheat-sheet, a get out of jail free card, a hookup, whether it’s brand loyalists or political partisans or religious zealots, and then get outraged by the lack of power over ourselves. Collectively and individually, mislabeling self-centeredness as survival is doing us in. Wanting more than others, believing we deserve it, is what’s perpetually undoing us. For a species that was still largely shitting in fields a couple of centuries ago, we are wrongly entitled. Our biggest political achievements are reneging laws which should never have been on the books in the first place.
If you yourself wish to be catered to but are not giving what you are receiving, then you yourself are living in opposition to equality. The status quo of everyone rationalizing their own kampf for the upper hand lessens no insults to injury.
Even if community-owned is superior morally to privately-owned, I won’t support a communism that seeks to work towards accumulating a wealth, because it still means laboring more than what is honestly needed or necessary, and that excess will absolutely be abused. I refuse to back any labels or branding or theology. None of it does what it says, no matter the abrupt sexiness of the little salesgirl and her skinny arms.
The world is so much more black and white than we give it credit for. We just complicate everything with exceptions and exemptions, double standards and plausible deniability. We praise the idea of accountability but shun it personally, clustering toward anything which lionizes rather than deflates our sense of self. And look where it has led us today.