All the military bases domestic and foreign owned by all other nations combined being fewer than just the non-domestic military bases of the USA means it’ll take more than petitions for dear old Lady Justice to take off the blindfold. Law enforcement fiefdoms exist to be lucrative. The hundreds of thousands of police, the for-profit prison system and military industrial complex have altogether pillaged and redistributed trillions into the hands of the most self-serving among us and will not be relinquished by logic or a call to ethics or by a fucking vote.
But most anti-Capitalists in the USA buckle at the idea that pop culture, by design or by happenstance, not only distracts the masses to allow our societal issues to fester, but it comes from exploitation and extortion all the same. A better world means our egos are not catered to. Capitalism cannot get abolished without abolishing Hollywood in the doing, and that will forever remain the ultimate roadblock. The sensible mind is a big believer that ego-gratification is root, that the more self-serving a person the higher the hero-worship rewards reaped, uplifting egos at an expense to the masses through relegating them to audiences and consumers. There is no pathway to riches without people being exploited and extorted.
America is the price of entertainment.
Trump is a diva, the biggest in world history, and is the very personification of Capitalism. But as with any Capitalist he is the originator of nothing. I think the experience of this administration has shown that nationalism and tribalism have been made archaic, replaced now by personality cults. And I feel the real debate under every societal ill is prioritizing the needs of others vs prioritizing personal preferences/bias/fetish. We’ve the largest and most expensive military in world history because our leaders have always suffered erectile dysfunction, but if nuking the Marshall Islands for years gave Americans the bikini then everyone’s cool with distraction from any sense of accountability in life. It was not in school where I learned that the Boston Tea Party had as much to do with objections to the East India Tea Co’s monopoly on imports, namely, the slaves, as it did with objections to taxation by the king.
The problem is not only that the wrong people are rich and famous with all the power, as if the mechanics of a self-ingratiating idiom hording trillions by price-gouging and overcharging, if not outright theft, can magically be traded for virtuous means to the same lucrative results.
A society free of exploitation and extortion means that nobody gets rich. And no mass-marketed pop culture pablum to distract the victims from the thieves. The idea that we *need* any of this is precisely *how* these issues endure and fester. If you want a better life there will be inconvenience, and Americans absolutely refuse that. We shoot each other if a fast food kid leaves lettuce on the taco. Nobody becomes a personality cult centerpiece by virtue. I admire Greta Thunberg as much as anyone else, as Capitalism obviously plays an active role in the destruction of our environs, but until she calls out the proactive profiteering on behalf of environmentalism, products sold for double the price while proving themselves half as effective, it would appear she is out of her depth in a place where her message is blown up to mask the cost of nuance for inconvenient truth. Wealth affords white-washing and advertising to contradict any and every reality of experiences to the contrary. Money is not just for those unable to do for themselves, it’s for the development and proliferation of lies. I would bet the farm that anti-Capitalists with shoe collections were reared in households lacking a dictionary. Spending more time playing video games than reaching out morally makes one no better than the unseemly long lines of Trumps of the world.
It’s not just that the wrong people are adored, it’s that everyone feels entitled to that infatuation. Being blockaded from impairing the rights of others is no violation of any civil or basic human rights, but neither is the lack of love. The American Dream is the notion that *any* ego warrants catering.
When cops complicate or brutalize our lives or we undergo a shitty healthcare experience, we are made to feel as though we are the exceptions rather than status quo. Considering how surface-level 2-D everything in this culture insists on being, I never understood why that is. It’s the same with employment, too. I think younger adults are more prone to faith, not yet experiencing just how many employers so regularly entitle themselves to pay late and/or less than agreed, or just weasel out of payment altogether. I was homeless more often than not throughout my adult years, and contrary to the stereotypes I actually worked more 100+ hour weeks then than when I had a roof. When you’ve nowhere to go it’s simpler to move from one job directly to the next, until you fall over dead. I’ve known hundreds of homeless in my time. People would be shocked by their nonstop migrations, always shuffled out of sight from one street to the next state. I knew many who were not criminals or junkies or losers, just too sane to involve themselves in this shit-show of a society. People watch the Walking Dead and fetish their own survival skills, when the homeless are already in the middle of it. Society can and shall crumble and when the penthouses clear out their medicine cabinets it’ll be just another day for those demonized, vilified and ostracized survivors who fail only in finding due cause to be consumers or audiences, to entertain or to be entertained. The legitimate exceptions to the rule. Pretenses that this particular society is worth preserving, that is the status quo. All I see and hear away from campfires are masochists.
Decluttering culture and downsizing the GDP are fundamental to one another, both necessary if we the people as individuals are ever to evolve beyond codependency. Creative Industry is irrefutably oxymoronic doublespeak until no art garners anymore gravitas than hobby. What would be the benefits to simplifying our lives like so? We would work far less, and while rags to riches fantasy would be called out for what it is, everybody would have the equal standing to finally explore our own lives, rather than giving it all to the egos of others or requiring others to cater our own. Not even Uncle Sam can self-mutilate for long before bleeding out. And that’s alright. When everyone deigns to be the star, to befriend the star or to fuck the star, nothing of the sort approaching equality, there are no real victims in the USA. Continuous headlines assure it to be the one bipartisan thing which all persons here will eagerly strive for, this perverse living by respite, this prolonging of moments for nothing.
23 zillion reasons to oppose the USA government, its economy and culture, but instead of aligning all want the whip in their own grasp. There are no good people here.