Faith in governance is cruise controlling daddy issues, default settings of reaction and repetition redux. Tell us who to love and who to loathe because everything’s so copy/paste we cannot see the trees for the forest.
When even rightwing platforms airing photos of protestors show crowds predominately in masks, and numbers of protestors are growing rather than diminishing, said protestors are probably not the ones spreading the pandemic. We quarantine only to save the lives of others, and we break quarantine only to save the lives of others. The voices objecting to that are putting their personal comfort first, which is by no definition patriotic, empathetic or moralistic. I think it does take breaking some eggs to make an omelette, but I also believe that allowing for just one person to unnecessarily die regardless of character or circumstances makes you a complete and total asshole for life in my book. Any animal can do that.
That is precisely the nature of ping-pong between the two parties throughout my lifetime. Every Capitalist state’s midlife crisis is followed by manufacturing demand for preordained services, the downhill being total reversal of the upswing, limiting options and profiteers. It’s not just the continuous, exponential consolidation of power, but the continuous, exponential consolidation of ideas, which I feel we are seeing in real time is even more dangerous than centralized power. Like the bucket list of vital necessities requested by democratic voters nationwide being completely disregarded or granted photo op chest-beating and jack else, universal free healthcare, equanimity in civil rights, debt forgiveness for the workers paying all the taxes, etc. There are clearly idiot voters and likely idiots among non-voters, but I am convinced a substantial number from the half of the population not voting are people with long-term memories. Half the country does not identify as independent, half the country never votes at all because they have more than short-term memories and/or are not susceptible to marketing and/or could care less about reindeer games. On some level both DNC and GOP get this and realize they can never win back the population half that’s aware of being repeatedly cheated, so they obsess with stealing votes from one another to the extent of cannibalizing the followers of allies. I think conservatives who bend left kill fewer people in the doing than if they’d kept their distance, and I think liberals lunging rightward endanger more lives than they would had they kept social distancing. One and all do they want your allegiance so gosh-darned badly but will turn on you in a New York minute. It’s almost romantic. Rationalizing any loss of life is so patriotic. If treason means refusing to recognize the authority of unelected officials who themselves refuse to aid half the population with public monies, sign me up. Anybody not broke right now is either lying or a psychopath.
I hope for and fear a domestic Bastille, where all those denied civil or basic human rights aren’t just chanting in the streets but physically storming the castles. If civil war 2.0 arrives it won’t be fought over political differences of opinion but life or death needs. Pre-pandemic, Trump cut millions of households from food stamps and denied as many unemployment claims, all to make numbers look better. But Obama quietly slashed fed monies to shelters unless helping only those fresh out of jail or in need of substance abuse outpatient services. The structural safety nets these evictees will desperately require are not what they were even 5 or 6 years back. Entirely overlooked by mainstream media to date, and it’ll probably amount to protests growing tenfold because of the silence. Fuck, early in the Obama admin when Twitter took its IPO public, it was boosted by a federal grant of millions, the same number of millions to the dollar cut from WIC that same week and not one pundit anywhere acknowledged that. In all the years I was homeless I was far too busy breaking even to be able to afford real alcoholism. And no media anywhere gives voice to the sizable number of homeless who are by no means victims of circumstance or shite decisions, but who have very willfully chosen to not participate in this Ponzi scheme of a society. Can’t give the masses any wild ideas. Any of us could challenge the boxers in the ring, but with bets in place it would only be rescheduled after self-proclaimed authorities have their fun with us. It’d be more productive and beneficial to burn down the convention center altogether.
A homeless person not being dumb enough to fall into the slave-wage grind does not and should not imply they are less informed than you. You would be shocked how many of them are literally defining sustainable living. Pop culture and the nightly news misinforms the types of people going ape-shit over lettuce left on their burger that homeless are feeble and feeble-minded across the board, for the sin of not enriching oligarchs and plutocrats by going into debt over pablum and traceable tech. When power-grids darken, society crumbles and middle classes clean out their medicine cabinets it’ll be just another day for the bartering and trading homeless. Most participants and contributors to proper society have survived shit compared to them. I think the bigger issue is ego itself. Informed or not, knowledgeable of a given thing or not, everybody views as experts themselves or whomever they wish to be, to befriend or to fuck. Americans condemn only the unflattering egos, and it’s fucking wrong.
When I reviewed indie comix and films a decade back, I was all too aware that someone whose work I generally liked could turn out trash, or someone whose work I generally loathed could abruptly make something of interest. People I knew and was friendly with could produce garbage, and people I knew and fought with could produce really intriguing stuff. I wouldn’t rationalize the discrepancies, I’d call them out within the articles for showing me wrong. It got me blacklisted from lots of places and it got me job offers from lots of places, everybody missing the point of what I was trying to do. When everyone is entitled to an opinion then no opinion should dominate, but the issue is most folks have no opinion unless marketed. Brand loyalty is religious fundamentalism is political partisanship. Each and every idiom thrives on allowing its most self-serving players to be safely lost in the crowd as centerpiece of their chosen personality cults, insisting on seeing the trees for the forest for all the wrong reasons. Each and every idiom claims ownership of the accomplishments of its most accomplished followers, while disowning all harm inflicted by its more devout followers upon anyone off brand. Dehumanizing anything not in favor of the centerpiece rather than observe its own cracks. Throughout human history, the loudest, most insistent voices asserting the necessity of Church, State and Industry come from Church, State and Industry. And everybody accepts the marketing at 2-D face value, because any self-reflection might show them wrong.
If wealth had taste they wouldn’t require poors to work their kitchens for them. It’s the same as presuming the rich are more intelligent when they are the ones buying university degrees that cannot be earned by their nanny-reared brats. Our societal norms are based entirely on marketing fabricated for no other purpose but the perpetuation of a class divide, holding the flaky upper crust on high with our hands made bloodied by climbing the mound of corpses for the solemn privilege. *flicks cigarette at propriety*