Virtues today are rare, sold by all followers of the industrial age for the creature comforts of artificial culture, of wish fulfillment. Striving to keep virtue in my life is nonstop waking sacrifice, an exercise in futility requiring all my time, all my attentions, and is no invitation for others to claim ownership over any aspect of it. My time, my attentions and what accomplishments I justly know are no curiosity bound for collection. The ideal good was alive and well long before any banner of brand or faith or partisanship was contrived into being, as their respective centerpieces, always the most selfish profiteering the rest of their brothers and sisters, serve no form of truth but private fancy. I never went looking for devils outside the mirror, never sought out saviors knowing I am made capable of sacrifice myself. Personal responsibility means so much more than deciding which color of tile is best for the bathroom floor.
Nobody in DC worships Moloch but everyone in DC goes down on Mammon. Each and every political, industrial or religious cult believes its centerpiece personality is the second coming, capable of no evils or wrongs. Our entire culture is hero-worshiping the most self-serving people. Drawing lines in the sand as the waters rise. Contrary to willful advertising no wrong is partisan wrong. Donald Trump’s not already locked up for life *because* this has been an autocracy for a long, long time. All the way back to when bankers wrote the Fed into legal existence. The power of belief is the basic premise behind both voodoo and marketing. Such as the belief in centrism being the necessary road less traveled. This quality of passive-aggressive centrism wants the consequences of their own actions and inactions in the hands of the same god who turned Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt so that Lot could impregnate their daughters.
And people forget, for those seeing Mitt Romney as any variety of savior to the problems presented by Trump, Trump bought out Cambridge Analytica services away from the Ted Cruz campaign, who had previously bought those services away from Romney’s campaign. The brainchild of Neocon Robert Mercer and Neolib Mark Zuckerberg digitizing military-grade psychological weaponization. The manipulation of millions of online user experiences by western Capitalists categorically played a larger role in influencing our elections than did anything foreign, and Romney’s inner circle was every bit as open to the idea as Trump’s financiers. But what would America be without its scapegoats? When the Vault7 releases from Wikileaks proved the CIA has had the means for years to falsify digital attribution, this only leaves a backdoor open for convenient scapegoats. Blaming Russia or China or Liberland is puppetry to cover for domestic billionaires, for those lingering Russiagaters still hungry for scapegoats to take blame for what our captains of industry pull in broad fucking daylight. It was always native Capitalists, not Putin or any other boogeyman, culpable for all that ails us. The very ones with the means to do so. It’s native greed to blame, not foreign anything.
The Russian government did not invent Capitalism. The American dream of fortune and/or fame is absolutely never met by good intentions. We’ve a thousand military bases around the world, more than those of all other nations combined and tripled, but marketing, invented in the USA, assures us that we are the ones always under threat. If the East India Tea Co, the first NGO, had only thought to market themselves as peacekeepers. Over the last half century our armed forces have become the costliest enterprise in recorded history, and our country is further in debt than any nation-state on the planet for it, all so that the most selfish among us be gifted the means to rape the world barren. The UN will never check the ego of Uncle Sam because they know he could wipe them out during a commercial break. With the flip of a switch our FAANG corporations could knock Russia back a hundred years, our 10 aircraft carriers making mincemeat of their 1. In the bible that our leaders claim to love, Goliath was the bad guy, not the pipsqueak.
The Nazis weren’t defeated by well-intentioned persons who had sought out employment opportunities among their ranks, but the Nuremberg principles could and should still apply to these current fuckups gifted power over our lives. If a single person in governance today were capable of growing a backbone, even just to save their own hide, they would never have entered the political sphere in the first place, where they are held upright only by the hands of lobbyists, bankers and blackmailers.
Fuck that. Authentic leftists moving to the right endanger lives, whereas right-wingers moving to the left get that much less blood on their hands. When everyone squeezes to the center of the bridge it will collapse under the weight of bullshit. Everyone left or nothing changes. Centrist liberals share much of the blame for allowing this melodrama to unfold. The idea that Capitalism might still be a manageable pathos turned a blind eye to everything on this side-trip in USA history. The damning truth of what’s prompting the ultimately bupkiss impeachment investigations, his cohorts wanting something in return aside, is that this is Trump selling/trading arms to be used against the armies of Vladimir Putin, his supposed enabler. Awfully convenient how nobody is looking at it that way, as though foreign flags are more incriminating than domestic currency. Whether it’s an interpersonal relationship or a business alliance, a tupperware party, a church choir, a political platform or an entire nation, self-interest will destabilize any grouping.
Capitalism is just the outfit it wears to the store at 4am for beer and smokes to pass for what it feels is normal.
It’s not like captains of industry and leaders of men engaging in self-interest is any sort of new ordeal. It is manifestly how powers and wealth have always been obtained, throughout the histories of civilization. The idea that some lust or greed is pardonable is no different from saying an STD will be less damaging when it comes from love. There’s not a good way to exploit or to oppress. Killing killers for killing means becoming a killer. If you favor one banner to another, be it partisanship or faith or branding iron, you approach matters from the same mindset as that ludicrous opposition. Competition is only a reflection.
The American way really is the Peter principle, just as greed’s unrelenting obsession invariably uncreates itself. If all the world’s a stage it is a solemn duty to throw rotten vegetables upon it, pick-pocketing the ushers dragging you out and using their billfolds to buy a round. The mindlessness of the world only ever leads to its own destruction. Mindfulness means not destroying ourselves, but the world behind every woe of every soul. Either way, the world is fucked. Indulging in what I might want, or what you feel that you want, results only with distractions allowing these ills to endure, to worsen. Self-interest meets with all else left at a loss. In this sense is entertainment a pox. It is pure drivel no matter its appeal, while so many are faced with no laughing matters at all. I know I can survive anything I need to, and I do it without lying, cheating or stealing, without forgiving or forgetting. Those barricaded within the eye of a tornado do so because they understand forgiveness is no virtue, it is an opening. And forgetting isn’t half the hell as is remembering.