If faults of a flag or brand or theology are excusable to its followers, how is that not a cult?
Whenever Alan Smithee realizes the standard operating procedure for signal-boosting is signal-boasting he pretends to be me, to get that much less.
Impeachment against Donald Trump will never happen, because if checks and balances are used against the home team, the pathway’s open for those same checks and balances to be used against the away team when it’s inevitably their turn for a home field advantage. Trump has succeeded only in expanding definitions for ideal hand-washing etiquette in the Executive branch, in broad daylight, and the other side of the political aisle wants to enjoy those same entitlements when their turn invariably comes around. It’s bad enough to rationalize when your good guys do a bad thing, but it’s a guilty conscience revealing its inner workings to refrain from restricting your bad guys from doing a bad thing lest those same restrictions someday pull a turnabout to bite you in your nethers. Republicans and Democrats are ideologically conjoined freaks, their packaging every bit as visceral as social optics. As if greed does not transcend laws.
It’s always down to earnings now, like how alternative energy sources will never ever be status quo until their profitability surpasses oil, hashtags be damned.
Business with foreign billionaires is not the same as business with foreign governments, as those governments are sold out by their own wealthy just as ours is by domestic billionaires. The common misrepresentation bugs me as much as wrongly equating leftism with liberals or Democrats. Nancy Pelosi, one of the most powerful Democrats, was famously quoted as saying how at the end of the day everyone in DC is a Capitalist. As in, the opposite of leftists. They know from experience that flags are quite purposefully a thing to seek shelter behind, so they’d never dare call out individuals, for fear that tables be turned. Neither wealth or power is obtained through good intentions. The people who defend such conduct are the real threat. Should the President face real consequences for any of his actions, the fandom would only be further lionized because of it. Either Hitler or Kid Rock would’ve been just another dime per dozen starving artist had people not heard them out, catering to their ego instead of challenging their ego. What we are living through is a for-profit liquidation. Billionaires holding more power than politicians hit home when, on the same day he reneged on the trio of global trade treaties Trump met with Wall Streeters promising lower taxes and fewer regulations, what the deals were about. Seamlessly in keeping with those deals which his predecessor from the other team established, just as Hillary Clinton would’ve done had she instead of Trump been elected, as judged by her very own words to a gathered assortment of CEOs and shareholders reassuring distinctions to her public policies and her private policies.
Both sides fail at rationalizing their bad things. And we can’t vote out billionaire influence when power never, ever relinquishes itself. Banks, arms manufacturers, tech megaliths, insurance and pharma companies non-figuratively write their own laws to service themselves. Diplomacy vs gaucherie when gaucherie sets the rules. Without the direct financial support by those captains of self-placating industry literally nobody can afford to run winning campaigns for office at state or federal levels. I’m not advocating for a bloodbath, but we need to remember how to use pitchforks and torches. Unless the majority take it upon themselves individually to boycott, divest and sanction those industries, the cluster will only get fucked more and more and more until Gabriel death-rattles his final trump.
I’m just glad America is taken as the laughing stock it wants to be. Most of our trillions in debt is owed to foreign nations, foreign businesses, but with hundreds of US bases shoved within their borders they don’t dare collect. It’s good they can finally share a nervous laugh.
Brand loyalty is political partisanship is religious zealotry, whether it’s holding up flags or religious iconography or corporate trademarks, hiding behind symbols to block out what nonbelievers are undergoing to empower those symbols. People only really want inclusivity or equality that allows loopholes, get out of jail free cards and plausible deniability for their own favorite labels. Nobody can stand others sharing the same rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as their own. So every persuasion feels itself to be the most subjugated if it is not the exception to all rules. And I write feels itself as it’s always ultimately a matter of ideological masturbation, the basic notion of supremacy. If a belief system is so grand, does it honestly require advertising? Can it not withstand equality and inclusiveness of outside interests? Politics, religious conviction and corporate marketing have long been little more than belittling others, generally uninterested parties or perceived competitors. It’s no different from what hip-hop has in common with country music, words alternately begging (for attention, sympathy and sex) and bragging, and all while idealizing where exactly the performers are from. Outsiders unwelcome but we *need* you, your faith, your patronage.
That is the underlying syntax of the American experience. As below, so above.