Voters are too eager to accept at face value the basic and frankly insulting premise, that a person cannot be helped unless others are granted power and authority over them. This, despite unending examples that one’s survival never proves the intent of their keepers but rather one’s rights, resources and opportunities be sacrificed for their benefit. Likewise, the arts today are a vicarious achievement at best, persons striving only to replicate the works and careers of those who came before or we believe they personally partook in the zillions of lifetimes of content and with a straight face found it lacking. This is most blatant in commercial art, the accursed mainstream, but I doubt anyone is capable of approaching creativity without established media or mediums as preset foundations, and this is why so many artists overdose or otherwise self-destruct, because what they do even when mastered is so commonly exceeded by history and by the natural world, the natural world widely shunned as if thousands of generations lived without inspiration or identity until twitter and netflix and google came about. Fan-fiction is essentially anti-art, but most artists are not so crazy about working on whatever IP as they are for getting the corporate-owned rubber-stamp for doing so, and doing so without real creative freedoms. If the work were their truest purpose they’d be fine with anonymity, even the lack of proceeds, but heaven forbid glory escape them especially when so many seem so intent on pursuing whichever glories of fandom than an accomplished work itself. How much more productive would so many persons be were they to delete their online social networking accounts, instead of praying their teases of work get signal-boosted enough they’d have no need to ever see any of it through. Artists today seem to believe their options are the glory hole or the memory hole, when they could just as easily keep it in their pants. Maybe syntax could benefit from a different term for most forms of creativity, when nothing is actually being created. But with every artist, just like with every politician, ambitions hang strictly on the sacrifices of others or else they’d need no audience to cough it up, and eternally under the pretense that those others would be the real beneficiaries.
While leftists may be political or artistic or both, they do not indulge careers therein. Nor do heroes, going by the textbook definition. For benefiting oneself is quite the opposite to sacrificing oneself. Yet sympathy today is merely a bartering ploy for self-interest. It’s never done without audience, and it’s never done for those who cannot pay some reward.
No individual can ethically speak for any populace, and no populace actually depends upon the fantasies of any individual. If I were ever innocent I’d have hoped this were tantamount to common sense, but evidently not when that populace are one and all so arrogant about personal exemptions or so ignorant to the harm their exemptions would nonetheless induce across anyone brazen enough to have a life of their very own.
Back when I was writing the lottery party, specifically around the middle of the Obama administration, I made the realization that the only difference between Neoliberals and Neoconservatives was that Neolibs project their shame where Neocons suppress it. In every other respect the two pathologies were entirely similar, just competing sets of financial interests never satisfied with whatever powers and authorities they connived from the masses. They’ve each become so blatant about it, their mutually exclusive ego-centrism, the differentiating terms are used less and less as days go by and few if any seem to have taken notice.
My last article here prompted a few lengthy email chains with former acquaintances, agreeable for the most part but with elements critical toward liberalism striking some nerve or other. It’s discomforting to note how it’s all right-wingers in DC, discomforting because all are obliged by proper society to look up to public servants in direct contrast to their pedestals granting them resource and opportunity to maintain the destabilization of that same society. It’s funny because while the extremes are painfully obvious, nobody in politics sees themselves as an extremist, rather one and all do they consider themselves as centrist. Suffice to say, modern liberals believe in raising minimum wages, because they believe that a good capitalism can exist, magically free of anyone facing entrapment, extortion or exploitation. Leftists by contrast would rather see maximum wages capped, which would cripple the abilities to inflate costs of living finitely, ultimately leading to the unraveling of the free market itself wherein lying, cheating and stealing are just elements to the game which hate-worthy players are encouraged to play if they feel they deserve more than others. Liberals, as with other right-wingers of the modern era, are preoccupied with immediate gratification, while leftists as ever focus themselves on solving the problem roundly no matter the sacrifice. While right-wingers pursue superiority or supremacy, the leftists compensate for it. I think it shows compromise doesn’t actually exist, just a word to throw around by people empowered to never actually care for results or consequences either one. Yet when only half the country votes, then only a quarter of the population votes for either party but god forbid any newscaster voice that. So much of geopolitical tensions with China boil down to mere financial competition. Like there’s not a single thing TikTok does to users that our tech companies are not matching or originating. But superiority complexes see the lack of furthered dominance as a threat to their life, when only ego is affected. How would we survive if the yuan passes the dollar? Same freaking way the world outside the USA has survived these decades. Sometimes I think the only thing stopping the rest of the world from uniting against us is that it would come across as an adult punching a toddler.
The strongest, most capable people we’ll ever hope to know in life truly are the heretics and blasphemers no matter the appeal or authority of the righteous. Requiring followers is no less codependent than the burning desire to follow others. I may well be in a fugue state currently, but I fail to find any due cause worth fervently suckling anybody’s finger pointing the way. Esteem holds no value, but it always carries a price.
Thomas Woodruff was apparently such a mean teacher across his years, that his graphic album garnering nominations in 4 different categories of the upcoming Eisner awards for comic book bullshit met with dozens of “vulnerable” former students giving voice to their angst, demanding his name be excluded from the consideration. His fast response was to request his removal himself, which surely aggravated the lot of them even more, such willingness to not perpetuate a melodrama.
I am the only person alive or dead to have written for both Heavy Metal Magazine and the Ditkomania fanzine. I served on the final BoD for the Friends of Lulu nonprofit, co-edited the indie Solestar OGN raising 20 grand for the Brain Aneurysm Foundation, and my name is buried in the closing credits for the Iron Sky film because life is a long story. I am a nobody.
But even a nobody can surmise that allowing Woodruff to omit himself from the nominations means that the awards are not in fact pertaining to accomplishments of given works, but simply to the popularity of persons involved. I do not know the man and have never traded words with him, but clearly whoever signed the petition is jealous, preferring that themselves or the centerpieces to whichever personality cults they subscribe to be the recipient. The notion that greatness can only be achieved by persons we agree with is an actual hallmark to fascism. It’s the same mentality of prejudiced legislators downplaying or outright editing out altogether the stories of black Americans from history books. I’d imagine by the wording of the petition many if not all of the co-signers see themselves as liberal, but clearly are they not leftist, or else their hurt feelings would not be their prime motivator in this or any circumstance of adulthood. They know no shame, for they either project it elsewhere or suppress it below their panty line. What separates them from me is that I do not conduct my life as though I am owed love. Why bother doing anything if the merit and mettle of it means less than the blessed sake of anyone else’s unending pursuits of happiness. How dare someone other than you or your D&D circle earn a thing, or be recipient to good fortune!
Every debt ceiling crisis backs that up, because what they’re essentially preaching to choirs is no different from me telling the pizza delivery guy that I will pay him sometime next year and that I will let his people know how much I actually owe and not versa vice. The pure arrogance, it’s completely ungrounded from reality, from every non-existential threat to be faced, and lets both sides of purported partisanship be aflame for the cameras while actual problems fester. The national debt is 4 or 5 times what’s publicly established, and most of it to foreign interests who’ve every right to be upset by the infantile, devil may care demeanor toward personal responsibility or accountability or common courtesy, generally on full display like an unzipped fly before the world.