Hope is the worst of evils, for it prolongs the torment of man.
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Hoping that the corporate slatterns from the lesser of two evil political parties would actually keep their promises and provide the citizens of this nation with health care is about as useful jigging for squid in the Sahara.
Hoping that a weak kneed Congress would actually stand up to the defense contractors who finance their campaigns and put a stop to the wars that rage on doesn’t amount to a pisshole in the snow.
Hoping that a president whose largest campaign contributions came from the financial industry would decide to rein in that industry’s excesses and $5 will get you a bottle of Boone’s Farm to drown your sorrows in.
If people want to see their situations improve in this country they are going to need to show a little more will, because the oligarchs sure as hell aren’t going to give us a damn thing voluntarily except their table scraps. Nietzsche knew that real power doesn’t come from hoping really hard. It’s going to take a lot more effort than merely voting for the same old clowns every two years to fix this train wreck of a nation.
Sacridelicious Moments: November 7th
1492 – The Ensisheim Meteorite, the oldest meteorite with a known date of impact, strikes the earth around noon in a wheat field outside the village of Ensisheim, Alsace, France.
1917 – Russian Revolution: In Petrograd, Russia, Bolshevik leaders Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky lead revolutionaries in overthrowing the Provisional Government
1973 – The U.S. Congress overrides President Richard M. Nixon’s veto of the War Powers Resolution, which limits presidential power to wage war without congressional approval.
2000 – The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration discovers one of the country’s largest LSD labs inside a converted military missile silo in Wamego, Kansas.
2002 – Iran bans advertising of United States products.
2004 – The interim government of Iraq calls for a 60-day “state of emergency” as U.S. forces storm the insurgent stronghold of Fallujah.
They Died on This Day
1225 – Engelbert II of Berg, Archbishop of Cologne
1550 – Jon Arason, the last Roman Catholic bishop of Iceland
1991 – Tom of Finland, Finnish fetish artist
If that old saw is true, I guess that means we’re a nation of dope smoking free spenders who are absolutely petrified of the gay. Because yesterday Maine voters said “Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em” to a new medical marijuana referendum, soundly trounced two anti-tax referenda which would have slashed revenue to the point that Maine became a third world state like California and yet these same voters said yes to a referendum overturning the law allowing same-sex marriage which had been passed by the legislature six months before.
Now if this was just the mouth-breathing tea-bagger crowd showing up in force in an off-year election you’d think their knee jerk reaction would have been to pass the anti-tax initiatives and vote down the demon weed too. But that isn’t what happened. Turnout was actually very high. The Globe article linked to above lists turnout at 53% and headlines on the papers this morning in Maine put it at over 60% which in many places is a lot even for a presidential election year. So it wasn’t just one faction showing up to vote and people did put at least some thought into their decisions. So why did voters make sensible decisions concerning taxes and drug policy and yet get confused about what the notion of equality means? This bit from the Globe article explains a lot:
Among the Stand for Marriage supporters were Scott York, 31, a carpenter who voted at the Portland Exposition Building. He said he wasn’t particularly passionate about the issue until he worried, because of advertisements, that same-sex marriage could be taught in schools.
“It’s not my style,’’ said York, who voted to overturn the law. “I just don’t feel it should be taught.’’
That’s right. Thanks to a campaign of fearmongering, insinuation, and blatant falsehood the Yes on 1 campaign was able to convince enough people who otherwise wouldn’t have cared one way or the other that when they asked little Johnny and Susie “What did you learn in school today?” the answer would be that right after gym period they went to their new class on Same Sex Sodomy and Cunnilingus Within the Confines of Marriage 101.
And who exactly were the Yes on 1 campaign? For the most part they weren’t Mainers as the campaign was heavily funded from outside the state by the National Organization for Marriage, the same troglodytes who funded the Prop 8 campaign last November in California. They were able to scare just enough people through blatantly false radio ads and cowardly robocalls that there was a movement afoot to turn everyone gay by any means necessary.
Maine could have upheld it’s motto of “Dirigo” (which means “I lead”) yesterday by becoming the first state in the nation whose citizens and legislature voted for equal marriage rights for everyone.
But they chose bigotry instead.
Here are some things I’ve been festering about over the weekend which indicate that those who ostensibly represent We the People aren’t really even trying.
This Bradblog post which has some good links to articles by David Swanson mentions that the most recent health care legislation proposal would not only allow states to opt out of any weak tea public option Congress may deign to offer as some sort of palliative, but it strips an amendment by Dennis Kucinich with the result that states couldn’t offer universal single payer health care to their own residents even if they wanted to.
As we noted at the time, “If it survives a House floor vote…the Kucinich amendment would insure that efforts to secure single-payer systems at the state level would not be preempted by federal law.” The measure would thus allow advocates of a single-payer health care system to pursue the same local democratic strategy used in Canada, where single-payer was achieved first at the Province level; then extended nationally.
On Thursday, the Pelosi-led House Leadership unveiled their so-called health care “reform” bill which presents an emasculated public insurance option to provide a populist fig-leaf as cover for what David Swanson aptly described as “a catastrophically bad law” and as a “Healthcare Hoax from Hell.” Not only does this legislative obscenity permit states to deprive all of their citizens of even this watered-down version by opting out of the public option, but these Democratic “leaders” stripped the Kucinich amendment out of H.R. 3200.
And then there was this post by Ken Silverstein on derivatives “reform” where the only person at a recent committee meeting who wanted any real reform at all was grudgingly invited at the last minute, was not allowed time to make his points, and then couldn’t even get his testimony on to the government website where it could be read. And the House committee in question was led by Barney Frank who has been making lots of little peeps lately about making sure any future bailouts like TARP came with full transparency, evidently hoping people wouldn’t notice shenanigans like this and that they’d forget he was one of the main legislators who pushed for the original bailout with no transparency in the first place.
…Congressman Barney Frank (D-Wall Street), invited a panel of eight guests who were distinguished by their uniformly pro-industry positions.
~snip~
In response to complaints from Americans for Financial Reform, which represents hundreds of consumer groups and labor unions, the committee issued an invitation—the night before the hearing was held — to Rob Johnson of the Roosevelt Institute.
~snip~
Johnson, who came last, offered the only serious critical viewpoint, saying that the American public had been “quite demoralized by…the bailouts that we experienced last fall.” After about five minutes of his testimony, Congresswoman Melissa Bean—another industry-funded committee member who chaired the hearing because Frank was absent—had heard enough. “I’m just going to ask you to wrap up because we’re running out of time,” she told Johnson.
~snip~
About five days later Johnson submitted his full testimony to the committee, to be included on its website along with the statements of the other eight panelists. When it wasn’t posted, Johnson asked Lynn Parramore, editor of the Roosevelt Institute’s blog, to see what was up. Parramore emailed and spoke to staffers at the Financial Services Committee, and received a number of explanations for why Johnson’s testimony had not been posted: first she was told it hadn’t been received, then that it had to be submitted as a PDF, then that the committee was having IT problems. “I couldn’t decide whether it was incompetence or mischief, but I began to suspect the latter,” Parramore told me.
Finally, she was informed that the committee’s general counsel would not allow posting of the testimony because Johnson had not submitted it during the hearing.
So to all you bought-off corporate whores who think you’re so goddamn clever that you can fool people into thinking you’re actually helping them with your grandstanding public pronouncements even as you continue to take away everything you promised once you meet with your fellow hustlers behind closed doors in a year when you have nothing to fear because none of you are up for re-election and we can’t vote your sorry asses out, please take the words in the video above to heart and go fuck yourselves eight ways to Sunday.
And I mean that sincerely, earnestly and without equivocation, forever and ever Amen.
Or, squids, squids are for kids!
May there be many treats to go with the tricks and unlimited mischief
Some days the stupidity of it all really gets to you.
Spleen – by Charles Baudelaire
When the low and heavy sky presses like a lid
On the groaning heart a prey to slow cares,
And when from a horizon holding the whole orb
There is cast at us a dark sky more sad than night;When earth is changed to a damp dungeon,
Where Hope, like a bat,
Flees beating the walls with its timorous wings,
And knocking its head on the rotting ceilings;
When the rain spreads out vast trails
Like the bars of a huge prison,
And when, like sordid spiders, silent people stretch
Threads to the depths of our brains,Suddenly the bells jump furiously
And hurl to the sky a horrible shriek,
Like some wandering landless spirits
Starting an obstinate complaint.— And long hearses, with no drums, no music,
File slowly through my soul: Hope,
Conquered, cries, and despotic atrocious Agony
Plants on my bent skull its flag of black.
But hey, it’s nothing that the power of positive thinking can’t fix, right? Just teach yourself to believe in fairy tales and everything will be AOK. Sometimes you have to destroy the village in order to save it. And you better believe it hard or the little fairy gets it.
“Make” is the key word here because as a nation we are definitely not being brave or playing nice with anybody these days of our own volition. We rain down death from afar with predator drones and have become so fearful that we arrest the disaffected for nothing except thought crimes.
We do have more than enough sick and stupid to go around and if it keeps up most of us won’t have to worry about growing old at all as wars continue to rage, bankers continue to plunder, and the climate continues to warm threatening the lives of billions.
With our own culture so decadent, it’s a nice escape to read the novels of Iain M Banks about The Culture, a futuristic humanoid society where scarcity and money have been eliminated and nobody ever gets sick, old or stupid. Here’s a CNN interview with Banks where he explains more about his ideas and why he portrays The Culture as humanoid rather than human.
CNN: In the Culture’s post-scarcity society, where no one needs for anything, you’re removing a lot of the struggle around everyday life. Is that not removing the point of life itself?
Iain M. Banks: I think a lot of the struggle is kind of pointless and is in itself boring. The struggle for existence for most people most of the time, especially in a post-agricultural, industrial society, is a bit of a grind. People have to work very hard and awfully long hours for not a great deal of money: if you don’t, you get virtually nothing. Life’s not much fun, frankly, so I’d quite happily trade in that struggle.
CNN: One of the most compelling aspects of the Culture’s society is that it’s post-scarcity: no one wants for anything, people aren’t hungry, everyone is clothed. Do you think it’s within humanity’s nature to build a society like that?
Iain M. Banks: Arguably not. This is why the Culture isn’t us. I thought long and hard about this long before the books were published and decided, that the Culture wasn’t going to be us in the future, it would be humanoid, they could kind of pass for us, because I’m not sure that we are.
It’s a very pessimistic thing to say that we do seem to be wedded to war and destruction and torture and racism and sexism — all the horrible things, all the xenophobic things — we seem to have a xenophobic gene sequence. I think we should genetically modify ourselves, frankly — if we could identify the bit that causes all the horrible things we can knock it out and become nicer people.
What is so funny about peace love and understanding anyway? Maybe one day science will locate the Elvis Costello gene and turn it up while turning down our fearful little lizard brain, the amygdala. Until then, if we want to see a truly better world we may have to settle for reading about it in the novels of sci-fi dreamers like Banks.
Here’s an example.
Swedes divided over bunny biofuel
Residents in Stockholm are divided over reports that rabbits are being used to make biofuel.
The bodies of thousands of rabbits are fuelling a heating plant in central Sweden, local newspapers say.
The city of Stockholm has an annual cull of thousands of rabbits to protect the capital’s parks and green spaces.
If I’d only known that rattuses also could have been put to such good use. Darn. Opportunity lost.
Here’s another, a serious interview of Crispin Glover by Tom Green about the influence of Werner Herzog. Or is it?
Ran across this post by Joe Bageant today where he talks about the dehumanizing aspects of the corporation and what we can do to remove our necks from under their boots. The conclusion seems to be not a whole hell of a lot. Trying to change them is a Sisyphean labor because any solution that threatens the status quo will be quickly co-opted and sold back to the masses, forcing reformers to start all over again. And as Bageant reminds us, we are all at least partly to blame for the current predicament.
Given that corporations own and dominate the needs hierarchy, I don’t see any mass uprising. Especially when we consider that the moving parts of those corporations are perfectly nice people just as unconscious as the rest of the nation. They are simply going to work every day and doing their jobs and taking care of their families and doing everything according to the directions issued by god and the manufacturers of society. Doing what our educational system trained them to do and what their parents, their church and their high school civics teacher taught them was right. Just like the millionbs of people they are fucking over so badly.
The best we can hope for is to better ourselves and learn to see the world around us as it really is, and maybe the example we set will rub off on somebody else.
One tried and true solution, of course, is self realization and inner liberation. Seeing the world with the cold eyes of the simplest and purest sort of awareness, and a fiery compassionate heart. Seeing the world without illusion, which is very hard and constant work. Then keeping it personally unto ourselves. Keeping our traps shut about it but acting individually upon what we see before our eyes each day, and not according to the consensus of those around us.
That reminded me of Voltaire’s Candide who grew disillusioned with the optimism of his tutor Dr. Pangloss who taught that ‘All was for the best in this best of all possible worlds’. After setting out to see the world for himself and being confronted with disaster, famine, death and the general banality of evil of which humankind is capable, Candide realized that the best we can do to combat the nastiness is to each cultivate our own garden. Or as Scott Horton puts it in this post about Candide and a similar work by Samuel Johnson -
For Johnson and Voltaire, this garden begins in the mind, but it does not end there. The duty to cultivate passes as well to the sphere of human interaction, to the recognition of common bands with family, community, nation and humankind.
~snip~
In the end both works are concerned with a philosophy of life. How should we use our lives? How do we allocate our lives between the vita activa and the vita contemplativa? What duties do we owe those around us? They ask, consider different answers, and ask again. They promise no ultimate answers. But they warn us against a life that falls into the mundane rut of the careerist, the money-maker, the shallow figure obsessed with the mercurial promises of beauty, pleasure, and fame. They admonish to skepticism, to a philosophical disposition, but also to engagement.
So how does one go about cultivating a garden in the modern age when the ambient white noise of the corporate world has become deafening and drowns out anyone who tries to get a word in edgewise? It would be a mistake to think that Voltaire lived in simpler and more innocent times. There has never been a shortage of psychopaths seeking to improve their positions and by the time Voltaire wrote Candide, Europeans seeking ever greater monetary profit had already
eradicated entire human populations in the Caribbean and driven whole species to extinction off the African coast. But back then it took a lot more work to do so much damage. Today rather than sending many men on perilous, months long voyages to perform their grisly tasks, far greater damage can be inflicted by remote vehicles operated from the safety of one’s comfortable office while sipping a nice warm latte. Or if the pen rather than the sword becomes the preferred weapon of subjugation, the likes of Rupert Murdoch are now able to propagandize millions and billions of people on all continents in the blink of an eye. And never mind the metaphor of the garden for a moment – how does one even cultivate a literal garden in this modern world when the nefarious deeds of corporate bad actors are so pervasive that they change the very climate of our little blue dot making it more and more difficult to cultivate and grow much of anything?
It may very well be that despite all our rage at the injustice of it all, we who dissent are still just rats in a cage at least for the time being and the best we can do is wait it out. Our current system of corporate governance is a relatively new phenomenon and we human beings have managed to muddle through without it for most of our time on this earth and can certainly do so again. It is arrogance and hubris that leads to so many believing that ours is the best country with the best system of governance despite all evidence to the contrary, and that hubris will be our undoing as it has been for so many others throughout history. So on this cool autumn day, sit back on the porch and sip a tall glass of homemade iced tea while taking in a good book and waiting for the empire to fall. And it will, just as surely as the leaves ablaze with red and orange descend from the maples. By the time our empire goes the way of that of Ozymandias, you may have acquired the knowledge and wisdom to contribute to whatever replaces the current bankrupt system.
But before we head to the comment section to further document the empire’s decline, I ask our vast readership one question. What do you see when you look at the painting at the top of this post?
Is it the image of Voltaire, the man who helped usher in an age of enlightenment and reason?
Or is it slaves in a market waiting helplessly to be sold?
![Project Gutenberg](http://<imgsrc="PG_Button_104x40.gif"width="104"height="40"alt="GoToProjectGutenberg">)
