"... Its down to me, yes it is
The way she does just what shes told
Down to me, the change has come
Shes under my thumb ..." the Rolling Stones
Clearly, nobody here is willing to finger the perps. Amazing isn't it? What a hold they got on us ... It can only go further down hill.
Tour the blogs, everybody knows but everybody speaks in our special roundabout language which is why we're stuck swaying on the broken ferris wheel. Even Mr. Rivero leaves the dirty work to others. Nobody is saying STOP!
All these brilliant writers, what are they doing? They're writing. What can be done, well, nothing, now. That's an entirely separate matter, as we still are at this moment loathe to admit the scale of our catastrophe.
Nothing has changed from the downward trajectory we've been following all along. Nor will it. Why will there be no Fema camps people? Because this whole place is under Katrinaization in slo-mo. The Fema camps story is utter wishful thinking as is a word seldom used during the aftermath of Katrina, hope.
I imagine hoards of people find a lot of comfort in stringing all the seemingly unrelated events of the recent past together, like doing a jigsaw puzzle and arriving at whatever conclusions they will, but that seems to be the totality of their upset. You could get the idea that doing jigsaws is another inversion of reality entertainment. You could get the idea that correcting the corners of the puzzle is even more entertaining if you get someone else to see the puzzle the way you do.
And how curious that Mr. Bageant writes of a comment gleaned from somewhere else suggesting the Trojan Horse aspect of the Chief Executive's immediate role? Circuitously curious. Perhaps, perhaps ... well, he writes well.
A poster on AlterNet named "monkeywrench" observed that Obama couldn't have handed the corporate owners of this country more if he had been a Trojan Horse candidate. So prescient was the poster that I have highjacked his chain of thought herein. Could Obama be a Trojan horse? Maybe, but it would be a waste of time and effort. Trojan horses are not necessary in a country that has only one political party anyway -- Big Business.
Everybody is writing well, maybe that's all we want to do. Maybe we can email some e-publisher and publish an online e-essay before the eye of the hurricane switches around for another beating. That is if we can just get that corner to fit before the power fails. Keep in mind remoured Trojan Horse yesterday reappointed Mr. Bernanke for having shouldered the nation through the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Like that? Good, huh? We must be on the other side now, right? No more mystery. News of the Weird is daily fare. It is sad that the reality of our sadness has lost its ability to move us beyond this most spectacular of tragedies since Earth's beginnings.
Frozen in time. A revolution that might have been. A people squandered. A direction clear, but a civilization adrift. It could have been different, it didn't have to be what it is. It won't be this way for long though because it is multiplying exponentially. The new shysters are more surgically strategic than the old ones, they learned from the best and today they do anything they want - freely. All the angry gangbangers and shake and bake tweakers are multiplying in lockstep with this same kind of free thinking. Have you looked outside today? Are the things you left there exactly as you placed them or was there some slight, almost indiscernible adjustment?
And somehow THIS is all going to, heh, turn ITSELF around? Tell me you don't see it. I like jokes, but only if they're really good. And unfortunately, there is just NO humor in catastrophe.
31 comments:
I have no illusions that I am able to do anything to avert a catastrophic readjustment of the global economic order.
The crisis of this order is what I hope for, because the only way I will be able to personally have an effect is on a level of organization much smaller than the global.
I would be able, for example, to use my verbal and analytical skills to sway my local community, if given the chance... but I do not yet have a local community. My neighbors are still stuck in the past, waiting for the Fed and PTB to resurrect a dead horse, so that they can start tilting at windmills again.
Thieves run the show, as they have for much of human history, except for those brief revolutionary moments in time when the majority of citizens have the motivation and ability to become active in forming their own destinies. The American Revolution, the French Revolution and even the Russian Revolution were like that in their beginning stages. All were quickly devoured by their children - the American Revolution's violence came later than the others, in the Civil War, but the results were the same: the power of the people was caged and tamed and neutered.
The people's ability to focus and engage with politics has been semi-permanently disrupted by modern media technologies. Yes, including the Internet. Until the electric grid is impaired, this will continue.
The best hope for the time being lies in critique and political engagement, done with a sense of ironical detachment, knowing that it will be largely ineffective.
Once the crisis hits, though, that political engagement will have given you the experience needed for the next phase: the recreation of a local polity, a local community, a human landscape.
The chaos, however, the ancient chthonic forces that are likely to emerge when masses of clueless people start to go hungry and cold, with their children in tow - this chaos will shock Americans, just as bourgeois German citizens were shocked when Allied bombs flattened their blocks. Disbelief soon gave way, however, to the struggle to survive. Read Heinrich Bolle for a good novelist who captured this disbelief and despair.
One of my worries is how I will react to the pleas of those who ignored my pleas to prepare. I foresee a time when neighbors are going hungry... yet I may have just enough prepped for my own family.
Our neighbors, a young couple with a 2 year old, and the wife is pregnant... they are insane. The husband lost his job last year and is about to fall off the extended unemployment rolls. He has basically given up looking for work, yet they have put thousands into an ill-conceived home renovation project. Now I find out that they about to put their child into a $68/day extra-special day care. Unbelievable... I am a freak to them, because I do not buy into their belief in recovery. They are aliens to me, because I cannot talk about any - literally any - of my interests and concerns.
So it goes...
Before we go rushing out the door with torches, pitchforks and knotted hemp it would be good to know that we had some chance of success. There is obviously the 435 members of Congress and their staffs who are in thrall to bribe-taking in the form of campaign contributions but there is also the legion of Wall Street executives who organize those bribes. There are media executives, military officers, corrupt church leaders, state legislatures, judges, mayors, doctors, researchers, city councilmen, corrupt flunkies by their tens of thousands right down to the level of the guy taking bribes for building permits.
Cutting off one of these heads, or ten or one thousand simply isn't going to work. The monster can grow heads faster than we can lop them. You have to starve the beast into quiescence and then start tying heads down and separating the hostages among them.
They knew this in South Africa. They couldn't just kill a few prominent whites or prominent rebels and win. They tried that path for decades. They had to tie down the most violent of the heads and bind their two warring creatures together and hope they would form a coherent whole. It's not working very well but it's not open warfare and slaughter either.
Fortunately the beast is starving itself. Unfortunately it's starving some of us too. If there was some thing I could throw my body into and save the planet I would. That only happens in movies. Instead we have flood waters rising on a sunny day and our neighbors wondering what the hell we are doing filling sandbags. They don't see the bodies already in the water. They refuse to. We can see the bodies but also the nearest other person filling sandbags is barely visible.
Yes, it's metaphor, metaphor, metaphor, still but blood on the iron isn't going to fix this one. Not yet.
Here's a really great joke for yah—We're at War ... with our govt. All else follows logically—HAHAHA—
just not for us.
Howdy Baz, did you get that from Mr. Bumbles? I can just hear him chortling through the nasal passages on his beak.
Everyone else... you know Baz? Baz is cool. We all have much to learn from him, if we plan on staying alive.
How coincidental is it that JFK, Bobby and John John are no longer on this planet?
Nina_No coincidence and you know it.
Add Paul Wellstone, Mel Carnahan, and god knows how many others. America holds 25% of the worlds prison population; a number that mysteriously corresponds with our outsized resource seizure from the rest of the world.
http://www.stoppoliticalassassinations.com/
There's also the Bush/Reagan treason that sabotaged Carter's re-election bid.
There's the media assassination of Al Gore and Howard Dean in the 2000 and 2004 elections where the US news media became functional arms of the Republican party. The vote machine rigging. Something my brother was working on as college faculty with a MS in computer science before HE suicided.
There is the ongoing South American coups, killing, assassinations, military invasions, drug trafficking and outright evil produced by the US government. It wasn't a mistake that cocaine flooded the inner cities during the Reagan years. The military was flying it in on C-130's from Honduras and Guatemala. The journalist who discovered that was "suicided."
Ask Mike Rupert before he dies. He's sicker than a dog now.
If we rely on heroes we're screwed. We have to rely on ants, on bees, on millions of tiny bites causing the body politic to start scratching. Then we have to get them to look at what the cause of the itch is.
The monster is very large and has inertia. We are very small. But we can push a little as it goes by. We can wear it down like sand scouring a mountain. Like water drilling through rock. Don't be standing where the foot comes down.
Never give up.
verification word:shenul
Hope looks like THIS:
http://rootbridges.blogspot.com/2009/08/blog-post.html
The only thing to be done is to be still and know thyself.
Everything else is theory.
I had a long reply all typed up but don't want to poop on your blog, Nina - so I just threw it up on my own blog.
I just wanted to say this, though.
Publius, don't waste your brilliance and passion trying to convince anyone out there of whatever truth you have sussed out for yourself. Your verbal and analytical skills are wasted there, and might be seen as something other than welcome wisdom. They obviously don't want to hear it, and if you need confirmation or commiseration you know where to turn.
Use those gifts for the support of your immediate community - your wife and that awesome little dude who won't understand any of your words, but will learn much from watching you act.
Your community may be forthcoming, but some need to follow a lead rather than an idea. That old "attraction rather than promotion" thing that seems to help people recover from their addictions.
This one may need further review;
"The best hope for the time being lies in critique and political engagement, done with a sense of ironical detachment, knowing that it will be largely ineffective."
It seems to me like that is a continuation of the status quo. I guess it just depends on how the "crisis" presents itself to any individual.
Sorry if this sounds like telling you what to do. I hope we are going to get together tomorrow evening and get to continue this in the "real" world.
Love to all of you,
Z
While I guarantee it is worse to be the one who is stupid, its almost as unpleasant watching other people stuck in stupid. I say watch because you cannot interfere with stupid without bringing on greater stupid. To really get out of stupid, is a 100% total self-immersion in truth, the most painful, but direct route to enlightenment. But you gotta keep an eye out you don't climb down into the hole everyone else is trying to get out of. Stupid is contagious with an instantaneous incubation period.
Pangolin, that's a wonderful link! Living Root Bridges! Of course, they call for patience and hard work so we won't be seeing them anytime soon.
Susu, I agree. But you already knew that. It could even be said that everything else is torture since conflict as entertainment is widely appealing.
... One of my worries is how I will react to the pleas of those who ignored my pleas to prepare. I foresee a time when neighbors are going hungry... yet I may have just enough prepped for my own family. ...
Publius, that one is easy, WHEN THEY ASK, you just show them how to plant.
nina, nuh—I got it from your front page .. and everyone else's front page. Mr Bumble and mate Wing looking for nesting site currently. All is OK in their world.
Humans: Remember, when the goin' gets tough, the easy way is mined!
Re: Baz said: 6:29 pm
When did it become okay to post metaphors and riddles as a means of communication, Baz? ...Except on poetry sites, I mean?
Can't you type a simple declarative statement? ...one that lays out your passions and positions without formless swamp fog vagueness plopping down all over everything?
I'd like to understand what it is you're typing about, is all.
(...Oh!...you MUST know there's NO EASY way...?!?...)
I don't mean to be rude, Baz - it's just that everyone else has been clear in laying out their opinions in this thread. It's you I'm having trouble translating into a language I think in.
Sorry.
Maybe you can help me out by taking a little more time to explain the points you're trying to make.
That would be great.
Thanks.
Art_ I Grok Baz perfectly. Of course, I'm willing to get a little fuzzy on that points thing and just go with
..."The new shysters are more surgically strategic than the old ones, they learned from the best and today they do anything they want - freely."
That hits home hard today in light of Ted Kennedy's demise. It feels like all the old icons and stalwarts of the Old Order that was the world that I grew up in (Walter Cronkite, the Kennedy's, Johnny Carson, Kurt Vonnegut, Hunter S. Thompson, and so many others) are all dead now. The bricks are coming out of the walls, and soon all that we knew is going to be gone and it won't take long before it is also forgotten. The charges are being set on the framework of our culture. Who the hell are these suits running things now - and why are their pockets full of thermite? When all the shit that they have put into place goes off, this country will free fall into it's own footprint much like the Twin Towers.
It feels like those not up for the ride are leaving this plane in advance. I find myself ambivalent.
I take a measure of comfort in the new archeological digs that are unearthing a civilization that precedes anything we have known. Many have come and gone before us. The Earth seems to have survived all the dumbasses that have come before.
Maybe a revolution is like trying to get pregnant. Once you give up on it and make other plans, it just happens.
I really hate to think that Obama is a Trojan Horse.
I know I am rambling. It's been a difficult day. My mind is adrift. Glad to be with you, though.
Jesus Arthur, where shall I begin, the Old Testament? Could ask you to extoll the virtues of formless swamp fog vagueness plopping metaphors? But I guess you missed that one also?
I don't mean to be rude,—nuh, me neither.
Sorry that George Bush only spoke in riddles, or Jesus in metaphors, you've missed out on a great deal of understanding. Perhaps an Encyclopedia? They have them in English.
Humans are notorious for selecting the easy path, it's in our nature, given the choice. Why I'll bet you're sitting on a nice comfy swivel chair in the cosy comfort of ... reading this right now, rather than clearing the leaves out of the gutter, that you've been putting off for ... when you know you should, hmmm.
Allow me to squeeze in here a sec and announce that on-topic rambling is not only permitted, but encouraged. What if we never rambled? I don't want to even think about that one.
Here's some rambling: Say, ummm, the Corporatocracy is the most powerful entity on Earth and everything else that appears as powerful is in actuality also powerful, but ultimately a beholden, aquired subsidiary? Let's do a mental graph, draw a line with the word Corporatocracy above the line. Underneath the line are little vertical lines as there are in geneology charts for families. Can you see it? Clearly the market is in a higher position than other subsidiaries and able to operate in a universal sphere successfully where units with very good PR departments are not nearly as effective. If they were what they promote themselves to be, we'd be long out of foreign engagements. We'd not be emptying the US piggybank on external conflict, but support and make internally productive the life blood of the people and future generations inside this nation.
Rambling? Maybe ... I was taken aback in the early stages of the Bush approach to governance with the dramatic change in language as if they saw the office as a boardroom where they prepackaged and sold policy like consumer products. (Then I noticed everyone in intellectual businesses adopted that language, repackaging conceptual services as "product lines.") They get themselves out of crimes the same way, which is the way of the Corporatocracy, with batteries of attorneys skilled in the finer points of boardroom debate instead of clear "right and wrong justice". The Exxon Valdez oil spill being a case in point. Nothing really gets done, it just goes on indefinitely without real resolution as Climate Chaos is debated and healthcare reform is a package benefitting whom exactly? You could argue we need foreign oil, but if we stopped arguing, we'd have gotten down with a sustainable way of life by now. America could have been the world's leader in sustainability, but has chosen debate over reality. This can't be a coincidence, IMO.
Rambling again...
The personalities on this thread are like a mental League of Nations. Can they find a meeting of the minds? Let's see how it unfolds. Heh.
I like watching minds unfold - particularly my very own with input from others.
This is where face-to-face encounters prove so very valuable, and the limitations of a cyber-community are revealed.
Word verification; waromen
Be well,
Z
Hahahahaha, waromen.
Recall on the rand thread POA got Burpaz.
Hahahahahah.
When rambling becomes reality: "Business as Usual": Legitimizing the Illegitimate, August 28, 2009 Charles is cooking on high today.
"A superior man, in regard to what he does not know, shows a cautious reserve. If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. If language be not in accordance with the truth of things, affairs cannot be carried on to success. When affairs cannot be carried on to success, proprieties and music do not flourish. When proprieties and music do not flourish, punishments will not be properly awarded. When punishments are not properly awarded, the people do not know how to move hand or foot. Therefore a superior man considers it necessary that the names he uses may be spoken appropriately, and also that what he speaks may be carried out appropriately. What the superior man requires is just that in his words there may be nothing incorrect." – Confucius, Analects, XIII, 3, tr. Legge
When we fail to learn the classics we frequently just fail.
word:nolval
Pangolin,
Great quote... the Eastern philosophers, I'm starting to suspect, have way more to offer than the vague and highly hypothetical metaphysics and ethics of the West. Gotta get me some Confucius!
Right as rain and timely too.
Holy Crap!! Nina you HAVE GOT to see this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vOhf3OvRXKg
You'll want to start it up and pause it until it downloads. Then let it play through.
It's art and like nothing I've ever seen. Amazing.
word: rumptic think straw into gold
Baz typed:
"Why I'll bet you're sitting on a nice comfy swivel chair in the cosy comfort of ... reading this right now, rather than clearing the leaves out of the gutter, that you've been putting off for ... when you know you should, hmmm."
The chair's not that comfy but it does swivel...I'm reading you because its that time of my day today. I don't have leaves in my gutters. But if I did I'd be cleaning them out instead of sitting here staring at my own trivial thoughts.
But I get your point. I think.
I know you had me smiling at the rueful truth of your post, that's for sure.
Hey Arthur, glad you're smiling and not confused and perplexed! That metaphor about leaves in the guttering—if you haven't figured-it already was inspired by my own procrastination—haha! So I know what I'm talking about. Someone once said, you can only really know something based on your own experience.
Minefields are dangerous places (no metaphor), so it is always dangerous (hazardous to life and limb) to traverse easy paths. Human nature is predictable and therefore perceived and exploited as weakness by an enemy (foreign or domestic). I'm a hunter—trapper, and exploit this knowledge on pathways commonly used by animals.
Some of my favorite quotations from Survivalists who knew something about staying alive in difficult times:—
“Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak.” Sun Tzu ~ The Art of War
Confucius say—“man who sit with mouth open wait long-time for roast duck to fly in mouth.”
I pad my (swivel) chair with cushions :—)
search engine ESTULIN and read about who's really doing this. they're real, and they're freaking out, and they can be beaten. and we will beat them. Three-pers, folks, Three-pers! (three percent of us is all it takes to prevail, and we have far more than that percentage willing to go head to head with this oligarchy. We will prevail. Count on it, we WILL PREVAIL.
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