Even if you're a filthy atheist like me, it's easy to recognize some of the ideals Christmas stands for, or at least should represent: charity; humility; compassion; the momentary contemplation of the idea that even the lowliest of people may turn out to be something special after all; that humans, individually and collectively, harbor within themselves an ineffable goodness, even if they have to be reminded of it once in a while.
An illegal immigrant couple, with a pregnant wife who has a really hinky story about how she got that way, sneak into an empire run by a mad king, and have their anchor baby. It's a story that should have extra resonance these days, at least to a population that wasn't already hopelessly desensitized by daily depredations, and Amazon commercials every thirty seconds exhorting them for the love of Christ almighty to fucking buy something and now.
Obviously, when someone bestows a gift on someone else, the gesture and the gift say something about the giver as well as the recipient, and about the nature of the relationship between them. So, for example, when the emperor decrees -- around Christmastime, no less -- that food assistance to the growing numbers of needy and desperate people shall be cut, it sends a message.
Ordinarily you could just say that that message is something along the usual grotesque lines of we don't give a shit, but when you factor in that some of these recipients are children, and many of the recipients live in states where they still loves them some Orange Foolius, that message gets a bit more complicated. Now it becomes something more like at least there might be some libturd out there taking it in the shorts worse than you.
But at least they can say Merry Christmas again without some jackbooted thug dragging them into the street and mercilessly truncheoning them within an inch of their sorry lives. I mean, that's what had been happening before Fat Orange Jesus came along, right? Pretty sure it was in all the papers.
To draw a scene in rather broad strokes, it seems that what passes for 'murkin dumbocracy these days boils down to four basic equations:
Filter that through a corporate media that keeps eating itself alive, in a futile attempt to recapture lost revenue, and a population that increasingly prefers to retreat into their epistemic bubbles, and it's become quite simple to maintain control.
I hadn't read King Leopold's Ghost in years, and on the re-read it has additional thematic impact for our current dynamic. The details of the Belgian genocide in the Congo are horrific, but what really hits home is the complicity with which everyone operated, heedlessly, always maintaining what good Christians they were. Locals were bribed or coerced into cooperating as well, committing atrocities on their neighbors in the next village, at the behest of greedy Europeans who paid them in brass rods and trinkets. Most of the journalists of the day preferred to merely chronicle the "achievements" of Leopold and his colonists, rather than discuss the brutalities that underwrote those accomplishments. Same as it ever was, as it's always been.
This may seem to be at odds with our earlier Christmas observation about (most) people being "good," but maybe it's just that "evil" is its own force multiplier. That is, it only takes a relative handful of genuinely rotten souls, with the assistance of their bribed enablers and minions, to subvert a much larger proportion of ordinary decent people. Fear and inertia and passivity do the rest of the heavy lifting.
The "good" news here is that, in this paradise of end-stage capitalism, even seemingly hardcore ideologues and religious fanatics are almost to a person really only and always about the money. Stripped of their true god, they have nothing. All the rest of us lack is the collective will to financially shun them.
As I mention from time to time, all we need to do is consider two seminal names from the lore of non-violent protest: Rosa Parks and Mahatma Gandhi. The way their stories are conveyed and perpetuated obscure their true impacts, which reveals a great deal about who tells those stories.
For example, when most Americans hear Rosa Parks' name, they might get as far as "that lady who refused to go to the back of the bus." But that's not why you know her name. After Parks was arrested, the boycott of the Montgomery bus system by the black-majority rider base forced the system to change its policies.
Same with Gandhi; his crowning achievement, the one that really got the ball rolling against the British colonialists, was the simple act of leading masses of Indians to the sea, where he showed them how to make their own salt, thus depriving the British of a key source of colonial revenue.
The powers that be want you to believe that the only way you can get anything to change is by taking to the streets. The reality of this is that only two outcomes are possible:
We've become conditioned to anticipate the actions of others, whether we agree or disagree with them, and then to apply those assumptions to our own actions. Look at all the hand-wringing among Democratic voters over which candidate they "should" support. Many of them are frustrated because they feel obligated to support Diamond Joe Biden, because as awful as he is, he's been anointed as the most "electable."
[strokes chin thoughtfully] Hmmm, I wonder if the entities who own the media outlets who make these assessments and prognostications might have any vested interest in supporting candidates whose policies are most closely aligned to theirs?
Let me tell you something about "electability": the person who makes the most people want to vote for them is the one that is the most electable. Crazy, right? Especially in a primary season, the minute you start trying to guess who other people will or should vote for is the minute you start playing a game you just can't win.
I think we'd all be surprised at what might happen if people simply decided who they want to vote for -- not the person they think "can beat" Trump, not the person they think this or that demographic voting bloc will vote for, but the person whose policies and statements most closely connect with what you believe.
I don't care who "black" people will vote for; in fact, I think the assumption that they (or anyone) are a predictive monolithic voting bloc is borderline insulting. And I really don't give a shit who people think the Real 'murka midwest cracker bloc will go for.
Here's a clue: if they voted for it last time, they'll do it again, no matter what it does or says, no matter what sort of class traitor tries to run neck-and-wattle against it. Those folks are getting what they want, and they want more of it. No matter how badly they get trampled by its policies, the rubes now have added incentive to simply not admit to themselves just how badly they fucked up. All I can add to that is that I sincerely wish I could let each and every one of them know that, aside from the headache I get when I hear their jabbering retard emperor open his burger-hole, I'm doing fine. I'm not losing the farm my grandfather built from nothing because of some idiotic trade war.
All those second-guessing games are designed to divide the opposition and muddle their thinking, pit them against each other with clever little diversions designed by soulless cubicle-rats pawning their services to moneyed weasels. Don't overthink it.
So to the extent one can bestow gifts and hopes and wishes upon distant strangers, here they are:
An illegal immigrant couple, with a pregnant wife who has a really hinky story about how she got that way, sneak into an empire run by a mad king, and have their anchor baby. It's a story that should have extra resonance these days, at least to a population that wasn't already hopelessly desensitized by daily depredations, and Amazon commercials every thirty seconds exhorting them for the love of Christ almighty to fucking buy something and now.
Obviously, when someone bestows a gift on someone else, the gesture and the gift say something about the giver as well as the recipient, and about the nature of the relationship between them. So, for example, when the emperor decrees -- around Christmastime, no less -- that food assistance to the growing numbers of needy and desperate people shall be cut, it sends a message.
Ordinarily you could just say that that message is something along the usual grotesque lines of we don't give a shit, but when you factor in that some of these recipients are children, and many of the recipients live in states where they still loves them some Orange Foolius, that message gets a bit more complicated. Now it becomes something more like at least there might be some libturd out there taking it in the shorts worse than you.
But at least they can say Merry Christmas again without some jackbooted thug dragging them into the street and mercilessly truncheoning them within an inch of their sorry lives. I mean, that's what had been happening before Fat Orange Jesus came along, right? Pretty sure it was in all the papers.
To draw a scene in rather broad strokes, it seems that what passes for 'murkin dumbocracy these days boils down to four basic equations:
- One citizen = one vote.
- One dollar = one vote.
- One acre = one vote.
- One vote = waste of time.
Filter that through a corporate media that keeps eating itself alive, in a futile attempt to recapture lost revenue, and a population that increasingly prefers to retreat into their epistemic bubbles, and it's become quite simple to maintain control.
I hadn't read King Leopold's Ghost in years, and on the re-read it has additional thematic impact for our current dynamic. The details of the Belgian genocide in the Congo are horrific, but what really hits home is the complicity with which everyone operated, heedlessly, always maintaining what good Christians they were. Locals were bribed or coerced into cooperating as well, committing atrocities on their neighbors in the next village, at the behest of greedy Europeans who paid them in brass rods and trinkets. Most of the journalists of the day preferred to merely chronicle the "achievements" of Leopold and his colonists, rather than discuss the brutalities that underwrote those accomplishments. Same as it ever was, as it's always been.
This may seem to be at odds with our earlier Christmas observation about (most) people being "good," but maybe it's just that "evil" is its own force multiplier. That is, it only takes a relative handful of genuinely rotten souls, with the assistance of their bribed enablers and minions, to subvert a much larger proportion of ordinary decent people. Fear and inertia and passivity do the rest of the heavy lifting.
The "good" news here is that, in this paradise of end-stage capitalism, even seemingly hardcore ideologues and religious fanatics are almost to a person really only and always about the money. Stripped of their true god, they have nothing. All the rest of us lack is the collective will to financially shun them.
As I mention from time to time, all we need to do is consider two seminal names from the lore of non-violent protest: Rosa Parks and Mahatma Gandhi. The way their stories are conveyed and perpetuated obscure their true impacts, which reveals a great deal about who tells those stories.
For example, when most Americans hear Rosa Parks' name, they might get as far as "that lady who refused to go to the back of the bus." But that's not why you know her name. After Parks was arrested, the boycott of the Montgomery bus system by the black-majority rider base forced the system to change its policies.
Same with Gandhi; his crowning achievement, the one that really got the ball rolling against the British colonialists, was the simple act of leading masses of Indians to the sea, where he showed them how to make their own salt, thus depriving the British of a key source of colonial revenue.
The powers that be want you to believe that the only way you can get anything to change is by taking to the streets. The reality of this is that only two outcomes are possible:
- You get the shit beaten out of you, whether by counter-protestors or cops.
- You come out of it unscathed.
We've become conditioned to anticipate the actions of others, whether we agree or disagree with them, and then to apply those assumptions to our own actions. Look at all the hand-wringing among Democratic voters over which candidate they "should" support. Many of them are frustrated because they feel obligated to support Diamond Joe Biden, because as awful as he is, he's been anointed as the most "electable."
[strokes chin thoughtfully] Hmmm, I wonder if the entities who own the media outlets who make these assessments and prognostications might have any vested interest in supporting candidates whose policies are most closely aligned to theirs?
Let me tell you something about "electability": the person who makes the most people want to vote for them is the one that is the most electable. Crazy, right? Especially in a primary season, the minute you start trying to guess who other people will or should vote for is the minute you start playing a game you just can't win.
I think we'd all be surprised at what might happen if people simply decided who they want to vote for -- not the person they think "can beat" Trump, not the person they think this or that demographic voting bloc will vote for, but the person whose policies and statements most closely connect with what you believe.
I don't care who "black" people will vote for; in fact, I think the assumption that they (or anyone) are a predictive monolithic voting bloc is borderline insulting. And I really don't give a shit who people think the Real 'murka midwest cracker bloc will go for.
Here's a clue: if they voted for it last time, they'll do it again, no matter what it does or says, no matter what sort of class traitor tries to run neck-and-wattle against it. Those folks are getting what they want, and they want more of it. No matter how badly they get trampled by its policies, the rubes now have added incentive to simply not admit to themselves just how badly they fucked up. All I can add to that is that I sincerely wish I could let each and every one of them know that, aside from the headache I get when I hear their jabbering retard emperor open his burger-hole, I'm doing fine. I'm not losing the farm my grandfather built from nothing because of some idiotic trade war.
All those second-guessing games are designed to divide the opposition and muddle their thinking, pit them against each other with clever little diversions designed by soulless cubicle-rats pawning their services to moneyed weasels. Don't overthink it.
So to the extent one can bestow gifts and hopes and wishes upon distant strangers, here they are:
- To the grifters and traitors and abusers actively running and abetting this human centipede of an administration, I sincerely wish them all the very worst things this life has to offer. Use your imagination. They assist with the daily monstrosities and incompetencies, knowing full well the collective effects on actual humans, and they still do not care. Their indifference is vile and inhuman, and they know it. Their worst nightmare is full accountability. I pray it finds them.
- To the fools at large who still support this shitshow, people with nary a pot to piss in nor a window to throw it out of, taking it straight in the ass for the benefit of the aristocracy, I wish for them the gift of reflection and insight, and everything that entails. The politicians they support use them and despise them. They're being hurt much more than the elite libturds they've been trained to hate. They can either stop for a moment and really think about the big picture, or they can continue down the road they're on, and find out the hard way when they're flushed like a handful of used toilet paper.
- To the corporate media, the gift of honesty, though most of them would have no fucking clue what to do with it. So maybe a sense of shame would be a more useful gift.
- To the people who see these things for what they really are, and are rightly despairing because the times have also revealed a disturbingly large percentage of people as willing dupes at best, I wish for them to have peace of mind and patience. Remember that two-thirds of Americans fucking despise Trump and everything he stands for; remember that if the Republicans weren't worried, they wouldn't be retiring in droves and trying to cheat; remember that the kids, whatever their faults, recognize greedy boomers and shady evilangelists for the hypocritical cowards they really are, and will remember their perfidy as the oceans reclaim what's theirs.
- To the non-voters out there, I offer the hope that they reflect for a moment as well, and make a decision that, as much of an exercise in futility as it may seem, it is actually not all that much to ask to take a few minutes to register, and then to actually cast that vote when it's time. I know they make it tough in some places -- but that's why they make it tough, to discourage you from exercising your rights. So just sack up and do it, every time. You might be surprised by what happens. Stop worrying about what other people might or might not do, and just make sure to do it yourself.
- And to the people who are doing it right across the board, voting with ballots and wallets at every opportunity, just keep at it. Keep doing the right thing, simply because it is exactly that. Live your life, while still paying attention, but not getting sucked in too much by the swirling chaos. They win by buying off or demoralizing people's innate sense of justice, that's how The Party gets you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. Once you make the decision for yourself that those things are your own, really all you ever will have in this world that's permanently yours, the rest falls into place. Keep this in mind at all times: fuck those people. Whatever else, they can't take that away from you.
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