New entry on the blogroll discovered via Avedon Carol at The Sideshow, The Arch Druid Report Report. Good writing, interesting subject matter. Spends a lot of time on a subject near and dear to my heart, the decline of the US Empire. It is looking more and more like the most exceptional thing about us is going to be the speed at which we devolved into a complete plutocracy that is always at war. Let that sink in: our country is always at war, and nobody seems to think this is a problem. It's just passively accepted by a majority of our citizens who are too appallingly ignorant to recognize what an insidious threat that is. Madison was aware of the threat that war poses to democracy, but who the hell was Madison? The Kardashians and Lindsey Lohan are far more important. (By the way, just who in the hell are the Kardasians? They just appeared one day like a cyst or a plague of locusts, and now the tastemakers in our culture insist on telling us all about them. It's a disgrace.
I did something unusual this morning. I watched some of the cheesy ass mainstream morning news shows, Good Morning America type crap. It is toxically vapid, even dangerous. They are all about whipping up fear: a shooter in Oregon. A ballistic missile in North Korea. Wrong way drivers! There was absolutely nothing in the way of real news. Then they switched from making us afraid of wicked foreigners with their magic ray guns in order to engage in a little mindless celebrity worship. Now, I didn't really learn anything I didn't know about the the cosmic shallowness of the MSM, but it is something that us concerned citizens must occasionally view to keep our finger on the pulse of the nation. It is who we are. This is how catastrophe like the invasion of Iraq happen: chubby consumers who have never travelled outside the country, don't read books, and don't even know the difference between Switzerland and Sweden (let alone Iran and Iraq), swallow any lie they are told about brown and yellow bogeyman with super duper weapons and a causeless desire to kill Americans in their beds. Barbara Walters interviewed Hillary Clinton and asked her what her biggest fear was going into the future. She said Iran. Good Heavens.
We are a bunch of easily frightened ninnies and we have the government we deserve. I was talking to someone about this and they said, well, you know Mick, maybe you just take this stuff too seriously. It's just harmless pap. Ignore it. Forget about it. But I don't agree. It's deadly serious. It's softened our brains while corporate vandals stole the country. Now, without the slightest trace of irony, multimillionaires can stare us straight in the face and claim that lowering their taxes is good for us low-wage peons, and about half the county believes it. They just go on eating their nachos and watching the gladiators and waving the flag and hating foreigners on command. I've had conversations with people who've told me in absolute earnest that they have no qualms at all about the the fact that the US tortures people now. Didn't matter at all to them. Fuck the Muslims. Fuck the Arabs. Turn their countries into parking lots. It was pointless to mention Nietzsche's observation that he who spends too much time slaying dragons eventually becomes a dragon himself. It was also useless to bring up the point that when the US falls from the top slot, which is a historic inevitability, we'd better damn well hope our replacement treats us better than we've been treating a lot of the world lately. But they just don't care. Oh well, to quote one of their heroes, in the future we'll all be dead, so I guess it doesn't really matter anyway.
I've been experiencing blog burn-out. Sickening of politics. Running out of amusing things to say. There are times when politics fill me with such utter revulsion, such bottomless and inconsolable disgust there are times when I literally have to turn away. In the case of Mitch McConnel I really do. He fills me with roiling nausea. He is so utterly repellent that, to steal a line from Kent Southard, his visage would cause spontaneous abortions in the livestock. And I just can't tolerate this bogus fiscal cliff shit. The Republicans are gunning for Social Security, plain and simple. A bunch of filthy rich partisan hacks just can't sleep at night knowing there is a successful government program that, you know, helps people. My mother would be homeless without it. Gotta take it away. Heaven forbid that we should treat other human beings with any semblance of generosity or common decency. This wicked, root, hog or die ethic that dominates policy-making elites will be our undoing. Oh yeah, the Democrats will go right along with it. We will be sold down the river, just like we were during another manufactured issue, the invasion of Iraq.
So where does this measure on your obscenity scale? The CEO of Goldman Sachs Lloyd Blankfein, who presides over a criminal organization and makes about forty million a year, thinks we need to raise the retirement age. Isn't that cute? This thoroughly amoral criminal collected a six figure bonus at taxpayer expense and now he has the temerity to suggest that us little people need to slave our lives away even longer, and Very Serious Beltway media types treat it like a Very Serious proposal. They are quite openly and explicitly trying to make this country a permanent plutocracy (and it is an exceptionally crude, crass, vulgar plutocracy because our self-styled elites do not have a shred of culture, breeding, or erudition. What are they bestowing on the future? Nothing. They are just shallow money grubbers, Visigoths in two thousand dollar suits. Just look at their former leader, Mitt, not a dumb man, but so devoid intellectual curiosity that he believes in Mormon fairytales. And they speak in empty cliches, "job creators," "trickle down," "tough choices," which is a euphemism for "bend over Mr. and Mrs. Average American and prepare to be brutally penetrated, yet again." None of them ever say anything memorable or original.
Hey, for someone who just griped about blog burn-out, I sure managed to spew out quite a lot of meandering verbiage, didn't I? I apologize from any typos or spelling errors in this post. The new Blogger is absolute junk, absolute total garbage. It doesn't save changes or edits half the time. Doesn't insert proper paragraph breaks. It's late, I'm tired, and I just don't wanna deal with it.
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