A Leaky Roof

A line of reasoning may make sense to you until you try to use it in a different situation. Here’s an example:

You live in a condominium along with several others, and you all have the same roof over your heads. You notice from time to time as you gaze up while entering the building that the roof looks a little shabby and mention it to others occasionally as you chance to meet them. But since you and they both know it would involve effort and expense, you tend to ignore it and get on with your life. But then you wake up one morning to a drop of water splashing on your forehead and you know something needs to be done. So after putting a pail of water under the leak, you knock on your neighbor’s door.

“Good morning, neighbor,” you say. “I know we’ve discussed the poor shape of the roof before but it’s suddenly become a problem and we need to do something about it.”

“Roofs are the problem, not the solution,” says your neighbor, irritably. In the background you hear the television turned up loudly as an angry voice speaks.

You are quite dumbfounded and ask him to clarify himself. “If we didn’t have roofs, we wouldn’t have leaks," he says.

“But we need a roof,” you protest.

“If we didn’t have a roof it wouldn’t rain. And if it did rain, well, the humidifier isn’t working either, not that I believe in humidifiers. If we didn’t have a roof the sun would warm us and the rain would provide the perfect amount of water in the atmosphere. Roofs interfere with the natural order of things.”

Needing to solve the roof problem before the bucket overflows and soaks your bed, you attempt another approach. “That may well be true, neighbor, but the existing roof has served us quite well for a good amount of time now and I don’t think it prudent for us to take drastic measures such as removing the roof but should instead repair what has worked for so long.”

“Once you get a roof you involve a bunch of people profiting off of it," says your neighbor. "The last people who installed the roof went over-budget and sold us a roof that was over-designed.”

You don’t disagree, remembering that one of the condo owners had talked all of you into using his brother-in-law’s company to do the job and had slipped in a lot of extra conditions into the contract that ended up making the cost far more than was expected or, indeed, necessary.

“Oh, for sure, we shouldn’t use the same people as we did the last time. In fact, I suggest we make sure we hire an entirely new group of people and investigate them thoroughly before permitting them to do the job.”

But you get nowhere with your neighbor, who hadn’t yet felt the effects of the leaky roof, or else blamed it instead on the innate leakiness of roofs. So you go away, hoping to find a neighbor with a little more common sense.

You knock on the next door and hear a swish swish of fabric as the tenant approaches his door. He opens it and you see the man in front of you dressed in rain gear from head to toe. With his yellow cap, his yellow jacket, and black rubber boots, he reminds you of nothing so much as the Gorton Fisherman. Behind a salt and pepper beard, a broad friendly smile beams back at you.

“Nice to see you, neighbor, what can I do for you?”

“Well, I was going to inform you of the fact that the roof was leaking, but I can see you are already aware of it.” As you gaze into his condo unit, you can see the roof is covered in heavy plastic and a complex system of gutters has been erected in order to re-route the water that was coming through the roof in steady streams. The whole system, you can’t help thinking, is ingeniously designed, a series of gutters that divert the water to pour out the window. And yet you can’t help thinking the whole system could have been avoided if he had alerted the rest of the tenants to the fact the roof was leaking.

“Ah, yes, the leaking roof. As you can see, I am a self-sufficient man who is able to find solutions to his own problems. I do not require a roof. In fact, I think roofs make us lazy and unaccountable for our own actions. In an ideal world, everyone would be responsible for constructing his own roof, as I have done. This, my good neighbor, is the key to happiness. You have the right to choose whether or not you want to have a roof over your head, and no committee should force you to have any roof that is not your desired roof.”

“But I’m not all that particular about what kind of roof I have over my head, provided it does not leak,” you tell the genial fellow in the rain gear.

“But you do not have a right to a dripless roof over your head,” he said, still cheerfully but a little paternally. “I fail to see why I should be forced to pay to fix the leak in your apartment when it does not affect me. That is socialism.”

“But the roof is leaking in your apartment as well,” you say, incredulously. “A new roof would solve both our problems, and with far less effort and—most likely—expense than what it required you to set up your own system.”

“Ah, but I reserve my freedom to have or not have a roof according to my own desire, and not on the whims and demands of my neighbors.”

He offers to share with you his plans for constructing a sub-roof system, even going as far as offering to lend you tools and help in the installation, but you demur. Surely there would be someone in the building who would see the need to repair a roof that would soon result in flooding and water damage for all. As bad as your drip is, you are able to see that it is far worse in other parts of the building.

In desperation, you remember a fellow condo owner you used to discuss condo business with. You remember her as being fair and open-minded about matters that concerned the whole. You knock on her door to find her in quite a degree of distress, though you do not see any sign of leaks or water damage.

You tell her about the leak in your apartment and she is eager to speak about the deplorable state of the roof. “Oh dear, oh dear,” she cries, almost hysterically.

“So you agree that the leaking roof is a problem?,” you ask, almost doubting that at last you have found a level-headed person who will assist you in finding a solution.

“A problem? No, it is a disaster,” she cries, and starts to hyperventilate at the mere thought of it.

“Well, yes, it is rather bad, isn’t it?” you say. And then, seeing the desperate state of mind of your neighbor, you attempt to console her by adding, “But we can take care of this situation if we just roll up our sleeves and get to work. Nothing we can’t solve once we put our minds to it and work shoulder to shoulder, eh?”

“Oh, I’ve already got the ball rolling,” says your neighbor, momentarily catching her breath. “I’ve called the roof company and they are on top of the situation.”

“Surely not the same roofing company who installed the roof we have now?” you ask. “I mean, they are the ones to blame for the situation we’re in now, aren’t they?”

“No,” she says, revealing a degree of hatred I would not have imagined her capable of. “It’s those damned kids throwing rocks at the roof who are responsible.”

“Kids throwing rocks?” you ask doubtfully. For you have seen no young ruffians in the neighborhood, nor any rocks, nor any damage on the roof that appeared as though it had been caused by rocks.

“Yes, those little bastards with rocks who have made a shambles of our roof!” Again, the glint of anger in her eyes shocks you, as though she was capable of great violence against any kid with a rock she might come upon.

You are almost afraid to say anything, such is the look in her eye, and the passion in her voice which causes it to tremble with rage. Nevertheless, you feel compelled to say what seems to be obvious to you.

“To be fair, the roof never looked too healthy,” you say sheepishly. Ignoring her rising wrath, you continue: “In fact, for a long time now I’ve noticed how shoddy it was looking. If you’ll recall, we actually had a discussion about it not a year ago, at which time you were in complete agreement with me. Why, you yourself complained about the untrustworthiness of the company that—

“You’re one of them, aren’t you?” she cries, cutting you off.

“One of who?”

“The roof company told me the kids with rocks had a lot of people working for them.”

“What kids with rocks?” you ask. For in truth, you have seen no kids with rocks, though you don’t dismiss the possibility that they exist or that they had in fact thrown rocks at the roof. You just don’t require a “kids with rocks” hypothesis to explain why the roof was in the condition it was. In fact, you view it as very suspicious that the roof company would be so certain that kids with rocks were responsible for the condition of the roof. If you were a disreputable roofing company—you think—a “kids with rocks” story would be a great way to avoid taking responsibility for your own shoddy work.

Innocently lost in conjecture about how the whole “kids with rocks” story didn’t seem to add up, you happen to look into the eyes of your neighbor and find there none of the questioning that was going on in your own mind. In fact, you see a certainty there that defies logic. You see a certainty that can be seen in the eyes of a true believer, the kind of certainty that shuts down minds and gives justification to the most irrational and violent of acts. People who blow up buildings have such a look in their eyes. It scares you.

So you go back to your apartment, feeling utterly alone and helpless, cut off from neighbors who are united by a common problem but unable to find any kind of common sense solution. You are tempted to sell your share in the building, but are already in debt more than you can ever hope to get for a unit with a leaky roof and weird neighbors. You listen to the drip, drip, drip, and cannot help but notice its tempo is increasing. You haven’t looked in the basement yet but fear it is already underwater. Drip. Drip.

A World Without Russia

I think the problem we are having with Russia at the moment is that it exists. I mean, I know we all know Russia exists, but it’s not supposed to occupy space on the planet we inhabit. It’s like those other countries, Kazakstan, and Tajikastan and Uzbekibekistanstan: we know they exist somewhere, but we’re never supposed to hear about them. We permit them their existence so long as they do not intrude upon our consciousness. When they do, I’m pretty sure the pat answer is to bomb them. Isn’t that what we do with any country we’ve never heard of and don’t care about when it suddenly is mentioned in the media? Would Afghanistan mean anything to anyone if we weren’t bombing and droning the crap out of them? Would any of us visit Afghanistan, or any other country for that matter, if we weren’t paid to put on a uniform and kill people there?

That’s the problem with Russia. They serve no useful purpose to our worldview. They are not part of Europe, at least not the Europe we like to think about, those countries that fought as allies with us against the evils of Nazism and Fascism.

 Well, granted, The Soviet Union fought against the Axis powers too. I mean, if you want to get technical about it, the USSR had more casualties than all the rest of the Allies combined. And if you really want to get out the fine tooth comb, we can say that they killed more Nazis than every other country combined, but this is just the sort of train of thought that gets annoying. Mention this on Facebook and you risk getting your page banned. Better to stick with cute puppy pictures (unless you’re from Russia, in which case puppy pictures are considered propaganda). But I digress.

Russia is comparable in our minds to those tiny—or simply remote—nations that exist despite the fact that their existence is inconsequential to our narrative. Nations like Senegal, that participated in the European wars and lost tremendous amounts of their young males fighting European battles for European purposes. They exist for our pleasure, like Japanese had their pleasure women, who were disposed of when they had served their purpose.

Russia is not part of Europe, not really. Nor is it part of Asia, not the way we think of it: after all, they provide us with neither televisions nor cheap plastic goods. 

It is a place holder, a blank spot on the map. Like Nigeria or Greenland, it pads out a globe. Without such countries, we’d only have a hemisphere, containing The United States and Western Europe. Come to think of it, we really have no use for the Southern Hemisphere either, do we?

  

Russia did serve a purpose for a time, did play a part in our narrative. After the defeat of the Axis powers, the war machine needed a raison d’etre, and the Soviet Union was the perfect excuse for increased military spending. It’s good to have an evil empire. One cannot have a military industrial complex without an existential threat.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, it was only a matter of time before we found another existential threat to justify a constant state of warfare. Seeing no major threats, we had to latch onto terrorism as the ultimate evil. Initially, it wasn’t up to the task, we had to guide it along, encourage it. In order to puff terrorism into a legitimate threat, we had to poke various countries until they reacted in the only way minor powers can react to the violence of major powers: through terrorist tactics. Eventually we provoked them enough—through our military presence in their countries and our support for brutal regimes--that they hit us back in a rather impressive fashion. This was a goldmine for us, as it gave us carte blanche to unleash the full military money-making machine upon them. It was the ideal situation in that we were at war against not a nation that could be defeated but an idea that could never be defeated. The mere fact that we killed people in distant nations and occupied their lands guaranteed that we would perpetuate terrorism, giving us the endless war we had so long desired. And there were no boundaries! We had an excuse to attack anyone we wanted anywhere in the world and justify it by calling them terrorists.

There was only one problem: as much as we liked our war against terrorism, we also liked using terrorists to advance our own agenda in overthrowing governments we did not like. It was hard to use terrorism as the existential threat against which we had to place all our energies when we were simultaneously using terrorists against other countries and governments. It all hit the fan in Syria when, in the midst of our attempt to overthrow a government with the use of terrorists, Russia stepped in on the side of their ally, using the claim that they too wanted to combat terrorism. America’s hypocrisy was suddenly exposed for all to see. And like any other hypocrite, America was not very happy to have its hypocrisy exposed. America was in the very difficult position of having to pretend that they weren’t supporting the terrorists which they claimed were their mortal enemy while at the same time trying to overthrow the government of Syria using internal organ-eating monsters as “freedom fighters”. What was a poor empire to do?

Pivot. That’s what we do best. That’s what spinmeisters, crisis management teams, marketers and propagandists are trained to do. If the current ad campaign isn’t moving product, move on to a new one. If we can no longer sell terrorism as the excuse for our inexcusable behavior, simply move on to a new paradigm.

Ladies and gentleman, let me introduce to you the newest model existential threat to the United States (and its democratic institutions which are the envy of the world): Russia 2.0. Forget for a moment that Russia is no longer the Soviet Union and that the Soviet Union wasn’t the threat to our nation the Military Industrial Complex and its intelligence agencies made it out to be. It is the land to the East, where the shadows lie (i.e. it is a country we know nothing about because our media is busily telling us about the Kardashians). The great eye of Putin, lidless and wreathed in flame, looks always to the west, hateful of all that his nation can never be: bright, glorious and free.

This, this is what your great heroes sacrificed their lives to deliver you from, people like John Wayne and Rambo, who put aside all thoughts of personal gain so that you might bask in the glorious sun of liberty. Will you now turn away from the eternal battle against darkness? Will you not pick up the weapons which warriors like Ronald Reagan and Charlie Wilson once so courageously carried into battle?

If Russia has the impertinence of existing, then they damn well better exist on our terms. Like any other nation you care to think of that attempted a degree of self-rule, Russia needs to be put into its place until it can once again be a nation we never speak of or are forced to acknowledge. If they must suffer, let them suffer in silence, as they did when IMF-imposed austerity programs forced the elderly into poverty and the young into homelessness and prostitution during the nineties.

 Russia is not a communist nation anymore, but it is something just as bad. Russia is now an oligarchy, which as we all know is a very bad thing. At least when we aren’t talking about the one in our own country. Which we never do. Let us not contemplate how the United States oligarchs imposed oligarchy on Russia by imposing “reforms” on Russia so that they might have an economy that mirrored our own.

Let’s put all that aside and focus instead on what is needed of us: hatred. Let us put aside all that we have done to Russia and think only of what anonymous sources from intelligence agencies tell us Russia has done to us. Let us blindly trust them as we did during the days leading up to the Iraq War.

Hate is all that is required of us. You can even use gay-shaming as a means of expressing hatred as long as it is applied to Vladimir Putin. The hatred demonstrated against Putin is at least as strong as it was in the case of Saddam Hussein or Manuel Noriega or any other figure we used as an excuse for war. Hatred has stopped you from being able to evaluate Russia or Putin in any sort of rational way.

Don’t believe me? Ask yourself, what could Vladimir Putin say that you would not immediately assume was the worst kind of sinister lies? Name me one person you don’t like who you would defend from collusion charges if nameless sources insinuated their guilt. Tell me one thing the United States has ever done that wasn’t fair to Russia or may have been to blame for our poor relationship with them.

Envision for yourself a healthy Russia with a government that worked for the Russian people and their interests. What would that look like? Could you ever see them being equal partners with the U.S. in a military alliance?

Is this your idea of ideal Russian leadership? 

I know, it would be so much simpler if Russia didn’t exist. But they do. It is a large country, large enough to demand a spot on the world map, powerful enough that we cannot control it or bomb it into submission. The imperialist model we have been using for the last quarter of a century cannot continue indefinitely. It was, in fact, a bad idea to begin with. We will have to find another way for our country to interact with other nations, or our future will be darker than we will permit ourselves to imagine.

The Boy Who Cried Whatever Intelligence Agencies Told Him To

Once there was a village whose principle means of income was raising sheep. As the flock needed looking after 24/7, a teenage boy was selected to take the night shift. Now this boy was neither very smart nor much of a worker. All he was interested in was his video games and his cell phone. His only interest in sheep was the mutton sandwich his mother packed for him his first night of work. One wonders why the village chose such a mutton-head to guard their principal source of wealth. My guess is his father was well-connected and his mother was eager to get him out of her house that smelled like Axe Body Spray and Taco Bell from his constant presence.

The kid was not eager to do his job, and to make matters worse, his cell phone wasn’t getting any connection out there in the pasture! After a few moments grumbling, followed by a few more spent distracting himself by teasing the sheep, the boy stumbled upon a (to his mind at least) genius idea. At the top of his lungs he started yelling “Wolf! Wolf!” And sure enough, within a matter of minutes, he could see a series of lanterns being lit and carried towards him by awakened villagers.

The kid was as amused as hell by this, the villagers not so much. But that made it all the more fun for the kid, who did the same thing the next night and the night after. Eventually, the amount of people who came to check on him dwindled, but it didn’t matter to the kid because the ones who did show up were even angrier than before. Until, one night, his face lit by the cell phone he gazed into, the boy thought he heard a noise. Finishing up his text and hitting send, the boy scanned the pasture in search of any sign of wolves. But as his eyes were used to staring into a lit screen, he couldn’t even see the white sheep, let alone any wolf prowling in the shadows.

So it wasn’t until the shit hit the fan that the boy realized there were wolves amidst the flock. Like the little spaz he was, he ran around, wildly crying “Wolf! Wolf!” while posting “OMG. Wolves!!!” on Twitter. But nobody came because nobody believed him.

And that is the end of the story as you know it. Most people assume the kid was eaten by the wolves and justice was done, but that wasn’t the case. See, in the real world, it is always the innocent sheep who suffer while those in charge go on to bigger and better things. While both are dumb and easily frightened, sheep, not pimply teenagers, are the preferred dinner of wolves. When the option is between a tasty lamb and a kid who reeks of Axe Body Spray and has metal piercings in unusual places, the wolf is going to go ovine every time.

So the kid got away with his life. Not only that, an intelligence agency that had been observing his Twitter account really appreciated his moxie, his attitude, and his ability to commit to a story. They hired him on to work for them.

You might be familiar with some of his work. Some years ago he wrote a story about wolves breaking into the sheep incubators and eating the children alive. You see, the pasture is gone now. The village was pretty much decimated by the loss of their sheep. Fortunately, Sheep Tech© saw the pasture as a great business opportunity and the state’s governor gave them a sweetheart deal on taxes to move there. So instead of sheep in a pasture, there is now a factory farm. Those few villagers who chose to stay saw their real estate value plummet even farther as the smell of sheep dung has become most intolerable. (The boy, who moonlights as a spokesman for Sheep Tech©, says it’s not bad and really rather reminds him of the old pasture days. He calls the smell “bucolic”).

The kid’s really grown up since his first temp job, as he now refers to it. Not only did he sell the wolves in the incubator story, he followed it up with the story about the wolves developing WSDs (Weapons Of Sheep Destruction). As with most of his stories, he’s had to lay low while the fallout happens, but once again he’s back to announce confidently that the wolves are up to their old tricks again. It’s a different pack of wolves this time, Eurasian wolves with sharp teeth dripping saliva in anticipation over feasting upon the carcass of our democratic institutions.

The valley wherein the pasture once lay, where now sits Sheep Tech’s© massive factory farm, has few people left nowadays. What with downsizing and automation, there isn’t much call for autonomous human beings anymore. But there is a greater herd of sheep than ever before, and their freedom and democratic institutions are of paramount importance to Sheep Tech©, which is why Sheep Tech’s© executives were so shocked to learn that the wolves were once again up to their dirty, underhanded tricks.

It seems that the wolves have been conspiring to disrupt the sheep’s sacred freedom to opt for which slaughter tunnel they entered, the left one or the right one. Apparently, at least according to the kid whose job it is to inform the sheep, these wolves have been leading the sheep to choose the slaughter tunnel on the right by telling the sheep the tunnel on the left leads to them having a steel pin shoved through their heads and then their bodies stripped of all their meat to be sold in supermarkets. Now even the kid whose job it is to warn the sheep about the danger of wolves has to admit that what the wolves were (allegedly but uncontestably) saying was true, but the mere fact they (allegedly but most certainly) said it proves what a danger the wolves are. Now more than ever, cried the boy, we need to fear the wolves.

And the sheep did what sheep do. They gathered frightened in a herd and looked for someone to lead them, which the people at Sheep Tech© most obligingly did. But as unintelligent, docile, and easily spooked as sheep can be, there is a limit to the amount of times they will respond to the habitual shrill cry of “Wolf! Wolf!” A trick that works once may work again, may work many, many times, but eventually, if only through weariness, the sheep will refuse to react to the boy and his well-worn game. And on that day they will prove themselves to be more than mere sheep.

Dinner For Six

The table is set for us to eat. The most succulent morsels from all over the world are on display. The rarest treats and the finest delicacies are piled decadently high. All of our most advanced technology has been applied towards a bountiful harvest. Forests have cut been cut down to make way for farmland on which to grow corn to feed the fatted calves. Our oceans have been over-fished to a critical degree in order to make this feast worthy of those who are to gorge themselves on more than they possibly need.

And yet there are only six seats. There is no place for you at this table, set with gold-plated eating utensils and bone china, resting upon the finest linen hand-spun by children working in sweatshops. Your place is somewhere lower. Your place is as a shim for the table leg in order to ensure stability, and if you work your way out of it you will be hammered back in. Your place is to sit patiently with the dogs, hoping for a scrap to be thrown to you. Your task is to either be the most obedient or the most entertaining. Perhaps if you are cute enough and obsequious enough you shall get special attention, an extra-large slice of meat.

True, there is a children’s table, where the more successful and more self-promoting table shims are allowed to eat, but they shall be served last and silence and acquiescence will be demanded of them. They will be called upon to dutifully step away from their meal should someone at the big table drop their knife and require a clean one. Most of them will do as they are told, remembering what it was like to be a table shim. Having climbed up from beneath the table, they now view themselves as like unto those six who sit at the big table, eagerly looking towards the time where they can sit at the big table where someone other than themselves props it up.

There is a table upon which half the wealth of all humanity sits, constructed by and heaped full of the earth’s harvest through the effort and the labor of us all. So heavily laden with obscene portions of animal flesh is it that it crushes those below whose task it is to hold this table up. So heavy is it that the floorboards groan at their burden, and yet daily more is piled upon it. It is surrounded by six ornately decorated chairs more luxurious than any throne any king or pharaoh, emperor or monarch, has ever sat on. And below it, more people than Genghis Khan had in his hordes, more people than ever worshipped Ramses II as a god. Animal-like, many of them clamor and fight each other to lick at the occasional drop of gravy that falls on the floor. Others simply starve for lack of anything to eat. But their lives and deaths take place beneath the table, covered by the fancy linen so that those at the table never have to contemplate such unpleasantries. When dining with the elite of society, such conversations should be avoided at the dinner table.

There is room at this table for many. There is room, should the effort be undertaken, for all. It is not that the table needs shims to prop it up, it is that there is too much placed upon it for a mere six individuals to consume. The table is too heavily laden, and when it eventually falls it will fall upon those who have been doing the thankless task of holding it up.

It is simply a matter of how we choose to set the table. Those who sit at the table now are the ones who established the seating arrangement, though they would have you believe they have harvested the crops and cooked the meal as well. It is time we once again remember to thank the cooks for their efforts, the farmers who toiled in the fields that this dinner might be possible. They deserve respected seats at the table. We all had a hand in making this meal possible, and we must remember to be appreciative of each other, not just the six who sit above us. And we must remember, too, those outside who have nothing, and invite them to share in the bounty, for when we cannot see the humanity in the least of us, we begin to stop seeing it in everyone else as well.

Resistance Versus Temper Tantrums

This is what political protest looks like in a civilized society where respect and commitment to peaceful resolution of conflict exist. 

 The women counter workers at Woolworth staged a sit-in strike for better wages and conditions. And won.

This is a picture of peaceful protest at the Woolworth lunch counter demanding the rights of blacks to sit at the counter: 

With time, courage, and commitment, they won.

This is a temper tantrum:

I want to point out the difference to you. I want you to know what gets results and what emotionally immature people try to do in order to get their way. I want you to understand the commitment required to actually make real and necessary change in the world and how it differs from being temporarily inconvenienced and wanting to get your way through an impotent show of emotions.

I see a hell of a lot of protest and “resistance” lately, and it looks a lot more like a temper tantrum than a commitment to actual change.

 Perhaps it was punk rock and the establishment support it received. An entire generation was taught that legitimate resistance could be expressed in primal emotion that was as much about personal expression as it was about ideas.

How has that worked out for you? What improvements have you made by emotional outbursts or crudeness? What good has rage and lack of civility and cocking off gotten any movement anywhere at any time?

Whatever success attained through emotional rather than disciplined, thoughtful, and self-sacrificing resistance has been more on the surface than in depth. It has been built on shaky foundations and the process of undermining was immediately begun. It has led use down the path of delusion rather than the path to progress.

To achieve progress, you must clearly demonstrate you have the moral high ground. Any movement for peace, justice, or equality will never succeed through force or hatred. Nothing positive will come from such tactics. Force will not change people’s perceptions, it will only reinforce force as the only real agent of change. And force will always devolve into injustice, inequality, and violence.

There is another way, but it requires appealing to people’s better nature, not their baser one. If you want to draw a clear distinction between your cause and the forces that oppose it, you had better treat that cause with the respect it deserves. You had better act with dignity for the cause, and that must include a larger respect for universal values. You must align your cause with all that is good and healthy in the world. To do that you must show respect to those who oppose you. You must demonstrate in your own behavior what you expect from others.

I have shared images of serious protest. Perhaps I have given the wrong impression by implying that intelligent protests led by deeply held convictions is an easy thing. It’s not. When you want to effect change, real change, there will be resistance. People comfortable with the status quo are not going to lightly permit change, even if the change is right or will lead to a better world for all. That’s just the way people are, they grow comfortable with how things are even if things aren’t very good. People, like sheep, are skittish. They are most comfortable when in the fold.

When you commit yourself to change, to progress, there is backlash. Here we see what people had to endure in order to upset the apple cart:

Those who fear change will seek to provoke you. They will try to drag you down to their level. You must resist such provocations, because if you don't you will have lost the cause you purport to stand for. You step down from your position of moral authority, which is your greatest defense. It is like leaving a castle on a hill to come down to face your enemy on his own terms.

Of course, the sort of resistance that makes real change will require sacrifice and work. That, more than anything, is why we resort to emotional gestures, rudeness, and violence. It is because we are not eager for the commitment involved. Because we are lazy, or basically satisfied, or lack a true adult approach to life, we convince ourselves to act out as a way of achieving change. It has worked before, in small ways, in immediate but superficial ways. But like a child who gets his way through such outbursts, it is not healthy for us in the long term. In the end, we will need to take an adult approach to politics and social concerns if we are ever to make a better society. This will require such adult concepts as dignity, commitment, sacrifice, rising above petty squabbles, and seeing beyond the immediate distractions to a long-term goal. It will require us not becoming distracted by what those forces resistant to change try to confuse us with. It will require coming together despite our differences, because the change we wish to make is not only desirable but necessary.

Home Alone: A Real Life Story

Once upon a time there was a boy whose parents had to go out of town. The boy, a young teenager, did not want to go with them and asked his parents if he might not stay home. He promised them that if they let him stay home not only would he behave, he would clean the house up while they were gone. Now the step-father didn’t trust this kid as far as he could throw him. As long as he had known the kid he had never done anything for anyone other than himself. But the mother for some reason could not see the obvious flaws in her child. Perhaps it was because the father was always berating him and she felt it was her job to support him. Whatever the case, the dad weakly protested but ended up giving in to the mother like he always did, just as the mother always gave in to her child.

So they left the spoiled child in charge of the household, and predictably, the moment he was in charge, he invited all his miscreant buddies over to “take care” of the house. The idea was that if he took good care of his buddies that they would in turn help with the house. It was flawed thinking but flawed thinking never stopped an immature teenager from doing anything.

The kids had one hell of a party, and made one hell of a mess. The liquor cabinet was immediately raided, the entire store of groceries for the month was eaten or else wasted in a food fight, and many precious family heirlooms were broken in the mindless reverie. When all the food and the liquor were gone, the kid’s friends started looking through the parents’ dresser drawers to find some money so they could order a pizza and get some adult to buy them beer. And sure enough, they found various stashes of money, some stored up for a rainy day, some being intended for the kids’ education expenses, and other amounts intended for charitable contributions. There was even a pile set aside to help pay for helping take care of grandpa when he was no longer capable of taking care of himself. These kids didn’t care about anyone but themselves and their immediate pleasures, and the kid who lived there didn’t mind because his buddies thought he was cool and he really didn’t care about grandpa or charity anyway.

They took it all, every bit of loose change, and everything that could be converted to cash in order that they could have one hell of a party, because they couldn’t see anything beyond their own short-term selfish interests. They even found the mom’s credit card, and racked up more debt than even they realized.

They got high, and they got drunk. They didn’t give a f*ck. They had cheap sex with lewd young women on the parents’ bed. They broke things just because they could. They peed in places other than the bathroom because it wasn’t their house.

The only problem was, they were having so much fun, they forgot the parents would eventually find out. They did. They came home a day earlier than they were supposed to, not that it would have mattered much one way or the other. The place was wrecked and there was no way these kids were ever going to repair the damage they had done, let alone make it cleaner than before. Arriving home and assessing the situation, both parents were able to see the son for what he was. The mother, who loved her son because he was hers, finally realized what she had allowed him to become. She realized the damage that had been done because of her foolish trust in a son who had never exhibited behavior worth putting her trust in.

The father gazed upon the devastation caused by this spoiled child and his delinquent buddies and it finally dawned on him how he had tolerated his bad behavior and his wife’s denial for too long, that he himself had been complicit in allowing the boy’s bad behavior because he did not want to make tough choices and be the adult the other two needed in their lives. He had always been content to meekly suggest that the mother might be wrong, but he never really communicated with her on an adult level, resorting instead to childish putdowns of the child. He timidly tiptoed at the edges of the issue while avoiding the obvious problems that needed to be tackled head on.

But in the end the parents realized they must never again leave their house in the protection of an immature and narcissistic individual. The day is coming, and it won’t be long, when even the most apologetic of voters—er, parents will no longer be able to ignore the behavior of their spoiled, selfish president. I mean son.

Beauty And Truth: A Guide For Writers And Other Human Beings

I have a knack for saying things no one wants to hear. Why do I feel the urge to say such things? Because no one else is. In a world where everything is determined by the market, no one wants to speak unpopular opinions for fear of tarnishing their “brand”, of alienating potential market segments, of potentially making less money. But writing to me is not primarily about making money, it is about providing the world with something useful. Therefore, let me provide some atypical suggestions for writers.

My advice to writers would be this: be honest, be bold, and be articulate. I considered adding “be passionate”, but one cannot be bold without a good amount of passion.

You need to be bold, need to believe your writing matters. Because the time you spend writing will be time ripped from your children, your widowed mother, your friends and family members. It will be time away from household chores and repairs, from playing with puppies under blue skies on summer days. MAKE THAT TIME COUNT. Imagine you are bringing into the world something it desperately needs, some new insight or a pathway forwards from lives that can sometimes seem meaningless. You write in order to give the world hope, or beauty, or truth, or joy. If you cannot give that to the world through your writing, perhaps you can give it to others in your immediate life through your presence. In other words, perhaps writing is not the appropriate medium for you. The overall goal is not to write, but to give to the world something you alone can give. Each of us has something unique to give the world, some of us do so through writing. That is a bold notion, but it is the only one that can keep me from stopping my work and giving my dog a belly rub, or fixing that leaky sink.

You’ll have to convince yourself that even those moments of doing nothing while settling in are more important than anything else on your agenda. Of course, you will have to learn when to flip that switch from procrastinating to creating. Procrastination is a necessary part of the writing process, because we need to stay in the physical writing area even when the drive and the inspiration is taking a break. It is an important skill to determine how much is too much distraction.

Be bold enough to give the world something new. Take a quick gander at the books on the shelves of your local thrift shop, peruse Amazon, or go to your library’s next book sale. The amount of books available not only for sale but being given away is almost unimaginable. And most of them differ little from a thousand others just like them. If you write for yourself, then by all means write however you wish, walk down a trail blazed by countless others before you, many of whom defined and perfected the genre. But if you write to be read, present readers with something new, something fresh, something different. Elevate your writing so that your book might be elevated above the millions of others sitting on the shelves.

Be honest. Writing is communication. Fiction, even science fiction and fantasy, is a mere framework upon which we can hang enduring truths. Let your characters be real and let them act according to understandable motivations. There’s nothing that bothers me more when a writer has a character do something to further the plot when it makes little sense to the character’s character.

Make your heroes and your villains real. Invest a degree of your own motivations in them. Place into their characters qualities you recognize and understand from people you know.

Make them human. We have enough celebrities and fictional characters who give to us a false sense of what human beings are. Perhaps they sell product, but it comes at the expense of humanity’s understanding of itself. You have an obligation as a writer to your readers, not simply to entertain them, but to enrich them. If you believe your only obligation is to entertain readers, you are like a parent who allows his children to eat anything they want. You are like a restaurant owner who loads his dishes with lard and salt. You are like a man who tells a woman exactly what she wants to hear in order for him to get what he wants. You are responsible for what you write, there’s no denying it, no tossing that responsibility upon the market place and leaving it to decide morality. Trusting the market to be the arbiter of morality hasn’t worked, doesn’t work, and it will be the ruin of humanity if we continue to make excuses for creating bad writing.

Be articulate. Choose your words carefully. Read them out loud and see if they speak to you the way you intended them to sound.

This is where the art and craft come in, rather than passion and vision.

Make sure the words you use do not accidentally convey a different meaning. But at the same time, do not be afraid to have your words convey more than one meaning or one idea at a time. Writing, especially fiction, is capable of layering meanings and motifs atop one another. Your writing can convey a surface message while also including underlying meaning. Like musical composition, writing can contain notes beyond those in the melody that not only augment the central idea but contain meaning and rhythm of their own.

I know this advice overlooks the primary concern most writers are wanting to have answered, namely: “How do I get rich from writing?” That is because “How do I get rich/successful?” should never be a question you should ask. You, as both a human being and a writer, should pursue passion rather than riches. Riches are a poor substitute for having lived a passionate life. You cannot hold on to your riches for long. They don’t, in the end, provide either security or validation of your worth to others. When you die, your riches will be given to others, and the least worthy and least moral among them will be the ones to sponge up whatever estate you hope to bequeath to your loved ones.

But your honesty, your passion, and your appreciation for craft have a chance at reaching out into eternity. What you create in such a fashion will always find the right people. It will encourage them to do better, to be better. You will be held in the highest of esteem by those most like you. Who could aspire to more?

Blue Collar Workers And Donald Trump

A picture of my co-workers and me on the last day before final layoffs began.

This year I started a new job after the company I worked at for over twenty years, Manitowoc Cranes, packed up and moved from the city for which it was named. I now work with fellow former Manitowoc Cranes employees—some with nearly thirty years seniority—who are having to start once again at the bottom. I also am working with former employees of Algoma Hardwood, a company that was recently bought out and taken from the town of its birth. One of my new co-workers had thirty-five years invested there, another had twenty-nine. We are now a bunch of new hires in our forties and fifties, with no vacation time or any of the other perks involved with being a longtime employee.

This is the sad reality facing many blue collar workers in small and medium-sized towns in America. I knew people at Manitowoc Cranes who had been through a factory closing before when Mirro moved to Mexico. Those people were the first ones to leave and I couldn’t understand why they didn’t just see it through to the end. That’s because I had no idea what a soul-crushing experience it could be. As one of the last employees at Manitowoc Cranes, I wandered through an increasingly deserted shop filled with the ghosts of former friends, coworkers, union brothers and sisters. I saw the equipment that had been used by generations of workers get packed up and shipped off to people who wouldn’t even know what to do with it. I saw a hundred years of a town’s history torn apart by people who would never deign step foot in our insignificant town, people who never see the workers who make their profits as anything more than numbers on a spreadsheet.

So while I am not a Trump supporter, I can understand why some people chose to vote for him. They forgive Donald Trump the outrageous things he says in the same way Hillary Clinton supporters forgive her the outrageous things she has done. Democrats have forgiven her vote for the Iraq War, have utterly ignored her part in the destruction of Libya. They have forgotten her anti-gay marriage stance, and they are similarly forgetful of her aggressive support of imprisoning black males. Trump supporters forgave his outrageous statements and even his actions because people always vote with a degree of unfounded optimism in their hearts or else they would simply stay home. That, by the way, is still the majority of Americans: those who are hopeless to the point where they did not vote at all.

That is what we are continuously being told to do, isn’t it? To vote for an imperfect candidate rather than support an ideal one? If you are urged election after election to vote for the lesser of two evils, you end up tolerating a whole lot of evil in your chosen candidate. If the game voters are taught to play is more about hatred than compassion, then people are going to be led by their baser motivations in their quest for self-interests. And the self-interest of the blue-collar worker is to have a decent paying job with decent benefits and some measure of security. All they are really asking for is a way to take care of themselves and their families. All they really want is a bit of peace of mind and a little recognition for their contributions to society. Whatever other wants they have are manufactured ones, pumped into them by the propaganda of a consumer society.

No other mainstream candidate was willing to speak to these people. And before you start calling those who reached out in need racists, the people I’m talking about have names like Chang and Jose, too. Whatever race issues exist may overlap but are separate from the issue of lack of job opportunities and security. If you really think it’s about fascist racists, consider how well an avowed socialist did in the 2016 election. A broad swath of the American population was looking for an outsider, they were kicking at both sides of the box they were being shoved into.

That is because no mainstream candidate was willing to admit a problem existed. They were burying the failures of NAFTA because they were gearing up for the next trade agreement, TPP. They were working, not for the American people, but for the international business interests who wanted to work out trade agreements on their terms, without any input from the workers. And here’s the reality: the deal was so bad for the common working stiff that even Republican voters were willing to cast aside Republicans who were in some way tied to such trade agreements.

The media, too, was a factor. It avoided dealing with the issues of working people. Not since Roseanne have working class issues been portrayed in any real fashion on television. The media has always been manipulating the average worker but the propaganda has built to the point where people are willing to rebel against it (even though such rebellion has been co-opted on both sides of the political spectrum, the hatred of the status quo is genuine).

I’m under no illusions Donald Trump is going to help the working man—like I said, I did not vote for him. I’m just trying to explain his appeal to those who don’t understand it. And if you want to cry out about how deluded Trump supporters are, I’d invite you to take a critical look at yourself in the mirror and see what delusions you may be harboring. The resistance of the left seems to me at least as absurd as the resistance on the right, both channeled into hatred against the other rather than seeing the need to come together to take on the greatest threats to our country and our planet today. Hatred and finger-pointing may feel like resistance, but I doubt it will come to anything positive. As a matter of fact, allowing your emotions to outpace your reason is the easiest way to allow yourselves to be manipulated by those people willing to prey upon your emotions. And after all, isn’t that what the Trump movement has been about? 

It's Not Our Fault

We Are Not Responsible

The media is not to blame. They didn’t make Trump a celebrity. They didn’t encourage us to worship those who are wealthy, didn’t make Trump into a household name. They never gave him his own TV show where he could treat ordinary people like shit and make it appear he had the right to do so. They never gave him a billion dollars in free advertising by covering his campaign non-stop. Never once did they cut away from a Bernie Sanders speech when the message became too uncomfortable in order to cover the breaking news of Donald Trump’s plane landing.

The media is not to blame because they presented the issues in an honest and insightful manner. They never treated the elections like a dog and pony show. They never stooped to “gotcha” sound bites, opting instead to elevate discourse.

The media gives us substance They have never been afraid to show us the blood-stained carnage that resulted from our wars without purpose or end. They were always willing to dedicate huge chunks of advertising time to serious treatment of issues like global warming or the impending TPP agreement. The media is not to blame because they provide us with the context necessary to make the important decisions that impact our lives and the lives of our children.

The media is not to blame because even though the oil industry, pharmaceutical and insurance companies and weapons manufacturers were their advertisers, they never shied away from delving into issues of alternative energy, socialized medicine, and peace.

The Clintons are not to blame. It’s not like they ever gave credibility to the Trump brand.

Bill has no responsibility for what happened. As president, he never deregulated the media so that it became the divisive, corporate conglomerate attention-grabber it is not today. Bill Clinton never signed a trade agreement that gave even more power to those who already had too much. NAFTA did not ravage small towns, did not ship local jobs out of the country. It gave many wonderful opportunities for blue-collar workers to get in debt to earn an education for a white collar job, and if they did not pivot successfully, well, it’s time those ignorant racist hillbillies got over it. Losers.

Bill Clinton is not to blame for first using NATO as an offensive military weapon, nor is he to blame for spreading it eastward towards a Russia that was reeling from its transition away from the Soviet Union.

And it sure wasn’t Hillary’s fault. She didn’t sit silently on the board of Walmart while an anti-union agenda was constantly expounded. And she wasn’t part of a giant, anti-union corporation that destroyed local businesses in small towns, turning business owners into low-paid Walmart managers.

It wasn’t Hillary’s fault, because she’s always been amazingly consistent on positions. She was always firmly in support of the gay community, an early proponent of gay marriage. She always had great empathy for the poor blacks in the grip of the prison-industrial complex.

The Iraq War had nothing to do with Hillary, in fact she boldly stood in opposition to it. She never flip-flopped and she never once tried to back off her statements.

As Secretary Of State, Hillary had no hand in the overthrow of the government in Libya, leaving it a breeding ground for extremists and terrorists. And when she ran for president, she gave no indication that she would continue a foreign policy of reckless interventionism, sending the children of the lower classes to die and to kill in countries they know nothing of.

The Democratic Party is not to blame. They never pushed Donald Trump as the candidate they’d most like to run their chosen candidate against. They didn’t run an establishment candidate in an environment where the populace was clearly calling for change.

The Democratic Party cannot be at fault. If they were, they would admit they no longer represent their base and do whatever it took to connect with voters rather than corporate donors. In short, they would change from the strategy that had nothing to do with their losing all branches of government.

Elitist liberals are not to blame. They clearly had their fingers on the pulse of the average American. They clearly were in tune with the zeitgeist. They were not trapped in their own little bubble where everything was fine. For them.

None of us are to blame, certainly not the average person. How can we be to blame when we are powerless? Only Putin has power, vast endless amounts of it. Power enough to spend money on puppy Facebook pages without even having a reason for doing so. He is positively dripping with power, the puppet-master behind the entire U.S. system. J. Edgar Hoover would have seen it clearly enough.

Sadly, Hoover is no longer around to protect us. But there still is an army of secret intelligence agencies, corporate-funded think tanks, and the largest military industrial complex ever seen on the planet. Only they now stand between us and the destruction of our democracy. We must give it our full support. We must give it our uncritical acceptance of the official narrative derived from unnamed sources from inside the government, deriding all else as fake news. Only the deep state can save us now.

I know beyond any doubt that this is true. It is madness to think otherwise. Any dissenting voice is merely the words of Vladimir Putin mindlessly mouthed by Bernie Bros. I know this because the media told me so.

Random Political Thoughts Part 11

Corporations don’t want to do away with government, they want to BE the government.

At least Romans didn’t actually vote for Nero.

If capitalists are so smart and government so inefficient, why do the capitalists keep loaning governments money? And if capitalists are smart and politicians incompetent, why do the capitalists pay the politicians so much money to work for them after they leave government?

They say the first million is the hardest, which means our last three Republican presidents never did any hard work.

Why does climate change denial exist? Because Republicans will never admit Democrats got something right.

We don’t find the truth because we are not looking for it. We live in a post-truth world. Democrats do not look for truth but only see the lies of the Republicans and vice versa. What we need to start seeing is the truth in others and ourselves. What we need to stop looking for is what divides us.

What makes people more upset than waking up to find reports of fifty people shot dead by a lunatic? The suggestion that some restrictions on guns should result from it.

If you accept dishonesty in yourself you accept it in you politicians. By demanding better of yourself you will in turn demand better of those who represent you.

There are basic values and principles underlying all human interactions, even in the political sphere. There are laws of conduct to adhere to even when confronting your greatest fears. Honesty and integrity can and should be appreciated even in those who hold beliefs different than our own. And honesty and integrity should be demanded of those who agree with us as well. We need to stick to issues rather than insults, and we must not judge the many by the actions of a few.

Redistribute the power and you won’t have to worry about redistributing the wealth. Once you give each man, not each dollar, an equal say, wealth will flow naturally to those who earn it as well as those who need it.

If politicians know nothing about how business is run, how come they’re offered seven figure salaries after leaving office and six figure speaking fees in front of corporate execs? I’d rather have a career politician than one who uses his time in office as a launching pad for his corporate payoff.

The problem with handing out trophies to children for participation is that you end up with adults who think they can argue global warming with atmospheric scientists.

There are a lot of bad people trying to mess with our minds. They want you to hate because they want to divide and conquer. They want to confuse you with misinformation so that in the end you feel hopeless and powerless, and afraid. They are bigger, smarter, better equipped and better funded than any group you belong to. It’s no good trying to outsmart them. There is only one thing we can do to thwart their plans. We can refuse to hate. We can refuse to play the game they want us to play. Our one weapon is love, the only thing within our possession that can overcome the hopelessness, powerlessness, and fear.

I don’t think it is a good idea to permit the people who own our government’s debt to own the lawmakers who are responsible for that debt. Any banker or mobster is eager to get others in their debt. Debt it too freely given. It was encouraged as a way to extend the lifestyle that normal circumstances wouldn’t have allowed. The fact that the working class does not have enough buying power to buy back what they produced led to a need to give them loans to keep the system going. But that only delays a problem that will only get worse the longer it goes on. In the meantime, the system we created (or was foisted upon us) permits morons to drive care the wise would never think they could afford. But when the moron’s time runs out, it be the frugal person who did without that will be stuck with the bill.

If you have nothing nice to say, say nothing. If you have no one nice to vote for, don’t vote.

A civilization falls when its citizens mutually agree to abandon responsibility.

If you cannot find a politician of integrity, intelligence and common decency to represent your values, perhaps it is time to seriously question your values.

Random Political Thoughts Part 10: The All Russian Hacking Edition

1. Remember how Russia was definitely hacking France’s election and then the whole story was disproven and forgotten once the U.S.’s chosen candidate won? That’s what would have happened here if Hillary would have won.


2. If the history books are written, they will say the 21st Century was home to two of the greatest episodes of mass delusion humanity has ever known: believing that global warming is a hoax and believing that Russian hacking was real. I say “if” history is written, because either of these mass delusions are capable of ending human existence on Earth.


3.You’d think with the sanctions against Russia President Trump signed into law that Putin would have released those pee-tapes by now.


4. The story goes that Vladimir Putin is blackmailing Donald Trump with video of Trump engaged in twisted sex acts with Russian Prostitutes. As if Trump could ever be shamed or his supporters ever love him any less.





5.Try this experiment: Turn on MSNBC, and every time they use the words Russia or Russian, change the words to Jews. This will give you some appreciation of what it was like to live in Nazi Germany.


6. Within the Russian hacking narrative are just enough absurdities to make conservatives believe liberals are out of their minds. I can’t help thinking the Reality Winner and the Pokemon Go stories were added as an inside joke by the deep state. Or more likely, as a means of driving a wedge still further between the two sides in the never ending game of divide and conquer.


7.What do Trump and Hitler have in common? Neither is a puppet of Russia.


8. Their chosen candidate defeated, Democrats have made good on their promise to leave the country and have moved to Fantasy Island, where nothing is ever their fault because Putin did it.


9. I hear Milton-Bradley is coming out with a board game called Clutin. It’s like Clue, where you have to guess the murder weapon and where the crime was committed, but Putin is the only suspect.


10. I won’t believe your allegations until they are corroborated by unnamed sources.





11. Putin: because it was hard to use ISIS as an excuse for our out of control military budget when we’re arming them.


12. BREAKING STORY: Kevin Bacon tied to Russian hacking.


13. American oligarchs are accusing Russian oligarchs of influencing our election. That’s like Al Capone accusing Bugs Moran of muscling in on his turf.

14. I do not blame liberals for hurting after their defeat but I do blame them for their willingness to abandon reason and morality in order to make the pain go away.


15. The day the Washington Post accuses Russia of a crime that has actually been committed—take for example, their shitty reporting—is the day I give them credence.


16. America likes Russians like it likes blacks: self-effacing, stereotyped, stupid, or dead. If we had our choice, Yakov Smirnoff would be Russia’s president. (Perhaps Yakov Smirnoff is not dead, but I’m pretty sure there hasn’t been a sighting outside of Branson in twenty years.)


17. If one of your Clinton supporting friends starts going on about Russian hacking, it is best to insert your wallet in their mouth so that they do not bite off their tongue while having their fit.


18. Just to be clear on matters as they now stand: if you look at puppy pictures you are betraying your country. Cat pictures are still okay for the moment. Stay tuned to MSNBC for further updates.


19. The reporting done on the Russian hacking story has led me to a deeper appreciation of the journalistic skills of Hedda Hopper and Rona Barrett.


20. We have reached a point where we trust those secret agencies—that sold weapons to Iran secretly and then used the profits of those weapons sales to import drugs into the inner cities, the profits from those drug sales going to buy weapons for terrorists in Nicaragua—more than we trust the people who exposed their crimes. This is not hyperbole. If anyone wishes to argue the specifics, I’d be more than willing to do so. And this is just one instance of what our intelligence agencies do on a regular basis. And yet so many of us swallow the Russian hacking narrative sold by unnamed sources despite the warnings of the very man who exposed the Iran-Contra story.


21. The presumption, unproven by the way, is that Russia engaged in the same kind of behavior as every other nation in the world. No evidence points beyond that and yet we have Morgan Freeman saying we are at war with Russia. The U.S. tapped Angela Merkel’s phone, and she’s an ally so you know we’re doing way worse to our non-allies. Did German directors make clips saying they were at war with the U.S.?


22. Not a word from Morgan Freeman about paper ballots, not a word about voter ID, not a word about black voters being scrubbed from the voter rolls. Instead, he says “We are at war”. And should we go to war with Russia, should we survive victorious with a habitable planet, will you then say something about gerrymandering, voter suppression, and campaign finance reform, Mr. Freeman? Because you have been silent so far.


23. It seems our propaganda machines have done too good a job. We’ve managed to stage uprisings in other countries while keeping our own populace ignorant and indifferent. Now that our intelligence agencies seek to stir its own citizens for an uprising in our own nation, they find it impossible to rouse us from the torpor they have lulled us into.


24. If you have heard a political idea mentioned so many times you accept it as inarguable fact and yet cannot say who formulated the idea, it is likely the product of some propaganda machine.


25. If two years ago you would have told me the Russians helped Donald Trump become president by using Pokemon Go to influence voters, I would have told you you were crazy. I'd say the same today, but I would have said it two years ago, too.


26. Remember, the President does not have the power to declare war, only Morgan Freeman can do that.

Random Political Thoughts Part 9

Good news Republicans: you don’t have to like Al Gore to accept the reality of climate change.

I think it's time we accept the fact the media has a profound mental illness and stop trying to react to the narrative it spins.

You’re a cry baby when you protest statues that glorify those who oppressed your ancestors, but you’re a patriot if you cry about those statues being taken down.

Once we realize that communication is not combat but the sharing of opinions and perceptions, we will all be happier and together make a better future. Your opinion, everyone’s opinion, matters. You don’t have to dominate, just speak your mind respectfully and listen openly.

I would go so far as to say capitalism is a religion, but I’m afraid capitalists would latch onto the idea and demand tax exemption.

Let me explain it to you in a way you might understand: I consider Muslims my neighbors and friends, but I do not wish to live under Sharia law. Similarly, I consider most capitalists I know to be good people, and yet I do not want my entire society to function according to the laws they dictate.

There are some who claim that Donald Trump has killed truth, but the fact is its lifeless body was already cold by the time he arrived on the scene. It had been beaten senseless by claims of Weapons of Mass Destruction, had countless stab wounds by phrases such as No Fly Zone, collateral damage, and preventive war. Media consolidation and the repeal of the fairness doctrine dug the hole for its burial and for-profit media filled in the grave.

No, what Donald Trump has done to make many so angry is not kill the truth, but burst the fragile bubble of illusion we were in that permitted us to go about our business and avoid confronting the lies we were being told.

If you have heard a political idea mentioned so many times you accept it as inarguable fact and yet cannot say who formulated the idea, it is likely the product of some propaganda machine.

I have worked in an office and I have worked in a union factory, and I have noticed in a union shop I never felt compelled to laugh at a joke my boss made if it wasn’t funny.

Dictatorial nations censor the press, capitalist nations bog it down with so many commercials and fluff that you’ll never even notice when the actual important information is slipped by you. And censoring, they do that too.

A problem with the consumer society we are living in is that it gives people what they want, not what they need. The very glut of available wants to be satisfied distracts us from our needs. It gives us sugar water instead of water. It gives us “grandma’s recipe” cookies instead of grandma’s cookies, which grandma works overtime to pay for but does not have time to bake.

A question for proponents of small government: if a child grows up thinking society doesn’t care about him, what makes you think he will care about society?

Telling people not to go to non-mainstream media sources is the same as telling them not to eat at non-chain restaurants or buy food from local farmers. 

We are no longer a nation capable of waging wars for victory but only for profit. Victory is unacceptable because that would mean an end to the gravy train. We no longer have any desire to rehabilitate criminals because they would leave the prison industrial complex that is a money-making machine. We no longer seek to cure the sick but rather introduce new patients into the system by inventing new illnesses  and producing new drugs to help manage them.

The Democratic Party is like an aged whore who thinks she needs nothing more than a little makeup to get voters to pledge their faithfulness, but it is merely a delusion brought on by the advanced symptoms of venereal disease.

If a person does not quote often from the sources that inspired deep thought within him, then there are no deep thoughts to be found within such a person.

A nation not open to debate is a doomed nation.

Is it going too far to suggest that those who own our nation’s debt should not also own the lawmakers who are responsible for that debt?

A nation that uses violence to suppress the rights of people in other nations will inevitably do the same within its own borders.

Mainstream Media's Love/Hate Relationship With Donald Trump

It’s funny how those who don’t believe a word the mainstream media says are so influenced by it. They believe the media is biased against Donald Trump while seeming to forget it was this same media that for decades helped make Trump the celebrity he is.

Let’s start back in the early 80’s and the amazing success of Donald Trump’s book, The Art Of The Deal. It was one of the bestselling books of the decade. Books don’t become bestsellers without the help of the media, especially ones that are ghost-written. Random House invested heavily in it, using its connections to get Donald Trump on all the TV talk shows. Donald Trump became a celebrity and the media sold his story.

Because that’s the narrative the media sells us: a celebration of the wealthy and the American Dream that we could all succeed if we were just smart enough (like, presumably, Donald Trump) and hard-working enough (again, presumably like Donald Trump). You have to have the guts to think big, too. Thinking big is in the end what separates the winners from the losers.

The implied but unspoken shadow of the narrative of the winner who thinks big, of course, is that the rest of us are losers who think small. Those of us who sacrificed wealth for other pursuits, well, we were not the story the media was interested in advancing. The cop who protects his community, the fireman or the nurse who saves lives, the average person working hard doing jobs that needed doing, the mother staying home to raise her children—that wasn’t what the 80’s were about. The 80’s were all about Alex P. Keaton, the Yuppies that were transforming our world, and the do-it-all moms. You were nothing unless you were busily climbing that ladder of success, sacrificing all lesser aspirations upon the altar of wealth.

And so it has remained to this day. Professionals are no longer judged by their talents or their accomplishments but by their wealth. People are no longer appreciated for what they contribute to society but by what they can extract from it. Donald Trump has created casinos and luxury hotels, hardly the things that made or will make America great. They in fact contribute nothing to the common man, but as noted before, the common man no longer counts. At least not with the mainstream media.

The common man is the person who gets voted off of Survivor. The media now celebrates the snake who looks out for himself over the person capable of building a fire, finding food, or helping people live in harmony. The media is busy selling a narrative of a dog eat dog world where we all have to be ruthless and relentless to not only triumph but merely survive. And Donald Trump has long been their poster boy, even if they had to fudge the narrative a little and make him appear more than he truly is.

Which is why they gave him his own “reality” TV show, The Apprentice. There he could be himself and advance the idea that everyone needs to be in competition with one another, the stakes being all or nothing. It is a story repeated throughout the new breed of competitive shows. No longer do we watch singers perform on television merely for the performance, we now need to watch them compete against each other on American Idol. Gone are the days of Julia Childs and her cooking show. The knives are out as chefs compete in a game exhibiting sadistic behavior in Gordon Ramsay Hell’s Kitchen. The boss gets to berate the people who work for him, it’s part of the fun of the show and one of the perks of being a winner and not a loser. The boss is always a winner, the rest fight among themselves to see who will be the one non-loser.

People no longer have appreciation for the art of dance. Those who work all their lives to reach physical perfection are not spotlighted. Instead we watch celebrities compete against each other in Dancing With The Stars. People are not given stories of romance and love, instead they are force-fed The Bachelor, wherein marriage is not a sacred contract but just another competition reflecting the values mainstream media exists to propagate: capitalism and survival of the fittest.

That’s what makes sports so elevated in our country, the fact that it is all about the competition, all about the fact that there are winners and losers. We are being taught that nothing matters if no one wins and no one loses.

I turn on the History Channel and I see Pawn Stars, where owners of a pawn shop compete with people coming in to sell historical items of some worth. It’s not really a competition, since the owners of the store always end up on top. It is, however, the lesson the media wishes to perpetuate: that it is our duty to get the best of our fellow man.

You see, it’s the MSM that made you like Donald Trump in the first place. You have come to accept cruelty, underhandedness and lack of cooperation as being a sign of the successful human being. This is what the media’s been selling and this is why you like Donald Trump so much. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that those who watch mainstream TV most like Donald Trump best.

The mainstream media has been shaping the way you see the world all along and you don’t even realize it. Most of the values you possess are because of the mainstream media. Ordinary people don’t support a person like Donald Trump otherwise.

But the mainstream media who loved Donald Trump the capitalist has turned against Donald Trump the politician and you have sided on the media’s creation rather than the creator. You see and sense the nastiness and propaganda involved in the media. It is unmistakable to anyone actually willing to think about it rather than simply be controlled by it.

It is useful to note that in refuting the mainstream media you are still clinging to its value system it has instilled in you. With that in mind, let us look into the reasons behind the media turning on Trump the way it has.

One reason is that he was the only presidential candidate other than Rand Paul to say the U.S. should not be involved in nation-building. He opposed our involvement in Syria and suggested there was no reason to view Russia as an enemy. That was a big no-no.

The MSM has always supported the Military Industrial Complex and such a message was counter to the narrative that is their mission to spread. Hell, when they aren’t running their advertisements (Northrop Grumman) interviewing their experts, allowing PSYOPS to work for them, then they are owned by a military contractor (NBC).

But while the MSM’s allegiance to the MIC is an incredibly important reason for them to oppose President Trump, it is a problem that can be worked out. Those who supported a non-interventionist position in Trump’s circle have been weeded out and replaced with generals and neo-cons. Trump has been hamstrung by a Russian hacking story that’s been playing non-stop for over a year and the only time he can get the media on his side is to bomb another country, at which point the media drools in ecstasy at his presidential moment.

So if it is not Trump’s isolationist stance that turned the media against him, then what was it? Perhaps it is because he has ripped the mask from the entire narrative they’ve been selling for decades now. The story has always been that while the road to success was rough, it was a game with fair rules that ultimately rewarded the most worthy recipients. The story was that above us ruled men and women who knew better than us and were morally respectable people despite whatever flaws might arise from time to time.

Trump stripped away the illusion that not only are the rich of the world laughably unsuitable to govern us, they are not even better human beings than us. Trump served the media’s purpose as a businessman/celebrity, but the sight of politician Trump was just too jarring, the contradictions between reality and the fantasy they had to spin too great to be reconciled. So they had to turn against Trump in order to preserve the image of our nation and economic system they’ve worked so hard to maintain.

Trump’s election also removed the last delusions the MSM clung to that politicians were anything more than the servants of the incredibly rich and powerful. Trump was now the face of America’s politics, and, while true, it was an idea too horrible for the media to allow. All the makeup, special effects, and CGI in the possession of the media could no longer hide the truth of what our nation had become.

You see, as much as the media loves to sell dog-eat-dog capitalism, it also realizes it must maintain a feeling of shared purpose, at least when it comes to promoting war. It’s had this difficult and contradicting story it had to sell, that we were each of us in it for ourselves and at the same time all needed to band together under the flag and violence that united us all as Americans. The stories were two completely different ones which were never to intersect. And then all of the sudden Trump jumps out of his adventure story of raw capitalism and jumps into the fairy tale story of pure politics. The gears did not mesh, it was as if anti-matter was introduced to matter. It blew both narratives to hell.

If only Trump had been black, or a woman, or a little bit more reserved in his speech. The media could have worked with that. But the truth goes against everything the mainstream media exists to promote. They have to close the curtain so the people can once again believe in the mighty Wizard of Oz, have to put the mask back on The Phantom Of The Opera so we can forget the ugly truth.

But it doesn’t work that way. What has been seen cannot be unseen. As much as the media wants to blame Russia for what has happened, it is the media itself that is being revealed. Eventually, even the Trump supporters will realize the media narrative they’ve been living with their entire lives has been a lie. Trump’s failure, inevitable and ugly, will show Americans the lies of the mainstream media. The orange genie is out of the bottle now, and there is no getting him back. Even football, the great distractor of the masses, is no longer effective for shutting out the truth. Surely that was the media’s Maginot Line.