I had a dream last night, a traveling dream in which I am rushing through a station of some sort, one of those huge, old-fashioned train stations, all marble, towering vaulted ceilings and dark wood paneling. Like a prestigious, ancient bank, almost.
Compare that image to that of your bank: if it’s like mine, it’s got cheap, worn carpet, a couple of beat-up looking windows where tellers perch from time to time, acoustic ceiling tile, and a crappy little kiosk where they keep cheap, crappy pens chained up (for their own good, no doubt) and deposit slips and so forth.
With that in mind, I remembered a subject that has been clawing at the back of my brain for a while now, the idea that when America finally crumbles, I think it’s not going to be through some major cataclysm. Rather, I predict we will go slowly, that we will almost imperceptibly decline into simple shabbiness. Things will fall apart that will go longer and longer before they get repaired, things will be made of cheaper and cheaper materials, and so will appear shabbier even from the get-go -- we will descend into a cheap, threadbare, Styrofoam/plastic existence that is strictly utilitarian before we disappear completely.
I think as a people, we Americans have a predilection for the dramatic. A country founded in blood, sundered by civil war, carved out of a huge and dramatic landscape -- one that was formerly occupied by numerous nations of people -- no wonder we’re drama queens. We tend not to notice events that don’t make a splash.
And let’s face it: as a people, we are at our best during crisis situations. Look at the secret delight, the coming-together we so enjoy when we help out at the scene of an accident, or hunker down to ride out a tornado, or pitch in after a flood. We are made for disaster -- it’s the rest of the time when we don’t really know what to do with ourselves.
And so I think that there is something built into the American psyche, some underlying, secretive spot that tells us that, when this grand experiment finally ends, when this strange empire that cannot ever call itself that finally goes down, it will be Big, and Loud, and Flashy.
Look at our films, our modern legends of ourselves and who we are as a people: disaster awaits us at every turn. Future scholars will be amused and probably not a little puzzled at how deeply paranoid we were at what might be coming to get us next: meteors, dinosaurs, birds, robots, invasion from space/sea/foreigners/the past/the future, invasion OF the sea -- it’s like we know on some level, deep inside that we’re going down, it’s just a question of how.
vysionous.deviantart.com
But it’s always, always got to be something Big.
I would suggest that when empires end, when the great gears of a sprawling, widespread and diverse empire begin to slow and grind down, it is almost imperceptible to the people living there at the time. I would argue that it’s much easier for future scholars looking back to stick a pin in the spot where empire ended, but not so much for the extant people of said empire.
We are given to understand that the Roman Empire ended in 476 AD, exactly, but that is long after Goths and other tribes had sacked the city of Rome several times, long after the Empire had been split in two, long after the prestige and power of the true empire had waned. But to our minds, that was the date the empire fell -- boom, crash, flames, over.
Even our language suggests hyperbolic drama in a moment of here/not here: the empire ‘fell,’ as in it toppled over. I would suggest it didn’t ‘fall’ so much as it ‘slid.’ And I bet they never knew it was happening, or at least never had a clear sense of ‘the end.’
I don’t think we’ll have a clear sense either. I think we will slide further and further into shabbiness, into a cheapened and degraded existence, an entropic descent as things incrementally grow more and more shabby. We won’t die with a bang -- it’ll be a whimper.
It has been posited (and largely debunked) that the Romans' extensive use of lead in water pipes, pottery glaze and cosmetics may have led, in part, to the end of the empire. The idea is that lead poisoning caused a vast, multi-generational, neurological degeneration so acute it led to malaise and finally madness across the empire.
And while further research shows that the Romans were at least aware of the ill effects of prolonged exposure to lead, it seems almost undeniable that SOMETHING happened to these people to cause them to just fade away, albeit over many centuries. Hell, it could be argued that the DECLINE of the Roman Empire lasted longer than this nation has even been in existence -- what makes us think we're going to go on forever? Or even much longer?
At any rate, reports of the excesses among the aristocratic classes of the Romans point to some sort of sickness at the heart of an empire that, for a time, controlled three-fourths of the known world.
Perhaps that very success is what begins the inevitable clock of entropy ticking for an empire. Perhaps individuals in an aristocratic class having almost literally anything they want leads to a sickness of the soul.
There is a jadedness of that sort at work today in this country, a sense that there is nothing new under the sun, that nothing is left that could possibly impress us. Lies become truth, the extraordinary becomes ordinary and ulterior motives become the only reasonable motivation for every action.
I started thinking about this 'end of empire' scenario and how it might work today in America when I re-read Phillip K. Dick's 'Valis' recently. He posits that the empire never really ended, that we humans were just unable to see it as continuous over centuries and millennia. (It's a long explanation -- read the book. It's amazing.)
But lately I've been thinking about the possible effects of the sickness that is at work over vast swaths of television, and in certain corners of the internet. In large part, these two means of transmitting media not only convey our culture to us -- they ARE our culture. Therefore they must be a fairly accurate barometer of who we are.
Now, I am by no means a Moral Majority type. I don't believe in whitewashing, in Disneyfying the world and pretending that everything is sunshine and roses. I believe there is a sickness at work there too, that people who can pretend that the world was just peachy in 1955 -- when people still got polio, institutional racism was the law of the land, and women were regarded as little more than objects to woo and marry in order to reproduce -- those people suffer from a blind kind of sickness, an ignorance of the soul. There is a deep sickness of denial in putting on blinders and pretending that humans aren't violent, sexual, visceral animals as well as poets and musicians and writers -- we are creators of beauty as well as 'creators of destruction,' as it were.
But perhaps there is a sickness in allowing ourselves to see too much as well. The other end of the scale, seeking out the most titillating, foul and degrading forms of entertainment cannot be without effect. It's at least possible that viewing these images and reading these words may at least create a sort of feedback loop that taps into the potential sickness in our souls and begets more of it. I'm talking about 'reality' television -- that vast bowl of shit and human self-degradation that pretty much IS television these days -- I'm talking about the chanboards, I'm talking about the hate-filled chat rooms, the hate-filled blogs -- I'm talking about the sheer, unprecedented quantity of dumbness and bile that surrounds us online and on television.
And I'm not saying that I'M somehow too cool or too smart or aloof to succumb to the guilty pleasure of these things. I just wonder what we are doing to ourselves when we do succumb.
There are times when I believe that humans in general are little more than monsters in disguise, that we are all Patrick Bateman in American Psycho: perfectly tailored, slathered in expensive oils and lotions, ripped from countless hours of working out -- a perfect beautiful form on the outside, but sick unto death at the heart.
And there are times I believe we are angels, creatures of potentiality that have a unique choice and ability to rise above our animal roots and become something almost god-like.
Perhaps there's a fine line, a place where we can -- while retaining an honest understanding of the very real underpinnings of our animal nature -- choose to rise above it, to react to our world and our fellow humans through something larger than revenge, or anger, or simple fear. Perhaps...
Or will the vast twin toilets of television and the internet, combined with easy consumerism promising us everything we could ever desire turn out to be our empire's lead paint?
There is a breathless feeling in the air these days, is there not? A sensation that we’re hanging on near the edge of the world, that here there be dragons. There is undeniably something in the zeitgeist that tells us a massive change is afoot.
The first is an excellent if somewhat heavy-handed piece from Dangerous Minds that talks a lot about income imbalance, and the second is from Alternet and deals more with the notion of empire as a military occupational force.
(Sidebar: I swear I started writing along these lines Tuesday night at rehearsal. I think these articles and even the title of the second one might just serve to prove part of my point, that this is something in the air, and also that once an idea is released into the world, it circulates. Somehow.)
So, you can sense it everywhere--everywhere, that is, except in the halls of power. Those who occupy the aeries of Washington, the elites and those who serve them continue playing The Old Game apace, despite the naked fact of the rules having been recently rendered invalid and inapplicable, at least to them. The Elites are, as always, quite immune from reality. Only this time they have so blatantly rigged the game in their favor that a sour, poisonous feeling permeates the national mood outside the Beltway.
Across the country and the globe there is a tension, as if humankind were a rubber band pulled so taut that it must surely soon snap, that there must soon, any second come a reckoning, one that is likely to put out more than an eye. But our fearless leaders continue to lead as if we were still living in the 90s, or the 80s, or any other decade since World War Two. They talk as if this mad lie they laughably continue to call America or Democracy were still something noble, not an overgrown, petulant behemoth-child fattened on wealth and privilege, a retarded, inbred oaf crammed into too-small overalls, snot smeared on his sleeves, drool dangling from his jutting chin, accidentally crushing pets, mindlessly raping the nanny and hulking over even his parents, striking out at those around him even as they view him with a weird combination of fear and pity.
It is the looming end of empire, of course. That’s what many, many different groups of people sense but perhaps are ill-equipped to define (e.g. the tea party’s predictions about the socialist-led usurpation of some imagined Christian America; religious groups seeing Armageddon around every corner; everyone, left and right, predicting Obama will destroy us all.)
But of course, one must presume that people of every era felt something similar when their own time was nearing an end. Mustn’t the Aztecs have recognized their own doom reflected in the glittering armor of Cortez and his men as they swept ashore like a clanking, disease-ridden sea? Didn’t the Emperor of Japan see in the blood-red sails of Marco Polo the setting of his own sun? Surely the relics of the Roman peoples could smell the wolves and the wilderness closing in as the barbarians crashed the Civilization Party with increasing boldness, as weeds grew through the cracks in the piazza and the empire’s sphere of influence shrank until it was no more than the heavily-guarded palaces of the privileged.
Also, the world obviously spins on--without Romans, without Aztecs and with a much different Japan than Marco Polo (might have) encountered--yet it spins on nonetheless.
Yet I can’t help but think that the greedy and short-sighted who are running things now--and scrambling desperately to get their own golden ticket at the expense of everyone and everything else--are in a way hastening the end of their own power. As the sheer unprecedented scale of their selfishness shreds the fabric of the presumed fairness of our nation, they hasten the dissolution of that nation, and thus the very machinery that gave them all that wealth and power. As they do violence to a sense of shared sacrifice, a sense of shared goals, they do violence to the sense that we even are one nation.
And of course that’s reflected on the streets as well; the leaders who should be suffering for the war crimes and financial crimes they have committed continue to babble away on the news, advise congressmen, and generally ply their trade, which is generally to make money for themselves.
So how and why should regular Americans continue to believe that we are all in this together when we are so clearly not?
And perhaps I read too much into things, but is there not a sense on the street of a certain cold barbarism creeping into the way we deal with and think about one another? There is a turning-away at the mention of the hungry or the homeless or any of a thousand kinds of unfortunate circumstances that affect our fellow Americans that would have been unthinkable during the first Great Depression.
Certainly times were tough back then, certainly a hardness must have affected people and made them reluctant to help. Yet, help they did. And people saw emerging from the Depression as something that ALL of us would achieve, together. This two-tiered economy of today is poison to the notion that an America might continue to exist. It poisons all of us.
It could be argued that we are becoming them, the insensate, inhuman, moneyed titans who feel nothing for anyone but their own, and are only concerned with their own mountains of wealth, even if the nation and the very planet itself be damned in the process. This mad imbalance cannot hold.
But. But, but, but.
Perhaps it is a bit apocalyptic to announce that, because the way we are used to doing things is about to go away, it portends the end of everything always.
On the other hand, this particular era of empire is one that has controlled the world for a long, long time, and has so permeated everything we think of as reality that it promises to be particularly wrenching as it is forced to give up the ghost, whether by revolution or by the sheer weight of history. The people who have inherited the wealth and power of this American empire, the decadent and inbred bluebloods, the dim-witted, frayed threads of the tapestry of U.S. royalty who cling to their great-grandfathers’ fortunes, wealth grown obscene and cancerous, wealth so institutionalized that it threatens the very stability of our democracy, these behemoth-children will not give way easily.
And they have guns and tanks and all the weight of government on their side.
But as weeds spring up along the highways, as potholes remain unrepaired, as police calls go longer and longer unanswered, as we walk past bleeding people lying on the sidewalk, one can’t help but wonder at the road we’ve started along, and if there is any turning back now.
It's a nice day for a walk, come to think of it. I can almost see the crumbling edifice of the coliseum in the distance, shining in a brilliant, red-orange glow as the sun sets.
The news out of Washington and Wall Street is getting to the point of the absurd. People are rightly enraged at a system that seems to be set up to reward the very people who got us into this financial mess. Stephen Colbert has been sharpening his pitchfork (plus he had a great idea about a Thunderdome type of tournament to weed out execs, vid below) and people have started staking out the homes of AIG executives, even putting together a bus tour of shame to see how these dirtbags live. I always find it amusing when the rich and their lackeys in the press try to either a) play off the sickening amounts of money these guys make, and are STILL making from taxpayer dollars, or b) pull the ‘oh, you little people don’t understand how all of this works. Don’t worry your pretty little heads about the $30 million dollar bonuses and the brand new corporate jets.’ There is more bullshit flying around these days than you can find at the Denver Stockshow.
If you haven’t read this article by Matt Taibbi over at Rolling Stone, you should take a few minutes to do so. Here’s the lede, just to give you an idea:
‘It's over — we're officially, royally fucked. no empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally went one step too far. It happened when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit that he was once again going to have to stuff billions of taxpayer dollars into a dying insurance giant called AIG, itself a profound symbol of our national decline — a corporation that got rich insuring the concrete and steel of American industry in the country's heyday, only to destroy itself chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street card tables, like a dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the waning days of the British Empire.’
And our national story goes downhill from there. It’s a long article, but it’s a fascinating read, in which Taibbi breaks down the AIG mess created by so-called ‘credit default swaps’ and other arcane financial instruments that led us to this weird place. All those terms you don’t quite understand are laid out here in clear, if simplified form. These too-big-to-fail giants -- AIG, Citigroup, Bank of America -- are certainly responsible for their own demise, as they chose to bet long on extremely dubious securities while pretending that it was all hunky-dory. And although our leaders like to pretend that some mysterious perfect storm arose out of nowhere to create the housing bubble and the subsequent crash, the tricky part you’re not hearing about out of the mainstream media is that our elected officials helped to create the atmosphere in which this could even have a possibility of happening. Hell, it could be said that they engineered it.
Read about the Glass-Steagall Act, a sensible law put in place after the (first) Great Depression in order to prevent normal, every-town USA banks from engaging in the risks undertaken at investment banks, and how then-Senator 'nation of whiners' Phil Gramm engineered its repeal, opening the floodgate for the too-big-to-fail guys to get that big. And guess how Wall Street got that done? Using both Reps and Dems, and whole big-ass pile of cash:
‘Wall Street responded by flooding Washington with money, buying allies in both parties. In the 10-year period beginning in 1998, financial companies spent $1.7 billion on federal campaign contributions and another $3.4 billion on lobbyists. They quickly got what they paid for. In 1999, Gramm co-sponsored a bill that repealed key aspects of the Glass-Steagall Act, smoothing the way for the creation of financial megafirms like Citigroup. The move did away with the built-in protections afforded by smaller banks.’
So, knowing the history is a good thing, knowing that these people in Washington -- many of whom are still in Congress, or who have migrated from Wall Street to Washington, and thus are tasked with cleaning up the very mess they so idiotically made -- bent over for a few thousand dollars in campaign contributions and in the process fucked the rest of us. But another piece you don’t hear about on the MSM news is that the so-called ‘bailout’ is but a drop in the bucket. Under Bush, going back to 2007, the Fed has been shoveling tons of money at these guys, by some estimates trillions of dollars, long before Congress approved (former Goldman-Sachs CEO and Bush Treasury Secretary) Hank Paulson’s original TARP funds:
‘While the rest of America, and most of Congress, have been bugging out about the $700 billion bailout program called TARP, all of these newly created organisms in the Federal Reserve zoo have quietly been pumping not billions but trillions of dollars into the hands of private companies (at least $3 trillion so far in loans, with as much as $5.7 trillion more in guarantees of private investments).’
And Taibbi also illustrates quite nicely how this is a game played by those in the inner circle, while the rest of us can go fuck ourselves:
‘Another member of Congress, who asked not to be named, offers his own theory about the TARP process. "I think basically if you knew Hank Paulson, you got the money," he says.’
And you wondered why Congress was so quick to sign off on untold trillions of dollars to be tossed into the banks while the big three automakers had to scrounge for a measly $15 billion -- money which, incidentally, may keep actual human beings doing things like, oh, I don’t know, making cars (that is, WORKING) and ordering steel and parts from other manufacturers, etc. What these guys on Wall Street actually create plainly amounts to two products: wealth for themselves, and misery for everyone else.
At any rate, there’s lots more in there. Kudos to the president, going on TV last night despite the idiocy of the MSM press (really, Chuck Todd? You think the American people should be asked to sacrifice more? Tell you what, I’ll give up the planned $10 million makeover I was going to get for my office, how’s that?). Obama is trying to get people to calm down and allow time for his program to work. Unfortunately the program, such as it is, does little to alleviate the underlying problems of the system as a whole, and simply props up the insiders who have already screwed the pooch, over and over again. As Taibbi calls it, we have just witnessed a bloodless coup d’etat, in which Wall Street has taken the reins of the country.
Frankly, if anything, people aren’t pissed-off enough.
Aw! I want one! (via neatorama.) This dude is so lucky -- he's got his very own pet AT-AT from Empire Strikes Back. They're really cute when they're small, but i bet it's a bitch keeping a full-grown one in an apartment. I wonder if they get along with dogs?
Here's another review of mine in the Post, for Dangerous Theatre's 'The Vagrant.' Full text follows below.
"The Vagrant" is an unusual play about a homeless man, played by Winter Maza, who chooses to live on the streets. (Provided by Dangerous Theatre)
Despite some clunkiness here and there--a couple of the smaller roles were played by people who seemed to have very little experience, or at least to have been given poor direction--it was a truly moving show. I'm always fascinated by playwrights and screenwriters and authors who can make you feel without seeming manipulative. There are far too many films and plays that prey on your emotions rather than bring them out honestly. I'm hard-pressed right now to define the difference; it's one of those 'I know it when I see it things.'
But in any case, 'The Vagrant' connected without being cloying.
THE VAGRANT
3 stars
running time 1:32
If you still don’t believe reports that the decelerating engine of American Empire is forcing people out of their houses, drive down Park Avenue West past the shelters sometime. Just a few blocks from Coors Field, that towering edifice of triumphal capitalism, you will see fifty, perhaps a hundred people spilling out into the street every evening as they queue up just hoping for a chance to sleep inside.
But that crowd is more than a faceless, amorphous blob. It is a demographic composed of individuals who have stories very much like our own. They have parents and siblings and sons and daughters; very likely, they once had a roof over their heads too.
And while there are complicated and overlapping issues coloring any honest discussion of homelessness--mental illness, alcohol and drug abuse, perpetual funding shortfalls--perhaps the most maddening of all is our lack of empathy toward those whom we as a society have deemed invisible.
Dangerous Theatre’s show “The Vagrant” seeks to address this, to re-humanize the problem of homelessness.
Enter Lenny, played by Winter Maza. He appears to be a jolly street-philosopher, taking homelessness as a sort of carnival act, cadging lunch from hapless hot dog man Rodney (Steve Towbin) through his gift of gab.
Soon we meet Lenny’s friend Maggie (Winnie Wenglewick), a grumpy, bag-toting sort who is perhaps not so high-functioning as Lenny. He reminds her to take her heart medicine, and gently pulls her back to reality when she rants about Shriners being aliens in disguise.
In an jarring moment during her entrance, Maggie turns the tables on the audience: she stares out hard and tells Lenny, “The bastards are back again, looking at you with their beady little eyes.”
It’s discomfiting to be among those on display, to have the luxury of privacy revoked even for a few seconds--a luxury the homeless never enjoy.
Lenny is soon visited at his park bench by John (Alexander Wu) and Rachel (Norrell Moore) a pair of young, struggling stockbrokers. When Lenny offers them a few stock tips resulting in better-than-expected gains, the pair are intrigued by this enigmatic man and drawn in different ways into his story.
Rachel is the personification of the argument against helping any individual homeless person: the problem is too great; I have my own problems, etc. She embodies unabashed selfishness, the dimwitted Randian mantra that greed is the only possible good, or even the only possibility for human behavior at all.
But Moore also manages to show us another, nastier component of this argument: there is an unspoken assumption buried within this philosophy that anyone less fortunate than ourselves probably only got what they deserved. Moore shows tremendous poise and grace as she plays out these multiple yet intersecting levels, which, in a less-skilled actor’s hands, could easily be shrill or overly simplistic.
Alexander Wu as John is the kinder, gentler counter to Rachel’s heartlessness, reaching out to Lenny and showing a compassion that is rare when the more fortunate are forced to deal with the homeless face to face. Wu infuses John with a bemused warmth, an instinctively human desire to help, to understand.
At the heart of the story though is Lenny, played by Winter Maza. His sonorous baritone voice calmly cuts through others’ self-delusions; he alternately laughs and cries, feels sorry for himself and empathizes with others. He cajoles, entreats, and raves. It is a beautiful performance marred only by rare occasions when actor momentarily seems disconnected from character.
Despite some supporting characters that are clunky at best and a couple of odd directorial choices, this is a moving, honest show that pulls at one’s emotions without being cloying or overly manipulative.
It may be an old saw that we’re all just two paychecks away from joining the ranks of the homeless, but in these times it might behoove us to remember that they are people too, flawed, fallible, imperfect people--just like us.
###
The car is on fire, and there's no driver at the wheel
And the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides
And a cold wind blows
--Godspeed You! Black Emperor, "Dead Flag Blues"
We Modern Americans love our disasters. We adore movies featuring asteroids bearing down on us, zombies trying to eat us, Mayan prophecies trying to Cusack us to death.
There’s also a strong argument to be made that we love actual disasters: killer storms, tsunamis, tornadoes, lunatic shooters. There are primal, visceral notes within us that are evoked when trouble occurs, when the world looks apocalyptic for a moment.
It’s rubbernecking on a grand scale. It’s seeing a live performance of an edgy, confrontational play or band. It’s riding a roller coaster: we realize we’re not in any actual danger ourselves, but we get to feel as though we are. From a place of safety, we empathize with the victims and vicariously become them. It’s the uncertainty of life, the “That could have been me,” moment where--and no shame or judgment--but we get a perverse, voyeuristic thrill deep in our bowels.
We do. Deal with it. We just do, as much as we might like to deny it. We do, because we are creatures of imagination and empathy. We are smart enough to realize that life does end. Or maybe it’s that we are still so deeply connected with our animal selves, the ancestral place where we are forever on the knife-edge of life and death.
This uncertainty is what perks up our ears at the sound of impending doom, even if it’s someone else’s doom--or better yet, the doom of the species or even the planet as a whole.
And it’s uncertainty that I think is at the heart of why modern Americans are so enamored of disaster, whether in movie form or reality. As random as the world is, we humans want and crave order, even when it comes to the apocalypse. When things are going to shit, we want proof positive that this is so. We want to be certain that it’s time to hole up in the hills with cases of Ensure and bottled water and take multiple wives and shoot interlopers on sight. That’s not something you want to do prematurely.
But the collapse of civilization doesn’t necessarily have to be apocalyptic. Maybe it can be more uncertain than that, more incremental and insidious. Maybe it can be more like the unmoving frog in a pan of water slowly brought to a boil. Maybe if things get bad enough slowly enough, we don’t necessarily get to see the moment when civilized society ended.
We are given a date in A.D. 476--September 4, to be precise--when the Roman Empire is purported to have “fallen.” But modern scholars agree that there was a period possibly as long as hundreds of years prior to this during which things got steadily worse for the general populace in terms of foreign invasions, loss of territory, and reduction in creature comforts. In the meantime, the elites increasingly holed up in their villas in the country with their servants and the trappings of their wealth and avoided the mess their misrule had created.
Sound familiar?
The collapse of civilization may very well look like the weeds growing from the cracks in the pavement on the shoulder of US 36 to Boulder. It may look like unrepaired bridges and crumbling schools and hospitals shutting down. It may look like the angry and beaten-down faces of the people at the bus stop waiting to go to their second or third or fourth job. It may look like foreclosed houses and broken windows and shuttered factories and glass on the sidewalk that never gets cleaned up.
What if apocalypse is gradual, not, well, apocalyptic?
I’m not the first to say it, and I won't be the last: The end of civilization may look like today. It may look like right now.
The government is corrupt
And we're on so many drugs
With the radio on and the curtains drawn
--Godspeed You! Black Emperor, "Dead Flag Blues"
So, Obama and Romney bicker for our amusement over who makes for a bigger bogeyman, an out-of-touch, robotic billionaire corporate raider with unknowable offshore wealth, or a socialist/communist/nazi/Kenyan-Hawaiian. And while they distract a deeply troubled nation with fatuous prophecies about who would more quickly destroy the republic, I would argue that it’s too late. The republic is already gone.
Romney and Obama are flip sides of the same coin, just as the people who run things want them to be. Not even flip sides; they’re both heads, because heads always wins these days: heads they win, tails you lose. Romney and Obama are like a Janus head, one facing forward, one backward, but both part of the same entity. (This may be an especially apt metaphor in that Janus was considered to have “two faces,” although between them Obama and Romney have four, at least...but never mind.)
The entity both these men represent is the machine that is stealing not only this country, and our freedoms and our future, but also the future of the entire planet, all in the name of making those with the most wealth even wealthier.
Those who exploit do so through layers of deceit. They hire charming and eloquent
interlocutors. How many more times do you want to be lied to by Barack Obama?
What is this penchant for self-delusion that makes us unable to see that we are
being sold into bondage? Why do we trust those who do not deserve our trust?
Why are we repeatedly seduced? The promised closure of Guantanamo. The public
option in health care. Reforming the Patriot Act. Environmental protection.
Restoring habeas corpus. Regulating Wall Street. Ending the wars. Jobs.
Defending labor rights. I could go on.
Oh, let me: the continued and useless drug war, stepped up to include legal
marijuana dispensaries; the knee-jerk law and order reaction to Occupy, during
which the administration either stood by and watched silently or actively
abetted the crackdown; the continued expansion of NSA spying on US citizens; the shameful prosecution of Wikileaks whistle-blower Bradley Manning; and
giving torturers and war criminals from the Bush Administration a free pass.
Hedges touches it with a needle. The thing is, Obama too is a tool of the
corporations. And the corporations for all intents and purposes are now firmly
in control of the levers of government. All of the levers. Our votes are bought
and sold on a scale unprecedented. We are propagandized so thoroughly and ubiquitously
that there is no escape; Hitler, Stalin and Mao couldn’t even conceive of the
level of control of information currently held by the elites in this country.
And not just by Fox News; the thin slices of the far left and right that actually ask the right
questions, questions outside of the strict parameters and framing laid down by
corporate power are marginalized at best, if not outright destroyed.
Our court decisions have become products like any other in this commodified system,
to be packaged and purchased by those who can afford them. (“Here’s that Bush
v. Gore you ordered, sir--would you like to super-size with a Citizens
United?”) Our justice system is neither just nor really a system any longer,
certainly not one that operates by any logic or fairness.
America as it was meant to be is pretty much over. We are just watching the slow
crumbling of what public edifices remain as the rest of the nation’s wealth is
sliced and diced and distributed upward to the puppet-masters in charge.
Obama and his cohort in Congress may publicly plea for consensus and admonish the
other side for blocking legislation, but the fact is, Obama, Harry Reid, and
Nancy Pelosi have gotten done exactly as much as they wanted to get done. With
Obama’s political capital in 2008, he could easily have gotten a better healthcare plan
through, one that didn't cater so massively to big pharma and the insurance
giants. And the rest of the laundry list Hedges cited--Guantanamo, the Patriot
Act, habeus corpus, the environment, labor laws, Iraq, Afghanistan--all of
these are hideous crimes of omission and commission for which we should all be
holding the administration’s feet to the fire, not congratulating them because
they are not quite as blatantly pro-business and pro-money and pro-power as
Daddy ‘Mittens’ Warbucks.
The left in this country today is like a victim of domestic abuse. The beatings continue apace, but when they do stop for a second, and Obama says something hopeful about gay marriage or vague promises of other reforms, we applaud and say, "See? He really does love us!"
But the one crime that we cannot forgive is that Obama did nothing to reform Wall
Street after the crash in 2008. With some effort--any effort--he could have
passed some new re-cobbling of Glass-Steagall
with judicious use of the bully pulpit and
the properly stirred-up ire of the populace, outraged as each new malfeasance
of the banks came to light. With the carrot of billions of dollars in bailouts
and the stick of an irate public, it could have been done. Easily.
But he didn’t want to. And that’s because he owes his presidency and the
possibility of a second term--not to mention a very wealthy post-presidential
life indeed; just ask Bill Clinton--to the same bankers and financiers who are
today right back at the same tricks they pulled prior to 2008.
And what this should illustrate is that democracy in America is essentially
finished. Justice as a broad concept that encompasses all Americans is over. The banks and bankers--and just as importantly, the people who own a
great deal of the money in those banks, which is all of the wealthy class,
essentially--are thoroughly in charge. They are above the law, because they
make the law. They are the law. There is no oversight, there is no counterweight to their control.
There is no one left who has the power or even inclination to slap down big money. What this means in terms of our day-to-day reality should be apparent: weeds on the side of the highway, unemployment with no end in sight, crumbling infrastructure, environmental catastrophes unpunished, financial ruin for all but the very top while the entire house of
cards crumbles and crushes us all.
We're all trapped in the belly of this horrible machine
And the machine is bleeding to death
--Godspeed You! Black Emperor, "Dead Flag Blues"
But even with the propaganda machine firing on all cylinders, cracks begin to show.
We can see the system is a not a fair or just system. We can see that no one
got punished for Wall Street’s crimes. We can see the oil companies continuing
to get taxpayer dollars even as they poison our water and land and air and
children. We can see through the increasingly obvious and blatant lies the
politicians and the media throw at us as they cease to really give a shit whether
we believe them anymore.
This is where the angry faces originate. This is where petty crime and nasty
discourse in the street and irate traffic and selfishness and a thousand
irritated slights between people come from. We want to blame someone, and we are frustrated enough sometimes to take it out on someone nearby. But people aren’t stupid, not completely.
Even us rubes walking down the midway of America, reaching into our empty
pockets having just thrown three rings in exchange for our last dollar can
sense when something about the game isn’t quite right.
We can see that things are getting shittier and shittier around us. We can also
see that those who are to blame go unpunished, while petty, minor criminals--that is, the poor--go to prison at unprecedented rates.
And what is becoming increasingly clear is that part of the game right now includes
expanding the police state apparatus as quickly and quietly as possible,
because those at the top realize that people won’t tolerate this forever. As
the mass of people are squeezed into ever more untenable positions, the machine cracks
down on the tools and means of protest that a free people should and always
have been able to use--by right, not by fiat. Remember that: these tools of
protest--free speech, freedom of assembly--are not gifts to be taken away on a
whim by any president, not even one you kind of like. That’s why they are
called “inalienable rights.”
Even as they slowly strangle us and our children and destroy any kind
of chance at a decent future, along with the means to live and survive on the
only planet on which anyone now living will ever reside, they simultaneously
take away our means to fight back against the crush of corporate power and
wealth.
The sun has fallen down
And the billboards are all leering
And the flags are all dead
--Godspeed You! Black Emperor, "Dead Flag Blues"
What’s hilarious is that the Teabaggers had it right, sort of. There is indeed a plan in
place to take our country away from us and rob us of our freedoms--only it’s
coming from the same corporate power structure that financed and built the Tea
Party.
Perhaps this is what the end of civilization looks like: the end of civilized discourse
between the leaders of a nation and its people. Leaders who no longer have to
bother listening to their people. In our case, this is not only because of the
influence of money in our elections, but also because the real leaders of our
nation are no longer the ones we elect. Rather, the true leaders are a select
few who have never been answerable to voters, but who nonetheless control the
future. And the ones we do elect are easily bought off with flattery and
trinkets and a taste of wealth of their own. It is too easy to incorporate them
into part of the machine that is devouring the world. Far from offering even
token resistance, they are downright eager to be assimilated.
I'm not the first to say it, and I won't be the last. Every generation has had people crying out that they were witnessing the end--of the world, humankind, civilization, something. We are a dramatic species.
But for the first time we can see an endgame, a place where there is unchecked--and ultimately uncheckable--power in the hands of a very few very powerful people, people who have shown no inclination to give up any of that power, not without a fight.
And we've seen very few people with the means to fight stepping up to do so.
I'm not saying the world's going to end on our watch, or even that America will. But I think we're seeing the beginning of the end of something.
Maybe civilization ends because humans, when given enough unchecked power over one another, are, in the final analysis, incapable of behaving in a civilized manner.
--kjb
###
Here's the song in full:
Here is some further reading, just a few articles I've run across lately, not all of which directly correspond to what I've written here, but which I find relevant nonetheless.
And here's a piece in New York magazine by one of my favorite writers, Frank Rich, "Mayberry, R.I.P.," in which he notes that people from all points on the political spectrum are crying that it's all over.
EDIT: I trimmed and altered parts of the opening this morning, a few hours after I posted this, to try to clarify and home in on what I was going after a bit more clearly.
Wow, so I ran across this article--I swear to god--just moments ago, after I had posted my last entry. Bruce Fein, from The Daily Beast, puts it much better than I did, and he goes a step further, saying that Obama is abrogating his Constitutional duty by not prosecuting the torturers:
"The evidence is now undeniable. President Barack Obama is flouting his unflagging constitutional obligation enshrined in Article II, Section 3 to “take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” He is also reneging on his signature campaign promise to restore the rule of law, transparency, and accountability to the White House. He is displaying the psychology of an arrogant Empire as opposed to a modest Republic in continuing and escalating the Bush-Cheney duumvirate’s global and perpetual war against international terrorism heedless of foreign sovereignties or the lives of civilians."
Heavy shit. Read the whole thing. It's worthwhile.
"The smiling Dad in this picture is the Honorable Jay S. Bybee. He is a judge on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. He’s a practicing Mormon. He has taught constitutional and administrative law. He worked at the Department of Justice until he was nominated for the Ninth Circuit. A Bush appointee, he was confirmed in March of 2003.
There's only one problem. Judge Bybee is also a monster."
Yes, that's the very same Bybee who wrote the first of the infamous torture memos, in which he states that in order for something to defined as torture, it must include 'severe pain,' which, by legal definitions he cites, must rise to level that could result in organ failure or death:
"They treat severe pain as an indicator of ailments that are likely to result in permanent and serious physical damage in the absence of immediate medical treatment. Such damage must rise to the level of death, organ failure, or the permanent impairment of a significant body function. These statutes suggest that "severe pain," as used in Section 2340, must rise to a similarly high level — the level that would ordinarily be associated with a sufficiently serious physical condition or injury such as death, organ failure, or serious impairment of body functions — in order to constitute torture."
In other words, if what you do to someone's mind or body couldn't or wouldn't result in organ failure or death, it can't by definition be torture.
The phrase ‘salting the earth’ is an ancient and overused one. The gist of the concept is that if one spreads salt over formerly productive fields, they won’t be able grow crops anymore. The origins of the term lie in a punishment employed by ancient cultures as a final slap in the face to the losers of a conflict. For instance, the Assyrians are said to have salted the earth surrounding certain cities that refused to pay tribute to them. And one ancient judge in Israel is said to have salted his own capital, Shechem, as punishment for an attempted rebellion against him. The Romans are said to have salted the earth surrounding Carthage as punishment for the prolonged Third Punic War, but scholars dispute this claim, as the Romans relied on North Africa as the ‘granary to the empire’ for centuries after. The Romans always knew which side their bread was buttered on.
Which brings me to my point. What the fuck are the douchebags in the outgoing administration and their myopic handmaidens in congress thinking? In a matter of weeks they have:
- opened up 150,000 new acres in the west to oil and gas drilling leases - slipped a nice loophole on limiting exec pay into the very public $700 billion it shoveled to its buddies on Wall Street resulting in, you guessed it, no limits on exec pay - admitted that Al Qaeda did not exist in Iraq prior to the U.S. invasion, responding with ‘So what?’ (No, Bush literally said that on television.) - decided that Detroit (and likely the rest of the economy) can sit and spin unless they’re willing to gut their union contracts
There’s a certain insane vindictiveness to all this behavior, when you consider that the $5 trillion surplus Bush inherited has already been turned into a $10 trillion deficit, and that despite that insane outlay, most Americans are worse off than they were 8 years ago. It’s almost too much to think that these guys are just so insanely greedy that squeezing more cash out of the taxpayers drives them to these levels of shamelessness.
It's like, you won, fuckers. What more do you want?
You raped the economy, you raped the Middle East, you raped our military, you raped the Constitution, you raped the memory of America's honor, you raped the poor and the middle class, you raped the environment, you raped the truth -- you raped the dignity of our very nation. YOUR nation too. What more could you possibly want?
Do you remember that moment in “The Dark Knight,” when Alfred is musing on The Joker’s possible motivations, and he says to Bruce Wayne, “Some people just like to watch the world burn?”
once again its been a while since i've posted. starting to sound like a broken record. here's my column from last week, at any rate.
CARPE DIEM 02-08-08
Ah, Super-Duper-Cali-Fragilisitic Tuesday. Watching the coverage makes me want to give myself a lobotomy with an ice pick and a ball-peen hammer, but I just can’t tear myself away.
There’s no shortage of whack-a-doo stories out there as pundits scramble to make sense of a completely mad day in a completely mad year for American politics. But even as the heavy-hitter media elites attempt to sift through the voluminous mounds of spin that the campaigns and their lackeys have left in steaming piles, they are also working hard to cover their own bets [read: asses] especially after the media debacle following the last round of primaries, when Clinton’s campaign was declared dead in the water.
Here are a few of the more off-the-map nutty storylines:
• Even though Obama raked in 562 delegates and 13 states Tuesday night, compared to Clinton’s 582 delegates and 8 states, the media declared the night a “disappointment” for the junior senator from Illinois. It seems that many pundits are scrambling to distance themselves from their love affair with Obama by now setting course 180 degrees away from him. Now it’s Obama who’s finished, washed-up, kaput. Here’s a headline from Wednesday’s Washington Post: “Obama Wave Wanes.”
It’s all over.
Only, it’s not.
Of course, given the recent hype surrounding his candidacy reaching epic, Kennedy-esque proportions—literally, in the sense that Ted Kennedy came out in support of him—any primary result not including a total and complete humiliation of Clinton at the polls could seem like a poor showing. The establishment hates that it’s not decided yet—and, really, hates that it’s not decided in favor of Clinton—because that means more days and weeks of uncomfortable questions about that very establishment, and what direction voters want the next president to take the country.
• Speaking of which, here’s a good one: Clinton advisor Mark Penn was quoted on the Talking Points Memo blog as claiming that Obama has become the “establishment candidate.” Apparently Penn reached that conclusion because of recent endorsements Obama has gotten, and is now attempting to both spin Clinton as an underdog, and undermine Obama’s outsider cachet. I guess Hillary’s eight years in the White House, seven years in the Senate after carpet-bagging to New York to get elected, K Street lobbyist connections, votes for more-stringent bankruptcy laws that favor credit card companies, supporting the Patriot Act, and, oh yeah, authorizing the Iraq war and all get wiped away the moment a nearly irrelevant Kennedy supports Obama.
• On the Republican side, John McCain won convincingly, putting away 511 delegates, compared with Romney’s 176 and Huckabee’s 147. Funny thing is, the Republicans don’t want him.
Huh? Well, lots of them anyway.
Even with that kind of widespread support for a war-hero Senator who—inexplicably—continues to speak of Iraq as if it were an overseas province of Empire America that we will occupy—inexplicably—for at least a century, many in the social conservative wing of the Republican big tent are denouncing McCain. Colorado’s own James Dobson stamped his little feet and said that he wouldn’t vote for McCain, because he’s “...convinced Senator McCain is not a conservative, and in fact, has gone out of his way to stick his thumb in the eyes of those who are.”
He’s a closet librul, folks. Watch out he doesn’t give your daughters abortions or your sons The Gay.
What this apparently means is that the religious wing of right wing, which has enjoyed the fawning flirtations of every Republican nominee in recent memory, is finding itself without a suitor—and prom night is coming up soon.
It’s only going to get nuttier from here, folks. Strap in tight, and keep your hands inside the car at all times.
I’ve reached a decision. This is something that has weighed heavily on my mind for some time now, but I have found that I cannot live my life to its fullest without being honest. It is time I come clean. I have been living a lie, and I am posting here to confess to you, my friends, in a public forum, in the hopes that exposing who I really am will allow me to live honestly.
I’ve been hiding for a long time, and I think it’s finally time that I come out of the closet. I just want all of you to know that this doesn’t change who I am. No matter what you may think about what I am about to reveal to you, I am still the same person you’ve always known and loved. Or loathed, as the case may be. All I ask is that, in spite of this long-hidden truth I am about to reveal to you, please, please, just give me a chance to be myself.
Yes, I know this must come as a surprise to those of you who thought that someone as good-looking, athletic, charming, studly, handsome, well-endowed, outgoing, funny, and, let’s face it, well-built as myself could never be a nerd. But truth is stranger than fiction.
Here’s how I came out of the nerd closet: I got a Kindle.
For a long time I would only read it in the privacy of my own home, closing the blinds and ducking under the covers so as not to be seen. I feared derision and jeering from packs of unlettered jocks if I were to venture out with it. I imagined hordes of librarians with torches chasing me down in the street and pummeling me to death with copies of Gibbon’s ‘The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,’ volumes 1 through 6.
But lately I have become bolder, making small forays into public with my Kindle in tow. At first cautiously taking it out of my bag, I would attempt to hold it in such a way that the leather cover made it look like an analogue book, peering over the top nervously, checking for torches and the odor of card catalogues. My boldness has grown however, to the point where I even read it on an airplane when I went to South Carolina in April! It feels good to be who I really am.
As someone who loves books and has read voraciously since childhood, the very notion of an e-book grated my nerves for a long time. It seemed so unnecessary. Besides, I love used books and the unexpected discoveries you can make in used book stores. I love ancient, yellowing books with crackling pages, I love even the strange notes you sometimes find jotted in the margins, and the proud claims of long-ago ownership inscribed inside front covers.
But I started looking into Amazon’s newest e-book (the Kindle 2, actually) after seeing a short (and rather derisive) segment on it on The Daily Show a while back.
And I love it. if you’re like me and suffer from ADD, you might read two or three books at a time. The Kindle is great for this. It remembers the last page you read when you click on a title, and it holds around 1500 books, depending on the format you use. It also can play MP3s and has text-to-voice, so any book you have on there can be read by a robotic-sounding voice, male or female, if you are too lazy to read for yourself, or if you drive a lot. Plus it’s hard to actually read when you’re fleeing from jocks.
You can change the font to five different sizes--if I’m running on a treadmill in order to maintain that incredible shape I possess, my aforementioned massive manhood bouncing around in my shorts before me, often smacking me in the chest and eyes, I can click the Kindle to display a larger type size, making it easier to read. Plus, hitting a button to flip pages is easier than trying to keep an analogue book open.
Also, Amazon is currently offering most new books for $9.99. This means bestsellers that are normally $25 and up are ten bucks in Kindle version. You can download newspapers, magazines and blogs as well. The kicker is that the device comes with 3G technology, like the iPhone, meaning that without ever plugging it into a computer, I can go online and download one of almost 300,000 titles they have available right now, and have it ready to read on my Kindle within 20 or 30 seconds. And books with expired copyrights are often free or almost free--classics, and lots of books published pre-1950 fall into this category.
Most importantly, to my devious, file-sharing, hacker-like mind, the idea that I am not bound by Amazon to purchase every title I wish to read makes the thing worth the rather hefty price tag ($359). Although Amazon has tried to limit the way users can get titles to maximize their profit margin, the device will read a variety of file types: pdf, word documents, text documents, and more, so I can transfer books I download from other sources as well as my own writing to the Kindle.
And it comes with a dictionary, so I can highlight a word and get a definition without leaving the title I’m reading. Plus you can make notes and highlight text that goes into a dedicated file.
Anyway. Whew.
I feel so much better having unburdened myself. Nerd power! Strap on your high-water pants and wear your pocket protectors proud, my brethren and sistren! Thickly tape that pesky spot where your horn-rimmed glasses broke when you were in high school! Brandish your slide-rules with freedom and joy!
On a break from play-writing the other day I wrote this. I guess it's a poem.
Latter Days
In these latter days, as we blithely sip cocktails beneath a boiling November sun;
Where the light is hot and low and lurid, sickly in a tangerine sky;
In these latter days, when it takes so many chemicals to make us feel remotely human;
And we’re so grateful for the table scraps they toss us;
In these latter days, when we casually burn our sole resource down to the ground;
When we’ve pretty much just given up with so much left undone;
In these latter days, which are inexplicable to children;
And all children are the offspring of fools;
In these latter days, where any brief voice of reason is quickly smothered in lucre;
Where the only sound the airwaves carry is the flutter of paper blown by plutocrats;
In these latter days, where parents whore out their children, not in black midnight alleys, but in the full mad glow of the national myth;
Where the dumb and venal rule, and the quavering smart are purchased like collectibles;
In these latter days, where we refuse to know for sure the things we all know for sure;
Where we hunker down alone each night in the blue screen glow;
Where ignorance is rewarded, and culture is a mockery of itself;
In these latter days, where the weight of a crumbling empire teeters on the overloaded shopping carts of the homeless;
In these latter days of death and circuses;
In these latter days, which no one dares call the last days;
Where love seems a long-ago memory, compassion a cruel joke;
In these latter days, there are no saints, only killers;
And every killer is a suicide.
When I was in Ohio for a mini-family reunion a few weeks back, my dad baited me into discussing politics.
This was after I told him and Cheryl that really, these days I don't even read the newspaper--at least not like I used to; the Washington Post was once my home page; I still have 30 or 40 political site bookmarks on my Firefox, all unused--and that I don't think about politics very much.
But my dad has been ripping through book after book on the economy's implosion, dissections by economists and the like explaining just what happened, who screwed who, and who got away with economic murder. So he was really into talking about all that; I was not.
I'm aware that we got fucked, and that the big banks did the fucking.
I am also aware that nothing changed. They are lubing us up again for another rogering, with virtually nothing and no one lining up to stop them, left or right.
What ensued demonstrated that I do know a lot about politics; I am not uninformed. I just refuse to waste any more brain power than absolutely necessary thinking about or battling over or struggling against the facts: the game is rigged. There can be no real, useful political discussion without overturning the way things are now, as it has become apparent that Obama and his promise of change has been subsumed by the relentless power of money.
He works for--and not coincidentally, has hired to implement his policies--the people with money or the people who work for the people with money. He has demonstrated himself incapable or unwilling to aggressively go after those who profited and continue to profit spectacularly while the rest of the country comes to resemble Rome circa 400 AD, just before the barbarian hordes destroyed the remnants of a mighty empire.
So it's not that I'm apolitical, or disinterested, or uninformed. It's rather that I refuse to participate in a shell game that always turns up the same winner, no matter if the apparent victor is wearing a D or an R next to his name. As Noam Chomsky observed, we spend all our time arguing 'Pepsi or Coke?' When what we should be discussing is whether spending our money on brown sugar water is really a good idea in the first place.
Thus I was really pleased to see someone lay it all out in the New York Times today (found via reddit). Drew Westen is a professor of psychology who consults for politicians, and he frames his article in terms of story-telling. He talks of the troubling signs even from Obama's inauguration onward, when we needed a leader who would lay out the story in honest terms, who's the bad guy, and how are we going to make certain this isn't going to happen again, much less let the same people pull off the same crime again. This story, had it been properly told:
...would have offered a clear, compelling alternative to the dominant narrative of the right, that our problem is not due to spending on things like the pensions of firefighters, but to the fact that those who can afford to buy influence are rewriting the rules so they can cut themselves progressively larger slices of the American pie while paying less of their fair share for it.
But there was no story — and there has been none since.
He points out that, unlike either Roosevelt:
...when faced with the greatest economic crisis, the greatest levels of economic inequality, and the greatest levels of corporate influence on politics since the Depression, Barack Obama stared into the eyes of history and chose to avert his gaze. Instead of indicting the people whose recklessness wrecked the economy, he put them in charge of it. He never explained that decision to the public — a failure in storytelling as extraordinary as the failure in judgment behind it.
And here's the real problem with Obama: his failure to do anything to help, and in fact his deliberate muddying of the waters--especially given a historic level of support and potential for real change. That's why I don't do politics anymore: if Obama couldn't or wouldn't pull it off then, with the support he had and the mandate he had and the historic immolation of the economy just behind him and thus a public hungry for change, then no one, ever will be able to overcome the moneyed powers who run things. Not without something that would look very much like a revolution, some change in the way things are done that is drastic and radical.
Read the entire article. It is illuminating, and cuts through the essentially useless and retrograde left-right dialogue and shouting that litters our airwaves.
I’ve seen this article, titles 'Five Ways Modern Men Are Trained to Hate Women' shared around FB and I have to take major exception with the writer’s entire premise. It should more properly be titled ‘Ways Idiot Douchebags Have Been Trained To Hate Women.’ Let's have a look, shall we? Point by idiotic point.
5.) Men Feel They Are Entitled To Sex, And To Have A Beautiful Woman.
Uh, fucking WHAT? Unless you’re talking about the no-neck, date-rapist population of fraternity row, this is utter bullshit. Most men I know are very very very very grateful when they get laid. When they are in a relationship with a woman, most men I know do everything in their power to keep her happy because we know we are lucky to have found a woman who can tolerate us.
This doesn’t make us weak. It makes us human. We like to make those we like and love happy. Even my dog understands this basic tenet of friendship.
To say that because men in rom-coms always end up with a woman, all men feel we not only ought to end up with a woman, but that we deserve to is beyond asinine. By that logic, all women feel they deserve to be and should and WILL be swept off their feet by a dashing prince charming. The only women (and men) I know who believe in these fantasies are children, the Horribly Damaged and the Seriously Medicated.
Happily Ever After
4.) Men Are Trained To See Women As Decoration.
Apparently the premise of this one is that because advertising and movies use sex to sell their products, men are all equally shallow and judge women solely on their looks. Again, maybe this is true at Alpha Douchebag Delta, but for any man with any kind of socialization beyond being raised in a box in the backyard with the family dogs, this is ridiculous.
First of all, women are somewhere around, oh let’s say, half-ish of the population. That’s an awful lot of decoration. Yes, there are certain retrograde elements of our society who see women as less than human somehow, but THAT’S THEM. That’s not us. It’s certainly not all of us or anywhere near. To put all men in this box is as insulting and ignorant as when certain emotionally immature guys go around griping about how ‘all women are bitches.’ And it’s equally stupid and false.
Some of the strongest people in my life, people who I most admire and who have taught me the most are women--which makes sense, because again, women ARE HALF THE POPULATION.
And back to the first point, that women are judged on their looks. There is some truth to this. But we are all judged on our looks in this shallow, dumb age in which we live. To say this is only true of women but not of men is absurd.
We are all attracted to The Attractive. Get over it. Even infants are more drawn to good-looking people. Ladies, you may claim you’re the only ones who are judged on your looks next time you go out with a fat, ugly, pimply guy.
3.) We Think Women Are Conspiring With Our Boners To Ruin Us.
This is so fucking stupid I almost don’t have the heart to shred it.
After spending a meandering eight grafs discussing public masturbation, and guys who get their dicks stuck in pool filters and the like, Wong finally gets to what is apparently the real point of this one: that if men get a boner from looking at a woman’s cleavage, we blame the woman.
Um...what? Some childhood trauma at Grandma's funeral for Mr. Wong perhaps?
He then tries to back up this feeble and frankly weird point by pointing out that the bible story of the Garden of Eden has the woman ‘conspiring with a snake’ to bring man down.
Uh, again, what? What the fuck are you even talking about? This is something I don’t think anyone I know has even considered as even fleetingly true, that we've all been laid low by women's evil powers. Is this 1928? Are you Michael Shannon's character Agent Nelson Van Alden on 'Boardwalk Empire?'
Unless you are an emotionally stunted child-man who hates all women already, or an intellectually stunted religious freak who believes in the literal truth of the bible, you know better than to blame an autonomic sexual response on the woman you’re attracted to.
Fuck you. This is beyond retarded.
I love my boners. Often literally. Why on earth would I be angry at the woman who turned me on? Who GAVE me a boner? I mean, what an AWESOME thing to give someone! Could there be any better gift?
Men--real men, not the cartoonish examples of impacted, moronic masculinity this article seems to be conflating with actual human men--aren’t this fucking stupid. No one in real life is this stupid except David Wong and his frat boy buddies. And by the way, if your erections make you angry, you've got deeper problems than can be expressed in a Cracked article.
Yo, Adam, watch where you're waving that thing.
2) We Feel Like Manhood Was Stolen From Us
and
1) We Feel Powerless
And here’s the kicker: we feel like it was women who stole our power and our manhood!!
Who’da thunk it?
These two are something about how characters on TV like Charlie Sheen’s on ‘Two and Half Men’ and Sterling Archer--or the title character from Wong’s books(!!!)--aren’t merely being dicks to everyone, they’re acting out what all men want to do. And how once we were able to pee anywhere we wanted, show our willies to people (when we were five or six) and how great it would be if the world was like the movie '300:' ‘...where everybody is shirtless and screaming and hacking things with swords.’
How when we were young and got in trouble for jumping off things and setting things on fire, it was women who took these pleasures away from us--somehow.
And here we come to the crux of Mr. Wong’s ‘argument’ (for lack of a better word, although ‘vaguely connected ramblings’ or ‘whiny diarrhea posing as words’ might be more accurate):
‘The result is a combination of frustration and humiliation and powerlessness...’
David Wong after getting turned down for a date. At least I assume this is him.
And this is really what this entire article is about: those men who feel weak and powerless and who blame women. They blame women for their own shortcomings, emphasis on ‘short.’
Sorry, Mr. Wong, I hate to break it to you and your meatheaded sympathizers, but your weakness, ineffectualness, and frustration with the life you have made are your own.
Actually, I suspect you are right, in a way--I suspect you have felt humiliated at the hands of women. But look at the construction of that sentence, versus the one you wrote above.
No one can MAKE you feel humiliated. No one can MAKE you feel powerless. No one can make you feel anything. Your humiliation and weakness come out of your own insecurities and all-around shitty character. Go back to the bar with your like-minded embittered friends and bitch about what a bunch of miserable bitches women are.
But in the future, please don’t bother writing about it; you’re giving real men a bad name.
vysionous.deviantart.com
