"Five war aeroplanes that had long slumbered useless in the distant arsenals of the Rhinemouth were manoeuvering now in the eastern sky. Evesham had astonished the world by producing them and others, and sending them to circle here and there. It was the threat material in the great game of bluff he was playing, and it had taken even me by surprise. He was one of those incredibly stupid energetic people who seem sent by Heaven to create disasters. His energy to the first glance seemed so wonderfully like capacity! But he had no imagination, no invention, only a stupid, vast driving force of will, and a mad faith in his stupid idiot 'luck' to pull him through."
H.G. Wells - A Dream of Armageddon
(1901)
Wow... does that sound like prescient vision of Trump the ever-sham candidate or what? As I've said before, these set types of power-mad, power-hungry control freaks never change.
Election time is nearly upon us here in the eww ess of ayyy and the whole world's watching... if for no other reason than to predict where this paranoid declining empire's bombs will fall next. With the current ideological disarray, ease of fundraising and the willingness of the public to give money to any rabid baboon spouting their favorite rhetoric, running for president has during the past decade become a for-profit enterprise. It's free publicity, inasmuch as the public's money is always free. So we've had, if nothing else, a very, very entertaining couple of election cycles over here in "the land of the comparatively free" as Ambrose Bierce so aptly put it back when Hearst had started playing kingmaker. In fact, the election should probably be held on Halloween to commemorate what a freakshow this has all been.
Personally, I miss Herman Cain. Can't beat him for sheer confusion factor, and things just aren't the same without him contradicting himself every other sentence and spacing out for a minute at a time and quoting the honored poet Pokemon. But, hey, at least we got him shuckin' and duckin' in Trump's general direction, and those two could not make for a better Vaudeville duo: the dopey, confused straight man and the high-strung, twitchy, abusive clown. I love that as proof he's not racist, Trump dug up Cain to prove that, hey, some of his best billionaire friends are black!
Look, Trump is not going to win. He's trailing Clinton by something like five to ten points and has been for nine out of ten months this year. He was never going to win and had no intention of winning. His entire campaign's been nothing but a sequel to The Apprentice, a publicity-boosting ego-trip filmed before a live captive nationwide audience. Fatcats like him nowadays run for president because they can get you to pay for their campaigns and then pay for their memoirs (all ten volumes) and buy the commemorative t-shirt and buy stock in their companies. You're being fleeced, chumps.
There is of course a very valid reason why no dignified Republican candidate cropped up this time around. This election's been decided for six years or so. It was always going to be Clinton. And no, it's not going to be because of some tinfoil "left-wing media conspiracy" that reactionaries are always so paranoid about. The U.S. has no left-wing media, aside from Bill Maher and maybe NPR on their good days. It's a system with two right wings. Also, as much as I might be expected, given my disdain for our feminized society and sheer disgust with feminism, to blame her being elected on the feminist vote, even that would be dishonest. Clinton will be elected for the same reason Obama was elected the first time around, and it's got nothing to do with ideology, either justifiable or faulty. It's just Money, and I do mean BIG MONEY. She's the fattest cat.
She's got the best name-brand recognition. When Clevon back in the sticks finally shuffles half-drunk into the polls he'll only remember there's been two heads talking on television, with some vague idea that one guy's a tough do-er of great deeds, the kind of alpha male you really wanna get behind, but on the other hand the other's a tough chick and it's nice to do nice things for girls and this one looks cool in all the TV ads, eyes upturned to the sky with a resolute expression, almost as dashing as them leggy blondes shootin' zombies in them thar mooovies. Finally, he'll go with the name he's heard repeated most because she sounds so successful that it's almost as if she's already won and politics works like horse racing, right? You don't wanna pick a lewzer, as Trump so kindly reminds us. Besides, there's only two choices.
Right?
Here's the thing. Ever since the U.S. came to be dominated by its military-industrial complex at the end of WWII, the fatcats have only gotten fatter. During Republican presidencies, they push with all their might to up-end any laws keeping them from stripmining everything in sight in their quest to enslave the world. Naturally this prompts some minimal pro forma public backlash like Occupy Wall Street and it's time to send in the good cop, some Democrat to placate them with lots of pretty populist speeches while really just playing a holding position, waiting out the public's canine-length attention span. After a while another bad cop can step in, terrorizing the populace with boogeymen overseas and explaining the real reason things haven't changed in the past eight years was all that "over-regulation" holding back the benevolent "job creators" from instituting a Utopia of a car in every pot and a chicken in every garage. Lather, rinse, repeat with every new generation. That's how reactionary programs from the early '90s like Cap-and-Trade become the supposed "progressive" and "liberal" alternative in 2010.
The thing to remember about the "good cop, bad cop" routine is that the good cop is on the bad cop's side, and neither is on yours. The trick, as in any shell game, isn't figuring out which shell to pick. It's that the ball is never on the table to begin with. All options lead to you losing.
-so long as you let the good cop and bad cop define your actions. The Tea Party movement was the most comically moronic and backwards bunch of superstitious hillbillies and grade school dropouts to grace the realm of politics, but in one respect they deserved respect: they went for option "none of the above." They saw the system's broken and sought candidates from outside the system. In this they were merely being manipulated by the same fatcats trying a new angle on the bad cop's shpiel, but inasmuch as they were willing to throw their lot in with someone they believed would break the cycle, the teabaggers were more progressive than all of the lazy, college-educated yuppies taking the safe bet of siding with Clinton, a Republican in all but name.
Want to make a difference in an election? Back a third party. Libertarian, Theocratic, White Power, Black Power, Green or Pink or Beige Party, hardline Marxists, Feminists screaming for the eradication of all males, I don't give a shit at this point. You can argue over your respective brands of insanity later, when the U.S. gets a true political system in which varied viewpoints can be voiced and heard instead of a jailhouse interrogation with both options leading to further time in this ideological prison.
Write in a candidate who didn't run a three billion dollar campaign.
Then we'll talk.
No comments:
Post a Comment