Dis-Civil Obedience (part one)

     "We do not remain slaves because masters exist, masters exist because we elect to remain slaves."
           -Paranoid Internet Yahoo

     "Arm the Homeless"
          -Paranoid Real Life Yahoo

(Author's note: There are a lot of links embedded in this article. They'll take you to more questionable information. I'm not getting paid for them.)

I'm a big fan of conspiracy theories. I'd like to be up front about that. I'm also a big fan of truth. What I'm not a big fan of is idiots that don't realize they're idiots.

It shouldn't have to be pointed out that not all 'theories' are equal. Saying that evolution and gravity are only theories, and then saying creationism and lizard people from beyond the stars replacing world leaders are theories too does not make them equal. But that's how dumb, crazy people justify believing in dumb, crazy ideas.

I desperately, desperately wish adults would self-educate. Unfortunately the vast majority of fully-developed humans I know are openly opposed to new information. Try to explain the Federal Reserve to them and it's like their brains shut down in fear. I don't know why that is.

I also wish I was half as smart as I claim to be. If I was, I'm sure I could find a way to shove truth into the heads of people that seem destined to happily base their entire lives on misinformation. Maybe start a Jersey Shore knockoff where every few minutes the Bar Hag and the Date Rapist erupt into a screaming match over the Bush Administration's culpability as war criminals.

Maybe a light-hearted web-comic?

It seems like people would rather believe an attractive lie than an ugly truth. You have to click on those last two links or the joke doesn't work. I'll wait.

Anyway, facts are boring and celebrity naked people rarely seem to want to attach giant boobs to boring old facts and figures. Leave that to boring old ugly boring people like Noam Chomsky and Richard Dawkins. Here's some I'll attach my marginal attractiveness to:

The Free Press

It seems like every time I turn on the TV someone's covering a revolution in the Middle East. And that's all well and good, but I've noticed an odd trend. The only revolutionary activity being covered here at home involves violent, ignorant hillbillies unwittingly representing the interests of private multinationals.

Like this charming fellow.

And again, there's nothing inherently wrong with this. The problem I have is that this minority of anti-healthcare, anti-choice, anti-government fringe lunatics receive such a disparate amount of media attention. Generally, supporters of this movement fall into two categories.

The first; The rich, power mad imperialists: the ones switching back and forth from company executives to government lobbyists and Representatives, the ones that benefited from the current economic meltdown, the ones pouring money into the campaigns of politicians that will later represent their interests in the State, the shadow CEOs, perfectly happy to perpetuate the current trend of low taxes, mass ignorance, poverty, disunity and deregulation. The ones that need the masses to believe in nonsensical ideas like 'too big to fail,' or 'death panels,' or 'small government,' that need the illusion that the system is fair, that hard work is the touchstone of success, that the voice of the little man is important. Their greatest strength lies in self-perpetuating falsehoods: That the unemployed are lazy, that the poor deserve to be poor, that they are being repressed, not by their oppressors, but by their fellow proletariat.

The second, of course, is the type of lower-class, herd-mentality, low functioning, country music and NASCAR loving apes that can be easily tricked into believing they have more in common with the smooth-talking, white multimillionaire that owns the company that enslaves him than with his dark-skinned (or Muslim or gay or female or whatever,) analogue. This type of capital B Believer seems custom made to be manipulated. Truth, to this type of person, is almost infinitely malleable. By harnessing this infantile and almost impossible level of naivete and lack of critical thinking with an almost endless capacity for misguided anger they have created the perfect army: the kind that doesn't require payment.

Truth isn't facts or dates or figures. Not to Sgt. NASCAR up there. Truth is a shared hallucination, a passionate conviction of faith, an agreed upon delusion. Truth is a catchy slogan. Death-Panels. Intelligent Design. The Bible is truth, and the Bible can be spun to support any argument. Incest is A-Okay because Lot did it. See? The dollar is truth, and the value of the dollar is based not on gold or resources, but on the whim of a private institution, (you shoulda listened when your weird friend tried to explain about the Fed). The perception that some people are genuinely evil is truth, and conveniently enough the 'evil people' are the ones that most share their common interests. The only mentality that breeds true evil is the one that is encouraged to see evil in others.

What this has caused is a perception shift in the American public, where the "Right," (Christian/Republican/conservative/etc.) is now seen as this fringe group of ultra-conservative capitalists, and the "Left" is now seen as anyone that embraces proven social programs that benefit the majority, such as socialized healthcare, well-funded public education or the social safety net for the unemployed, mentally ill, elderly, handicapped or those unlucky enough to slip through the cracks. As a consequence, what we now call "Centerist" or moderate views would have, 30 years ago, been seen as "Conservative."

The media, a capitalist institution, has fallen victim to the same amoral buyouts and mutual back-scratchings that took down our political and financial institutions. When the protesters don't represent the same lunatic ideologies as the Tea Party or Christian Dominionists the media coverage dries up. When it doesn't dry up it takes on the tone of condescending scorn, name-calling, derision, conspiracy-mongering (the kind based in wild assertions and linking unrelated coincidences, not the kind based on research and fact-checking,) and other blatant editorializing passed off as 'fact' by an irresponsible press to a public kept in ignorance of the truth.

The Madison, Wisconsin protests over Scott Walker's Union busting garnered a fair bit of attention. The weird thing is that the further up the media ladder one climbs the less 'fair and balanced' the coverage becomes. While online blogs and progressive activist sites treat it with the same gravitas as their conservative counter parts treat, I don't know, assault rifle porn and Planned Parenthood clinic burnings, major news sites were more likely to shift the focus away from the facts and towards editorializing. All of a sudden the buzzword wasn't 'union busting,' it was 'right-to-work.' The "Democratic Walkout" became an 'irresponsible stunt.' Suddenly it wasn't "gigantic ass protest over threatened union bargaining rights,' it was 'Democrats abandon ship while Walker makes tough choices.' It was marginalized and deflated and spun in a dozen different directions. Then the bill was passed. Then media coverage vanished.

Wait, what about the recall elections? What about the lawsuits filed against the State? What about Walker's relationship with the Koch brothers? What about pundits like Beitbart and Palin making against-character statements supporting Big-Government making decisions negatively impacting the working class? What about the smaller protests this caused across the nation?

Here's what happened: They were ignored. Old news. It was close enough to election season to resume the overly simplified black-or-white ideological charade that is American politics. People have the right to petition their elected representatives for redress of grievances, and inconvenient troublemakers that don't fit with the current narrative have the right to be ignored, mocked, demonized, bought out, criminalized, and ignored again.

Next Time: The Austerity of Hope and #Occupywallstreet

A 'Merican Dream

"Convictions are more dangerous foes of truth than lies."-F. Nietzsche

"People are fucking stupid."-anonymous

Ever since I was a young man I've dreamed of being a super-villain. The road has not been easy. I don't know how to build a Doomsday Cannon, I can't afford a secret lair, and I only have one henchman, and she moved to a different state to go to some bourgeoisie 'school.' So she could 'learn things,' and 'get a job.' Since my only super powers involve the ability to know exactly which toothpick someone is about to take out of a toothpick container and the power to make most people feel vaguely uncomfortable around me, I thought I would have to throw in the black, pentagram-encrusted towel.

So there I was, ready to throw the old spandex outerwear, cape and mask in the dumpster and apply for a job in telemarketing or the Motor Vehicle Department when the beginning of the cunningest of cunning schemes began to hatch in my mind. At exactly late 2007 or early 2008 a movement of utter destruction began in America. It combined all the classic elements of villainy: absolute unquestioning certainty that this lunacy was commanded by the gods, a level of self-centered monomaniacal contrariness that should be impossible for humans after the age of 13, and the unbreakable constitution that only the doomed cult member can possess. Combined with a hatred and fear of science and learning, a blatant and total rejection of  self-preservation, coherent communication, rational thought and basic humanity, it was truly a sight to behold.

Formless as a fog and pervasive as a pop song, it rose; casting off the fetters of knowledge, discourse, progress and civility that had bound it for so long. It was weaponized denialism. Striking with the mindless drive of the revolting mob and the clinical callousness of a corporate takeover, America didn't stand a chance. As the prophet said, evil had come to America wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross. It called itself Tea Party.

Historically, the Tea Party was an event in American History that involved Paul Revere and White Jesus sinking the British fleets by firing Thomas Jefferson's illegitimate children out of a cannon made out of the Liberty Bell while George Washington built the White House out of the bones of brown people on the day that Moses and John the Baptist copied the Bill of Rights out of the King James Bible. Fuck you, if politicians get to invent history, then so do I. The current Tea Party aims to... actually I have no idea what the current Tea Party's agenda is. Lower taxes on the rich? Being an easy target for stand up comedians?

Probably not this.

Whatever their ultimate goal is, it didn't take a genius to see that a force this unrelentingly insane could never sustain itself. I, however, am a genius and saw hope: how my Empire of Skulls could be built upon its blackened corpse. After systematically hamstringing and/or dismantling and/or corpse-raping central and local governments through sheer audacity of will, the Tea Party, along with everyone else that doesn't control the things that make a functioning society function, would soon be too concerned with animal level survival to continue its ideological rampage. 

In the near future, having intentionally cut the strings for their own safety net: their access to cheap food, clean water, dependable energy, education, affordable healthcare and gainful employment, the American people would no longer have the capacity to work together or stand up for their rights, and the country will degenerate into what I imagine will be called The Remember-When-This-Happened-In-That-Road-Warrior-Movie Future by the toothless, syphilitic scavengers of the American Wasteland. The only commoners spared from this future, of course, will be those able-bodied and quick-witted enough to be conscripted into the Armed Forces of The Theocracy Of the Unclosing Eye of Jesus.

The good news, at least for me, is that this will save me a HUGE amount of time and money and effort. Just think, I won't have to develop a super-virus to control the population if people not only can't afford to go to the doctor, but also sincerely believe that an imaginary father figure that lives in the sky will cure their child's infected wound if they only continue praying and not making any real fucking effort to learn how to grow penicillin. I won't have to spend decades slowly building a campaign to brainwash the masses into believing I'm an incarnate god sent to liberate them if the masses first convince themselves that anyone that can read or do math or check facts or work an internet is a communist witch that feeds on miscarriages and should be sacrificed accordingly. That's a society begging for a Nefarious and Evil God King.

From there it's a simple matter of training the ignorant, diseased, malnourished masses into a suicidally vicious army while keeping a much smaller cadre of the intelligent and useful back to help run things or to attack any problems that attacking doesn't fix. Like power grids or communication networks. 

The absolute best thing about controlling an army of ignorant, hostile, xenophobic barbarians is that, as a super-villain, I would be morally obligated to not care if they die; therefore I only have to worry about results as I ransack the strongholds of the former elite, regardless of the cost in human life. I'm already practicing my anti-affirmations in the mirror every day: repeating things like "A man that cherishes ignorance is not a man," and "There is no more noble death than to die serving the greater good."

So, with that I'll leave you to stockpile water and ammo for the day everything burns. But just so you know, you will never have enough.