Tired of Being Governed by CHILDREN and IDIOTS?

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When you listen to the news lately, have you been shaking your head so much that your chiropractor bills have tripled? Are you disheartened that both major American political parties are being run in the kind of greedy, self-serving way our parents warned us never to run our own lives? You know I do... hell, I started this blog because of it!

Well, joining my ranks is a man who I hold in great esteem, and though I can honestly say I don't agree with some of his causes, there are many of which I DO. This is one. He spoke at length on the subject during his program's final word, and I transcribed it for your reading pleasure. His name is Bill Maher, and in my opinion he holds an inquisitive and incisive mind, and uses a laser beam scalpel of humor and truth to slice through the bullshit and red tape to get to the heart of each matter. He does so now in his latest rant:

A major talking point on the right these days is that it's time to bring the 'adults' back into power, so they can reign in our deficit, defeat terrorism and focus on America's real enemy… cleaning ladies in Arizona. But I must protest this premise, because it's conservatives who tend to believe in magical ideas, like 'America is never wrong', 'you can defeat terrorism militarily', and 'lower taxes will somehow fix the deficit'. And I'm not even mentioning the stuff about how Jesus used to fly around on a pterodactyl and just hated it when homos ate wedding cake.

Now, am I saying that there are no adults in today's Republican party? Absolutely not, there are. But like a lot of parents today, the adults let their kids cow them, and silence them, and rule over them. Rush Limbaugh is a child, but he gets his way because he's the fat bully on the playground. For example, to solve our debt crisis a bunch of Republican senators suggested a bipartisan debt commission, which IS the adult thing to do. But when Obama agreed to it, immediately seven of them said no, now they're against it, because Obama has cooties. That's right, Democrats have cooties so you can't vote with them or work with them, and compromise is treason.

Now compare this to England, where they just had an election two weeks ago and power changed hands, but the party that lost is working WITH the party that won. They're not accusing them of being Bolshevik Zulus out to destroy Magna Carta, because the English ARE grown ups, including their Conservatives, who enjoy a wonderful luxury that conservatives on this side of the pond do not-- they're allowed to be SANE. They don't have to pander to creationists and anti-intellectuals. Only in this dumb country to liberals and conservatives argue over things like evolution and climate change, and whether sick people should be left to die in the street.

The conservative who won in England, David Cameron, was asked if he's religious and he said, "I don't feel I have a direct line." That's right, he distanced himself from God. If Obama did that, we wouldn't see him again until neighbors called the cops about the smell. Conservatives in England don't care about the three 'G's'-- God, guns and gays, that tilt so many elections in this country, and they don't get their policy ideas from TV shows, like 24. You never hear a Brit say 'I'm for torture because it worked on the Avengers'. The Washington Post said David Cameron won by running as sort of an 'anti Sarah Palin'. Heh, heh. Let those words settle in. Anti Sarah Palin? They feel so good coming out of my mouth it's like I bit into a refreshing burst of civilization!

And finally, one hallmark of not being very adult is a tendency to exaggerate. Like this week when Newt Gingrich said, "The Obama administration represents as great a threat to America as Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did. Which is basically the same as saying, "Obama is a BILLION times worse than any president, EVER!" "No, he's INFINITY times worse!" and it made me think, were we this deranged when Bush was in office? I don't think so. And Bush merited it! We once presented on this show a series of 'George Bush Fuckup Collector Plates', which included the Iraq war, not catching Bin Laden, Katrina, Abu Grabh, turning a surplus into a debt, not doing anything about global warming, sitting on his ass on 9/11, outing Valerie Plame, firing Federal prosecutors, nominating Harriet Myers… I mean giant, tangible, horrific fuckups that Obama could never equal-- although with the way he's solving this oil spill he's off to a good start.

Like I said-- laser beam. Okay, I admit I'm not the most eloquent writer... sometimes it seems the phone book is more graceful. So why should I attempt to duplicate his thought with words of my own when you can be certain it will not resonate with the same stifled rage and humorous acceptance at our collective fates as his do?

Because it's a blog, that's why. Speaking your mind is the very definition of this medium.

By the way, did you see the season finale of Medium? Can you believe that she dies... wait, I'll save this talk for a TV blog I'll have to form. Maybe I'll call it 'The Guy Who Watches Every OTHER Show but the Popular Ones', or 'I Liked Fast Forward more than V', or even 'Who is Jack Bauer and Why Is Everyone Talking About What a Badass He Is?' (Who IS Jack Bauer?) Like I say, a topic for another blog. Back to politics.

While it seems like both Houses, and the Supreme Court, and the Administration, is staffed by petulant sniveling brats, I think there's much more going on than meets the eye. I believe we are watching a huge daily lie on television, and are being bamboozled by an enormous hoax.

Sorry Bill, but I think you've had the wool pulled over your eyes as well.

The hoax is that we're not really watching politics at work. What we see is a veritable scripted program designed to squelch our ambition through distraction, called the 'Come watch how badly our government works so you can vent your frustration at the TV screen, and then later in a local bar where everyone shares your viewpoint, and even later when you drunkenly beat up some homeless guy for causing poverty', show.

What we're watching is an elaborate prank set up for us to stew over and hate, so we never find out how the government is REALLY being run. You think we're disgruntled now? Wait till the absolute truth hits the news stands. Oh wait... it can't, because just about all the newspaper businesses have folded or been discredited. All the major TV outlets are owned by individuals who tell us ONLY what they want us to know, truth be damned. And the people who DO try to spread the facts are treated as crazed, ravenous curs by this enormous and biased media.

I mean, when before in history were scientists and other truth tellers demonized and shot down? A little period we like to call 'The Dark Ages', that's when. At least it WAS called that before the Texas school book program rewrote the past. NOW it's probably called 'The Enlightening' or some other doubleplusuntruth. Scary.

So I say it now, here, in this forum which is monitored by nobody and read by even fewer, a place which is safe for me to speak my mind because I have disguised my IP address and send all data to the web via satellite from international waters off the coast of Colorado. Colorado Island. The truth is, and you have probably guessed this already, the truth is that the politicians answer to money. Big money. The voices of the faces behind the world's largest corporations. Their names are barely known, but certainly not secret-- just read the list of Boards of Directors. Certain names keep popping up.

It's them.

Whew! A very heady load they've taken on... running the entire world. It's the kind of job which should be reserved for those people who have a firm grasp of the big picture. You know, knowledge of where all this is heading. WHY they do what they do. They must be smart, huh? Almost Godlike, to have a grasp of everything... right?

I wish.

They certainly do NOT have a good hold on what's important for the Earth and its inhabitants. If they did, they would be reducing the world's population to manageable levels, close to one billion. They would be developing new and clean methods of supplying energy to the world instead of using what's easy, fast, cheap and dirty. They would be entirely invested in recycling, to reuse the products we painstakingly wrested from the Earth years ago and molded to our specific needs, rather than tearing up miles of the planet in search of new ore and piling our discards in vast, filthy landfills that are growing like a cancer everywhere.

What are they doing this for, then? What is the point of all this anyway? WHY do those people seek to subjugate ever-increasing swatches of our population and our land? What good does it do?

It makes money.

THAT'S IT! That's the only motivator for these captains of the world. They don't care about the planet, or the air, or the water, or the welfare of the population. They WANT more people! More people equals more customers!

And (shall I coin a term?) MEGACAPITALISM, or the global game of winner take all, has one goal. One stupid goal, which is... to find the winner. Who gets all the money. In this game, eventually one single person has it all, and everybody else has... nothing. Our forefather's original idea, Democracy, has been bastardized and pushed to the curb, left in a pool of its own vomit to fester and die.

We've been hoodwinked into believing that our votes make any kind of difference. Oh, it might tighten borders or legalize pot or ban gay marriage, but those are the non-issues we've been conned into believing are important.

They are not important. Sort this mess out and they will naturally work themselves out. No, the voting that is important will never make it to ballots. We will never be asked to vote on these issues:

• Shall the Congress and House of Representatives be disbanded, and the former members be placed into corrective facilities for massive theft and fraud?

• Shall earnings, gifts, side work and all other monies and gifts of worth be capped at $500,000 per year, and shall each person's savings be limited to $5,000,000 at all times with any excesses being distributed among the world's poorest?

• Shall all corporate profits be distributed equally among all people to prevent the type of massive wealth which has caused this whole mess?

• Shall we cease the siphoning of petroleum for use as a fuel and devote the world's resources to find viable clean and renewable alternatives?

• Shall we disband the notion of personal wealth in favor of equal wealth, where each person has the same, no more or less, than each other person?

• Shall we no longer give any one person power over other individuals in the form of governance, replacing it instead with mass responsibility?

Radical ideas, some of these. Of course they would not work if we just dropped society into a world run that way-- we would have to build up to them. But if we dropped the concept of each person fighting for their future and instead guaranteed a tailored education, individual goal development and comfortable minimum standards of sustenance and residence all while preventing the cancer of hoarding, wouldn't this non competitive methodology yield a happier, more well-adjusted society?

The only question left would be what to do with the type-A personalities that caused the mess in the first place.

Maybe we could build them their own continent-- made of the terrahectares of garbage in landfills they insisted we create in the first place. We could start by combining the leaking oil in the Gulf with the garbage patch in the Pacific, making a soggy, wadded base upon which to build the NEXT ecoterrorist nation.

It's gonna be a bumpy ride.

The Thought

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In what is appearing to be evermore the exception rather than the rule, I was hit with a flash of insight the other day. Can you believe it? And rather than the mundane, id-inspired child's fantasy which has become my trademark, this idea felt new and smart and revelatory. So rather than let it bounce around aimlessly inside my cranium looking for a dank recess in which to cower, I have chosen to give it voice, to pass my rare words of wisdom along to you all.

In a moment. First, allow me to pepper this arena with questions designed to massage your thought muscle.

•Are we, as a species, civilized or not?

•Are we, like other mammals, helplessly controlled by instincts, or are we able to instead examine our impulses and choose rational paths?

•Can we control our fear response enough to remain a civilized culture, or are we inevitably doomed to backslide and self destruct, time after time after time?

•If is true that we CAN consistently control these actions... then why the hell don't we?

I only bring it up to swivel a five million candlepower spotlight on the answer, which is:

Some people got it, and some people don't.

That's right. I'm saying that while some people use intelligence to create solutions, countless others rest on their simpler instincts when searching for lofty answers to humanity's jarring social issues. There are many, MANY, people who reflexively answer the call for original and complex answers with a chipper 'What They Said', all while pointing at husbands, bosses, labor leaders, captains of industry, religious icons or political officeholders.

In other words, they pass the buck.

Don't misinterpret me here. Some of us surely can work the gray matter, mulling over data and weighing it against years of past experience to hone shrewd solutions our college professors would give a 'thumbs up' to. Some of us.

But some of us can't even puzzle out a bus schedule to get home from work. Those people can't control themselves. They make impulse-driven choices over and over again without using the megaquads of data they've learned as a thinking, experimenting race which allows them to make wise choices.

And unfortunately, their number is growing with each passing day, each passing week, each passing of crappy legislation that further damages our nation's ability to impart rational behavior.

Unfortunately, those who cannot think clearly always seem to end up in charge. The politicians, the religious shepherds and most disturbing, the vastly rich, all somehow end up running the show and making irresponsible decisions from on high that benefit themselves greatly while eroding the veil of civility upon which all of modern society depends.

We see it dropping even now as our capitalist reins pull taut, bringing the forward motion of humanity to a shuddering, protesting halt, and revealing the inner animal each of us becomes when our survival is threatened.

These clear decisions I'm referring to are the choices we must make in order to keep society running smoothly. The ones our mothers (MOST of our mothers) kept banging into our heads: Be polite. Be fair. Share. Be the better person.

We used to all try to be that better person, in spades, in our nation's early history. Even then they still existed... but the rest of us could see them for what they were and so didn't award them positions of power and influence. In that way, magnanimous decisions which served everybody naturally won over those choices which would clearly serve the few. We were keeping the fear and greed and selfishness from becoming policy, a good thing. Unfortunately those policies have recently been re-instituted.

Thanks, fearful selfish greedy people. Thanks a fragging lot.

How did they accomplish this task? In the past these kinds of thinkers couldn't achieve such lofty goals-- their brains smashed into an intellectual ceiling which prevented them from reaching positions of power, the jobs which require benevolent behavior.

Simple. We made the dollar our conscience.

We gave corporations the right to be treated as human, along with the power to vote.

We decreed that money equals voting, so the rich always got their way.

We abandoned the tax structure which kept the rich and the corporations from becoming too big. We allowed them to convince us that taking some of their money in tax and using it for the good of all was somehow selfish, and we somehow were convinced to let them keep most of it.

We allowed them to screw with the nation's free education system, limiting the learning potential of the vast majority, then let them own the media so they could spread misinformation right through our television sets.

We stood by idly while they turned the country's finances into a giant Ponzi scheme prewired to steal our meager savings away and add it, drop by precious drop, onto the vast piles of the OVERrich, leaving the majority poor and frightened and worst of all, nearly helpless to do anything about it.

Wait... that last part wasn't completely correct. We CAN do something about it. We can VOTE.

But even that system has been corrupted. When a ballot measure passes by a couple of percentage points that is considered a resounding win. But when 90% percent vote for one side, it's called a mega-landslide, my friends. We don't see many of those because an avalanche of misinformation is issued prior to each election which confuses the voting public, obscures the real issues and prevents a true reading of the majority's desires.

There is one more tactic the megarich use to keep themselves in power. By the time any bill comes to a vote, it has already been polluted with additions and changes which make it a pale imitation of its original form, a method that would be immensely more difficult to make happen if ALL PEOPLE WERE WELL-EDUCATED.

So I guess my thought is more than "some got it, some don't". In the full exposure, I guess what I'm saying is: Let's make our populace smart and eliminate the twisted influences which destroy the modern mind.

Yeah, that's it.

Perfect World Take Two

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Hello one and all! Thank you for muddling through the last fifty posts or so, if you have done so... if not, don't take credit which you don't deserve. But if you are one of the brave ones, I commend you... and feel for you.

Though I'm certainly not the first, I have reinvented the wheel... but developed one with four sharp corners. That's how I feel about writing all year without direction or editing, and virtually no feedback-- traveling down a long road on square tires.

What did I think would happen? I didn't make this blog widely available-- just wrote it and stuck it here for all to see, a little like viewing a head on a pike.

And what was I expecting, really? The subject matter could be considered... well, dull. It's politics, after all. It's not sexy. All it is is one man's dream for a better social system... one which really doesn't have an iceberg's chance in hell of becoming a reality. Not in my lifetime.

Okay, should I whine? Should I complain that you aren't following my ideas with tongue-wagging excitement? Nah. What does whining achieve, really, except the tut-tuts of a few 'told-you-so'ers anyway? If I wanted any of this to be exciting I would report on real steps being taken in the world today that are leading us to the future I envision.

The problem with that approach is that there are too few examples to cite, and the ones that do exist are anemic at best... not hardly the 'build a new city and import like-minded people to prove this can work' approach I have been penning.

What few reviews I have received began hopefully enough... people hated the very idea of it. So why do I say hopeful? Because of the tenet 'any great new idea will be dually hated and loved.' I figured I just hadn't met the ones who loved the idea yet, so I figured I was on the right road.

Then I re-read them all. Whew!

Needless to say, I really could have used an editor, or at least a follower with a complete high-school education in compositional writing. Me, all I was was the the fountain, the conduit for these (what I felt were) brilliant ideas designed to rid modern society of its unpleasantness. I was NOT an English major, so it was surprising to me that I could string a series of sentences together to make a rational thought.

Rational, yes. Interesting, no.

I began to look for reasons to blame for my failure. Had I started writing too late in life? College is a distant memory for me. Had I spent too much time in frivolous endeavors-- chasing tail, partying and wanton drug use? Have I burnt my brain to the point that subtlety became an impossible goal for me?

Or was I never that smart to begin with?

Introspection is a vicious bitch of a friend, let me tell you.

So I dropped off the face of the virtual planet for a couple of months and went on a vision quest (of a sort) to find my inner voice, my soulful muse. I stopped writing. I sat and thought. I read.

And I came to a conclusion. Drumroll, please.

No drumroll? Oh, okay. I forgot I'm alone here. The end result of my internalization was a list of improvements which would help me pen sentences others want to read.

• First on my list is volume. I needed to write more. Like cracking my knuckles before playing an instrument, I needed rehearsal. Practice.

• Second is quality. Not only should I write more, but the sonnets I produced needed to be better. More gripping, more interesting, smarter. Logical.

• Third is feedback. How will I know if my end product has any of those attributes without receiving real criticism from a quorum of my peers?

• Fourth is exposure. I needed to read more, and dare I say it, steal more. No plagiarism! Not that kind of stealing. I needed to break down the components of an already gripping story and follow the same architecture with my own, sort of like hearing a blues tune and writing one of my own in the same blues style.

• Fifth is a different kind of exposure-- where I experience firsthand the issues that represent to me the failure of our social arrangement. I'm talking road trip... walkabout. Watching the destruction of America from within is a good start, but to get a visceral sense of it all I must be right up in the face of it. I've never even been hungry, such is my life of shielding.

• Sixth and most difficult is commitment. My life has to be ordered in such a fashion that it facilitates the forming of meaningful parables.

• Seventh (and impossible) is background. I have to BE the man who would write a treatise like the Aden Codex. Like a guru on a mountaintop or a monk committed to silence, I must become the person who would ostensibly pen an opus like that.

When an author comes onto a talk show we hear about his 'credentials' and can nod wisely at them-- "She was a teacher and had the background to write a book about learning disabilities" -- "He was a lifelong chef and so wrote a cookbook of delectable recipes" -- "She was a prostitute and of course wrote a book about politics" -- that sort of thing.

I don't have the qualifications which support me as a philosophical thinker. Right now Jon Stewart might introduce me this way: "He wrote a heady discourse on the remodeling of American society, which makes perfect sense since he spent his working life as a carpenter and his off hours as an addict of cheap network television."

Yeah, that's not gonna fly.

So knocking around for a couple of months without writing so much as a shopping list was my solution to being a sub-par writer.

Actually, that was just step one, wherein I kicked myself daily for being a self-assured idiot.

Step two, as well as all the other steps, are in the process of occurring. I'm joining a writing support group. Some people have warned me against this-- they feel a support group made up of failed writers will just enhance my ability to be a failed writer. Maybe so, but I want to check it out for myself. At least there I can see what NOT to do.

Step three is to submit my finest short story to as many publishers as I can. I don't care if it ends up gracing the pages of 'Preschool Weekly'... it is a confidence-building exercise I can hang on my wall, like the first dollar I ever made.

It may turn out that I'm not an 'Utne Reader' type of author. Maybe I'm just a 'Weekly Reader' writer. Step four would be to determine which of those I actually am. There might be a bright future for me in the children's book section. I just hope it's the future where I am writing them, not just alphabetizing the shelves (I forget... does 'T' come before or after '§'?).

Regardless of any way that this fallout occurs, prepare yourself in the coming months for a slew of short posts from me. Rather than write stories you would rather not read (as I've been doing in the past), I'll be concentrating on creating a reality commentary that you would rather not read. With any luck somewhere in the middle of this all there should be a subtle change to my output.

A change for the better, I'm hoping. Wish me luck.

Copyright 2010 Bruce Ian Friedman