Tired of Being Governed by CHILDREN and IDIOTS?

essay

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.