Anyway, despite Time Magazine's naming of "The Protestor" as "Man of the Year," the Occupy movement is no longer quite so newsworthy since it is holiday shopping season, and the American populace, on average, has the attention span of a moth in a light bulb factory. Like electricity, the public's attention follows the path of least resistance, and it's much easier to think about buying little Skyler a new copy of Battlefield 3 so that he doesn't have to share with his sister Meegan, than to ponder the deleterious effects of corporate-statism on our culture.
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| Fucking Meegan, she only ever plays so that she can hog the controller when I want to play! |
But what I said about being willing to die for fundamental rights and knowing what is true and good and right and all that other shit is still, to me, gospel. Occupy made some noise, and things seem to have quieted down for now, but there are still significant problems in this great paradoxical mass of collected individuals called Western Society.
Number One: Big Smother
I've said, twice, that the Occupy movement is quieting down. Apparently, some people haven't gotten the message. There is still significant Occupy activity from coast to coast - where's the media attention? In the words of Sal, the ABC Warehouse spokesdago: fuhgeddabowdit. Most American's media access is controlled by a few corporate gatekeepers with a vested interest in so being. Continuing to cover Occupy with real earnestness might grant the movement the sort of validity that comes from careful study, coverage, and analysis, which in turn might perpetuate the anti-corporate message behind a lot of Occupy mumbling.
Plus, it's Xmas - the time of year when you're supposed to shut the fuck up and consume. Fucking hippies.
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| I bust out SCIENCE for my blathering internet rants! |
Number two: A Kilogram is Better than a...damn we've got a lot of people in prison
I don't really care HOW we got into this giant, asinine drug war, but it's absolutely time to stop. You want me to consume something, producers? Want me to get that consumer confidence back up to 1990's levels? Let me buy a bag of weed, a carton of twinkies, and all three seasons of Metalocalypse on DVD, and in three hours you'll have one eager consumer ready to buy a new guitar, amplifier, effects pedals, and also another bag of weed and another carton of twinkies.
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| Ah man, bro...heh...like...murderface...and ... what? |
Here we have a perfectly legitimate consumer product for which people are going to prison under the thin guise of protecting health, social structure, and family structure. Dear government: If I want to kill myself, I don't need drugs to do it. If I want to be a shitty parent, I don't need drugs for that either. If I don't want to participate in society, well...okay, in which part of society am I supposed to participate?
Number Three: We are the 10% (or 30% if you factor in people who have stopped looking)
In a capitalist society, you're not participating if you're no buying or selling. I mentioned in last year's Xmas post that Americans have two votes: ballots and bucks. Since nobody bothers to vote anymore, that leaves us influencing the policy of our corporate overloads with our purchasing choices - it stands to reason then that if you have no purchasing power with which to make purchasing choices, you have no influence in world affairs.
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| COMRADES! |
I'll admit that I might be a little bit socialist while at the same time being, paradoxically, anti-statist. Fucked up, right? I mean, how could I possibly pretend to enforce any manner of wealth redistribution if I don't think the state should do it? My philosophy doesn't go much farther than realizing that trickle-down economics don't work, and that income inequality eventually leads to radical social instability, but also that taxation and regulation stifle innovation. So how to reconcile all this? Well fuck if I know, I graduated from public school, which leads me to point...
Number Four: Hey, General Electric in Partnership with Nabisco, leave them kids alone
To paraphrase Jack Nicholson's Joker: Our educational system needs an enema. K-through-college needs a good flushing out, and NOT of teachers. I know, yes, it's me (full disclosure, a teacher) saying "oh no, don't cut teacher pay - how am I going to afford weed and twinkies and Metalocalypse and this new Marshall stack?" - but as I have said again, and again, and again, money is only part of the reason I teach. I teach, and so do most educators, because we love opening up brains. It seriously makes us happy to see little Skyler and Meegan setting aside their video games in order to learn something about global conflict and military force as opposed to just watching a cartoonish re-creation of it's viscera.
Government has no place in education, nor does the MIC. The tax dollars supporting public education have come with a lot of strings, most notably No Child Left Behind- but NCLB is a symptom, not a disease. It's time to explore alternative education. No, not charter schools (half the education, twice the fees), but I'm not opposed to a community-school model
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| Adventure one: shut up and help mommy find her scotch |
Number Five: Hack the Planet into smaller, more manageable pieces
Localized education is pointless without some sort of access to global information - otherwise, you get a "Children of the Corn" / "M. Night Shyamalan's The Village" effect in which small, isolated communities stumble around in inbred ignorance, pooping in their drinking water and discussing what kind of dinosaur Jesus H. America rode to church on Easter.
The internet (said the internet writer) is probably the most important educational tool invented within the last 100 years. I'd like to say "the most important tool period," but I really think water desalinization and vaccines might have it beat. Regardless, while I've written about generalities up until now, I would specifically argue for a free and unfettered internet, and for unrestricted access to so-called "intellectual property" in general (so true Net Neutrality, no SOPA, no PROTECT IP, etc). Ideas are the currency of thought, and nobody should get to horde that wealth.
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| Oh political cartoons- you are the last refuge for the desperate blogger |
***
As much as anything, it's orthodoxy that's gotten this culture to where it is today: the orthodoxy of big business, the orthodoxy of governmental regulation, the orthodoxy of traditional morality. The whole thing has gotten too big and too unwieldy, and in the spirit of full disclosure, world affairs are, have always been, and always will be, too big and too unwieldy.
Thus, there's no solution for the global Western blues except to leave the whole thing to implode upon itself. You can get involved if you like, but the machine will probably chew you up and spit you out. I think there's a nobility in that, but you know what nobility gets you? A cup of coffee if you've also got two bucks.
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| Which war? The fucking CULTURE war! |
But ironically, abstaining may also be the solution. All that hippy shit, like "buy local" and "homeschool your kids?" Starting to sound like increasingly better ideas right along with "buy a gun" and "be prepared." America, to paraphrase the rhetoric and cliches, was founded on principles of freedom and self-reliance. Our America will have less of everything to go around than a generation before, and that's not necessarily a bad thing for you or I so long as it fosters within us a ruggedness that inures us to hardship, and a resilience that readies us for adversity, so that when we emerge from our current climate of crisis, we will, each of us individually, have a new appreciation for what we can make.
Or we could riot in the streets and burn this bitch down. I'm cool either way.
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