Week of 05/13/2013

Capitalism Is Its Own Worst Enemy
– by David Matthews 2

As a fan (and as a fan-based creator) of comic books, I know that a hero is only as good as his or her enemies.  Indeed, quite often the hero’s greatness is defined by the enemy it confronts. 

For instance, Superman’s nobility and selflessness stands out against the greed and narcissistic arrogance of Lex Luthor.  Someone who gives constantly of themselves without reward will always be seen in a much more clearer light when compared to someone who simple takes and takes and flaunts their ability to get away with it.

Indeed, sometimes the hero ends up creating their worst enemies, whether they want to or not.

Going back to comics, all we have to do is look at the history of the Joker and how he came about to show how he became the iconic foil for Batman.  Batman created the Joker, whether by accident or negligence, and thus the Joker became the opposite of everything Batman stands for.

So riddle me this, Internet readers: how you spin a flawed and otherwise bad guy into a good light?

The answer is simple: you create an enemy that appears to be even worse.

We will excuse evil and even enable it as long as we fear something worse than it.  A battered wife will excuse her abusive husband and even defend him for fear that leaving him would be worse.  Molested kids will rationalize their victimization by saying that they would rather endure it than to know that their siblings would be next.  Whole school districts will rationalize allowing out-and-out criminal activity to go on by their athletes for fear that being branded as “losers” would be even worse.  An assistant coach can molest children repeatedly and the university will be silent for fear that the scandal would “stain” their legendary head coach.  A church can be allowed to hide and shuffle around predatory priests for fear that the scandal would “stain” the church’s reputation.

So picture, if you will, society during the Industrial Revolution. 

Greedy industrialists are openly exploiting the workers, causing a division between the haves and the have-nots that rivals those of the old system of feudalism.  They know that slavery is being discouraged, even sparking a Civil War in the United States. 

There is no more fear of “brutal heathen savages” that used to keep the people in check.  Sure they “exist”, but you have to actually go out looking for them at this time.  It’s not like they’re going to show up in the middle of New York or Boston or London.

There’s always the threat of war… but that’s one industrial country against another, rehashing old egos.  No real “threat” to capitalism there.

No, there needs to be something really scary waiting in the wings.  Something that will frighten the average overworked and underpaid grunt so they will actually defend the very institution that is plundering them.

Capitalism needs a boogeyman!

So they invented one.

They took a little piece of speculative fiction by two German theorists by the names of Karl Marx and Fredrick Engels and turned it into the capitalist version of the Dark Grimoire; a book of blasphemy so profane that it should never be uttered in the presence of a capitalist for fear that their very souls would burn.

That is what “The Communist Manifesto” really is, folks.  It is speculative fiction.  It is fantasy.  No different than the speculative future of the late Gene Roddenberry in the TV series “Star Trek”, or the speculative future in H.G. Wells’ book “The Time Machine”, or the dystopian future in George Orwell’s “Nineteen-Eighty-Four” or James Cameron’s “The Terminator” movie series.  You take current events and you speculate as to how the future could turn out.

But it also became the perfect foil for Capitalism.  It combined past and current trends of the time – namely the battle over slavery and the economic disparagement of the Industrial Revolution – and threw in references to evolution, which in and of itself was seen as a profane threat to the power-hold of Christianity, and theorized a “future society” in which all the trappings of wealth and power would no longer exist.

Now for some stuffy rich industrialist sitting in the parlor of some elite social club smoking a cigar that costs more than the year’s wages for one of his child-workers, the very thought of a future without all of those things is scary indeed.  Wouldn’t you consider the perceived “loss” of all that you have amassed to be frightening?  And the more that you have amassed, the greater the fear that you could lose it all.

Of course it also helps if you have someone actually trying to make that fictional future society real.  Take a country suffering from a perpetual inferiority complex, like Russia in the early 20^th Century, and convince certain people that they could somehow skip all of those countless years of social evolution and actually be in that “perfect utopian society” today.  Then you have some idealists talking about how “wonderful” it would be if we could live in that kind of world.  Now you have a physical enemy to point to.  Now you have a force that industrialists and politicians and religious leaders can all point to and lump in the perceived world’s evils and demonize in one-felled swoop.

But it’s still just an enemy in name only, even after fifty years of waging a war-in-name-only called the “Cold War”, after McCarthyism and the Sword-of-Damocles threat of Mutual Assured Destruction. 

Sure the Soviet Union fell, but in hindsight we realize that it couldn’t be the “all-encompassing enemy” that the almighty world of capitalism feared.  The Soviet Bloc fell, with the USSR not far behind it, because what they had wasn’t that “next step in social evolution” but merely oligarchs and stratocrats. 

Here’s a hint, boys and girls: if you need to put up walls to keep people in, then yours is not the “next stage in social evolution”.

No, the enemy that capitalists and their cronies in politics and the media so loudly bray against is neither a country nor a person.  It’s an idea.  An idea that suggests that there is an alternative to the misery of the status quo.

It’s an idea that must be replenished somewhere, right?  Someone or something gives reason for this idea to continue, otherwise it wouldn’t have lasted this long.

The culprits, boys and girls, are none other than those within capitalism itself!

Let’s get brutally honest here… if there is any group that is to blame for people yearning for communism or socialism, the movers and shakers and self-professed “masters of the universe” need only look into a mirror.

Just like communism and socialism, capitalism itself is merely an idea.  An idea is only as good as those that live up to it and claim to champion it.

But when you have rampant instances of greed, corruption, systematic injustice, and an economic disparagement that rivals events prior to the French Revolution, and you have the audacity to call that “capitalism”, you are not encouraging people to support it.  Indeed, you are driving people to look for an alternative… any alternative.

The Russian leadership fell almost a hundred years ago not because of Vladimir Lenin, but because people were without food.  Lenin wasn’t even in the country when the Russian Revolution happened!  The revolution happened because the system failed the masses.  Lenin had to engineer his own revolution in order to get his ideas imposed, and even that involved screwing over the masses in the same way the Czars did previously.

Likewise, do you know what caused the Soviet Union to fall?  It wasn’t because of the strength of capitalism.  It was because the people again realized that they were being screwed over by the ones in power.  The oligarchs and stratocrats that called themselves “Communists” but were living like French nobles.

The biggest selling points for socialism and communism are not the “superiority” of those ideas, but because of the failings of capitalism.  Because of the greed and the corruption and the systematic injustices and the economic disparages.  People will not support a system that is failing them.  They will not support a system that screws them over while at the same time make other people obscenely rich.  And if they are presented a way that will screw over those folks that have been screwing them, guess what?  They’ll probably take it.

The people that claim to be the champions of “capitalism” have a responsibility to themselves and to others to make sure that what is being delivered is what they are promising.  You want to truly defeat the ideas of “communism” and “socialism”?  Then don’t give the masses a reason to consider alternatives.  Stop creating your own enemies and start living up to the “heroic roles” that you pretend to serve.

Week of 05/06/2013

G-String Soap Hypocrisy
– by David Matthews 2

Leave it to my favorite soap opera, “Days of Our Lives”, to continually find ways to annoy me.

In recent storylines for the long-running daytime serial, a certain young professional was revealed to be living a double-life.  This person was forced to take a second job to pay off certain debts, and it wasn’t a job that this person wanted to have those close to them know about.  In fact this person felt embarrassed to have to do this to help make ends meet.  But soon others found out that this otherwise professional person was moonlighting as… a stripper!

This isn’t the first time that the “my secret life as a stripper” story was used.  It’s an old TV formula to show the angst and shame of a young woman as she struggles to succeed and yet keep her secret intact.  The initial titillation turns to horror as the young woman’s “secret” is revealed, and she is condemned, ostracized, and punished for supposedly “debasing herself and her profession” by being a stripper.  She’s treated as a slut.  She loses her professional job.  She loses her boyfriend/fiancé/husband.  She loses her children.  She gets arrested in the middle of some police raid.  She gets driven to despair and sometimes even to the brink of suicide.  And then she quits, or she’s thrown in jail overnight, and she turns her life around and slowly is redeemed in the self-righteous eyes of the community.

It’s tired and old and it continually reinforces the hidden messages that “stripping is wrong” and “you’re a slut if you do it” and “nobody will ever love you until you stop being a stripper”.  But it gets brought up over and over again because it allows the writers to totally engage in soap opera fan-service (“just for ratings”, of course) and then engage in blatant emotional-porn so they can give those hidden messages of self-righteous indignation.

Ah, but this time things are different for the “Days” cast!  It’s “my secret life as a stripper” with a twist! 

Two twists, actually!  Eat your heart out M. Knight Shyamalan.

The first twist is that the “secret stripper” in this case is a guy.  Yes, dashing young Doctor Cameron Davis, brother of the late Doctor Lexie Carver, paid off his huge student loans through working nights as a male stripper.  Of course he didn’t want anyone else to know about this, including his friends and the young blonde woman that he found himself falling for, but they became the first to find out about his secret anyway.

Well, okay, so far so good.  It’s a bit of a change, but, hey, it’s not too long after the movie “Magic Mike” came out so I can see where they got the inspiration.

But then there’s the second twist: what happens when that secret life is “revealed”.

Does Doctor Cameron lose his job?  Does he lose his would-be girlfriend?  Is he shamed and his name is dragged through the mud?

No, no, and hell-no!

Actually, the exact opposite happens.  When other people find out that Doctor Cameron is about to be revealed by the hospital’s Human Resource director, they all show up at the strip club for moral support.  And not just as patrons, but even the men show up to give their own bump-and-grind renditions!

I wish I was kidding about that, but first the music cues up and there was Dr. Daniel Jonas, a.k.a. “Scruffy The Horndog”, the hospital’s bed-hopping relationship-killing man-whore.  Then there’s Brady Black, the moody ex-addict who can’t get into a relationship without ruining it and yet somehow becomes a big corporate executive.  This is followed by Rafe Hernandez… or I should say Detective Rafe Hernandez off-and-on of the Salem Police Department.  All of them up on stage, bumping and grinding for dollar bills along with Doctor Cameron, aka “Apollo”.

And nobody ends up being fired or dragged through the mud.  The “new talent” all tell the hospital administrator (who was dragged down there by the evil HR person) that they did what they did for charity, but eventually the moonlighting doctor comes clean and says he did what he did for his own reasons and never let it interfere with the hospital.  And he kept his job!  (The medical one, not the bump-and-grind one.)

This is where I have to call BS.

Gone is the talk of exploitation.  Gone is the talk of how stripping “demeans” a person.  Gone is the talk about how strippers are no different than prostitutes (something “Days” knows all too well, but I’m getting ahead of myself here).  There’s no talk about crime or drugs, and no mention that this club is in a “seedy section” of the city.  In other words, none of the “negative secondary effects” that are always brought up when the subject of strip clubs are otherwise discussed.  No, it’s just a super-brightly-lit male strip club someplace in the city.

And how about how the audience acts in this male strip club?  The ladies end up doing things that would brand men as perverts!

Even more baffling, though, is the idea that other men would bump-and-grind to help out their friend.  Sure they invented this idea of it being done “for charity”, but, seriously, how many guys in the real world would go to a male strip club that they’ve never heard of before and take their clothes off in front of a bunch of crazed women just to help out another guy they may or may not know?  How many of them would put their relationships and their jobs on the line for this?  Remember, we’re talking about doctors, business executives, and even a police officer!  Nude or not-nude, just the fact that they performed for an impromptu “charity event” would get most men in hot water with Human Resources, especially when it comes to a member of the local police department.

And what if the gender roles were reversed… or in this case “normalized”?  What if it was a female character taking her clothes off in a regular strip club and her “secret life” was about to be discovered?  Would you honestly expect the other female characters of that soap to be hitting the pole to help out their friend and colleague?  And if, by some moment of studio insanity it happened, would you honestly expect those female characters to get away with it, “charity” or not?  Even for a soap opera, where aliens, super-spies, and demonic possessions are commonplace, “suspension of disbelief” can only go so far.

As much as I would not object to either gender having a strip club, let’s get brutally honest here… the cast and crew of “Days of Our Lives” essentially committed a huge sexist and hypocritical insult with how they handled this storyline.  On par, this commentator would say, as the old “rape as seduction” idea.

What “Days” did is essentially glamorize male strippers.  Maybe they are easily-manipulated addicts (Brady), maybe they are moody and stressed-out (Cameron), maybe they are family-killing man-whores (Daniel), maybe they are incompetent heroes (Rafe), maybe they each can’t keep relationships worth a damn, but isn’t it nice to know that the women think they would be best suited on a strip club stage taking their clothes off for dollar bills?  Isn’t it nice to know that the writers and the traditionally-targeted audience think that these men are only good for being used as sex objects so women can fight over every article of clothing they remove?

Bear in mind this is the same soap opera that has its share of former prostitutes and porn stars.  Kimberly Brady, former high-priced hooker, now West Coast therapist.  Eve Donovan, Kimberly’s step-daughter and former psychotic street walker.  Kate Roberts (formerly Kate DiMera, formerly Kate Kiriakis), former high-priced hooker and madam, now corporate CEO.  Chloe Lane, former singer and victim of schoolyard bullying, chased out of town after she was forced into prostitution (not to mention ruining three marriages).  Then there’s Nicole Walker, former porn star and designated pariah of the community, whose very name elicits painful groans from even ordinary citizens.

All of that self-righteous indignation, and yet they have no qualms with men being used as strippers, or for a male strip club to operate in their little “god-fearing community”.  The women in that community used to be the victims of serial stranglers and slashers.  Now they’re screaming wild-eyed customers treating men as sex objects.

As the old cigarette ad goes… "You've come a long way, baby."  You’ve gone from victims of sexism to its perpetrators and enablers.  I hope you’re happy.

I guess what I’m looking for is a little bit of quid pro quo in the soap world.  I want the writers and producers and the cast to remember this storyline and how they handled the subject of male strippers.  And the next time they come up with a more traditional strip club or turn the old “Cheating Heart” bar into a Hooters-style restaurant and show the supposed “shame” of a beautiful young woman working there, I want someone in Salem to give a “Harper Valley PTA” sermon and remind the community of when they were stuffing dollar bills down the boxer shorts of male strippers.  I want the inevitable estrogen-fueled crusade against such a business operating in their community to be thoroughly bitch-slapped on camera, with flashbacks for proof, as a reminder that they set the bar low for themselves, and now they have to suck it up and apply that same bar to others.

And maybe… just maybe… we could then see the same thing emulated in the real world.

Or is that too much disbelief to suspend?

Week of 04/29/2013

Argue From Reason, Not Arrogance
– by David Matthews 2

“Who cares what the majority wants?”

That was the question posed by columnist David Harsanyi for Reason Magazine when it came to gun control legislation.  Who cares about the majority, he argues?  The majority doesn’t matter!  It’s about the Constitution, you stupid ignorant twits! (Okay, the last part was added for emphasis.)

Having read the whole article, I couldn’t find fault with the premise.  And yet I didn’t want to agree with it.  I found myself wanting to dismiss both it and the author just out of spite.  And I didn’t know why!

I’m a practical libertarian.  Not only would I otherwise be agreeing with the author on the premise, I’d be writing articles just like it.  And yet I have this urge to want to disagree with him.

Then it hit me.  It wasn’t about the premise of the article.  It was about the tone given in the article.

Pompous, arrogant, self-righteous… and it’s right there in the title: “Who Cares What the Majority Wants on Guns?”

Who cares what the majority wants?

Bear in mind that every member of Congress is there today because of the majority of the voters.  Every Supreme Court justice is seated today because they were each confirmed by a majority of Senators.  The President and Vice-President of the United States are where they are today because of a majority of Electoral College delegates that were selected from a majority of voters in their respective states.

And if that’s not bad enough, we just got done with a very abrasive Presidential Election season where two dominant political parties not only claimed to represent “the majority”, but also to this day claim to be acting in accordance to that same “majority”.

The so-called “Tea Party” crowd, conservatives and neo-conservatives one and all, claim that they represent that fictional “silent majority” first originated by Richard Nixon.  They demand that the GOP carry out their bidding because of that fictional status.  They demand the dismantling and sabotage of the federal government because of that fictional status.  And they aren’t the only ones playing the “silent majority” hoax either!  The AARP, the NRA, the Christian Coalition, the Parents Television Council, they all claim to represent “the majority”!

And now here comes Mister Harsanyi, who then dismisses the “majority” and says that what they think doesn’t matter when it comes to gun laws!

He may be right, but he doesn’t do his stance any favors with the arrogance.

This is neither the first nor the last time that “the will of the majority” is used to take away the rights of others.  Remember California’s Prop. 8?  The “will of the majority” supposedly dictated that same-sex marriages should be illegal in that state.  Does that make it right?  No.  But it was passed nonetheless, and now it’s up to the Supreme Court to decide if it is right, and even they’ve indicated that they don’t want to be the ones to make that decision.

Speech is censored, supposedly because “the majority” demands it in the name of little children.  Is it right?  No.  But it’s done nonetheless and our courts rationalize it by saying that “family values” trump the First Amendment.

Funny how the First Amendment can be traipsed on continually by “the will of the people” with hardly a word in protest, but when the Second Amendment is targeted we suddenly have these “freedom-loving defenders of the Constitution” who argue that “the will of the people” is tyranny!  And unlike the Second Amendment, the First Amendment uses some pretty no-nonsense words!  You can’t beat “Congress shall make no law”, and yet they do on a continual basis, and all supposedly because of “the will of the people”.

Now we can fight a million-billion-trillion battles one after another after another with the majority on these causes, arguing the same position, the same stance over and over and over again.  We can fight this battle in the editorial sections and on the Internet and on the cable news channels all we want.

And you know what?  We’re probably going to lose a good percentage of those battles. 

Politicians want to stay in office, which means they have to pander to the groups that can get them that majority edge come Election Day.  Lower court judges want to become high court judges, and they know they can’t do that if they can’t get support from the politicians.  The media doesn’t want to take on a cause that doesn’t bring in the majority of viewers.  It’s not about what is right with these groups; it’s about appeasing the majority.  So they will use that to subvert our rights on a continual basis.

Or we can try to cut down on those million-billion-trillion battles by convincing the masses that not everything is about “the will of the people”.  So the politicians won’t feel obligated to subvert our rights on a continual basis.  So the judges won’t feel that they have to choose between their careers and doing what is right.  So the media can talk about freedom instead of trying to nudge down Orwellian nightmares.

Well guess what?  We can’t do that when you have people like Mr. Harsanyi sitting on his high horse and telling the masses “It doesn’t matter what you want!”  That kind of attitude not only turns people off, but it makes them want to do the exact opposite just out of spite!

Sadly, this isn’t the only instance concerning Reason Magazine of arguing from a position of arrogance.

A recent Reason article whines about how the NFL Draft is somehow “unfair” and needs to be abolished.  Keep in mind that the National Football League is still a private organization… a fact that they remind us of at every televised game when it comes to their copyright disclaimer.  So where’s the issue?  Doesn’t this fall under “freedom of association?”  Nobody is forcing you to play football.

Reason’s YouTube channel is rife with mocking and condescending “exclusives” of any protest group or rally that either they or the Koch Brothers have a beef with.  Borrowing a page from Fox News, they look for the zaniest of people, the ones with the weird signs or the outlandish statements, and put them center-stage to be the standard-bearer for that group.  It’s like going to a science fiction convention and then focusing on the protesters from the Westboro Baptist Church and then passing that off as being the whole convention.

Let’s get brutally honest here… if Reason wants to be taken seriously by more people, they need to argue more from a position of reason instead one of pompous arrogance!

It’s one thing to argue from a position of arrogance when you’re preaching to the choir.  You can afford to be arrogant when your audience already agrees with what you have to say.

But when it comes to the Internet, this is not the same Internet audience of fifteen years ago, when most users were intellectual and mostly libertarian and voted for the Libertarian Party candidates in online polls in staggering numbers.  Today the Internet is as diverse as the rest of the world, with liberals and conservatives passing around links based on what appeals to them.  People that have been brought up thinking that might makes right and the majority will have their way no matter what.  They don’t take to arrogant positions like someone from the libertarian choir would.  In fact, they will probably resent what you have to say simply because of how you presented it.

One of the complaints made about libertarians is that they are seen as being stuffy elitists.  It’s hard to get past that kind of negative stereotype when you have groups like those from Reason Magazine perpetuating the image with messages that say “Who cares what the majority wants?”  If the folks at Reason want more people agreeing with them, or at least respecting their stances, and hopefully cutting down on those million-billion-trillion battles against “the will of the people”, then they need to use more reason and less arrogance.

Week of 04/22/2013

The Same Five Sentences
– by David Matthews 2

I’ve learned to do something that people in power don’t want me to do.

I’ve learned to love silence.

If there is ever a reason to turn off the television set, it’s not long after something bad happens.  Get the basic information; the who, what, when, where, and how… and then turn it off.  Turn off the TV set.  Turn the whole thing off.  Put on some music or otherwise just enjoy the bliss of silence.

Why, you ask?

Simple.  Because of the media and their fetish of repeating the same five sentences.

Tragedy happens, like the terrorist bombing of the Boston Marathon, and the media uses it as the justification to interrupt our lives for hours on in.  They barrage us endlessly with talk about the tragedy, the number of lives lost, the number of those injured or missing, the damage caused, even rumors and theories become supposedly “breaking news”.

And for the hours upon hours of time spent on tragic events, they waste most of it repeating themselves over and over and over again.  The same five sentences, over and over and over again, told by different people, rehashed from different viewpoints, and then once again repeated “in case you just tuned in”.

Mind you, I’m not talking about the cable news channels like CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News, where they live for nothing but breaking news and have no qualms repeating the same things over and over and over again.  They need something to happen in order to fill their 24/7 news schedule.  In fact one might say that they were created for this kind of regurgitated news.

No, I’m talking about the mainstream networks of ABC, NBC, Fox, and CBS.  The national networks with all sorts of scheduled programming that now gets sacrificed because of something that happened hours ago.

It’s one thing to have something fluid, like the events of 9/11, or some of the military activity from either the Gulf War or the Iraq War.  Not too many people would dispute the need for the media to provide urgent information to the public in those situations.

But of late the mainstream media news divisions have decided to go above and beyond simply providing the basic information before turning things back to our regularly-scheduled programs.  They’ve turned “breaking news” into excuses to sabotage whole hours of commercial time.

The great “Boston Manhunt” of April 19^th is the best example of this.  Both ABC and NBC took it upon themselves to sacrifice literally a whole day’s worth of programming to cover the supposed “lockdown” of Boston while police searched for the bombing suspect.  Continual coverage over what happened in Boston and that people need to stay indoors and that nothing is open and how empty the streets are.  Well, not really empty, because you had search parties, and of course the media out giving street-by-street assessments of how “empty” things are and how urgent it is for people (not including themselves of course) to stay indoors.

Ironically it was someone that was sick and tired of being held hostage in his own home by the city and the media that led to the discovery of the wanted bombing suspect.  Imagine that: a modest act of defiance to the fear-mongering of the media led to the end of the lockdown.

But the question is why did ABC and NBC decide to waste their whole day talking endlessly about this lockdown, rehashing the same five sentences over and over and over again?  There was nothing new happening, and if there was, they could have always broken in to report it.  Events are cancelled, stores are closed, schools are closed, businesses are closed, people are in their homes, the police are looking for the bad guy, nothing new to report, and there was no reason to justify holding their own viewers hostage all day.

And it’s not just the national networks that are doing this!  The local media here in Atlanta have also taken it upon themselves to drag out news stories obscenely long after their “breaking news” status has expired.

WXIA here in Atlanta, the local NBC affiliate, decided to take a local story of two children caught up in a carjacking and perpetually regurgitate the same five sentences over and over and over again.  The children were found, thankfully, but WXIA’s news people took it upon themselves to hijack the viewers and stay on that story over and over and over and over again, supposedly so they could catch the mother being reunited with her children.

The same video footage over and over and over again of the school where the stolen car was found, the same video footage of the road where the carjacking reportedly happened, the same reporters repeating the same five sentences over and over and over again, lather, rinse, repeat.

And they never did get that footage of the mother being reunited with her children!  WXIA held their viewers hostage for nothing!  Just an endless, nauseating regurgitation of the same five sentences with the news anchor slowly turning the story into a religious sermon.

Now imagine you’re a local businessperson who paid good money to have your commercials appear at a certain time of the day.  That money is now wasted for the day because the news division decided to regurgitate stagnant news for no reason other than for ego-gratification.  Would you want to continue doing business with that kind of station?

Okay, now imagine that being spread nation-wide.  Well, you don’t really have to imagine that, do you?  That is what ABC and NBC did on April 19^th.  They wasted a whole day with stagnant news for something that pertained only to Boston.  The Boston Marathon bombing suspect wasn’t in New York, or Miami, or Tucson, or Cleveland, or Portland, or Dallas, or Charlotte, or Las Vegas, or Los Angeles, or Honolulu, or Anchorage.  It was the news divisions of those two national networks that decided all by themselves that it should involve all of those cities and everyplace in between.  They held their viewers and their paying sponsors hostage for much of the day over stagnant news.

Now you know why I’ve come to appreciate silence of late.

Let’s get brutally honest here… there is no excuse for the media, either regional or national, to hold their viewers hostage with stagnant news.  It’s one thing if the story is fluid.  If events are still happening and the story continues to evolve, then, by all means, keep going.  But if you’re repeating the same five sentences over and over and over again, then you need to wrap it up and save the rest for the six o’clock news.

Because what the major networks have been engaging in at that point is not news.  It’s misery pornography.

Unfortunately there’s no real remedy that we the viewers can employ other than to simply turn off the TV and radio when the media gets fixated on regurgitation.  And it’s not easy, because it’s just as hard to turn off the TV in the middle of so-called “breaking news” as it is to look away from a car accident, but still it must be done.

News has a fast expiration date.  “Breaking” news, even faster.  But only those in the media are concerned as to whether or not that news is “fast”.  The rest of us simply want it to be accurate and honest.  And if you’re repeating the same five sentences over and over again, then the news isn’t “breaking”; nor at that point is it “news”. 

At that point, the only thing that really makes sense… is silence.

Week of 04/15/2013

Where’s the Tea Party for Small Government?
– by David Matthews 2

I was reading the local Georgia paper recently when I noticed something strange was missing.

Local communities were talking about their tax revenues and how city and county officials say they have no choice but to raise local taxes and utilities to make up for the expected loss in revenue due to the extended Great Recession.  The newspaper articles each reported on these things as though they were foregone conclusions that tax rates and utility costs were going to go up to compensate for the Great Recession. 

And that is pretty much what will probably happen.  Local communities will jack up taxes and utilities to make up for the revenue they feel they need to keep the area going.  There’s very little discussion about it, there’s virtually no debate as to whether or not the community can afford it.  They announce it and then it happens.

As I read the latest announcement of a property tax millage hike, I realized that there was something important missing from this regular “foregone conclusion”.  Or, at least they presume themselves to be so important when it comes to this subject.

Where’s the so-called “Tea Party” crowd?

I’ve been watching the local government discussions in the greater Atlanta area, and in pretty much every local decision to raise property taxes and utilities has gone on without so much as a word from the so-called “Tea Party” crowd in protest.  No rallies, no marches, no pushes to have local officials removed from office, no scathing letters to the editors.  It’s like the “Tea Party” is operating in a totally different universe from small-town America.

And it’s funny too because, from what I understand, many of the self-professed “Taxed Enough Already” folks are small-town small-community homeowners.  These are people that have to see their tax bills go up and up, so you would think that they should be the first to start complaining about a bill that they know they have to pay.

So… why are they so silent when it comes to local taxes?

Granted, the voters here in Georgia recently rejected a Special Local Option Sales Tax, which was the first in a long time, but that one was for a special project that got plenty of negative feedback from communities in general.  An aberration when compared to the dozens of taxes that get passed and renewed without so much as a word in edgewise.

And, again, not a peep from the “No New Taxes” crowd!

That should sound off alarm bells given how the so-called “Tea Party” crowd have this thing about taxes and how we all are supposedly “taxed too much” and what they define as a “tax increase”.  They’re normally throwing on their tinfoil tri-fold hats and making picket signs and slapping on cheap bumper stickers in protest of anything that raises taxes.  They talk of needing to wage a new American Revolution or a new Civil War when a tax break is scheduled to expire or when someone suggests cutting a tax loophole.  They supposedly condemn any – and I mean “any” – attempt to raise taxes as a matter of principle… but not apparently for local taxes.

So why aren’t they up-at-arms about what’s going on in their own backyards?  Why aren’t they as fixated about taxes with local government as they are with the federal government?

Are they ignorant of their own local burdens?  I really don’t think that’s the case.  Property tax assessments and bills are sent out in their own individual notices, and, again, the local newspapers are quick to announce when a change in those tax bills are going to be made, with plenty of time before it becomes reality for people to voice their objections, so it’s not really a surprise.

Someone suggested to me that the local governments have a certain measure of transparency that the federal government doesn’t.  People can supposedly see the “need” for those tax increases and accept them.  I have to disagree with that rationalization for two reasons.  First, because objecting to taxes as a “matter of principle” precludes any exception, even those based on necessity.  Second, because I have seen local community leaders base their budgets on tax revenue that did not exist and dedicate an ever-expanding amount of local revenue to certain divisions like law enforcement without proving necessity.  Besides, it should be easier for so-called anti-tax people to complain about local taxes because of that supposed transparency.  Just because Small Government is announcing its intentions doesn’t automatically make it right.

Another suggested given to me is that the so-called “Tea Party” crowd is really a national party and they do best on a national stage instead of smaller battlegrounds.  This rationalization actually comes closer to what I suspect is the truth, but it doesn’t really justify their political hypocrisy.

Bible-thumping freedom-hating groups also claim to be national groups, and yet they seem to have no problems whatsoever sticking their noses in local matters.  If there’s a local strip club or bookstore they want shut down, they have no problem mobilizing people to City Hall to have their will imposed on us.  If they feel some town is lacking a Ten Commandments display in local government, they have no problem mobilizing people and resources to make sure that “their will be done”.

If the freedom-hating bible-thumpers can do that, why can’t the so-called “Tea Party” crowd?  After all, aren’t they supposed to be this huge leviathan of voter outrage?  Aren’t they supposed to be the literal embodiment of Richard Nixon’s fictional “silent majority” ready to rise up and take back control of government?  Any group that is supposedly that large should have no problems whatsoever with a government of any size.

Or maybe the supposed “Tea Party” crowd is not really as large as they claim to be?  Maybe they’re not the fictional “silent majority” that they’ve propped themselves up as.  Maybe the reason behind their fixation on national taxes instead of local ones has less to do with some sense of “anti-tax principle” and more to do with the dysfunction of the federal government and the interests of the K-Street backers?  Maybe the reason why they’re silent about Main Street and Your Street is because they’re only concerned with Wall Street and Pennsylvania Avenue.

Let’s get brutally honest here… if the so-called “Tea Party” crowd is supposedly so interested in taxes, then they need to do far more than just complain about federal taxes.  They need to be consistent with their philosophy and concentrate just as hard on the burdens imposed by state and local government. 

For every announced millage rate or tax rate hike, for every added fee, for every increase in government-run utilities, there should be protests and picket signs and people marching to City Hall screaming “Hell No!”  The message should be resonating from this so-called “not-so-silent majority” loud-and-clear that the mayor or city councilman or county commissioner or state representative that proposes these things does so at the cost of their career.  They should treat state and local politicians just like they would their federal counterparts. 

Indeed, many a federal politician came from the state and local levels.  This is where they develop that pompous belief that they are above accountability.  This is where they learn how to play the system like a rigged game and get away with it as long as they keep certain special interest groups appeased.  Any true grass-roots political movement knows this.

So again, I ask, where is the so-called “Tea Party” crowd when it comes to local taxes and local government-run burdens?  Why do they appear to be so silent on these matters?  Are they silent because they don’t care?  Or are they silent because they’re not what they appear to be?

Sure it’s easier to focus on one body of government than to spread one’s efforts out through fifty states and then through hundreds and thousands of individual counties, cities, towns, and communities, but that is the burden one faces when they claim to be a huge “national movement”, never mind making any kind of broad political statement like opposing all taxes and claim it be “on principle”.  The burden is on you and your members to actually live up to that supposed “principle”, and not just when it is “convenient”.