Fifty Years Of Life Experiences
As of this column’s posting I will be...
Fifty.
Sorry, I had to let it sink in.
Yeah, like some of you, I still can’t believe I made it this far either.
Yes, I am now officially an “old guy”.
I’ve already been getting the AARP mails. I’m now a target for everyone with a nearby
Spencer’s Gifts store stocked with “Old Fart” novelty times.
But what it also means is that I have plenty of experience in certain
things. Experience that is somewhat
valuable… unless you’re a younger person, in which case it is usually
disregarded as being ether “outdated” or “snooty”.
Funny… the very generation that needs the experience from the previous
generation are the ones that shun it the most.
Anyhow, I want to use this 50th Birthday article to share a
few thoughts that may or may not come from experience. Accept them or disregard them at your peril.
Trump Did Not Start The (Norse) Fire! You’ll have to see the movie “V for Vendetta”
to find out what I mean.
Like many things in this world that President-Elect Donald Trump takes
credit for, he didn’t create the potential political nightmare that we are all
going through. He simply fixed his last
name to it. Trump would call that being “smart”.
Former Comedy Central host Jon Stewart said it best: America is the same
country two weeks after the election as it was two weeks before the election.
What is going on in the heads of people hasn’t changed simply because Donald
Trump won the electoral process, even if he didn’t win the popular vote. We’re just not used to seeing that part of
America win. Remember, it’s been sixteen
years since Bush-vs-Gore in 2000.
I’ve been listening to the rhetoric from people over the years. I’m not just talking about the propagandists
in talk radio and Fox News or even those that call in. I’m talking about ordinary people. Your neighbors and co-workers. The ones that will tell you that they’re “not
racists” but they just don’t like the first African-American president yet they
just can’t tell you why without making stuff up about him. “He’s a
commie-socialist-atheist-satanist-Arab-mooslum who wasn’t even born in this
country and surrendered all our military to the Russians and the Chinese and
the mooslums.” And you can’t use reason
to convince them otherwise and you can’t ask for proof because they “don’t need
it”. And yet this is the way that they’ve
been for the past eight years. They
haven’t changed. Their mindsets are
still the same. They just now feel
vindicated by Trump’s win.
These are the people that gave Trump the victory. They saw his very-public faults and excused
them, and they will be the ones that will keep excusing his faults in the
future. They are the followers of the
political death cult that we have all become subject to, and just like the
Branch Davidians, they will ride this crazy train all the way to its fiery end.
But don’t think for a moment that this is anything recent! This movement, this trend, this slouching
towards fascism has been building over the decades. I started noticing this in the late 1980’s,
pretty much when I was in college; which, coincidentally was around the time
when “V for Vendetta” started being published as a comic series, so I know I
wasn’t the only one seeing this happen.
It’s only been building, creeping, smoldering like an underground fire
with every election. Four years of the
mediocre Bush Senior. Eight years of Big
Bubba, Bill Clinton, and his wife, the co-president. Eight years of Bush Junior and his neo-Roman
Imperium. Eight years of Barack Obama
and his struggling cluelessness. And
then along comes Trump and his alt-right acolytes, and finally these people
feel validated and vindicated.
No, if you’re really looking for someone to blame other than yourselves
for what happens next, you need to blame your neighbors and the people that you
work with. The ones that hated Obama but
just can’t explain “why” without making stuff up.
Kill This “Mandate” Crap! I
don’t want to advocate violence, but I really want the people who are throwing
around the word “mandate” to get tongue cancer.
Donald Trump did not win a “mandate from the people”. I don’t care how many electoral votes he got,
he still lost the popular vote. But even
if he did, it still would not make his win an automatic “mandate”. Ronald Reagan won a “mandate” in 1984. Bush Senior won a “mandate” in 1988. Bush Junior won a “mandate” in 2004. Nobody else can make that claim, including
Barack Obama.
Listen, the people who are using the word “mandate” to describe Trump’s
victory are doing so as a subliminal bullying tactic to shut up anyone who
might criticize him. They’re basically
saying “The world is with us, not with you, so shut the hell up and don’t you
dare questions our authority!” These are
punks and thugs, no different than Il Duce’s blackshirts in the 1920’s.
Give The Office A Chance! I know my telling people to give Trump a
chance to serve as President does not sit well with the Hillites that just got
the biggest disappointment in their lives.
I know you’re angry. I don’t
blame you for being angry. You backed
the wrong horse. Some of you sold your
souls to support Hillary Clinton even though you wanted Bernie Sanders to be
the nominee. Worse yet, you got lulled
into a false sense of security that she’d win by your “friends” in the
air-fluffed ego-driven media, and by the so-called “experts” that basically
turned supposed “impartial” polling services into nothing less than propaganda
mills.
I get it. I understand why you’re
out in the streets throwing your tantrums.
I know you want to oppose the orange-skinned-whacky-man with everything
you have, just like the GOP did to Obama for eight years straight. You want to shut down Congress like the GOP
did for six of the eight years under Obama.
You want to throw your disrespect for the man around like the GOP threw
their disrespect of Obama in all of our faces.
But… if it was Hillary that won, what would you be telling those same
people who would be in the “sore loser” spot?
Well, beyond saying “You lost, losers, nyah-nyah!”
You’d be asking them to give Hillary a chance wouldn’t you? You know you would be! You know it!
That’s exactly what you’d be saying with that false sense of grace that
the Trumpets are displaying right now. (By the way, I claim ownership to the term “Trumpet” to describe the
Trump supporters. This is mine!)
So I’m saying this: don’t give Trump a chance. Give the office of the President of the
United States of America a chance for its future occupant to prove his
worth. This is what I’ve been doing in
my own life since 2000. Give the office,
not the man, one chance. Just one
chance. Only one. If it is shown afterward that he cannot be a
true and respectful leader for all of the nation, if he ends up being the very
orange-skinned-whacky-man and #whinylittlebitch that we saw on the campaign
trail, then, by all means, unleash hell.
But then at least you can say that you gave him the opportunity to do
what is right. Then you can say that
your outrage is validated and not based in blinding partisan bigotry. Then you would have the one thing that the
GOP did not have with Obama, but I did after six months… a valid reason.
Know Your History! Even when I was a young man, I knew the value
of history. Sun Tsu said that to defeat
your enemy, you must first know your enemy.
Why do Muslim extremists hate the Western World? Know your history, and you’ll find there’s
more to it than what you hear from the propaganda mills on Fox News and
Brietbart.
You want to know why our economy is so screwed up? Look back at history and see where things
have gone wrong. There have been patterns
of economic booms and busts going back centuries. Why do they keep repeating? Because the people promoting the next boom
constantly deny history and falsely claim that “this time is different”. And it’s not that they don’t know history;
they want you to not know it!
Some people are making comparisons between the incoming Trump presidency
and the one from Herbert Hoover in 1928. But if you really knew your history,
then you’d know that the GOP was not the same party that it was back then, and
Hoover was certainly not the same kind of person that Trump is today. Hoover’s systemic failure as President was a
key reason why the Great Depression was as devastating as it was for America,
and why it led to Franklin Roosevelt’s election in 1932 and his New Deal
programs. Know your history!
Enough With The Slut-Shaming, Liberals! If there is one thing that I am disgusted
with concerning the liberals more than anything is their utter and hypocritical
betrayal towards sex and sexual expression.
This new wave of prudishness – borne from the man-hating factions of the
late Andrea Dworkin – is nothing short of an absolute betrayal of everything
liberals advocated in the 50’s, 60’s, and 70’s.
I know of and I am friends with several women who advocated for and
demonstrated the kind of expressionism in the day that would be virulently condemned
by their modern-day successors. I don’t
know if they would be disgusted with how things have been turning out, but I do
know that I am disgusted with what I see.
The most recent attack involves Melania
Trump, the future First Lady, whether or not we want her to be. Yes, she once
posed naked for modeling shoots. Yes,
the pictures are out there on the Internet.
But so what? Patti Davis,
daughter of Ronald Reagan, once posed for Playboy Magazine back when doing so
was scandalous. And she did so as a
mature woman, not as some fawning don’t-know-anything. So did a lot of other women during the
magazine’s legitimate publication. Hell,
Marilyn Monroe was the very first centerfold model for Playboy!
So why are the liberals going after the latest Mrs. Trump for her past
modeling career? I understand that the
bible-thumpers would do so back when Donald Trump was simply a wannabe and not
the official GOP nominee, but why are the Hillites acting just like the true
enemies of freedom?
Seriously, you liberals need to get off the prude-wagon right now,
because you are going to lose any and all moral justification over LGBTQ issues
as long as you are acting no better than your enemies. And I know you like your
LGBTQ issues!
And speaking of freedom and issues...
Stop Trying To Silence The Alt-Right! I have an issue with the efforts of people
trying to silence the alt-right discussions and banish symbols of their
movement.
First the liberals banned Pepe the Frog, a computer-generated avatar that
the alt-right used for their online discussions. Then they went after Mac
Tonight, aka “Moon Man”, a failed McDonald’s mascot that became Pepe’s
replacement.
Why? Why are you so fixated on
trying to hide and banish the alt-right discussions?
Do you know why the Klu Klux Klan was able to survive for as long as it
has been? Because its chief weapon is anonymity. Your average skinhead or neo-Nazi doesn’t get
this, which is why they never really got too much traction. They’re open and public about what they
believe in. The KKK, however, prides
itself on its secrecy. That’s why they
call themselves the “invisible army”.
That’s why they wear hoods and meet in the dead of night instead of the local
rotary club.
Sure, you had a few openly racist people.
You had people like Senator Robert Byrd or Strom Thurmond. But for the most part they kept their participation
to themselves. You didn’t know if the
county sheriff was a Klansman or just your average ingrown bigot. You didn’t know if your neighbor had a Klan
outfit in his closet. The sneering cook
in the local diner may be okay, but the polite waitress saying “Bless your
heart” may be married to a Klansman. You
wouldn’t know. And even if the Klan was
nowhere in the area, their ideology was pervasive enough to be a part of that
community.
That’s why I say don’t ban Pepe the Frog or Mac Tonight. Put them and their supporters on
display. Bring them into the
sunlight! Let everyone know who they
are! Because I’ll tell you right now, the
first rule of the alt-right movement is to say that there is no alt-right
movement.
We saw this with the neo-conservatives a decade earlier. Their cancerous spread in the Bush Imperium
after 9/11was simultaneously followed by people like FoxNews hemorrhoid Sean
Hannity proclaiming that there really is no such thing as a “neo-conservative”;
that there are only liberals and conservatives.
The first defensive act of any thug is to claim that they’re really the
victims.
Don’t ban the alt-right symbols or the people that use them. Let them be seen! After all, these are the people that helped
put Donald Trump in the White House. Let
them be recognized for it.
And finally...
I have some strongly-recommended books and movies for
you. You know,
it’s funny that when I was growing up, book reading was considered boring. Why read when you can watch the movie? And, really, who had the time to read a
book? That was the mindset I was given
growing up. But, today, you take a book
and you put it on a tablet or a smartphone and suddenly people find all the
time in the world to enjoy it.
But there are some books that I really think you should take the time to
read, either online or on hardcover.
The two biggest books I would suggest anyone to go through are from the
late, great George Orwell.
“Nineteen Eighty-Four” (or “1984”) and
“Animal Farm” are pretty much required reading for anyone concerned about where
we are headed in America. And I would
suggest that you skip the movie versions of these books because there is a lot
that gets lost in the movie adaptations.
“Nineteen Eighty-Four” shows the mechanizations behind a totalitarian
government as seen from the perspective of someone already caught up in the system. It shows how power is maintained and how the
human spirit can be crushed. I keep
telling people that this book should not be used as a checklist or as a “how-to”,
but rather as cautionary tale of how far things have fallen for us. The idea of perpetual war, how easily the
stupid people can be swayed to go from one enemy to another literally at a
moment’s notice, and how abhorrent activities can be excused under the air of
legitimacy can all be seen in this book.
“Animal Farm” shows how idealistic forms of governing can be easily perverted
by the people in charge. But, rather
than using people, Orwell used animals to get his point across. And, yes, I know that Orwell’s story is more
of an allegory for the Russian Revolution of 1917 and to demonstrate the
failure of communism. That was something
big in Orwell’s time. The overriding
script of the time was to condemn communism at all costs.
But let’s get brutally honest here... the real underlying message of “Animal
Farm” is that any system of governance can be perverted so quickly and so
stealthily that nobody would really know any better.
In “Animal Farm”, the front side of the barn has a series of “rules”
about how the farm animals should govern after they chased away their human
masters. One-by-one they are each
altered by those in power in the dead of night.
Nobody lays claim to them, but Orwell leaves just enough clues for the
readers to figure out which animal is responsible. But the scary part is that the animals in the
farm quickly adapt to these changes and even treat them as though this was
always meant to be.
So near the end of the book, you get to the very last “rule”: “All
animals are equal”. And that gets
perverted to “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than
others.” And you would think that this
rule would be the one that the other animals object to, but they just go along with
it.
Now compare that to the man that will soon inhabit the White House. The one that thinks that using sneaky
measures to not pay taxes is “smart”.
The one who thinks that being rich and famous and a celebrity makes him
special than others. Listen to the
myrmidons and propagandists in talk radio excuse his stances and actions as
being appropriate for an “alpha male”.
The Declaration of Independence says that all men are created equal. The “squealers” and the “geese” of the GOP are
essentially telling the world that “all men are created equal, but some men are
more equal than others.”
I can go on and on with this, but I think you get the point. This is why reading “Animal Farm” is so
important to get a grasp of our situation.
There is one more I would recommend and that is the movie “V for Vendetta”. Not the book, mind you, but the movie. “V for Vendetta” was
actually a comic series published in the early 1980’s by the British publishing
company Quality Communications as part of their “Warrior” series. It was later picked up by DC Comics and
republished under their Vertigo brand after they colorized it. It was released as a film in 2006, almost twenty
years after the Vertigo re-release.
Why the movie? Simple. It ties everything in closer than the book
series did. The book series gets sidetracked
too often. The underlying message of how
things got that bad and who stood to profit from it all is shown better in the
movie.
Can’t happen here, you say?
Remember the anthrax scare after 9/11?
Remember the years of orchestrated
scares under the Bush Imperium?
That brings us back, of course, to the first point made in this article
about Trump and how he didn’t start the (Norse) fire. The Norsefire group were the real villains of
the movie. Ultra-conservative,
fascistic, nationalistic, and they were Christian supremacists to boot. They started off as a minor political faction
with no leverage at all, but a series of opportunities of questionable coincidences
elevated them through fear to rule the government. And what the movie shows better than the
comic series is how they got there. Look
past the drama of the starring characters and you’ll see a story that is
starting to get played out now. The only
real questions to ask, then, are: when will the rest of you see it, and then
what will you be doing about it?
Well there you have it. It may be
my 50th birthday but you guys get the gifts. Enjoy!
No comments:
Post a Comment