Out of Your Trance, Assholes

Yeah, I'm still here. Sort of. I feel like shit almost all the time, and it exhausts me for an entire day just walking to the corner store to get a quart of milk. Hell, it exhausts me to walk from one side of my very small apartment to the other. But I think I shall have to do my damnedest to get some more writing done. Yes, I can! On the rare occasions over the last six weeks or so when I managed to crawl out of bed, I fiddled with this piece of crap computer. I used the "System Recovery" function 10 or 15 times; I lost count. It's supposed to reset everything to "original factory condition." I guess it kind of worked one of the last times. Now the computer only crashes every once in a while. Still slower than molasses, but at least it keeps slowly chugging away most of the time.

So. I've tried to catch up a bit over the last few days, and I've looked over what various commentators and bloggers have been saying about The Most Significant, Metaphysics-Altering, Consciousness-Raising, Paradigm-Shattering Craptastic Farce Election Since the Multiverses Were a Teensy Eeensy Embryo in the Non-Existent God's Fantasy Belly. It's enough to make me advocate forced abortions. Look: it's fine with me if most people voluntarily choose to obliterate their few remaining brain cells and enthusiastically stick their noses in the filthy, smelly ass of the ruling class. Whatever works for you, you know? But Jesus F. Christ, doesn't it trouble people at all to make themselves so utterly, fantastically stupid? I mean, shouldn't there be at least a passing moment of regret that people have chosen to make themselves dumber than unicellular life? It would appear not.

I will not make a show of false modesty here, and instead I will point out that I predicted everything that is now transpiring. I did so on the basis of carefully reasoned arguments based on the available relevant facts, always keeping in mind the nature of the political system that rules our lives. A number of individuals frequently write off views like mine as mere "cynicism." When such criticisms are offered without much (or any) more, this is simply a way of dismissing arguments one doesn't like without engaging them. Well, one shouldn't expect more from amoeba.

I point you to two essays in particular: "Killing Truth and Hope -- The Fatal Illusion of Opposition" and "Silenced: Barack Obama and the End of Struggle toward Truth and Freedom." At the beginning of the latter article, you will find links to many of my essays about Obama's candidacy and the issues it raised.

You should consult the complete essays for my full argument, but I realize that's a lot to ask of amoeba. Because following links and actually, you know, reading rivals intergalactic travel in its complexity (I say nothing of "thinking," since I do not believe in miracles), I offer one brief excerpt from "The Fatal Illusion of Opposition." After describing the authoritarian-corporatist system that is now irrevocably entrenched in the United States, I wrote:

Given this system and its nature and complexity, it is only ignorance, a failure to understand history, politics, economics and culture, and/or repeated, habitual dishonesty and manipulation that can permit anyone to believe that a single individual could reverse these developments over more than a century, or alter them in any significant manner whatsoever. You may wish to engage in magical thinking -- as even liberals and progressives like to do these days, when they repeat with straight faces that Barack Obama's goal is "changing the very nature of politics" -- but deluding yourself that miracles will happen will not alter the nature or direction of our political system. Liberals and progressives correctly and severely criticize the Republicans for believing in such miracles with regard to Iraq, yet when it comes to their chosen savior on the domestic front, they themselves now sound like the worst kind of fundamentalist. Their capacity for critical thinking and analysis has vanished entirely, and they are capable of believing anything. Such people are exceptionally dangerous, especially to all the rest of us; I will be exploring some of the more particular dangers involved later in this series.

Even if we assume that Obama genuinely wishes to alter our political system, the critical point is unchanged: one individual cannot do it. It is folly to believe otherwise. More bluntly: it is deeply, profoundly stupid. And the truth is very different from this idiotic fantasy: Obama is the perfect embodiment of the system as it now exists. He will challenge it on no issue of importance. To the contrary, he will advance the goals of the ruling class and ensure that the powerful are fully protected. He will lie to you about all of this, as he already has on numerous occasions -- but as I have noted, many Americans, including many liberals and progressives, are enthusiastically willing to believe anything.

Rotten health and a shitty computer permitting, I hope to write much more about this in the coming weeks, focusing on developments since the election. Anyone who is "disappointed" in Obama's recent actions failed to understand even a single point of significance during the endless campaign. Of course, there is an upside to self-inflicted terminal stupidity: when you make yourself dumb enough, everything will be a surprise to you. Jumpin' gee whizzes and gosh whillikers! The sun rises every goddamned day! I swear to God, if it weren't for about 12 of you who seem to have some idea what I'm talking about, I'd lie down and die right now. It often seems the most advisable course, especially at this particular moment.

Pending my own future commentary, including some essays on economic developments (check the September archive for many pieces on that topic -- and I again point out that I have been correct in every aspect of my analysis), I offer you some observations from John Ross. I don't agree with Ross on every particular in his column, but he speaks for me on the major issues:

I don't buy Barack Obama as the Messiah. I didn't vote for him (I voted for another Afro-American) and I haven't filed an application to join his regime. He ran a duplicitous, multi-million dollar campaign that masqueraded as a social movement and because it was a gimmick and a shuck, will thwart and demoralize the re-creation of real social movement for years to come.

...

Eduardo Galeano does not get it. When he tells Amy Goodman that he has high hopes for El Baracko because black slaves once built the White House for which the president-elect is now measuring the drapes, he does not consider that Obama himself is a slave, a slave to Wall Street and General Motors and Big Oil and Big Ethanol, a slave to the War Machine and U.S. Imperialism and Israel, a slave to We're Number One jingoism, avarice, and greed and the American Nightmare, a slave to the free market and free enterprise and free trade and the flimflam of corporate globalization, and most of all, a slave to the Democratic Party puppet masters who now move his strings.

Galeano doesn't seem to recall that Afro-Americans can be mass murderers too. Condi is a killer and Barack's big booster Colin Powell once obligated the United National Security Council to cover up a reproduction of Picasso's ["Guernica"] before he could lie that contaminated body in the eye about Saddam's make-believe WMDs and jumpstart a war that has now taken a million Iraqi lives. So far. The bloodletting has hardly abated.

We are in garbage time. The adulatory garbage being spewed about the virtues of Barack Obama are a toxic trick on the peoples of the earth.

...

False Messiahs are made to be unmasked. Anyone who aspires to be the maximum capo of the world's most homicidal on-going criminal conspiracy is just that, a criminal. Barack Obama is a war criminal-in-waiting masquerading as a peace candidate on the pretext that he will move the Yanqui troops two wars to the east to massacre civilians who did not vote for him. I am not fooled.

...

On the night that Barack Obama was elected commander-in-chief, U.S. killers operating under NATO impunity, murdered at least 40 more Afghani civilians - "NATO" has now snuffed out over a thousand non-combatant lives this year in a war that Obama is pledged to escalate.

Ross has more. I must offer one correction to his observations: Obama is not "a war criminal-in-waiting" -- he's already a war criminal. But of course, almost no one chooses to face that fact, among many other facts that most people repeatedly blind themselves to.

I'll be back in a few days, trying to perform my very minor clean-up chores in connection with all the shit that has piled up during my enforced absence. You're not rid of me quite yet. My apologies.

In the meantime, as my headline says: time to wake up out of your trance. You can choose to live in a cognitive coma if you wish. But you may not live for long -- and if you should manage to survive, you will find nothing akin to a life worth living, or one suitable to a genuinely aware, compassionate human being. Not that most people would know the difference, of course...