Wednesday, September 9, 2009

Not Clear On the Concept

Saturday, I spent time petitioning at the Illinois State Fair in DuQuoin. The Green Party space was off (way off) the main path. We were near the track where the Motocross and Demolition Derby were held. So we tried to get those on their way to watch vehicles crash to sign the petition.

A surprising number of people claimed that they were registered to vote. Is this possible? Do people so incredibly uninterested in politics actually register to vote? Why bother?

It really didn't matter whether they signed or not. Almost all offered their opinion of the US morass in this way "This country is going socialist".

How is giving public money to capitalists - socialist? This is a clear contradiction. Socialism wants to overthrow capitalism and replace it with a worker owned and run society. I am unable to comprehend how giving billions of dollars to capitalists could possibly be socialist. Somehow, the American people have been convinced that the ownership of the country's wealth by a very small minority is "socialist".

Local schools didn't show Obama's speech because it was, you guessed it, "socialist".

Let's see. He informs the children that it is their responsibility to educate themselves. He informs them that if they fail to work hard and study and go to college, they won't get a job. He informs them that they need to be smart and educated so that the US can prevail over all other countries in the world.

Sounds pretty capitalistic to me! You're on your own, kid. If you fail, you deserve to sleep in the streets. We will use your brainpower and your labor to take over the world, but all you get out of it is a job.

I can't see how Obama could have made it any plainer to kids that they live in a dog eat dog capitalist society, and it is their problem if they can't make it to the top. (Of course, if they understand math, they will know that, by definition, if there is to be a top 1%, there has to be a bottom 99%).

I tip my hat once more to the amazing propaganda masters of the media. They are outstanding in their field!


5 comments:

ryk said...

This period in our history will someday be known as The Great Conservative Re-Defining. Their ideas are so morally bankrupt that the only way they can still sell them to the rubes is with constant obfuscation. They have so muddied the waters of our politics that words no longer mean what they once did. It's making me quite insane.

David G said...

The indoctrination that Americans get is clearly addling their brains, Wage Laborer. Most will believe whatever they are told by the idiot box.

We who can think, who can see where we're headed, must continue to speak out even if few are listening.

Perhaps, one day, when the Big Brother State comes to pass, more will listen.

Anonymous said...

In the sixties, Kurt Vonnegut wrote an essay called In a Manner that Must Shame God Himself. Part of it reads:

The two real parties in America are the Winners and the Losers. The people do not acknowledge this. They claim membership in two imaginary parties, the Republicans and the Democrats instead. Both imaginary parties are bossed by Winners. When Republicans battle Democrats, this much is certain. Winners will win. The Democrats have been the larger party in the past because their leaders have noty been as openly contemptuous of Losers as the Republicans have been. Losers have thousands of religions, oftren the bleeding heart variety...the single religion of the Winners is a harsh interpretation of Darwinism, which argues that it is the will of the universe that only the fittest should survive...The Vietnamese are impoverished farmers far far away. The Winners in America have had them bombed and shot day in and day out for years on end. This is not madness or foolishness as some people have suggested. It is a way for the Winners to learn how to be pitiless. They understand tha the material resources of the planet are almost exhaused and that pity will soon be a form of suicide. The Winners are rehearsing for things to come...I now glimpsed Abbie Hoffman, the clowning revolutionary...I had the feeling he wasn't going to be clowning much more. A lot of naturally funny people who want to help Losers aren't going to clown anymore. They have caught on that clowning doesn't throw off the timing or slow down cruel social machinery. In fact, it usually serves as a lubricant...Every so often somegody tells me that it is a delicious fact of history that clowns have often been the most effective revolutionaires. This isn't true. Cruel social machines in the past have needed clowns for lubricastion so much that they have often manufactured them. Consider the Spanish Inquisition. When the Inquisition was about to burn somebody alive in a public square, it shaved that person from head to foot. It tortured the person to the point of babbling idiocy, fitted hyim out with a dunce cap and a lurid cloak. His or her face was painted and masked. Hey presto! A clown! The idea, of course was the make the victim comical rather than pitiful. Pity is like rust to a cruel social machine. I do not say that America's Winners are about to burn America's losers in public squares, although if they did, it would be nothing new. I say the Winners are avid to neglect the Losers, which is cruelty too. And neglecting becomes easier, if only the victims or people who represent them will look like clowns. If clownish looking people hadn't come to Miami Beach to raise hell with the convention, there still would have been plenty clowns in the cartoons and prose in campaign literature floating around - jackbooted lesbians, mincing male homosexuals, drug crazed hippies, prostitutes on their way to the unemployment office in Cadillacs, big fat black mamas with thirteen children and no papa around."

Anonymous said...

I reject your premise that the money is going to capitalists. Using government money to bail out or buy out industry is indeed socialist. Everybody suffers at the expense of the few who failed; this is the definition of socialism. Furthermore, it interferes with the free market system - more evidence of socialism.

Our government has no business buying out or taking over private industry.

ryk said...

Our government has no business buying out or taking over private industry.

Then I guess you are happy they did neither of those things, right?