Once again, the daily blabbery about who will replace Obama -- let alone oppose him -- in 2012 continues.
And because the public has been almost fully conditioned into a rarely challenged state of unnatural expectation of immediate gratification, seduced by technology's embrace of the HEY! WOW! IPHONE! IPAD! WHOOPEE! technology, the thinking-living-working public's sense of process has been thoroughly compressed, if not eliminated outright.
Things (to sum it up quickly so I don't lose you) take time.
And when things have been royally, cataclysmically fucked up by, oh, someone (*cough* *Bush* *cough*) it takes TIME to SET IT RIGHT.
The sight of the little spinning beach-ball on a computer screen causing primal outrage at the unmitigated gall of ponderation -- it's a problem. And it's what's been allowing the purveyors of such time-cleaving, IQ-lowering nar-co-techs to get away with their plans: The Creeps take power from The Peeps. There! Quick and simple!
This, my speed-freaky friends, is a recipe for disaster. And here it is (just in time for the holidays or The War on Christmas -- whichever you celebrate):
Recipe For Disaster
(makes 200,000,000+ servings)
1 democratic republic
6 decades of greed consumed media
30+ years of insidious corporate influence
a dash of extreme religious hypocrisy
a pinch of borderline capitalisto-fascism
regularly stir in "patriotism"
add technology fetish (to lull and distract)
add generous lashings of xenophobia
remove as many regulations as possible
Let sit
Mmmm. Smell that?
But one must ask: why the desperation? What's the rush? Why the catapults firing round-the-clock bullshit pies? Why brazenly sow seeds of divisiveness? What is the prize they seek and why take such obviously wrong measures to attain it?
Far from caring in any way for democracy and the welfare of the citizens, the right wing corporate establishment is, rather, at war with both. And under the guise of business as usual, using the already-in-place infrastructure to deliver a death blow to the democracy we once knew and supposedly cherished, the idea is to utterly eliminate thought in the citizenry and encourage knee-jerk responses to "hot button" issues, most of which the right happily gins up. Instead of giving a hand to those hanging onto the ledge, they stomp the fingers. Compliance and consumption. That's the prize.
And so, I again ask the question: if not Obama, then who? 'Cause if any one of those jolly GOPers get elected, based on all the instant, real time polls and flip-flops and applauded gay-hatred and poor-vilifying and regulation-destroying and middle class-killing and overseas job-shipping tendencies they have in zillions of constantly streamed and instantly absorbed bytes and pixels, then we'd have wished
we took
time
to
think.
Follow Steven Weber on Twitter: www.twitter.com/TheStevenWeber
And thanks for the comment about my 'Christmas Carol."
And if your answer is some candidate that cannot possibly beat the Repub nominee in 2012, what will your responsibility be if that Repub wins?
I'm 57 years old, and I can tell you that my life has been FILLED, on every level, with choices between the lesser of two evils.
But I'll also tell you this: In every opportunity I was capable of, I tried to narrow those choices down to more good than evil. See my post below concerning campaign funding, for what I believe should be the defining issue of every voter wishing to end this "lesser of two evils" situation we find ourselves in every election.
Voting to allow a Republican to take the WH in 2012, will NOT achieve that goal. It will only delay it. A delay I'm sure we both agree we cannot afford.
Vote D, Vote R, or suck it up.
Myself, I will be voting Obama with pleasure.
When Ford ran against Carter, both of those candidates ran on the simple funding provided by the Presidential campaign checkoff box on our tax forms. Same with the contest between Carter and Reagan in 1980.
We MUST march, write, phone, email RELENTLESSLY, on this critical issue. Vote only for candidates that support ending corporate funding. Ending corporate control of elections MUST be the DEFINING issue in every new election, for it is the very CORE of the disease that threatens our democracy.
You might be surprised by how many pols would love to be out from under the need to spend half their time raising money, rather than on the job they were sent to do.
Until laws are written to remove corporate funding from the election and legislative process, the corporations will control even the best pols we elect, and thus also control the nation's direction. That direction is currently off the cliff.
WE are the only ones who can save US/U.S. now.
I think there's something called movetoamend.org which you might want to look at.
However, we have the numbers on our side if we just get organized. OWS understood the need to get in the streets, but they lack, so far, a cohesive message. We all have our favorites gripes, but I now believe the crux of the matter is ending corporate funding of elections.
If we can somehow do that, then our Reps will be freed up to concentrate on what the people who elected them sent them to DC and our local governments for. It's appalling that our elected officials must spend most of their time in office, fund raising. No wonder this nation's in the shape it's in.
“From Wikipedia:
"The Square Deal was President Theodore Roosevelt's domestic program formed upon three basic ideas: conservation of natural resources, control of corporations, and consumer protection. Thus, it aimed at helping middle class citizens and involved attacking plutocracy and bad trusts while at the same time protecting business from the most extreme demands of organized labor. In contrast to his conservative predecessor William McKinley, Roosevelt was a liberal Republican who believed in government action to mitigate social evils, and as president denounced “the representatives of predatory wealth” as guilty of “all forms of iniquity from the oppression of wage workers to defrauding the public.”
Was Teddy a "Marxist?" A "Socialist?" A "Communist?"
Roosevelt's are the very principals Obama ran on, and the ones he is now, at least rhetorically, returning to. Teddy Roosevelt would be appalled, APPALLED at the current Republican party, for they now represent the very policies he was dedicated to ending.”
Our sports saturated pop media has created the cover, a dyadic them vs us meme to distract from the truth. Yay for our side! Boo their side! Obama saw this when he articulated his "no blue state; no red state" riff. Sadly he has either been co-opted or overwhelmed. He is fighting against the Return of the Blob. It divides; it slimes; it slobbers; it slithers. No need to drown the government in a bathtub. The Money-Blob ate our government.
Now that it is done our elected representatives only represent their owners. The Repubs serve their paymasters: blatantly, shamelessly, relentlessly. The Dems make countless excuses for abandoning the heretofor shining ideals of their 20th century reforms. They compete with the Repubs to see how to demolish every vestige of our progressive past. Ask yourself, who runs America? Rich people and corporations. Who does their bidding? Elected officials and appointees. That, my friends, is a coup d'etat.
as much as O has played nice far too long.......he is the only one standing between us and what could
become us if theshamelessteapartyhatrightwinglimpuglicants were given cart blanche.
one can only hope that somehow freed from the spectre of another election - and with every miracle
granted - there is an unquestionable mandate from the voters in every elective office - he just might
become the ONE we thought we had voted for the last time.............
THEIR recipe calls for a vat, not a dash.
Great stuff as always Steven.
That thinkin' stuff is messy.
And it takes time.
Gotta go...
Once again, Steven, you hit the nail on the head--people don't THINK these days.