Lonnies Lament
“Life is pain, Highness. Anyone who tells you differently is selling something.”- William Goldman
Psychological projection is a funny thing as is human history. One could easily take headlines of the past 100 years, turn them into some hieroglyphic language and passages of it would look just like this very, very old cave painting.
After a year of 350000 people dead and more dying, giving Wall Street and corporate America’s oligarchy of corporate barons, thug tycoons, and pseudo civil servants a chance to steal trillions, the capitol building has now been abandoned and ‘taken over’ by a lost group of Bobby Jew-haters later to leave with a can of coke, a selfie, and a smile.
If you’re still under the impression that you have a ‘government’ in any real sense of the word I’d take a break, close your eyes, take a deep breath and realize people can do whatever they want and anything can happen as long as it doesn’t mess with these people’s bank accounts, the system that feeds them, and the power to keep it, however, fragmented it might be. That’s what counts, blue or red, I should say blue and red.
Later in the evening, we were allowed hours of speeches from war criminals, insider traders, corporate profiteers, and other social psychotics parading as government servants. The topic, for the most part, is the sanctity of the institutions they have spent their ‘terms’ as it were, (it means nothing in an oligarchy), hollowing out the last vestiges of said institutions that are left in this country. A quick and simplified analogy, which is to say an effective one. The horror of this farce and those to come are singular and should be spoken of as such, it is not ‘like’ anything else. I full well know the value of learning about the history of this planet, the universe, life, the human race, and its rise, information that has always been valuable, but the realities of what we face have no precedent and anyone saying otherwise is selling something, maybe a book, maybe themselves to themselves, an ego trip.
‘The sell’ what a phrase this has become. One of the many cards our overlords have to play is the simplifying of complex problems, well at least the presenting, signifying an image of having simple answers to complex problems. In a sense it does, massacring people via the grimmer side of mother nature whether it be something like Holodomor or the soon to be half a million dead in America, an easy answer to a complex situation…..The situation being maintaining power and the system that gives it, not Covid to be clear. Even clearer, letting these people in America die along with the economic fallout of the lower classes was a simple answer to the problem of keeping the current neoliberal system not only intact as it were but to gain from it, which they have. One can dissect the ideologies, the histories, the contexts, the strategy, all of it, of the right, its past and present in detail all one wants to. One can say, in a room, with people in it, that these past few years in American history have been ‘extreme’ or that we have reached a ‘turning point’, a climax of sorts and you will get plenty of head nods. This would defy everything I’ve learned from history, only that some of the realities of our current social organization have been in a sense brought to the fore of American pop culture which for the most part embarrassingly enough is to say…American culture. I hear things like “everything is so political now”.
With the supposed but not really end of one sell in America comes another, just as dangerous just as hollowed, and whose levels and forms of penury will no doubt be a history all its own if there is anyone around to read it. I’ve always loved the great synthesizers of history, the ability to take something away from its source and use it with something from another, an elementary part of creation. Bruce Lee was a great synthesizer, John Coltrane a great synthesizer, Goethe, Hegel, Bartok, Lamar, Lao Tzu. The online commentary that evolved from one of the Trumps and fellow industrialist bandit Elon Musk using the scene from the matrix in which Neo has the choice of taking the blue pill or the red pill as an analogy to the two-party system could not be more perfect and I’m sure it at the time echoed in the halls of loneliness, social media and blog world. I hate to use it but it works well, only that in this case both are a dream and both are supposedly the only two choices for the American lower classes. The blue pill is on its way, maybe, probably, most likely, without any further interference. Another dream to be sold, this one will feel a little warmer, a little nicer. The description of the ‘Democratic’ neoliberal class, as it will be in the future, hopefully, the etymology of the phrase will travel eventually in its general use to be held in the same light as Fascism as it should be, not in ideology but in results: death, destruction, violence, all the hits of the human race, the classics. These now will be fully arriving home soon as they have been living abroad for the most part. Identity politics will not save us from our coming future, as all the ideological variants developing and branching from the Democratic party won’t. There is another choice for us, the context, form, tasks, implementation, maintaining, etc., will obviously take more than a web post or anything I obviously personally have to say but they are there, to be made, by us. Social organization is always shaky, it is elementarily fluid and malleable. Naturally, we give its physical representations a gigantic, immovable and overwhelming quality, think the obelisk to George Washington in DC or architecture from the USSR, boxy, straight angles, interesting projections. At age forty four a Mongolian, named Temujin, a name roughly meaning ‘iron worker’ was given the title Genghis Khan, Genghis or Chinngis coming from the Turkik ‘tengiz’ meaning ‘Oceanic’, though it is commonly translated as the great or universal ruler. These elements of organized society constantly develop and renew themselves but in a sense stay the same, the phrase ‘Mother Russia’, ‘The Motherland’ for instance hearkening back to Mat Zemlya an ancient Slavic deity, the earth mother. Obelisks themselves going back to Egypt, in its more primitive forms, much older. it’s worth mentioning that the obelisk in DC isn’t called an obelisk, it’s a ‘monument’. Always this veneer of pseudo-originality, of something different.
I can bark this all day I could come up with ridiculous quips like put a pic of Biden and Trump in photoshop, cut and paste trump’s hair on Biden and take three steps back. The Democrats are not the answer to their sibling Right in all its manifestations. This is an old and tired sell used many a time in politics if not all the time in America by both sides, hence the prominent and strong updating of ideologies… on both sides. However the jig is up as it ever has been, Covid-19 like many novel infectious diseases develop within the confines of what is commonly called severe environmental degradation, which in our case in 2021 means just about everywhere on this planet more or less. Devastation will earn a plurality in the common tongue, Covid being one of the devastations that came last year, the Atlantic hurricane season being another, its fifth year in a row of being more and more destructive.
Reread that word devastation and think biology when you do, think molecular, mud, earthiness, ‘chemical interaction’. Imagine a virus, a living thing that lives as one strain or another inside a mammal that is through its own biological makeup, its genes, luckily immune to the virus, but at the same time the virus is happy not to infect other species then something fucked up happens to cause a Viral emergence. A bat virus was given a chance to jump ship and the bet paid off in spades. The virus’s new host was everywhere and in some cases, their hyper-individualistic societies were ripe for infestation. This is the ‘crazy’ as my parents say that is coming and as time will tell is just the beginning of catastrophes to come. The molecular as it, in reality everywhere is nowhere to American cultural, it has no say in the next trove of Netflix series and baconator deals. All talk of virus’ aside the results of industrialization of every aspect of our collective lives not only has its mental and propagandic truths, it lives now everywhere on this planet in the very molecular strains that make up everything you see and everything the human mind can’t. It is the main cause of another invisible killer, cancer. One can say these things out loud and one can watch as the ice bucket challenge amount of soft derision and general amount of uncomfortable ‘change the subject’ type reactions arise. A point I’m not going to bother arguing being Covid in ways changed a lot of things, sort of, not really. It was a massive opportunity for run of the mill shock doctrine. The kind that’s been going on for the last 80 years. If one looks at society on a molecular level the patterns didn’t change much if at all. America the beautiful is now America the collapsing empire as it was before covid, if your reaction to this is who cares, you will, when your kid hasn’t had a drink of water in the last 24 hours. Mmmm I can feel several ice bucket challenge amounts of uncomfortable knee jerk reactions for that comment.
The point is current structures, institutions, etc will not be able to handle it nor can they stop themselves from causing it. The only hope we have, organizing ourselves into power and into new institutions and social structures that can whether it be merely damage control or not. This is true in a very simple sense, in the sense that my car has tires. Humans are naturally social, a general saying that hints at the larger world of humans beings, being societal, what becomes of and what that societal behavior looks like becomes the domain of power despite what our hyper individualistic culture would say.
Here we are again another article, another circle gone round. My reaction to the 21st century, your reaction to it, culture’s reaction to it, will be what it will be. The finger shaking at the reality that America is collapsing is as laughable to me as someone talking to me about dumping ice water on my head. So climb into a bottle, smoke cigs and read books, write a song, become a Wall Street trader, move to Alaska and live off grid, join a political organization, drudge your brain with Netflix series’, point out that I’m drinking an old style instead of some goofy micro brew and change the subject, it will probably get a laugh. I don’t expect answers from any one person but I do expect a reaction. Time laughs at us all, as does anyone who has been through social collapse before. I suggest talking to them. As someone who grew up watching The Princess Bride, I’ve learned much from them. Now remember, ‘life is pain anyone saying otherwise is selling something.’
America 2021 same as the last, don’t slip. I feel that ‘it’s a new year’ vibe coming on…… it stopped.
