After three days of mouselike quivering in the truck cab listening to the Evil and Stupid party jockey into mutually assured destruction I dropped all contact with “news”. I was in constant motion. I hadn’t surfed the net, listened to what the press shovels into our heads as news, or even seen a headline for weeks. I ignored my blog, deferred addressing the looming menace of tax day, and nearly forgot my name.
Just a few hours ago I resurfaced. All I needed to do was make the last leg on a multi day multi mode trip into nowhere and I’d be safe at home. I flipped on the radio. Since I’d missed over a month of electioneering surely something had changed? I wondered what progress had been made.
The Stupid party: “Trump is still doing fairly well and zillions of people like him. As Republicans we will find out why he’s popular and do the exact thing that most pisses off his supporters.”
The Evil party: “Jesus Christ, that dick Sanders totally won’t leave the anointed one (Hillary) alone. And speaking of innocent, it’s no big deal to be under FBI investigation for the eleventh time. I mean who hasn’t been subpoenaed in a bunch of compromising matters? And doesn’t everyone have a bunch of strange sources of income, questionable contacts, and wads of ill gotten gains? And when someone gives you State secrets it’s no big deal… just blab that shit everywhere. Everyone is hereby ordered to chill out and submit to the inevitable. Did we mention the flying monkeys?”
Really? All that time and expensive scheming and backstabbing and lying has done so little! Both parties, in fact the whole of the 2016 election cycle boils down to this:
“The people have spoken and we, their betters, refuse to accept it. We hereby order them to shut the hell up and do as we’ve instructed.”
That’s the “problem” with democracy (or in our case a Republic). People who have free will make decisions. Inherently some of these decisions will differ from the “elite’s” considered and proper opinion that they strenuously insist all people must hold.
I suppose it’s the mark of being elite? One is elite when they know with no reservations or doubt how other people ought to live? It’s impressive really; the complete lack of humility that accompanies their false belief that they know precisely how everyone should live their lives. I consider it a character flaw. They consider it simply the truth.
Now the people are pissed off. (Why now instead of any year in the last several decades is a mystery but it’s definitely palpable in 2016.) Meanwhile both parties have crossed the line of frustration with dipshits in flyover country and have gone all the way to disagreeing with the concept of free will itself. They can’t fuckin’ stand the citizenry. It’s ever more apparent.
How odd that it must come to this. Yet how predictable. An expanding portion of our society is personally invested in the MANAGING of others. You can call them socialists or you can call them micromanagers or you can call them busybodies or you can call them nitwits but it doesn’t have much to do with their politics. It’s all about their self announced Godlike powers. There are people who allocate for themselves the role of decider and the rest of us are presumed to be cattle. They hang out with each other and tell each other how awesome they are. They’re the fish that can’t see water. They’re walking overinflated egos in need of a pin.
And so it goes until it crosses the dumbass event horizon.
Forget about large clusterfucks like the Trumpening or Sanders’ Quixotic socialist challenge to Hillary’s Tower of Sauron. I have a funnier example. Here’s my report on the mundane stupidity that comes from people who smell their own shit and call it roses:
In a hotel room I saw ads about how smoking will kill your pets. This was meant as a self referential “joke” that was “serious”. It was also stupidity so compressed it created its own gravity.
Someone somewhere collected tax dollars. They used to force of government, including men and women with guns and scary dudes with law degrees, to get this money. (Actually they used ill gotten gains from a huge lawsuit.) Then they expended the seized fruits of someone else’s labor on manipulative ads. These ads tell me my cat will die if I light up a Camel. Suppose I want a Camel and personally experiencing lung cancer isn’t sufficient motivation to keep me away? What then? Will they shoot my ass for my own good? Will they shoot my cat?
Quite simply the kind of person that’ll spend seized funds on ads to manipulate someone’s behavior is a person who’s never considered the ethics of manipulating other people. It’s… for want of a better word… evil.
That’s the crux of it. The problem with that person and their cat saving crusade is not that they’re wrong. It’s that they’re at odds with free will.
There’s more. Stay tuned.
A.C.
P.S. I wasn’t hallucinating. I found the link here. The link goes to America’s State Sponsored media, NPR. Unsurprisingly they like the ads. You expected a State Sponsored Media to say “nah, leave the people alone”? NPR knows everything about how you should live and they know it better than you. So just shut up and do as you’re told.