Man, I see in Fight Club the strongest and smartest men who've ever lived. I see all this potential, and I see it squandered. God damn it, an entire generation pumping gas, waiting tables – slaves with white collars. Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don't need. We're the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our great war is a spiritual war. Our great depression is our lives. We've all been raised on television to believe that one day we'd all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars, but we won't. We're slowly learning that fact. And we're very, very pissed off.
- Tyler Durden
Late January, 2011: Still waiting for the system to collapse, the inevitable cannot be prolonged much longer. Prices at the pump are once again over 3 bucks a gallon, the Pope of Hope has caved and extended the Bush tax cuts for the rich, grocery prices spiking, coffee costs more for smaller cans, the low end bread is so dry that you have to suspect that the wheat is mixed with sawdust and yet the schmucks are still enshrouded warmly in their cocoons of denial. Every day the man grows stronger, the police state countermeasures continue to be rolled out for the one day when the sheep will no longer be content to remain entranced by their beloved 50 inch living room gods, the day when finally, in the final leg of their journey to the steel chutes they will realize that they are doomed, have always been doomed and the only real choice is to just meekly submit or go out thrashing, striking in every direction. Uprisings are increasing throughout the world, most recently in Egypt yet on the great American lemming farm there is nothing, that is unless one believes that the ludicrous, co-opted Tea Party is anything other than an assemblage of useful idiots and a corporate endorsed pressure valve to prevent any real sort of insurrection.
While the streets of Egypt are filled with open revolt, people who finally had enough of the despotic regime of Hosni Mubarak, U.S. puppet strongman the news media here only seems to be concerned with how the uprising will affect the precious fucking stock market. The same stock market that destroyed the economic prospects of millions while the politically connected criminals of Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase and Citi are propped up by a corrupt government that runs a torture state. The Wall Street criminals will not only not be prosecuted for their illicit financial schemes, their usury and their use of fraud as a daily tool of just doing business but the corrupt U.S. government will continue to shakedown whatever remains of the once mighty working class to foot the bill for the high-rolling, four-flushing flim-flam men of Wall Street. It is largely the result of the obscene bailout of the big banking casinos by Obama men Tim Geithner and Ben Bernanke that has contributed to setting the world ablaze with the genocidal fallout of balls out commodities speculation.
The rising tide of food prices will contine to fuel global unrest because there is no way on God's green Earth that the Obama administration is going to do anything to shackle the greedheads, eventually the rising tide will become a tsunami and there will be one king hell day of reckoning. Look at Egypt, despite the caterwauling of the garden variety Neocon swine that it is all the fault of those terrible swarthy fanatics in the Muslim Brotherwood fewer and fewer are lining up to gobble up the Empire's self-serving bullshit. Al Jazeera online has provided Americans with real coverage of the ongoing events in the streets of Alexandria and Cairo while the big-titted teleprompter readers with the thousand yard stares and valley girl voices babble on and on about some nonsensical national epidemic of baby theft. CNN has been going absolutely fucking apeshit over one infant being snatched despite around four million newborns who weren't rudely stolen away by some TV addled mentally deficient moron. For the added benefit of the viewing public there is the latest chapter in the lurid life of Charlie Sheen, party monster. CNN has the scoop on the Los Angeles rager that landed poor Charlie in rehab. The prized official source, some hose-monster porn actress bemoaned the epic spree of binge drinking and drug use - shit, sounds like the good ole days to me but then again before the descent into Idiocracy courtesy of the Reagan years and the worm hole in reality that we were all sucked into with the decade of greed, decadence and the transformation of the entire goddamned society into drooling TV addicts, Raptureheads and moral reprobates. So thanks to CNN we get all of the real news, former AIPAC lobbyist Wolf Blitzer has a lifetime gig over there masquerading as the straight man to the rest of the ass clowns.
But I digress...
This is very serious business, this revolution stuff and it's spreading. With any luck, one day it will even manifest itself in some sort of open revolt in our very own bunting-bedrecked armed madhouse. The news just gets worse by the day, the economy sure as hell isn't getting better and now the Duke and Duke wanna be commodities speculators are on depraved binges like Charlie Sheen bearing down on a mountain of pure Peruvian flake cocaine. MSNBC, the preferred viewing network for limousine liberals who hated the wars back when Bush was Commander in Chief just rolled out this headline from the no-fucking shit department "An era of cheap food may be drawing to a close" and now the word is coming down that scientists are in the process of growing meat in laboratories, watch the fuck out Taco Bell! How much longer until the pigs who run the system get around to catching reruns of Soylent Green on the Science Fiction Channel? Yep, in 2011 the land of plenty has turned into the land of plenty of misery and I want y'all to just get one thing in your minds straight: today is the best day that you are ever going to have for the rest of your life. Now that is some heavy shit isn't it? Face it, the US of A is bankrupt, running on fumes and the big time grifters on Wall Street, in D.C. and in the commodities pits are fixing to extract the last drop of blood for the rocks. Get ready for Soylent Red, White and Blue, comin' soon to a Wal-Mart near you. The food crisis has roots in our very own cancerous looter capitalist U.S.A, thanks to Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke whose QE2 is far more devastating to humanity than any of Stalins’ ‘reforms’ ever could be. Shit, Helicopter Ben could very easily surpass the body counts of the ‘great ones’ like Hitler, Mao, Stalin, Pol Pot when it comes down to it..
But because he doesn’t wear a uniform and has is lifelong pampered poopy-hole cleansed with a bidet he is somehow excepted from the stinking mounds of dead bodies that are on his tab…..you can dress up a dork Ivy League elitist in a suit but when it really comes down to it he is still a genocidal maniac. Just watch the bloated bellies of the starving children thanks to now unaffordable food, what is really going to get ugly is the coming gambling in rice prices, just watch the porkers in the pits and penthouses on this one! I am sure that it is going to do wonders for global political stability, rice is the staple food for roughly 3 billion humans, most of whom live in Asia. What is the old warning about letting pyromaniacs play with matches.....?
But here in Murka we are not starving YET anyway, it’s just that food prices are skyrocketing but shit, since food and energy costs are omitted from Core Inflation figures you know, just pony up, take a hit of the Super Bowl E-Crack-E-Trade commercials and plow your money into our blessed markets…enjoy the game, suck down a couple of dozen Coors lites and enjoy the show. Shit the Tostitas are coming in a smaller sized, higher priced bag which most of the idiots don’t realize since the bags are pumped up with more air inflation, the still employed are getting ass-ended AGAIN thanks to commodities speculators drunk on taking straight shots of Sweet Brent Crude without a beer chaser and a system rotten to the core and beholden to a filthy oligarchy driven mad by centuries of incestuous breeding…You Da Man Ben!!!!! In America they have it all figured out, give the sheeple just enough to get by and allow the electronic lobotomies to continue to do the job. The oligarchy and it's servants may be greedballs but they are smart enough to outwit the average tea bagging boobus Americanus any day of the week. The police state hasn't been so painstakingly built on the fake bait and switch about the existential crisis of those damned dirty brown Islamists hating us for our way of life now has it? Those in the heavily fortified gated compounds, the ivory towers and their mansions are going to whatever they can to stay rich, revolt is for the peasants, especially when right here in Der Heimat we have a torture state extraordinaire that is largely hidden from view.
One day fairly recently, in a big box retailer I had a bone-chilling moment of clarity on just how easy it would be to be swallowed whole by the American torture state. A routine purchase of cold medicine led to the seizure of my drivers license by an overly zealous Target team member who ran into the back of the pharmacy to enter me into a federal database. It could be so easy to be disappeared and rendered, a call to store security and minimum wage goons would drag me into an office, the local police would be called, the local fusion center notified…you betcha, they sure have good reason to hate us for our way of life.The crackdown is coming and soon, the rotten to the core Justice Department, chock a block full of fascists and criminals, an overflowing jar of vomit along with our political prostitutes are working 24/7 to revamp and update the 1917 Espionage Act which will then be used to silence dissent. Wikileaks and the mysterious Mr. Assange while providing little of interest (so far) have put a burr up the establishment’s asses as well as justification for he next step. Bradley Manning is being starved, tortured and coerced into giving a confession for which Assange then will be hauled in for his sins, all of our sins actually for those who realize the rogue state’s criminality. There will be a massive show trial, the likes of which hasn’t been seen since America jacked itself off dry over the O.J. Simpson legal circus, a travesty that puked up a cottage industry of cable media flotsam and jetsam that will hit the lottery anew with the Assange electronic lynching.
It'll be a spectacle for the ages and will even top the standard bread and circuses, what Americans really need now is a good old scapegoat, someone who the devil horns can be affixed to and trotted out for an ugly public eviseration, a long-running one of course....gotta keep those ratings up. Move along, nothing to see here folks, just pay no attention to those terrible anti-American brown people running amok in the streets in the uncivilized world. Rest assured that the sawdust filled bread and mystery meat at Taco Bell will still be in supply albeit at a much higher price, thanks to Chairmen Ben and QE 3, 4 and more the fun's only beginning, soon you will need the proverbial wheel-barrow full of Reichmarks to buy a fucking chalupa. The real stuff is gonna start when the oil prices hit escape velocity on the way past 200 bucks a barrel and into the that rarified air of the stratosphere where only the real eagles like the Koch Brothers the Rockefeller clan and all of the lesser known plunderers breathe. Once the oil prices go up up and away and the food trucks stop rolling just how long till those supermarket shelves go barren...even at hyperinflationary prices? My advice is to start stocking up now and arm yourselves to the teeth because the last place that you ever want to be is in the midst of a marauding horde of American morons whose credit cards were long ago maxed out and whose idea of serious preparation for a potential food shortage doesn't extend past a twelve pack of Busch, three cans of Beefaroni and a bag or two of borderline stale chips. Once the shelves run bare then what?
Cannibalism??? Cormack McCarthy’s “The Road” only with iPads and HDTV….I'm not joking either.
So, where to go from here. Why not just start planning for a real REVOLUTION of our very own. I mean come on now, just think of the national catharsis that a series of million man marches on Wall Street could be, especially if we bring along the guillotines. Why can't we do it here?
I would like to now recommend a nice little book by my favorite outlaw cartoonist and serious social critic Ted Rall entitled The Anti-American Manifesto. I happened to catch an interview with Mr. Rall on the hilarious and balls nasty Sirius Radio show Lyin' Cocksuckers with Mojo Nixon (Thursday nights at 8 pm EST on Sirius Rawdog Comedy) about this wonderful little tract which is without a doubt the most radical tract unleashed since the infamous Anarchist Cookbook. While the imbecile Tea Party continue to be duped by lyin' cocksuckers like multi-millionaires Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh to mount their phony little S.A. style stunts while singing the praises to national dimwits hit it big like Sarah Palin and moonbat Michelle Bachmann the real ideas are in books like this one.
Rall opens with this classic bit of truth:
The great triumph of Reaganism is that it has convinced Americans to stop demanding that their government do anything for them. This is absurd. Any government, regardless of its political orientation ought to provide the necessiteis of life- the things everybody needs to live and thrive - for free. Well, not free - in return for paying taxes.
Nice advice now that the rotting carcass of the Gipper is being exhumed anew for some bizarre ritual of national worship thanks to the Reagan Centennial, a fully funded by greedy pigs orgy of fraud that is a testament to the old fraud himself. Reagan's ascension to the throne (thanks to the October Surprise bag over the head kick in the balls to poor ole Jimmy Carter) will be marked by historians one day as the official beginning of the end of America, it was when we reached the demarcation point from anything even remotely resembling reality. The golden-tonsiled fascist, mobbed up, opportunist Reagan, a man who once did campaign commercials to Harry Truman curried much favor by ratting out his fellow actors to the rabid Red baiters in order to further his career. The B-movie actor who once adoringly sniffed the bung of Bonzo became the regular pitchman for critical Military Industrial Complex lynchpin GE from which he used the forum of a weekly show to pitch his form of friendly facism. Reagan then used his clout with mafia infiltrated MCA to rise through the ranks, collecting chits and eventually making Barry Goldwater look like some sort of peacenik, weak on crime, limp-wristed sissy...but the entire Reagan fraud is a story for another time and trust me, with what I have seen in recent days in the grocery store checkstand touting the great Gipper's 100th birthday celebration (they act like he is fucking Jesus Christ or something) any American with any semblance of decency will be sickened.
Rall's book is great reading though, even more so with events evolving in Egypt, Tunisia and hopefully soon to the very doorstep of the House of Saud whose complicity in creating this monstrous system cannot possibly be understated. I will exerpt a bit here:
You can feel it. Or maybe you can't.
It doesn't matter whether you feel it or not. It's happening. The story of the United States of America as we know it -- not merely as the world's dominant superpower, but as a discrete political, economic, and geographic entity -- is drawing to a close due to a convergence of emerging economic, environmental, and political crises.
Nothing lasts forever, empires least of all. And this one, which only began to expand in earnest circa the year 1900, doesn't feel like it has the staying power of ancient Rome.
Not at all.
But we're not here to talk about the vague possibility of collapse at some point in the future. We are here -- in this book and within this historical moment -- because the collapse feels as though it is currently in progress.
We are here because the U.S. is going to end soon. There's going to be an intense, violent, probably haphazard struggle for control. It's going to come down to us versus them. The question is: What are you going to do about it?
Definitions:
Us: Hard-working, underpaid, put upon, thoughtful, freedom-loving, disenfranchised, ordinary people
Them: Reactionary, stupid, overpaid, greedy, shortsighted, exploitative, power-mad, abusive politicians and corporate executives.
Sums it up pretty much right there. The choice is ours now because as as now apparent history is actually taking place, outside of our little warped lemming colony of course but there is hope...provided that we can get our shit together and get off of our asses. Rall is often a bit too charitable towards Barack Obama, the man to me is nothing but a footstool for Wall Street and a corporate product, a teflon-coated bullshit salesman just like The Gipper who he gushes admiration for on a regular basis. Here is a bit more of Rall:
Obama inevitably come too late to actually accomplish anything. Even if a leader like Obama were inclined to push for the sweeping reforms that might save American late-stage capitalism from itself, as did Franklin D. Roosevelt -- and there is no evidence that the thought has crossed Obama's mind -- his fellow powerbrokers, fixated on quarterly profit statements and personal position, would never allow it.
The media talks a lot about reform. But it's too late for nips and tucks. Reform can only fix a system if the system is viable and open to change. Neither is true about the United States of America.
A veneer of normalcy slapped -- sloppily slapped -- on top of a stinking pile of obviously out-of-control unsustainability can no longer disguise the ugly truth: The United States of America is finished. Shopkeepers still take our dollars, foreigners still fear our bombs, but watching the crazy federal deficits, the wildly expanding international military presence, the putrid joke that is our healthcare/education/employment system, and a natural world in free fall (mainly due to the crap pumped into the air and water by the people and corporations of the United States) makes the debate over whether Democrats are better than Republicans feel surreal.
Government exists to serve economic power. In the U.S. and globally, economic power is concentrated in business, namely the large corporations whose profits account for more than ten percent of the nation's gross domestic product. Corporations can't operate without the government. They are codependent, yet independent of and barely responsive to the nation. A nation goes on with or without its government, with or without the big businesses we take for granted.We are not the government that serves those companies. They are parasites, vampires, hideous monsters that underpay and overcharge us and get fat on the spread. Who are we then?
We are their victims. We are weak and pathetic. But only by choice.
We can wait for the system to collapse of its own accord, for the rage of the downtrodden and dispossessed to build, for chaos of some sort to expose and destroy it. But implosion might take a long time. And when it happens, we may find ourselves even more powerless than we are now. They -- the hardcore, racist, undereducated, fundamentalist Christian, anti-civil liberties Right -- are preparing to step into the breach, to seize power. They can't wait to unleash their venomous hatred on the city-dwelling commie hipster fags they despise. They are armed. They recognize that the system is doomed. They've seen this coming. They're organized and willing to merge their disparate brands of conservatism under a common
leadership. Most importantly, they get it. They don't need to be convinced that everything is in play. They're putting it in play.
Christian fundamentalists, the millennial end-of-the-worlders obsessed with the Left Behind series about the End Times, neo-Nazi racists, rural black-helicopter Michigan Militia types cut from the same inbred cloth as Timothy McVeigh, allied with "mainstream" gun nuts and right-wing Republicans, have been planning, preparing, and praying for the destruction of the "Godless," "secular" United States for decades. In the past, they formed groups like the John Birch Society and the Aryan Nations. Now the hard Right has a postmodern, decentralized non-organization organization called the Tea Party.
Right-wing organizational names change, but they amount to the same thing: the reactionary sociopolitical force -- the sole force -- poised to fill the vacuum when collapse occurs. The scenario outlined by Margaret Atwood's prescient novel The Handmaid's Tale -- rednecks in the trenches, hard military men running things, minorities and liberals taken away and massacred, setting the stage for an even more extreme form of laissez-faire corporate capitalism than we're suffering under today -- is a fair guess of how a post-U.S. scenario will play out unless we prepare to turn it in another direction.
Although the U.S. has fascist tendencies, it is unlikely that an ascendant American right would embrace fascism in its classic form. But a post-collapse reactionary government would likely have some attributes of fascism. Robert Paxton, who was my history professor at Columbia and is widely regarded as the nation's leading expert on the field, wrote the book on the subject (The Anatomy of Fascism). As Professor Paxton told me in 1991, the United States is the nation that is the most likely to go fascist, the one that has the most of the necessary ingredients -- including distrust of parliamentary democracy, extreme militarism, and a highly industrialized society -- required for a true fascist state. As things stand, there will be no one to prevent this nightmare.
So this book is a call to arms. And an appeal to self-preservation to those who know we can do better.
If Not Now, When?
A war is coming. At stake: our lives, the planet, freedom, living. The government, the corporations, and the extreme right are prepared to coalesce into an Axis of Evil. Are you going to fight back? Will you do whatever it takes, including taking up arms?
Hell, this is America isn't it? The Egyptians are infinetly more civilized than us as a people, they have managed to shake the world without violence, but I repeat myself, they are civilized, never mistake being busted out, impoverished and neutered and beggared by decades long roaming torture squads. We here on the wild frontier, fed a daily diet of video violence and armed to the teeth will take to the streets like John Fucking Wayne, Rambo or a loosely organized band of rednecks like something out of the old Patrick Swayze flick Next of Kin. Now I certainly don't advocate armed insurrection, I am smart enough to know that the guns and ammo belonging to the average militia schmuck is no match for what the government has. Hell, you can take two-hundred of the most ardent teabaggers with their Gadsden flags, think tank slogans and popguns and a squad or two of U.S. Marines would turn them into hamburger within minutes. But that is the way it's gonna be in a culture that has been indoctrinated to revere gun violence and it's coming soon too.
Best be prepared folks, history is coming. Turn off CNN, turn on Al-Jazeera and get ready for the day when Hell comes to America.
Just my two cents
EE
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