I hate reruns.
(Let me repeat that for clarity’s sake:)
I HATE reruns.
Thanks to my wife’s taste in television, I have now been subjected to the entire episode catalog of MASH at least 15 times (and only 5 times for the 2 hour finale, since they don’t broadcast that episode nearly as often).
It doesn’t stop there, either: 5 times for the entire Partridge Family series, 7 times for all of Little House on the Prairie, 8 times for The Waltons, 14 times for Murder She Wrote, 4 times for Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman… and now we’re working on racking up repeat viewings of NCIS, which will probably go out beyond our record for MASH viewings (we’re now up to 3 viewings of that one’s entire catalog so far).
There was a point some time ago where in order to keep from losing my mind over it all, I pretended that I was attending an updated, modernized version of a Rocky Horror Picture Show event; I’d seen some of the programs so many times that I could almost lip-synch the entire dialog of all the characters of a few of the episodes. And frankly I knew all along that there were far better, healthier things to do with my brain than that: I eventually trained myself to simply retreat to the studio in my home and get in some writing or quality guitar practice when any one of the overly-familiar program opening jingles invaded my ears.
Now it’s one thing to watch the same shows repeatedly, if for no other reason than for background noise while doing something else… but now we’ve got the most serious rerun of my entire life going on. And for the many who haven’t been paying much attention while they’ve been watching their own reruns on their teevees, they suddenly are beginning to wonder “How on earth did all this get started in the first place?”
Well… the exact answer isn’t encapsulated in just one single event, and attempting to address them all would be embarassingly complicated and fill up several diaries (and writing them would seriously eat into my practice time). However it’s possible to create a short “Cliff Notes” explanation by hitting the highlights and low-hanging fruit of this mess, so I’ll attempt to avoid long sentences, big words and abstract ideas that could befuddle an already befuddled nation.
The root cause of what has happened has 4 basic parts that, taken by themselves, are not terminally dangerous to the entire country. But taken together full strength and all at once, they have the effect on goverrnment and civilization like taking a 20 pound sledge hammer to a soft-boiled egg. They are, in no particular order of impact:
- Human Nature
- Apathy
- Tribalism
- Ignorance
Let’s look at each one in a bit more detail (I promise I won’t over-indulge each description)
Human Nature
It’s no secret that humans are apex predators on this planet. If we see something and we want it, we will do (or tolerate) just about anything necessary to obtain it. Food, sex, money, power, fame, control, prime market share, you name it. The part of the human experience that makes us apex predators is in all of us, by degrees of saturation, but the ones that find themselves at the top of the heap of human wreckage almost always are completely devoid of empathy and a sense of community. They hold the mass majority of the world’s material wealth and the smallest, nanoscopic minority of compassion for others.
That said, a significant proportion of people with far lesser means regards the corpulent financial elite in almost religious awe. That psychologists and anthropologists believe it’s designed to curry favor with the elites, or obtain some kind of protection from them similar to how a person would care for their pet goldfish or lizard does not matter at all: they have given up the things that would otherwise help a person to be self-sufficient and compassionate. Benjie Franklin said it best:
“Those who relinquish their liberty for security deserve neither”
The rest of the population shuffles along, going about the business of trying to carve out a tolerable existence in a chrome-plated, integrated circuit capitalist existence that demands fealty to bills, mortgages, car payments and medical expenses with no apparent end in sight except for the eventual coroner’s slab.
Apathy
Combined with ignorance (addressed later here), one wonders how people couldn’t care one way or the other for what happens to the country, so long as it doesn’t affect them? After all, their government spends a lot of time telling them how much they care, and yet almost nothing of a tangible result happens to better their lot. If you were a horse wearing those silly-looking blinders on your eyes, you too would see only a very narrow path where someone wants you to go. In our case, those blinders come in the form of radio, television and the attendant sound bites designed to create the illusion of being well-informed. A person saturated with that many reruns (See? Remember those?) will tend to believe exactly what they are told to believe without expending the energy to learn the facts for themselves, thereby creating an intellectual stupor of apathy - after all, why should they care about the facts when they already believe that everything is cool and normal? Facts do get in the way of a manufactured reality- such as in the past 6 years there hasn't been one republican piece of legislation introduced to address anything that matters to people - like climate change, infrastructure, jobs, health care, student debt, and a host of other issues. And yet the same people will continue to vote those useless wonks back into office for another 4 or 6 years.
Tribalism
Somewhere in my distant past I remember reading a quote by Karl Marx:
“Religion is the opiate of the people…It is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of our soulless conditions.”
Marx could have just as easily have been referring to David Koresh’s members of the Branch Dividians, the followers of Jim Jones at The People’s Temple in Jonestown in Guyana, the disciples of the MAGA cult or the German people from 1930-1945. That deeply-imbedded primal need of human beings to belong to something - anything - no matter how anti-social, deviant, pious, sanctimonious or even dangerous - is one of the most destructive acts of intellectual capitulation a person can do to themselves. One essentially surrenders objectivity and facts that are in plain view in favor of that oft-repeated notion: “Faith is the belief of things not seen.” and then accepts someone’s manufactured “unseen” or conjured version of reality at face value. That line of thinking is what may have prompted Denis Diderot (1713-1784) to pen the following:
"Men will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”
Unlike many who consider Diderot’s remark to be a blasphemous screed against government and religion, I instead see it in a more generalized context: along with human nature’s innate requirement to belong to “something” and its insistence on deifying those with wealth and power to gain favor and protection, even modern politicians tried to warn of upcoming peril unless we started to pay close attention to the things we preferred not to see: something that most persons find very distatsteful. Here’s Barry Goldwater in 1963:
“Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them.”
Goldwater’s warning served as an instructive message to the evangelical movement and all but directly told the future republican political gunsels that marrying evangelical religion, racism and fascist politics together then mentally browbeating the poorly educated and deliberately ignorant with anti-social diatribes would get them where they wanted to be. And here they are… in spite of those who adamantly declared that “It can’t happen here.”
It’s worthwhile to add here that in my opinion, there’s nothing inherently wrong with a person choosing to worship something or someone; however religion should be a very personal thing between one’s creator and one’s self. Much like what someone does with their sexuality, it’s nobody’s business but their own. As someone mentioned recently, we have freedom OF religion; not freedom FROM religion. And that requires the individual responsibility to show respect for other’s religions rights through discretion.
IGNORANCE
The single most dangerous aspect of what has happened to America is what I’ve come to call “shallow electronic intellect”. All too often both online and in person, I’ve had to deal with people who, feigning their ignorance on a given subject, hop onto their phones, punch up the subject on Wikipedia, spend a minute speed-reading through the article, then engaging the conversation as though they suddenly acquired a master’s degree on the subject. Problem is, that isn’t intelligence. What someone attending an actual class in an actual school achieves (at least it did for me) was acquire two things to put the desired fact into perspective: the context under which the fact was arrived, and the fact’s consequent effect on human existence. One cannot possibly obtain that kind of clarity in a purely fact-driven source with no context or cited consequences.
There’s no doubt that the Internet as a repository of human knowledge is an amazing source of information. It cannot, however supplant the dreadful, almost criminal decomposition of the public school experience. Due to mis-prioritization together with social decline, classrooms more closely resemble casting calls for a remake of “Lord Of The Flies”; teachers are forced to attempt impossible scholastic objectives while dealing with 30-40 unruly kids in a classroom and expected to present their lessons with virtually no instruction aids, outdated books (and some libraries have become a resource for combustible winter fuel and kindling) and classroom behavior enforcement now requires guidance from a teacher’s personal attorney before discipline is even discussed, or else they can risk being sued or lose their jobs.
The result?
Fractured, arrogant, kids that become fractured, arrogant adults - exactly what the conservative republican fascist machine needs to retain power in government. To this day I STILL hear from some of the 20 and 30-somethings who claim that there’s no difference at all between Democrats and republicans - the same old Libertarian lie that Ron Paul, Ralph Nader and Jill Stein continue to tell those who either sit on the fence or on their hands.
Then throw in the propagation of fear, confusion, dissent and anger and you have the perfect mix for civilization collapse that makes Rome’s fade into history look like somebody simply threw bucket of water on a camp fire…
And now for the part where we explore why all of this is the rerun I mentioned at the beginning of this diary: THE EXHIBITS!
EXHIBIT A: The 1933 German Enabling Act
(German on the left, English Translation on the right)
This document was the outcome of a strong-armed “negotiation” between the then - German president von Hindenburg and the Nazi party’s leader, Adolf Hitler which ceded control of government functions away from their elected body to the Chancellor and his cohorts. It paved the way for Hitler and his National Socialists to easily barge in and deconstruct elected representative government made up from different parties and appoint his Nazi loyalists.
Given the Latest Supreme Court ruling on Presidential immunity, it should come as no surprise what parallel direction this country’s political future is headed.
EXHIBIT B: Sample Ballot from the Austrian Election asking for Approval for Germany to annex Austria
Notice that voting “Nein” was the less desired of the two choices… could a 2028 ballot in America be similarly formatted in the next Presidential election?
EXHIBIT C: Fascist Tea Party Economist Objective
Grover Norquist:
"I'm not in favor of abolishing the government. I just want to shrink it down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub."
AND:
We don't need a president to tell us in what direction to go. We know what direction to go. We just need a president to sign this stuff. We don't need someone to think it up or design it.
Pick a Republican with enough working digits to handle a pen to become president of the United States. This is a change for Republicans: the House and Senate doing the work with the president signing bills. His job is to be captain of the team, to sign the legislation that has already been prepared.”
I’m reminded of an old editorial cartoon from the times of Newt Gingrich and Bush 41 (I looked everywhere for a reprint and I could not find it) :
A CEO is sitting in a plush chair behind his desk in his luxurious office. An assistant barges into his office and reports that there are no more Middle Class people in the country anymore. The CEO responds, “So what?” The assistant replies, “That means that there’s no customers left to buy our products!” In the final panel, the CEO looks as though he’s seen a ghost.
EXHIBIT D: Current Election Methodology
Steve Bannon, as quoted in Bloomberg, 21 February, 2018:
“Our main work is cognitive warfare, war for the mind. Our propaganda is not about persuasion: it is about disorientation.”
“Our real opposition is the media; the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with crap. Stink up the joint. Flooding the zone and spinning on a daily basis plus shamelessness is a potent combination.”
“What Democrats do does not matter because we always go on the offense. We do not respond to them: we attack.”
“America’s militant Christians are god’s chosen to bring about his divine civilization on earth. We are unstoppable in our holy war, waging in the mind and on the streets.”
“Our agenda is the deconstruction of the administrative state.”
Bannon’s 4th point here ties in exactly with what Goldwater warned would happen. The ongoing problem with America is that voters refuse to believe them when the fascists reveal their intentions for evangelical social engineering - and then after they give the fascists the power to execute their intentions in the voting booth, they get angry and blame the Democrats for someone taking away their “freedoms”.
It’s also useful to point out that this very same identical methodology was used extensively by Joseph Goebbels in his numerous radio addresses to the German people.
EXHIBIT E: The Heritage Foundation’s Clarion Call
Washington D.C.’s latest gauleiter, Kevin Roberts of the Heritage Foundation issued his clarion call to the cult faithful recently:
“We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”
If that isn’t an implied threat, I don’t know how much more direct he could be without ordering Idaho and Montana armed militias to deploy to previously reconnoitered locations where Democrats are supposedly known to frequent.
It’s a very Heinrich Himmler-like remark.
Finally, I might be showing my age - but my intention of this lengthy diary is to point out something that might not be so obvious to a lot of people that requires me to “borrow” from the very first Cheech and Chong party record I ever owned back when I was a kid…in stark, unmistakable terms. It does a good job of summarizing my points and provides a short but appropriate warning.
I won’t describe the record’s entire scenario to conserve space, but the moral of the story goes like this:
“If it LOOKS like fascism; If it SMELLS like fascism; if it FEELS like fascism; if it TASTES like fascism:
THEN IT’S FASCISM!