August 7, 2009

The Revolution WIll Be Tased

Being out of heart with government
I took a broken root to fling
Where the proud, wayward squirrel went,
Taking delight that he could spring;
And he, with that low whinnying sound
That is like laughter, sprang again
And so to the other tree at a bound.
Nor the tame will, nor timid brain,
Nor heavy knitting of the brow
Bred that fierce tooth and cleanly limb
And threw him up to laugh on the bough;
No government appointed him.
- W.B. Yeats, "An Appointment," from Responsibilities, 1914


The 64th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima just passed, and I forgot to quote one of Oscar Wilde's arrows of truths. "For life," said Wilde, "is terribly deficient in form. Its catastrophes happen in the wrong way and to the wrong people." He died at the dawn of the modern nightmare, but before he disappeared he summed up the century ahead in that one statement.


Curtain Falls - And So It Begins

Before we start to think that we are the crazy and paranoid ones, let us not forget that the secret agents of the State, as well as employees of dominant and private Corporations whose decisions affect society at large, and generally anyone within a closed institution, are the most paranoid and fearful creatures on this God-Green Earth. Making a pact against the public, whether you work for the police, intelligence services, or a health care company, leaves you exposed all the time, and from inside and outside your institution. Hence, all the propaganda, lobbying, disinformation, scapegoating, threats, blackmail, etc, aimed for and against the public. But there is a funny thing about using the devil's tricks; they only work if people continue to believe that you are the devil. It is disappointing to know that you're enemy is not as convincing as he appears. We are not up against supreme deities, but shameless copycats, whose giddiness of having accomplished the greatest heist in history will be their downfall.

America has comical rulers, who share with each other one laugh, and one beer too many. Although I think that the Obama-Joker poster misdirects anger from the Elite to a figurehead, a mere sticker on a machine, it does serve good purposes, and follows a long tradition of parody and satire, which are the best weapons to unmask totalitarian states and discredit the elite's schemes for society. But the Joker detested schemes, so the wrong imagery is being used, and that might dampen its edge. Two-Face would've been a more accurate representation of Obama's psychological nature. Still, it is nearer to the truth of who Obama is and who he works for, than the brainwashed liberals who view him, in part, as the opposite of the Anti-Christ, the Messiah.

Detractors of truth can argue until the cows come home about Obama's authenticity, but it must be recognized that the cows are returning to a slaughterhouse guarded by self-obsessed beer jugglers. And unluckily for us, Obama, the ear honcho, has more pig in him than Honest Babe, who, after all, was assassinated, so he must have done something right.

All the spin-misters who have circumvented the expansion of truth in the American public will never be successful to do one thing, and that is; change the ordinary American's view of his country. The Jeffersonian ethic, and Thoreau's disobedient stamp, are forever fixed in America's unconscious psyche, ready to be excavated and put on display, though not in the museum of thought, but on the theater of life. My task is not to eagerly dress the truth up for unsuspecting minds, using harsh, and polemic language, who will then strip her just as quick, but to bring to light the hidden facts established by history, as quietly as I can. On the surface of my thought, all is contradiction, a crude trick I unknowingly play on myself, not on the reader, and to mislead myself, and myself only. Take the title of this piece for example, the revolution will be tased, but so far I have not in the least bit explained why, or what leads me to believe that such a course will be taken by the police state, and why a physical rebellion will not defeat the plans of our enemies. Oh, wait,... I know why, because it is staring us in the face and needs only to be stated, not explained. Don't think, feeeelll, Bruce Lee taught. In Enter the Dragon, Lee and his teacher have a conservation and their insights are very timely in our fight against the State-as-Father Nature:
Lee: A good fight should be like a small play, but played seriously. A good martial artist does not become tense, but ready. Not thinking, yet not dreaming. Ready for whatever may come. When the opponent expands, I contract. When he contracts, I expand. And when there is an opportunity, I do not hit. It hits all by itself.

Teacher: Now, you must remember: the enemy has only images and illusions behind which he hides his true motives. Destroy the image and you will break the enemy.
The enemy is not easy to break because he is phantasy, shifting matter, and getting a hold of him, in our minds, is the hardest task. To even think in this way is a bit slippery, and there are so many avenues to go down, that I go numb and would much rather not bother on this journey at all. One thing I'm afraid to admit about the planners in support of a one world government, and the high level perpetrators behind 9/11 and other terror attacks, is that they are rational beings, who believe they are doing good, but are afraid to be upfront because their skeptical that the public will understand their 'grander' scheme for history. Or, they are not rational beings, the Illuminati is all evil, and must be cut through. But I can't accept that because even the devil stands for something, which explains why he is willing to go the full length to see his project be completed. I'm still very impressionable, and tend to look at many issues from all sides, so I shudder when I read that Jung thought that "the great problem before us is over-population, not the atom bomb." Either he hit the mark, in which case he is a sage and all morality is doomed for humanity, or he was not all-knowing, and that a great deal of his observations were speculative. As it stands now, I despise the shadow workers, and will work to bring down the banking and political elite who occupy the Tower. Meanwhile, the public is running from freedom's direction and half-blind from the sight of smoke.

I think the Earth can sustain as much life as long as we recognize some boundaries, some restrictions and preserve all sort of wildlife, both with the aid of technology and good morality. As with human growth, there are limits to how much we can take from the Earth. Despite the calls for overt control from frantic environmentalists, it is a good thing that environmental awareness has increased, and the degradation of nature is being acknowledged. All it requires to realize that you can't consume what you don't have the means for, is common sense. My problem with planners like Holdren & Ehrlich(s) and others, who are in positions of influence in the White House, is that they are seeking to reduce Americans' economic means rather than challenging their appetite for material progress in a honest fashion.

Material progress, in of itself, is not a bad thing, as Orwell said, since material progress is the only friend the poor and working classes have. But, as Orwell also said, it is important to conserve nature, which is best done by leaving it alone. Holdren & Ehrlich(s) advocate the institutionalization of government, long-range planning, which I am vehemently against, and for good reasons. Much of the horrors of the twentieth century were planned in advanced, they include; the use of the atomic bomb, the Holocaust, the wars, the economic boom and busts etc. Housing complexes, whose reputations are now tarnished, were constructed by urban planners who did not consult the future attendants of the neighbourhood. All good things occur spontaneously, and once the life flow is blocked, death reigns, boredom is king, creativity is stunned, and men with no heart rule.

We are in a crisis, that's certain, but invention as opposed to intervention will lead us out. Setting up a vertical power grid, whether it is in the service of delivering health care or establishing school zones, goes against all that we learned from the 20th century about how things naturally grow in society, what human beings prefer, and why regenerative, uninterrupted processes are almost always the best method to yield to. Yielding rather than wielding should be the motto of the 21st century. Yielding to nature rather than wielding it; yielding power as opposed to wielding it.

Jane Jacobs beautifully defends against planning of cities in her treatise "The Death and Life of Great American Cities," where she says "planning commissions are organized, just as the other bureaucratic empires are, in fundamentally vertical fashion, with vertical fractionated responsibility and, as need and expediency have dictated, into random horizontal divisions here and there (renewal districts, conservation areas, etc.), coming together under top commands." She later writes that "under a system as unrealistic as this, the coordinators are unable to coordinate, even for themselves, let alone for others." And yet her message was lost on Holdren's ears, who insists that his goals of population control and environmental health are in line with the public interest. As Frederic Bastiat said, "the plans differ; the planners are all alike."

But Holdren & Ehrlich(s), for all their derailment against industry in their book Ecoscience, do express some honesty about the reality that private enterprise that does not actually exist in America. "Increasingly," they write, "the same corporations that swear by the free-market system in some respects ahve shown themselves more than willing to abandon it selectively, campaigning for all manner of special subsidies, tax incentives, and privileges, while expecting the government to undertake the riskiest and most difficult parts of the energy enterprise," [Ecoscience, 1977, p. 862] What this describes is a fascist system and not a free-market one, yet, the planners continue to insist that the State is the lovable mistress being used by cheating corporations.

The State, in actuality, is the engine that is being used to make the energy sector uncompetitive, and because the government is the law, even corporations bow down before it, hence their army of lawyers. Levelling the paying field does not mean ruling out cheating payers, but decreasing the weight of the Umpire-State, so it cannot be thrown around by, and for a select group of elites. Once that type of game is established, the corporate players will be in their own pockets on the field, where as now they are like scavengers, hunting the public wealth. Getting mad at corporations organizing to fraud the public is like getting mad at bears when they go through a picnic basket. The critique must be focused on us, the consumers, along with our representatives in government, and not the corporations.

Albert Jay Nock in "Our Enemy, The State," clarified the distinction between the State, and government:
One may put it in a word that while government is by its nature concerned with the administration of justice, the State is by its nature concerned with the administration of law--law, which the State itself manufactures for the service of its own primary ends.
The pseudo-environmentalists of today desire to take the machinery of the State, and use it for their own purposes, all the while pandering to the public, lying that the consolidation of power and control are being used for the greater good. And to be clear, although the new State is being directed for environmental ends, whatever that means is not clear yet, there still exists the power of the financial elite who are not just co-signing this development for installing a 'Temperature Regime' as I like to call it, but are bringing it about behind the scenes, by funding the think tanks, intellectuals, scientists, etc., who push this totalitarian agenda. Nock goes over the history of the State's directives and handlers throughout its existence, writing:
The State had by no means always kept it hands off trade, but it had never countenacned the idea that its chief reason for existence was, as we say, "to help business." The merchants and financiers, however, had precisely this idea in mind. They saw the attractive possibilities of production for profit, with the incidence of exploitation gradually shifting to an industrial proletariat. They saw also, however, that to realize all these possibilities, they must get the State's mechanism to working as smoothly and powerfully on the side of "business" as it had been working on the side of monarchy, the Church, and the large-holding landed propreitors.
So, what is to be done? Thoreau had the answer:
All machines have their friction; and possibly this does enough good to counterbalance the evil. At any rate, it is a great evil to make a stir about it. But when the friction comes to have its machine, and oppression and robbery are organized, I say, let us not have such a machine any longer.
Historian Jacques Barzun, who is at times very critical of Thoreau and the bent of his mind, was very generous about his poetic vision and style, calling him an Impressionist, saying that "from no other writer does one get such a sense of the immensity of the cosmos, the minuteness of its parts, and the simultaneity of its motions, which keep any object from remaining unchanged even for a moment."

But let's get back to the matter at hand hand, which in my eyes, is challenging the totalitarian tendencies that exist in all societies, but especially those that are rotting up in the West at this point. At the end of the second world war, after all the Nazi debris settled, a quiet way of life followed that made people too complacent, except for a brief period in the 1960's when a few political saints showed up on the screen of history. During that time, the idea of Big Brother was projected to Russia and Russia alone. America, it was thought, would never descent to such political depths because of its liberal tradition, founding myths, and of course, its rhetoric against Communism.

But from 1968 to the current date, a wide number of influential intellectuals in America, and also Europe, have developed a line of attack that is eerily totalitarian in its scope. If you happen to think, you are either an environmentalist, a marxist, a free-market ideologue, a social structuralist, a post-structuralist, etc. There were more sticker-labels handed out at graduate school than in grade one class. Except, funny enough, these stickers were meant to be taken seriously. Outside the gate of the modern university are ufo heretics, conspiracy theorists, JFK researchers, 9/11 truth heretics, alternative historians, natural economists, doubters of ungodly-evolution, proponents of the natural cycle of climate change, who argue with strong evidence that the activity on the sun outweighs human intervention, etc., And all of them, whose knowledge matters greatly to me, have been either ignored, or ridiculed. Orwell warned against denying intellectual liberties in his essay, The Prevention of Literature:
Our own society is still, broadly speaking, liberal. To exercise your right of free speech you have to fight against economic pressure and against strong sections of public opinion, but not, as yet, against a secret police force. You can say or print almost anything so long as you are willing to do it in a hole-and-corner way. But what is sinister, as I said at the beginning of this essay, is that the conscious enemies of liberty are those to whom liberty ought to mean most. The big public do not care about the matter one way or the other. They are not in favour of persecuting the heretic, and they will not exert themselves to defend him. They are at once too sane and too stupid to acquire the totalitarian outlook. The direct, conscious attack on intellectual decency comes from the intellectuals themselves.
And the few, true intellectuals that have some level of fame are not given a proper public and national platform to share their ideas, like Chomsky. If there ever was an Idea-less age, as Kierkegaard alluded to, it is ours. The only place ideas are mentioned in public are on comedy stages and mostly by revolutionary comedians like Hicks or Carlin, both dead. The biggest reason why the internet is so popular is the widespread discussion of ideas by people who have all sorts of interests. Sharing ideas, without being emotional about them, is our best hope to defeating society's totalitarian tendencies, and will keep us from forgetting about the storehouse of Western knowledge, which includes ideas that pertain to the concept liberty, human nature, ethics, government, and the list goes on.

Speaking of forgetting, I forgot to tackle the original subject of this expose. But I have nothing to add, The Revolution Will be Tased is pretty self-explanatory, however, I am not pessimistic about the other revolution, the revolution of ideas, which has a much likelier chance of succeeding. Approaching the fight purely physically is not our ticket, because the Establishment, with their technologically-advanced weaponry, have closed that avenue shut. Self-defense is a very noble ethic, and protecting the second amendment is still one of the safeguards against the encroachment of American liberties, but as a poet and an intellectual, that is not my battlefield. I've got my sights not on the goons of the totalitarian empire, whose hands are marked with dirt, but the spin-doctors and intellectual wizards, who reside high up in the tower, in the red, burning eye, smelling like melting slime.