Steven D wrote a diary called UNF*KINGBELIEVABLE! regarding the recent NY Times story regarding the callous incompetence of the U. S. establishment in not providing body armor for our troops.
He calls this `UNF**KINGBELIEVABLE!” and asks the loaded question “Can’t these bastards do anything right?”
My answer appears below.
Re: UNF**KINGBELIEVABLE!
Steven…you ask:
“Can’t these bastards do anything right?”
And the answer is:
No.
This corporate culture that is running the government, big business AND the media/propaganda system here in the United States can by and large no longer do anything “right”.
They cannot build a decent automobile for the working and middle classes. And when they DO….they can’t market it.
They cannot cure the simplest illnesses. The common cold, indigestion. So they market palliatives instead.
They cannot produce much in the way of meaningful culture.
They cannot run an educational system that really educates.
Their food supply is tainted by massive chemical pollution.
And, as Mao Tse Tung observed as early as the mid-1950s, their military is in reality a paper tiger as well.
Capable of massive destruction and nothing else.
USELESS in a situation where they want to preserve something of value…oil in this case…and a population to be used as labor to produce it and then ship it to the victors.
Plus…they consider their soldiers to be an expendable asset. As long as the bosses get their oil and remain able play their covert power games with creatures like Chalabi, they are quite happy. What’s another plebe or two? They’d just be hanging out on the streetcorner and causing trouble anyway if they weren’t fighting the good fight…
I will GUARANTEE that some flaccid son of a bitch in an expensive suit somewhere in Washington has said something at a high level meeting to the effect of “What are they all complaining about? We’ve only lost a couple of thousand men!!! Hell, we lost sixty thousand in Vietnam and if theyd’a just shut the fuck up about it, we woulda won THAT one, too.”
Hell, Steven…this corporate culture stonewalled the tobacco/cancer connection for 30 years at the cost of MILLIONS of lives. If we hadn’t pitched a bitch, these motherfuckers would still be building Pintos and roasting us alive every time there was a rear end collision.
Taken any Vioxx lately?
Learned anything from the Thalidomide scandal, did they?
Ya think?
Not a fucking chance.
New Orleans?
Just a buncha welfare niggers.
No rush…
Body armor?
For PRIVATES!!!???
Whaddayou…kiddin’ me?
That’s EXPENSIVE!!!
We got THINGS to do!!!
SUITS to buy!!!
MONEY to steal!!!
Joseph Conrad wrote “”The horror! The horror!” as Kurtz’s last words in “Heart Of Darkness”.
Had he been writing about THIS heart of darkness…this cabal of thieves and hustlers currently in power here…it would have been “The shame! The shame!”
We are living under the tyranny of the weak.
Karl Rove is the perfect poster boy for what is happening here.
The weak sissy boy of everyone’s high school, come home to rule the roost out of envy and spite.
The shame! The shame!
And the SHAM!!!
The tyranny of the weak.
And its inevitable result.
The agony of the powerless.
Nasty.
This shame is OUR shame.
WE let this happen.
And now the question is…what are we going to DO about it.
I can hear them now, fat and sleek in their K Street eateries.
“Yeah…that’s right!! Whaddaya gonna DO about it?”
Well…?
What ARE we going to do about it?
AG
“Whenever a feeling of aversion comes into the heart of a good soul, it is not without significance. Intuition-a Divine attribute, not vain suspicion.” Rumi
Too many diaries.
Not enough time.
I keep trying, though…
AG
is the only answer to these bastards.
We stopped bulldozers in the lower ninth ward yesterday in New Orleans. That got the attention of the talking heads and the heads of corporations.
There is a big attempt at land grabbing here, and people are organizing and mobilizing.
Commonground, People’s Hurricane Relief Fund, C3…
In the early part of the 20th century, there was a huge socialist movement in this country that was very threatening to the status quo. It had a number of successes, because it involved direct action.
What is going on in your communities?
A huge land grab was stopped in NYC last year when Bloomberg and his real estate boys tried to build a new stadium on the West Side of Manhattan. The scale is so enormous here that laying down in front of bulldozers simply won’t work, but still…it got done, and it basically got done because rational people mobilized big business interests to oppose it because it would have put yet another into the coffin of NYC as a place to live and work. Turned it even more into Disneyland Northeast.
Plus…the Transit Workers actually fought Bloomberg to a narrow decision in their favor.
But the Ratpubs DO keep on trying. You’ve got to give them credit for that. Just like regular rats. (As above, so below, except in this instance it is really hard to decide which level is lower.) You can set out all of the poison and and lay out all of the traps that can be mustered; you can send out press releases saying that the rat problem has been solved, but…there they are, busily at work in the basement, gnawing away.
Just gnawing and gnawing away…
So it goes.
Keep the faith.
AG