Proximity 1 wrote a comment on The Wild Wild Left regarding my recent post about the Sarah Palin/religious far right connection, Sarah Palin And Her Demon-Possessed Witchunters.
Here it is:
America is close to the edge and close to going over it. People of good sense had better act and act as though the nation’s survival depended on it because it seems that it may.
And there it is.
America is close to the edge.
Prox pinned it.
Close to the edge of an apocalypse.
The Palin phenomenon is only a symptom of the problem. But it is indeed a dangerous symptom.
Read on for more.
America is close to the edge and it does not yet seem to be able to truly comprehend that single, salient fact. Religious fanatics are one electoral vote and one beat of an old man’s heart away from the presidency of a country that possesses more destructive power than has ever before existed in the history of mankind. The nation’s economic system is in cardiac arrest and it is only being sustained by makeshift pacemakers installed by political spin doctors that do not really understand how the system works. The economic imperialist system that created and sustained the country’s enormous wealth has broken down despite the ongoing valiant efforts of U.S. armed forces to terrorize previously enslaved countries into continued submission over the past 50+ years. Most of the real, physical work of sustaining the day-to-day infrastructure of the nation is being done by immigrant laborers while the educational and cultural systems that are supposed to produce and maintain a workforce from its so-called middle and working classes have totally broken down. The fuels that have been used to run its machine are only about ten years away from running out and environmental consequences the of sloppy overuse of those fuels are causing disastrous changes in the overall climate, the day-to-day weather and the whole food/water/air ecological system.
Meanwhile, its citizens continue to be fed…and continue to mindlessly consume… the bread-and-circus, dog-and-pony shows of the mainstream media as if everything is A-OK, as if it’ll all work out if we just remain calm and start buying expensive hybrid cars instead of those bad ol’ expensive SUVs, as if electing a representative of the left wing of the right wing instead of one from the right wing of the right wing will make a difference, will solve all of our problems.
Any day now.
Aaaaany day now…
Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five pinned it a quarter century ago in The Message . The seriousness of the situation was clear to the scuffling American underclasses long before it began to intrude on the bourgeois dreams of the manager classes.
America has been “close to the edge” for 50 years or more. Majority white America is just now beginning to feel the strain.
<center>The Message
Don’t push me ’cause I’m close to the edge
I’m trying not to lose my head, ah huh-huh-huh ah huh-huh-huh
It’s like a jungle sometimes it makes me wonder
How I keep from going underIt’s like a jungle sometimes it makes me wonder
How I keep from going under
“Ah huh-huh-huh ah huh-huh-huh.”
The laugh that does not mean “Ha ha”.
Bet on it.
The laugh that comes from confronting the real, continuing threat of going under.
“Ah huh-huh-huh ah huh-huh-huh.”
It drives some people over the edge, that kind of ongoing threat. The weak ones. The panicky ones, like Sarah Palin’s compatriots in the speaking-in-tongues, gabble gabble movement. We should not allow their hysteria and fear to excuse them. We should not be saying “Oh, just that’s freedom of religion.” Not when it drives a political agenda we shouldn’t. ESPECIALLY not when it uses words like “Armageddon” and “The Rapture” the way previous political movements used ideas like reform and justice.
This movement is the single most serious internal threat to the people of America today, in my opinion, and it should be opposed at all costs and in every way possible. It is nothing less than the beginnings of an American Taliban. Remember, it was only 80 years ago that the pasty white Puritan underbelly of the first conquerers of America arose in reaction to economic troubles and imposed the disastrous era of Prohibition upon the culture, an imposition of the few upon the many that spawned the even more disastrous spectre of organized crime that has leached some 10% to 20% (if not more) of our GNP right out of our system for nearly a century.
And this group threatens much worse.
It threatens the end of days.
I often find myself saying “Wake the fuck up” on these leftiness blogs, mostly because the sheepleness/sleepleness quotient of the media-hypnotized American public is only a little less predominant here than it is in other segments of the culture. Well, at the risk of repeating myself once too often, I will say it again.
Wake the fuck up!!!
We are indeed close to the edge.
VAYA!!!
RESIST!!!
With everything you’ve got.
Or…go over the edge.
Your choice.
It’s less than one month until D Day.
Decision Day.
DDo we plummet over the edge of the flatland universe into uncharted areas, into place where demons and sea serpents abound?
Or do we pull back, take a good deep breath and try to begin again?
Your choice.
OUR choice.
VAYA!!!
RESIST!!!
Please!!!
AG
But most importantly…
Goddamnit.
Later…
AG
Broken glass everywhere
People pissing on the stairs, you know they just
Dont care
I cant take the smell, I cant take the noise
Got no money to move out, I guess I got no choice
Rats in the front room, roaches in the back
Junkies in the alley with a baseball bat
I tried to get away, but I couldnt get far
Cause the man with the tow-truck repossessed my car
Simple:
Work for cash.
Buy with cash.
Sell for cash.
Well, as much as possible.
Lower East Side and Red Hook, Brooklyn, 1965-1973. So have most of my peers of any race. It was pretty much what you had to do in NYC if you were serious about wanting to learn how to play jazz and latin music and you were not born wealthy. Not for any “spiritual” reasons, but simply because the learning process was literally 24/7 and no one was paying us much to play. We lived on the poverty line. When you are practicing and studying 15+ hours a day there’s not much time left for clerking, let alone a “career”, and the only ones who got their act together were those who totally dedicated themselves to the task at hand in the same manner as did I. Black, brown OR tan. Even now, out of 40+ years in the business I have only had maybe 12 that were securely above that line financially, and that money went to raising a child in some sort of safety.
So it goes. This is not a complaint but rather a celebration. “Je ne regrette rien” sang Edith Piaf. Yup. I did…and continue to do…what I set out to do.
The life that I have led puts me in a position where I can see things that most working class/middle class white people do not see…or at the very least it put me in a place to see them earlier and from a totally different perspective.
When I say “Wake the fuck up” so often, it is because I was forcibly and completely without my own volition awakened to the position of the underclasses around the world in a truly visceral manner.
People pissing in the stairs? Yup. And worse. MUCH worse. These guys weren’t making a damned thing up when they wrote that piece. They were just relating the daily circumstances of their life, a life that was not theirs for any other reason on earth other than an accident of birth and a system that had kept them and their ancestors on the bottom the shit pile by the simple use of a skin marker.
Living on that level…black brown or tan (A couple of Duke Ellington licks combined there, by the way. The Black And Tan Fantasy-1933. Black, Brown and Beige-1943. Duke was SO far ahead of the rest of the world.)…again, black brown or tan, served to wake you the fuck up to the ongoing lies of the system. Once awakened on such a level, it is impossible to return to the initial coma in which most of us live our inherited lives.
Now I have been lambasting Sarah Palin for a couple of weeks on the leftiness blogs, and I have received some resistance regarding this lambasting from leftiness shmoon of several stripes…mostly religious freedom supporters. “Prove it” they say. “PROVE that she is deeply involved in the scene that you describe.” They use Barack Obama’s long term attendance at Rev. Wright’s church as a counter-argument. “You don’t attack him for being there while the good Reverend was preaching holy hell about this society, do you? Then you cannot assume that Sarah Palin was any more involved in the Wasilla church’s scene than was Barack Obama in Rev. Wright’s ideas.”
And my ongoing response has been that:
1-What Rev. Wright was saying was perfectly true and the system NEEDED some holy hell. Still does.
and
2-I can smell the hatred and the naked desire for power coming off of every word and every motion of Sarah Palin.
How can I “smell” it? Why am I so prescient, so attuned to that kind of shit?
Because I lived in Grandmaster Flash’s world long enough to develop certain survival skills. Like a wild animal, I hear the tsunami LONG before the domesticated varieties are hip to it.
And now we are getting a veritable tidal wave of proof.
Here is one that I particularly like.
From Bag News Notes:
RESIST!!!
With everything that you possess.
This is nasty business coming our way.
Bet on it.
The John Birch/Christian chapter of the Taliban.
Watch.
AG
When they talk of burning actual Demons out of rooms, cities, states, whole geographic areas, that PROSELYTIZING force that drives them is as dangerous as the Crusades, as dangerous as witch burnings, as dangerous as the INQUISITION.
This is a symptom of the underlying rot that American Kleptocracy has wrought.
There is no pride anymore. There is no challenge to be a Master at your trade and have personal satisfaction in a job well done.
There is only the empty and hollow being a cog in a greater machine that values you not at all, in a world where less cogs are need3ed daily and competition for nothingness is the only shameful, hateful challenge left. Eat eachother or be eaten.
For me, the end times really started when Corporations were granted personhood, and as such could claim rights as such. But I digress.
I understand that people feel meaningless and worthless and search from exterior sources to be valued, a thing we seem to have forgotten to teach our children. Things like “A man is only good as his word,” or “Any task worth doing is worth doing well, with your full attention.”
People forgot that, instead cheating and lying to get ahead replaced trust and personal integrity. It created a world with out connection. Greed is Good. Get yours. Every man for himself.
So, again, it is symptomatic that people turn to this INSANITY, this MASS HYSTERIA to soothe their broken psyches.
It is symptomatic too, of a society that has forsaken teaching free thinking and logic over producing mindless drones that this has gone this far greatly unchallenged.
“They love God, you cannot challenge that!” “Freedom of Religion!”
I call bullshit.
They said the same thing about witch burners, and as you have noted, witch burners are again on the rise in Africa.
These are dangerous times.
The flip side of this mass hysteria are almost worse. The so-called liberals who think when Obama is elected, the only worry they have is which fucking wine to drink?
Talk about blindness.
It is precisely the elitist thinking that everything will be dandy if we get our way. It is precisely the ignoring of the poverty of the many while enjoying the spoils of your excess that has been ingrained in society. (Now I have nothing against enjoying a fine wine, but the bragging about it, the wrong headed-ness of the “What me worry?” crowd is pathetic.)
We are headed for economic disaster, global environmental disaster, societal collapse into less than 3rd world conditions….
…and the best America can come up with is Drink or Pray?????
Lose the blinders, people.
It ain’t going to be okay if we lose our focus and fall into false security any more than hiding behind the skirts of a shaman will.
Some mornings, I want to send America a semi-load of “Shut the fuck up” followed by two back-loads of “Wake the Fuck up.”
.
this revelation about Sarah …
I
Sarah Palin flipped the Republican presidential ticket around this week when she spoke about things the “Palin and McCain administration” would do in office.
Palin also referred to McCain as “my running mate” Friday in Green Bay, Wis., as she did twice in Iowa the day before.
Who is John McCain anyway?
"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."