No Philosophy, Part 3

Did you get what you wanted?  If you did, is it okay that a not much smaller segment didn’t?  Is it okay that many smaller fragments didn’t get what they wanted either?  How about that a large segment opted out entirely, and that with or without with these minorities, there was a majority opposition to the group that got what they wanted.  Is that okay?  What exactly is it that you did get when the previous four years of it weren’t actually what you wanted?  From where I’m standing it doesn’t look all that different, but a lot of people have convinced themselves that it is.

Statism is an almost religious way of thinking.  It is built on faith, and anybody critical of it is dismissed outright.  Statism is the conviction of opposites where an entity can get away with saying one thing, doing another, and people believing that the thing which was said is true, even with all the evidence against it.  It’s a system of belief where two different groups involved in it’s mechanics can take something definite like crony capitalism and mold it to be either socialism or free-market economics.  For good or for bad.

Whether the thought pattern is war is peace, taxation is charity, or security is freedom, the most hardened belief of the statist is that they have control of the people that actually control them.

NO PHILOSOPHY, PART 3

MACHINERY OF THE STATE

During the first presidential election in which I had the chance to vote, I had the good sense not to vote for Bush or Gore, but then that just means I supported the campaign for a different person to rule over me, Ralph Nader.  My memory is vague as to why I voted for Nader, maybe during the little attention I paid I heard a blurb or two from him that I liked, but overall I know it had something to do with him not being in the debates and I thought that was wrong.  I believe that I had heard if he got enough votes, third parties would be allowed to debate.  Of course this was all at a time before I knew that Republicans and Democrats owned the debates and made all the rules.  This was also a time where I hardly understood what the differences between the two parties were (coming full-circle now, I actually see no difference).  I remember friends at the time trying to convince me that I was a Democrat and that if I voted for Nader, it was really a vote for Bush.  I’m sure you’ve heard that scam put out there many times in your life, that if you vote outside of one main party, it’s a vote for the other.  That is total propagandist framing of reality.  I’m sure a think tank came up with that one during the early nineties when Ross Perot scared the shit out of the establishment.  If you vote for someone in a third party, that is exactly who your vote is going to.  That’s all there is to it because when a Bush or a Romney or a Gore or Obama wins, the differences are in presentation only.  When an Obama sounds like a more peaceful and just man, it’s only because he’s a better liar than an outright violent monster like Dick Cheney.  They are one and the same, and more importantly, so is the government they are the figureheads over.  It doesn’t change, and of course there is no proof that much else would change if one of these third party characters got elected.

Back to the story of my first vote where my friends were trying to convince me I was a Democrat, the only thing I knew about Gore was that his wife pushed for music censorship in the eighties.  Why would any young person from my era involve themselves with that kind of racket?  So I voted for Ralph Nader during the first election in which the almighty federal government granted me the right to choose my new ruler.  Bush was then elected, and like most people, for a few months I forgot that the president existed.  If you aren’t a news junky, who wouldn’t forget?  When you replace a left-wing authoritarian government with a right-wing authoritarian government, you still have authoritarian government.

But then the World Trade Center fell, and like just about everyone who didn’t pay attention to the world and how America was involved in it, I was completely shocked, and then quite conveniently fell into a nationalistic stupor.  Yes, I had a flag on my car for a long time after.  This silly symbol of the state that I smartly ignored in high school during the Pledge of Allegiance(the name is even offensive) was with me at all times.  I didn’t understand why it happened or what “we” Americans had done wrong.  I didn’t know what Al-Qaeda was and being from Monroe, Connecticut, I hardly knew what a Muslim was.  I was too young and naive to understand that “we” had not done anything, and this attack was not against “us”.  It was all about the central government.  It was a criminal act of aggression against them.  It was blowback for things that they had done.  Individuals were paying the price with their lives for the violent acts of the collective.  I bought the Afghanistan police action that came afterward, but thankfully that’s where it ended for me.

So it was 9/11 when I started paying attention to the world around me.  A definite change was coming over my life.  The world wasn’t just my friends or my home.  It wasn’t just partying or working for a paycheck.  There was a lot of other stuff out there, I wasn’t always sure what, but this terrorist act happened right next door to me, slapped me hard in the face, and told me to wake the fuck up.  It wasn’t just on TV like the Gulf War or the L.A. Riots for example.  New York was a place I spent countless weekends with my friends.  It was where I took my first film class.  In many ways, it was a place that I became an adult.  I started taking the train there by myself at sixteen and it was an exhilarating feeling of independence.  New York City was where I wanted to live.  I’m not even sure I realized it at the time, but after 9/11, I organized my life a bit, moved out west the next year, and didn’t actually return to that city for years after.  Sometimes when I read now about the city New York has turned into, with their militaristic police and statist laws, I really do feel like the world lost more than just two buildings that day, the world lost a great city.

Through this act of violence, I started paying attention to the everything around me, enough that I sometimes wonder who I would be without that horrific event happening.  Change comes in strange ways.  I started watching State of the Union addresses, the news, listening to talk radio, and I used the internet for more than just online chat and reading about movies.  I started to realize that the government actually does something, nothing good, but something, and back then I felt doing something is always better than doing nothing.  After the federal government got involved in another police action, this time with Iraq, I knew that I now had to do something myself because this Bush character had to go.

So what did I do?  What was my big move?  In the next election I voted for the Democratic candidate, John Kerry.  Why?  Because his name wasn’t George Bush and he had more of a chance than one of those third party candidates.  Why, if he was elected, he would have ended those wars and thrown out the Patriot Act.  We wouldn’t be living under the surveillance state that we do now.  Police wouldn’t be militarized!  We would have a stable economy!  The world would be so different!

I’ll tell you what, right after I walked out of that voting booth, I felt sick to my stomach.  I knew I had just done something cheap.  Something I didn’t believe in.  I had no idea who John Kerry really was, but I voted for him and in the end, whether he won or not, it would mean nothing.  I promised myself that during the next election I would be a doubleplusgood citizen and pay extra close attention and pick the candidate I really believed in.

There’s a problem with that though, isn’t there?  All that doubleplusgood citizenry usually ends up meaning is receiving information from terrible sources.  You’ve most likely picked a side and are going to be watching MSNBC or Fox News, both meaningless gestures, just as much so if you watch CNN.  The media loves and protects the state.  All information they give you is bunk, backed by lies, and told with the split-tongues of lobbyists, think tanks, and garbage-mouthed wordsmiths who speak in fallacies and twist history and current events to the benefit of their team.  Of course the team is ultimately the same, a massive government whose tentacles wrap themselves around every aspect of life possible.

I’m not sure what got me, but the presentation of Barack Obama was a winning one.  I was still under the impression that we only needed a Democrat in the White House for a huge change.  He was young black man who played basketball to Bush’s old white guy who played golf.  His name was Muslim to Bush’s Christian.  He also spoke with clarity and seemed to have foresight compared to Bush’s marble-mouthed idiocy.  For a person who had forgotten what politician’s were and ached for some difference in the imperialist ventures of America throughout the world, it was good enough for me.  Of course, Barack Obama was bullshit from top to bottom. And as I would soon learn, though not soon enough, the presidency was as well.