Let's All LOL At Everything There Is

And let's all go ahead and laugh at the powerful.

You know, most of the people in my life--from the 86-year-old mass transit driver to the 70ish woman in my apartment complex who recently cracked a couple of vertebrae when her dogs took after a squirrel and forced her onto the concrete to my countrified neighbor who doesn't like the big city because, he suggests, people don't like talking to anyone--all of us agree that whatever it is that is happening in the US as of 2023 is not supposed to be occurring, and that, even though we can see this problem quite clearly, we have little to no power to change much of any of it. I think this is a common issue many of us either face or refuse to acknowledge, even as we worry, sometimes insomniac until way too early in the morning. But what happens inside of us? What does this do to us?

I'd like to suggest this strange phenomenon of a country beginning to sink or degenerate right before our eyes generates numerous responses--from learned helplessness to outright reactionary activity of the kind all of us saw on January 6, 2021.

This morning, as I pondered this widespread sense of powerlessness, a fact ironic to me mainly because so many powerful politicians and commercial owners, those who actually have the power to foment some kind of change, are too busy either being polite or are committed to politely sniping at a variety of malefactors on the television set, where everyone can see the posturing and display "in defense of the US against the malefactors", and it all goes off like this: A big shrugging off of the problem. All talk, no action. This is nothing new.

Let's for a moment imagine ourselves powerless. How do we react to this sense of inability? I've noticed many will posture as if to combat this subjective phenomenon when it besets each of us, thus advertising to others that "this is wrong" or "that is injustice"--as if such broad-brush declarations of omnipotence and omniscience actually prove to those of us doing the pontificating are actually much more powerful than we think we are, or at the very least, have some kind of social or public power left in our lives. Another reaction, as mentioned, is learned helplessness. According to psychologists, repeated aversive stimuli create a sense of helplessness in the individual subject, a helplessness that eventually transforms him or her into complacency, passivity, apathy, nihilism, alienation, and obliviousness. None of this is healthy, but you know: If it bleeds it leads.

Both of these disparate reactions--magical thinking in terms of "I've decided this and my opinion is the absolute truth" and learned helplessness--may be familiar to us all. Maybe not. Not everyone is going to be self-consciously aware of the workings of their own minds. Sometimes, and interestingly enough, those of us who dare to look may see both a fraudulent projection of power and obliviousness simultaneously manifest.

Then there is a sense of absurdity. Absurdity doesn't mean "acting ridiculous" or "exhibiting crazy behavior". Rather, it involves an unconscious choice to see the world as absurd and then simply move on, even deciding to laugh about it. After all, what we casually call "the world" technically encompasses the multiplicity of social constructs that in part rule our lives. Those social constructs, good and bad, are mere representations: they cannot wholly reflect the truth--whatever that is at any given moment. Hence, when we find ourselves in conflict with a social construct, or when we find the social construct inadequate to our needs as human beings, we are subjected to a sense of absurdity. How we respond to absurdities is actually quite important.

In some respects, this freedom of choice of how to respond to absurdity has always been my position. I've been through all kinds of suffering in my life--from the suicide of a parent to the blizzard of years under the influence of Bipolar Disorder, to homelessness, to a wholesale sense of rejection by those who could, but chose not to, help me. Sometimes, and in fact too many times, this communication breakdown has always stricken me as absurd. In reality, life doesn't quite fit the world as well as we'd like it to, and vice versa, the world doesn't always fit life well at all.

When cornered, oftentimes I’ve decided all I’m good for in this world, even now, at 68, is what could be called “the chicken feed”, left as an unimportant non-factor within the milieu of other people’s lives, the ones I don’t get to live as a servant of. . . .  

LOL 

See? I laughed about this absurdity. Told one thing about life only to see it is absurd to believe it, how should I choose to respond? Supposing this blog is a public forum (which it isn't), going public with a sense of ridicule at the sheer absurdity of powerful people simply shrugging my concerns off as a matter of ignorance, or flyover country, or victimhood; going public in such a way that indicates that, in contrast to how I imagine I could be being seen by powerful personages, I know how absolutely stupidly they're behaving and as an expresssion of powerlessness I'm choosing to laugh at them. And this laughter? It isn't nihilistic laughter. It's more along the lines of pointing out the nakedness of powerful people who are content to do nothing as long as they benefit from whatever it is many of us see as off-the-beam.

Just this morning, I read a deeply self-important pontification, written by a man with a history of demonstrating in public how so supremely solemn and serious he is, even with inessential big words shooting out of his face like a projectile vomit of alphabet soup; I couldn't help but laugh at him. Ostensibly, his reasoning is that he is here, a public expert, here to help us all sort out something--something he's managed to instrumentalize to suit his ideology, his partisanship, or his biases. Really. It seemed to me that if he got any more full of himself he’d explode.  

Vanity is everywhere in America's punditocracy. Vanity seems to be an occupational hazard for pundits. I can only assume it's quite difficult to resist intimations of vanity in one's writing if one is forced to produce like a dog in a Pavlovian experiment we sometimes call "the deadline".

I know, I know. The pundit likely affects a tone of seriousness and expertise as equivocations, ways of pretending he is somehow an authority, and thus must be listened to because he has an important answer to impart to us all. There are all sorts of ways to accomplish this magic trick: big words, armadas of statistics, generally broad-brush statements, etc.

But isn't the pundit in the same boat we are in? Like us, the pundit likely feels powerless. He's projecting power he likely doesn't possess and yet believes that only if he can gain some form of power or authority will he be able to change the world for the better. It all seems like an exercise in false pride as well. And yet he's paid for this. Exhibitionism as an occupation. He's likely doing a job we can't see as well: working in tandem with political, ideological, and economic interests he's not revealing to his reader- or viewership.

Is that honest? The legendary "memorandum" in "conservative" circles, a list of preferred subjects for those in ideological alliance with the whims of powerful economic and political actors that prefer to work behind the scenes comes to mind. But the newspaper columnist pretends he's a lone voice, an individual. He's not. He's part of a team no less sporty than the Chicago Red Sox.

I don't remember what the pundit's topic was today, but I couldn't help but imagine his vanity, false pride, and hubris, along with enough arrogance to make anyone with a lick of common sense laugh at him as more similar to the stance of a food critic than as a pundit.

Yes, let's sit back and make a judgment on the republic in light of it being maybe dinner at nine. At his very best, the man is a spectator. He might as well be watching his TV with a beer in his hand and shouting at it. Maybe all human behavior is movie criticism.

Life as movie criticism: In perhaps the most superficial of senses, the objectified human being standing before each of us--at the bus stop, at the grocery, in a bar or club--is a two-dimensional cardboard cutout. We see behavior. We do not stop to assess context. We can't, unless we actively communicate with that "object", know any of its histories. Yet we judge--no more and no less than how I judged a pundit whose newspaper column smacked, at least to me, as an absurdity.

This is not as if I don't know I'm also an absurdity. To what extent is likely none of my business.

Exacerbated by our hypnotic enslavement to a hyper-reality in the form of television, movies, radio, advertising, the Internet, and more, this tendency to be a spectator can really get raw. No wonder people get irritated. If we tend to see others as two-dimensional "celluloid" or "movies", something deep inside is going to tell us we're likely also seen as the same. That two-dimensional image passing before your eyes while you're out walking the neighborhood--your vigilante mind is on a sort of movie critic "police beat"--well, well, well, he's a suspicious TV bad guy because he or she is unfamiliar, possibly behaving incongruently with how you believe right-minded people behave: A character: no depth, no context, nothing but more videotape.

By assessing others as cardboard cutouts or "movies", we're dehumanizing others, not to mention restricting their freedom by reducing who they are in a social sense in which both we and he are involved.

Did the object have consciousness? Something's obvious here. You didn't demonstrate any consciousness. Maybe whatever it was you saw should become just like you, lest you become whatever it was you think you saw.

LOL

In fact, because we're each essentially and publicly powerless, and thus desperately in need of power, and to be seen as a success, our opinions, in our minds, are immediately translatable by something in our heads (which are apparently on the blink) as "what I have subjectively interpreted in the behavior of that person" is actually the truth about that person. This is called magical thinking. Even our experts are guilty of thinking they have magic powers to determine "the absolute truth". Because even our experts feel powerless. Perhaps many of them simply do not have the time to dig deeper into the behaviors they sometimes find abominable. Who really knows? I'm not expecting any of them to let us in on what is preventing them from digging deeper.

I was on the bus this afternoon, and there was another of the same kind of meat robot.  Someone possibly just like me-as-meat-robot: Nary a thought in his head as he passively sat and made determinations about those around him. Yes, he was sitting. Passively.  Relaxing and complacent. On a bus. In a three, four, or even five-piece luxury suit, black coat, black tie, black shoes, all black: a human funeral parading for all to see. On a bus. With "the masses". Possibly "the mob", that epithetic expression many elitists have for those who are not in the business class. Alas! I finally spotted one: the big man.  Yessir!  That’s what I wondered how I should refer to him, mainly because I knew that if I were to tell him NO, that's he's not at all the big man he is projecting to the world, his narrow world, with his clothing, his demeanor, his blank face, I’d have to. . . 

LOL

The other day, the psychopathic sister of one Kim Jong Un, a real piece of work, with an angry glare, and with desperate bloodlust in her beady eyes, threatened the US with nuclear war if we didn’t stop whatever it is we’re doing and allow North Korea to reign supreme in, um, which entire hemisphere was it this time?  See? She's projecting power, and posturing, mainly because she likely feels somewhat powerless in being faced by not only a South Korea that is doing fantastically well but by a large and increasing number of countries that aren't happy with the regime she's helped take North Korea into--powerlessness projecting power. It must be precarious for fabricated elitists around the world . . . .

Hey. She looks pretty nutty, And mean. A little like John Wayne Gacy, the Asian version, a true psychopath taking her act on the road after North Korea made some nuclear weapons. Which is scary. Kids shouldn't be allowed to play with firecrackers if unsupervised. But what can I do about it? Will my opinions here carry any weight at all? If she's posing a serious threat to the city where I live, can I change that? Nope. So. What would be the best course for me to take? I think it might be expedient to get out there in public and. . . .

LOL 

That's right. Use my right to public freedom of speech to call a spade a spade and laugh at her. Just laugh. What good is that kind of posturing? To what end? If she has such a lousy disposition, well, there are medications for that now on the market.

Nothing makes a narcissistic megalomaniac back down faster than widespread public ridicule. If those in the world, by a strange twist in subjective perception, are nothing but projections or extensions of the subject's self, and if all those projections and extensions of the narcissistic self are ridiculing the narcissist. . . .

LOL

Too bad our experts and politicians need to be so polite. Call her a bitch on television, please. Tell her that she's icier in bed than Nancy Reagan on her wedding night. Say on the NBC Nightly News that Little Miss North Korea is nothing but Donald Trump in drag.

LOL

Someone give Joe Biden, the current President, a laugh track and some rim shots. As long as "conservatives" and other reactionary capitalists are content to make pointless potshots, why not give them a dose of their own medicine? How else to tell some crazy woman, or Donald Trump, or some nutball in the US House Moron Caucus, each trying to bully the entire world, that they're absurdities?

When I was a kid in the 1960s, we called this "tell it like it is". But today, that is apparently verboten. Instead, we get the manners police on us. Why should we impart a sense of dignity on someone who literally could never deserve it?

This isn't an argument for political incorrectness. When I think of political correctness, I see it as another tactic that has been instrumentalized by people who feel powerless, a tactic designed to shut down conversations via shame and guilt. At its best, political correctness is simply standing up for what you believe is right, honorable, and loyal to your duty to the rest of us and to the amorphous "public" around which we circle. That almost never happens, mainly because most of us have no sense of duty at all. Duty's too uncomfortable to fit into the pleasure principle. And if we're all very large, two-legged fruitflies compelled by honey and positivity, we'll never be dutiful toward those who can't supply the good stuff.

LOL

Not long ago, I began thinking of something Richard Nixon said to his depleting circle of allies in the last days of his awry presidency, as recounted by Bernstein and Woodward in "All the President's Men". Nixon made a promise to push the US “so far to the right we wouldn’t recognize it”. I also remember rumors Nixon and his cohort of corrupt hooligans were big fans of Riefenstahl's "Triumph of the Will". Then, I recall reading a quotation by Friedrich Hayek, one of the architects of libertarianism's advocacy for a regulation-free commercial atmosphere, an observation that a Nazi Germany without Hitler or the Holocaust wouldn't be so bad.

I've looked around at this country, or what I've been allowed to see of it, and yup, yup, yup, and away, the news stations are falling for exactly what Nixon wanted for us. Some advocates of a sort of commercially-led totalitarianism call it "authoritarian democracy". Most of us know it as fascism.

But we must be polite. If we point this out, we must do so gently, with the utmost of respect to the fascists, lest we be seen as--Heaven forbid--impolite and declasse. After all, what happens if we meet Little Miss North Korea or Donald Trump or Marjorie Taylor Greene at one of those lucky, high-dollar Washington DC soirees? Oh. The embarrassment.

But we all should know this already. Yet, for some reason, we can't do anything about it. Those who are powerful enough to enact change for the better are tied down by convention and social constructs they're apparently not independent-minded enough to contravene. Other than yelp on social media, what can we do? As I've already mentioned, those who can do something about this simply shrug their shoulders and maybe make a sharp comment to a pundit on the TV set.

All done!

LOL  

That's right. Think about the sheer idiocy Donald Trump has been allowed to get away with. Even now, here in late July 2023, we are hard put to find even one Republican who is willing to call a spade a spade. Two impeachments--chances relinquished by the GOP Senate majority that refused to indict him citing a flurry of flimsy alibis. Now look at the consequences of that. See it? The latest fashion in attention-grabbing involves a media whore doing or saying something so absolutely unreasonable the US mass media can't resist chattering about what was said or done. All anyone has to do to market oneself as a badass is to be one persnickety motherfucker about "wokeness" or about the LGBTQ community, about Drag Queen story hours, or about "the Liberal media". Can I do anything about this? Isn't that what our political representatives are for? This situation has become an absurdity. Even the rest of the world is looking at the US as plumb crazy. But, since everyone with the power to do more than shrug it all off merely shrugs it all off, the behavior gets worse and worse. Even to the point that Trump is now being mimicked by all the hairless monkeys in his thrall. Someone needs to give 2024 presidential candidate Ron DeSantis a Festivus pole for Easter.

LOL

Repeat after me: I was sitting at the DART light rail train station here in far North Dallas after trying to use no less than three (3) automated ticket machines, all to no success–to the point that I had come to realize that since DART had been given less money than DART wanted in a recent ask of the City of Dallas, the populace that uses mass transit is going to have to pay for the City's refusal to fork up the cash--through our noses so to speak--by encountering poor service and broken equipment. Suddenly, everything–ticket machines, escalators out of the tunnel under CityPlace, doors, all kinds of stuff--is broken.  Can I do anything about this? Isn't this what our City Council and executive Dallas Area Rapid Transit figures are for? Where are they?

LOL

Should I be exasperated? Frustrated by all this complacency and obliviousness on the part of our public representatives? Is this observable absurdity to be measured as a figment of my frustration? And here I was thinking that the Catholic Church was the only slam-bam-thank-you-ma'am fly-by-night carnival in town that will plead poverty when caught red-handed over abusing little boys. Indeed. Our religious representations--doing the nasty with kids. When the Diocese of Dallas was pegged with a large fine after Rudy Kos, a Catholic priest, had been found guilty of molesting a number of young boys, one of whom I knew quite well, the Diocese of Dallas claimed it was too poor to pay (a ploy based on sentimentality and geared to manipulate the credulous), and almost got away with it; and then, in a great Fuck You Dallas gambit, the Diocese erected a huge steeple atop the Cathedral of Guadalupe at Pearl and Ross.

You don't have the money to express repentance in a financial way, but plenty of money to tell the very skyline to stick it? See it? The big steeple at Ross and Pearl is telling me to stick it.

LOL 

Incident after incident of observable absurdity. We all confront the idiocy that has us surrounded every single day. Learned helplessness is a stopgap solution that always fails us. For example, the other afternoon, I gently pulled open my microwave’s door–and the handle ripped off, thus teaching me of my submission to planned obsolescence. I looked over the damage: what had caused the handle to break off the microwave door? After around one second, I noticed that its connection to the door happened to be brittle plastic.  In fact, all the parts of the microwave that would be subjected to repeated stress were made of the kind of plastic used to make model airplanes. Brittle, flimsy as any number of pat excuses for anything that happens. . . .

I used to ponder the fluorescent light fixtures at one business where I worked. One day, a fixture's brittle plastic cover crashed onto the carpet, sending plastic shrapnel all over the office. Wouldn't it have been prudent of the manufacturer to have made the fixture's cover out of the kind of plastic that doesn't break and even gives a little when hit? Someone with a little power and influence might have been able to change this sort of thing.

LOL

Cars, houses, cellphones, almost everything on "the market" is planned to break. This kind of makes some sense: If manufacturers made unbreakable things, "the market" would collapse. Or so manufacturers and economists claim. Hence, manufacturers create products designed to break. We're all familiar with the short shelf life of the PC laptops and tablets we have been conditioned to need. make it all breakable. We must protect the "holy market" from people who wouldn't otherwise have to employ it. Whether we like it or not. We already know that social constructs are imperfect; let's leave it to commercial force to exaggerate that for us. Learned helplessness.

LOL

The examples of absurdity are everywhere. On a city bus one afternoon, I noticed, as we passed the area known as the West Village (an obvious rip-off of New York’s famed East Village, only a sort of MBA roach motel) an unknown person had parallel parked his expensive silver Jaguar at an angle steep enough for a bus to tear its back end clean off its luxuriant suspension, an obvious bid to be noticed.  Maybe the person was in a hurry and didn't have the foresight to see that the road he'd pulled off of was narrow but also a thoroughfare delivery trucks and the wide-load transit buses that roll past all the time.

Yes, I gave the stranger with the luxury car a bit of latitude, the kind of latitude his or her obliviousness didn't give the DART bus drive. There might have been other reasons the Jag had been so ineptly parked. What will it be?

I think I'll go with "Look at me!" for $500.

LOL 

The other afternoon, I received a nice, automated email from Grammarly, an automated service that makes grammar and spelling suggestions, a convenience I sometimes use when I'm writing quickly and may not be thinking as much about grammar and syntax as I would otherwise. Grammarly chirped in an email that I use more unique words than 99 percent of all Grammarly users.  Like the dumb title to a quasi-LOL poem, “Autochthonous Coajutor”, a free verse piece that uses San Diego’s famous Rocky De La Fuente as an expression of power due to his ownership of multiple assisted living centers, a poem similar to my not-famous “Will To Power Flashcards”.

I like to use precise language. Precise language, in a word, can also convey a sense of power to the user. But seriously. Why would anyone in his or her right mind compare Rocky De La Fuente with a diocesan bishop stand-in as a foundational fact of life on Earth?

LOL 

I recently saw on TV that California Governor Gavin Newsome has ended California’s contract with Walgreens, a drug chain, because the board of directors of the chain–and do I ever mean chain, as in shackles or manacles–had bowed to pressure from an anti-abortion faction in the US so hard-bitten to take freedom of choice away from not only women but from entire families. Walgreens no longer will carry what is known as the abortion pill in states where the faction of anti-choice is threatening to clobber anyone who even dares take a freaking, ideologically incorrect pill. That clearly was a marketing decision on the part of Walgreens. And a political one informed by marketing: getting in trouble with the anti-abortion law is bad business for ever-cowardly Walgreens. This is self-interest gone absolutely feral: shuck one's duty to the American public and cover your behind. It's also a way to forget to use one's political power to tell anti-abortion tyrants to stop the pointless oppression. You know, a pharmacy company doing a measure of public duty that would benefit all of us rather than one silly faction with its collective panties in a wad is almost nonexistent. To some, perhaps, such a pipe dream is an absurdity.

This act of kowtowing to extremism is something all sane people find disgusting and pathetic. But you know how it is: Walgreens might have to sacrifice some profits by taking a public stand that demonstrates courage in the marketplace. And Newsome, like any fairminded person, chose, along with the entire state government of California, to oppose Walgreens' lack of courage, thus ending its contract with Walgreens. That also took courage. He's representing the people of California. By doing his public duty.

Then the whining started.  

One especially weird, and cowardly anonymous, editorial in The Washington Post, nailed Newsome for... what? Grandstanding. That's correct. Apparently, Newsome, being sane, was trying to get some attention. Now that public duty is "grandstanding", why do public duty? After all, if you do public duty, the vanity holding the rest of the world, face to the floor, is going to measure your behavior by the standards of vanity.

In the world of The Washington Post's Opinions editors, neoliberalism reigns supreme now that Jeff Bezos, a wealthy libertarian, has taken control of the organ. Neoliberalism suggests that the use of market power to enact a semblance of political justice is better than depending on the government to enact it.

The editorialist? Was he or she commanded to ignore these so-called neoliberal principles because a California governor who is known as a Liberal or Progressive uses the State's market power to both represent and work towards a semblance of justice in a very neoliberal way that goes in contravention of some egghead on the paper's board of directors?

LOL

Economization doesn't necessarily mean scrimping and saving. It can also mean turning every little thing into numbers, ratios, ratiocinations, calculations, and especially dollar bills. Did someone say a thing? The opportunity cost thus comes into play in a neoliberal fantasy island setup.

How much does doing one's public duty as a governor of a large state cost? After all, the US Supreme Court has decided money = freedom of speech. But anyone with a grounding in philosophy should know that such a fraudulent moral or ethical equivalence is fallacious if it doesn't work the other way around. Hence, freedom has to = money. Pay me what you owe me.

LOL

Now that’s it spring, the birds are, like, totally happy and ready to mate.  Avian happiness is all over the neighborhood. I see this as a good sign for the growth of the bird population after a sort of avian holocaust involving both bird flu and pollution managed to kill nearly one-third of all the birds in North America. During the bird flu avian pandemic, I'd noticed a proliferation of gnats in the area. Calling City of Dallas Pest Control about the issue, I learned the gnat problem is city-wide, and that the City would like to address it but cannot use pesticides because pesticides might hurt wildlife.

I told her, "So. This is the first time I've ever heard of gnats being considered wildlife."

LOL 

Of course, the inference I could have been asked to make in regard to pesticides hurting wildlife may have had something to do with "that evil Environmental Protection Agency". Not only does the EPA tell commercial and government agents what to do, but the EPA also tells them what they can't do. And in a world where the libertarian principle of "coercion" has cast its black pall over the psyches of many Americans, it's clear that the mantra, Don't Tell Me What To Do", is in full throttle weirdness. Mandates. Wear a mask. Get vaccinated. Don't force people to sacrifice their lives to supply you with your bottom line.

Don't tell me what to do.

LOL

In regard to pests, I sometimes think about a few really, overly serious people I used to see in a prominent, and nationally-known law firm where I worked. Indeed, it was laugh-worthy to see how they seemed eager to bow and scrape before the presence of one Bunker Hunt, an extraordinarily eccentric (but kind) man who is obsessed with owning all the silver it might take to manufacture nuclear weapons.  Silver, by the way, was the color sign of a group of post-WWII neo-Nazis that called itself "the silver shirts". Go figure. Here in Dallas, everybody knows. . . .

Those big-shot lawyers always bowed and scraped in the presence of their rich clients. Even a peep about it was met by high seriousness, arrogance, pride, vanity, and hubris. I don't know if any of those attorneys ever felt bad about being so servile to wealth. What continues to trouble me is how the same attorneys so happy to bow, scrape, and manifest servility--wanted me to bow, scrape and express extreme servility. . .

. . . before them. See how feelings of powerlessness manifest in fraudulent projections of power? I think this is part of the disease of too much capitalism: to be a success, one has to project power, but if one feels powerless, it's possible one is a failure. I find it highly strange--and estranging--that such "successes" tend to cast subtle aspersions upon those who either have failed to measure up despite tremendous effort or barriers placed against their progress, or who have chosen that such interpretations of measuring up are inessential and shallow. Those who do not understand such an odd dynamic, one that has everything to do with status as a measuring rod or riding crop, seeking to recoup their power, riot in the US Capitol. . . .

LOL 

Usually, laughter directed at absurdity isn't enough. What happens if a situation becomes so serious and terrifying that feeling anything at all has been stymied? In my life, this has actually occurred. The Harvard-educated leader of a public hospital oncology team that treated me for acute myelogenous leukemia told me with certainty that, likely, this blood disease was due to US Army above-ground nuclear weapons testing northwest of Denver in the late 1950s and early 1960s

Powerless. And stricken by fear.  

The oncologist added it could have been a rising problem in public water purification issues–benzine in the water table.  Benzine, a common ingredient in gasoline, is horribly damaging to the human body. How could I have been poisoned by benzine? I've never worked around gasoline or oil.

Research into this revealed more absurdity: "The Texas way" of discarding lawnmower engine oil, for decades here in this quasi-civilized area was to dump it on ant hills to kill the ants. . .

. . . and destroy the chances of the future's local population for survival. . . .

LOL

And if that's in the water table, how are we to get it out of the water table? The recent Addams Family TV show, friends told me, sucked because it wasn’t realistic enough, and I thought of the LOL above.  

Horror everywhere--and people get upset about TV shows? Seriously? Remember: television and mass media are hyper-reality, tiny pinholes of information that are mere representations of reality, representations that are also stereotypical as are all words and pictures, and if hyper-reality is unconsciously substituted for the real world, our values become distorted ghosts. Hey. The Addams Family and ghosts and hyper-reality and passive forms of oblivion. . . .

LOL

Then, immediately after this, and my assessment of it as a spectator, and in big news, President Xi of China (the name sounds like the Z as seen on Russian tanks) announced that the US and Taiwan had better straighten up and fly right or there would be big trouble. As many of us have heard here in 2023, The People's Republic of China badly covets the island of Formosa, otherwise known as Taiwan. During the Chinese Revolution, won by Mao and Chow's troops in 1949, the Nationalist Chinese fled in droves to Formosa, declared Taiwan a democracy, and immediately allied themselves with the US. Now that PRC is economically powerful, China is posturing. And, given the US is also posturing in the region, China, afraid of powerful resistance over which he or the PRC has no power, is projecting power. Just like any chump in an online politics thread.

At Xi's speech, the auditorium full of what I’ve been ordered to take as “the commie people” erupted in wild applause–on TV–just like annual STOU addresses when, no matter how much his opponents hate him, the President gets enough standing ovations to irritate every septuagenarian knee in the room.  The entire thing seemed staged, of course, but likely it was a mere reflex as audience members did what they'd been conditioned to do whenever Xi or any major PRC leader makes a powerful speech. How many times do we need to experience this from those who supposedly represent us and our opinions before we come to the realization that all this is literally nothing but utter crap, a sort of high-society convention nobody actually finds believable?

Such is what passes for leadership in the world. . . .

LOL

China. I remember hearing about a powerful "entrepreneur" who, because he knew a great deal about Chinese food, decided he was an expert on foreign relations with the PRC. Thus, in that vein, a friend and I were only today talking about how much we like Sriracha sauce, a Chinese pepper sauce that is spicier than Mexican Picante sauce. I told the man how I put Sriracha on crackers during the wintertime to stave off colds, and my friend said the Sriracha sauce has been awfully hard to get since the pandemic, more evidence, he said, that capitalism is more hype than competent. In reality, the reason siracha sauce has been scarce is because climate change has made it impossible for the peppers used to make it to grow. Most of the peppers are grown here in the US--in already semi-arid conditions. But all sorts of forces far beyond my power have compromised a food I happen to like.

Thus, my expertise in relations with the PRC is second to none. . . .

LOL

That's right. And I blame capitalism for everything. Capitalism can't do anything right. When the world was in crisis during the pandemic, capitalism totally muffed it. Without any basis, recriminations of the US government continue, most of them uttered by. . .

. . . the capitalists.

LOL 

Finally, I’m anxious to hear the latest New Pornographers recording, “Continue As A Guest”

This pop vocal group, which has a large following, writes songs critical of the commercialization of the music industry, songs that are “smack on the money”. This is a type of art--a presentation that takes a critical stance about something in order to shed light on that something as an institution. Obviously, commercialized popular music as an institution shares more in common with the uncommonly but widespread bad taste of the bourgeoisie or business community than it does with actual creativity.

How does one continue as a guest? Perhaps one is not "official". Doesn't toe the line. Doesn't get with the program. Doesn't lie through their teeth simply to get along. And since art in itself is implicitly critical of the very institution of culture, and this in a 21st-century cultural milieu where culture has been instrumentalized into a way of flipping a buck or satisfying exchange value over use value, being an artist can be difficult. But this is well known. When one is subjected to either/or instrumentalizing force or coercion, life is like inhabiting a hotel. Thus the title of the group's upcoming recording ironically reminded me of an old Steely Dan song that goes, “Be born again, my friend / WON’T YOU SIGN IN STRANGER!”.

Yes, even salvation is for sale.

This is where I came to another "stunning realization"--for the first time ever: Every single time I have ever visited a fundamentalist church, especially when I was homeless, I always had to register, to sign in, possibly because, when the Dominionists take over, my name will be checked for “violations of reverence”. . . .

My name? It's in "the book of The Lord" . . . .

Then I had a nice muffin.  

LOL