What The Devil Is This Weirdness We Used To Call "The System"?

What on earth is "The System"?  Recently, I've been reading and hearing about "The System" and how, somehow, the government is "The System", and that "The Establishment" is to blame for all the ills of the country.  Both terms, now trendy among the spokespeople and propagandists of the fraudulently self-named "conservative" mass movement, stem from the 1960s anti-war movement.  

Today, many supporters of the antiwar movement have reached the age of retirement, and of course, after they moved the US government to end the draft, because many of them reentered the conventional wisdom of a mainstream life of the house and car and wife and kids mentality, many have a great deal of power in terms of economic coercion.  Apparently, the anti "System" propaganda is that these people are the ones Donald Trump and other 2023 GOP primary candidates are combating.  

Indeed.  A very weird co-optation of something that has a definite meaning into something that is essentially meaningless seems to be taking place--on TV, on the radio, and in print news.  It's really easy in other words, to simply toss out concepts without defining them in hopes of bamboozling people prone to be too credulous to think for themselves. 

But what is "The System"?  What is "The Establishment"?  Since this is suddenly all-important as a means to the end of slamming a Democratic presidential administration, as propagandists on the far rightist fringe are currently doing, shouldn't these self-described "experts" take the time to explain their use of the two terms?  

Naw.  Why pressure them to be half-assed honest for a change?  

From a general perspective, what does the instrumentalization of a valid concept into a means to an end qualitatively different from its actual meaning do toward the goal of understanding complex phenomena in the contemporary world?  More importantly, how do these concepts affect localities?  In the latter example, many who live in small towns and rural areas that are far removed from the power politics of many urban centers and are in fact somewhat alienated from decisions made from afar that have profound negative effects on their lives, may see "The System" in a way far different from what those in the urban centers see it.  Inculcating often and politically unsophisticated people that "The System" is solely the federal government, a government supposedly inhabited by self-interested "Liberal extremists", or worse, "the extreme left", is a form of disinformation.  

In other words, The System is claiming to be on the side of the common American while waging war with a redefinition of that The System really is.  Orwellian, right?   

A few months ago, an exemplar of the money-maimed zombie-robots we used to call "The System" came calling.  Into my life like a door-to-door vacuum cleaner salesman "The System" arrived, and immediately after kinda-sorta identifying itself as "a bargain" and "profit for everyone", The System tossed dirt onto the rug and then said, "Here!  Lemme clean it all up for ya!"  

Proverbial: The offer you can't refuse.  Unless you want to hang out with a soiled carpet.  

Of course, this seeming absurdity didn't literally occur.  No stranger showed up to mess up my carpet in order to sell me some contraption.  Rather, as a sort of facetious allegory, the little vignette seems to capture what happens when The System decides that everything around you needs to change.  To suit The System.  

In the past, some of the really doctrinaire detractors of the interrelationship between capitalism and government here in the United States saw this systemic interrelationship to be more of an imperialistic confidence game whereby the government concocted spurious reasons to defend commercial interests against often imaginary enemies like the North Vietnamese.  What could ever have gone wrong for the US to use the full force of its military power to subdue a tiny Southeast Asian country that was in the midst of a civil war?  In many ways, after all, The System mightily profited.  There was no express danger from Hanoi.  There was no Domino Theory.  The only real threat to the American way of life--or so we were told--involved another imperialistic power, that of the USSR, vying for world dominance in a competition with the US that was slowly boiling and sometimes coming to blows.  

The real reason for the Vietnam conflict was to boost the economy and make money for wealthy special interests: The System.  

Most of us who still remember the antiwar movement's demand for the United States simply back off as they read the Riot Act to the military contractors and wealthy interests manipulating the democratic impulse for imperialistic ends; we recall that nobody really appreciated the idea that special interests could wield such power over a government and manage to get away with it.  

There.  The System: Work the government like a profitable whore.  Stand back at a distance and let the whore take all the blame for what you, the pimp, forced the whore to do.  

If we go back farther into the American past, we come to the knowledge that, beginning over 100 years ago, the American people fought hard to keep this republic sovereign from the influences of commercial interests, passing rules, establishing boundaries to commercial activities and behaviors, and basically reforming capitalism to make it safe for democracy.  That was a pitch fight, and for a time, the American people won.  The result?  A pretty nice place to live.  

Until The System came calling again.  It was like the warning in The Book of Revelations about the Beast that was here, then gone, then here again: In the Eighties, under Ronald Reagan, a vast blowback and backlash began to gain steam.  Attacks on collective bargaining, and by extension attacks on the very idea of employees exercising political agency while on the job; attacks on banking and financial regulations; a wholesale "unleashing" of commercial interests in a vast push for deregulation of commercial activities--all under the guise of "winning" the Cold War.  

I remember that period too.  Pretty goofy.  Prior to the overblown hype called The Reagan Revolution--one that did produce some hopeful short-term goals but one that also has turned out to be an almost absolute failure in terms of its long term effects on the quality of life of most Americans--the US economy was slowing down.  New competitors--mainly Germany and Japan--were cutting into what the Soviets called "US economic hegemony", and Reagan and his hunchbacked hoodlums decided to rev-up the economy like magic.  Voodoo Economics.  Real wizardry, right?  People liked seeing the economy temporarily bounce back.  Of course, deregulation did result in a resurrection of boom and bust cycles that had been vanquished in the 1930s, but if one was wealthy that was almost imperceptible.  

What have been some of the more widespread results of the Reagan era backlash against the government?  Reagan's goal seems to have been to re-empower already quite powerful commercial interests in order to literally combat what he called "too much government".  Government, per Reagan, was oppressive.  But to whom?  Who was being oppressed?  

Oppression.  This is a term that involves a subjective value judgment.  Anyone can claim to be oppressed.  But oppression is either real oppression that influences the material and physical needs of relatively powerless people--or it is a spurious term to be instrumentalized into a cudgel, a means to the end of gaining money, power and enabling an almost imperialistic sense of endless expansion.  

Since this "Reaganesque" period of often absurd surrealism passed off as reality, a form of what I call reactionary capitalism has become quite powerful, too influential, and far too self-interested-- and all to the point of eroding its generalized relationship to the public good.  

After all, not everyone is involved in the economic theatrics of power, money and endless expansion, and far too often, since those "ethics" are not subject to any true ethical foundation,  what we've habitually come to accept is a capitalism that is flailing out of control because those "values"--power, money, and endless expansion--have not only been politicized, they've cut into everyone's freedoms in a way unanticipated by Ronald Reagan, the paranoid actor who was the first MIA president in US history.  Who else could get away with telling Iran-Contra investigators "I do not recall" 157 times in a single afternoon?  

So.  How did The System Reagan amped-up land on my doorstep?  If all politics is local, then when a new apartment management company purchased this out-of-the-way complex, suddenly all of us, every tenant, was confronted by a wildly flailing, rootless capitalist expression devoid of any ethical foundation.  It's been a weird ride.  Whereas the former company did a good job backing its tenants, the idea the new Pharaoh might follow suit has been sorely put out of its misery.  Out here in the urban badlands, the new management company's tactics look to be a pairing of happy talk and incompetence: a pretense.  But what seems to be happening is that real estate developers have found a future of profits in this neighborhood, and likely, have big plans on chasing the poor tenants, many of them veterans of that Vietnam war, right out of the area.  An apartment complex in a struggling neighborhood is now being retranslated into "luxury living", and the management company is "upgrading" all the apartments with essentially pointless things like "stone counter tops" and new cupboards.  Whoa.  And all for more money.  

I've never seen such penny-pinching in my life.  A perfect example of this penny pinching and outright brutality for the sake of greed and "more" involves a strange gap between the old and new regimes.  The old company had employed a utilities bundler, a company that would bill tenants for all the utilities each month.  The old system pro-rated these bills, essentially billing for the previous month.  This took pressure off tenants.  The timeline for paying those utilities offered tenants some latitude in when to pay.  When the new regime took over like Mussolini in drag, a new bundling system billed for the current month.  This left money owed--sometimes as much as $1,000 to complete that gap.  

Of course, the new regime, had it done its financial due diligence before it signed off on the purchase of this complex, would have made some kind of settlement with the old management company simply in order to back the tenants: "Let's ask for the payment of that lost month of utilities bills to be mixed into what we're going to pay for the complex!"  That would have been the sane way to handle this.  But New Pharaoh isn't having it.  It's billing all the tenants--and worse, it's threatening tenants with eviction if they don't pay up on time.  Beyond that, all late payments for that missing month are being hit with exorbitant late fees.  It's a ridiculous set-up that tells me the foundational "value" of the New Pharaoh is this: 

"Just gimme some money!"  

Yes, The System: Straight to my room from its Temple of Doom.  

Sadly, insofar as all tenants who are enrolled in HUD- or VA-backed housing programs, the new management is rumored to be refusing to renew the leases of individuals who, as VA housing recipients, did all the fighting in the wars some cheap-o plutocrats found profitable.  The System. 

My sister, when I told her of my 87-year-old friend being pushed out, said, "That's horrible!" 

A friend called the new management company, "Bastards!"  And another urged me to get a lawyer.  

Getting a lawyer would likely do no good, even if the discrimination the new management company is employing in its bid to create a new group of tenants in "luxury apartment living" were illegal.  Landlord / tenant laws in this state are heavily-weighed in the favor of landlords in a kangaroo court kind of way.  Evicted?  Go before a judge who'll slam down his hammer, no questions allowed, and rule for the landlord.  Every.  Single.  Time.  

Redlining on the basis of economic class is totally legal here in this state.  A state whose leadership claims  it "owns" all the Christianity.  The System.  Using theocracy as a way to limit the freedom of its subjects.  Just like 1,300 years of Catholic Church oppression.  

Meanwhile, maintenance calls remain unanswered out here, the complex's mailboxes are now a shambles after repeated break-ins, and tenants are being issued eviction notices for the crime of being held responsible for a new apartment management company's failure to do its financial due diligence before signing off on its purchase of the complex.  

In other words, the policy of "just gimme some money!" isn't buffered by any sense of reciprocity at all.  "You pay us, we blame you for the fact we can't even correct our own financial accounting".  

Every time I mention to the new Pharaoh that a maintenance issue needs to be addressed, she passes the buck.  Usually, it's either my fault, or the fault of the landscapers, or the fault of anyone else on earth but the management company.  Pretense.  

It's more of that Trumpian shifting of the blame: The company fails to do a competent job--and  then saddles the negative responsibilities on the tenants.  It's The System: blame someone else, victimize those who are not involved in the money-making venture.  None of those humanesque gizmos seem to bother imagining that it is we, their tenants, who are paying their salaries.  The game?  Get rid of poor people, upgrade, and then sell luxury apartments for big money.  No ethics necessary.  Money, power, and endless expansion.  A little Elmer Gantry of a commercial empire, right here in a town dominated by feral real estate developers.  Literally.  Real estate developers run this big city of over a million people in an area that it's estimated is the home of five million.  After all, as said before, this state offers tenants no relief from those meat robots.  The opening for corruption and injustice is wide.  The idea is that the developers should be set upon us like rabid dogs, and this is where the cannibalism of the American Dream begins. 

Here's part of the big grift: Many denizens and advocates of "free" market economic ideology pretend that "the market" can somehow (nobody knows how) dispense justice and promote equality.  Apparently, according to the more libertarian extraterrestrial kidnapping victims, "the market" preserves economic justice because, if a business is conducting itself badly, consumers won't buy.  Right.  When consumers are basically a captive audience besotted by crass lies and happy talk, apparently some kind of collective inner crap detector goes off and the company is sent to the dustbin of bankruptcy.  Happens all the time, right?  Exxon doesn't pay any federal income taxes--and thus the people are refusing to buy gasoline or natural gas until Exxon decides to be a good citizen that puts its money where its red-white-and-blue mouth is.  Not navy blue like that in the US flag; royal blue.  As in a strange brand of "neo-monarchism".  

Meet the new monarchs, same as the old monarchs.  

Exxon.  I remember reading how, in the early 2000s, Exxon had made a huge oil discovery in the African state of Chad, one of those banana republic kinds of tyrannies, and when Exxon planned to pay the Chad government money for oil leases and purchases of property--as well as large percentages of oil money profits, the United States exacted a foreign policy law that forbade Exxon from simply paying Chad's government--because, in the opinion of the US government, Chad's dictator would use it to buy weapons to use against rebels trying to topple him.  And because the dictator would use oil profits to enrich himself.  Under Rex Tillerson, later a Secretary of State under Trump, Exxon, which made bookoo bucks off its Chad deals, simply ignored US laws and paid the Chad government.  Which bought weapons to kill poor subjects.  

One goal of the US government was to help direct those oil profits to help the people of Chad.  Instead its dictator enriched himself to the tune of millions upon millions.  

Right, Exxon: The System strikes back.  A new episode of Star Wars--where Exxon is the star. Good people die, evil people buy--mansions, big cars, resort townhouses.  Yay, Exxon.  Always dispensing justice and equality wherever Exxon goes.  

And yes!  By all means!  The US government is bad, bad, bad!  Right Ronnie Reagan?  

Back to my locality.  The huge apartment management company, headquartered in Atlanta, boats that it controls something like 200,000 apartments nationwide--but if one checks their Better Business Bureau rating, one finds the company has received and F-.  That's right.  As bad as it can get.  Worse, BBB refuses to accredit the company.  Over 200 unanswered consumer complaints too.  Apparently New Pharaoh is pulling the same stunts on at the very least 200,000 Americans.  The System.  And there is nothing stopping The System.  That's part of how The System operates: regulatory capture, massive campaign expenditures, ideological allies within the State government, and BOOM.  Kismet if you're wealthy, oppression if you're poor.  

Is that freedom?  Justice?  Equality?  The System says YES!

In this area, as mentioned, the real estate community is literally a huge collective.  It's a feral animal.  Since another brusque Reagan move in eradicating 80 percent of the money of an LBJ-created program to aid financially-troubled big cities, most major American urban areas are having financial trouble.  Some are resorting to raising property taxes to make up for what the loss of that program has done to exacerbate financial drownings across America.  Hence, the city here has engaged in a sort of marketing campaign to bring young, single professionals into the wonders of dense urban living--just like San Francisco!  Just like New York City!  But don't mention Baltimore or Pittsburgh please!  This has indeed made the inner city a lot more "neato torpedo" for people who have the big money to spend on luxury apartments and luxury condominiums, even luxury houses.  But on the dark underbelly of this resides something else: 

Not job creation.  Homelessness creation.  

That's right.  The fact developers raise the rent to cover higher property taxes, and to simply exploit the bejesus out of tenants and mortgage holders, is a fact that is pushing entire families into the already overcrowded emergency homeless shelter industrial-complex.  And HUD?  It has plenty of money to help people who can't rate the high rent.  The big problem with HUD's ability to actually help people is that the real estate developers "don't feel like" creating affordable housing conditions.  

Why is that?  Obvious.  The money.  Big profits, and the poor can lump it under the excuse-policy of "what the market can bear".  If the market in one sector of the city can bear a higher rent than elsewhere, the developers all get on the extraction-extortion-exploitation bandwagon and raise the rent everywhere in the city.  And homelessness grows.  

Just the other day, a spuriously boosterist monthly magazine here chirped at the "wit" of one real estate developer who seemed to think that building big, 20-story glass boxes is "improving the city's culture".  Moreover, he even said he was building commercial real estate "to scare homeless people away".  

Ah yes.  The social mission in privatization, right here before our eyes.  Remember?  Because "the government can't do anything right", the privatization of government services will benefit all as we use public funding for private gain.  BAM!  The System strikes again.  

I hate to see such distortions in how we are conditioned to view the government.  The government itself, as a concept, isn't to blame.  The government's tax base has been so reduced it cannot man or fund federal agencies designed to keep an eye out for the kind of idiocy being committed according to the "conventional wisdom" of real estate barons who are basically feral vermin in the eyes of many in this area.  

I found an interesting thread on Facebook, the social network, just the other day.  On the post's thread, many locals were commenting on real estate developer hegemony in the area.  Weighing in with my opinion, I suggested that what needs to be done is for the City to "bag" some of those robber barons with tranquilizer guns, ship them outside the city limits to reeducation camps out in the country "where they can't hurt anybody", and teach them how to be good citizens.  

Then I added, "Who would have thought that the country's real estate robber barons would literally buy the entire country right out from under our feet!"  

One typically ignorant response?  "So.  Money bad".  

And there you go: The System speaks like a ventriloquist through a little wooden dummy.  And you can see this almost every night on TV.  

"Just gimme some money!"  We love the hand that feeds because the hand feeds.  Now bark.  You're Pavlov's new dog!  

As I've indicated many times before in this blog, I don't "hate" capitalism.  What I don't particularly appreciate the idea that a highly influential, deeply powerful, and excessively self-interested faction that is the one faction that actually "controls the economy" has based itself on specious ethical grounds.  When did running one's life from the stomach up come to be better than running one's life from the brain on down?  Appetite.  Impulse.  Instinct.  Domination.  Economic coercion.  Gain by force or by fraud.  

"Survival of the fittest, baby!"  

This is where the crack-up of the American Dream actually makes me chuckle: Social Darwinism--the concept whereby a bunch of self-interested animals got "survival of the fittest"--is itself a cheap, crass bowdlerization of Darwinism.  Darwin would have chaffed at the idea that civilized humans would base anything on mere survival of the fittest.  Sometimes, in the natural world, the least fit are the ones that survive--as the Great Big Survivors survive themselves right out of existence.  Perhaps because if aggressiveness and selfishness replace concepts of mutual self interest, and thus become hardwired, the killer instinct kills off the host.  

Then there's the libertarian pabulum that concocts civil rights as if by magic in its heehaw defense of "natural law".  Most of them may have an inkling that one of the great philosophers who helped pave the way for civil government, John Locke, used natural law as an idea in his Second Treatise Of Government, and that Jean Jacques Rousseau, also propounded the idea of "the noble savage", but most don't seem to understand that the savage world of nature is a far cry from the civilized one.  

In fact, civil government is one of many potential antidotes to a world overruled by "natural rights"--if it can be done in reality, then do it: If you want a thing, just take it by force or by fraud.  Be a savage.  Be an animal.  Win.  

Really?  

When Jefferson cited "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" in the Declaration of Independence, he issued a rhetorical broadside against the King of England's advocacy of, not natural right, but of "divine right".  At the time of the Declaration, the idea that Nature is the source of reason, and that Divinity is more myth than method, was an important change in how humans had come to see themselves.  But leave it to today's advocates of The System to bowdlerize that in insistence that natural rights are the foundation of civil rights.  Actually, civil rights are the antidote to natural law.  Natural law is ineffective if humans want to live in close proximity to one another.  Natural law, unsurprisingly, is a basis of the nonsensical idea of "self interest" as some kind of loony universal solvent: If you're absolutely consumed by self interest, the interests of others do not pertain to you, your behavior or your actions.  Hence, in an odd turn, you are suddenly in pitch competition with all others, and eventually, only one of you will "dominate the field" and become the totalized, autocratic, authoritarian dictator to exercise your self interest to the detriment or betterment of all others.  To obtain your favor, your "underlings" will lie, cheat, steal and even kill to "win" over the other contestants.  

That is no way to be free.  

So.  We indeed do see The System in play right here in my locality.  Self interested rabble, those who have decided that the principles of justice and equality and fairness do not apply to their actions and behaviors, are running roughshod over powerless people, and all for the sake of profit, capital, and property.  And how do they deal with the contradictions in their own "happy talk"? 

They'll claim they're patriots.  Making the world better by doffing all the veterans to god knows where.  

Nope.  Not a way to defend freedom.   Not a way to privatize anything but the contents of other people's wallets.  

Let's go ahead and call this what it is: The Church of the Holy Wallet.  That's a strange cult that suggests the road to self-regulation is Jesus.  No need to have a third-party regulation regime oversee your actions; just claim to be saved, one of the Chosen, a Man or Woman In Christ.  That way, you'll always behave morally and ethically.  And yes, you'll defend the interests of the poor.  Just like the New Pharaoh is doing right here in the Big City.  

"That's life in the big city. . . . "

No wonder people without power quail at that sort of nonsense.  People from afar, looking for short term financial gain, operating under an absolutism involving self interest uber alles, come in as if from nowhere to muck up everything they can.  And if you're a commoner, relatively powerless, what can you do?  

You react against what the TV tells you is the real reason for those slick dicks in suits coming to ruin your life: The government.  

There.  That's The System's way of looking at the world: Conduct oneself unjustly, and unjustifiably, and then shift the blame onto the poor, or the powerless, or onto the one institution that defend the poor or powerless: the government.  

The System is a way to systematically rig the game by manipulating government to one's self aggrandizing advantage.  

And from there, understanding "The Establishment" is quite easily accomplished: An established group of powerful private interests who have established them as the de facto rulers who do so from behind the scenes with vast amounts of economic coercion, power and money.  

Right.  And while they're at it, they're happy to tell you "the government" doesn't belong to you.  They'll be happier when they insert themselves between you and the government. That's like being One Big Road Hog driving straight down the middle of the road.  Swerve to the side, groundlings, The Establishment with its System is coming through. 

 

   

  

"Don't Bother Pardoning My Leftist Revenge"

Last night, I dreamed I was a leftist.  

I'm sure it was a nightmare but I was asleep.  Therefore, I was safe from the commies--which, in the dream, were me.  

Like many in the particular niche in my generation--boomers--I became an adult in the years surrounding the antiwar movement's pinnacle: aged 17 when the Kent State and Jackson State massacres-by-soldier occurred, 15 when the police riot outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August 1978, and most interestingly, my first year in college was a year of an-all out "Bring The War Home" move by an antiwar movement that was getting nothing but repression from the ever-paranoid Nixon administration.  

I remember when Nixon and his hoodlum henchmen went bonkers enough to steal into the offices of Daniel Ellsberg, all to hide the horrific military abuses occurring in Vietnam.   I remember the Christmas bombing of Hanoi.  Mostly, I remember the something like 1,700 property bombings--mainly draft offices and RNC sales outlets and police stations--and I remember when the Weather Underground managed to spring Timothy Leary out of San Quentin Prison.  

At 18, those events laid down quite an impression with me.  I was becoming an adult, after all, and thus more and more self aware, I had come to realize that the Vietnam war was more about charitable contributions to military contractors and the military-industrial complex than it was even remotely to be associated with defending freedom in Southeast Asia.  In fact, while as a young teenager, I had a map of Vietnam on my bedroom wall, my confusion then today persists in my memory when I laugh at the irony that, next to the map (I'd used pins to mark major battles), a Look Magazine photo of nude hippies dancing around a horse that had been dyed blue regaled the then-mystifying images of what it might mean to reach adulthood in the midst of the Sexual Revolution.  

As the Jefferson Airplane sang, "Wild Times".  

Naw.  The times weren't that wild.  In fact, I remember how much fun it was not to be a slave to The Lawrence Welk Show on TV, something that remains like a rotten fish in my memory as it was the de rigeur ritual at my house every Saturday night as my parents got ready to go dancing at the Elks Club.  I remember how fun it was to blare Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love" on Christmas morning after a friend delivered the record album as a gift that day.  I also recall how shocked the adults at my church were when the youth group of which I was a member decided to make posters about Christianity.  This was exciting.  At the time, lots of teens were designing their own florescent posters in addition to those we could buy at Spencer's Gifts at the mall, a place lofting with incense and lava lamps and mystery.  Meanwhile, the TG&Y in White Rock Shopping Center had all kinds of supplies for this, paints, brushes, pens, poster board.  My poster I painted in Day Glo tempera--an image of the globe ensconced like a beautiful jewel in a candle flame.  

"May The Light Of The Spirit Encircle The World" read the poster's caption.  The black poster board added to the bright yellows and reds, and of course represented outer space.   But no moon. Why a new moon?  I really don't know.  Perhaps I wanted my viewers to focus on the Earth.

As a tiny group of teens, we displayed our posters one Sunday after a church service.  We were artists.  At least for a short time.  We felt good about ourselves.  We had accomplished something cool and countercultural by our lights, and that, more than anything, meant a much to me at the time.  I was still a kid.  Feeling all sorts of uncertainty.  And testing limits.  Breaking a few rules.  Questioning authority.  And here I was that Sunday morning, finding acceptance from the adults in the middle of what was termed "the generation gap".  Political agency through art. 

Most of the posters we had made were of rainbows and flowers and even amateur imitations of some of the more well-known images of the day.  A couple of rock stars, the "love is a flower..." bit "that needs to be treated gently", psychedelic designs.  But mine?  It seemed to stick out.  As I lifted my poster for a crowd of adults to see in the recreation hall, I found puzzled, almost alarmed, looks in a number of adult faces.  Why were the adults looking at me with puzzlement in their eyes?  

Wait.  Look at the context surrounding my poster.  The world was on the brink of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD).  Everyone, including us us teenagers, was terrified at the face-off between what I today see as a competition between US imperialism and Soviet imperialism.  

Yeah.  Like Wednesday Addams, I'd painted something that looked like the Earth on fire.  Well, in today's terminology, that was the bomb.  

Yup.  The bomb, the bomb, the bomb.  We as humans in the thrall of high technology's eyeless ability to wipe us all off the map as if Mother Earth was shaking off an infestation of lice; we had to live with that possible horror.  All the time.  At any minute we could have been turned into grease spots on green glass.  That would be radioactive shards for 10,000 years.  At least our remains would be pretty for a while. . . 

I've thought a lot about those events many times since they occurred.  I remember reading numerous science fiction novels about nuclear holocaust.  "Alas Babylon", "A Canticle For Liebowitz", "Level Seven": all these come to mind.  Yes, even our finest futurists were scared shitless.  And they were warning us.  We needed temperance.  And prudence.  Possibly a little providence.  None of those seemed to be materializing anywhere.  Not only had the Ban The Bomb protests of the late 1950s and early 1960s been rubbed out by what its proponents called "The Death Machine", people wanted to escape the maw of crazy that was possessing American leadership.  

Today, two things about those wild times come to mind: First, everyone of us kids wanted peace--everyone, that is, adults included, at least adults other than those who were using their power for ominous ends, and everyone really was worried about the potential for nuclear armageddon.  My father was.  As was my mother. 

Let's back up.  When I was smaller, age seven, my family lived in Denver.   My father worked for the government.  At that time, Denver was a manufacturing center for the military because its location far inland would make it harder to hit during an attack.  But by 1962, the advent of the ICBM was Xing that out.  Then the Cuban Missile Crisis occurred.  Yes, terror.  At school, our teachers handed us forms to fill out.  For dog-tags.  As a second grader, I thought that was amazingly cool.  But when I took the form home to be signed by my parents, my mother cried.  The tags, made of of tungsten, would survive a nuclear attack, thus making our identities recognizable in the charred remnants of lunacy brought to us by...well, what exactly? Why were we to be enslaved by that fear?  Even our parents were reticent about obeying some vague dictates we remain fully patriotic during the Cold War.  If capitalism was so superior to socialism, what was the fuss about?  

Throughout that era, the creepy warnings about communist subversion hammered at us constantly like some kind of death knell.  I didn't know any commies.  I was just a kid.  Then the very worst happened in the middle of the Cuban Missile Crisis: the air raid sirens in the neighborhood went off in the middle of the night.  Crying, my father rushed us all into the basement of our home.  There, we crouched until the sirens stopped.  Yes, it had been a false alarm.  But people were keeping quiet about it.  Later, my dad told me "some beatniks" had broken into Bancroft High School and triggered the alarms as a protest.  

Ban The Bomb. Stop The Death Machine.  

Were those "beatniks" commies?  Or were they people just like you and me?  I'll never know.  the drumbeats about subversion continued.  Subversion...subversion...subversion.  All through the Sixties, into the Seventies, and onward into the Eighties.  Even after the Cold War officially ended some people were still finding that, well, propitious, a means to power via fear tactics.  

Subversion.  And backlash.  Reactionaryism began to rise too.  At the Northwest Shopping Center, at a hardware store, two odd brothers lined their dusty counter-top with tracts and weirdly colored books.  "None Dare Call It Conspiracy" by Gary Powell cost me 75 cents to read, and for a 14-year-old, the contents were indeed scary.  A vast vast conspiracy was underway.  The commies were hiding in America, and they were everywhere.  A vast underground of communists had infiltrated the Democratic Party.  John F. Kennedy had sold his soul to the commies.  Business was not safe.  The revolution could occur any time.  And the peace symbol?  A secret sign gestured by one commie to another.  The white dove--the Communist International's co-optation of the dove of peace.  

Wow.  

The brothers, who looked like what today I'd label "paleoconservatives", dressed in suits.   The expressions on their faces were zombie-like, expressionless, mystified.  I would imagine they believed they were the neighborhood's last bastion of patriotism.  They were members of a creepy organization founded by Fred Koch, Charles Koch's father.  But even then, when they were making noise, as my dad told me, they were "the lunatic fringe".  

Today, the John Birch Society has forced itself into the mainstream--all to spread the same paranoid idiocy it was founded to do.  Today they appear at CPAC, a convention of paranoids and generally reactionary types who, to this day, are waiting for two and only two developments: 

What are the expected developments?  The communist takeover of the United States and the return of Jesus Christ.  What would happen if Jesus turned out to be the leader of the revolution, a hippie friend of mine--Jennifer--once asked me quite coyly.  How could I answer?  This sort of thing was bigger than I was.  How are teenagers supposed to understand all that reactionary garbage?  Or communism?  How were we supposed to get that down?  

Oh yeah.  We could read books about the renewed Red Scare all right

I found J. Edgar Hoover's "Masters of Deceit", another wholly paranoid book profiling subversion in action, right here in the US., I think, on the sidewalk somewhere. No one but J. Edgar Hoover and his black-shoed allies, Hoover claimed, could even detect the subversives.  But they were there, subversives, many of them intellectuals and professors, academics and even high school teachers.  

Sound familiar?  It's not a coincidence that reactionaries always go after intellectuals and academics and artists first.  They always do.  Those are the ones who can actually think.  

Who knows why all that garbage came upon us?  It was a contrast to the rise of a counterculture that, at first, had nothing at all to do with destroying America.  Being young, being filled with life and energy, only naturally we rebelled against the paranoids.  And we rebelled against the warlords pushing us into a state of perpetual war as in Orwell's "1984".  Craziness is putting the entire planet on a nuclear countdown clock for no reason other than some spurious fears over some very deluded people coming to take toys away from all adult Americans.  That's how I saw it.  As a tremendously dumb thing for powerful people to do to the world.  I still believe that.  

Second, I remember that the Sixties Generation was the first generation after World War II that was able to enjoy being alive.  Our parents?  Our parents had endured, first, the penury of the Great Depression, another wholly dumb thing that happened due to the same market speculators that almost caused another one in 2008.  Then they'd endured the war.  Growing up in the shadow of that thing was sometimes depressing to me.  In Denver, as a child, sometimes my father and I would go walking in the darker parts of downtown, and there I'd see old men without arms and legs, men with nothing but a chunk of wood serving as an artificial limb.  Very sad.  And worse: an awful lot of really traumatized human beings.  

We were young, us kids.  We weren't living under those two man-made disasters.  For the first time in over 50 years, we could be free, happy, and unfettered, alive, human, humane, and precocious.  And people were.  I remember the Sixties as a happy period.  Enthusiasm was in the air.  Possibility.  Freedom, liberation, and resistance.  Outside of the house, I was in the midst of a true American awakening.  Our parents, having endured so much at the hands of forces against which they were powerless, weren't so sure.  

Apparently, that was "all bad all the time" to repressed adults who saw the counterculture as a threat to nothing more nor less than their own sense of stability and status quo.  Ridiculous.  As for J. Edgar Hoover's "Masters of Deceit"?  My father called Hoover, "Master of the Seat".  And he probably was.  The ass.  

Hence, in the face of all kinds of creepy "conservative" resistance and bellowing about the need to restore the country "to a semblance of morality", the rebellions began.  Vietnam was sucking up the younger generation like a bone-crushing vacuum cleaner.  Kids would grow up with hope in their eyes only to be doomed after being tossed into something they had no way to resist.  Why be free and happy and alive if some goof is out to send you to a foreign jungle to be killed simply so some military contractors could trot home with lots of cash?

For my older friends, I remember, the implications of the Vietnam war were even worse than a personal sacrifice.  Some had risked their lives as Freedom Riders, people who put themselves against the machine of Jim Crow in a valiant bid to demonstrate to Black men they were not only men but also free.  Suddenly, the same people the Freedom Riders had worked so hard to be convinced by the American Dream were being sent off to Southeast Asia to be killed.  

No one with one lick of sense was down with that military-industrial complex caper.  And it was a caper indeed.  The communist threat wasn't really real.  Sure antagonism between a totalitarian state and a supposed republic were waxing and waning, oftentimes stoked by myopic leaders on both sides of the wall who literally could not see straight.  What good is a Cold War if the goal of keeping people happy and fulfilled is destroyed in the process?  

Hence, protests began.  Protests against public hypocrisy.  Most young people knew it was all a game.  Yes, Soviet imperialism was threatening to the freedoms of millions caught in the maw of that idiotic machine.  Yes, Third World countries, as they then were called, were being victimized by communist agitators and terrorists determined to sell a crazy kind of communism as if it was something that could even shine your shoes.  Yes, many of us intuitively knew as well that the USSR would likely collapse--all by its obvious flaws.  It wasn't going to need any help.  Repressive regimes always crack from the inside out.  Including our own.  That was the rub our elders simply weren't willing to face.  Fear, fear, fear.  It's repression.  And it's oppressive.  

That was then.  Today, the same paranoids who rushed the West into dumb wars over capitalism's dislike for even the ideals of socialism are again rising--again paranoid, again grabby, and again starting up more drumbeats to war, this time as an extreme type of economic competition with the Chinese Communist Party.  Right.  We definitely need one of those.  Yay.  Another Cold War.  Paranoids on the warpath.  But what is the paranoia about?  Why is a political/economic order that is slowly being outmoded in China being challenged as a threat to capitalism?  Those with astute eyes and the ability to do their own research suggest that the Chinese Communist Party is already cracking down on the people of China because they're hanging on by their eye-teeth.  Whatever the truth is to that, it's also evident that authorities are slowly replacing the Marxian pipe dream with a revamped Confucianism.  After all, that tradition order works if the leadership is relatively sane. . . 

So.  What about protecting the one domestically subversive force readily evident in America of 2023?  What about protecting capitalism from some kind of mirage-like subversion?  Why would capitalism need to be protected?  Oh, the paranoids have all kinds of answers for that.  Some in the libertarian camp have even concocted "alternative definitions" of what socialism is.  Here's a stab at what I saw as a boy: My parents fought over money.  Who controls the money?  Lots of emotionally abusive events occurred to my sister and I due to arguments over who controls the products of my father's labor.  I saw the Cold War as the very same thing.  Still dumb, still pointless, still paranoia, albeit on a national scale.  

But wait.  Wait.  Hey, the paranoids are back. . . . 

That's right.   With new, alternate definitions behind them, many fraudulently self-describing "conservatives" are whining that any large government is tantamount to socialism.  If the government is big, socialism is coming to take your shampoo away from you, and no matter how you cry out, you'll never get to wash your mullet again.  Right?  Exactly!  If a government "interferes" with sacrosanct "free markets", it's "socialism".  If the government regulates economic activities and behavior--these are called laws--it's "socialism".  If the government conducts any administrative activities, it's "socialism".  

How could anyone with any political sense come up with an alternative definition of socialism?   People like F. A. Hayek, the reactionary purveyor of sham economics, did exactly that.  He had to redefine socialism to make his idiotic ideas seem to work.  Which they don't.  But never mind all that, it's time to move along kiddies, there's a circus in town.  

In other words, these doofuses are shadow boxing because they're afraid of their own shadows.  Yes, as the Wobblies used to say, "You can run but you cannot hide."  

I've often wondered about this instrumentalization of fear.  Of course, instilling old fears in new minds is convenient for those trying to hack the federal government to pieces.  What's that about anyway?  Some of the wealthier capitalists who practice a type of backlash capitalism I call reactionary capitalism don't want a government big enough to challenge their designs.  They suggest it's entirely appropriate to make the federal government dance like it's 1789--while commercial and economic forces advance into the middle of the 21st Century.  That makes no sense at all.  The paradigm of democracy circa 1787 has shifted to meet the demands of industrialization, and now, financialization.  Both of those were crises for democracy.  Destabilizing events that hurt a lot of people.  Forcing us backwards to a time when life only seems simple to us is absolute Mutual Assured Destruction, a kind of retrograde imperialism turned against the American people by interests not interested at all in democracy.  

I have an absurd pet theory about this.  A sort of thought experiment.  What if the American bourgeoisie, otherwise known as the business community, believes it is so endangered that it needs to foray with an imperialistic "civilizing mission" among the "native peoples" of the United States--namely everyone not involved in gleaning commercial profits--and is thus eating the American Dream alive like a Hostess Twinkie?  

That's not an entirely new angle on what is occurring in the US in 2023.  People who didn't have their souls killed by commercialism, consumerism and commodification of anything that isn't already nailed down, and some things that are, have been warning us of this obsessive compulsion to consume everything.  It's a dark force.  It's like The Beast, a representation of physical necessity paired with an overweaning materialism, from the Book of Revelation.  But do purveyors of storefront religion pay attention to the meaning of Biblical myths and parables?

And then there is what I call "The Cold War Hangover".  Some people are still fighting The Cold War.  It's as if this is all they know.  Possibly they were petrified years ago by all the fear tactics of the Fifties and the Sixties.  Maybe they have a guilty conscience over consuming us all.  Maybe they are beset by their own shadow selves.  Whatever the case, they behave like drunks after the party.  And they're tiresome, cranky and out of control.  After 80 years fighting an ideology, when the Soviets let go of the tug-of-war rope, the silly reactionaries kept backing up and backing up until now the US is so far to the right it's almost not a democracy anymore.  

Is that freedom?  I thought freedom thrives when one is without fear.  

Action and reaction: the laws of thermodynamics are in play.  Look at reaction for example.  Reaction has been long known to be entirely passive, a creature of stasis and the status quo--until it is moved by another force that acts upon it.  Reaction is not inherently active at all.  In fact, for reaction to thrive it has to act against something.  What is that something?  Easy.  A phantom.  Communist subversion.  At least that's one of reactionaryism's scapegoats.  It needs a malevolent actor in order to be moved.  If it is to motivate the passive and apathetic into reaction it has to find Jews, Gypsies, Communists, Marxism, Democrats, Liberals, Progressives, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, George Soros and more and more and more.  You know: to keep the reactionary process going.  

Just for grins, let's add a little spice to the paranoia and reactionaryism.  Let's add Lenin's remark: "To control the opposition, we will lead it ourselves."  Well, that was clever.  There are many ways to lead an opposition--especially a reactionary one. 

That's simple.  Be the scapegoat.  Be the fox the hunters desire to catch and kill.  The reactionaries will chase you to the gates of Hell just to keep their madness alive.  

Perhaps that's the true reactionary mantra: Keep the madness alive!  Everybody?  Just keep shivering.  

OK.  Put your paranoia tinfoil hats on for a second.  They've been brought to you by your sponsor, Kaiser Aluminium.  What if pushing the US into a reactionary position was the commie plan all along?  What if it's so easy to make reactionaries react that if the capitalists are conditioned to do this, they'll begin pushing the government, society, culture, and especially economics into a reactionary pit so deep that the only way out is authoritarianism.  And once the authoritarianism is in place, while no one but the authoritarians is satisfied or in satisfactory emotional and intellectual condition, any resistance will be squelched.  But...once the economy begins to fizzle, and once the wild ride of unrestrained capitalism spins out of control, what's left but anger, disdain, and in the end, revolution?  

Sometimes, if you look at culture war issues in particular, what you may see is almost a call-and-response between two wildly divergent extremes.  The leftists call for culture war: Pop Art co-opting Madison Avenue; New Wave music's "detonation at the point-of-sale" in terms of making anti-commercial buying habits so trendy people almost don't know what they're buying; punk as "combat rock".  I see a lot of what could almost constitute as leftist baiting going on, and it's puzzling how the reactionary right always bites.  Always.  The anti-nuclear crowd militates against nuclear power--and the rightists go all-in for the nuclear family.  All sorts of countercultural gestures point to a push to get America off the modern Liberalism. . . . 

. . . because modern Liberalism, not Ronald Reagan, defeated communism in both Western Europe and the United States.  Karl Marx's observations were observations about economic and political conditions in the mid-19th Century's period of industrialization.  They have little to no bearing today mainly because modern Liberalism took his critique of unrestrained capitalism seriously and did something about it.  That was reform, Progressive and Liberal reform.  Those reforms were successful enough to shut down the rising socialist movement in the US.  In fact, many socialists and Marxian thought leaders today blame modern Liberalism for the failure of socialism.  

It only makes sense to find a way to push Liberalism's head under the water and drown it if you want a socialist comeback in the United States.  And who else can do that other than capitalists who need scapegoats in order to fuel reactionaryism on a vast scale?  Building a giant machine to defeat Liberalism in the US seems to be job number one for these fraudulent "conservatives" who are actually libertarian in their "smaller government, fewer regulations, lower taxes" mantras and talking points.  Yes, they're frauds.  Conservatism is about hereditary rulership, not political governance.  Edmund Burke, in his seminal rant, "Reflections On The Revolution In France", spent more time sucking up to the British monarchy than he did codifying much of anything beyond praising the elite.  And the mob of the French Terror, the one led by ideologues who had no real intellectual understanding of the realities of a revolution of misery?  We hear Democrats and Liberals being called "mob rule" by the very reactionary capitalists who are instrumentalizing fear as if they were Oreo Cookies.  

What's the alternative to the fake "socialism" of 2023?  Libertarianism.  The economization of the political, i.e. interpreting political action as economic preference.  It's silly.  But it's definitely the sort of thing some "eater" might want to swallow.  Consume the eaters.  That sounds like a plan.  Eat the rich.  This phrase was an incendiary one that began to manifest in the early Eighties.  In his book, "Subculture: The Meaning Of Style", Dick Hebdige describes the political meanings behind British punk and New Wave: commercialization of public dissent.  Hebdige describes "revolution at the point of sale".  In the US, we got Tipper Gore trying to put out another countercultural fire with warning labels on New Wave record albums.  Nice try.  Hebdige goes on to observe that anything on earth can serve as a political metaphor.  And using metaphor in a political way is becoming a widespread phenomenon in 2023.  

It's time for a laugh.  Since libertarians won't look askance at anything they can sell, it's almost comedy to see culture warriors of the leftist variety creating saleable revolution right under the noses of the Kochtopus.  And even Clear Channel buying up all the FM radio stations to control content can't really stop this.    

Kochtopussy, the new James Bond flick.  Subversives! you can almost hear on the wind.  Get behind the reactionaries and push push push!  

Interestingly, once the Bolshevik revolution--actually it was a military coup that overthrew the previous 1917 revolution that took place in February of the year of the fabled (hyped) October Revolution--got going, its apparatchiks promised ignorant peasants "liberty" from heavy-handed government interference.  Yup, yup, yup: Libertarianism.  

Even more surprising to those knee-jerk anti-socialists is that left-libertarianism, anti-statist, is called Trotskyism.  Hilarious.  All this time, the libertarian mass movement in the United States, masquerading as either conservatism or classical Liberalism, has been tirelessly working to get the Liberalism out of Dodge once and for all.  

I bet the real Marxists in hibernation as they wait for conditions to change literally love that process.  

OK.  Say I'm a leftist.  Say I saw what FDR and the Liberals did to the socialist mass movement in the US when it waxed in the 1930s.  What if the only way I could see to get around Liberalism would be to defeat Liberalism in a domestic bid to "take the country back"?  What if the entire shebang--letting go of the tug-of-war rope to force a rightward reactionary spin-out, usurping modern Liberalism, amplifying unrestrained capitalism to the point that old-fashioned exploitation and wage slavery and even child labor began to return to disrupt the domestic tranquility the Liberals have fought so hard to create for the American people--was part of some super-secret Marxian plan to simply wait it out?  Wait out until the unrestrained capitalism literally spins out of control?  

Sounds like a plan to me, all you paranoids.  Get right on it, Cato Institute!  

And what if some of the commies all these reactionaries are terrified of have already managed to infiltrate the conservative mass movement?  What if, interestingly enough, what we know as neo-conservatism was a turn by 1930s era Trotskyists into something that would fight-off modern Liberalism?  Actually this is true.  Many early neo-conservatives began as Trotskyites.  

Oh well. Fooled again, paranoids.  Fooled again.  The opposition may be getting itself led around by the nose by the super-secret Marxists, and it's all happening far and wide inside the conservative mass movement.  

Remove government regulations, and suddenly all of capitalism's negative neighborhood effects return.  Remove the government's ability to administer some economic activity, and yup, Liberalism becomes "the enemy", not merely to "conservatives" but to old school socialists.  

Libertarianism: working tirelessly to create two classes satisfactory to conservatism's bid to lead "the mob" with a moneyed elite: bourgeoisie and proletariat, ready-made and waiting for the socialists to come out of hibernation during "night" or "the Ice Age", or "when the moon is down".  

I suppose it's quite easy to lead paranoids around with their kid fears.  Who knows?  Maybe this really is the plan.  Maybe it's been the plan since before Ronald Reagan's entrance on the scene.  He was paranoid all the way--even if he used tactics invented by modern Liberalism to defeat the Soviets.  Or sorta: he went into deficit spending, tripled the debt, and invested heavily in manufacturing and in the commercial sector.  In the real world of historical fact, by 1980, the year Reagan was elected to the Presidency, the USSR was already tottering.  It was going bankrupt, in part due to its iron-fisted control issues, partly due to 75 years of boycotting and embargo.  In fact, interestingly, big Western banks like Chase and Bank of America, and even Goldman Sachs, were all lending all kinds of money to Warsaw Pact members in the years leading up to its 1989 collapse.  

You know why: Because money.  

Wait.  Aren't those New Deal tactics verboten in today's conservative mass movement?  Maybe Reagan was a secret commie.  Maybe the USSR just faked its collapse to make a reactionary movement eat the United States alive.  Who really knows?  These ideas are definitely worth investigating.  But one thing more: Once the "populists" of today's GOP come to the stunning revelation they've been fooled by libertarian propaganda, there is going to be a fury likely never before seen in the US.  Should the upcoming unrestrained capitalism that is returning suddenly spin out of control, those currently in control could find themselves hanging from lampposts and steeples.  

Convenient idiots don't need any subversives to tell them how to eradicate democracy, do they.