(no subject)
Sometime over the winter - without much fanfare or even a monent I can look back on as a real beginning - I entered what you might call My Nihilist Stage. I've been struggling for some time to find some sort of reason - if not some kind of useful direction - for the legions of fears and worries and desires I held for what I feel is going on all around me in the world at large. Why do I not go to bed at night praying for a government job like the rest of my co-workers? Am I really content with the idea of doing absolutely nothing? What can I truly apply all of my skills towards? What am I still afraid of? What am I hopeful for? What next?
For so long, my stock answer when family and co-workers asked me about "long-terms plans" involved something regarding politics. After all, I'm interested in it, I understand it and - until quite recently - I held some hope that it was truly "important" in 2007 America.
But bit by bit, evening after evening after month after month of rumination and self-examination, I started to notice that this wasn't holding water anymore. I didn't quite admit it to myself, but I knew it even on a level fairly close to the surface. Maybe thats why I was so struck by the letter Cindy Sheehan wrote to the press, announcing her retirement as the de facto face of the anti-war "movement" in this country earlier this week. In it, she wrote:
"I have invested everything I have into trying to bring peace with justice to a country that wants neither. Casey died for a country which cares more about who will be the next American Idol than how many people will be killed in the next few months while Democrats and Republicans play politics with human lives. In five, ten, or fifteen years, our troops will come limping home in another abject defeat and ten or twenty years from then, our children’s children will be seeing their loved ones die for no reason, because their grandparents also bought into this corrupt system. George Bush will never be impeached because if the Democrats dig too deeply, they may unearth a few skeletons in their own graves and the system will perpetuate itself in perpetuity.
"Good-bye America ...you are not the country that I love and I finally realized no matter how much I sacrifice, I can’t make you be that country unless you want it."
And that's just it - I have no hope any more than things in America are ever going to get better. None. Not an ounce. Not if we're looking at President Obama in two years time, not if Democrats win every seat in both houses of Congress - the players may change, but the game will always be played the same.
Anyone who's been paying attention to this Congress ought to have been absolutely gutted by what went on with the war spending bill over the last month. In the history of American politics, you probably can't find a better indication that the fix is in. More than 2/3 of the country disapprove of the war, and more than half want all U.S. troops home within a year. And the fact that the Democrats instead caved into Bush who was COMPLETELY WITHOUT LEVERAGE just proves that there's something more at play. Reid, Pelosi, Kerry, Kennedy - they're not writing the playbook. The Captains of Industry, Controllers of Media and Super-Imperialist Capitalists are, and we are simply irrelevant.
And I don't mean irrelevant in the short-term - I mean The Game is Over. Its done. There's no sense in playing any more. The closest we came to winning were the late-60s which is the last and ONLY time the paradigm has ever been seriously challeged. And even they couldn't end the war or keep Nixon from office or stop themselves from becoming exactly like their parents - apathetic, ignorant enablers of the End of the American Empire.
Capitalism is our everything - our economic policy, our social policy, our politcal theory, even our value system. And that won't change in our lifetimes. And there's absolutely zero chance of some fabled Great Awakening when the media isn't interested in shaking up the status quo, but perpetuating it. Like David Simon said when speaking on the topic, the only question that remains now is what kind of society our children and our children's children are going to create after The Fall.
So then what matters? The little things you can control - blowing off work, cheesecake, hot sex, good albums, creating an existence that you find meaning in, rather than subscribing to the work-produce-consume-work-produce-consume schedule that keeps us isolated, alone and ignorant of all that goes on around us.
For so long, my stock answer when family and co-workers asked me about "long-terms plans" involved something regarding politics. After all, I'm interested in it, I understand it and - until quite recently - I held some hope that it was truly "important" in 2007 America.
But bit by bit, evening after evening after month after month of rumination and self-examination, I started to notice that this wasn't holding water anymore. I didn't quite admit it to myself, but I knew it even on a level fairly close to the surface. Maybe thats why I was so struck by the letter Cindy Sheehan wrote to the press, announcing her retirement as the de facto face of the anti-war "movement" in this country earlier this week. In it, she wrote:
"I have invested everything I have into trying to bring peace with justice to a country that wants neither. Casey died for a country which cares more about who will be the next American Idol than how many people will be killed in the next few months while Democrats and Republicans play politics with human lives. In five, ten, or fifteen years, our troops will come limping home in another abject defeat and ten or twenty years from then, our children’s children will be seeing their loved ones die for no reason, because their grandparents also bought into this corrupt system. George Bush will never be impeached because if the Democrats dig too deeply, they may unearth a few skeletons in their own graves and the system will perpetuate itself in perpetuity.
"Good-bye America ...you are not the country that I love and I finally realized no matter how much I sacrifice, I can’t make you be that country unless you want it."
And that's just it - I have no hope any more than things in America are ever going to get better. None. Not an ounce. Not if we're looking at President Obama in two years time, not if Democrats win every seat in both houses of Congress - the players may change, but the game will always be played the same.
Anyone who's been paying attention to this Congress ought to have been absolutely gutted by what went on with the war spending bill over the last month. In the history of American politics, you probably can't find a better indication that the fix is in. More than 2/3 of the country disapprove of the war, and more than half want all U.S. troops home within a year. And the fact that the Democrats instead caved into Bush who was COMPLETELY WITHOUT LEVERAGE just proves that there's something more at play. Reid, Pelosi, Kerry, Kennedy - they're not writing the playbook. The Captains of Industry, Controllers of Media and Super-Imperialist Capitalists are, and we are simply irrelevant.
And I don't mean irrelevant in the short-term - I mean The Game is Over. Its done. There's no sense in playing any more. The closest we came to winning were the late-60s which is the last and ONLY time the paradigm has ever been seriously challeged. And even they couldn't end the war or keep Nixon from office or stop themselves from becoming exactly like their parents - apathetic, ignorant enablers of the End of the American Empire.
Capitalism is our everything - our economic policy, our social policy, our politcal theory, even our value system. And that won't change in our lifetimes. And there's absolutely zero chance of some fabled Great Awakening when the media isn't interested in shaking up the status quo, but perpetuating it. Like David Simon said when speaking on the topic, the only question that remains now is what kind of society our children and our children's children are going to create after The Fall.
So then what matters? The little things you can control - blowing off work, cheesecake, hot sex, good albums, creating an existence that you find meaning in, rather than subscribing to the work-produce-consume-work-produce-consume schedule that keeps us isolated, alone and ignorant of all that goes on around us.