Friday, March 20, 2015

The Secession Has Been Televised


Forget your blue state red state maps. Civil War II is but marginally being fought over territory. Rather, it is the people who hate the idea of an inclusive American experience and that more perfect union that liberal thought has wanted to make of our republic going back to the framers, just hate it, versus the people who paid attention in class.


Perhaps an oversimplification, so stipulated, mainly because many smart folks also had inherited wealth, a sense of privilege and immunity from the responsibilities of citizenship, and an engraved invitation to participate in a plutocracy to rival any that had come before. They know full well the common good they eschew.



Like the red staters, this elite has a thing about people who paid attention in class. They have entered into a limited coalition, noses held, with those who have had years upon decades of tradition rebelling against anything the liberal-minded are for, often for hysterical reasons. It's a limited partnership, in the way the promoter might have to coddle one of the cocks with special feed to ensure a better fight and, of course, a bigger return.




The indoctrination of the red stater has been hyperloaded with newspeak, as Orwell coined it, and always, included in every Luntz-approved foray into limited coalition, is a roadmap to avoiding the thought crime of entertaining even well-reasoned liberalism. Building on years of culture wars and Christianism, the third leg, relentless propaganda, has thrived on the legitimacy of plain sight. 

You're being invited into a club which would happily brand you a thought criminal if you didn't agree but thankfully you do. No surprise to me that so many among the nutcrackers in the celebrity right have advanced degrees from mostly accredited colleges and universities. Bobby Jindal, Rhodes scholar. Master of Letters in Political Science. He's the almost candidate who felt comfortable repeating a debunked story about "no-go zones" in large British cities because no doubt his information comes in "letter" form, the light speed kind being a tad tough to "master."

Granted the reductio ad avatar of it, the blue stater is perpetually blindsided by the force with which even the ordinary functioning of government and the revenue collection to make it so are continually under attack at the mouthpiece end of things and obstruction at the other. They form a vast reservoir which knows what the right is up to and seems unable to do anything about it. 

Perhaps it's because the right is, oh what's that word for when whatever you do, you know, they always seem to have a topper, a more win the morning-er, bare-armed blondier thing that everyone now has to react to before anyone can proceed - a reaction always at the ready, regardless of its instantaneousness? What's that word?

Though it may not be over the actual separation of the union, Civil War II is no less blue/gray. The sequel pits parts of Florida against others, whole regions of California against its cities, city versus suburbs in many cases, and it's all so transnational. Pockets everywhere.

Somebody appears to be doing well regardless. See: Dylan, Bob, Masters of War.

And the smoke on the battlefield, as it were, is the irresponsibility of reporting on "both sides" with equal stenography.  A plutocracy couldn't purchase a more compliant media landscape.



Okay, happy now? Red and blue can't stand one another. Now what? It's more than half past "you can have Texas."
 

“No profit grows where is no pleasure ta'en,” the bard wrote shrewdly, so fight you little cocks, fight. 

I'm picturing a Frank Frazetta poster like those Molly Hatchet album covers, with Gohmertisms and bons mots realized as weapons, plus horses and other beasts dressed in either reds or blues, lots of snorting and it's epic. And it's all such a misdirect. 

Take it with pleasure so the profits may grow. 

You wouldn't want to be ungood, would you?