Via
MOMENT OF TRIUMPH
I avoided the movie "Good Will Hunting" after I saw the trailers. It looked like a wank. I'm still convinced it's a wank, and I'll probably never bother to see it. But someone sent me an .mp3 of this rant this morning. It said, albeit through an anecdotal approach, everything I was thinking since I woke up. Here I was, thinking the scales were falling from my eyes, that it was time to start talking turkey every time I open my mouth, that it's time to stop humoring people who are just living in The Movie, to cut across the grain of their commodified narrative with a simple account of the money trail and the body count, to give no quarter, to make no apology, to console no coward, to tell it like it is.
That was stupid (not to mention a little smug). It's already been done.
It's already part of the zeitgeist. It was done six years ago. I was catching on then, but I see I was way behind.
"Once they have that location, they bomb the village where the rebels were hiding and fifteen hundred people that I never met and that I never had no problem with get killed. Now the politicians are sayin', "Send in the marines to secure the area" 'cause they don't give a shit. It won't be their kid over there, gettin' shot. Just like it wasn't them when their number was called, 'cause they were pullin' a tour in the National Guard. It'll be some kid from Southie takin' shrapnel in the ass. And he comes home to find that the plant he used to work at got exported to the country he just got back from. And the guy who put the shrapnel in his ass got his old job, 'cause he'll work for fifteen cents a day and no bathroom breaks. Meanwhile he realizes the only reason he was over there in the first place was so we could install a government that would sell us oil at a good price. And of course the oil companies used the skirmish over there to scare up domestic oil prices. A cute little ancillary benefit for them but it ain't helping my buddy at two-fifty a gallon. They're takin' their sweet time bringin' the oil back, and maybe even took the liberty of hiring an alcoholic skipper who likes to drink martinis and fuckin' play slalom with the icebergs, and it ain't too long 'til he hits one, spills the oil and kills all the sea life in the North Atlantic. So now my buddy's out of work and he can't afford to drive, so he's walking to the fuckin' job interviews, which sucks 'cause the schrapnel in his ass is givin' him chronic hemorroids. And meanwhile he's starvin' 'cause every time he tries to get a bite to eat the only blue plate special they're servin' is North Atlantic scrod with Quaker State.
So what did I think? I'm holdin' out for somethin' better.
I figure, fuck it, while I'm at it, why not just shoot my buddy, take his job and give it to his sworn enemy, hike up gas prices, bomb a village, club a baby seal, hit the hash pipe and join the National Guard? I could be elected president."
See, we can villify them all we want. And we can mock their earnest dupes and hapless sock-puppets and even our figure-"head" president himself. But that last paragraph, above, is how the few people who actually matter wake up thinking every day. And they thrive. They always have. This parasite class arises in every society, there's nothing American about them. They're just succeeding in a way here that they haven't in four generations. We've failed, they've won, and the country will just have to service them. This isn't a matter of ideology. There is no more ideology as a causal agent, it's merely a vehicle now. They don't smoke the crack themselves. They can't afford to. Their terms are our terms. In principle, they agree with us. They just have different priorities.
And why not? If you can use advertising to short-circuit people's thinking, to get them to buy things they don't need with money they don't have, even if it hurts them and their families, what else can you get out of the suckers? If you were born with some capital to play with, or have learned to suck up to it during life, you farm those losers. You raise whole fields of them on ignorance, whole thronging hordes with open mouths and empty heads, and then you scythe them down with the laws you paid for, bind them into sheaves with fear, beat out of them what you need, and leave the chaff to blow away in the wind.
Raise the blind, undifferentiated mob so you can extract thier surplus. You squeeze them as consumers and as employees. You've got 'em coming and going, both sides of the macroeconomic cycle. Pack that surplus away into your own life. Raise your standard of living. Protect what you've stolen, cajoled, defrauded. It's for you, for your family.
You think to yourself, "that's whay they're there for. They're losers. What else are they good for?"
Politics, commerce, you'd have to be a fool to distinguish between them. While you're at it, send their kids overseas to steal stuff for your company, and to murder your competitors. Same pitch. Should be easy.
Tell 'em it's for their own good. Tell 'em you had no other choice. Tell 'em that the threat you didn't bother to protect them from is the reason why they have to trust you blindly now. Tell them that the plan you've been polishing for a decade, to further stuff your burgeoning gut, is a brand new emergency plan to protect THEM.
Go ahead. You took those rubes for everything they're worth (and more, since they're willing to go into debt to subsidize your lifestyle, they're willing to work longer hours for less to subsidize your lifestyle, they're willing to shoulder more and more of the tax burden to subsidize your lifestyle), they're just dumb enough to believe this one, too. You've slashed their wages for a generation and made them make up for the part of the tax base you ran out on. You're screwing them both as private citizens and as taxpayers.
Why shouldn't you use them any other way?
Can you give me a reason?
Because, now, the rubes are almost useless to you, and it's probably not even fun any more. You've disenfranchised them. They can only vote for candidates vetted by capital. You've cut them off from the world. They only hear what your friends tell them on Tee-Vee. And now, they're up to their unwaxed eyebrows in debt. They're almost used up. What else are they good for? What is any underclass good for?
They breed.
They are livestock. They pump out things they call children and you call bullets. After all, for any good Straussian, "freedom" means the "freedom" of the strong to prey on the weak.
There is one last use for this otherwise used-up whore. And you'd be a fool not to do it...