In his book: “Captured: The Corporate Infiltration of American Democracy,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse quotes former Republican Senator Alan Simpson of Wyoming as saying: “Ending the tyranny of big money corruption isn’t partisan—it’s patriotic. It’s essential to preserving the most deeply held values and beliefs we share.”
In a previous post, I wrote about the science of ‘memetics,’ how memes affect our culture and society. We live in a world of memes. Social media has devolved into all out wars of memes that are posted to either attack a ‘side’ or bolster an ideology or dialog. Author Richard Brodie wrote the book “Virus of the Mind” in which he shows how memes and memetic thinking infiltrate the collective and spread like a virus.
Today’s culture is a total standoff. Social Media is the new Gettysburg, the bloody battlefield that contains the tweets, Facebook posts and angst and anxiety of the collective. Both sides are ‘sick,’ ‘unpatriotic,’ ‘sheep,’ and/or a long series of vulgar and twisted projections. The great leveler, the magical tool that was going to bring society together, has become an inane battlefield of trolls and all-out vile hatred toward our fellow human beings. Memes fly past in a futile effort to chip away at a side or augment and cement the belief systems on the other side.
We The People need a new, centralized meme. A meme that will stand for all of us, a meme that promotes unity instead of division. We stand on this bloody battlefield today because, in the late 1970s, the wheels began to turn for what ultimately would be Citizen’s United…the ability for corporations to basically own the United States government. Since that Supreme Court ruling, the battle for the soul of the nation has emerged. We are no longer the country that the founders foresaw, we are not a government, as Lincoln stated in Gettysburg, “…of the people, by the people, for the people.” We are a plutocracy owned by the corporations.
Books like Jane Mayer’s Dark Money paint a sad picture of the influence of corporate money and the takeover of the US Government, it’s important to remember that this disease affects the entire political spectrum. Yes, Citizen’s United was created to further right-wing ideology. The truth is that both ‘wings’ have benefited from its inception.
Big media is owned by the same corporations that own our government. The corporate media, under the guise of patriotism and love of country, cooks up and dishes out the disruptive and destructive memes that has created the biggest shell game ever played on a population. It doesn’t matter if you eat dinner watching Fox News or MSNBC, the result is precisely the same. Corporate plutocrats are preaching to the choirs they created. The plutocracy sits back and laughs while Americans tear each other apart on social media, laughing all the way to the bank.
The new meme needs to be a collective meme, one that has all of us ‘resisting.’ Think about how powerful the memes are that the plutocracy has created for us. Government is broken, it is bureaucratic, bloated and ineffective. Corporations are a symbol of democracy, they create wealth in a capitalist society, blah blah blah. This ‘three card Monty’ has allowed the corporate takeover of our very government and their sleight of hand has allowed them to trash the core principles of democracy all in the name of making themselves fabulously wealthy. While real wages have stagnated for the past 35 years, CEOs and corporations have never been fatter. We are living in their meme. The plutocratic meme NEEDS everyone to be fighting non-stop so, while we are distracted, they can pick our pockets clean.
In 2016, people were afraid of ‘more of the same’ in government, forgetting…or never realizing…that government is no longer ours. As a result of this sophisticated shell game, we now have the following: an oil lobbyist runs the Dept. of the Interior, a coal lobbyist runs the EPA, a pharma lobbyist runs HHS, a Raytheon lobbyist is acting Secretary of Defense, a billionaire heiress and large donor runs the Dept. of Education and a banking executive is Secretary of the Treasury. To say the foxes are guarding the hen house is putting it mildly. Do we all remember how “Shillary” was such a big ‘corporate shill’ and the swamp was going to get ‘drained?’
Now, some would say this is the brain-child of the Bannon/Miller alliance…both of whom are Leninists. But, this is a different form of Leninism. These men have no interest in forming a social state. The goal was simply to destroy the infrastructure, tear it all down to rebuild anew. They went at it with all the structural thinking of Jim Carrey in The Cable Guy when he says: “I don’t really have a plan, as such. I’m really just kind of winging it right now.”
Both men, heavily influenced by the corporate donors, knew the fastest way to achieve their vision was to use age-old fascist technologies of maintaining division in the populace/proletariat. Every single time a meme is posted or an angry tweet is typed, we have become the ‘bitches’ of the plutocracy. We have played right into their hands. Make some signs, march in the streets, yell and scream until you are blue in the face. In the meantime, they are rifling through the cookie jar and piling up all the goodies for themselves. We are the ones left to die, bleeding on the new Gettysburg of social media while the corporate interests chuckle their way to obscene opulence.
We supposedly live in this era of ‘wokeness.’ It is time for us to wake up and, first, have a Kumbaya moment and, second, storm the freaking castle….together. It’s not Republican versus Democrat, right versus left, Conservative versus Progressive…that is what the corporate donors want us to believe. That is their meme. If your media consumption is something that conveniently fits your own personal narrative, then it’s time to start doing some research. Start by studying history. Go back and look at what the experiment of Democracy was built upon. The founders of this country had the foresight to see a wide swatch of dangers to a self-governed people, they built in numerous sets of checks and balances. The one thing they did not foresee was the power of mega-corporations and the possibility that they would consume the US government to serve their own selfish interests.
We need to create our own meme of taking back our Democracy. Screw all the social media nonsense. Delete the apps if that’s what it takes. We should be painting the protest signs together, sharing our arts and crafts materials with each other. This is OUR country, NOT the corporations. Citizen’s United needs to go, we need to drive a stake through the heart of that polluted ruling. We look at Hong Kong and are amazed at 1.7 million people amassing in the name of Democracy…but do they know for what they are asking? The same fate awaits every Democracy on this planet until the cradle, the birthplace of self-governance stands up and takes back what is rightfully theirs. We are all The Resistance.