...which have subsisted fully on the fat of the disciplinary state, the extraction-enforcement regime, the depoliticized dregs of the New Deal:
Dear Homo Petroleumicus,
Fuck you.
The fighting unions, the reds and the anarchists, the labor agitators and general strikers fought the state and its funding corporations to their knees. They didn't win. But they won a respite, a break in a five thousand year project of systematic oppression.
You handed it back to the bankers, the oil men, the insurance companies and the defense contractors. You weighed out the drug war, and decided that if the blacks couldn't behave within the narrow confines of their enfranchised impoverishment, more prisons, more cops and more lawn order would do the trick. Same too for your own sons and daughters.
Sacrifices on the altars of your convenience, on your petty security. For green lawns and Sunday brunches.
You weighed out the advantages, and never looked back.
You gave Kennedy, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Clinton, the Bushes and Obama the moral whitewash, allowing them to savage the Commons and call it progress. You consistently supported candidates and policies who undid all that the reds and the other misbehaving misfits ground out their lives to defend. You gave your imprimatur to Lebanon, Grenada, El Salvador, Colombia, Panama, Bosnia, Serbia, Kosovo, East Timor, Iraq, Somalia, Sudan, Balochistan, Kurdistan, Iran, Yemen and Afghanistan every fucking time you re-elected and refinanced the architects of those war actions. You traded out liberty and vigilance for security and and some belly fat.
You turned the forests into clear cuts and mountaintops into strip mines. You literally raped the earth, and you wear it around your fattened middles, riding that excess on fat cars and fat asses.
You pillaged the schools and built shopping malls. You broke the farmers' backs, and you got cheap sugar, suburbs and poisonous syrup of corn.
You squeeze the last gasp out of Medicare and Social Security, whilst one half of you bitch about new taxes and new costs and the other half tells us to suck it up and take the lesser evil.
You raised two generations of moral nitwits. You hooked them on bad programming, bad pharma, bad literature and bad beer.
You suck and I'm tired of you.
Fuck off, already.
~ Jack
PS - Yes, I know this is scribbled in broad strokes. If it doesn't apply to you, don't get your druthers up...
Crow's Eye: Maintaining a commitment to Pointless Acrimony™ and Hate Filled Invective™! Also available in corvid mischief and traditional sly dog's mistrust.
4 comments:
The thing is, this applies to all of us, at least in my generation, so really none of us have any right to get mad about it. You're also dead on.
This is a much less grand thing, just a very, very small thing that this post reminded me of: every time I see someone work through their (unpaid) lunch, I want to rant and scream at them and shake them by the shoulders and sear into their brains that people actually literally died, and not that long ago, to secure them that measly half hour. Not taking it is not only an unacceptable acquiescence to the demands of the Man (if you will), but also a profound disrespect to the memory of just those people you describe, the misbehaving misfits.
Ethan,
I have no argument against what you wrote. I drive a car, use an expensive computer made of gold, oil and Indonesian slavery and buy oil input food (often unwillingly).
I can't drink a cup of coffee, literally, without funding oppression in Africa, Asia and South America.
I feed my kids in relative safety because I was accidentally born a subject to the imperial american protectorate.
I think we have an obligation to burn a bit of the anger, over it.
Hell, I'm from the first "moral nitwit" generation, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't name names.
And I yap at my wife all the time about working through her lunch, for the same reason. She's just trying to stay ahead of a crushing task list, where her failure results in blame to her, and success accrues to her superiors.
What's her choice?
What's ours?
Great post.
"You hooked them on bad programming, bad pharma, bad literature and bad beer." Amen to that! I'm of the second "moral nitwits" generation, and I feel increasingly alienated from my own peers because I cannot personally relate to the only topics in which they seem interested: T.V. programming, trash literature, cars, shopping, casual sex, or drunkenness. It's not that I begrudge these people their right to indulge in these things, but rather that the moment I try to bring up a topic that matters, they try to change the subject back to something meaningless and, if I don't oblige, they just find a polite way to exit the conversation.
My generation was taught that whoring out your morals in exchange for wealth and material possessions was not only acceptable, but was our God-given American right. We were selfish and stupid enough to believe it.
Fuck us all. Fuck all of us for whoring ourselves out to Homo Petroleumicus for green lawns and Sunday brunches, because the brutal truth is that Homo Petroleumicus is similar to a pimp: he has no power, and will make no profit, unless he is presiding over whores.
A crude metaphor, I know, but the concept is accurate. Everyone who has sucked the sweet, capitalist milk of the American teat is complicit (to varying degrees) in raping the Earth and spilling the blood of innocents, both domestic and abroad.
Yes, I am including myself in that, because I am an American citizen. Still, if it were up to me, the crimes our country commits would not be absolved, so I do feel I have the right to be angry about this, even though I am part of it. Just because I am a small cog in an evil machine doesn't mean I can't object to what that machine is producing.
However, I do very strongly feel that one day, in some manner, all the Americans (including me) who grew fat on the suffering of others will pay for their crimes, and when that happens, we will not have the right to be angry.
A,
My kids are complete outsiders, simply because we raised them without television for the first six/ten years of their lives.
They lack a number of the cultural markers which would mark them as insiders, and really stand out for that, among their peer groups.
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