See more articles, reviews, fiction and poetry, including more of my writings, at group blog PLUTO'S REALM.

Friday, August 01, 2008

Politics


One of Hunter Thompson's most celebrated bits of genius writing came in the midst of the book many consider to be his masterpiece, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. He wrote circa 1971 of living in California in the '60's:

You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning...And that, I think, was the handle – that sense of inevitable victory over the forces of Old and Evil. Not in any mean or military sense; we didn't need that. Our energy would simply PREVAIL. There was no point in fighting – on our side or theirs. We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave...So now, less than five years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark – that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.

Out of the ashes of the failed Hippie and the Peace Movement, my culturally immediate progenitors, came some of the biggest greedheads and failed bastards of all time, the people who have made America and the world what they are today; a wasteland of the dead and dying, the rich sucking off a petroleum pipe full of opium, while the populace lies starving in the desert. But for most of us without Thompson's vision, the true turning point came at the end of the year 2000.

Who would have guessed that the Doomsday Millennialists were right? All those deranged fantasists who told us that the end of the world would come in that seminal year. I did, I felt it as a sleazy, slick, sickening feeling when the U.S. Supreme Court, the American people, and yes even Al Gore himself were complicit in allowing the Bush Cabal to steal the Presidential election.

One has to ask, would it have gone down the same way, had any of us, including the Clintons, known the true horrors of what would happen in eight years of lawless tyranny? Did even Bill Clinton, who surely knew more than anyone at this point, know how America would tolerate the evisceration of its Constitution and its heart, by the soulless bastards who seized control in 2001? What would have happened at the end in November and December, 2000, if Clinton's Executive branch had seen how Congress would roll over and play dead when the present current Executive blatantly refused to follow the Constitution and the mandates of the powerless Legislature and Judiciary, and taunted it as young George must have taunted the flies whose wings he pulled off as a child?

In 2000, the Clinton administration still had control of the Executive branch, and Bill Clinton was Commander-in-Chief of the military, who I think would have been at least partially loyal to him. What if Clinton and Gore had beat the Cabal to the punch and refused to acknowledge the manipulated Supreme Court affirmation of the Bush coronation? Well, it would have been the end of our Constitutional government, for sure. It would have happened a few years earlier; how different would the results have been?

And more intriguingly, while maundering in rancid waters of useless speculation, what would Clinton and Gore have done had they known how truly heinous the Cabal would prove to be? The planes did fall out of the sky, not at midnight at the beginning of 2000, but twenty-one months later (and remember, most of the Millennialists were Christian and uneducated; the Third Millennium actually began on January 1, 2001, not a year earlier). Would Gore have rolled over and played dead, as he did, had he known, how Bush's puppetmasters would manipulate the hunger and desperation of the Middle Easterners, for their own vile ends? How the Cabal would manipulate the incipient desperation of the American public, using pseudo-patriotic hokum which would have embarrassed P.T. Barnum to lure the gullible youth of this declining empire into the jaws of death, to secure the last few remaining petrodollars for the grim old men and their sharp-tooted prodigy who now roam the corridors of power?

Would Clinton and Gore have fought back, had they known the ruthless means by which the real Evil Ones would seize the reign of power to steer the Hummer down the fatal slope into oblivion? Or what's worse, more frightening: Did they? And were they just too afraid to fight on?

I think it was all over in 2001, when Bush was inaugurated the first time. The theatre of the War on Terror which his masters created and performed nauseates me now as it did then; I refuse to revisit it further, here.

But for most of us whose hearts still beat, the final nail in the coffin came this year, when a still-gullible American public allowed Rove (or whoever is really behind him) and his instruments manipulated the sad, gullible Democrats into nominating Barak Obama, thus abandoning the last hope we had of having anyone with any pragmatic sense of responsibility, and moreover capability, anywhere near the power switch. A Hillary Clinton administration could've done, with the aid of the people and the apparatus who gave us the last successful administration in the last real American Presidency, whatever could have been done to minimize the bloodletting. The bus is already headed down the slope at breakneck speed, and nothing can be done to avert that, but it would've been nice to have a pilot who gave a shit to avoid a few trees and rocks on the way down, and would've been experienced enough to drive the thing.

Now we have an election between Tweedledum and Tweedledoofus, who will do nothing. It will be a one-term administration that begins the Plague Years. And yes, I said Plague. I'll vote for Obama, though I don't like him. But I have no hope; he's been set up to fall big before November, which is why he was hand-picked by the Cabal in the first place. But even if he wins, in some twist of manipulation that is too far away from the hand for the eye to see, he's been so compromised that he's be nothing but a scapegoat.

Tanya asked me why I don't write more about politics; this is why. I can try to show you the big picture, plain as the smirk on Bush's face or the heaps of our predecessors dying in Africa; or I can urge you to focus on developing yourself now, for what is happening, now. But the middle ground? Politics is dead. Get ready to starve and join it.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Tanya approves this message! You already know I don't agree with some of it - I like Obama, a lot, as you know. HOWEVER, the rest of it. Masterful! Fabulous! Yes!

Keep writing ... about politics or whatever moves you.

Rocks! Love it! Tanya

Anonymous said...

Will These Leaders Cause Another Wreckage in 2008 like the famous 1903 Wreck of the Old 97?

Dear Wayne,

You report,
“Vaclav Havel never did choose to stand up and pull the ’stop’ cord on the train!”

But, Wayne, the colossal train is adding cars and accelerating its speed as it proceeds down the track. There is no engineer on the train. Everyone has gone below to stoke the furnace so that the train goes faster and faster. Where it will stop, or how, nobody knows. Conventional wisdom indicates the track is clear ahead and without an endpoint. Widely shared and consensually validated thinking assures everyone on board this train that we can add more and more cars to the train and continuously stoke its furnace with fossil fuels so that the train can keep going at an increasing speed as long as we have fuel to keep the train going. There are no limits to the speed the train can achieve, no limits to the number of cars the engine can pull, and no end to the railroad track. Everything is going as planned and will continue without interruption indefinitely.

Wayne, if this train is a metaphor for the ever manmade global political economy, could you help us understand how magical thinking, arrogance, pyramid-type schemes and greed are governing the seemingly endless growth of the global economy and how the unbridled increase of the leviathan-like global economy cannot be sustained much longer by a relatively small, evidently finite, noticeably frangible planet with the size and make-up of Earth?

And what of the ’stop’ cord on the train, Wayne? I can see it, but cannot yet see how pulling it will do any good because there is no engineer in control. Do you think Vaclav Havel could see that the engine room must have been empty for a long time?
Sincerely,

Steve

Steven Earl Salmony
AWAREness Campaign on The Human Population, established 2001

SueW said...

I agree with much of that which you have said. BUT I neither forgive nor forget that it was Clinton who agreed to Nafta and Gant. He KNEW that the American people would neither be served first nor best , which I feel is the DUTY of American Presidents. To do otherwise would be for the President/CEO of AT&T to serve the interests of Centurytel first and strongest.
Gore had no guts and Kerry was a quitter. What will be the excuse THIS time?
Who serves the interest of THIS nation? Though I believe that there is a hiearchy according to ability and inclination - you still cannot totally drop the least paid and least able short of Hitler's final solution.
That there is too much interdependency to logically do that.
I am sickened by American jobs going overseas. I am appalled with the total lack of choice in this whole thing - this election is a joke. None of them were exceptionally interested in the American Public. Most were just variances of Bush with different window dressing. Including Hillary.
I think that an evaluation needs to be done on out current leg. If their job evaluation doesnot serve US 1st by voting record- they should be voted out.
Alas, I fear that it maybe too late.
No one cared when it was Black and Decker going to Mexico because it was factory jobs. My paternal grandfather ( Business agent IBEW in Springfield , MA , had 1 bit of wisdom for me as a child. It was there has never been a UNION in place in ANY job that the actions of the management and administration had not forced into existance by their actions.