Survival Strategies
I know someone who is so screwed up psychologically that he's only marginally functional. He lives off his rich old man, and he has the self esteem of an underachieving paramecium. For all that, he's a Hater, looking down on other people for all manner of reasons. He listens to the Right Wing radio talk show bullies and buys into every twisted, mean spirited misconception they can cook up in their short circuited brains, unchecked by their withered souls.
For a long time I wondered why this guy couldn't see the irony in his copping an attitude toward others when he was himself a loser by his own standards. He judges himself very harshly, so there's a hugh disconnect. Then it came to me. He's stuck. He has no choice other than to live out this dichotomy.
Slamming others is the only was he can get relief from the grief he feels. It's false, it's temporary, but it's all he has. It's all he ever learned.
His rich father must have been a prick, a rich, authoritarian prick. He must have judged the people he screwed to get where he is very harshly. His son, suspecting he was no better -if even as worthy- as the people his father condemned, became a self-judged failure early on. This was bound to happen whether the father directly criticized him or not. Furthermore, it stunted the son's development, despite whatever natural abilities he might have started with. So the father's exaggerated projection of superiority condemned the son to a lifelong feeling of inferiority. He could never live up to the haughty father's standards.
But the father's curse didn't stop at that. The son never even learned any way to cope other than mimicking his father's nasty, judgmental, superior attitude. The son can only demean others like his old man does, so he's doomed to oscillating between dumping on others one moment and loathing himself the next. Two generations, but only one trick in their family bag. And I bet I know where the old man got it from.
Perhaps this is a survival mechanism in a perverted way. If the son had been slightly stronger or marginally more gifted or just luckier, he might have succeeded in life, having been motivated by shame and secret self loathing. If he'd done so, he could have carried on the ritual and passed the self-loathing on to his own children (he has none), who would then be motivated to achieve through compensating.
Maybe that's how the rich operate. There are some weird but ultimately practical survival strategies in nature. Look at the sickle cell trait: it imparts some immunity to malaria, so even though countless people die from it, more would die without it. There is still a numerical survival advantage. When the price of the potential of becoming rich is the chance of winding up a miserable, failed soul though, it's hard to rationalize. I'm positive this guy I know would have been better off just being an average Joe. But then, he'd be just a working schmuck like me, and that's not the American Dream, is it?
Everybody's Serfin', Serfin' USA
Well, global free trade has brought these fruits to American workers: cheap stuff at WalMart at the cost of their jobs and their homes. For years we've borrowed against our houses to buy electronics, cars, lead-laced toys, and contaminated food from abroad, while the countries producing these items dutifully mitigated the dollar drain by sucking up our treasury notes. But even that can't offset the trade imbalance anymore. Now the dollar is a shrunken relic and our houses aren't worth what we owe on them, for the simple reason we've syphoned off their value. The money went partly to offshore manufactures, but it went mostly into the pockets of American corporations doing the importing. All of which now leaves us in a deep hole that's hard to work our way out of because we're underemployed. Oops.
The pain was felt first at the bottom of the corporate food chain, with the disappearance of manufacturing jobs in the 80's. We were assured by politicians of all stripes that this was okay, because better jobs would take their place. Then the vaunted high-tech jobs took flight too. Even still, the Corporate Tool in Chief recently mouthed platitudes about retraining being the key to employment. As he said this, engineers and other skilled workers sat at their kitchen tables and wrote cover letters for resumes that would be discarded on arrival.
Politically, the trick has been to persuade the unemployed that their own deficiencies caused their job loss. Of course, as the pain climbs higher up the corporate ladder this becomes a harder sell. Ultimately, the ruse will be exposed and the corporate shill politicians will be targeted for blame. By then though, the worst offenders will have run away to live in Dubai or Paraguay, but the fate of these politicians during the coming maelstrom will be of little relevance to the rest of us. We will be preoccupied with trying not to drown in the storm.
Meanwhile, the underpaid, underemployed taxpayers, present and future, will be saddled with debt to shore up financial institutions that gambled on trash loans for big profits and lost. They're "too big to fail", don't you know? We will be forced to bail them out, and so will our children. We, of course, will not be protected from foreclosure, because if the government did that, it would be socialism. And forget about guaranteed healthcare (socialism again). Neither will our children be assured a living wage, or even a job. In this era of free market fundamentalism, neo-conservative power, and globalization, corporations get a gold mine. We get the shaft.
"If language is not correct, then what is said is not what is meant; if what is said is not what is meant, then what must be done remains undone; if this remains undone, morals and art will deteriorate; if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion. Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything." -Confucius
The term "middle class" once strictly applied only to merchants, successful business owners, and manufacturers. They were wealthy, but not enough to belong to the "upper class". They were not part of the aristocracy of wealth. Of course, they longed to be considered upper class, and spared no expense to appear to be cultured and well-born, rather than the money grubbing social climbers they were. On the other hand, the "working class" never made any pretense at being better than the were, mainly because they were too busy trying to survive.
When the distribution of wealth became more even following the Depression, life for the working class became much better than it had ever been, so much so that there was finally an opportunity for them to entertain some delusions of having finally made it out of the ranks of mere disposable labor. The attainment of the American Dream, a house, ample food, a car, and the ability to send their children to institutions of higher learning gave them a sense that they had broken the bonds and had arrived in the middle class.
This was an illusion because they were merely well remunerated working people, punching a clock or taking orders from a boss. But still, they were doing so well that they understandably committed the dual mistake of presumption and pretension. Around the 1960's they started to forget where they came from completely.
As a result, the era of working class materialism and conspicuous consumption was born. Bigger cars and more of them, bigger houses in the suburbs, a TV in every room of the house, and perhaps a motor boat became commonplace. Like Hyacinth Bucket in the BBC comedy "Keeping Up Appearances", this pseudo-middle class (which encompasses most of us) spent and borrowed to shore up the illusion they were rich. And things were going along pretty well in a superficial way. However, there was an alligator lurking under the floating mat in this swamp of delusion.
You see, the real middle class and the aristocratic upper class never accepted the redistribution of wealth imposed by the New Deal as either permanent or irreversible. If they could just find a way to restore the natural order...
Eureka! Why not capitalize on the working class's misplaced reckoning they were "middle class" and get them to overturn the New Deal institutions that had redistributed wealth downward? By essentially saying, "you are a member of the middle class now, so vote like one" the shrewd aristocrats of wealth persuaded working people to take up causes like reduction in taxes, which are far more the concern of the rich than the working class. In actuality, this was against the working class's own interests. Forgetting that taxes were the main instrument of wealth redistribution that afforded them their improved lifestyle, the self-deluded working class went along, believing they were on the right side of the tracks now. (The bamboozling continues still with the Orwellian named Fair-Tax scam. ...A fool and his money are soon parted.)
The upshot is that the rich now pay a lower tax rate than their maids and the children of the working class have as little opportunity for a decent and financially secure life as their great grandparents did. To boot, we are the only industrialized nation that doesn't have universal healthcare, education is becoming farther and farther out of reach for children of the working class, wages in real dollars haven't risen for the average worker in decades, and the economic future for the majority of Americans looks bleak. Ultimately, as planned, the distribution of wealth has shifted to the top of the Bell Curve to an extent not seen since before the Depression.
All this because the rich found our weakness: vanity. Certainly, they employed other tactics besides exploiting our pretension to be higher on the social scale than we really were. They used our racial animosities too, and our fears of the "homosexual agenda", among other things. The list of wedge issues goes on and on, but the overarching theme is that we've been played, big time.
Where do we go from here? Perhaps the younger generation will straighten it out over the next couple of decades. I hope so, because we've left them in a hell of a fix. All i know is that while we Boomers chant our mantra, "I've got mine", our precious 401K's are shriveling like salted garden snails. Good, we deserve it.
We forgot where we came from, and because we forgot, our children and grandchildren are fated to go back there. Tragic.
Narrative of the Middle Class White Male Republican
They play by the rules, go through school, submit to the demands of their employers, show up to work on time every day for their whole careers, get the big house in the suburbs, send their kids to college, and then have to admit to themselves, finally, that it's not enough. Perhaps if they had become a little richer, that would have been enough. Yes, the problem is that they didn't end up going quite as far as they might have. Not their fault though, so it must be someone else's.
Who, then, is to blame? It can't be their benefactor, the holy corporation. Certainly, they themselves couldn't have toed the line any more closely. And above all, it can't be that they were on a meaningless course, a dead end path all along! No, it's the welfare parasites that weighed them down, and the filthy government that robbed them to pay off those scum. Of course, the enablers of this ignominious injustice were the demon Liberals who pretend to care about their fellow man but who really just crave a feeling of moral superiority. They do this because they lack the real faith that can only be found in organized, authoritarian religion, substituting hollow secular humanism for blind faith, and so needing the balm of ridiculous empathy with others.
Yep, if only everyone submitted obediently to authority, gave the other fellow hell on command from his bosses, and stayed in ranks, then the affluent middle aged White American male wouldn't be so justifiably angry, or feel so cheated.
Like hell. These conformist, ass-kissing good little boys sold their soul to authority on the altar of material wealth, and now they're staring into the abyss of their own pointless existence. No wonder they cling to the sleeve of that vituperative piece of filth, Rush Limpbaugh. Daily exposure to his whirling fiesta of hate helps them avoid the truth: they've pissed their lives away as corporate fags.
Elite Right Plays Stupid People Like a Fiddle
"All conservatives are not stupid, but most stupid people are conservative." How true. Take the matter of Mexican immigration (legal or illegal) and the political Right's reaction to it. Business interests have been using importation of cheap labor to undercut wages since the start of the industrial revolution in this country, yet stupid people, then as now, blame the imported labor rather than finger calculating businessmen for their depredation.
Of course, the rich elite of the Right have been diabolically clever in their manipulation of how WalMart Republicans and their antecedents perceive who's really doing the screwing. The elite have exploited the weak-minded's propensity to feel rancor instead of using their limited ability to analyze. The elite have studiously become better at this over time, forever staying one step ahead of Stupid People's ability to catch on to the game. In this they have utilized the best marketing psychology money can buy.
There was a period in this country following the Depression and WWII in which the Stupid People rode the wave of the union movement to better their lot. They never really understood the dynamic, but because things had been so bad and then become so much better, they went with the flow. Then along came the avuncular actor Reagan, who convinced them that unions were holding them back, despite the fact unions had won them a living wage. He told them that the government was evil, despite the fact it had protected them from corporate avidity and provided their more able children with an education. Reagan was able to do this because smart people writing the script for him, who were well paid by the Elite Right, understood how to tap into the Stupid People's innate racism. Plus, he was such an affable guy! He made you feel good.
So now working people, their children, and almost certainly their grandchildren are serfs again, courtesy of the Stupid People's proclivity to stomp their feet over whatever wedge issue the Elite Right's psy-ops henchmen cook up. They blame the "Damn Mexicans" for their low standing instead of the business interests that subjugate them by undercutting wages. Stupid People are manna from Heaven for the Rich Elite of the Right.
Here's what "US Government" really represents now: a skeleton crew that merely signs contracts with private corporations and then writes a series of checks to them afterwards. The contracts are written by the corporations themselves, and the people that sign them are former/future employees of those same corporations. That's why a half-witted scion of wealth can be president. He doesn't have to do a damn thing other than shill for the fat cats. The malaprops are just a bonus.
In the early 80's, members of "The Greatest Generation" voted for the Republican, Ronald Reagan, because they were pissed off at Democrats for supporting and implementing civil rights for Black Americans. In doing so, the good people of the American White Majority enabled an age of anti-union, anti-worker, corporate hegemony. This has doomed their grandchildren to a twenty-first century serfdom in a new class society.
This isn't the first time we've cut off our nose to spite our own face, based on racial animosity. In the 50's, under Harry Truman, we came very close to having universal healthcare. It was quashed at the last minute because of Souther Democrats' fear it would lead to integration of hospitals in the South.
So there we have it. Jefferson was right, slavery has been the United States of America's poison pill. Party on.
Commemorating 28 years of Trickle Down Economics --and a corresponding drought for working people. See the connection yet?
(from Truthout) Bill Moyers, from an adaptation of his keynote address at the National Conference for Media Reform, writes for In These Times: "Democracy without honest information creates the illusion of popular consent at the same time that it enhances the power of the state and the privileged interests that the state protects. And nothing characterizes corporate media today more than its disdain toward the fragile nature of modern life and its indifference toward the complex social debate required of a free and self-governing people."
In other words, the media sucks shit.
Look out Canada!
Drilling for oil in ANWAR will have a miniscule effect on gas prices in the future, and won't reduce our dependence on foreign oil. Besides, most of that "foreign" oil comes from Mexico and Canada, not the Mideast.
Breaking our dependence on foreign oil is a pipe dream. Drilling in ANWAR will have only one palpable effect: oil companies will increase their revenue stream, which is all well and good, except it may do environmental damage there, and the continued consumption of fossil fuels at a prodigious rate will hasten global climate change.
But the administration's pitch presenting drilling in ANWAR as a blow for energy independence perpetuates their practice of leveraging any crisis into a boon for big business. It's what they've done for eight years, and they're not going to change. Unfortunately, the next group of politicians to take power is likely to do much of the same, considering where their campaign contributions come from.
The only effective energy policy is conservation. Period. But that's not considered patriotic in this era, because it isn't nationalistic or bellicose, which is to say it isn't macho. Like the Roman Empire in it's decline, it's all about projecting a powerful image now. (Gladiator spectacles in Rome didn't come into being until the end of the empire, and were designed to keep the populace in a bloodthirsty frame of mind.)
So until there's a crisis so extreme the government can't sell it as a rationale for lining someone's pockets, we'll continue to pollute and suffer, ever more painfully, perhaps until the Vandals arrive. Ironically, although oil is the frantic concern now, the more dire crisis looming is the shortage of water. And Canada has it, we don't. Look out Canada!
This isn't a game
The facts couldn't be clearer, George W. Bush has committed impeachable offenses while in office. This effort to impeach is not about politics, this is about upholding the Constitution. On the other hand, any and all resistance to impeachment at this point IS entirely political.
Beyond duty to uphold the Constitution, not that any additional reason is required, President Bush must be impeached now, rather than merely waiting for his term in office to expire, for the imminent reason that in the interim he is highly likely to embroil the country in yet another disastrous, unnecessary, and entirely avoidable armed conflict in Iran.
Therefore, any member of Congress who refuses to vote at this time for the impeachment of President George W. Bush is not only derelict in his or her duty to defend the Constitution, but is additionally complicit in exposing the United States to the potential of more mortal losses in foreign military misadventure and the further draining of our national resources.
Sing it again: el Presidente and Congressonal Conservatives going after Public Broadcasting's funding.
How is it we can afford to start discretionary wars but we can't pay for untainted news and non-commercial, factual, informative programming? ...or is it that war-on-a-whim and Public Broadcasting are mutually exclusive on other, non-economic grounds?
minimalist progressive bumper sticker:
"Healthcare and a Bigger Share!"
"Privitization" is a euphemism. The word we should really be using is "profitization", because that describes the process better: take a task performed by the public sector and then build an added cost, profit, into it so politically connected businessmen can get a new revenue stream. Voila! And this extra cost is touted to make it better somehow, more efficient, and even more patriotic! (?) ...got any magic beans on you?
if King George had had the NSA, this shit would have been nipped in the bud:
" ...all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government... "
Open the door, and there's the sheeple
Tens of thousands of South Koreans took to the streets in an impressive display, protesting against the importing of American beef, presumably due to concern over "mad cow" disease. In this country, the average wage earner hasn't had a raise in pay, adjusted for inflation, in thirty years, but we sit in front of our televisions and decline to say "peep" on our own behalf. Perhaps the South Koreans are less concerned about catching mad cow disease than "timid sheep" syndrome from whatever it is we've been eating.
AUTHORITARIANS are guys who can't get it up unless they have one up their own arse.
The current reason we don't have universal healthcare is that large companies have used medical benefits to control workers: you'll stay in a job that you're dissatisfied with because you need the benefits. Well, that's changing, and not because working people have become more independent. It's such an employer's market now that companies don't need to use this carrot anymore, and besides, the carrot has become far too expensive. So the party of business has decided that best thing is to throw out employer-paid medical benefits altogether and let working people fend for themselves. If employees get sick, "let them die and decrease the surplus population!" The pool is teaming with excess labor now, so replacement is easy, fast, and cheap.
Historically, we came very close to getting universal healthcare under Truman, but it fell through at the last minute because Southern Democrats feared it would lead to racial integration of hospitals in the South. So, then as now, healthcare for the average person was secondary to other priorities and agendas.
Fear the Fear Monger most, he's trying to frighten you into going against your own best interests.
People's tendency to live by the rules hinges on their adherence to two things: the golden rule, which is based on empathy; authoritarian control, which is based on fear of punishment. Liberals who abide by the law are motivated to do so through two parts empathy and one part fear. Conservatives do so based on one part empathy and two parts fear. Those who do not abide by the rules have little or no empathy, and little fear.
Pay no attention to that man behind the gas pump
When the President said that if a Democrat is elected there will be another terrorist attack on our soil, he got it half right: there will assuredly be more terrorist attacks, and they will take place regardless of who is in office. The overriding reason for this is the President's own failure to deal effectively with al Qeada, leaving it as strong an organization now as it was before 9-11. Rather than deal with terrorism directly and relentlessly, his administration chose to use 9-11 as a pretext to start an unrelated war. In typical double-dealing fashion, a la Karl Rove, they piggybacked their desire to invade Iraq onto the 9-11 tragedy, and away they went.
That's why bin Laden is living free in Pakistan now and why al Qeada has been able to reconstitute itself. It was never the primary target of the "War on Terror", but was in fact used as an excuse to pursue military action in the Mideast to control the oil under the sand. Unfortunately for Bush and his backers, the whole operation got bogged down in Iraq before they could sweep into Iran and Syria.
And by the way, bin Laden would like nothing better than for the US to invade Iran, and not for reasons you might think. Surely, he'd love to see us embroiled in another unpopular military action, to see us further overreach and alienate the people of the region. After all, in the words of one English bureaucrat, "George Bush is the best recruiting sergeant al Qeada ever had!" but that's just the icing on the cake for bin Laden. The fact is he'd love to see us bomb Iran because he hates, HATES Iran. With them out of the way he would be one step closer to his goal of becoming the Pasha of Oil. You see, he wants the very same prize Bush and Company want. Bin Laden is Bush's local competition.
The oil's the thing. Uncle Al Greenspan was impolitic enough to say so in his memoir, and even Senator McCain has said it recently, although he tried, vainly, to back away from the statement afterward (Joe Lieberman should never be farther than five feet from the Straight Shooter, lest he go off half-cocked and shoot himself in the foot). But oil's at the heart of the Iraq war, and that's why the US fought with and is occupying Iraq now. Rather than going after al Qeada directly with an international police effort dedicated solely to apprehending them and neutralizing their operations, the Administration took a right turn into Iraq for oil.
It's time for less fear-mongering and war-mongering and time instead to pursue terrorists directly. It's time to drop the "war" rhetoric which only serves to dramatize and amplify the image of people like bin Laden, who happens incidentally, to dig the B52's and has had a crush on Whitney Housten. He's really just another spoiled rich kid on the make, but we inadvertently elevated his status by going to "war" with him. It's time to focus on doing the necessary police work to drive these guys back into the woodwork and keep them there. It's time to stop confusing the desire to controlthe world's most accessible oil with protecting US soil ( "homeland" sounds like a name rejected by the Third Reich) and the soil of other targeted nations.
So yes, there will be other attacks. They will likely come at the worst times, when they will be the most emotionally devastating. After all, terrorism by definition seeks to destabilize a targeted population through shock and fear. A prime time would be right after an election or an inauguration, especially if it might cause the electorate to second-guess their choice. But if we allow terrorists (and cynical, manipulative US politicians) to dictate which candidate we vote for, isn't that in itself outright capitulation to al Qeada?
and the beat goes on...
I've read several times that states use the number of kids failing in reading in the third or fourth grade to predict the number of jails cells that will be needed in twenty years. My question is this: given this obvious correlation, is there any major effort at the federal level to analyze the causes, with the object of preventing the wasting of these kids' future and the cost to society?
Since US jails hold so many of its citizens, you'd think this would be a top priority. Poverty, coupled with draconian drug laws are to blame in large part, but I'm wondering if ADD isn't at least as big a factor.
Of course, if I were cynical, I'd think that such research might be suppressed by the influence of the profitized prison industry because it would be bad for business.
McCain's grandfather was an admiral. His father was an Admiral too. He divorced and married a beer heiress and they have eight, that's right, eight different residences. And he calls Obama an elitist while passing himself off as a regular guy. Really?
Give Cheney a Hand
Dick Cheney is not insane. In the past I have called the vice president a draft-dogging militarist, a sociopath, and a paranoid. I have blamed him above all others for the gratuitous death in Iraq. While all that still holds, he does have and is still the only one with a plan.
Our way of life in the US has evolved around the ingenuous and prodigious use of fossil fuels. We drive gas hungry behemoths to get to school, store, and work. We have followed the interstates to far flung suburbs because gas was cheap and we therefore could. We have huge houses that we heat and cool through the burning of coal and oil. Even our recreation is based on the internal combustion engine.
Cheap gas has led us down a primrose path. Even President Bush has known this from the beginning. When a subordinate suggested to him early in his presidency that we needed cheap gas again, he shot back that cheap gas was the problem. I assume he is aware of and was referring to the impossibility of continued prodigious gasoline use, and not referring to oil company profits.
We will achieve energy independence the day after the Tooth Fairy comes over to help us with our algebra homework. We would have nothing to eat if we tried to run our cars and electric plants on biofuels, and we would still fall far short of demand.
We could conserve, there's plenty of opportunity for that because we use more than twice the energy per capita than anyone else in the developed world. But that's not our style. We're too self indulgent. Without our energy-hungry toys, who are we?
We could go nuclear. That has always been problematic because of public hysteria and real concerns about safety and the problem of spent radioactive fuel.
So what's left? Well, we could invade the Middle East and lay claim to our right to the oil there. Oh, wait a minute, we're doing that. Iraq was the first tentative step in the plan. It hasn't gone all that well, but there's still hope in the administration that we can expand into Iran somehow, despite those meddling Democrats. One great ray of hope is that Senator "Boom-Boom" McCain will capture the flag. He gets it, and has openly promised that "There will be more wars, my friends."
Of course, our government can't openly state this is the game they're playing, because it would give the opposition Democrats cause to howl and the Mideast rulers a propaganda coup. For that matter, they can't even say it straight to the US voter, because we "haven't got the stomach for war" as VP Cheney has said.
So, where does that leave us? One might think that the rising cost of gas at the pump due to increased foreign demand and the devaluation of the US dollar would simply school us in conservation and we would come to an equilibrium in time. Adam Smith himself was never that naive, however. The invisible hand of the marketplace is wrapped around a gun.
Note to the president of ABC after the PA Democratic debate
It's not just that your boys' performance was fatuous, but along with the other TV news outlets you force everything into a pre-chosen narrative. Hillary's dishonest, Obama's a radical/elitist, McCain's a straight shooter, and Gore was a hopeless pathological exaggerator.
That's soap opera, not news. You're at the circus end of bread and circus, and the main reason why the electorate is so uninformed. But you do sell lots of meds to your aging audience, and that's your only reason for being.
Seeing Douglas Feith on 60 Minutes reminded me that most of these neo-con militarists, these laptop Napoleons, look like the type that got picked on mercilessly in junior high. Maybe that's why they act like adult bullies when they find themselves in positions of power. They take their cues from their childhood tormentors. It's someone else's turn to pay now, specifically, the soldiers they're sending to their deaths and the myriad civilians of all ages that have been killed. It's like Columbine in many respects, but on a much larger scale.
See You in the Free Speech Zone
Fair & Balanced is the media creed of presenting two sides of an issue as having equal weight and allowing the viewer to come to his or her on conclusion. The blatant fallacy in this is that coverage is far too superficial to provide enough information to make an informed choice, so that the asymmetry in merit between two points of view is never revealed or perceived. Thus, everything in the news, apart from crime reporting, is reduced to a "he said/ she said" pointlessness.
The tactical advantage of this to those in power is that when everything is moot and all arguments are circular, it becomes much easier to hide malfeasance. In fact, the genesis of the F&B movement took place in the depths of right wing conservative think tanks, where the invective "liberal media" was also hatched.
At the end of the day, an igloo's the same as an iceberg, because they're both cold, they're both white, and they both stick up. Thus, F&B is a euphemism for "Fact versus Balderdash", and proves itself to be the heavy artillery in the overall campaign for the Great Dumbing-Down.
Chauchescu aboard the Straight Talk Express
John McCain is against abortion, which many consider a principled stance. At the same time, however, his voting record puts him at rock bottom in the Senate on children's issues, according to the Children's Defense Fund rating. So, young lady, you committed the sin of sex and now you're going to have that damn baby! And don't you dare ask for one penny in help for feeding it, clothing it, or just raising it in general!
McCain subscribes to the Chauchescu model of outlawing abortion in order to raise children in poverty and depravation. Apparently, if it's good enough for Communist Romania, it's good enough for the US of A. (We don't know what advice Chauchescu would have now, as he is presently unavailable for comment.)
Demockracy on the March
Hey, you make more than the average schmo, so why not get in on the benefits of being a Superior Citizen? Do you want to know what the FBI knows and not even local and state governments have been told? Do you want help(?) from the FBI with disgruntled employees? Do you want to be on the inside when martial law is declared? Then don't wait, join at InfraGard now!
Special information can protect you and your family when the stuff hits the fan. It can put you in a protective cocoon when the masses get uppity by providing you with inside information they can't get their mitts on.
Also, despite the FBI's firm denial that it doesn't give you special "shoot to kill" privileges and immunity from prosecution, read between the lines. A careful parsing of the FBI's statement that you won't have any more right to "shoot-to-kill" than the average citizen sounds unequivocal, but it leaves open the possibility the rules could change overnight under martial law. And if you and the other gold club members are the only one's told about it, that's a huge advantage! It's as good as a gift Uzi in the mail from Antonin Scalia!
So in this post-9/11 world, don't go down the drain with egalitarianism. The bottom line is: you're better, you make more, so get on the Fas-Track to fascism today.
Keith Olbermann Channels Thomas Paine: "A Veto of the FISA Bill Endangers Americans"
When the power of unions was diminished, that opened up the market to importation of cheap labor from south of the border to undercut wages. Therefore, don't blame immigrants, illegal or otherwise, for massive immigration, blame Reagan the Union Slayer.
A precedent was set by none other than General George Washington that this new country would not stoop to torture. That rule held from the Revolution through WWII and later. We have now broken that rule, and it may be too late to retrieve what has been lost. Even if we rehabilitate ourselves, the sin we have committed may have pushed us onto a slope of inexorable decline.
Sweet Crude and Poppies
While this country was in its infancy, Britain had a trade deficit with China similar to the one our country has now. The British were hooked on tea from China, just as we now are on cheaply made consumer goods. British sterling reserves were draining away, so to equalize the balance of trade, the British resorted to selling opium in China. It was an immoral and unethical thing to do, but it worked. The trade imbalance was reversed.
If you make the following substitutions: US for British, consumer goods for tea, Treasury notes for sterling, and OIL for opium, then you get a pretty clear picture of what Dick Cheney and the oil executives talked about at their still top secret energy policy meetings and why we're involved militarily in the Middle East now.
New actors, different props, but it's an old script borrowed from the British Empire. There's a new twist though, we're cloaking our intentions by claiming to fight terrorism.
Hillary's Conservative Credentials
Worked for the presidential campaign of the ultra-right republican Barry Goldwater.
Served on the board of directors of wal-mart. Conservative Walton was so happy with her that she was known as "Sam's girl".
Founding member of the "democratic leadership council" (DLC) which recast the party as more business-friendly, i.e. "republican lite".
Voted to give bush a blank check to invade Iraq on the strength of the ludicrous assertion that Hussein was involved in 9-11.
Enthusiastically in favor of faith-based initiatives, putting public money in the hands of religious groups.
Co-sponsered a bill with a conservative republican to amend the Constitution to ban flag burning (seeking to protect freedom by stamping it out).
Hillary is a moderate republican. Since the authoritarian right has purged them from their own party, they only exist now under the Democratic umbrella.
That said, I'll vote for whoever gets the Democratic nomination for the presidential election in November, even if it's a sock puppet.
Paltry Panacea
I have two children in their twenties who can barely scrape together their rent every month, let alone buy their own health insurance. So I shell out $331.14 a month for minimal healthcare insurance for them. The proposed $600 rebate stimulus will buy one month, three weeks, and three days of stop-gap of health insurance for my kids. Big deal. Don't get me wrong, I'll cash the check as soon as I get it, but this isn't going to rescue the economy. It's a band aid on a bubo.
Everything changed on 9/11: authoritarians took over, used fear to control the populace, then tore up the US Constitution. That gave the terrorists a win by default.
Land of Opportunity: These are the growth careers we boomers are offering our children: Server(waiter/waitress/barrista), Prison Guard, Cop, Soldier. Verily, we are the Crimson Asshole Generation.
Feudalism is back. Embrace your serfdom!
We can only conclude that MSNBC/GE doesn't want to broadcast what Kucinich has to say, so they ditched him before the Nevada debate.
Consider the top three's "Oh my, yes!" answer to the debate question of whether they would sign a law mandating that ROTC be allowed on campuses (where the hell did THAT question come from?) versus Kucinich's post-debate response: "No, we're already enough of a militaristic society." Whew, that would have been an awful viewpoint to expose the electorate to! Bad business for GE's defense divisions, eh?
Meanwhile, the moderators' questions skirted global warming except where they used it to justify nuclear power. That's good business for GE's power division!
Wonder why people don't trust the MSM. Heck of a job, GEBC!
The two presidential candidates that talk about class inequality are Mike Huckabee and John Edwards. The press doesn't mention Huckabee's populist message, and it doesn't mention Edward's at all. Neither's party is particulary proud of him, and will do everything in their power to torpedo him, if required. Perhaps Huckabee and Edwards ought to consider forming their own party, because the major parties and the mainstream media are invested in the status quo so deeply as to be devoid of objectivity.
The Ephemeral Miracle
Without any effort on my part or awareness of its happening, ever year the Christmas spirit overtakes me. Around Christmas I feel I have a temporary truce with the world, that it's time to put down the shield, sheathe the sword, and bridge the gulf of distrust with my fellow man. Nearly everyone feels the same way at the same time, which makes the Christmas truce possible.
Provided the material madness of Xmas shopping doesn't totally tweak you out, your adrenaline level drops and you feel warmly instead of wary toward the world. Peace on earth, good will to men. The miraculous change even happens to a lifelong agnostic like myself.
After a week or so basking in the heart of the Prince of Peace, you wake up one morning and the rules have been restored to normal. Once again we are all in fierce competition. The race resumes, and we set about trying to outstrip one another. We strive to gain advantage over the other guy in order to garner wealth and power. We will earn security at the cost of his insecurity. We will vanquish our enemies.
Christmastide is done now. It must be, because yesterday the TV news magi told the story that today's Jesus is principally concerned with making us thin. Time to move on, obviously. Bring me my ax and my broadsword!
Gee, I wonder if the TV addicted, newstainment addled, thought avoiding, fear manipulated public will stay away from the polls again in '08 so right wing religious Zellots can put another pro-aristocracy, anti-union, authoritarian, warrior president in charge. That'll really send the nation over the falls as far as the average person (and his children) are concerned.
Rx: Cut the BS
Basic tenet of free market fundamentalism: there is a superior market solution for everything.
Incontrovertible refutation of that belief: the example of the US system of profit-driven medical care.
To those who say reflexively, "We have the best medical care in the world", here's a glaringly contradictory fact to ponder: a study comparing the health of of boomer-aged people in the US with those in Britain showed the Yanks to be much sicker. It turns out the poorest person in Britain enjoys health as good as the richest (caucasian) person in the United States, while the rest of us in the US are far less healthy than all of Britain's population. By the way, the per-person cost of their medical system is half of ours. The Brits drink alcohol in abundance, they smoke more than we do, and with the single exception that they needn't worry about medical insurance as we do, their lives are just as stressful.
In summary, we have the least effective and most expensive medical care in the industrialized world, and those who maintain there's a superior market solution for everything are either blindly and disfunctionally dogmatic or cynical and corrupt, being primary beneficiaries of the current way of doing business. If those same people continue to pull all the strings, they might at least consider outsourcing US medical care to Britain for a fee. I'm sure they could arrange some sort of kickback.
[ BBC -journalism +corporate_shilling ] x DumbingDown_50% = ABC
So, I'm watching ABC News and they have a panel of experts on to discuss universal healthcare, and one of them says that it's the Republicans who have the really exciting new idea, which is to get employers out of the practice of offering medical benefits. And get this, the "expert" is from Kaiser Permanente! Gosh, would his corporation stand to benefit at all from that radical innovation, I wonder?
I could learn more about universal healthcare listening to Britney Spears than watching ABC News. BBC it isn't.
How Schools Promote ADHD
A study has recently come out that found the brains of ADHD kids develop more slowly than the mean population's, but the good news is that the problem is merely one of a slower rate of maturation, and they catch up eventually. They are just intellectual late-bloomers. Heartening, because AD(H)D kids go through a lot of extra strain and face challenges that the average kid doesn't have to deal with, so it's good to know that there is light at the end of the tunnel for them. It's reassuring that like the ugly duckling that eventually emerges as a swan, they too will come into their own.
But it's still a bit tragic that kids with ADD have had to undergo unnecessary stigmatization. If the system had been more patient and just refrained from making what turns out to be unreasonable demands on these kids while they were catching up on their brain-building, a whole lot of emotional pain and even misery could have been avoided. In point of fact though, the system is heading in the other direction. During the last several decades the national educational curriculum has followed a paradigm that actually exacerbates the problems of kids with ADD.
I've called what goes on in schools the "push-down" curriculum, in which skills and milestones have been set to be accomplished at lower and lower grade levels, so that for example, kindergarten kids are now expected to become proficient at tasks that formerly were reserved for first graders. A by-product of this is that kids are assigned far more homework than their parents were assigned, even in their own worst nightmares. Add to this the stress of high-stakes testing, and then the elimination of art, music, and physical education in some places, all done to clear the decks for more strenuous academics.
Schoolwork has become a lot more serious, probably less fun, and a lot more difficult, maybe even impossible for some kids like the ones who are late-bloomers. That is, the push-down curriculum has been hell on kids with ADD. I postulate that the increase in the number of children diagnosed with ADD in the last couple of decades is actually a function of the evermore strenuous early curriculum, as opposed to other explanations like diet, improvement in diagnosis, or as suggested, excessive TV watching, which is likely a result rather than a cause of ADD.
Clearly, any acceleration in education has to be devastating to kids with ADD who are desperately struggling to catch up. But never fear, the system has a cure: an end to so-called "social promotion"! Yes, the brain trust guiding education has chosen to frustrate poor little ADD kids with a curriculum that is forever just out of their reach, and which convinces them they are "stupid". The system then holds them behind their peers so that their stigma is in full view of the world!
Putting an end to social promotion brings up the achievement level in school systems that do so, but not because it improves the skills of the children kept back. No, they ultimately drop out of school, but in the end getting rid of the little human deadwood raises the average for the school district. Most times when I reflect on the absurdities and dumb brutality of the education system I think the people making decisions are either complete dolts or sadists, or perhaps both.
Now, I understand that a large segment of the adult population would say I'm overstating the emotional toll on children and the magnitude of the problem. To this I say that what happens to kids in the early grades is no joke. Many states use what they consider a reliable empirical yardstick for projecting the number of jail cells that will be needed in twenty years: the number of children failing reading in the state's third grade classes. How many of these angry little self-adjudged failures suffer from ADD is anybody's guess.
In an ideal system, kids would learn at their own pace. There would be sufficient resources so that the quick learners weren't bored and the rest weren't asked to hurdle ahead of their ability to grasp what was being presented. It's a difficult task to carry off, but now we're not even close to achieving it. To the contrary, we're just flogging the kids with high-stakes testing.
Our system is damaging children and scoring poorly when compared to other countries. The US is somewhere around twenty-fifth in the world in education. Educators instituted the pushed-down curriculum to improve our standing, but metrics showed years ago that it's in middle and high school where our kids fall behind the pack, and that prior to push-down our elementary school kids were more or less on a par with kids in other wealthy nations. Rather than trying to improve our high schools, perhaps by making them more relevant to teenagers, our top educators decided to put pressure on grade schoolers. Made no sense whatsoever, but maybe it was cheaper. Who knows?
We are torturing kids with ADD unnecessarily, since they will eventually catch up, and ruthlessly pushing them, to no avail because they can only wait for brain maturation to happen naturally. Further, by slavishly keeping to a grueling regimen of the three R's, we are actually precluding the development of intellectual curiosity in children across the board. The result is they are exhibiting a "fifth grade slump" in which they are simply tired of high-pressure learning and lack any motivation to propel them forward in learning. And all this comes about because of a misbegotten drive to make kids smarter younger by turning them into answer boxes.
I don't see the point of forcing kids to do differential calculus in daycare and I never did, but some educator/dingbat thinks it would be fantastic. I think John Lennon summed up the situation pretty well in Working Class Hero: "They hit you at home and they hurt you at school. They hate if you're clever, they despise a fool. 'Til they've got you so crazy, you can't follow their rules."
American Mega-Flake
It has become apparent why Newt Gingrich dropped his flirtation with a run for the presidency in '08: he's running all out for the post of village idiot. Now he's going around saying all sixteen intelligence agencies that contributed to the just released (finally) NIE are biased against the Bush administration so strongly that they ignored intelligence facts and concocted a report designed to undermine Bush's policies. The implication is that all sixteen US intelligence agencies are traitorous to the degree they have willfully undercut the security, even perhaps the existence of our country merely to stymie a common political enemy. Give me a friggen break!
Either the staff and leadership of all sixteen premier intelligence agencies in the US are heinous turncoats, or one guy is a mega-flake. The "Fair and Balanced" (aka "Facts and Bullshit") doctrine maintains it's a standoff, but common sense and Occam's razor lead us to a different conclusion.
I think Newt would probably make a better villiage vice-idiot.
True Leaning of Christmas
Secular humanists are not trying to steal Christmas, as the zealots will assuredly claim again this year. These right wing religious extremists are just trying to fuel the persecution complex that's essential to their psyche. In point of fact, Christians, specifically Puritans, put an end to the celebration of Christmas several hundred years ago because they were displeased with the secularization of the holiday then, which included the practice of exchanging Christmas cards.
So, under Puritan influence, the celebration of Christmas was drastically downplayed in England. It was downgraded to a minor holiday until Charles Dickens released "A Christmas Carol". Upon publication of that great secular humanistic work, the celebration experienced a sudden and tremendous resurgence. Proof of the modern holiday's lineage to Dickens' work lies in the fact that today we use the phrase "Merry Christmas", which appeared in "A Christmas Carol", rather than "Happy Christmas", as had been the common greeting in olden times.
The fact we still celebrate Christmas, despite the efforts of the hyper-religious, has a lot more to do with Dickens' concern for the poor than it has to do with anyone's religious piety, past or present. And when you come right down to it, caring for fellow human beings is much closer to the message of Jesus of Nazareth than any arcane turf war over the pedigree of virtue, religious versus secular.
As a secular humanist, even I have a problem with the current idolatry of the season, concentrated as it is on merchandising and materialism. Rather than a time of family closeness, acceptance, love, and reconciliation, it's a media-fueled orgy of consumerism. I've noticed the zealots have very little to say about that aspect of the assault on Christmas though, bacause they're so wedded to free market fundamentalism, joined as the are now to the neo-conservative political movement.
Oh, and while we're at it, I want the American Taliban to stop hijacking Halloween!
'Tis the Season for Search and Seizure
I was at the checkout line in a Target store the other day when I saw a woman stopped at the door by a hulking security guard. He proceeded to pick through the numerous bags in her cart while he reconciled the contents with the woman's sales slip. I was struck by the fact this woman had probably just spent three our four hundreds dollars for presents in the store, and the corporation was showing its appreciation by searching her bags on the presumption she was a thief.
My view, which could be wrong legally, is that when you hand a cashier payment in their store a transaction takes place in which your money transfers to the store and the merchandise you carried to the checkout becomes yours, presto! So when a person hired by the store stops me on my way out the door and asks to compare my sales slip with the contents of the shopping bags in my cart, my inclination is to say, "No, if you think I stole something, arrest me, but this is my property."
Now that the Merchandise Season is upon us, more chains are posting guards at their door, especially in stores located in non-affluent areas. I wonder if this is because the stores mistrust the poor more than they mistrust the well-to-do, or if the stores are just mindful that wealthier people have access to legal representation, so they're not worth bothering. In any case, during the Merchandise Season, I'll shop on the internet to avoid being shaken down like a prisoner going from the exercise yard back to the cell block.
Cindy Sheehan's question still stands
Other than George W's ego, what are we defending in Iraq? Certainly, we're not holding off the terrorists by being there, because their home base is in Pakistan. Has been ever since we let Osama leave Tora Bora. We're not there to "train them to stand up" because we've already given that up as a fool's errand. It even looks now as though Iraq won't be needed as a lilly pad for invading Iran.
Above all, it doesn't look like we'll be slurping up all their oil after all, because the Iraqi "government" won't play ball and sign on to privitization of the oil feilds. So, again, besides W's ego, what else is at stake, and please don't say "honor", because we pretty much traded that away when we lied to the world about yellow cake, anthrax, and mushroom clouds, and then adopted torture as our official policy. After that, pulling out of Iraq isn't going to make much of an impression one way or the other.
Short Analysis of Modern Politics: the Great Distraction and the War on the Middle Class
The very wealthy, tired of paying taxes on their fortunes and being forced by unions to compensate workers fairly and amply, decided to do something about it. First, they pandered to the racial prejudices and ire of white Americans, especially those in the South. Then, while these working people were distracted, the clever wealthy crushed unions and dismantled the tax system.
Racial division has stymied progressive advances in this country before (e.g. Truman's universal healthcare plan was rejected in the 1940's because it might require Southern hospitals to racially integrate). This time however, the wealthy skillfully manipulated race to actually reverse progress, rolling back the New Deal to reduce working people's share of the pie.
As a result, the tremendous increase in productivity since the start of the Great Distraction has not translated into a proportional increase in income for the middle class worker. The wealth generated has instead gone almost entirely into the pockets of the already rich, boosting their wealth to stratospheric levels.
Unhindered by taxation, fortunes will compound and be passed between generations, assuring dynasties of great wealth. At the same time, the children of the middle class will earn less and live less well than their parents, and the children's children may know only squalor and deprivation. Since the the social safety net was funded through taxes, the progeny of the erstwhile middle class will founder helplessly at the bottom of a two class society, a society with massive inequality of wealth and power.
The wealthy have bamboozled middle class working people into surrendering their stake in the economy. There's an old saw about a con that says every mark is hooked on his own greed. In this instance the mark was hooked on his own hatred. Putting aside the tragic consequences of this now lost War on the American Middle Class, one must grudgingly admit to the skill and determination with which it was carried out.
Pick your poison
People opposed to universal healthcare coverage say they "don't want the government making their medical decisions", but are they happy now with corporations making them?
Besides, a single-payer system doesn't mean government will make healthcare decisions, it will just pay for them, as insurance companies (are supposed to) do now. Only government won't need to rake 31% off the top as they do. Oh, and single-payer healthcare coverage isn't "socialized medicine", as shills for the health insurance industry like to call it.
Productivity is way up, but the middle class isn't getting anywhere, and our kids will have even a rougher time in the years ahead. Meanwhile, the top 1% are being feted like royalty, hogging all the gains brought by increased productivity. We would be making 30% more than we are now if they weren't skimming the nation's wealth.
The Class War started in the 80's under Reagan, when he began unravelling the New Deal for his wealthy benefactors.
Democrats in the Senate Judiciary Committee have decided they can live with a new Attorney General who espouses the Nixon idea that "If the President does it, that means it's not illegal." Jefferson and Madison are spinning in their graves. Washington is trying to claw his way out of his. Though off course, even if he makes it he'll just be swift-boated.
You can't really call what Senators Schumer and Feinstein are doing bipartisanship, because that implies cooperation between two parties, whereas in this case we are really talking about two wings of just one party: the moderate Republicans (nee Democrats) and the bat-shit crazy, tire-biting, frothing far right of the Republican party.
Bush & Cheney are so fond of the Constitution that they're introducing a 2-ply version.
Fox, your indignation station. Stoking resentment, keeping the anger alive! (And showing lots of boobies!)
This is a culture without Empathy, where the Christianity is a brand devoid of Charity. Money is the Holy Grail, and having it the only Virtue. Exploitation is the pathway to Advancement, which suffices for Salvation.
The right wing hates Al Gore the same way the Wicked Queen hated Snow White, and they wish they had a poison apple for him.
I heard a right-winger say on Sunday morning TV that people are so disappointed with the Democrats that they may very well turn to Republicans in '08.
That makes about as much sense as going back outside to lay by the pool because the aloe you used isn't helping your sunburn.
But that's how right wing logic runs.
Our present system of private healthcare insurance and "competing" private Medicare prescription programs is a macabre joke that even its defenders will ultimately suffer from.
Privatization of government's functions is antithetical to public oversight. The Freedom of Information Act just doesn't apply to private companies. Think Halliburton/KB&R, Blackwater, and the private company that formulated the evacuation plan for New Orleans. Think Diebold voting machines. Government without oversight invites tyranny.
High Crimes and Misdemeanors
With intent and fervor, the neo-conservative Republican executive branch has sabotaged most US government agencies. It has done this by appointing to key positions those whose life's work and endeavors have hitherto been directed toward fighting against the very goals of the agencies they have now been appointed to. These are people who's natural and abiding inclination is to work in direct opposition to the charters of the agencies they now head.
This regime lied to the people of the nation and entered a war under false pretenses, betrayed their oaths of office by divulging the identity of a covert CIA agent in order to punish and discredit a witness to their lies, then proceeded to bungle the occupation of the defeated country so horribly as to result in that country's civil war. Ironically, their ineptitude has provided a breeding ground for the very terrorist elements the war was ostensibly started to eradicate, although that pretense has now long been exposed as mere subterfuge, a cynical marketing ploy used to sell the impending war to the people.
This heinous band of thugs disdains the Constitution they swore to uphold, effectively banning open protest by relegating opposition to Orwellian named "Free Speech zones", throwing out habeas corpus, and instituting torture as the official policy or our nation, upending the precedent set by none other than General George Washington. Add to that their abrogation of laws protecting privacy of the individual, a principle that largely drove the American Revolution. Further, they spy on dissidents and use the awsome power of government to punish and neutralize opposition, morphing US law enforcement agencies into an American version of the KGB.
Where will this end if we don't stop it?
Shortchanging children's health and accepting their suffering as the necessary price for your corporate donor's healthy bottom line isn't a philosophy, it's blackhearted thuggery. The President's assertion "They can go to the emergency room!" is tantamount to "Let them eat cake!" (Of course, Marie Antoinette really didn't say that about cake, whereas our own Boy King actually did say that about emergency rooms.)
Really bad stuff happens when paranoid schizophrenics start acting on their fears and suspicions preemptively.
Hawking Hate and Pushing Adreneline on the AM Dial
While former my boss was giving me a ride home from work one evening, he had the car's radio tuned to a talk show. The radio host was bellowing about a terrible crime in which a parent, I think it was the mother, had cruelly and coldly murdered her children. The story had filled the news for the past day or two, so this really wasn't new anymore. The host was using the story to inveigh against the perpetrator, rabidly calling for her violent death in the same manner as her children's. An eye for an eye.
On the surface, the radio provocateur, by urging revenge, was standing up for the dead children. However, it quickly occurred to me that he was actually exploiting them in their death, using their tragedy to rile the radio audience and give them the surge of anger and righteous indignation that it was his job to serve up to them daily. That's how he earns his paycheck.
Sadly, there seems to be a vast radio market for hate mongering, there being a great number of anger-addicts desperate for their next jolt of indignation-released adrenaline. That's how little some people have going for them, apparently.
Pathetic anger-addicts aside, what about the radio toad who supplies their cheap, fleeting drug? What good, either lasting or transient, does he do for society? If someone were to heed his words and kill the mother as suggested, that would not bring her children back to life or expunge the horror and suffering they felt at death.
Although I don't embrace killing for vengeance, if it were done and if I alone had the means to deliver up the self-appointed executioner to the authorities, I would decline. Not feeling qualified to play god in the matter of the execution, I would not judge the executioner either. One the other hand, if I could pin either crime on the vermin host of that radio talk show, I'd do it in a heartbeat.
Numb-Nuts Nixes Child Healthcare, Abetted by Re-bubba-cans in Congress
Denying kids medical care on a philosophical basis is absurd, not to mention mean spirited, cruel, and just plain dunderheaded. Doing it to cater to your corporate healthcare donors, preferring to do their bidding to stay in office, rather than alleviate suffering, is flat out evil. We should banish Bush and the erstwhile Southern Democrats/Republicans who snatched healthcare from children to the island of Elba. Without health coverage.
An Exciting Career in Hate Mongering!
Are you the kid who always gets picked on, ridiculed, shoved around? Well, don't go out and score an assault rifle and a few thousand rounds of ammo yet, just be patient. Someday you can use the humiliating experiences of the present to become a successful right wing radio talk show host.
All the bullying you are at the receiving end of now can teach you the fundamentals of personal attack and even put a chip on your shoulder you can mine later in your adult professional life! If you're willing to use today's pain as the foundation of tomorrow's gain, you too can become a master of low-market discourse. Soon enough, you can be the one spreading the hate!
Of course, even as you enjoy the fruits of your career as a right wing bully, the immutable fact is that the one you really hate is you, for being unable to stand up for your younger self. But don't let it concern you, for that there's Vicodin!
