OpEds – Sharks and Shadows: A Crossroad.

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A Reply to “OpEds-The Lion and the Ox: The Winter of Our Discontent” by Gary Steven Corseri

Gary, my dear, you can turn a phrase.  This was priceless: “The possibility of war with Iran is a warmonger’s wet-dream now-and the sheets are gross and soggy.”

I am shamed such talent has gone to waste, such obvious intellect has been coopted by the human need for a saviour, and the human ability to delude itself.  Much like your disappointment in President Hopey-McChangey, you have not the ears to hear.

For while some of us were duped by his rhetoric, others among us reminded us that he was candidly a centrist – that he wanted increased War in Afghanistan (the right war) and that he intended to “reach across the aisle” (read reach-around) to those who sponsored his campaign. The right.

Here you are, a grown man, tapping your heels, saying, “there’s no place like home,” and clapping your hands and saying, “I do believe in faeries,” for yet another candidate whose record is clearly illiberal and equally dangerous, Ron Paul.

Yet, I believe you know in your heart of hearts, that this is so many marionettes dancing on a cave wall.  

For some reason, or lack thereof may be more accurate, people are emotionally drawn over and over to words like “freedom,” “personal responsibility,” and the most insidious, “liberty.”  We are better programed than Huxley’s hatchlings to believe our Brave New World is indeed superior, and relishes all those things.  One need not be a historian, nor have witnessed the American nightmare as visited upon other nations to understand this malevolent kabuki; one must look only to the mean streets of our cities to see how the wretched victims of our Liberty play out for our own.  That vision makes the cave-shadows ever more odious and the enlightened intellectuals fomenting the false apparitions doubly damned for having so done.  I can call it nothing more kind than the “enabler class” – those who should know better, pretending to be blind.  Those who should know better leading the people back into the Platonic caves, telling the starving abused masses they are lucky, for the cave shall keep them safe from drone bombs at the very least.

I understand why you do it, dear Gary.  I understand the need to vote the LOTE.  Lesser of the two evils, or in this case three or thousands seems like the only recourse in a World so stacked against us.  But can you not see how odious it is to capitulate to that false meme?  Can you not see that is how we support the status quo?

As an irreverent and far from PC leftist, I have many friends, allies and even frenemies from all political points of view.  I am in danger of losing my house.  I am a recent widow with a 12 year old son and no insurance.  And?  Some 25 years prior to the birth of my son, I had an abortion that likely saved my life, and was told I could never bear children.  Had I not had that abortion, sir, I would likely be dust, and certainly not have had my miracle child.  I get both the human directive to procreate and the Motherly love for child whose fierceness has no match.  Yet that blob of tissue in a dumpster was making me randomly pass out, my blood pressure dropping to nothing, I was passing clots and hemorrhaging. Many of my closest friends are religious and opposed to abortion on those grounds, to which I say, “Then by all means never have one and impart your morality to your own children as is your right, but please, please do not impart your morality on others whose religious views are different, or those like me who merely wished to live.”

The material out there about Ron Paul is legion. When he rings the states-rights dogwhistle, knuckle dragging mouth breathers stumble out of their trailers and dream of using the N-word freely again as is their right.  When he talks about states-rights, the christinazis and flat-earthers swoon and speak in tongues knowing soon their little hollars of the world will be cleansed once and for all of “all them homos and faggots” and that finally the Bible will be taught in school, so their inbred children can again know a 6000 year old earth and that Jesus so loved the dinosaurs he hid their bones in rocks to give us something to do.  Kind of like an Easter Egg hunt.

Those are the unreachable.  I get that.

But what you have done, sir, is to try and pull the heartstrings of rational liberals whose compassion for humanity would hope to remove us, ever, from the blood drenched theaters of War.  

Do you think for even a nanosecond that the Military Industrial Complex would allow one man to change the most profitable business in the History of Humankind?  Surely you know that the Beltway is populated entirely by people on that MIC payroll. If the Houses didn’t over ride him completely, the Black Ops people would.  They can and have killed Presidents before, and that foreknowledge certainly keeps anyone holding that Esteemed Office complaint.  They would not allow it.

Even were he to do that impossible task and break the back of Goliath with his isolationist slingshot, do you not know his intended policies would do much the same?  The dead care not whether they were blown up, or starved to death, worse, poisoned to death by the unregulated greed of neo-liberal Predatory Capitalists. Our swath of Global death and destruction has been a bloody sword of Economic Ruin as often as by the Gun Barrel.  Ask a Chilean. Ask anyone, really.

So, having established the unlikelihood of influencing the Armies of Empire we employ, lets explore which of his ideas they would let him employ:  His domestic policies.

They will allow him the privatization of nearly every Governmental agency. Want an education?  Pay or be illiterate.  Want a social safety net?  You should have started saving from your paper route on up.  Don’t like the nuclear waste in your water source?  Private property rights say “its our back yard,” so suck it up.  In fact?  You can even sue us if you wish, but we have much better lawyers and unlimited monetary resources to beat you.  You have the “right” to work for 2 dollars an hour, that’s freedom, so quit complaining about some big-government imposed minimum wage. The Fed may be abolished, the Gold Standard renewed, but who has all the Gold?  Certainly not you or I – ultimately the Fed is a bad thing, serves the few already, but its abolishing would change little of the facts on the ground.

It is Warfare, my friend, Class Warfare, and he would like nothing better than to be its crowning glory.

Death by biting the bullet as the Planet is raped, its humans enslaved.  I would prefer a clean head-shot myself to this to end my meager existence.  

I, for one, smell something in the air.  Empires always die, once balanced too precariously on their inverted pyramid apex of the few.  The United States is wobbling, its Elites scrambling to find a figurehead that will make we at the bottom shore up the status quo, and let them hang on for another generation.  But this season of our discontent is no longer held between those arbitrary lines we call borders, it is Global.

When the shark is about to consume you, you argue not about how many teeth are in its mouth, nor which tooth is duller and will masticate the masses more slowly.

You call your fellow piranhas and dissemble the shark.

Pick up your guitar Mr. Johnson, and your pen Mr. Corseri.  Your talents are good enough not to have to make that Faustian deal.  If you doubt that, look around you, the World’s citizens are rising to join the band, and a help write a new chapter for our ages.  The deal only seems like your lone option at this point. At least until you look away from the road, and into the fields around the road… and hear the whispers in the fields, how every revolution begins.  Whispers in the field that call for change, a new way, and remind you that there are not only 2 roads at that crossroads, but a 360 panoramic view of opportunity which you can step off into.

Occupy is is merely the building of the fulcrum.

We, the poets, bards and prophets must climb aboard to bring that tipping point that not only ends wars, but ends the very system that enables it.  Extraction Capitalism.  Kleptocracy.  Greed.  The fouling of our life-support system.  Gross inequality.

We need to expose the man behind the curtain, and acknowledge that no incrementalist change will serve to stop the shark from making entrails of what it sees as useless eaters in the way of its right to consuming everything in its path.

Let me state the most obvious.

There are no Wars without Class War.  There are no Wars without Profit.  There are no Wars that occur without the “Few” deluding the weak into enabling them.  New and better Class War Leaders will not change any of that.

Use your considerable talent to help us dismantle that system, if your love for Humanity would see fewer of us Suffer and Die.

The World is waiting for People like us, sir, crying out across the miles in this electronic age.  Whispering in the fields, “We are like you.  We want to live.  We tire of despots and abuse, of not-having in a World rich with resources. We are one.”

If this be the Winter of our Discontent, come, whisper with me and lets make it count.

There be Sharks here, there be Shadows to obfuscate, and we are at a Crossroads.

And if we only listen well and speak more honestly?  There be Revolution, sir. A People’s Revolution. The only true path into the Light.

Regards,

Diane M Gee.