There's Nothing To Do Over The Holidays
But read. Oh, and maybe write.
This dissemination of power, octopussing out from the cap of the Americas, that crown-dome of the US of A, is really blowing me down. Merry fucking Christmas. Besides the continuity of it all (none of it is new, but now just so blatant and shameless), and digressing from the arguments that it may be the beginning of the end, the decline of an empire, we still have to live with it, festering all the way through the operations of a global economy, and constantly meddling, muddling and pounding us like a pestle in mortar.
It's never about anything but control, and the will to dominate: imperialism cannot really disguise itself, but remains so laughable as it benefits such a small designation of any society, which remains in power as even the arms of its influence are just as bereaved and ravaged as its oppressed. Those lower classes kept poor, annexed, ghettoed, and then used as cannon fodder and filler. Michael Moore had something in that anti-Bush propaganda film: the policy makers do not pay the price. Where's the revolution? We've got the complaints down, certainly. We can belly-ache all the way through our lives, and continue to avoid any sort of responsibly for the complacency that allows all of the abominable waste and exploitation to persevere.
When I first came to the city, and especially after I started to work in the "high end" restaurants where the wealthy came to complain and criticize an experience, which should have been nourishing rather than aggravating, I was astonished by the real numbers of the wealthy. Coming from such small communities it was hard to picture that the upper class existed as a horde rather than a small group of wandering eccentrics; but then when I started working in catering, and began to enter into the homes of these people, hired to rearrange and embellish their already showpiece properties, I was even more overwhelmed and depressed by the realization of the scale of what we're talking about when we say "rich". Setting up a bar in a hallway, a colonnade of pillared marble, running between a sitting room and a kitchen, it starts to dawn on you, what the real gap is voiding the stretch between the haves and the have-nots. This kind of greed has been normalized: envied, sought and accepted.
We have to keep these things in perspective: it all happens so a class of first-world residents can maintain estates of opulence and gluttony. People are stacked in blocks of concrete towers and told to live productively; freedoms are constrained and limited to designate consciousness, fostering ignorance and apathy, promoting fear; wars are promoted and fought; oil fields are sought and ravaged; the green world turned ash grey and muddy brown; all so a meager percentage of the worlds population can have a toilet in a quiet room overlooking a lake. Four baths, six bedrooms, a ballroom and billiards in the basement. The puppet masters are maintained by the comfort mongers, the silly enthusiasts, the vain and tawdry aesthetes that preen their way above the unwashed.
Without taste, I might add. I know, I've served them.
These are the obscene, the affronts; the structure has to be redesigned; we're out of our depth. You have to consider that in terms of evolution (or progression, if your cap is in with the intelligent designers) we are a stone's throw of generations away from a time when we were hunter-gatherers. Money is a concept perhaps not understood in our blood, not carried physically; and money is a representation, not of worldly goods, but of virtual power, symbolizing only itself. It used to have a direct correlation: it used to be gold, and even that was better because it was almost understandable. What we understand is exchange, and as animals, no matter how capable of self-identification we might be, we are designed to respond to our environment, not base life and death decisions (even daily ones: how do we feed and get fed?) on the basis of a concept. I think that the structure of our existence has brought us to psychosis.
We've all gone crazy and are trying to keep it together.
So, we've made the globe into a warren of madhouses; and the ones leading us from one ruin to another are the ones who buy into it so unreservedly, and are doing their best to defend the ability to control that which has no actual equivalence without the exercision of will, by capitalizing on those poor in conceptual currency, and made comfortable with a good night's rest atop a down pillow, in a bedroom large enough to house an entire family. A house that sucks up enough of this earth's resources to maintain an entire community. Indefinitely, come wind or rain, terror or ruin.
Now that's physical representation.
This dissemination of power, octopussing out from the cap of the Americas, that crown-dome of the US of A, is really blowing me down. Merry fucking Christmas. Besides the continuity of it all (none of it is new, but now just so blatant and shameless), and digressing from the arguments that it may be the beginning of the end, the decline of an empire, we still have to live with it, festering all the way through the operations of a global economy, and constantly meddling, muddling and pounding us like a pestle in mortar.
It's never about anything but control, and the will to dominate: imperialism cannot really disguise itself, but remains so laughable as it benefits such a small designation of any society, which remains in power as even the arms of its influence are just as bereaved and ravaged as its oppressed. Those lower classes kept poor, annexed, ghettoed, and then used as cannon fodder and filler. Michael Moore had something in that anti-Bush propaganda film: the policy makers do not pay the price. Where's the revolution? We've got the complaints down, certainly. We can belly-ache all the way through our lives, and continue to avoid any sort of responsibly for the complacency that allows all of the abominable waste and exploitation to persevere.
When I first came to the city, and especially after I started to work in the "high end" restaurants where the wealthy came to complain and criticize an experience, which should have been nourishing rather than aggravating, I was astonished by the real numbers of the wealthy. Coming from such small communities it was hard to picture that the upper class existed as a horde rather than a small group of wandering eccentrics; but then when I started working in catering, and began to enter into the homes of these people, hired to rearrange and embellish their already showpiece properties, I was even more overwhelmed and depressed by the realization of the scale of what we're talking about when we say "rich". Setting up a bar in a hallway, a colonnade of pillared marble, running between a sitting room and a kitchen, it starts to dawn on you, what the real gap is voiding the stretch between the haves and the have-nots. This kind of greed has been normalized: envied, sought and accepted.
We have to keep these things in perspective: it all happens so a class of first-world residents can maintain estates of opulence and gluttony. People are stacked in blocks of concrete towers and told to live productively; freedoms are constrained and limited to designate consciousness, fostering ignorance and apathy, promoting fear; wars are promoted and fought; oil fields are sought and ravaged; the green world turned ash grey and muddy brown; all so a meager percentage of the worlds population can have a toilet in a quiet room overlooking a lake. Four baths, six bedrooms, a ballroom and billiards in the basement. The puppet masters are maintained by the comfort mongers, the silly enthusiasts, the vain and tawdry aesthetes that preen their way above the unwashed.
Without taste, I might add. I know, I've served them.
These are the obscene, the affronts; the structure has to be redesigned; we're out of our depth. You have to consider that in terms of evolution (or progression, if your cap is in with the intelligent designers) we are a stone's throw of generations away from a time when we were hunter-gatherers. Money is a concept perhaps not understood in our blood, not carried physically; and money is a representation, not of worldly goods, but of virtual power, symbolizing only itself. It used to have a direct correlation: it used to be gold, and even that was better because it was almost understandable. What we understand is exchange, and as animals, no matter how capable of self-identification we might be, we are designed to respond to our environment, not base life and death decisions (even daily ones: how do we feed and get fed?) on the basis of a concept. I think that the structure of our existence has brought us to psychosis.
We've all gone crazy and are trying to keep it together.
So, we've made the globe into a warren of madhouses; and the ones leading us from one ruin to another are the ones who buy into it so unreservedly, and are doing their best to defend the ability to control that which has no actual equivalence without the exercision of will, by capitalizing on those poor in conceptual currency, and made comfortable with a good night's rest atop a down pillow, in a bedroom large enough to house an entire family. A house that sucks up enough of this earth's resources to maintain an entire community. Indefinitely, come wind or rain, terror or ruin.
Now that's physical representation.
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