Witnessing the acts and utterances of Republican presidential candidates can be regarded as a helpful psychological exercise, a type of "exposure therapy" involving the development of methods used to bear the presence of unbearable people who insist on evincing the history of human ignorance, duplicity and insanity.
"I can't go on; I go on."--Samuel Beckett
All alive are tasked with the challenge of not only proceeding through life despite these kinds of insults to common sense and common decency, but to make a stand, in one's own unique way, against prevailing forms of madness and oppression.
As a case in point, within the mainstream narratives of the corporate media and that of both major political parties, one bears constant witness to palaver involving the nebulous tyrannies of "big government"; although, incongruously, one scarcely receives from those sources focused complaints and critiques (much less probing investigative reports or congressional hearings) directed at the excesses of the national security/police state and Military/Big Media/Prison Industrial Complex.
The "big government" narrative is a misdirection campaign -- a smoke-screen serving to obscure corporate/military dominance of political life and its effects on the social criteria of everyday life in the nation. Accordingly, government is only as big as the 1 percent who own and operate it will allow it to be.Therefore, due to the fact that elitist interests all but control the U.S. political class, in order to change government policies, a radical rethinking and revamping of the economic order of the nation must occur.
Although, at this late date in the life of empire, change will have to come from the streets, from uprisings -- by occupations -- by a restructuring of the entire system, from its cracked foundation, to rotting support beams, to corroding particle board, to lousy paint job.
Yet, this will be an organic process ... unpredictable, fraught with peril, freighted with the expansiveness of the novel, tinged with apprehensions borne of grief. But upheaval is inevitable because the present system is deep into the process of entropic runaway. And because uncertainty will be our constant companion, one is advised to make it an ally.
The neoliberal capitalist order is on a path towards extinction. And it will, most likely, die ugly. But it has lived ugly as well. The system never worked as advertised ... was more sales pitch than substance in its promise to increase innovation and deliver prosperity worldwide.
Conversely, the set-up leveled enslavement to powerful interests by means of a 21st Century version of company-town despotism e.g., workhouses, sweat shops, unhealthy mining towns and industrial wastelands where the laboring classes are shackled by debt-slavery to company store-type coercion.
This global company town criteria has inflicted sub-living wages, no benefit, no future jobs, yet the corporate state's 24/7, commercial propaganda apparatus has the consumer multitudes of the U.S. convinced that they are "living the dream." As a result, great numbers still believe their oligarchic oppressors actually believe their own lies about freedom, liberty and equal opportunity for all.
That's right: Scheming princes simply love the peasants of their kingdom. ... They do, as long as those wretches continue to bow down in the presence of the powerful, do all they are commanded to do, and unthinkingly serve the interests of their vain, arrogant rulers.
Absurdly, large numbers in the U.S. still claim the burdensome economic yoke they bear is a glittering accessory of freedom gifted to them by their privileged betters. Often, one hears the assertion: Although the U.S. is an empire, it is, in fact, a benign sort of empire ... as far as empires go.
To the contrary, the nation's post-Second World War, empire-building enterprise, as is the case throughout history with exercises in imperium, has leveled death-scapes abroad, corrupted the society's elite and delivered anomie and alienation to the general population.
From the soulless, dehumanizing nothing-scapes of the U.S. interstate highway system and its resultant suburban project, to the douche-scapes of hyper-commercialized pop culture, empire's legacy is as pervasive as it is dismal.
And all delivered and maintained by trading in the bartered blood of the innocent abroad by mechanisms of imperial plunder while serving to create a gallery of heartless, authoritarian-minded, consumerism-addicted grotesques at home. One suspects this is the reason discussions involving the true nature of empire are not considered a subject fit for nice company.
Often, by attempting to adapt to the burdensome daily obligations and the spirit-crushing, hierarchical structure of neoliberal capitalism, individuals will begin to internalize its pathologies.
In the age of corporate-state-dominated media, to ensure the circular, self-reinforcing nature of the noxious narratives of empire remain in place, faux populist, conservative media talk show hosts, talking heads and rightist pundits -- elitist bully boys and gals -- i.e., the bigot whisperers of the Right -- continually seed the dismal air with false narratives, contrived to misdirect anger and foment displaced resentments.
