While we are distracted by the US election process and current policy construction of the President-elect, Orwell's 1984 form the background notion for the "Winstonization of the United States of America."
In one of the encounters between O'Brien a representative of the ruling elite and Winston, the armchair radical in Orwell's 1984, occurs, where O'Brien reaches into Winston's mouth and effortlessly pulls out a tooth from Winston's rotting gums.
Over 99% of America is like Winston.
Americans are so incredibly divided and conquered that some of us think we are well off compared to others.
The relative comparisons among social and economic strata within the bottom 90% are barely meaningful. We are quick to criticize those who are still wed to the system as though they are worthless with nothing to offer to help change the system. Not recognizing that we need them. So we isolate them instead of finding ways to empathize with their concerns some of which are similar to our own.
We fail to understand that the 1% doesn't move among us. Most of us never see the .1% hanging out or passing through any place that we traverse. When the .1% travel we certainly can find them in the sky overhead as the noise of their jet craft slams into our ears. Bastards. They don't shop in our neighborhood or local stores, or go to the movies. They don't drive through ATMs, go to the gym, or to the bureau of motor vehicles or the pharmacy.
I took a short cut between two shopping centers and found homeless living behind one. Strewn ubiquitous plastic bags, needles, empty bottles of alcohol and beverage and canned food containers, discarded clothes, human excrement, used toilet paper and shoes. There were surprisingly very few cigarette butts. Strange isn't it? The homeless benefit from not being able to afford super expensive cigarettes which subsequently slow lung deterioration from smoking but this is offset instead from poor diet and exposure through the seasons.
Another Winstonization of America is the trash. It is everywhere, especially along our roadsides, in the median, in the empty lots and the sidewalks within seconds of our "neighborhood" bodegas, and drainage ditches lining rural roads and farm fields. It must be in the human DNA to drop trash everywhere we go. I've seen trash and plastic water bottles on the ground in photos of the Peshmerga on their way to Mosul from a few days ago, and of course we all know by now that there are square miles of plastic trash in the Pacific Ocean.
We have also seen decaying chunks of infrastructural concrete, sunken storm water grates along the entrance and exit ramps of our great/misguided highway system, poised to rip out your vehicle axle; one that we are proud of except when we reflect briefly on its current condition and hide from our mind, ignoring the past 35 year accumulation of the broken pieces of our exceptionalism. We delude ourselves into urban and rural tribal realities as we are manipulated into divisions by the elites responsible for this mess and who are still engaged in an 80 year tax boycott and who have also subcontracted most of our government to themselves.
When I reached the front of plaza, I found clean parking lots and nice cars and only a smattering of vehicles with crash injuries, windows covered in plastic, doors, broken mirrors and hanging fenders held together by duct tape, essentially a deceptive mental picture accompanied by an insidious unease that I believe is shared by many Americans, a harsh truth: America's slowly unraveling and we are losing our teeth.
Americans still believe that we have the greatest and most modern cities, not that being modern is the greatest accomplishment of a civilization, but it has been held in high esteem for a long time and remains a mainstay of political propaganda by the demagogue. Today there are dozens of new and newer cities elsewhere in the world, suggesting the capitalist model of wealth and vitality has moved on and left us with our downgraded and poorly lit dingy underpasses, unkempt industrial wastelands soiling the land broken and crumbling sidewalks.
The life is being sucked out of America. We can feel and glimpse it, but it is still the emperor with no clothes propaganda of the establishment to help us ignore the reality of our plight and instead settle for the lies of our exceptionalism, we are number ONE, are we not? We are told that we are number one in healthcare, education, income, and quality of life. I used to think we were number one in the best military hardware that money could buy. Except I hear that Russia may be a few generations ahead of western armature because the western elites looted national military budgets instead of producing new military tech.
Once I suggested to my friends that we could form The Stupid Peoples' Party (TSPP), but they thought that stupid people would be so insulted and offended that they would never join. Indeed stupid people would be smart to be offended which of course is the wrong market segment to recruit for the TSPP.
I am going to push ahead, at least in my imagination. The Stupid Peoples' Party platform will consist of all the insanities of what's wrong with the US globalist elites, Thomas Frank-light, author of, What's the Matter with Kansas?
The .1% doesn't laugh in our face about how stupid we think they are; because they understand that their social engineering is working"we are the stupid ones. We are the rotting Winstons that are America.
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