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May 20, 2009
Doom and Gloom for the Dumb and the Glum
By J. Edward Tremlett
Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean they ARE out to get you -- It might just mean that you're paranoid. It's time for the thinking Left to unshackle themselves from the paranoid Duopoly-merchants in their midst and remember how change happens.
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“It looks like this could be the end...”
Over 100 days into the Obama Administration, we have entered the age of the smirking paranoid know-it-all. “See? I told you so!” is their battle cry. And their goal is to make you poop yourself in fear.
Because now, NOW that we see that -- *gasp* -- Obama isn’t the great liberal hope some people fooled themselves into believing he was, they appear to have been proven “right.”
No, he’s not going to reverse all Bush policies. No, he’s not going to kow-tow to the lefty protest set, especially given how it does its business. No, he’s not going to fix all our problems from on high by his lonesome, or even understand what all the problems are, or how to fix them.
No, he’s not going to make Ralph Nader the Secretary of anything.
And yes, like any other politician, he’s going to appoint people who have long laundry lists of questionable behavior and troubling connections to key positions that, in an ideal world, they wouldn’t even be able to grovel at the desks of.
In an ideal world.
Unfortunately, we don’t live there. We live in a dirty, realpolitic reality where being prudent trumps idealism, campaign promises often wilt in the glare of being behind the big desk, and the only certainty we can claim is that, in the end, mistakes are going to made.
The question is how those mistakes are realized, addressed and solved, and why.
But oh no. That’s not good enough to the smirking paranoid know-it-all. Battened on Pearl Harbor as a set-up, spoon-fed the official unofficial truth of JFK’s martyrdom, rightly frightened by Kent State, COINTELPRO and ECHELON but failing to grasp the nuances, and still humming the songs they burned their draft cards to, today’s Church Of The Obtuse cries “foul” early and often, accusing everyone everywhere of being in on the capital-C CONSPIRACY.
Of being part of the fabled Duopoly -- which seems to have replaced the Bilderbergers, Bohemian Grove, Military Industrial Complex, Jews or some combination of the above as the CONSPIRACY of choice.
What is the Duopoly, you may ask? Taken literally, it means any situation where two main contenders dominate the market. Coke and Pepsi. Visa and Mastercard. Democrats and Republicans.
However, it’s slowly gaining another definition: the notion that America’s two party system is a largely illusory affair designed to lull us into sideshow after sideshow, thus distracting us from the real powers that be. The Duopoly offers us a false dichotomy, and softens us up for the one horrible day when they finally bring down the hammer, and we are too busy watching FOX News or busting on it to notice.
The same beast with two faces, in other words. “Who do you trust when everyone’s a crook?”
To the believer in Duopoly, there is no real difference between Reagan and Carter, Clinton and Bush I, Gore and Bush II, and Obama and McCain. All of them were following a script given unto them by the ascended masters of commerce, arms and industry. All were here to distract us from the dark goings-on that are designed to turn America into a 1984-style slave labor camp for totalitarian overlords.
And there’s nothing anyone can do about it, because they already. Control. EVERYTHING.
Vote? Don’t bother -- the elections are scripted about as badly as pro-wrestling. And when you hear news about vote fraud or stolen elections, it’s all a smoke-screen, too.
It’s all over except for the screaming.
March? Don’t kid yourself -- the people who run the people who “run” things don’t care about your opinion. And protests didn’t get us out of Vietnam, they just provided a good excuse to pack in a losing battle and retool for much more profitable conflicts in the future.
It’s all over except for the screaming.
Speak out? Who are you kidding? The media is co-opted. The splinter and protest parties are shills. Anyone who runs a major op-ed outfit has been co-opted and only wants shills.
Again, it’s all over except for the screaming.
But still, in spite of knowing we’re all gonna die this Summer, just like we were all gonna die last Summer and the one before that, and maybe the Summer after this one, too, the Calvacade Of The Omniscient -- staunch believers in Duopoly -- can be seen fighting the good fight. They’re warning us all of the oncoming storm. They’re agitating for revolution.
And they’re keeping the subject alive like a sidewalk sandwich-board prophet of doom, Doom, DOOOOOOOM.
But then we have to wonder -- “how can I even be READING this?”
After all, if the Duopoly is that powerful and all-controlling, and ready and willing to disappear and assassinate well-placed people who won’t play along, then what does that make the little people who rail against it? Shills? Distractions?
Are they the principle of hiding a great secret in plain sight put into action -- one pair of Birkenstocks and angry blog at a time?
Is there some weird-ass, government-run factory school ejecting small clutches of grumpy, paranoid anti-Duopoly activists to plague us with visions of mass graves, engineered plagues, FEMA stormtroopers cordoning us off to die and Obama eating babies for dinner? While not likely, it could explain why so many of their screeds sound like they’re all cribbed from the same set of notes.
Here's their recipe: Take anything that comes from on high -- good, bad or indifferent -- mix with big money and sinister intent, sprinkle with past indiscretions and then leave it in the oven until it’s half-baked. Then serve with a smirk, and a haughty heaping of disdain for anyone who asks questions.
I think the best critique of Duopoly is the fact that the mask has remained on for this long. After all, if the two parties are one party, key personnel in the agencies are in on the gag, the military only ever obeys orders, and the media won’t lift a finger in fear of losing money, then the overt coup of America is already a fait accompli. So why not take off the mask, shoot a few visible dissidents and imprison quite a few more to make an object lesson, and then get about the business of totalitarianism out in the open? What do they really have to lose?
Better yet, what do they have to gain by waiting? Why wasn’t this already done back in the 80’s, under Reagan? Or in the 90’s, under Clinton? Or in the early 00’s, by Bush the younger? Why wait all this time to bring the glory of Empire to America’s people?
Why this Summer, of all Summers?
The answer is simple: it’s a trick question with a false premise. There is no fabled evil Duopoly. There is only the myth of evil Duopoly, eagerly professed by the burned-out, the brain-damaged activists and the intellectually lazy. And eagerly clung to by those who’d much rather complain about the world’s problems than get off their butts and actually DO something about it.
“Run to the hills!” shout the Committee Of The Outraged, urging us to flee while there’s still time. But then why are they still sticking around and making themselves targets?
I think it's because THEY know they’re full of it, too.
See, belief in Duopoly means never having to take responsibility for your own lack of action. If the battle’s already lost, and there’s no chance of winning, then why even try? Just stand by the emergency exits and tell people to get out before they get burned, even though there’s no real sign of a fire in the theatre.
Even though, if the theory were true, the “exit” would most likely lead to a gas chamber.
Show me a believer in the great Duopolistic takeover of America and I’ll show you a grumpy paranoiac who sees a vast, sinister conspiracy behind every tree, and points out that there’s a whole lot of trees. I’ll show you a 9/11 Truther who thinks there were only two plane crashes, or maybe none at all. I’ll show you someone who’ll cling to any “fact,” or “testimonial,” or online petition just to bolster the argument that someone, somewhere, set up us the bomb.
I’ll also show you a paranoid lunatic who’s lost all right to call themselves “progressive,” or even “liberal,” and should instead be relegated to the same dogma dustbin as people who think the Protocols were real, we faked the Moon landings, and reptile people run the world.
But hey, it’s a free society. It’s a free world. I don’t get to tell people they can’t say what they want to say. That would be fascism, right?
And that would be bad -- and pretty evil Duopoly of me, huh?
So it’s a good thing we have so many criers of Duopoly Doom around on the interwebs. It makes it easier to figure out who’s worthy hooking up with and who ought to be ignored. Who knows what they’re talking about and who is talking out of something that should really be used to expel feces.
Who is going to confront Obama about the bad decisions he’s made so far and try to get him to reverse them, or at least do a better job of explaining why he made them.
Who is going to effectively make noise to make those mistakes visible, and explain why they’re wrong in a way that makes the right people listen, and makes everyone who gives a damn act on them.
Who is going to use their influence to influence others to put pressure on the folks up at the top to get them to change their ways.
You see, Obama’s not the second head of the single-bodied beast, but neither is he the savior of America. He is a politician. He is playing politics as he leads.
That’s what always happens when we vote someone in. All we can hope for is that, at the end of the day, we’ve convinced him to do more help than harm.
But someone has to convince him, and that’s OUR job.
That’s how the system works.
That’s how it’s supposed to work, anyway. And that’s how it WOULD work if the activist left hadn’t been co-opted into thinking that civil disobedience meant getting arrested for blocking access, that effective protest meant nasty chants and wild accusations, and that wearing a monkey suit and accepting the occasional compromise or disappointment once in a while is totally bourgeois and sell-out, man.
But sadly, this is not to be. Self-brainwashed by countless years of marijuana and moping, the Left largely celebrates its own ineffectiveness, and then has the nerve to blame an ever-burgeoning conspiracy for the reason why it can’t stop another war, or get a new President to just say no to continued war crimes against an enemy.
No, none of that silliness. It’s so much easier for our stalwart Confabulation Of the Totally Over-it to say that the enemy is a smokescreen created by the real enemy, who also tells the President what to do, and then roll back over for some self-fulfillment... after verbally abusing nay-sayers on your angry little blog.
So much easier, so much less effective, and so much more hilarious -- however sadly so.
But hey, are you them? Do you have to be them? Do you have to look to them as your guiding light of how to stir up trouble, talk out of turn and make positive change happen? Do you have to be shackled to their nihilism and horror?
No, you don’t. So please don’t. Please consider giving common sense a chance. Please consider that conspiracy theories tend to be large clouds of smoke around a tiny fire. Please remember that the worst crimes are the ones that happen in plain sight, but no one really says “boo” about them because they’re too wrapped up wondering who killed Ron Brown, and why.
If we’re going to make the next four or eight years of America’s political landscape look like something we want to inhabit, we can’t be beholden to the smirking Duopoly Doom peddlers. They’re not right, they’re just saying the sky is falling until something actually DOES tumble down, and then declaring themselves to have had the moral superiority all along, and aren’t we just ashamed for having ever doubted them?
Doom and Gloom makes you Dumb and Glum. Trade up your eyewear, get off your butt and act like what you say and do actually has an effect on things. Because it CAN.
Because, contrary to the Contrarians On The Othersideofrealityfromus, it does.
J. Edward Tremlett is a lot of things, currently. He's back in the states after a seven-year stint in Dubai, UAE. He's been published in such diverse places as The American Partisan, the International American, The End is Nigh, Pyramid Magazine and Worlds of Cthulhu.
He's proudly in the thrall of the evil people who make bad things happen all around the world. He gets paid to shill for them on sites just like this, and is well-paid to do so. He also stole your car, ate your lunch, and had an amazing time with your lover while you were at work. But don't tell anyone. The machine is listening, always.
Please be aware that numerous things that are said are not to meant be taken seriously. Please be aware that serious things that are said are meant to be taken numerous ways. Please be seriously numerous with those things that are meant but not said, rather than said but not meant. Please be. : )