What a week it”s been! Or has it? well, if you follow the normal media, it’s been just about the most pants-shittingly important week in history. But stripped of all the hyperbole and the poetic sentimentalising by journalists far overestimating the extent of their talents; what has actually happened? Well, shorn of all the crap, the story went that the rather odd leader of a peculiar little country miles from anywhere developed a swelled head that rendered his shoes far too small, and he smiled all like, evil when his minions built a knewkular bomb. It was a knewkular bomb bigger than the one dropped on Hiroshima in World War Two (cue grainy black-and-white footage of America’s one undeniable wartime success). Show maps, cities with superimposed circles of theoretical damage if such a bomb was set of in said city. Finish by calming the peasantry with the announcement that (at present anyway) the bad man had no way of “delivering” such an unwelcome gift.
After a few days announce that the said bad man has his minions were experimenting with rockets (cue shot of rocket whooshing up in some foreign, presumably evil sky). Calm the more hysterical among the viewers by saying that the said rocket has a range capable of reaching only other foreign slant-eyed yellow devil countries (and not us). Turn heat back up a notch by saying that the bad man undoubtedly regrets this shortcoming and is surely devoting his evil to remedying it by extending the range of his evil rockets; and anyway, he probably can’t put his bombs on his puny rockets anyway (like we have – yay us).
After a short break- announce that the evil man has now been upgraded to nemesis level. He *can* put his bombs on his rockets! and his bombs just got bigger! And biggerer! (Cue more maps and circles for the believers to dutifully pore over). Calm the masses by segueing the news to some theoretically important sporting fixture that keeps the Neanderthals off the street and in the arenas where they belong. After said fixture is over, release more film of rockets, more maps, more circles and an army of experts who know everything about the small far-away country and its lambently evil leader.
Ignore the fact that a good percentage of these experts have apparently never learned to comb their own hair but unleash them to bombard the dutiful media consumer with so many conflicting opinions that they simultaneously feel “informed” and inclined to spend long periods deep in basement carparks cradling tins of beans. Then, when all appears beyond saving, announce a super-top-level summit with the American President and the evil head of the secretive nation. Have saturation coverage of every aspect of preparations for the meeting. Try to imbue this momentous event with the same sort of suspense usually reserved for Royal Weddings. Pretend that the President of the U.S.A. does not look like 140 kilos of condemned veal in a shiny suit topped off with a wig fashioned from an orangutang’s pubic hair and somehow profanely imbued with sufficient intelligence to at least sit for the entrance exam for the village idiot’s guild.
Have the paid shills show shock when the condemned veal and the mystery meat shake hands and (peacefully) display their fangs. Announce singing and dancing in the streets instruct the girls of marriageable age that they should don such clothes as are normally reserved for festivals of great rejoicing. Let the bells of the halls of pederasty ring forth with great joy. Of course, all of these bombs and rockets were simply to strengthen the evil frighty man’s position at the negotiations when his country stopped being a “pariah state” and started producing shitty cars instead of rockets and shit. Oh goody!
That, at least, approximates the public story. But like all big stories, closer examination and clear (ahem) thought can deliver dividends which in turn lead to productive trains of thought of their own, so if you’ll stay with me a little longer consider this; contrary to the opinion of one “expert”, the condemned veal was far from “democratically” elected – in fact that election was subverted in about as many ways as there were individual votes cast (somewhere between five and ten at a guess). Putin definitely saw an advantage in playing geopolitics against 140 kilos of condemned veal as opposed to either of the alternatives; (at least probably believing that his bear- sodomising masculinity would be vitiated by arguing with a woman). As for Bernie Sanders, well, there was an awful possibility that he might have lost sometimes.
But of course all of this is just ink in the water, produced by some irritated octopus. Only those who live deep under the largest rocks still truly believe that heads of state in so called democratic societies are anything more than than figureheads of the consortiums that use them as puppets. In Australia the “Liberal” party accuses the Labor party of being a wholly owned puppet of the labour unions while keeping quiet about its own intimate relationship with big business and the thoroughly corrupt banking system. To some extent, it is the same in every country the world over; an uneasy truce exists between those who enjoy telling people what to do, and those who “have” to do as they are told. One camp apparently cannot exist without the other since an army consisting of no-one but officers is nothing but a gang of shouting fools and an army without officers usually becomes a large party. Both sides always take great pleasure in reminding the other of this. Some believe that government is safe in the hands of the rich- that a President or a Prime minister who has a large personal fortune will not be prone to accepting the bribes of the rich since they are already rich themselves. Also the argument goes, if they’re single minded and “dedicated” enough to amass a large personal fortune – they probably have the nous to run a country. Of course the lack of logic here is glaring. A company is not a country. A company is run for the enrichment of its board members and (to a far lesser extent) its shareholders. Effectively a country should be the opposite of that – being an entity run to maximise the standard of living and quality of life of its citizens and (hopefully) the countries around it. The track records of billionaires as heads of state make this dichotomy clear; if Silvio Berlosconi of Italy had devoted as much attention to running the country and covering his tracks as to his hobby, his devotion to underage prostitutes would most likely have been far less injurious at the polls.
Probably.
The largely invisible powers that maneouvered Donald Trump into power by ignoring the popular vote and using the Electoral Colleges to project their puppet into power have done it before. Both Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush arrived in the Oval Office the same way – by subterfuge. Their methods of consolidation of power look to be similar too. It may have slipped the popular memory but George W. Bush was a very unpopular president – until 9-11. Then America was “under attack”- it became so unfashionable as to be almost illegal to criticise the man. Almost overnight the country flowered with an ocean of “I Support our Troops” flags. 9-11 was not only a sea change in geopolitics, it was also a political gift from heaven for the Republican incumbent.
Can I be forgiven for rolling my eyes when another “long shot” Republican incumbent barely surviving in office is rewarded with another “attack”- one that only he can apparently solve single-handedly? Especially when this said incumbent shows every sign of being approximately as intelligent as the average beaver?
The simple truth is that America is not a democracy as per the common pretence. It is a Plutocracy, with figureheads being guided into place at the whim of powerful and very secretive cadres, call them the “Skull and Bones Society” the “Builderburg” Group or the “Illuminati”or just some group of malignant billionaires with too much time on their hands enriching themselves on the misery of their peasantry, they’re getting sloppy enough to have pulled the same trick on the same peasants only ten years apart, and its common knowledge what happens when the peasants lose patience with their masters; though our present gang of leaders are undoubtedly sequestered on remote tropical islands or even perhaps in the comfort of microgravity in Earth orbit. Wherever they are they have to rely on other people, since power cannot exist in a vacuum and no-one is beyond the reach of justice, especially when every man’s hand is raised against them. As far as that goes no-one is beyond the grasp of the infinite – Mao and Stalin died in office and Hitler would probably be dead by now if reality had not arranged a different ending for him. The history books are filled with an army of dead despots and for every psychopathic monster whose name is remembered, there are a hundred more, mercifully forgotten but thankfully just as dead
The Gleet Net 