davydog

As our society continues its slide towards “populist” fascism, corpostate-mandated totalitarianism and cultural depravity, America’s dwindling middle-classes might at least consider sitting up and taking notice. After the Putsch, wouldn’t you agree that you (those still left alive, of course) might find it worthwhile to at least have some understanding—however dim—of how and why our society drove itself off the cliff?

Tea Baggers At Play

12. SilverFox | 09.14.09
I’m just drove back from the 9-12 march & I’m saying that this is now a Movement!! It’s We the People……not you the government!! Keep going EnterStageRight. com & booksbyoliver. com — The Revolution is Coming!!

13. Voyo Milenic | 09.14.09
Yes foam at the mouth and keep up the fanatical propagandist inversion fear mongering. You people on the far right are so out of touch you actually believe you’re lies to power program are going to be successful! There are far more common sense, rational, honest, REAL AMERICANS just lying in wait right now. Every stupid little action like that pathetic sham of a march on Washington keeps adding steam to the big push-back coming! Now bring on the snide petty immature remarks and throw your rotten tomatoes but don’t forget what I say!

Sequential commentary in response to Matthew Shaer’s blog post, published on September 14, 2009 on the Christian Science Monitor website.

The Big Stick

In 1969 Amon Düül II, a bedraggled coterie of Krautrockers from a disbanded Munich commune, released their first album, Phallus Dei (that’s “God’s Penis” to you English speakers). The band attained an “underground popularity for its free form musical improvisations” and “performed around the happenings and demonstrations of the contemporary politicized youth movement.” With their “liberal attitude to artistic freedom,” the former members of the “radical political art commune” valued “enthusiasm and attitude over artistic ability.”^*

Had Amon Düül II harbored more focused ambitions, perhaps they could’ve recruited an obscure economics professor to help promote their record in the United States. They might have even asked him to set up the band’s first American tour. After all, how could’ve our intrepid Krautrockers found anyone with a more perfect name than Dick Armey to help thrust God’s Penis deep into the hot-’n’-clammy fundamentum of America’s psychedelic rock-’n’-art-’n’-acid scene?

A Phallus Of One

Alas, it’s doubtful the Marching Dick would’ve accepted an offer to play with God’s Penis from a rag-tag band of Krautrock acid freaks like Amon Düül II. Instead Dick Armey would wait a decade and a half before groping for bigger things—god’s pecker, for instance. This particular appendage was attached to a different god, of course—the god of big business, political power and reactionary religious cults. During his 18 years as the U.S. Representative from Texas’s 26th congressional district—including eight years as House Majority Leader, and as one of the engineers of the “Republican Revolution”—Dick Armey found that wielding god’s pecker would prove infinitely more useful than anything he might have achieved by playing with God’s Penis.

The battles Dick Armey waged as a Congressional Representative ended in 2003 after he temporarily lost his grip on god’s pecker while engaged in a pissing match with James Dobson, the Focus On The Family kingpin, Republican king maker, and key architect of America’s theocracy-minded “Christian Right.” Dobson, who—according to Armey—“scolded” him for failing to sufficiently “deliver for Christian conservatives,” succeeded in momentarily snatching the (un)holy phallus right out of Armey’s grubby hands. Pecker in hand, Dobson pinned Armey to the wall with it while asserting that Republicans “owed (their) majority to him, and that he (Dobson) had the power to take (it) back.”^*

Although Dobson ruthlessly crushed Dick’s balls after Armey foolishly allowed their petty dickering to “come to blows,” all was not lost. Armey instinctively understood that—though his tenure in the Congressional Club’s ultra right wing was coming to a close—he could continue brandishing his “big stick” as he marched through Congress’s revolving door and straight into the “private sector,” where he could wield it to ruthlessly enforce the edicts of big business and high finance.

In recent months Dick mobilized his “Armey” in an obsessive drive to completely scuttle efforts by the Obama Administration to pass “healthcare reform” legislation. Dick’s Armey insists on total victory. They’re not satisfied that the proposed legislation currently “on the table” is a terribly compromised version of what Barack Obama promised to help deliver to the American People during his run for the White House. Dick’s shock troops have prevailed in a few strategically impressive skirmishes. Last month a large group of disgruntled “tax protesters” marched on Washington to protest what they claimed as “out-of-control spending by an expanding federal government.” According to an article on the Fox News website, the march “was part of the so-called Tea Party Movement that gathered steam in April.” Their arrival in Washington D.C. was “the culmination of a 34-city, 7,000-mile bus tour that began Aug. 28 in Sacramento, Calif.”

What makes mass mobilizations of people protesting “out-of-control spending”—instigated by the likes of Armey and his gang of would-be Dick-tators—so stunning is the near total absence of these same folks to protest the escalating hyper-pillage inflicted on regular people by Wall Street, big business, the Pentagon and other predatory institutions. A rapacious plundering abetted by their whorish K Street-walker allies in big government. Not only have these predations become more pernicious and systemic in recent decades—and dramatically more-so in recent years and months—but the devastation they inflict on the rest of us is almost impossible to miss. Yet when proposed legislation comes along that might provide at least some benefit to regular Americans, but could also threaten “out-of-control profiteering by an expanding Kleptocracy,” the corporeich’s brownshirts are immediately deployed. Presumably the only “out-of-control spending” allowed is that which stuffs massive wads of cash into the offshore bank accounts of our society’s most ruthless crime lords on Wall Street and in plush corporate boardrooms.

Killing Hope

For a regular schmo like me, what’s most disturbing about these spectacles is the cultural malaise they represent. We live in a culture that has completely lost its way; victims of our own self-abuse in a society gone mad. Even our culture’s most substantive pretenses at “debate” are merely tawdry sideshows: lowbrow performance art fueling our collective hallucinations. Our business and political elites, with rare exceptions, relentlessly sell everyday people like you and me down the river to achieve selfish, short-term gain. But the worst is that we regular folks have all-too-often gone along with this madness. We buy into their senseless wars, their absurd economic dogmas, their planet-destroying consumer culture with its strip malls, gas guzzlers, endless sprawl, and the horrifying psychic sewage mercilessly pumped into our nervous systems through television tubes, radio signals and computer monitors.

The “self-regulating market” ideology driving much of this horror has long since been proved a sham. But we can’t seem to break free of the delusion. Part of the reason is because corporate-funded opportunists like Dick Armey and so many of his ilk have mastered the art of playing us off against each other. Keeping us off-balance. Provoking us to fight their battles for them. Over the past three or four decades the result has been an immense transfer of loot from our pockets to a handful of criminal kingpins on Wall Street, in business boardrooms, in government offices and into the hellbent-for-theocracy covens of our society’s most notorious religious cults.

Even though the policies foisted onto us by these charlatans have plundered our pockets, ravaged our natural surroundings, trashed our economies, tossed millions of our neighbors into prisons and poisoned our minds with theological hucksterism and planet-destroying consumerism, the perpetrators can’t see fit to toss us the occasional bone. Like allowing us to piece together a rational method for healthcare delivery. One similar to any of the healthcare delivery systems enjoyed by people living in virtually all of the other “developed” countries, and even in a handful of the “developing” nations. One that would cost a hell of a lot less and deliver much better results than the corporate protection rackets currently forced down our sore throats and up our HappyMeal McAsses.

For any of you Tea Bagger’s who’ve plowed into this blog post this far, I’ll ask you for a favor, although I’m sure it’s probably too much to ask. Particularly from members of a “grassroots” organization foolish enough to christen themselves with such a vulgar epithet like “tea bagger.” But here’s my request anyway. Do your homework. Discover how fascist movements take hold in a society. Compare the similarities of those movements with your own. Then observe what happens to societies that allow themselves to sink into such depravity.