A Thousand Death Rattles...

The World is Not Out of Control...it's just got a really bad case of Diarrhea...

Our society appears to be on a downward spiral, and whether it recovers or not is a question I'm not truly qualified to answer, but I have some ideas. Sheer optimism would say it shall, for if America has done anything in the past 229 years it has been to endure, to reinvent itself, to soldier on, but optimism is an attitude that it's getting harder and harder to maintain. The warning signs are everywhere; the sirens are in full wail, the red lights flashing like supernovae, and there is no Great Savior who will come along and set everything aright again.

Just in case you've missed it, here's a partial list of All That's Wrong, and what's Wrong With the People Who Are Wrong:

Professional athletes, many of whom are multi-millionaires, a privilege bestowed upon them for their ability to dunk a basketball, catch a touchdown pass, run faster, or merely wrestle another man to the ground -- in other words, not necessarily the greatest intellects -- are currently engaged in a series of protests that are designed to be deliberately obnoxious and gratuitously racist to make the point that America is somehow a fundamentally unfair nation and society.

Mind you, many of the Shining Intellects engaged in displays of "taking the knee", or advocating on behalf of anti-social organizations are, themselves, anti-social beneficiaries of the "unfair" system they're protesting.

How many of those brain-damaged football players you’ve seen kneel last Sunday were given scholarships to play football at the country's finest universities, despite having IQ's below room temperature? How many of our professional athletes (this is like being a professional prostitute, given the rules of free agency), raised in crushing poverty, were able to escape that life materially (many never seem to escape it mentally, however) because the American system provided them with a professional league? Are they not, right now, taking advantage of the First Amendment to speak their (empty) minds, free of fear of retaliation from the State? And still getting paid while offending their customers?

I always ask this question, and never get a satisfactory response, mostly because the people it's asked of never have "honesty" at the top of the list of their virtues.

If America has been so bad to you, despite all you've obviously been given, then why do you stay? Could it be because you could not receive the same benefits, rights, opportunities and, above all, money, if you were to go someplace you think more amenable to your beliefs? Like Zimbabwe? Or Vietnam? Perhaps Venezuela?

A good rule of thumb: if you're taking your political positions from rich people who do nothing of real value to society, you're a dumbass. Society can get on just fine without an NBA or NFL, for what these organizations do is merely entertain.

Celebritards (that's "retarded celebrities", I'm claiming ownership of that word, since I made it up) of a thousand stripes, likewise, continuously rail against the oppressive nature of American society, and like the Athletes they apparently either don't recognize their privileged position (a by-product of freedom and capitalism), or they know it very well and have some other agenda to peddle.

Mostly they're peddling the idea that, like athletes, they're somehow "special" and better-informed people that others should aspire to be like, but this is a derivative of the intense narcissism that drives these people to performance arts in the first place.

Does Robert DeNiro strike you as being especially smart? Does Beyonce give you the impression she can spell her own name? Would you buy a used car from Matt Damon? Would you follow Scarlett Johanson through your own front door if she weren't naked and carrying a fistful of $100 bills in one hand, and a bottle of Crown Royal in the other? Do you believe that Paris Hilton represents the upper 1% of the Bell Curve? If Spike Lee were to begin lecturing you on the problems of foreign affairs, could you resist the urge to demand he start tap-dancing, and perhaps, fetch his shine box?

Having childishly threatened to leave the country a combined 9,000 times, and not surprisingly failed to follow through, why should you take anything said by Alec Baldwin or Rosie O'Donnell seriously?

And yet people will lend credence to anything said by these folks. Because "they're famous", as if "fame" was synonymous with "genius", or even just "useful".

On college campuses all over America, the inheritors of Western Civilization are busy denouncing it in vile, often-violent terms. They are rejecting all the things that have made their comfortable, privileged lives possible -- legal systems, freedom, enumerated rights, capitalism, scientific advancement, free expression, exchange of ideas, and so much more -- because they feel (college students don't have "beliefs". To most, the best idea they've ever heard was also the last idea they ever heard. It's a defect of the young) them to be "unfair" or don't provide a super-elevated level of personal comfort that today's mollycoddled young snowflake demands.

They walk around with smartphones, and denounce the corporations that make them for being evil.

They arrive at anti-Capitalism protest in Daddy’s Suburban, or Mommy’s Beemer, wearing designer street-guerrilla wear made by Central Americans sweating for 12-cents an hour.

They cry about the Rape of Mother Earth, but couldn't last five minutes without WiFi or a Starbucks double-frap with an extra squeeze of caramel.

The Media, collectively, clutch their pearls in a mewling, reflexive way as they see the monopoly of information and thought they once held evaporate in the face of the internet and social media. Those who once thought it their job to “shape” (create) public opinion in line with their own (questionable) values and politics are outraged on a daily basis that some of the inmates have escaped the re-education camp, and worse, enough of them managed to scrape up enough votes to elevate a man they once counted as one of their own (but now regard as the Next Incarnation of Hitler) to the office of the presidency.

Because he speaks over their heads. His words, thanks to Twitter and 24-hour cable news and the internet, can no longer be filtered, examined, twisted, reinterpreted, by a profession whose main claim to fame is that they spent years in college learning how to write balanced paragraphs. I learned that in 3^rd grade.

They are flabbergasted that when he speaks to the rubes in an un-artful fashion that they somehow still manage to understand what he meant (it must be the “Secret Language of White Supremacy!) without a Dan Rather or Brian Williams having to break it down (lie) for them with their Sledgehammer of Bias. The typewriter-and-bad-whiskey set that once dismissed the Red Menace as the by-product of the fevered imagination of the Right, now try to spoon-feed you a “narrative” that Moscow got the Orange Crush elected by interfering with your votes.

And they mocked Mitt Romney?

Various Cults of Personality proliferate: Hillary Clinton will not go away, lingering upon the scene like a bad odor filling a room, long walks in the woods and massive doses of Chardonnay apparently no palliative for defeat. The Bernie Bros still stand by their champion, even as he sold them out for the visible symbols of the fat cat Capitalist – a third home and a sports car. The Cult of Obama remains, although it no longer exists to promote the “Enlightened” champion of the downtrodden who increased his own wealth some 16 times while simultaneously destroying everyone else’s, but to stand vigil over a legacy of failure, ready to re-write history on the spot and lie out of both sides of their mouths and their rectums, simultaneously, if required.

And there’s more…Upper Middle Class White Chicks taking to the streets in vagina hats demanding to be taken seriously. Fascists calling themselves anti-Fascists fighting with other Fascists over who gets to call themselves “anti-Fascist”. A Pope who sits upon the wealthiest throne in Europe who spends his time forgetting the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John in favor of the Gospel according to Marx, a philosophy that one of his better predecessors helped destroy. Mayors of American cities and territories declaring Genocide By Omission in the wake of natural disaster, while holding press conferences and photo-ops in front of tons of donated and undelivered supplies.

And could it get worse? Why, yes, it can: the Civil Rights establishment now seeks re-Segregation in what it sees as an incurably racist society, and does so in the most egregiously racist language, behind the banner of the Congressional Black Congress and Black Lives Matter (and no one else does), organizations that fairly scream “Racism”. The “Social Justice Warrior” rampages across the campus becoming the most un-social of creatures, meting out a “justice” which is often worse than the imagined crimes, “Warriors” for “tolerance” acting out in the most intolerant of ways.

The Illegal claim they have the right to be made Legal, retroactively, to live the American Dream…in Spanish and on welfare.

We’ve gone from the Great Melting Pot to the Luke-Warm Crucible of Fools.

You might be forgiven for seeing all of this unfold before your very eyes and retreating into a sea of negative emotions: despair, anger, confusion, depression. It’s enough to make Pandora’s Box look like a fairy tale with a “happily ever after”. I, too, sometimes despair.

But then my rational mind takes over. I think for a few minutes, and then it all becomes, if not crystal clear, then a great deal less-murkier.

The first thought is “What do these people have in common?”

Naturally, the answers are easy: they’re not very bright. They think too highly of themselves. They show a marked tendency to react emotionally to events rather than intelligently. Their protests to the contrary, not a one of them ever presents a solution to the problem(s) they’re protesting or shouting about. Primarily, this is because the solutions would require them to accept some personal responsibility, and perhaps do something more useful than take a knee, virtue signal, or burn down the local Pottery Barn.

They would rather someone else do it for them. And primarily that someone else PAY to have it done for them. So long as their impetus revolves around a lack of personal action and depends upon other people’s money and action, they will not succeed. They have only one place left to go: whine, cry, bitch and moan. It's worked for them so often in the past, but no longer.

The second thought I have is “What will they do if they don’t get their way?”

The answer to that is easy, too. Nothing. Except complain more, perhaps in a shriller tone and with more disgusting and offensive behavior. It’s all they have. It's all they do, for they are fundamentally never satisfied, and they aren't equipped for success. As I’ve said before, they lack the impulse to real, meaningful action, as this entails WORK. Football players don’t work. Actors don’t work. Journalists don’t work very hard, either: shit happens every day, they just tell you what the shit is. Students don’t work, certainly not in atmosphere that is more like an expensive Day Care Center with a Football Team (with easy A’s, therapy pets, and non-caring administrators who will go to great lengths to scratch your special itch at $200k a pop, and who don’t care about the results of doing so).

Great masses of discontented people without the wherewithal to do anything serious will always fail.

The only thing that unites them is their discontent, and since the discontent applies to a wide (staggering, I’d say) array of disconnected premises, the chance for unity among the discontented fades with each passing day. 

Each band of malcontents is too pre-occupied with his/her own special problem, and is often unaware of any other; they may, occasionally, band together when they do have an actual common cause, but that display of synthesis quickly fades when the common cause evaporates and they’re back to fighting with one another for the same pile of cash, the same access to a government program, the same politician. Each small victory for a sub-group causes it to push their advantage over all the other competing groups.

This is the net result of Identity Politics and Multiculturalism. The American left, long the champions of those notions, is now poisoning itself with them. It has now fractured into a thousand pieces and will not form the coalition necessary to advance in unison again for quite some time. The Left has some nasty habits that keep them handicapped in this regard, too: they eat their own, and they don't just bury their dead -- they bury the wounded, too. Especially after a defeat.

You are listening to the Death Rattles of a thousand different viewpoints which have just encountered an unexpected reality. One which they had no plans for, and which they viscerally fear, even if they can’t verbally express why they should (the ability to express it requires honesty and awareness, and so instead you get vague word vomit -- a bunch of -ism's intended to whip up emotions). They see the end of their “free” stuff; their special privileges; the attention bestowed upon them by the machinations of Managerialist politics (the pitting of one group against another for political gain).

They have shot themselves with their own guns.

Take heart, Dear Reader, for while the Right may have similar problems, it does not have them to the same extent. The Left plays politics as Winner-Take-All while the Right adheres to the dictum that Half-a-Loaf-is-Better-Than-No-Bread, and is far more willing to compromise with its internal dissenters, Paul Ryan and Mitch McConnell, notwithstanding.

I’ll talk about them in a few days, I promise.