You All Suck (#42- Random Bits of As*hole and Orwell Edition)

 "I believe in equality. Equality for everyone. No matter how stupid they are or how superior I am to them..." -- Steve Martin

"He is not so ugly, after all, provided, of course, that one shuts one's eyes, and does not look at him..." -- Oscar Wilde, "A House of Pomegranates".

Just some random thoughts and events that have me wishing I had the authority to kill the stupid on sight.

The first instance occurred this morning.

A nor'easter blew through New York the day before yesterday, depositing nearly a foot of snow upon the blessed soil of the Isle of Staten.

Snow does not trouble Your Overlord, in any amount, for he is prepared for such eventualities. I've got a Craftsman 20 horsepower snowblower with a 24" scoop. I routinely stock snow melt products in spring (last count: 120 pounds of rock salt on hand), and I purchased new shovels after last year's excessive snowfall basically destroyed the previous batch of snow shovels (last year saw a LOT of wet, heavy snow, which always freezes beneath the powdery surface, leaving thick ice to be scraped off the sidewalk).

What does give me agita is the people who park their cars on the street in front of my house.

Granted, they have every right to park there (I do not own the street) and I do not begrudge them the opportunity to avail themselves of an open parking spot when one is needed.

No, my issue is what happens after a snowstorm and the Sanitation Department -- in the process of plowing the roads -- has buried their vehicles.

For people, being what they are -- short-sighted, inconsiderate pieces of sub-human worm shit -- find it necessary to put the results of their excavation activities right back on the sidewalk that I've spent several hours clearing, scraping and salting, so that I have to do the job all over again.

This is New York City and one must keep the sidewalks and driveway aprons in front of one's home clear of snow (for emergency purposes) or risk being fined heavily. Those handing out the fines don't care that someone else fucked up your previously-clean sidewalk.

Having to re-clear a sidewalk I've already cleared twice at great expense to my back and sanity is bad enough. To have one of these knuckle-dragging, thumb-sucking, drooling, non-critical thinkers take the opportunity to not only re-sully my pristine sidewalks all over again, but to empty the often-disgusting contents of their vehicle onto my front lawn, to boot, enrages me.

And so it was this morning that I caught one of these Neanderthal mentalities digging out her oversized, rolling Day Care Center, tossing snow-and-ice back onto my sidewalk, but also wantonly ejecting empty fast food containers, bottles, assorted trash and a pizza box onto the front lawn. Caught red-handed, she profusely apologized for being a fucking slob. It was obvious the apology was pro-forma and there was no sincerity in it.

Calmly, I told her it was no problem and that I should like to help her clean the mess up. She smiled. I then collected all the trash she threw on my property and deposited it all back in its place of origin.

That is, to her own back seat, through the still-open door.

She was miffed, but obviously in a rush, so after a few harsh words she entered her vehicle and took off in a huff.

I broke out the snowblower, again, and made certain to pile the dirty remnants of Wednesday's storm back into the parking spot. Then I cleared the street down to the pavement into the same location. I made a pile at least 2' high and perhaps 20' long. Which means that until this snow melts (probably not completely until sometime in April) NO ONE can park in front of my house again all winter.

Come next snowfall, I shall repeat the process. I shall continue to do so all winter, until there is a snow heap -- slowly transforming into a block of solid ice as it melts in daylight and re-freezes at night -- as high as I can possibly get it and as long as I can possibly make it.

Don't fuck with me.

Another (kinda) snow-related diatribe...

One of my neighbor's kids was out shoveling the other night, too. Until now, I had always thought of him as an earnest, fairly-good kid (I think he's 21 now), who didn't show any of the classic signs of being "on the Spectrum" at all.

Until he asked to jam with me when we were done.

The boy fancies himself a guitar player.

He's not very good.

The Overlord plays drums (very well) and also fiddles with the bass guitar (not so well), and I often talk music with the lad. So, here we are, having put in several hours of hard labor and a little coffee and some musical time on a cold evening is pretty good remedy and well-earned reward (socially-distanced, masked and slathered in Purell, of course).

The boy arrives at my basement door with a handtruck, upon which he has piled two amplifiers, two guitars and a rather large duffelbag I was later to discover contained something on the order of a dozen effects pedals and a laptop.

It became apparent that the idea was not to "jam", but rather for the lad to engage in a braggadocio display of his self-assumed virtuosity, which is to say, that if you put enough distortion and effects upon a poorly-played guitar handled by an ignoramus who only knows two or three chords, it can sound like "something" to an untrained ear.

I tried to engage him (more like teach him something) by changing tempos and styles, but the boy couldn't follow the lead. A bossa nova beat confused him. A reggae feel was beyond his grasp. Blues, Texas shuffles, a little jazz...he couldn't keep up. All he was interested in was power (kind of) chords and overwhelming me with "this thing I'm working on" (he apparently works on a lot, but accomplishes little. Most of it is "check out this cool sound I can produce" and little beyond). I give him full marks for effort, though.

When my patience had finally waned, I suggested we take a break and we started talking about music, in general. Or, at least, I did. The youngster could speak of nothing but Pink Floyd, which, I assume, he discovered last week. To bring this story to a conclusion, nothing existed before Pink Floyd, nothing came after Pink Floyd, nothing is as good as Pink Floyd, and the criteria for coming to this conclusion includes such subjective things as "longevity of the band" (Umm, two original members are dead, and the remainder haven't performed together since 1984), "musicality" (that discounts any other example of same by someone else or another band), quality of the stage show (this from someone ho has never attended a concert, ever, and only ever watches them on YouTube), and his own personal feelz, which, of course, are unassailable by either example, logic, reason, or expression of someone else's personal preferences.

You'll be happy to know that his expert opinion has decided that everyone from Chuck Berry to the Beatles to Led Zeppelin to Rush to Sinatra to Count Basie to whoever you could think of all "suck".

There is Floyd, and only Floyd.

It got heated. For him. I was too busy laughing. Which pissed him off even more.

Eventually, I gave in, for the thing had become pointless, validated his feelz and gave him his metaphorical cookie.

I'm sure he rushed home to proudly show Mommy the trophy he had gotten for coming in last.

Guess who is never invited to play at my house again?

I was reading Orwell the other day, something I am wont to do often. I know I have recommended it before here, but it bears another recommendation, that if you can obtain a copy of "George Orwell: Essays" from the Penguin Library (a hefty 1500 pages or so, not the cut-down, cheap version) you should acquire it. It is as complete a collection of Orwellian reportage, essays, newspaper columns and literary reviews as you're ever likely to find.

All of it eventually finds its way into Orwell's classics -- Animal Farm and 1984.

In an essay entitled "Why I Join the I.L.P.", Orwell states (a common theme for him) that the writer is somehow something to be elevated slightly above the greater mass of people. He does not explicitly STATE the writer is a superior human being, he merely insinuates-- repeatedly -- that it is somehow desirable that a writer should not be allowed "to starve", as if a writer should not be forced by necessity to find a real job when his writing doesn't pay.

According to Orwell, since writers write, asking them to work for a living is somehow a no-no. He states, in this essay, that this is the primary reason he chose (at that date, I think 1938) to be "a Socialist". He then goes on to admit -- in the same essay -- that without capitalism he could not write for a living, at all, but that this is constraining because he can only earn a living on writing things that sell, or that a light form of censorship exists when moneyed interests -- like publishers -- interfere with the writers right to write.

He provides no evidence for this assertion, he just assumes everyone knows or believes this.

What Orwell wants is "Art for Art's Sake", so long as it's HIS art and he gets the check. To cover this essentially selfish point of view, Orwell often resorts to the device of stating that, under Socialism, even bad writers would be given a living, and therefore, his position is rock-solid --everyone gets to be what they want, get paid for it, and suck at it, too. Because "fair"! -- and he's a virtuous human being.

But what really perturbs me about this particular essay is that Orwell states, emphatically, that under Socialism, there would be no censorship of any kind, the writer would be free to express even un-orthodox opinions, and the writer would be spared the sordid, petty, intellect-sapping experience of having to deal with REAL LIFE.

When one considers 1984, and the predictions made within it, those who know nothing of the entirety of the Orwellian catalogue credit him with a great prescience, but, in fact, most of that classic is based around the experience of the Second World War and preceding Spanish Civil War (that Orwell fought in, in much the same way as your kids clean their room -- they're there, they're moving about, but they aren't accomplishing anything, and then Orwell got shot in the throat). That's the basis for The Party.

The world in which 1984 takes place, however, is a direct result of the work of James Burnham, whom Orwell denigrated -- for years -- as a shallow thinker, a debased supplicant to the will of power, and a moron, before stealing his ideas for Oceania, Eastasia and Eurasia and their systems of government almost in their entirety. History has shown, thus far, that Burnham was right and Orwell was very wrong.

We live in Burnham's Managerialist World.

Especially concerning the bit about Socalism exercising no censorship over the writer.

We've had decades of just that in America. The Press and Mass Media (The Mouth of Sauron!)are products of the Left, much of it pushing squishy Socialist agendas for decades, and it exercises the most-blatant censorship imaginable.

If you doubt this:

1. Have you ever seen Barack Obama's grades from the Ivy league? Has anyone ever explained to you what makes a Kennedy special, aside from their deaths?

2. Has anyone ever apologized for the "Russian Collusion" false-narrative and the chaos it spawned?

3. Was your city recently blessed with an Urban Renewal Project undertaken by "peaceful protestors" with Molotov Cocktails, baseball bats, bricks and wearing body armor, who wantonly loot, riot, and beat passers-by with impunity, making civilized life impossible in the name of beatifying criminals and advancing fascism?

4. How much do you really know about Hillary's e-mail? Hunter Biden's business dealings? Did anyone ever explain to you how James Comey, James Clapper and John Brennan committed a boatload of felonies in order to have someone else prosecuted and all have gotten off with nary a question being asked?

5. Are you 100% the last election was completely above-board and honest after 4 years of screaming about a rigged election? Do you know that, contrary to press reports, there are lawsuits being won to contest the results?

The point being that the Socialists who would never consider censoring anyone, in fact do so all the time.

If there isn't a deliberate silencing of contrary thought by direct censorship (see: Google, Facebook, et. al.) then there is an iron-clad policy of not allowing dissenters to speak up by de-platforming them, refusing to report on them, or to give them equal time on air or in print. That's when there isn't outright lying and co-ordination of an official press response that isn't even hidden, anymore.

The antagonists in Animal Farm were Socialists.

The antagonists in 1984 were Socialists.

The real-life examples before Orwell were all Socialists or Communists -- Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, the Spanish Popular Front, Oswald Mosely, Leon Degrelle, Vidkun Quisling, and many more -- and somehow the Orwell that writes 1984 in 1948 does not remember what the Orwell of 1938 wrote. SO, one wonders, did the Orwell of 1948 finally discover that Socialism was a joke, best to use capitalism so that he wouldn't "starve", or was he as full of shit as every professed leftist is?

Even when Orwell "sank into poverty" he was merely vacationing in another's misery", as the saying goes. His middle class family was always there to take him back in and ensure his discomfort was never more than temporary.

Hypocrisy is a basic human characteristic. I still like Orwell for his use of language and readability, but his politics seem to have been little more than a means to end, that is to say, capitalist fame and fortune.