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November 14, 2004
Fahrenheit 9/11
Excellent movie. Everyone should see it. It was much less rambling and unstructured than Bowling for Columbine—I assume because Moore wants to seem reasonable and get his point out more than just unleash his inner rage. I’m a lot less pissed off than I was coming out of Bowling for Columbine, a fact which I find sort of surprising given all the talk about the movie. I really don’t see how anyone who saw the movie could have remained pro-Bush, since almost all of the content was media clips incriminating Bush and his cronies.
Now, I am very, very pissed off about things, but I want to explain (in my opinion) why things are so fucked up, and why this really is so much more insidious than Nazism.
All government slowly devolves into a familial power structure. I think this is simply a property of power, and I think Bakunin would agree with me. People like familiar faces, people with power help out their friends, and soon you have a caste or class system depending on how long it goes on. My boss and his family are extremely anti-abortion, for example. I think if they knew the kind of people who need abortions, they would understand that it’s not middle income kids getting knocked up and skirting responsibility—they can afford better systems. It is the lowest classes, unemployed, futureless people who have nothing who need abortion. To the anti-abortion community, there somehow is a loving home for every child. They cannot comprehend the kind of poverty which necessitates it, as a humanistic right to reduce the overall misery of the world. They simply do not associate with that class of people. Unthinkable.
I don’t think our situation is one in which the Nazi’s showed up and said, “right, we’re taking over.” Clinton, after all, signed into law his fair share of liberty-reducing laws, mostly right after the Oklahoma City bombing. No, instead what’s happened is simply this:
- People with power acquire wealth, because they have power
- People with wealth acquire power, because they have wealth
- People associate with people like themselves, people they can relate to
- People with wealth and power maintain wealth and power
Nothing here is rocket science. It’s just ordinary cronyism. Something which I think can be good in small doses—look at the clan system. It is true that the current generation is much less violent than previous ones, many studies have found this. The clan concept is beneficial to us because it gives us a place to exercise our cronyist instincts and aspirations where it’s mostly a good thing.
Anyway, the current regime is only interested in trampling on our rights just enough to maintain their wealth and power. They don’t seem particularly interested in blocking what we say, so long as nobody is hearing us. The media seems to be in on it because they are owned by wealthy, powerful people, who are all basically friends in some capacity or another. They couldn’t be more distant from us.
This seems like a situation poised for a French-style revolution in 30 or 40 years, long after I’ve left the country. The regime maintains power by feeding the ignorant images of us as a free and democratic nation, liberating the rest of the world. The soldiers we send out are the poorest, least educated among us, who grew up absorbing the propaganda. They are surprised when the nation they are invading to liberate starts to fight back, unable to see the relationship between the death and destruction they are creating and the ill feelings towards them produced by it. It should be obvious, but it isn’t, because the soldiers are not educated (they usually join to pay for an education later on).
But I don’t think there is any real idealistic principles at work within the regime. They are playing a very simple game: maintain personal money and power at whatever cost. It’s just pure capitalism, and that’s why it’s insidious and frankly quite invulnerable in America, because we think we like capitalism. Every downtrodden man and woman in the country thinks, “gee, they musta shure hadta work hard to get them millions and billions. They loves the flag, the land and the people, I knows fur shure because they tells me so. I bet if I just work hard and loves the flag, the land and the people like they do, it’ll be my turn next year.” We know what Nazis look like: they have the whole marching, the whole arm band thing, the whole “final solution” thing, and these men aren’t Nazis. And I hate to say it, but they really aren’t. They’re just capitalists, who happen to be on top, protecting their investments and doing whatever it takes to maintain their power. Every middling capitalist in the country is going to back them up every step of the way, until they see something in it for them, some sort of way to put themselves on top, and then there will be a firestorm, Bush ‘n co. will be out of office, and we’ll have a new set of smiling capitalists, ready and willing to maintain the status quo that produced them.
This should also explain why the Democratic party has been castrated. They are the same top 0.005% fucksacks the Republicans are, they just have a false idealism to go with it. So, half of them are basically Republicans with a different color coat on, and the other half are limp dicks like Kerry, who pretend to be about the Democratic ideal but are rendered moot by the fact that they have all the same wealth and smiling friends as the Republicans. To prefer one flavor of dictatorship over another is folly. Support the Socialist party—nobody likes them, they’ll never get elected, they have no wealth and no friends. They’re a lot like the real American people in that regard, and I’d rather vote for a real person anyway.
In conclusion, I just hope I’m outta here long before I get to be proven wrong and find out that things are even worse than I suspect.
By the way, a special message to Eric: your faith in the American people (and the Democratic party in particular) is sad and misplaced. You should join up with me and the Socialist party, and I’d work harder at convincing you of this but I am too lazy and don’t want to take any action that might be construed as “organizing” or, really, as “taking action.”
Posted by FusionGyro at November 14, 2004 12:50 AM
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