I can’t believe it, but then I can believe it, or I must believe it. These are compliant times, where people in the US workforce are kowtowed and then for years these multiple generations in the workforce have thrown in the towel and been so bullied by the Politically Crap Corrective Collective Group-Think that they are not even human — they can’t even rage against the injustice befalling them. I have both taught and worked alongside people who just believe deep down there’s no sense in fighting the powers that be, and that’s it, too bad, sure, but what can we do about it? They have been spoon-fed endless media mush that pushes that theme to the hilt, and so it’s easy to wake up each morning with a feeling that this might be the last day at the office, at work. They follow the rules, just do their job, and go home and self-actualize with the pet fido, with their Amazon orders, the potential wine tasting trip and all that gastronomy that has taken over most of urban America.
This is the death of the liberal class, from one perspective — this punishment class, those middle managers, those lingering two-income families with some middle class stance bringing up kids that are so protected, so helicopter controlled, so so much the center of adults’ lives that we are a society of infantilized cretins who absolutely want nothing serious to do in the workplace. We are told what to think, how to speak, and what’s going around that fucked up company water cooler is mush — the digital water cooler which FuckYouZuckerbergBook now claims as a billion people clamoring to one up and then double one up everyone from navel shot to interviews with angels.
This has created a class of stupid people: their stupidity and superficiality and claim to weekends galore eating, splurging, arm-chair coaching, gorging on the consumer-service shit that runs this flaccid economy, well, it would be innocuous if there was a large percentage of Americans not only not living and abiding by the Marketing planned and perceive obsolescence, but who are actively railing against it. That number is in the hundreds of thousands, in a country with 345 million!
We have to grasp, as Marx and Adam Smith did, that corporations are not concerned with the common good. They exploit, pollute, impoverish, repress, kill, and lie to make money. They throw poor people out of homes, let the uninsured die, wage useless wars for profit, poison and pollute the ecosystem, slash social assistance programs, gut public education, trash the global economy, plunder the U.S. Treasury and crush all popular movements that seek justice for working men and women. They worship money and power.
The corporations that profit from permanent war need us to be afraid. Fear stops us from objecting to government spending on a bloated military. Fear means we will not ask unpleasant questions of those in power. Fear permits the government to operate in secret. Fear means we are willing to give up our rights and liberties for promises of security. The imposition of fear ensures that the corporations that wrecked the country cannot be challenged. Fear keeps us penned in like livestock.
— Chris Hedges, The Death of the Liberal Class
So, back to the scourge, me today, as I was called into HR, un-Human Resources, at age 59, by people who have no clue, no clue, accusing me of too much passion, too many discussions about politics in the office, my younger colleagues running behind my back to tell how they feel my opinions are too strong, and theirs aren’t listened to.
Fact – they have no real deeply held political opinions, except for a few who try and ameliorate the idea of two evils, one choice, and some audacious idea that the Gates of the world, the Bloombergs, all those people lobbying and in high office, well, they are more capable than the masses, that we can’t have people who aren’t them, without their credentials and pedigrees, without their vanguard experiences, running things.
I am not to blame as a college teacher for these college-educated spineless ones, or for their squid like opinions, slithering around the back of some redneck’s pick up truck. They are sullen, and not steeped in standing down this mess, stopping the bleed, and just railing and railing against the system. I have been at the forefront of standing down my bosses, my administrators, against insanity, and my teaching has been spot on but in that process, I have had targets put on my back. In that regard, I have been sacked, and sacked, and sacked.
Imagine, I tell my co-workers, all of us supposedly working to get homeless and addicts and those living with mental health back on their feet, if we all subverted this non-profit, fought the rules, railed against the prissy PC rules, and do our clients better by monkey wrenching the system, hmm, wouldn’t we be the real heroes instead of these perverts in sports at the top of the money pile, or those all-the-same-sounding new pop music icons, and all the other perverts gaining notoriety and the pot?
I am in the exact fucking precarious place I have always been in this pathetic PC world of neutered, spayed and declawed middlings in the social work/education gig I have been so many times before. This bastion of flippant lies and Zionist tongue in cheek har-har’s about Portlandia, and the rest of the state which is rural, red and wanting to succeed from the state itself, yet I work with snitches, these non-profit losers who have taken more classes on micro-aggressions, inclusion therapy, diversity enlightenment, workplace harmony, how to get along with your enemy, consensus building, anti-harassment coaching and how to be a Little Eichmann or littler Joe McCarthy without all the baggage. HR departments run roughshod over entire programs, and I live in a world of students – only a few – complaining to the higher ups (wasted air breathers, that they are) and expecting to get people axed because those people are Marxists, anti-status quo, challengers to their parents’ myopia and ignorance; and we work them hard but fairly in college classes, courses they expect to be so watered down that one might as well give A’s for typing their names and dates on the correct side of the essay page.
This is not humorous, but I have to laugh, the crying already gone from my continence decades ago. Decades ago when Governor Bush’s Texas threatened part-time activist faculty with dismissal and fines if we dared walk out of class, even for an hour, or the day, as a way to bring light to the complete exploitation of part-time, precarious, at-will, just-in-time academic workers.
The fear of fearing is like ice in my veins – so many supposedly enlightened and post-graduate graduated fools with all this book learning caving in, saying walking out was illegal, and that they understood the governor’s threats.
Imagine, being one of only a handful of people out on the campus mall. Protesting, while my brethren were reading the shit that is Western Civilization’s Canon, pontificating, talking like million-dollar superstar faculty/authors, when, in fact, most had to take three other teaching gigs and part-time work as Nordstrom sales associates, or the more interesting ones were strippers and bouncers.
I am there again, 1989, 1992, 1997, 2001, 2004, 2007, 2011, 2012, 2014, 2015, and, shit is it happening again, 2016?
I work with tattle-tellers, people who are incapable of hearing someone blurt out – “oh, I am working with Little Hillary’s if this is how we are going to react to some leftist-Marxist idea that we just might be considered poverty pimps by a few of our clients!” Really, that’s what I said last time, and, now, a meeting with boss (another back of the class leader with little formal education) who has taken it upon herself to contact HR (another person with little formal education and a strange Elmer Fudd way of thinking about bullying) and demand a meeting, some sweating bullets session, one where I will be admonished, put on some corrective plan, or, given my one day, one hour notice. Improvement plan, watch what you say around non-profit people who have nothing more to say than which food cart tastes rad, which movie is better than the last, which musical group is coming to town, which new little outfit looks the best. You get it, we have created 20-, 30-, 40-year-olds who know nothing of the political, social justice and humane contexts and revolutionary needs of what we do helping at-risk youth, alternative high school youth, the developmentally disabled, homeless, recovering addicts, and people challenged with mental and economic bad health.
All because I took out my frustrations on several people I work with who were sort of laughing it up about the three-in-one-day tickets I was issued on the train ($175), parking for work ($39) and parking to take a client to the unemployment office ($100).
I do not take lightly ANYONE who thinks a citation for a parking meter violation or being on a train and getting fined (with a shit load of tickets for rides in his possession but with none of them validated since I was running to catch the door closing to make an appointment with one of my clients) is funny.
Democrats running the show, an Oregon governor virtually guilty and dethroned, giving his significant other all these insider deals, a governor with an MD at the end of his title, disgraced, resigned, what a shit storm these elites are.
Knight and rip-off Nike, IT and digital dingbats, a world of ever-gentrifying Portland, which is really just a Cleveland on the other side of the Island of Turtles. A state that is right to work, a la at-will, so you have one hour to clean out your desk, under supervision of some hind teat getting paid for creating more nonsense and vapidity which is human resources crap!
I NORMALLY rail on and on, cover all sorts of tangents, run amok and afoul with the grammar police and the police making sure there are no calls to action, you know, calls for upsetting the money changers’ carts and tables. Think about that crime, supposedly carried out by the supposed Jewish Carpenter. Massive FBI investigation, Secret Service, ATF, Homeland Security . . . Imagine, upsetting those money changers’ money caches back then, now.
Year after year of lobotomizing cultural crack cocaine, the Disney-ification/Walmart-ization/Netflix-abomination of this society, over and over, the fix is in at the top, all those fines and overdraft fees, and all the endless Black President-now-Female President Wars. Numb-nuts George W’s bedfellows, the entire project of mauling media, these Fox News cretins, absolutely racist-classist-war drumming manicured females NOW coming out of the closet against their boss who helped them advance their bankrolls and neoconservative shit storm. NOW there’s a sexual harassment suit from these barbarians, these female death thinkers.
I see the confusion every day working with ex-criminals, in-recovery folks, all those homeless, served by a few hundred non-profits. The line is, if you are busted here, you are lucky, and if you are homeless here, you will be served Cadillac-sized support services. Portland, or Multnomah County. Well, of course, all of that is more middling middle class white floundering fools lies, but, sure, better caught here with mental illness on the street than say, Houston, or Atlanta or anywhere in those Red Southern States.
But the liberals, those democrats with the big D for dumb, they are worse off than the unholy ones, those busted and broken and marked for life, at $10 an hour lifting boxes all day. Because, they have no experience, nothing to give to the revolution, no scars, no nothing, all but entitlement, diversity training, LGBTQII, what have you, training, but no knowledge, no grand critical thinking, and no guts to say, Fuck This Country and All It Stands For.
It’s cathartic, really. Realizing the poverty and the putrid world of the rest of the world is so-so much filled with joy and happiness, in all that poverty, than anything any community in the US of Assassins will ever see.
They still listen to the millionaires, pine over over-paid same-sounding new (sic) sounds musical groups, bands. They’ll throw down $200 for a concert but wouldn’t be caught dead at a socialists’ rally, or anything with color deeper than the flesh of a catfish.
And so we muscle through the day, listen to the incompetents speak nothing and tolerate fools and little little Eichmanns, who just want to push paper and do their duty, no frills, please, no grand passion, no great leaps of commitment and no roar.
I have been accused of being TOO passionate, TOO involved, TOO political, TOO critical, TOO complicated, TOO intense, TOO knowledgeable, TOO much of an advocate, TOO caring, TOO serious, TOO smart for my own good, TOO big of a mouth . . . TOO-too-TOO-TOO!
This is the operating system now for the social services, administrative class, education class – mothering, matriarchal, patriarchal females, corrective, punishment centric, all cleaned up, all PC, all so smooth and moderating, all so captured inside a consensus corpse.
That’s what I am experiencing – the interaction with corpses. So many, so many rotting ones, so many with no ideas, so many with fear and loathing stuck in the craw, so many just there, in some sort of recovery, post-PTSD thing, everyone so into 12 steps and some higher being, something bigger than their shit hole, their little world of little hierarchies….
Any day is a pink slip day, and that’s symbolic, not literal. They have this clean form letter, and they deliver it to you, in person, asking you to box up everything and leave. They tell all the fearful ones to not talk to the ex-employee, to not ask why he’s been let go, or better, why she no longer works here, and we can’t say why, or how . . . .
The world is a giant Costco run, a giant jumpy castle and a pizza party a block long, music at the fair, turkey drumsticks the size of Hellfire missiles. This is a Big Gulp/Black Friday/Death Stare Xmas Pyramid of Useless Junks.
They are counting it, at the office cooler, where I got yanked over the coals for talking about politics, the very soul of what people working with the homeless, felons, addicts SHOULD be nurturing, Politics, and Standing Down . . . . but instead, these people can’t tell me about one bill pending that affects our social work, but I know now, right now, there are 109 days until Christmas.
Letting John Steppling riff here, over at his blog:
From Freud’s point of view, aggression is not something learned necessarily, nor is it innate. It is rather the result of a basic conflict in the human psyche. We are in conflict with ourselves. And this then leads on to looking at the ruthlessness of the super ego. And the role of narcissism. One of things that I think is most difficult to grasp if looking at the political reality around us today is the gratuitous nature of so much institutional violence as well as individual violence. Why do fascist leaders desire more when they already have much more of everything than they, or anyone, could possibly need? The U.S. government could easily feed everyone in the country, provide them with homes and even cars and clothing. But they don’t even consider it. And even the most radical lives given to helping others (Dorothy Day comes to mind) are somehow in need of an ideological reason for their generosity and kindness. Others, the various celebrity driven photo op displays of charity are largely hypocritical. Why own six yachts? Or twenty five gold watches? Or five mansions? Many of the very richest people in the world simply believe they are better. But what does that mean, exactly?
This is why class is so significant. For on a basic level the class conflict is a reflection of interior conflict. And the ruling class in this dynamic is the most unwell. But perhaps the bourgeoisie are even more sick, for they embody both the masochistic and the sadistic.