The global condition can at any time be likened to the situation on the sinking Titanic with its crew re-arranging deck chairs and throw pillows as the ship continues to submerge. This analogy may not quite fit the present status of the global center, the USA. Here, the situation at a mental health crisis center under a full moon while suffering a shortage of powerful tranquilizers might seem pleasant by comparison. As always under profit and loss economics, increasing numbers face growing hardship bordering on absolute disaster while some enjoy ever more lavish splendor with their servant class living in relative if temporary comfort.
Just another day at empire’s headquarters.
The imperial subjects in the rest of the world suffer far more with the austerity religion of fundamentalist capital turning Europe into a snake pit of material inequality. Things are much worse in the Middle East with savagery increasing in Syria as hypocritical clucking from those who are behind the mass murder induces mass nausea among those still spared from the descent into mass idiocy. Danger of a wider conflict increases as “the west” – the USA and Israel – bring a dangerous situation threatening a world war to a breaking point with behaviors that would have an individual put in a strait jacket, heavily sedated and placed under 24 hour watch in a padded cell.
As always, a fiend dictator-murderer-tyrant-genocidal-satanic monster is identified as the cause of everything that is wrong, and as always, this is a gross simplification and often a total lie, even when the dictators or tyrants really are awful people presiding over worse regimes. Individuals always loom larger than systems, whether the problems are an unemployed worker who is told she needs therapy to improve her unmarketable neurotic tendencies, or the problem is a CEO or head of state who is made to seem a single-handed creator of misery who needs to be terminated to make everything right while an entrenched corporate bureaucracy of state is invisible, existing in a social vacuum.
In this environment switching from ruling by AI (artificial intelligence) to dominating with SI (superficial intelligence) could pass without anyone noticing. Apparently it has.
Recent signs of hysterical hypocrisy continue a historic trend but increase in number and seriousness. Israel conducts attacks on Syria and the international community – the USA, Israel and a couple of islands in the pacific – yawns. Syria is alleged to have used chemical weapons, the charges coming from a group less trustworthy than wall street banks, and the shrieks and screams from the same minority of ruling jackals drown out the cries of hunger and pain emanating from those who suffer all day, every day, at the ravages of a system that allows a minority to dress up in finery for temporary visits to the opera house while a near majority wears their reject rags as it moves permanently into the poor house.
The U.S. military suffers an outbreak of rape and suicide while TV ads implore more youth to seek a career in the exciting field of killing foreigners, raping women compatriots and then killing themselves at contemplation of what a sordid immoral mess their lives have become.
At the rate things are going the legalization of marijuana won’t come soon enough to bring some much-needed relief. Meanwhile, the increased strains and pressures creating more common mental cases who murder or blow up their neighbors are a deeper threat among the supposed leaders and decision makers who not only threaten a family, co-workers or neighbors by totally flipping out, but all of society and maybe the world. These borderline certifiable loonies aren’t funny in that they have or remotely exercise control of nuclear weapons.
Israel has several hundred nukes which everybody knows about but no one is to speak of (because, you know, the holocaust and three, four, five or six thousand years of extermination policies that make you wonder how any Jews at all are left), is run by a group dementia extending to the US government, which has thousands more nukes and is the only nation ever to have used them to slaughter tens of thousands of humans at a time. You know, democracy, higher form of civilization, western Judeo-Christian morality and stuff like that? This is a situation that calls for democratic control to be exercised quickly, but when such reality threatens to exist anywhere it is quickly attacked – see Venezuela – by the alleged leaders of that international democratic community which is killing and suppressing more people than past fascist tyrants could ever have hoped – assuming they did – to slaughter.
Good marijuana may not be a powerful enough tranquilizer for this mob that would be a bunch of laughable buffoons if they weren’t such a deadly menace to the future of all humanity and not just one nation. Getting them stoned won’t help, and all of us getting stoned will be worse. We can party after we deal with the crisis but until then, stay straight, maintain vigilance and take democratic action to transform reality. And work faster.