The State of the Blog

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Hey mikey. What's all this stuff you've been writing lately? What about liberal outrage and political injustice?

Just looking for some distraction

Yeah. I know. And you know what? I'm just tired of it. It's the same thing, over and over again. Think Progress is unreadable - they're writing the same crap they wrote five years ago. You even get the sense that Krugman is getting tired of shouting into the abyss.

Look. We have divided government. The only thing that prevents the US from becoming an utterly dystopian third world authoritarian oligarchy is that the Republican party has sacrificed any ability to win the White House in order to control the House.  But that leaves us where we are - radical right-wing extremists trying to turn the US into something ugly and unrecognizable, and a very thin line of non-white Democratic activists preventing them from going full on East Germany on what's left of the liberal democratic dream. The sickness is clear - what used to be fringe hate groups now have a stranglehold on the mainstream Republican party, and stand as gatekeepers for any legislative initiative. And the result of decades of Republican presidents and Democratic indifference is a Judicial System wholly invested in the movement conservative project, from the protection of the wealth of the 1% to the destruction of any kind of social safety net.

But mikey, you say - if we don't speak out, and continue to point out their lies and hypocrisy, the status quo will just continue unabated.

Meh. Show me some evidence we're changing anything. Here's the hard facts. The system is obsolete, antiquated, massively corrupt and hardened against democratic change. This - this toxic madness, this dysfunctional charade, this democratic kabuki - THIS system is the problem. And until we're willing to do what they did in Tunisia, in Egypt, in Libya, in Hong Kong - until we're willing to die in the streets to regain some kind of systemic justice, it's all just noise and bullshit. And you know who enjoys the noise and bullshit the most? Yep - the wealthy and business interests that are reaping record profits while the people hurt. I'm mostly done shouting at them. Let me know when the shooting starts.

Hope. Belief. Faith. These are toxic concepts. They are us saying we recognize we have no agency, no control, no access to the process. They are saying we want change, but we neither believe change is coming nor do we have any idea how to effectively contribute to change.

Tell Me How This Ends

Seriously. Explain to me how we fix this. How we get back some kind of democracy, some kind of social justice, some kind basic human rights. The torturers went free. The thieves in the banking and mortgage industry went free. The cops that committed blatant murder in front of witnesses and video cameras went free. This is the world we created, or at least permitted to come into existence while we were distracted by big screen teevees, smart phones and American Idol. 

If you want to understand how pathetic we are, our system can't even be arsed to lock us up. In other nations the politically powerful fear the opposition, and they arrest them, they torture them, they imprison them. Here, they laugh at us. "Go ahead, whine" they are saying, "while we own all the power and all the wealth. Your pathetic tears mean nothing". And they are right - we can't change the system and they know it as well as we do. 

This isn't Ghandi vs. The Raj or even Mandela vs. The Apartheid regime. This is two very large portions of our population with vastly divergent visions for what America is and what she should become. And virtually no part of either of those visions is even remotely acceptable to the other side. Meanwhile, the media refuses to acknowledge the collapse of governance. They refer to it as 'gridlock', a kind of business-as-usual state of democratic governance, not a long term failure of the system itself.

So no. I can't keep writing the same stories, recording the same failings of an obsolete, massively corrupt and utterly co-opted system of governance. I can't learn anything from repeatedly describing the daily drumbeat of lies and hypocrisy. I can't convince you to abandon hope and act - but until you do, there is simply nothing new to say.
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