Sadly, A Top Ten List

Last week a coworker asked me why I’m always so cynical. (I had been making snide comments about the new expansion of Tysons Corner shopping mall – something like: nine more acres of the same twenty product brands…). The thing is, I don’t even begin to think of myself as cynical. Just disgusted. But it got me thinking, what am I so disgusted about? So I started listing the stuff that bothers me to see if I could find a pattern.

Here they are, in no particular order: Ten Things* that Indicate that We’ve Become a Nation of Flaccid, Water-Kneed, Cringing, Suburbanized Lambs Undeserving of the Rights and Radical Heritage of Which We Remain Unconscionably Unconscious, Who Would Eagerly Sell Our Mothers, Souls, Testicles (or Parallel Female Genital Metaphor), Children or Anything Else of Fundamental Consequence to Our Humanity for the Equivalent of a Discount Coupon for a Cafemoogabocharonichino** at Seattlebux.

• Incredibly bad and deteriorating service at every corporate chain and franchise. For instance, has anyone noticed that since Royal Ahold bought Giant Food, the staff has become incapable of answering such difficult customer inquiries as “Where can one find canned soup?” and “How much longer will I have to wait until you find out the price of this untagged bottle of olive oil?” Home Depot is another place where the staff seems either poorly trained, disgruntled, or both. The typical Home Depot “Associate” acts as if unable to understand why people keep asking questions about home improvement tools and products.

• Our cowardly bullying of fellow victims of #1 above who are unfortunate enough to be compelled to work at these corporate concerns. Ever thought of this? Next time you’re about to wet your pants because your latte is taking tooooo loooong to prepare, instead of bravely scolding the minimum wage “barista” how about you ask to speak to the manager – not to complain about said barista, but rather to advocate for pay, training, and sufficient staffing to give you the quality service you desire and thus justify the $4.00 price you paid for 31 cents worth of coffee and 9 cents of milk? How about you ask who the regional manager is and make your complaint there instead of giving yourself a sadistic little groin-tickle by beating up on someone whose position and economic need guarantee they’ll have to stand there and silently take your shit?

• That we elected not one but two members of the ultra-weenie Bush family to serve in the same office once held by Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt.

• Our tolerance for police who wear terminator-type sunglasses. What the hell is this about? I’m completely out of patience for our uniformed public servants carrying on infantile intimidation tactics any time they have contact with the public. The whole power-posture, command-voice, theater of authority thing is getting way old and way over the top. The other day I was waved to a stop at a school crossing by a cop wearing a pair of sunglasses suitable for a WWF badguy-persona wrestler. Apparently, even while helping children safely cross a busy intersection on their way to the neighborhood middle school, this officer felt he needed to be prepared to intimidate some would-be criminal, traffic scofflaw, or sociopathic pre-teen unwilling to comply with public authority. Maybe the officer felt that wearing futuro-sadofascist eyewear would restore the testicles shrunken by getting crossing-guard duty while all his policeman pals were out doing real policeman work. Why can't our police do their routine work in a spirit of service to the community rather than as an occupation army? Take off those ridiculous roidrage nazigoggles you morons, you work for us

• John Stossel is on TV. Oh c'mon...

• Our daily acceptance of anti-human work environments for ourselves and our fellow human beings. Without even getting to the evil of how we support our bourgeois lifestyles on the backs of sweatshop (and worse) work done in "developing" countries, the stultifying nature of the daily working conditions most of us toil in at our workplaces is entirely unbefitting and unsupporting of fully-upright humanity. The wallpaper of the laboring existence of most of us is an unrelieved, monotonous repetition of indignities and humiliations so pervasive we don't even notice most of it most of the time. And even for those of us who are fortunate enough to have jobs that allow us to use our minds and judgment as part of our work, more and more we find ourselves putting our creativity and intelligence in service to questionable, dumb, or downright odious enterprises. And despite the corporate-speak of teamwork, workforce buy-in, human resource development, blah blah, most of this is just a scumfilm-thin 21st century gloss on what remains 19th century capitalist command and control and exploitation of workers. Workers of the US unite; you have nothing to lose but your quarterly performance evaluation!

• The continued presence of republicans among us let alone in positions of power and influence.

• Ditto christian conservatives. Although they and especially their leading public figures are an almost constant source of morbid amusement.

• Our acceptance of cellphone toting toddlers. Does anyone actually think that giving cellphones to children who should be spending their time twirling in circles of delight and pretending to be animals and comets is a good idea? Stop it! Just stop it now, I say! I'm going to punch the next parent I see whining "could you put that down and listen to me" to a prepubescent sneer-monster at the mall. Why'd you buy them the friggin thing in the first place, bub?

• Our mindless, orwellian parroting of the stupid claims and idea-slogans of neo-lib capitalists and conservative cranks:

1. creative destruction (With apologies to all the sweet, Shiva loving hippie types, real creation is never destructive -- disruptive maybe but destruction is never the outcome of anything we ought to call creativity. For the record, most of the corporate-capitalist apologist nitwits who throw this around in defense of what many would call breath-taking examples of profound market-failure and bottom-seeking competition are probably unaware that Joseph Schumpeter, who first coined the phrase, also predicted the ultimate triumph of socialism. For the record, Schumpeter was a half-crank who had lots of quaint ideas.)
2. tragedy of the commons (The only tragedy here is that people accept a fantasy version of phenomena from a pastoral 17th century anglo past that never actually existed to justify present-day corporate-privative exploitative uses of the commonweal of humanity under the banner of "privatization".)
3. privatization (Oh for the love of god. Click here if you want to get the most recent rant on this.)
4. war is a continuation of politics by other means (Yeah. Just as blather is the continuation of philosophical thought by other means. This is one of the most stupid quotations in history. Clausewitz may have been a brilliant guy, but this slogan is inane. And the funniest part is, wannabe intellectuals throw this around like it shows off their sophisticated thought. Every time I hear some talking chimp "thinker" spew this line I want to project my lunch into their slackjawed face. Look how easy this philosophical dogtrick is: Outsourcing is a continuation of workforce employment by other means. Pollution is a continuation of environmental control by other means. Exploitation is a continuation of stewardship by other means. Genocide is a continuation of humanitarian aid by other means. Stupidity is a continuation of erudition... Why has anyone ever been taken in by this nonsense? For the record, war is the failure of politics.)
5. capitalism is the real democracy because it allows people to vote with their dollars (OK, follow along carefully. Voting is democratic if and only if conducted under the conditions of one-person-one-vote. "Voting" with dollars is called purchasing. [Important Tip: When there are two different words or labels it's a good tip-off that they refer to different objects or concepts; that's why we have different names for them.] Now, in markets, because differnt persons possess differing amounts of dollars, different persons and entities have differing levels of purchasing power. In a democracy, different voters must have equal voting power. (Remember? One-person-one-vote.) If you argue that in our country it is not true that different persons have equal voting power, you've just stumbled across the fact the you do not live in a democracy. A system which distributes political power according to variations of purchasing power, giving the greatest political power to the most wealthy individuals and entities, is called a plutocracy not a democracy. Different words referring to different objects and concepts, Cletus.)
6. ours is the best health care system in the world (This is simply a lie. By the way, to call what we have in the US a health care system would be like calling the dumpster outside an office building an information management system.)
7. the liberal media (blah blah blah blah...)

Well, that's it.*** Some days I find myself hoping to wake up soon and it will still be 1971, I'll still be poised on the brink of adulthood and giddy with hope, and it will still be possible to avert the collapse of left politics into denialist apolitical lifestyle crafting, irrelevant micropolitical issue advocacy, and distracting and disintegrating identity politics. Ronald Reagan will still be a punch line about California politics and George W. Bush will still be the drunken dumbest fratboy son of a Republican hack scion of a family whose patriarch was a nazi sympathizing financier.

But most of the time I think about my children and how wide awake they are and especially my daughter and her husband and how they are raising their wise and dazzlingly alive daughter with grace, humanity and awareness and realize that 1971 isn't so far in the past after all.

*For those who sneer at the ongoing fad of Top Ten Lists either because you credit or blame their creation on David Letterman: Ever heard of the Decalogue? Or how about the Bill of Rights (that would be Amendments one through ten of the Constitution). Perhaps if these lists of ten had been named, respectively, Top Ten Things That Piss Off God and Top Ten Principles We Really Hope Our New Federal Government Will Not Violate, folks would know that Letterman has merely borrowed a deeply rooted Western form. Had Letterman been of Asian heritage he would no doubt have “originated’ the top eight list, as in: The Eightfold Path to Ironic Mockery.

** In a future rant I will list the infantile product names that corporate Nazis in control of all our goods and services force us to say, the worst of which being “rooty-tooty-fresh-and-fruity”…

*** Yeah, I know I cheated on the last one and added a bunch of other items going way beyond a list of ten. If this bothers you, you must be some sort of poorly toilet-trained crypto-fascist thug.