28 May 2018

Fuck Neoliberalism and the Sickly Pale Horse It Rode in On


This was a piece I did in 2018 for the group podcast Left Ungagged.

Welcome back to the rabbit hole from your clever commie cunt in Chattanooga, Tennessee, USA, author of the blog Notes from the Ninth Circle.  Just call me Chuck.

I used to call America Neverland, after the world of Peter Pan in which no one ever grows old so that no one ever grows up, meaning that, since the essence of life is change and evolution, no one there (in Peter’s Neverland) ever really lives because that which is static is not living.

I also formerly began with “welcome to another trip down the rabbit hole” as if I were going on a trip with the audience and not a permanent resident of the world to which it leads.

Tinker, tailor, soldier, sailor, rich man, poor man, beggar man, thief.  Tinker, tailor, soldier, spy, stick a needle in my eye.  If I should die before I wake, give them to my brother, Jake.  What’re “them”, you ask?  The bag of peanuts at my feet as I laid me down to sleep.

Tingle, tingle, tangle toes, she’s a good fisherman, catches hens, puts ‘em inna pens...wire blier, limber lock, three geese in a flock, one flew east, one flew west, one flew over the cuckoo’s nest...O-U-T- spells out...goose swoops down and plucks you out.

That last rhyme inspired the title for Ken Kesey’s 1962 novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, which led to the 1975 movie of the same name starring Jack Nicholson, considered one of the greatest films of all time. 

The novel was published at the beginning of the policy trend away from keeping all those with psychological and psychiatric issues locked inside institutions where every aspect of their lives could be totally controlled toward deinstitutionalization in which they were released into society and the care of community mental health services regardless of their individual ability to cope with a world outside which they were in but not necessarily of.  Believe it or not, that was all one sentence.

As much good as that policy was and as much good as it did for many, since it became a point of doctrine for an almost religious ideology that took no thought for the morrow, it also aided and abetted Ronnie Raygun’s mass dump of mental patients onto the streets with no resources.

Hickory dickory dock, three mice ran up the clock.  The clock struck one, and the other two got away with minor injuries.

The movie starring Nicholson and introducing the trope or motif of Nurse Ratched through the stellar performance Louis Fletcher focused more on resistance against The Man, The System, or The Combine as the novel’s narrator The Chief puts it, by the lone individual rather than by the collective many.  In much the same way the graphic novel V for Vendetta casts his protagonist’s struggle against The Man, The System, The Combine, a lone solitary effort which he passes on to his protégé, Evey Hammond, versus the movie, in which the struggle of the one becomes the struggle of the many.

Remember, remember, the Fifth of November, the gunpowder treason and plot.  Voila!  In view humble vaudevillian veteran, cast vicariously as both victim and villain by the vicissitudes of fate.  This visage, no mere veneer of vanity, is a vestige of the “vox populi” now vacant, vanished.  However, this valorous visitation of a bygone vexation stands vivified, and has vowed to vanquish these venal and virulent vermin, vanguarding vice and vouchsafing the violently vicious and voracious violation of volition.  The only verdict is vengeance; a vendetta, held as a votive not in vain, for the value and veracity of such shall one day vindicate the vigilant and the virtuous.  Verily this vichyssoise of verbiage veers most verbose, so let me simply add that it’s my very good honour to meet you and you may call me V.

That is neither, or is it neither, here nor there, nor is it now or then.

Kesey saw himself  and his fellow Merry Pranksters throwing Electric Kool-Aid Test parties and travelling throughout America on their wheeled yellow land submarine magic school bus actually named Sunshine to the destination Further as the link between the Beatniks of the 1950s and the Hippies of the 1960s.  Some truth to that, if a bit narcissistic, since he saw himself not as “a” link but “THE” link.

That segment of the Boomers reflects the later Generation Jones, a grouping that straddles the last years of the Baby Boomers and the early years of Generation X, which most profoundly illustrates the switch from change the world to greed is good, from yippie to yuppie.  In fact, the seeds of that kudzu were there when the New Left forsook the actual working class for the imaginary working class of their soteriological pseudo-revolutionary imaginations.

Rocking my heart, rocking the rez’; we miss you, John Trudell.  You’ve walked on, but we’re still here, fighting the rich man’s war.  What becomes of the broken-hearted?

I forgot to mention the title of this piece, by the way; it’s called “Fuck Robert Reich and the Sickly Pale Horse He Rode in On”.  That honor comes from his most recent pathetic defense of liberal centrism and smug admonition for progressives to vote for regressive liberals rather than actual progressives as the best way to stop retrogressive conservatives and reactionaries, so shame on us for voting for what we believe in.  To which I can only reply, “Look, you smug, arrogant, pig-fucking cunt; you and your ilk gave us Trump with your support, insistence, and coronation of Hillary two years before campaigning even began.  So, fuck y’all. 

Hell, if I thought a bland, boring, tasteless, shallow, superficial, spin-doctored, focus-grouped specimen of the hated establishment such as the self-anointed Christa Regina proponent of the status quo would have had a snowball’s chance in the sites of the sun of defeating that spoiled child who now sits on the tarnished throne, I would’ve supported her.  But in 2016, she was the worst candidate the Democratic Party could possibly come up with.  So much for your smug bullshit about pragmatism and doing the rational thing.  If that’s what any of you were acting on and not your stingy self-interest, you would have supported Bernie that year, not someone who was, is, and every shall be the epitomy of everything we hated, hate, and will hate, world without end, Amen.  God save the Queen, she ain’t no human being.

Deficits don’t bring down empires; economic inequality does.  It wasn’t social spending which bankrupted the Imperium Romanum; it was tax breaks to the wealthy which left coffers to promote the general welfare empty.  Here’s another historical truth an establishment approved curriculum would have ignored or deflected: serfdom in Europe was not a creation of the so-called Middle Ages.  It was, in fact, born in the 3rd century of the Common Era, begotten and given birth to by the Roman Empire itself, the great Imperium Romanum, an asexual conception and birth that fucked all commoners in the ass without lube.

Insurance companies began with people wanting to spread out costs among the masses to make more affordable for all, operating under the theory that more people contributing to a single general cost would do that.  Instead, what capitalists did was create artificial scarcity and drive up the price the more people that paid.  Like De Boers did with diamonds, only with our health and with our lives and with our general welfare.

Capitalism cannot be reformed.  Putting lipstick on a pig is all any attempt to do that really is.  That does not mean that we should not support any change that makes life more bearable for the poor and the upper and lower working class yet falls short of the ultimate goal, but it does mean that we should never accept such concessions as anything other than a start.  The only way to reform The Combine, The System, capitalism, is to set it on fire and watch the motherfucker burn, all the way to the ground, then use its ashes to fertilize a new world where the need of the many outweighs the greed of the few.

By the way, series 3 of the Channel 4 show Humans is now showing.

I am a Terran, a citizen of Earth.  The whole world is my home, and all its people, human and nonhuman, whether organic or synthetic, are my brothers, sisters, and cousins.  Like our distant cousins on other planets across space and throughout time, we are all children of the Universe.

Be the darkness that illuminates.  Be the silence that resonates.  Be the stillness that agitates.

Our day will come, inshallah.  Keep the  faith.  May the Aught be with y’all.  Peace out.

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