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