The descent into pettiness

Having covered agriculture and business for many years, I have developed a huge disrespect for corporate bureaucracies.   There are dangers to big government.  But bureaucracies are bureaucracies, no matter their setting, and they operate on the lowest common denominator--the stupid, the mean, the incompetent, the crooked, the retarded.

All people are created equal in the sense that no  one is to be regarded as more or less valuable than anybody else.  But they are not created the same.  They are equal but different.  And many people just are not very smart or very decent or very noble.  But we give them equal status, and that is why we find ourselves dealing with incompetent idiots much of the time.

Nothing is more idiotic than yammering about the dangers of big government.  If they want to talk about the incompetence, inefficiencies, and crookedness of big, let us talk about General Motors, Chrysler, Ford, AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Citicorp, Enron, Worldcom, and the list is almost endless,  because it would include almost every large enterprise.  People have a huge capacity for stupidity, and bureaucracies cater to it.  That is a basic premise of bureaucratic culture.

My own position on the matter of bailouts is that we should just let the greedy and fatuous fools who got the economy to where it has sunk  go under.  I realize that the government took the actions because it realized that the rest of us would go under with the huge, incompetent bureaucracies and not all of us should have to reap what the big corporations have sown.  About 17 percent of our people who are unemployed and can't find jobs are reaping the raping of the economy by being asked to bend over and smile while they take the reaping up their individual wazoos.  There is a huge denial of equality when some people can't get enough to eat and others can garner million-dollar bonuses from bailout money from American taxpayers.  Some people defend corporate executive pay scales and bonuses as a capitalistic right.  I think it is their right to reap the consequences of their mental and moral failures and go to the end of the soup lines.  But Bernie Madoff is the capitalistic Jesus and the only people we permit to pay for the bureaucratic shystering are the poor.

Obama ran on the promise to change all that kind of nonsense.  He is a smart man.  He is a decent man.  His flaw, which may prove to be fatal, is that he is a polite and considerate man.  In making nice to an opposition which is on the side of economic and actual rape, he has squandered the opportunity to drive the rats out of the ship of state and has allowed them to derail real reform.  His opposition will oppose anything he proposes or stands for.

One of their latest complaints is that Obama bowed to the emperor of Japan.  He also bowed to the Saudi King and the Queen of  England.   Obama is a bower.  Some people think that a bow is a sign of respect and good intentions.  Like in dancing the Virginia reel which begins with the men bowing to the women and the women curtsying to the men as a demonstration of respect and good will.  But the opposition sees the Obama bow as the damned field slave being so enthralled at being received by his massas in the big house that he falls to his knees in a gesture of supplication that pledges slavehood to the royalty.   On the other hand, any attempts to give the ordinary, working people some equity in their country is decried as socialism and communism. The fact that such mean and petty nonsense is circulated around the country shows what a mean and petty and utterly stupid country we have  become.

Just as the corporations deserve to reap what they have sown, it may be time to let the country itself reap what is sown.  We have serious issues that could be talked about on the basis of sound information and intelligence, but the GOP has decided to put on displays of stupid obstinacy and false accusations.  Health care is one of those areas  which a would-be ruling class uses to put the American serfs in their place.  The reform efforts have been compromised by making nice to the "rulers."  The GOP has launched a barrage of insanity.  The Democrats have allowed themselves to be drawn into the noise of idiots venting their sound and fury as if idiots can be reasoned with.  And so, we are left living at the level of the mean and petty and greedy and nefarious, who would rather slur the President than solve the country's problems.

Critics of American democracy have said from its inception that it was doomed to failure because it would be dominated by the lowest motives in the human spirit.  Perhaps, it is time to see the government as being operated on the same moral and intellectual basis as the big corporate bureaucracies.  It might be time to let it fail and let people confront the reality of what we have become.  There will be turmoil and atrocity and obscenity of the kind that takes place daily in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and elsewhere.  It may be time to put the theories of those persistent critics to the test.

The voices of indecency, the sound and the fury, are loud and clear.  It may well be time to let America fail and see if what endures is the better angels of human nature or the malevolent demons that thrive on the mean, the petty, and the stupid. 













 a