Tuesday, September 12, 2006

BOILING FROGS IN THE MELTING POT


Ah, the wonderful world of internet where you can begin looking for a replacement for your refrigerator’s light bulb and wind up being the latest of the only 16 people in the world to know an obscure feature of the mating habits of the emperor penguin. In this case I was attempting to verify killtown's claim that the 31% of flight 77’s passengers being military or government employees justified his suspicions, I began searching population numbers. It dawned on me in the process that killtown must be completely ignoring the fact that the flight was out of DC making 31% actually a lower portion than I would suspect most such flights carry. Also in process I ran across Grandfather’s Economic Report, which inspired me to write this post. As I read the report, written from the viewpoint of a grandfather concerned about the world being inherited by his grandchildren from the prospective of one who has watched the changes for the last seventy years, I was continually reminded of times in my life over the same period when changes drastic enough for me to notice floated to the surface of my consciousness only to be pushed down again by believing it was only nostalgic sentimentality, like fluffing my pillow. His list of the five most poignant changes includes increased government use of the GNP, dumbing down of public education, individual and national indebtedness and dependence on foreign sources for energy, “the lifeblood of our standard of living.” These trends combined with the more swift changes since 9/11/01 seem to reveal a pattern more ominous than I’d perceived in any previous scenario of the past projected into the future.
While I have long been aware of the imperial urges that have driven the policies of the United States of America during my lifetime in the guise of representing me and how this is a direct inheritance from the acquisitive western culture of our European ancestors, this disturbing inability to live within our own borders was always a concern secondary to our disregard for the health of the planet.
Our sacred shores have been invaded by the most insidious of foes. They wear no uniform. They do not challenge us. In fact, they willingly encourage and reinforce everything we do. When the general trend of our lives veers into open pastures, they gently nudge us back to the path they intend.
We respond to our desire for ever increasing standard of corporate supplied comfort in “the American way of life” and to our fear of godless heathens who are jealous of our freedom to glut our garages, they tell us, and who believe in some other false god who told them to kill us — you know those “Al Kaeda types,” as so succinctly expressed by our profile reliant vice-president reading his black and white map of reality which he redraws every day to cover up his lies and blunders..
There are two folk tales about nature that are perfect metaphors for the process that we have been undergoing since the advent of totalitarian agriculture. The first tale is about the fellow who walked into the general store and inquired about a rumor that had drawn him to these parts about a large herd of wild hogs out in the swamp that the local farmers couldn’t keep from raiding their crops. Finding confirmation, he purchase several hundred feet of rope and fifty pounds of corn and headed off into the brush. About a month later he returned leading a long parade of tame hogs tied to one another with the rope. He declared, “I can pen any animal on the face of the earth if I can first get him to depend on me for a free handout.” The second involves the process of boiling a frog. If you throw a frog in boiling water he will leap right out with scalded feet and wiser. If you throw a frog in tepid water it will swim around checking out its new digs. If you slowly heat the water to boiling you can boil the whole frog without a croak.
Somewhere in our history someone or a group of someone's realized they had penned a large dependent group of wild people by gaining an inordinate amount of wealth extracted from them in exchange for the security of an orderly course to their lives. Sort of like the protection racket of the Mafia; pay up or we’ll break your store window. Or the church; God told priests He can’t hear your atonement prayers if you don’t tithe, you sinner you. It isn’t hard to see such a pusher-addict relationship when it is out in front of us happening to someone else. It is virtually impossible to see ones own addictions, much less any pusher or plan behind it unless notified by a friend who would rather teach you to see rather than cater to your blindness. I don’t look for anyone to tell the truth. I can see the corn continually being spread all over the place, the rope being tied from tree to tree around me, the temperature rising in the sauce I swim in every day and hear the cauldron in which I simmer ironically called a the Melting Pot with the patriotic pride of fellow sauce mates who believe they’ve survived because the sauce tastes just right; the flavor of cotton candy spun out of the sugar of valueless promissory notes. Paranoia? Only when I think of other people.
What I have always dismissed as people's preoccupation with government affairs at different periods seems to have increased in magnitude and frequency of late. It could be because the government is now consuming 44% of the national income and each person must work five months of the year just to pay taxes. In the 30’s that was 12% of the income, or 1.2 months of work per person! That’s outrageous. More and more the government policies have ensured a further economic division in the population by completely ignoring public education further distancing the children of the elite who take the private school to college route from the public high school graduate whose SAT/income has declined 71% since 1960. And Bush insists he is a "uniter", which must surely come from a different root than unifier. Our state of distrust of all things different has reached the point where an individual may now act like a spy versus the spy he suspects everyone else to be as evidenced by this sad statement for the 21st century found in an ad for personal spyphones, you can give ‘em as a gift to those friends you need to use but can’t quite trust.

the following is the text in the ad above
These Spyphones look and operate like a normal phone……
But when you call the phone from one special number programmed in the phone the spy phone will be turned into a sophisticated bugging device, allowing you to hear what is going on in the vicinity of the phone. The spy phone works like a normal mobile phone and so shows nothing suspicious or unusual to the user. But when called using the special access number the phone answers but does not ring, light up, bleep or anything else. Even the display freezes.
When a key is touched the Spyphone automatically breaks the connection to prevent suspicioun. The phone appears normal and in standby mode. However you can be listening in to everything what’s happening and being said in that room or around the target person. You can access the phone from anywhere in the world with no range limitations, just dial in and listen. The phone comes in it's original box and with charger, manuals etc. and so could be given as a gift without arousing suspicion.

What is to keep our government from secretly requiring all cell phones to have such insidious listening devices to which only they know the numbers, thus circumventing a bothersome warrent or other pesky legalities required for old fashioned wire tapping — absolutly nothing!
The credit card debt of today has replaced the savings account of the ‘40s as we, like nanobot replicas of the fiat empire of the United Stetsons’ unrepayable international debt, weave our own personal empires in competition for the top rung. Why else would Bush’s first plan of action after the pyroclastic dust from the buildings, furniture and humans at the World Trade Center was cleared away be, “Go shopping!?!?” By the way, the people who were cleared to enter the area two days after the tragedy to clean it up by our completely inept FEMA department’s hurried declaration that it was safe have come down with asbestosis and related illnesses which could well result in more than three times more deaths than in the original tragedy. And the government ignores their pleas for help — there’s a war going on, we have to open wall street, don’t bother us with reality!
Plans for how best to herd this flock by tempting them with a carrot, scaring them with a sheep dog and shearing them every spring began long before Bush, the USA or the Roman empire, but lately the enactors have gotten either arrogantly sloppy or brazenly experimental enough to begin letting the wolf show through the shepherd mask just to see how drowsy the hypnotized sheep are. From all appearances, they’re sound asleep and ready to do anything they're told. My friend, Speedy, refers to the invaders as the reptile people.

2 comments:

Rancho Perros Bravos said...

Boiled frogs, spyphones, replite people, what a world that has been created. How could the government have got this far with so few fighting it. Why don´t they see the nightmare, instead of holding onto the dead dream.

Garth said...

To paraphrase Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth: "Somebody rescue that frog"