JIMMY CARTER WAS NOT A GREAT PRESIDENT and is much-maligned. But he’s maligned for the wrong things. The conservatives who rely on “conventional wisdom” about his Presidency don’t talk too much about the massive deregulation schemes that began on his watch and continued into the Reagan Presidency, a trend that started with the early 70s ‘Powell Memorandum’ stating that corporations needed to play a bigger role in American life, roll back taxes and the New Deal, and crush unions.
None of that bothers them. No, conservatives/reactionaries/even centrists harp on Carter’s “Malaise Speech” (in which he never actually said the word ‘malaise’), where he had the audacity to suggest that our capitalist obsession with materialism would lead to spiritual bankruptcy, the destruction of the environment and the degradation of human life. LOL! For this, he was voted out of office and replaced by a cruel, callow idiot from Hollywood who sold us a fairy tale that there should be no restrictions on American growth, wealth and power, forever.
Let’s see how that’s working out!
TWITTER IS COLLAPSING AND GOOGLE IS SHEDDING JOBS FOR FUN AND THE METAVERSE IS NOT GOING TO HAPPEN and we may have to accept that our futures will not be on Mars or in The Matrix but in a real, physical world that we need to safeguard and protect. Certainly, the world’s billionaires and nation-states seem to think this, as they purchase/invade all of the arable land and potable drinking water across the globe. Mark Zuckerberg didn’t drop $53M on a 1,500 acre estate in the Metaverse in 2021. It’s in Hawaii.
THE TRAINS ARE NO LONGER RUNNING ON TIME! Quite the opposite. The only thing you can set your watch to is the frequency with which they are crashing/exploding/derailing. This is not unexpected. Republicans run the country into the ground and then the Dems win, but lack the political acumen/will to make any significant changes or reforms. Then the GOP blames the Dems for the problems that they themselves created (in this case, deregulating braking/safety requirements for trains under Trump), and cast themselves as EITHER the responsible businessmen/adults who can fix the problem (e.g. George W. Bush, Mitch McConnell), or the blood-and-soil Patriots who can save real Americans from the corporate/Globalist/Wall Street schemes that harmed them; while also themselves benefitting from the patronage of those wealthy-types (e.g. Marjorie Taylor Greene, JD Vance).
Frankly, the only thing that has held America together in the past few decades is that the Democrats have, in those brief moments when they hold power, managed to gather up enough wet gum and rock salt to patch the economy/infrastructure back together and keep the machine from totally collapsing; before they inevitably lose the following election. But that doesn’t seem to be working so much lately, and entropy has gained purchase. The GOP, now quite vocally, want to dismantle America as it is commonly defined and create a hollowed-out corporatist state with the “America” brand, leaving everyone inside its borders to fend for themselves. If you are strong/connected enough to get paid, you deserve it; if you fail, then it’s because you are either a weak loser OR (((Someone)))/Trans/POC cheated you out of your birthright. They will focus your anger at those who have ‘stolen’ what is yours, or they will dream up some highly profitable overseas (or domestic) war for you to go kill and die in.
It gets tiresome.
As of this writing, the Western world is led by an 800-year-old man who thinks that he’s going to live forever but also that it will remain 1996, forever. His favored challenger- for the moment- is Governor Ron DeSantis (R-Cocytus); a former Gitmo torturer who absolutely hates Big Government’s influence on American life except when he’s using it to ban library books and is forcing teenage girls to report their menstrual cycles to high school officials in order to play sports.
“MEATBALL” RON is evil and cruel enough to be a capable fascist functionary, but simply lacks the clownish, preening charisma that all successful dictators need to reach the S-Tier. Guys like Hitler, Mussolini, Gaddafi and Trump knew/know how to walk the catwalk, how to strut, how to entertain. Idi Amin would have had some banger Tweets; Goebbels would overthink the medium, and that’s why men like him are second bananas to the big dogs.
Alas, DeSantis is too much of a pouty weirdo to have despot swag, and the possibility of him exporting Florida’s destruction of AP classes and state colleges onto a national scale isn’t going to play to well with the upper middle-class suburbanites looking to pull the ladder up after their kids, thank you very much.
No, what will probably happen is that DeSantis will follow the Rudy Giuliani/Chris Christie route: Early support from donors and conservative media-types who like his cruel, bullying style and firm commitment to the plutocratic agenda, then his Presidential ambitions will collapse when the general public discovers that he’s brutally unentertaining. Then Trump will castrate him in the primaries. After that, he’ll either wait for Trump to die before he runs again, or he’ll fall in line and debase himself in the hopes of a VP slot. Let’s not forget to laugh what that happens.
CULTURE CORNER!
CHRIS ROCK: SELECTIVE OUTRAGE: (Or, Chris Rock: Always Scared) Sad. I couldn’t get more than about halfway through this show of yet another obscenely rich, oddly bitter Gen-X comedian whining that he can no longer tell the same homo jokes that he once did back in ’97 at the Yuckle Hut in Poughkeepsie.
Rock opens up by proclaiming his allegiance to ‘wokeness’ and equality (unlike Chappelle and Gervais, he is at least savvy enough to do this) then immediately launches into a rant how everyone that is ‘Woke’ is full of shit, and they are the oppressors in this terrifying new age. While he correctly calls out the amorality of ‘Woke Capitalism’, he doesn’t quite make the connection that modern capitalism doesn’t actually have any ideological slant against Wokeness. Capitalism doesn’t believe in anything at all- hence to amorality- it’s merely hungry for new markets and is thus reflecting back the language of the people it is trying to sell to (i.e. young people, LGBTQ+).
Then Rock makes a joke(?) about how people who care about Wokeness use iPhones are made by Chinese slaves (which is basically this meme) and that he “speaks for everyone” when he says that people would prefer a “$20 racist pair of yoga pants that shouts the n-word when you walk” instead of a “$100 pair of woke yoga pants from Lululemon”. Which… haha, I guess(?). That IS expensive for a pair of yoga pants.
But, it all kind of underlines the basic belief that Rock and his generational/occupational cohorts have, that people shouldn’t be compelled to be less racist, everyone should simply admit how racist they truly are and accept how fucked the world is and move on with their lives. Seems pretty easy for you to say, buddy!
TOP GUN MAVERICK: This is not a movie about American military supremacy. The movie very pointedly shows that the next generation of ‘Top Gun’ pilots are pussies who cannot compete with Maverick. No, this is a movie about Tom Cruise supremacy. The movie is dumb, absurd and fun, and one of the only blockbusters of 2022 that didn’t have terrible lighting to hide its cheap effects. You can actually see what is happening on screen, which is a novelty these days. That said, Cruise’s increasingly risky stunt work will probably lead to his eventual death, but maybe that’s how it has to be.
Next time: A promise of positivity!
https://tinyletter.com/The_Oculus_Online
