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Storming of the Bastille (Duesseldorf version) -Flickr Creative Commons
Oh do I see so much rancor and vindictiveness here these days. Nearly as much for the current administration as the last. Ideologues and fanatics all in a tither with their tails in the air and oh so upset that their previous messiah has not turned out to be as they imagined.
Oh where have we seen this before. Historically in just about every chosen one.
With so many now convinced that if only they could get the right person elected or the citizens energized and as impassioned as they are, they can change the system instantly. Storm the gates of the Congress and demand…yes demand that they all resign and they WILL install a righteous and responsive government that WILL work for the people. And woo to he who says otherwise.
AIN’T GONNA HAPPEN.
Not until the engineers and middle management of places like IBM, DELL, Apple, Microsoft, Simmons, Blue Cross, Motorola, Boeing, MacDonald Douglas, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon….- who are still doing very well thankyouverymuch – are in as bad a shape as the worst of the so called 99%.
Or the retirees in Florida and Arizona and California and Mississippi…..are about to lose the retirement and be out of their nice gated communities in the cold.
Or that you can get Blacks and Asians and Latinos and native Americans and Muslims….all rallying to you side.
These visions are just that. I think there are those who need to reexamine the history of previous revolutions. How long it took and how bad it had to get before the “masses” were willing to risk themselves and what they had to overturn the powers that be.
There is a saying we have in computerdom about systems and our current political and economic one is a perfect example.
Functions as designed.
So you can go and vote for who ever you want (or not) and be disappointed again (which you most assuredly will be) and pout and talk and and throw brick bats at the system which is corrupt and treacherous and duplicitous and all the rest or you can make things better for yourself and your neighbors. Having hissy fits over what you really have little control over does not help one bit.
As far as a revolution goes…forgetaboutit.
32 Comments
Ah, Eeyore; always nice to see your pixels.
Rancor, if I can help out that far.
Yeah, it’s a feature, not a bug. Not that we can’t change that.
Well I know a lot of people in the areas I mentioned and I can tell you this. There ain’t a one of them that is will to risk their comfortable life styles, too big houses and and gas guzzling cars on some idealistic notion.
Not until their own precious little rear ends are in a sling.
HA…most of them think Tom Friedman’s a radical.
Yep, and it will take multiple millions of us in resistance, but imo, the time may be coming when their lives aren’t as cushy as they are now, and we need to build a movement to show them the error of their ways.
Europe is far more entwined with our banks and market than they like to let on, and there’s an even chance now that things there will melt down, unless I’m readin’ the wrong sites. And it won’t be pretty, but an economic system built on lies and pretense cannot hold indefinitely.
Isn’t Tom a radical? OBomba’s a Socialist.
You leave us with so few alternatives cmauk. BTW engineers and middle managers rarely ever make revolution so why worry about them? Revolution is a young persons duty and they are rising to that calling.
do you mean rancor? Anyway, let the beings steeped in illusion go–there are plenty who live lives of truth. They, like Mycroft Holmes, are too disinterested to prove themselves “right.”
The professional classes are now under assault from the top tier–let’s call it the 1%.
This is really bad. It has happened before, though never in America. But it HAS happened in England, France, Mexico, Germany, Russia, and ancient Rome. And in quite a few other places, as well.
I’ll give you two guesses, and the first one doesn’t count, about what happened next. All of the examples I listed had one thing in common:
The popular wisdom said, “It can’t happen here.”
Yes, in your lifetime, cmaukonen, because it is already happening. You just don’t see it.
No, not in all the areas which are the excesses of human depravity – why seek what we all need in the gated communities or in the fake hallowed halls of the people you mention? Those calcified constructions, indeed, will be the last places to find the first shoots of uninhibited change, the first new ideas, the first answer to the call which went out from so many voices in the campaign for change you seem so eager to debunk. Debunk all you like, but direct your ire not at us who knew what we were voting for, but at the person who mispresented himself as being our representative – not our messiah, our representative. The loss is his, not ours; we go on without him.
You’ve just got to get down in the dirt and start pulling weeds like Kit to discover where the meaningful happenings are ongoing. Personally, I was never one for climbing up glassfronted buildings in a crayolasuit. What goes up must come down.
I loved the 2008 enthusiasm of our young people, and I still love it. We’re not climbing a skyscraper; we’re handing on a torch. At ground level. You get one shot at this beautiful earth, I just believe, cmaukonen. Why waste it? At the very least, pull a few weeds. It might make you actually enjoy the process, which is where it is at for us mere mortals. Humans, humble humans.
Bravo to Kit.
Damn, Cm, I fully concur.
The systems are gamed, the games are rigged and it’s all unsustainable.
Either it collapses econ wise, or it collapses thru extended and unintended war/nukes, or it collapses cuz mama nature does her thang.
The USA has less than 20 years before it fractures like the USSR.
I might live long enough to see that.
A curse or a blessing, I don’t know, but at this rate we’re all goners anyway . . . . we the people have NO impact on the decisions being made, nor will we as long as the 1% hold enough power over those below them . . . and make no mistake about it, we the people are being sacrificed for the chosen few.
End of story.
Rcc’d.
May I rec your comment, juliania? Thank you.
History says it’s so.
Agreed!
Collapse is inevitable.
I’n not real sure what the hayall you meant in the cluster phuck you commented with . . . diary author said the political game is rigged and we can’t use votes to change it.
Spot on shit.
You, I’m not sure WHAT you are replying to, but the psycho babble is totally impossible to decipher in regards to the diary author’s post.
N you drag Siun’s kin into this for weeding in a garden?
Wow.
I don’t think you should be dispensing advice to anyone.
N certainly not to CM in the manner you did.
Ah but the might get just a wee bit upset about it.
Oh collapse is inevitable. I never said it wasn’t. Just not a quickly and as soon as one might think.
No…I’m busy building my own stuff. Been doing that for years. Get into the nitty gritty of it.
Need a new desk so I think that will be my next project.
I agree with Wendy. Good comment, juliania.
My stars, LaRue. Juliania’s comment might be considered prose, with an underlying metaphor suggesting alternatives to CMaukonen’s defeatist rant, but it’s nothing like ‘psycho-babble’. Your inability to find her meaning is telling enough, but adding in what is reflexive defense of ‘Siun’s kin’, is jarring, if typical of you. Most of us wouldn’t have known that Kit is related to Sun, but what on earth could that matter to anyone but a gunslinger like you, always poised to shoot anyone in defense of anyone you deem a comrade?
She was clearly inspired by Kit’s brief mention of how healing it was to get into his garden and tend it by pulling weeds so that they wouldn’t be impairing his garden crops’ growth, stealing nutrients, water and sunlight, and how that simple karma labor allowed him to feel more of the optimism that is ordinarily his wont.
As far as ‘dispensing advice’, it would work for me if you held back on that more. I read one thread today on which you attacked others over and over for what you refer to as ‘trying to own this site’, which you do any time someone here expresses a desire for this site to evolve a mite as the election grows closer.
Shorter: stop your bullying, LaRue, and stop misunderstanding what you can’t read right; we’ll all be happier for it.
Desks are good, cmaukonen, and bravo to you, too. Apologies if my defense sounded too much like offense, as Larue received it – tone is a hard thing to convey. And it is true as Wendy says that I have really no idea of the relationships of everyone at this forum, nor am I going deep into anyone’s backgrounds. Posts are posts, and I respond to them as I see them. (Saw a great Nova about solar flares the other night, and it’s those positive and negative slinky magnetized plasma roads crossing that get ya.)
What I was replying to, Larue, was the opening comment about ‘so much rancor and bitterness’ leading to ‘forgeddaboutit’. This is not an inconsequential diary, because I heard its echo in the opening lines of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets:
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present all time is unredeemable.
Takes Eliot four great poems with a war thrown in to grapple with this opening, and silly me tried to compress it into one sound bite. Had to come off supercilious and offputting. Apologies to you for that.
CM – my generation is working damn hard to make sure that this does happen in your lifetime.
For you to discredit the thousands of arrests, hundreds of Occupy groups, protests, bank shutdowns, foreclosure stoppages, the upcoming General Strike on May 1st… fuck, you’re cynical.
Join us in the street if you want things to change in your lifetime.
Those educated professionals you speak of? They’re intelligent enough to see how outsourcing and offshoring models are rendering their cushy American 6 figure income jobs obsolete. Explain it to them, and invite them to join you in the street as well.
It’s going to be uncomfortable. It’s going to be hard. It’s going to get bloody as the police strike against us, time and time again. But we will fucking win. You know why? Because we are the people, and history teaches us that the people prevail.
I don’t understand poetry. Never have, never will. So this old barbarian doesn’t get TS Eliot and thinks James Joyce is the worst author ever. Wait, maybe Ayn Rand was worse, maybe.
But I agree with you, Juliana, for this old barbarian does know his history. Nearly all of the ingredients are in place for sudden revolutionary change. I emphasize the word “sudden.” It will probably take years, or maybe at most a couple of decades, but when it happens it will happen very quickly, in a matter of mere months. It is always thus.
What happens afterwards can take additional years or decades, and can go in many different directions. But if there is already a strong movement with positive goals in place, the longterm outcome can be better. And that, IMHO, is what we need to work on now. It’s already happening. The Occupy movement is just the beginning of a long process.
I will issue one warning, however. The reason we are in the mess we are in is capitalism itself. The ONLY objective of capitalism is the accumulation of more capital. That’s it. So to capitalists the ends will always ultimately justify the means. If you want your grandchildren and great-grandchildren to have a chance of living in a world that is more just and less violent, you need to come up with an alternative to capitalism. My personal favorite is socialism, but, like Cmaukonen, I probably won’t live to see what the ultimate outcome of the pending collapse of our current system will be.
Maybe you and others like you will come up with something totally different that actually kinda sorta works. But whatever it is must be just. No justice, no peace.
Damn, Larue. That’s really harsh. I see you posted it at 9:35pm Pacific Time. There’s a reason I didn’t reply then, for it was 12:35am Eastern Time and I did not want to post under the influence of Kentucky Bourbon. If I had, I would probably have posted something like you did.
So, until things get a helluva lot worse, we should stop wasting our time.
Wow, what cynicism!
Mayhaps not in our lifetimes but we gotta start somewhere.
Taking Over the Enterprise
Reccomended.
Me three.
cmauk, the first step in actualizing it is visualizing it.
Oh and just FYI, take it from someone from the Sopranos Corridor:
it’s “Faggedaboudit!!”
Ditto this, too.
Put a sock in it, LaRue.
(hey, now I’M a poet!!)
If the US consists of mostly middle class liberals they aren’t going to stand up.
This is why they are scorned on the left and the bottom.
They have people like Alexandra Pelosi to lead the liberal hate fest.
To have a proletarian revolution/campesinos uprising, there has to be a wider distribution of the suffering, not more suffering for just the poor or old. The young are being saddled with tremendous education debt for jobs that don’t exist or for wages that don’t warrant the expense. For these pissed off young people, there are prisons being built right now where their labor can be farmed out for 19 cents per hour. (Centrally planned economy?)
Direct your ire at those inside the village bubble who profit from this system. It’s going to be while before we reach a critical mass.
Re: your link- Isn’t Wolff describing syndicalism?
Absolutely agree ! What those who cite the revolutions in Russia and France and elsewhere forget is that they were missing what we have a large contingent of – a professional class. And they will not be so easy to convince to go along with any so called revolution.
Not sure what you mean by professional class, cmaukonen. Russia had one, if I’m thinking of the same group of people, and they were caught in the middle (Dr. Zhivago). I don’t think anyone wants that kind of revolution, and that’s why folk are racking their brains in order to do a kinder and gentler version. Putting their bodies on the line for nonviolence, being thrown in jail to protest unlawful takings, running against the oligarchical duopoly in third parties. We can still have a professional class – only the professions have to change to real stuff that improves the life of the community at large rather than who wants to be a millionaire. (Dr. Zhivago again.)
These revolutionary actions in combination may not be taken notice of by the media, nor by what you call the professional class, but ordinary people are noticing – I forget who posted about a bus driver the other day who was telling his passengers that the very rich are robbing the middle class and poor.
Maybe the professionals don’t notice these things happening – not until the wolf is at the door so to speak – but that won’t stop the wolf from coming.
What I think sadly you and I won’t be around to see is the restoration of this good and beautiful and precious planet, our only home – though we can already witness the beginnings of good husbandry. That’s going to take a long time to return to the point where our rock pools on the seashore are again filled with the teeming life I saw as a child. But it will happen, even if my generation has to bite the dust first and get out of the way.
I am not sure you will be terribly successful in that though. You might want kinder gentler but the powers that be are of another mind. The reactions to the various protests should be evidence of this.
When protesters become domestic terrorists, you will know.
No, syndicalism is a federation of unions, etc. Wolff is talking about the workers at each factory controlling it instead of the previous owners/shareholders. There would be no need for trade unions. Worker owned companies could form cooperatives, or collectives, whatever one wants to call it, but is not necessary. The whole purpose is to enable the workers to make the decisions inside the company rather than a board of directors.
When that happens workers can begin to shape policies on both the micro and macro levels that will strengthen individuals and their communities. Instead of corporate boards putting the surplus to work gutting regulations, privatizing public services and trashing the environment, worker owned cooperatives could use those resources to improve the lives and communities of the worker-owners.