(I originally wrote the following as a reply to a comment from Jonf on Booman’s recent post “Why are Trump’s Polls So Stable?” It grew, so here it is as a standalone.)
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Jonf wrote:
So the question is then how can we help degrade or replace some of those signifiers? [See below.] We had a good start after the Nazis in Charlottesville but seemed to let it go. So too with others you noted. Or is it hopeless?
It is not hopeless, Jonf….it simply is what it is. Those signifiers…misogyny, belligerent nationalism, white supremacy, Devil-take-the-hindmost capitalism, etc…are symptoms of bone-deep stupidity. If history tells us anything, it is that you cannot eliminate “stupid” from the human genome. Round up every hater and eliminate them? First of all, you would necessarily become what you are fighting, and secondly the entire society would disintegrate. As Lenny Bruce once remarked on a similar topic, “But…but…who’ll clean the shithouse?”
50 or 60 years ago that was a valid question, but we are now at the edge of a robotic answer to that question, and also at the edge of a possible reactionary movement by the “stupids” who reside at the lower end of the economic and evolutionary ladder. Why are Trump’s polls so stable? Because..dumb as they are…these people are feeling the heat of the technological revolution in which we are becoming progressively enmeshed.
And…they are strong, prone to violence and well armed.
Plus…and it is very important to remember this…they are human beings. They are you and me and the rest of the people who tend to complain about their existence and their stupidity, 2 or 4 or 20 or 100 generations ago. They are part of the living, ever-evolving tree of humanity, and when we mess with that system, we do so at our own peril. It’s kind of like saying “Oh…let’s get rid of all of the dirt and mess of root systems for our food, all of the blood and guts. Let’s clean that whole thing up, why don’t we? We’ll just take supplements, instead!!!” Have you ever noticed how unhealthy-looking, how pallid and slow-thinking the majority of people are who work at healthfood stores? I have, and I eat almost entirely organically. They rely on too many vitamins and not enough living food.
As above, so below.
Read on for more.
Successful societies create systems that utilize the talents of all of their members. Some of those societies do so through the use of slavery and/or serfdom/rigid caste systems, but the most successful, dominant societies over the last several hundred years have evolved into places where talents and work are rewarded sufficiently to create livable lives for most of their members.
Including the stupid.
The hard, generational trek up the class ladder is evidence of evolution at work, and the more our system includes all of its citizens equally in terms of possibilities, the better it will become. Use what talents people possess. Sure, reward the brilliant, but make life palatable for the ditchdigger as well.
The U.S. has failed to keep up with much of the rest of the developing world in this matter, and it is finally reaping the whirlwind created by its greed and folly. All you need to know on that account is our world-leading percentage of prison residents.
In October 2013, the incarceration rate of the United States of America was the highest in the world, at 716 per 100,000 of the national population. While the United States represents about 4.4 percent of the world’s population, it houses around 22 percent of the world’s prisoners. Corrections (which includes prisons, jails, probation, and parole) cost around $74 billion in 2007 according to the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics.
We are not taking care of “the stupids,” and when they get mad, they steal and kill. End of story. All races, all sexes. That’s the way it works.
How best to do this?
Keep on humping along, I guess. Distrust so-called leaders…no what matter their supposed politics may be…if they take huge money from corporate entities that are dedicated to the bottom line even if that means sending jobs from our “stupids” to others elsewhere that are paid a fraction of what U.S. workers are paid.
Or used to be paid, anyway. Ross Perot pinned it 25+ years ago.
From the NY Times coverage of the 1992 presidential debates:
Q: Yes, I’d like to direct my question to Mr. Perot. What will you do as President to open foreign markets to fair competition from American business, and to stop unfair competition here at home from foreign countries so that we can bring jobs back to the United States.
PEROT: That’s right at the top of my agenda. We’ve shipped millions of jobs overseas and we have a strange situation because we have a process in Washington where after you’ve served for a while you cash in and become a foreign lobbyist, make $30,000 a month; then take a leave, work on Presidential campaigns, make sure you got good contacts, and then go back out. Now if you just want to get down to brass tacks, the first thing you ought to do is get all these folks who’ve got these one-way trade agreements that we’ve negotiated over the years and say, “Fellows, we’ll take the same deal we gave you.” And they’ll gridlock right at that point because, for example, we’ve got international competitors who simply could not unload their cars off the ships if they had to comply — you see, if it was a two-way street — just couldn’t do it. We have got to stop sending jobs overseas.
To those of you in the audience who are business people, pretty simple: If you’re paying $12, $13, $14 an hour for factory workers and you can move your factory South of the border, pay a dollar an hour for labor, hire young — let’s assume you’ve been in business for a long time and you’ve got a mature work force — pay a dollar an hour for your labor, have no health care — that’s the most expensive single element in making a car — have no environmental controls, no pollution controls and no retirement, and you don’t care about anything but making money, there will be a giant sucking sound going south.
So we — if the people send me to Washington the first thing I’ll do is study that 2,000-page agreement and make sure it’s a two-way street. One last part here — I decided I was dumb and didn’t understand it so I called the Who’s Who of the folks who’ve been around it and I said, “Why won’t everybody go South?” They say, “It’d be disruptive.” I said, “For how long?” I finally got them up from 12 to 15 years. And I said, “well, how does it stop being disruptive?” And that is when their jobs come up from a dollar an hour to six dollars an hour, and ours go down to six dollars an hour, and then it’s leveled again. But in the meantime, you’ve wrecked the country with these kinds of deals. We’ve got to cut it out.
It took a little longer than he thought it would take and the revolt of the “stupids” ended up with Trump in the White House, but here we jolly well are, aren’t we.
The best bet for the 2020 presidential election if we do not wake the fuck up?
A Republican centrist vs. a Democratic centrist…and by “centrist” I mean someone who takes money from those corporate interests that have…in pursuit of the bottom line…fulfilled Perot’s prediction.
…when their jobs come up from a dollar an hour to six dollars an hour, and ours go down to six dollars an hour, and then it’s leveled again. But in the meantime, you’ve wrecked the country with these kinds of deals.
Welcome to the wreckage of the good ship “S.S. United States.”
As Perot also said:
We’ve got to cut it out.
Trump isn’t going to do it, despite his populist, nationalist spiel. All he really wants is power and profit for himself and the new gang that he represents. And the mainstream Republicans aren’t going to do it, for sure!!!
That leaves the Dems.
Who are controlled by the corporate-funded DNC establishment.
The prospects don’t look too good right about now, do they.
So it goes.
But we do keep trying.
Don’t we.
Don’t we?
Please!!!
Later…
AG