Booman recently posted an article called This Ain’t Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. In it he wrote:
I remember the show Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous. They didn’t air it so we’d know where to go to string the bastards up. Things feel different now.
He also wrote:
Maybe it’s my imagination, but things are changing.
My comments follow. Read on if you are interested.
It’s not your imagination, Booman. Things are changing. All you have to do is look at the ever-increasing media coverage of the Occupy movement and…to a lesser degree but still accelerating…of Ron Paul to know that. Things are changing so hard and so quickly that they can no longer be ignored.
I mean…look around. In three quick years Barack Obama…who appeared to reside somewhere left of center when he first appeared on the national scene…now occupies dead center. (Or even center-right if you consider some of the more draconian military and intelligence/surveillance/assassination actions that he has approved.)
Has he moved?
Nope.
He’s still the same “…smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics” that Dr. Adolph Reed Jr. described way back in 1996.
But the board on which the game is played has moved.
The success of the Tea Party was the first real indication of this movement. Although it is regressive and anti-evolutionary on every level, it is also a sincere expression of the real dissatisfaction that is being felt on all levels of this society regarding the way things are being run by the Permanent Government.
The Bernie Madoff bust was another. Suddenly a face was put on the kleptocracy, and questions began to be asked.
How could he possibly have gotten away with such a crude scam at such a high level for so long?
The answer was plain enough. Corruption and incompetence at the highest levels of the system had allowed him to run his game. And almost simultaneously other, much larger Ponzi bubbles began to burst.
The “change” was upon us.
That change is going to continue until it is either successfully repressed by the same forces that have been in power for 50+ years here…I date the JFK assassination as the real beginning of the metamorphosis of America into Omertica, myself…or it climbs right on up into the White House in the person of Ron Paul. Or…if we survive four more years w/a PermaGov-allied preznit of either mainstream party…some other expression of that “change.”
Bet on it.
Repression?
If the media can’t do it, there are…other ways.
Cooption, infiltration, military/police actions…just look at the PermaGov tactics that worked for so long in South/Central/Caribbean America to see how it will fight this change.
But also…look at the ultimate failure of those efforts in that area of the world. They were was successful only as holding and delaying actions. You can take down but so many Allendes, priests and nuns before the word begins to spread, and this particular change that we are seeing is largely crowd technology-driven so it’s almost impossible to figure out who to take down.
What to do, what to do…?
They don’t really know what to do, apparently, because this American Autumn thing is growing at an exponential rate right now.
When the time is ripe, things change.
And this country is ripe like a motherfucker.
Bet on that as well.
People like Jamie Dimon, Lloyd Blankfein and the execrable Jeffery Immelt (Who Obama has recently honored by making him the head of some jive blue ribbon panel on “Jobs Creation.”) are now painfully obvious villains to a majority of the American people. This is a sea change the likes of which has not been seen here since the Great Depression.
Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous?
The media can’t run that game anymore because it simply won’t fly when people are faced with mass foreclosures, runaway inflation and increasingly serious unemployment numbers. Suddenly the “rich and famous” appear to be criminals instead of role models.
Change?
“You betcha!!!,” as one of the prime agents of that change is wont to say.
What’s that!!!??? Sarah Palin as a prime agent of change?
Yup.
Dig it.
When American Idol-style amateurism, (un)reality TV and politics all coalesced in the person of Sarah “Sweetlips” Palin, it was only a matter of time before the whole media house of cards message would collapse as well. I mean…y’gotta have at least line-level competent actors if you are going to get a whole society to suspend its disbelief when they are daily faced with the real facts of the matter, right? She couldn’t even learn her lines, fer chrissake!!!
And here we are, three years later.
At a crossroads.
You know what the crossroads meant to the old, blues-based black culture, right?
That was where the devil made bargains with the greedy and the unaware.
Are we aware enough not to sell out once again? Sell our souls down Hades’ various rivers?
We shall soon see.
Remember…even “change” can change.
The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man is eternal vigilance; which condition if he break, servitude is at once the consequence of his crime, and punishment of his guilt.-John Philpot Curran from his speech on the Right of Election of Lord Mayor of Dublin, July 10, 1790.
Are we in it for the long game?
Have we got due vigilance as well as due diligence?
We shall see, soon enough.
Watch.
Later…
AG
