Atheist Meditations

I'm still bothered by the same banshee screams as one culture is ground asunder by another. Like one tectonic plate sliding beneath its neighbor; sometimes quiet, sometimes quake.

Either I'm just growing a little less idealistic and that's scuffing me into a pattern of negative thinking, or the culture of America has changed quite a bit in the last six years. I'm not sure which. Really, I'm not.

I've heard more than one person observe that 'you can tell who's going to be an asshole driver on the road by whether they have a fish/God Bless America/Support Our Troops bumper sticker on their vehicle. The kernel of this be more than the fact that a-holes are drawn to the dominate culture; the propaganda model currently applied to those groups purposefully excludes the information and perspective necessary to make the co-operative process of freeway travel possible.

Just as our Lieutenant Governor (and Secretary of Transportation) yesterday got neigh hysterical denying that the 35-W tragedy could possibly be something she might have to own up to - 'my daughter drives that bridge twice a day going to school, so to suggest anyone in our department chose dollars over public safety is an outrage' - - - the patterns never change. It is not about having contemplated the fact that your daughter drives a particular bridge every day, the kernel lies in never having contemplated anything. Nothing beyond short term impacts upon the self can be engaged in the current media model disseminated by corporate media.

This is brutally fascinating in a state where just one hundred and fifty years ago Sioux Indians were worth twenty five bucks a scalp.

We occupy our place in Minnesota because a majority of our ancestors were able to dehumanize the natives to the level of dogs. Yeah, its too bad they can't feed their children, guess they should have worked harder on their farms this spring. A subconscious refusal to connect the dots between forcing them off the valuable land and starvation of their next generation.

Again the refusal to consider other human beings reigns supreme.

Ms. Molnau, our Lieutenant Governor and Secretary of Transportation, totally misses the point. For her, the notions of human beings' safety and the bridge integrity were so far removed from the petty concerns of governance . . . that was engaged in such a level of the abstract as to be meaningless.

Of course she starts breaking glass with the sound of her nasal voice when she contemplates her daughter being in one of those submerged cars, but she has never considered that scenario until it happened to ten or so Minnesotans! It is the retardation of the neo-cons. It would have ironic value if dead people were not involved. They can never see themselves or their loved ones as part of society, only as elite - better than, superior too. We all die when the bridge we're driving over collapses.

So back to the initial impetus. The dehumanization of others has long been a part of the 'conservative' view, and now it is ascendant. All conservative media separates a man from his society and makes him feel defensive and reactionary; that's an easy man to control. That's a man with deformed testicles, but that's another blog entry.

Just as you will never get that prick in the SUV to back off more that six inches from your rear bumper before you find a place to merge into the right lane - no bumper sticker or hand gesture is going to change that behavior. It is not that the driver is too stupid to understand that their SUV has twenty times the mass of the motorcycle they are tailgating, just that they don't consider it or the life of said motorcyclist as being worthy of immediate consideration.

Grrr. I'm still frustrated.

Just as the tobacco industry made bazillions by screwing multiple generations of Americans into emphysema and lung cancer, so is the media cartel making bazillions at the cost of our democracy. They don't care. Just as our society is saddled with tens of millions of oxygen tanks 'cuz our legislature would rather lick the sensitive spot between the balls and the anus of Big Tobacco than challenge it, they are not going to challenge a media that turns potential human beings into retards.

Who wouldn't want to be a leader in a superpower populated by retards? Unlimited power, zero oversight. Sounds like fascist nirvana to me.

Labels: Grrr