Nobody will refrain from using dumbass buzzwords like “job creators.” Dude, they’re bosses, which means they’re assholes, probably.
Nobody thinks your favorite band rocks.
Nobody will wisely allocate resources.
Nobody believes so strongly about kids that we should take one or even two of them to the park and hold a barbecue every time we want to yell more about political bullshit.
Nobody believes your Facebook links to articles about your favorite candidates are persuasive.
Nobody believes you should be proud of your political leaders, who’ve delivered you to this great historical moment.
Nobody believes another law will help us relieve whatever problem is afflicting us now.
Nobody will give a fuck. That is absolutely certain.
Nobody will seriously believe in American Exceptionalism, and won’t that be a fine day?
Nobody agrees with you about abortion, civil rights, civil liberties, the Constitution, America’s place in the world, privatization, public education, tax rates, basic economics, the importance of William McKinley in modern politics, and everything else, so you don’t have to talk about it anymore, okay?
This is not a left wing/right wing debate. I am no Democrat. I’m no democrat either. The problem for Mustaine is a problem for any follower of modern politics. The more you follow and the more you read, the stupider you become. That’s because almost everything you follow and read is propaganda of the most pathetic sort. In otherwise normal conversations, you end up spouting the opinions of thousands or millions. The more you follow and read, the less critical analysis you apply to what you follow and read. Because there is such a surplus to follow and read, you never have the time, capacity, and real information with which you can form a critique. You end up parroting another fool’s critique, which is, in fact, propaganda.
So here’s Dave Mustaine spouting off about Obama’s birthplace and gun control in precisely the manner and nearly the language of various right-wing callers to radio talk shows who spout off in precisely the manner and nearly the language of those radio talk show hosts who spout off in precisely the manner and nearly the language of pundits … keep following that line through TV ads to politicians to “think tank” “scholarship.”
Mustaine is an easy target, particularly for liberals who listen to classic rock or jazz or fucking Metallica, but those liberals might wonder about all those graphs and pictures of Obama laughing with children as though he couldn’t kill one and as though he has improved their lives and yours by a factor of ten thousand, even though he’s doing just about all the shit Bush did and even a little more.
But dig that second paragraph again. When we grew up, we were told to read, because reading would bring knowledge, and that knowledge would bring power. Hey, man, Dave Mustaine can read. He probably reads a lot. So do you. Do you think reading what he’s reading has helped him understand the world? Or has it shaped his world so tightly and weirdly that he ends up sounding like a fool when he talks to someone who hasn’t read the same stuff he’s read? Has reading all those newspapers and speech transcripts shaped you in similar fashion?
Literacy does grant power, but that power is limited, particularly in these dumb times. As noted everywhere, we live in a land of ridiculous surplus super-sized everything. So many people write books and papers and blogposts and so much of all that is an echo of others’ writing and speech, half-heard and remembered.
Know that, and know this: reading helps you understand and makes sense of words, but not necessarily the world.
RE: Greek tragedy. Somewhere along the way you’ve heard terms like catharsis and deus ex machina. You know tears must come in buckets. You’ve read something about the roots of man-boy relations in ancient Greece and wondered about the secret roots of NAMBLA and how you’re going to react if something less than American happens on stage. Maybe these things come to mind when you imagine Greek tragedy. Or not. Maybe I’m just projecting my funky ignorant associations onto you.
Sorry.
Last Friday, the Wife took me to see a production of Euripides’s The Trojan Women. I didn’t expect any man-boy love, exactly, but I have recently read some Greek tragedies, including Euripedes’s The Bacchae, and what is clear is that although our culture owes a great deal to the ancient Greeks, we are at least as different from them as Jews like myself are from the ancient Israelites.
In Shakespearean tragedies, a basically likeable dude starts on high and ends bloody on the floor, the last of many bloody dead. We know how they’ll end, but they at least begin with hope. The tragedy is that hope is inevitably squashed under a patient mean thumb. Greek tragedies go from black to deeper black. Few of us are prepared for it. The Wife sure wasn’t. By the time Astyanax was sentenced to a splat from on high, she was chuckling to save her sanity, or she felt it was melodrama.
I think she felt what a lot of the audience felt: this was too much. By the end, when the Trojan women were marched to their separate ships and and lives of slavery far from Troy, they felt wrung dry.
You won’t be surprised to learn I felt differently. In fact, I walked out all smiles, and it wasn’t just because the Wife had taken me out for an evening of culture rare in Jacksonville. Some folks, a small set, are wired for the real darkness. Like, dig this.
Even though they chart black maps of awesome, Loss will never be popular, precisely because the maps are pure black. Most of us mostly want entertainment to be a sweet escape from these rough times. We are culturally programmed to want that, which explains every sorry shit band you and I love. Yeah, I include myself. You think I’ve escaped Poison and Whitesnake? I still listen to Whitesnake. I can see the awesomeness of Greek plays and Loss, but only in limited doses.
Listen: escape is not release.
We understand catharsis–in our brains. That’s not where the real thing is found.
*Despite what any or all of this post may suggest, I am happier now than I have ever been.
Nobody will end the wars on abstraction.
marcuspactor 