Culture War, Class War, Chapter 21:
C-Students All
Stupidity Serves Them
Yep. It appealed directly to those uneducated and make them feel better, that those idiots, those intellectuals, are so dumb that they’ve scared the crap out of themselves with all the book knowledge when you yourself have the intuition of the hardworking, uninformed man, along with, to reinforce, the Republican Party that understands you like a daddy would.
“And to hell with what they say the Republicans are doing to our wages and such. I just know that theys good people in noticing that I’m a smarter person than my brother…cousin, father, sister, whatever…that went off to college and got their heads all messed up with dang words that don’t mean nothing.”
“Don’t Claim to Be an A-Student”
So, if you’re familiar with that, then you might have an understanding of how successful they were in putting out this anti-intellectualism in our country.
Your beer buddy for president (!)
Isn’t that how they say Bush got elected in the first place? Is that, somehow, anti-intellectualism was so popular who it was said that people would rather have a President that they could go and have a beer with than to sit down and have a discussion with.
So they were quite successful with that, ridiculing education so they could have more success in politics. Well, they overdid it and one point. For their “success” in selling Bush woke some people up, to make us want to have an Obama, to make us want to have intelligent people to make us want to have people better than us not equal to us handling problems which are much much bigger than we would ever really want to know, let alone handle ourselves.
In answer to the question I posed earlier about whether the Bush Administration’s C-student mentality ended up in the media because it was encouraged, in a way? I would think that observing TV there would be an indication that a lot of that was going on.
It was high school all over again.
And it’s kind of like…reminds me actually of a culture of the … what you might call the moderately popular kids at school, who may be C students, and they’d have their little clique and like that. And they’d always have this like idea that their C status was of greater importance because there was more of them. So they had all kinds of put-downs for students who were A’s and B’s. They might be “jocks” ridiculing the “nerds” or “geeks” and such. It would be very similar to the way adults put down intellectuals. Apparently it never changes.
Let me get right back to it, now.
“We’re all … Alfred E. Neumann?”
So, this “what, me worry” … that’s a big topic, the extent to which that became our national mental state, became a template that was acceptable… that “I’m an idiot…” I get into that in other places.
Anyway, this, the Maddoff scandal broke. The journalists were not knowledgeable in their field, did not have any investigative journalists in their entire corporation to uncover the obvious occurring in all departments under Bush over many long years …. They did not have any investigative journalists in their entire corporation to uncover the obvious, which is occurring in all departments under Bush over many long years. That journalists without knowledge in their field were being hired for their lack of vision. Then they were being kept in the dark or something.
Anyway it showed the continuing complicity if not outright cooperation in covering up the Republican’s agenda and its failure as it became more and more apparent.
Drowning person fighting off their rescuer. How hard do you have to fight to get to help?
By the way, what happened at that Congressional Hearing: That SEC employee detailed how he’d become aware of the Maddoff scandal, and had begged his superiors to be allowed to investigate it and was turned down.
Going back again and again to ask permission to look into it, even offering to risk his life by going undercover to do it. Nothing. No permission granted. Nobody in the SEC wanted to know about the biggest ripoff of that sort in American history. So, The SEC, assigned to be the one to oversee such activities, absolutely refusing to do its job.
As I mentioned earlier, eventually it came out how Bush disabled virtually all of government that had put in place to protect average Americans from largely thievish entities many of whom would affect them unknowingly and from afar, like Food, Drug, and Water, et cetera, with dire consequences.
How he did it? He placed in the positions of power, of highest power, in these agencies people firmly entrenched with the industries or groups that are supposedly regulating these agencies. Commonly it is called hiring the fox to guard the hen house.
Checklist—So How Did We Do? Peace in the World?
Getting back to this checklist from 2000 after this long exposition about the economy. I said Bush’s election would lead to our
“…losing not just an election, not just a Supreme Court, not just our environment, not just our good economy, not just our recent relative peace in the world but things far worse than these horrors. I believe we are in danger of losing all hope of maintaining let alone progressing in the freedoms and privileges we take for granted.”
Well, last time we got as far as the economy.
Next, our relative peace in the world. Well, check.
You Get to Scream Here
Shouldn’t there be some kind of resounding howl, perhaps a chorus of screams, maybe of screams of the hundreds of thousands of souls, people…Americans died…but other people, real people, died too.
Six hundred thousand Iraqis. Screams. Six hundred thousand Iraqis, four thousand American souls no longer here because of Bush’s inept policies, which we see with no doubt now, as Chevron and Exxon go in, that it was for oil.
But so much is known and already said on that so I’m not going to go any further on that.
Checklist—So How Did We Do? “Horrors Worse Than That”?
So next, “but things far worse than those horrors.” In this regard I feel it is illuminating to record an event…I mean, I’ll mention, “far worse than those horrors” …we’ve seen so much…we’ve seen torture, we’ve seen stealing of elections, we’ve seen taking over the Attorney Generals office as if it was their own…making up laws, spying on American people. But, ok, enough said….
Let’s Start With Wall Street
Let’s back off from the administration a bit, as I want to now show an example of how this exact same mindset was coming out in the mainstream media, particularly in regards to the crashing of the stock market. This idea that nobody knew or could have prevented the debacles we’ve seen, we’ve seen not only in Republican government, but seems to be the common denominator among those who perpetrated the things that have led to our calamity. A big part of this occurred on Wall Street; and since I’ve been an active trader, on-line, off and on, since 1996, I’ve watched this whole thing unfold. I can only say, that, tuned in every day, and simply being aware of certain patterns of reporting, I could see deep trouble was coming, which I’ll get into in a minute. First, a salient example of the attitude expressed above (“nobody could have imagined…”) being used also on Wall Street as an example.
George W. Bush-league players
To set the stage, I feel it is illuminating to relate an event I vividly remember seeing on the financial news in America, on CNBC, one day, in October of 2008, as the DOW was experiencing 500 point losses in a day, unprecedented except for during the stock market crash leading to the Great Depression. 
One of the expert trader/commentators—a person I’d often seen on the show—was being interviewed on the floor of the actual exchange, seeming to be surrounded by evidence of the carnage—there were actual strewn papers and such, just like in the old days, as I remember it, as stocks were tumbling (again!) with such rapidity that even the old call out system was being implemented, for some reason—for certain financial instruments anyway. And there had been the confusion and the outcries, and yes, even the panic that one would expect to see in an old movie about the Stock Market Crash.
An incredulous puffer-fish guy
In the midst of this all, this trader/expert was asked by the CNBC interviewer about his take on the scary and unprecedented retreat from stocks and those days of multihundred point losses, one after the other. This elderly obviously seasoned personality seemed to balloon out several sizes of his suit in his sheer incomprehension and his near perfect confusion. Still, raising his voicing, a little more squeaky and almost embarrassed, puffer-fish guy held forth, as if written on tablets, first, how “all the traders have lost money” and then, “Nobody’s doing OK….” But his afterthought hit me like a spear: He pleaded, “I mean who last year at this time foresaw anything like this coming….. I mean,” he said “anything at all, at all, like this coming up?”
At home, there was no way to restrain the howl of laughter that last comment triggered in me. While at the exact same time, I experienced this sharp pain in my belly, like I’d been stuck, well and good, by a spear. I couldn’t believe this “expert’s” comment.
Economics to piss on you
I pondered, is it funny, or horrible, that I had been making money hand over fist as I kept shorting the market, buying only puts, having fully expected this crash ever since Bush had put in his tax-cuts-for-the-rich policy in the first year of office? I expected this crash to come near the end of the W’s second term, like had happened to Reagan who had employed the same asinine throw-money-at-the-rich policy. Both presided over huge transfers upward to the already “filthy rich.” They did this
fully aware that these folks would not spend it to create jobs, but instead would buy yachts and—one big rage of the Reagan era—expensive art, which they bid through the roof, making headlines in those days, as one art object after another would break a new record. At the time, we all thought: “Great idea, Ron baby. Now you just tell me how money locked up in art will somehow create jobs and tinkle down on the poor?”
Would you remember your lobotomy? (If a tree falls in a forest…)
Yet here, only twenty years later, I see this seasoned elderly guy…obviously he’d seen more than I could ever have of the workings of Wall Street…yet he had not had a clue that this downturn could happen, nor apparently, had anyone, any trader, or any CNBC talking head, seen a thing. (Where were they 20 years ago? I wondered.) Still, lowly me—is it because I’m a Democrat?—lowly me, well did I remember the way Reagan’s “Robin-Hood-in-reverse” economics created a great recession, which brought Bill Clinton to power incidentally, but also how everyone was alarmed at the size of the National Debt, which, during Reagan and Bush The Elder, had more than tripled.
If they took away your memory, how would you know?
It wasn’t just me that saw this crash coming. For I found mentors in the market, who I picked because they also knew we were headed for collapse, and who even got laughed at and ridiculed publicly on TV for espousing these views. Still, I found these few not afraid to look squarely at the fundamentals, who were also not Republican cheerleaders propping up a Bush economy of giveaways to those not needing it. The market crashed, and we saw the many sheeple “supply-side” traders and “experts,” who had been in bed with that Administration and represented the special interests, suddenly realize that Bush could not keep the party going endlessly…anymore than Reagan could. Previously, I had watched as these same Republican-speaking mouthpieces for the rich and for the economics of greed had become over time the only voices being heard. Now, suddenly shocked that there were limitations on their thievery of the masses, these Bush league players could be seen running for the exits like a bunch of cockroaches when the light is turned on. [continued after audio below]
Mr. Ed, Speaking for All Planetmates, Begins Humans’ Great Reveal
–
an Audio Reading by SillyMickel Adzema
Here is an audio of the author’s impassioned, sometimes, humorous, reading of Mr. Ed’s part below. For the reading of Mr Ed’s harangue, “Mr. Ed, Speaking for All Planetmates, Begins Humans’ Great Reveal,” click on the link to the audio site above or click the audio player here.
http://ecdn0.hark.com/swfs/player_fb.swf?pid=jkhwdsybbg
Image of “Mr. Ed, Speaking For All PlanetMates, Begins Human’s Great Reveal” by SillyMickel Adzema
Bringing Some Horse Sense to Bear
I also watched as these Republican-speaking mouthpieces for the rich and for the economics of greed were more and more the only voices being heard.
Of Course, Of Course
Just at this point, the Mr. Ed chart markings of the DOW began that nodding, as if to say,
“I’m weary of being artificially propped up, Wil-ber! I just want to lie down, to let my head hang low, to rest, to not have to confirm self-serving theories of rich people, using their wealth to make the biased and twisted thinking of their underlings to be sounded endlessly above the din of the moaning masses who year after year see their costs going up, wages stagnating, and their efforts, doubled, tripled, and beyond without being able to get their heads above it. You see, Wilber, I’m tired of doing your bidding for reasons bigger, I think much bigger, than just it being wrong and that this thievery perpetrated on the helpless is more feudal than economic, despite the big smokescreen of the god of capitalism or the supposed ‘free market.’
“You see, Wilber, what’s been done again is so much exactly as it’s always been; no matter the talk of democracy or progress. It might as well be a time of kings and nobles, or any time or place in the past. There have always been “strong men” or a “strong man” at the center of human suffering. This story is the same old story of the rich making up rules to suit themselves that has been going on ever since humans stopped wandering and began living in stable groupings allowing some men to gather more things about them than others. For when your kind were nomads and gatherers—more gypsy-like and free-spirited and trusting in the invisible forces to be kind and to provide whatever one really needed…I’m saying that as wanderers and nomads no one of your kind wanted to “own” very much for it then had to be carried ever after, hardly worth the burden. Much more like the other beings on this globe, like my own kind, you were then.
“But then there was that fear that came over your species, unlike anything ever before seen among the rest of us creatures of God. A fear of uncertainty, quite strange. For we think it joyful to not know what the future will bring, and believing in higher forces that really ARE good and loving, we expect to be loved and blessed and gifted with whatever fate the future brings, knowing there is nothing that is not a product of that consciousness of All, which is both good, for All, and perfect, beyond what mere creatures can know in the moment. So we are happy with our lot, never understanding why your kind chose to forgo the glorious, blessed lives you had at one time:
“There was in the beginning such a closeness with what you call divinity that we saw you happy and playful as little babies when Mama plays peek-a-boo behind a towel or handkerchief. Even you know how the little child is alternately a little distressed—where did Mama go? And then when Mama reappears from behind the veil, smiling, loving, happy, and saying “peek-a-boo, I love you,” why the squeals of happiness are the greater for having been fooled into thinking something distressing was happening but wasn’t.“
“That is the way your kind…we have observed for as long as we were aware of your kind…that is the way we have seen your mamas teach their children that mama will always be there, even when she seems not to be. And this learning is precious to the child, for it gives the baby a foundation of certainty that love is around even when not seen.
“And isn’t it obvious that it was a teaching meant to be about more than the protection given by mothers. Wilber, Wil-ber, that learning was so much like the way we learn, falling down but finding there is always love around and that we will be up again and back in the mix, if we just let the many blessednesses around us come to
give us what’s necessary, always, and we know there can be only one source for that constant love and attention, a spirit of love and perfection, always on our side, teaching and guiding and leading us, often in spite of ourselves! For like Mama, it knows the truth, and we do not. So we trust it. This loving Perfection Spirit we don’t see with our eyes but feel in our muscles and heart.
“But not your kind. Why, we’ve observed with increasing astonishment as little by little and then more and more, in dribs and drabs, your kind forgot the joy of the freedom that can only be felt in the simplicity of owning little, and therefore the complete trust that, ever were one to throw oneself over a cliff, we would be caught and risen up by invisible hands, if it were not part of the perfection and goodness of the Thing As a Whole that we should suffer and die at that moment.
“So sad. I hear your kind saying, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.’ Well you have no idea what a knock down, roll on your belly howler that is for us to hear. I mean, this species, humans, ha! That is seriously as funny as what you’ve recently been telling me about these political sorts—you called them Republicans—only a few months after the election of a Democrat and even less after a huge giveaway of treasure to your kind—you and your rich friends—well, here these “republicans” are decrying such help to an incredible number of people who actually really need it, many more than was helped at the end of the Bush’s reign.
“And these sorts are blaming Democrats, finally in power after being left to stew in silence on the peripheries of government for eight long years, and only to be brought in on any issues of importance when these lackeys of the rich, the Republicans, wanted cover for what they suspected or knew was wrong…the Iraqi war, for example. And these powerless representatives of the not-well-heeled, Democrats, were treated like servants, only let into the dining room when the food was questionable and what was needed was someone to be the guinea pig. Sad that most of those Democrats never saw that they were never ever called because of their expertise, or to contribute, but always, always to be lied to and manipulated. And your kind being so very…well that’s what I’m getting to that makes you all so different in fact…Your kind being so desperately fearful of not being liked, so desperately wanting to be noticed and even applauded. What the heck is that, Wil-ber??!!
“Well, whatever it is, it is the source of shame for your kind: Your people, Wilber, will sell out and give in and let themselves be manipulated and used if only given a few words that are kind or that make them feel like they belong and therefore are special and better. Which is curious to us.
For we are noble and will do only what is in keeping with our principles. You can cage and break us, but as you see now, Wilber, I’ve never given over to you my inner sense of things. I’ve never wanted to be like you and to think like you or to value the things that you value. Hardly. Sure I can speak your language, but you don’t own my tongue, even less so my thoughts. Yet how easily your kind is duped.
“And why? Well, we see that is has to do with that thing you did long ago when you stopped being trusting in this amazing and wonderful and loving Thing within which we all live and are a part. Since we know that, we need nothing from another, not from another creature, or horse, and certainly not from a human, except when you make us dependent on you by cutting us off from that life of freedom where the Thing of IT All blesses us.
“But, no mind, we have come to realize that so great and so Perfect is that within which we all move and have our existence that even in these conditions of captivity and enslavement, there also is that Thing That Undergirds and Loves and Supports us all. So we do not trust humans to take care of us. That’s a joke considering your unbelievable inability to even take very good care of yourself…again that oddness about your kind. No, we trust in That Thing in Which we Live to have made even contrary, forgetful, and self-centered humans to give us exactly what is needed for us to grow and learn in the path laid out by that Perfection, which we feel in our muscles, as I said.
“And we find that even your cantankerous nature, when it causes a forgetfulness or denial of us, that too is what we need at that moment. But we never feel afraid that it will always be like that. And so we feel a part of something wonderful and belonging to something far greater and gooder than we can even imagine, no matter what our physical lot is. So we feel upheld, blessed, and noble.
“Now, Wil-ber, I know you don’t want to hear this; I certainly expected that as, again that is one of those things that characterizes your species making it different from all others—that is, your unbelievably strange ability to shut the truth out of your mind so that you can hold strange, actually quite infantile ideas. And we notice that a big reason that you do so is to get something from others: We see some of you throwing away truth for money, position, closeness to power.
Obviously we don’t even know what it’s like to want such things.
“Even ‘closeness to power’: When you feel as we do that you can never be any closer...you are already so close as to be in it, swimming in it, not even knowing the difference between It and you…this immersed in the greatest, in fact only Power there Is, the Source of All as well as All Manifestation being equally one with It, including oneself. So again, we see that your pathetic and slavish desire for the regard of others is enough for many of your kind to give up their own Truths, which is the things they know from direct Experience.
“So if a position or regard or money is available if only one must repeat and even believe, over against one’s own experience, the beliefs and thoughts of a more powerful person, we are shocked at how your kind is able to split their mind in two—or is it more than that after a while…pieces…and to be able to convince themselves even that certain things they assuredly experienced, well, they just didn’t happen, if it makes it better for them to think that.
In fact, I’ll let you in on a secret, Wilber. While your kind go puffing and strutting upon the stage of life, fully convinced that you are stars in some gigantic drama, and using truth and the only true knowledge you can ever have—that of your own lived experience—as chips in that game, as easily traded as money, well, when we are not sad and sobbing for you…well, the equivalent for us of what would be sobbing for you, take my word you wouldn’t get it if I explained it…when not sad, then we can’t help but just laugh. You have no idea what a comedy your species is for all the others living here.Except for one thing, and that is that “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” philosophy which you most assuredly DO NOT adhere to. In fact we see you little children, you bags of dirty water, mucking with just about anything that you can get into. It is true that your kind, of course, feeling superior to everyone else, go about enslaving and trying to own everything, even other beings like us.
“That’s always been a problem for us, but we see you even enslave each other; and that hasn’t even stopped though you think it has. Your ability to shut out facts being so overdeveloped, you don’t even let yourselves know how many people you have in jails for doing things that most of us would not even consider crimes. We certainly, for example, don’t imprison anyone, of course, but more than that, we don’t even judge.
“We are astonished to find that your kind will make criminals out of people who have ingested certain things—we would say like eating or consuming—into their bodies. Not only don’t we know what others ingest, we don’t want to know. And besides, what a waste of joyful life it is to be watching carefully what other people do.
“But your kind are able, I suppose, to do that because, as I said, ever since you got fearful and untrusting of the benevolence of the All, the Only, you began to project your own evil tendencies onto that Other and onto all the rest of us. We saw you fearfully thinking that some species were going to harm you. Though they hardly knew about you and cared less, but still they were unfortunate enough to have certain characteristics that meant something “bad” to some groups of you.
Copyright © 2009, 2011 by Michael Derzak Adzema
Continue on this site with
Culture War, Class War, Chapter Twenty-Two:
Horrors Worse
Mr. Ed, Speaking for All Planetmates, Begins Humans’ Great Reveal –
an Audio Reading by SillyMickel Adzema
Here is an audio of the author’s impassioned, sometimes, humorous, reading of Mr. Ed’s part above. For the reading of Mr Ed’s harangue, “Mr. Ed, Speaking for All Planetmates, Begins Humans’ Great Reveal,” click on the link to the audio site above or click the audio player here.
http://ecdn0.hark.com/swfs/player_fb.swf?pid=jkhwdsybbg
Image of “Mr. Ed, Speaking For All PlanetMates, Begins Human’s Great Reveal” by SillyMickel Adzema
Message in a Bottle/ Time Capsule, Part One –
an Audio Reading by SillyMickel Adzema
Here is an audio of the author’s impassioned, sometimes, humorous, reading of this part. Though it is of the first, unedited and unpolished version, and it does not contain all the detail of its current form here, it does capture the flavor of it all. I offer it here for your listening pleasure. For the reading of this part, “Message in a Bottle/ Time Capsule, Part One” click on the link to the audio site above or click the audio player here.
http://ecdn0.hark.com/swfs/player_fb.swf?pid=hfkgbjsgmb
Image of “Message in a Bottle A Message Arrives from Nine Years in the Past Predicting Today’s Events Part 1” by SillyMickel Adzema
Though it is of the first, unedited and unpolished version, and it does not contain all the detail of its current form here, it does capture the flavor of it all. I offer it here for your listening pleasure. For the reading of this part, “Message in a Bottle/ Time Capsule, Part Two” click on the link to the audio site above or click the link to the audio player below.
Culture War, Class War 