CSotD: Making cowards of us all
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Tom the Dancing Bug starts the year off with a heartfelt plea for cooperation from Big Brother.
My growing anger over the violation of the Fourth Amendment and the social contract in general, and my growing distrust over the Official Story, is beginning to overcome my indifference to the spying itself, which means the timing for this was exquisite.
One of the logical flaws in "1984" is that it is based on the idea that everyone is under constant surveillance, even a nebbish like Winston Smith.
Orwell overcomes that in large part by suggesting that the government has full-employment for that very reason: Everybody is pretty much in the business of keeping track of everybody else.
Well, then, Oceania must have been running one hell of a deficit.
Or maybe they were doing it on the cheap, the way we wage wars, by simply going off-budget and pretending it will all come together at some glorious point in the economic future.
In any case, the notion Ruben Bolling plays with here is, first of all, that we are being watched (rather than just having our data collected in case of need) and that, after all, it's perfectly natural for that to be happening (which is the topic of today's rant).
His bland tone is not only in keeping with his point, but an absolute delight.
As I have noted before, I've had at least tangential experience of being under surveillance. They were then, and are now, pretty incompetent.
I dated a draft counselor for a short time, and we knew she was under surveillance because, when she moved, the FBI came to the door and asked if we knew where she'd gone. She and I stopped going out because I was too apolitical for her and she was too political for me, so they may or may not have caught our brief dalliance in their records.
And that same summer, when the mother of a girl who was coming to visit someone in the house called because the FBI had shown up looking for her and had somehow already known that she was headed our way, we had a house rap to discuss whether we should clean the place top to bottom and play it cool, or go the other direction and dare them to try to play games with us by hanging a sign out the second floor saying, "Welcome FBI!"
Our conclusion was (A) don't poke the tiger with your umbrella and (B) don't bother vacuuming up every seed because, if they need evidence, they'll bring their own.
Which means that, having given it some thought and prolonged discussion, we decided in the end to do nothing.
This, you will note, is not a revolutionary attitude, but, then again, except for Annie who no longer lived there, we were freaks, not revolutionaries.
Anyone who wants to wait for ideas first to triumph among the masses, in a majority fashion before revolutionary action is initiated, will never become a revolutionary. What would be the difference, then, between a kind of a revolutionary and a latifundio owner, a wealthy bourgeoisie? None! It is clear that the human race will change. Of course, the human race will continue to develop, despite men and their errors. However, this is not a revolutionary attitude. — Fidel Castro, August, 1967
The problem was that we all wanted to change the world, but Annie insisted on carrying pictures of Chairman Mao while the rest of us were content to declare that war was over if we wanted it, counting on the collective will to impose itself on the government.
While alienating potential allies doesn't help your cause and may even set it back, Fidel is correct that, if you do want change, sitting around waiting for it to happen on its own doesn't accomplish a whole lot.
So now, for those of us who say, "Hey, kids, we did our part. It's up to you," here comes Matt Wuerker to bollix up things a little more.
Passing the torch is perfectly legitimate. We can't all be Benjamin Spock and stay out there on the barricades into our 70s, nor should we have to. Raise your kids right, and then, as you are handing off the torch, first use it to light a candle, and place that candle in your window.
That latter part, well, yeah. We have no problem letting it be someone else's battle, but the candle is becoming problematic …
The good news is, the market closed up at the end of 2013. The bad news is, the market closed up at the end up 2013.
Thing is, the privatizers would like to stop Social Security in favor of giving everyone 401k's in order to allow their pals on Wall Street to earn higher profits from churn and activity fees and so forth.
This is a somewhat selfless attitude, since it would take away their ability to raid the Social Security trust fund for their own budgetary purposes, but ain't nobody gonna contribute to their slush funds in that cause, so I guess it depends on your definition of "selfless."
In any case, most companies have long since converted their pensions to 401k systems. In my case, they carefully explained that they would still be paying into it by matching our own contributions.
This was shortly before they explained that they wouldn't be paying into it by matching our own contributions anymore.
We retained our existing-now-frozen pensions, though I was recently offered the choice of cashing mine out and rolling it over into my IRA, which I did, mostly because I didn't trust them to keep it solvent.
But I'm an old man in that regard. I suspect that an awful lot of 50-and-under workers have 401k's entirely, rather than pensions, and so find themselves in the position of this fellow, watching the ups and downs way too closely or, worse, actively meddling in their holdings in order to screw it all up faster.
(Yes, I know — you do an excellent job managing your 401k. You also about break even on lottery tickets. Which is a good thing, because, wasting money would annoy your wife, Morgan Fairchild, to whom you are married.)
The greater point being that, while the general health of pensions is also tied to the overall economy, the payout is fixed and so individual holders don't have quite the same sense of watching their own, personal futures rise and fall with the market.
Which means pension-holders aren't psychologically as closely tied to the power structure.
Theoretically.
If their employer were making contributions to that pension fund like they are supposed to, and if Congress were making regular contributions to the Social Security trust fund as it is supposed to, and if those funds were conservatively invested in generally non-exciting places as best practice and fiduciary trust would suggest, then the vagaries of the market would matter little.
And, if frogs had wings, the hardness of the earth would be irrelevant because they wouldn't keep bumping their little green asses on it.
But on this planet, in this reality, even for pensioners, we've created something as all-encompassing as Oceania, and, if we can't afford enough people to actually make sure that Winston Smith is doing his morning exercises properly, we can at least tie his future ability to feed, clothe and shelter himself to the success of Big Brother.
Thus, in order to break his bonds, he would have to also cash in his bonds, probably at a substantial loss.
And now we see where that leads.
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