My parents have apparently gotten me a subscription to "Newsweek" magazine, to help balance out from a more mainstream, "establishment" point of view, all the left wing propaganda I read. The headline this week is "WE ARE ALL SOCIALISTS NOW". Damn. I've been saying that stuff for like 10 years. What gives?
The point is that the ruling class is completely discredited in what it has been doing to our economy and our foreign policy for the past several decades. It has no confidence in its own ideas or leaders or propagandists so it's looking to borrow some from other traditions (of course in a watered down, pervered way...). The point though is that it is super ironic, and indeed, validating, to see such a headline proclaimed so loudly from a mainstream source...
You steal bread and you go to jail. You destroy the economy of the biggest (economically), most powerful nation in the history of the world and YOU GET PAID BILLIONS OF DOLLARS IN BAILOUTS, AND YOU GET TO KEEP YOUR JOB WHILE EVERYONE ELSE LOOSES THEIRS! But there is one price paid: it is a political price. The cost of doing business like this is that people see the men behind the curtains for the manipulators they really are, and they will find their voices and find (and become) new leaders. The political price of the American neo-liberal impolosion is that across the land, articulate, unemployed college graduates brought up on myspace and service jobs are writing angry blogs with embedded revolutionary imagery about their own life experiences. This isn't about reading some book of Marx or Trotsky's that was written a hundred years ago over coffee with a tiny handful of people with similarly 'quirky' interests... Nor is it about protesting the IMF or kicking sweatshops off campus because it's the morally "right" thing to do... This is about people choosing between food and rent, adults having to live with their parents or off their parents because their skills and lives aren't cared about by the people who decide what jobs will exist.
This is about people's ideologies being broken down and new paradigms emerging out of our own, painful, life experiance.
Tonight these are my words.... and I am feeling slightly violent.
Unemployment deleted my claim.
The former employer that laid me off denies I worked for them.
Someone in Georgia stole my SSN and is apparently filing an unemployment claim with it.
People have been here SIX times to look at garbage disposal or oven and neither are fixed yet
A sometimes GF / FWB calls me while I am at the bar with other people crying about a horrible day and losing her job and being stabbed in the back by her friends so I go there to try and be supportive and I knock on her door and she doesn't even open. I call she says she's taking a bath and doesn't want to be bothered. The people I left at the bar think I am lame for ditching them. Then today this same girl I see walking down the street and she just says 'hi' and walks by apparently not caring at all.
Another friend asks me to give them a ride five blocks from the bar to their house so they don't have to walk in the snow. I get there (I have a cold) and I have to wait at this bar for an hour for her to talk to the bar manager who is in a meeting about something. Why didn't she do that before she asked me to come pick her up and if I'm upset about my time being wasted I am the bad guy?
I have some money... wait I have to pay electric bill and cpr + first aid certification for a job there goes the money never mind
I thought the album mixing was done but it is not there are still things that need to be fixed, just a decibel or two up or down here and there it is driving me crazy I want this done and to work on some new music.
I like freezing soup in Tupperware and then microwaving it but today I learned this can give me cancer.
Car windshield wiper switch is broken again I had it replaced in May it is still fucking around I have to take the fuse in and out with pliers to turn it on or off.
They pass all these 'stimulus' bills... the bills give more money than I can conceive of to rich capitalist speculators and banks and the banks aren't loaning it out or creating more jobs with it or putting anyone back to work.
They keep funding the war so we can keep rapist, human rights violating, fundamentalist warlords in power in Afghanistan who make money by growing the opiates that in our depression we buy and then get sent to jail for using and another corporation gets paid our tax dollars to build the jail.
Fucking windows vista keeps blue screening.
My degree is worthless. I went to college for four years and paid 10s of thousands of dollars each year of it and I can't get a job driving a delivery truck or disassembling bits of electronic stuff for $8 an hour on an assembly line because I don't have 'experiance'.
In a few months I will have self written/ released nine full length albums that no one hears that only looses money and I have waited in rip off car repair places on tour and frozen in the snow to take this sound and image and authentic, live playing of instruments to people but it's the people who make poorly produced, repetitive music that is not at all creative or innovative or meaningful and who have never played a live show in their life that are now getting distribution deals and ego boosts dropped into their laps.
I came in to work when I was sick when the manager asked me to because it was busy.
I brought to the manager's attention that we need to move the chairs and extra tables from the fire escape when the fire marshal came during a party for a surprise inspection and I helped us frantically do this so "we" would not get caught.
I stood on my feet at one am after working 16 hour day double shifts all week to fold 175 napkins in a hot kitchen because there was no where unoccupied to sit.
I told the tables the grat was already on the bill and didn't try to cheat them this way.
I sucked it up and went home with little money because I preferred to see what money there was distributed more equally among us than if I just sharked the tables.
I believed that, even though I don't necessarily like these rich people, or how they got their money, that if I was relatively honest and hard working for them and did all the crazy shifts and begged in different languages for the chef to do all the stupid food modifications that they wanted of me, that I could then take that money and experiance and use it for my own hopes and dreams afterwords...
I believed in the America of following your dreams, doing what is right for you, being nice to others and going out of your way for people you care about when you can, loving the country you live in, taking time to get to know its people, its dialects, its different fast food chains, its languages, and its geography, and I have written in word and in music about these places so that others may know the stories they tell...
And I feel at times like this that no one cares, that it has all been a complete waste of time. The government that allegedly gives a crap about whether or not an Iraqi can vote doesn't give a fuck about whether or not I can pay the rent or buy food before I get thrown out into the street... The people I thought were cool and genuine and that I tried to care about in the deep, loving way apparently only wanted me for random sex if that... The things I have done for myself to try and keep myself sane and re-affirm that the world really *is* beautiful, splendid, exciting, and at times rewarding are pounded out of my mind by the daily burden of every humiliation and theft and lie- petty and presidential alike...
The oil companies took all my savings in 2008 with their inflated prices. Exxon reported the highest quarterly earnings of any corporation in the history of the world that year. "Democratic" governors and senators eat Alaskan king crab and raw oysters and chocolates with pieces of silver on top of them while kids die in a stupid war because they are trying to get money for a college degree that none of the existing jobs even care about.
I am feeling slightly violent and slightly cheated and I want to scream or hurt something or hurt myself or start a revolution. I don't want to be at home by myself on the internet. I want to be next to you with signs and slogans and torches and pitchforks and I want to help the army revolt and I want to defend my co workers when the secret police deports them while their children wait at a school that no one will be able to pick them up from and I want to cry in joy and hold hands with homosexuals who love with a strength and a stability few hetero marriages have ever had and I want the CEOs and the Stock brokers to go to prison and I want people who sold dope because the jobs got exported to china to be freed and I want to vote on whether we burn down Ken Lay and Paris Hilton's mansions or turn them into homes for wounded soldiers instead and I want to breathe and relax and look into your eyes and have you tell me it will all be better and I want to have children that smile and laugh and I don't want you to look at the floor when you walk down the street and I want every bully confronted and I don't want to live in a world that can put a man on the moon but can't put food in people's stomachs or a roof over their heads so I will DEMAND and I will be HEARD when I say that all of us have the right to LOVE and to SMILE and to LIVE.
Have I done everything right? No... but I've done more things right than a lot of people who are more 'successful' in this rat race than I am.
I have the right to be ornery.
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