Category: News

INTERNET — Seventeen hurricanes are loading up with hate over Africa, tearing a swath of destruction towards the Atlantic and the east coast of America. Grocery stores are manic with energy as Florence bears down but shelves are empty and customers are suffering from a mass outbreak of psychotic episodes.

“Why don’t they nuke the goddamn hurricane?” A man in a loud Hawaiian shirt shouted at a pile of emergency rations. “And why is this goddamn cart’s wheel stuck! God Dammit!” He threw the cart on the ground and told the nearby manager, “Look at this piece of shit store you’re running here. Goddamn cart wheel’s broken.”

Store manager Dr. Angstrom H. Troubador shook his head and said,”Tier One Civilization. It’s the Kardashev scale. We’re at tier zero because we have not tamed the earth’s energies. Well, actually we have, but our pyromaniac engineers have designed a string of seventeen hurricanes that power a spying ‘social media’ bought and paid for by a nascent neofascist political world order.”

“Fuck you! Fuck the store! Fuck everyone!” the man roared, crunching packets of ramen into his pockets and hurling a beer bottle at the concrete floor.

Dr. Troubador looked wistfully at the tall cumulus clouds through the vast windows above the Customer Service department and its dense assortment of tobacco products. “Yes we all know the carbon dioxide is to blame. But has anyone ever considered the effects of turbines, pistons, propellers, and all the billions of little devices spinning off into the air? It seems almost as if these gizmos are designed to stir up hurricanes, if you think about it for long enough.”

The angry man began to pick up the glass. “I’m very sorry about this mess.”

“Say nothing of it!” Dr. Troubador waved his hand and several red-vested customer service experts swept and mopped the mess and uprighted the man’s cart in a onslaught similar to a SWAT team.

He blinked, staring off at the clouds, dazed by the flurry of action.

“We’re getting several cases like you each hour. But I wonder now, what would a 50 megaton thermonuclear device do if it was detonated in the center of a hurricane?” Scratching at his iconic notepad and doing quick calculations on a scientific calculator app, Troubador raised an eyebrow. “My God look at this man! The incredible heat vaporizing all that water and the concussion waves – not to mention the X-Ray ablation. Add it all up and you’d have a hurricane that would stretch from Brazil to Quebec! Jesus Christ, let’s hope they don’t drop a nuke on it.”

Already forgetting his psychotic break, the man in the Hawaiian shirt walked off muttering “god damn” at price tags, pieces of ramen falling all over the place.

Dr. Troubador cruised his Segway towards the loud yelps and howls from the produce department, thinking about what a neutron bomb salted with cobalt would do when popped off at the center of a hurricane.

“I wish you had some real vegetables,” the dreadlocked woman hissed at Dr. Troubador. “All this fake monsanto shit tastes like shit and is made of glyphosate chemtrails!”

“Ma’am vegetables are shit. Shit and sunshine. You won’t find any more natural vegetables than these here. Except over there in the organic section, if you can afford it.”

The dreadlocked woman smashed the squash open and ate with her eyes wide, pieces falling out. “Look at me, I’m healthy. I’m a healthy healthy healthy health.”

Dr. Troubador blanched at this vulgarity, but regained his composure almost immediately. “Our individual, narrow idea of what mother nature’s essence is will only further complicate the matter. It’s true, Monsanto has made some small improvements to crop yields and patented what amounts to a small modification of millennia of human ingenuity. It’s a real racket and I hope they lock the bastards up.”

She stripped off her squash tainted clothes and screeched, “Gaia! Mother Gaia! I am free!”

“There’s no helping you, I can see now. Whatever you do, don’t go into farming. It’ll only take you farther from nature. I recommend you join up with the Femen movement immediately.”

“Thank you Doctor Troubador. That’s exactly what I’ll do. I thought the squash was actually okay, even mediocre.”

Troubador waved off the red vests and helped her clean up the terrible mess with the shirt off his back. “That’s the secret of our success. Outstanding mediocrity. But don’t tell anyone I told you.”

There is great confusion, generally, about the terms ‘liberal democracy’, the related ‘neoliberalism’, ‘republicanism’, as well as ‘fascism’ and ‘neofascism’. While some of these terms are often jumbled around in murky waters and Orwellized by all-too-clear propaganda, so it might be easy to meet any of them with the scoff of dismissal that shows you know everything and nothing at the same time. Perhaps the meanings are not easy to suss out for those who aren’t interested in reading about political science or history, and very difficult for readers who are very limited to the ‘blogosphere’, and totally impossible for those who strongly receive propaganda, but for today only, Dr. Angstrom H. Troubador is pouring out his intellectual gravy for the internet masses to summarily reject and eject, injecting wordplay like a tired and unfun episode (medical) coming out of Lionel Nation’s big mouth.

Firstly, a liberal democracy is a weak democracy, in fact it is one purposefully designed to protect the property of the rich and powerful. This kind of limited democracy in which only political rights are appropriate for the masses to debate purposefully engendered an ongoing ‘culture war’ wherein civil rights are the only rights that many citizens, for example Ta Nehisi Coates, can even imagine. Early liberal thinkers did not go out of their way to hide the fact that they distrusted democracy and looked at it as an instrument by which the rich and powerful could preserve and legitimize their power. To put a fine point on it, a liberal democracy that is operating as originally intended is an oligarchy. In practice, however, this oligarchy is forever in constant peril.

That doesn’t sound very ‘liberal’, at least in the common usage of the word in the United States at this moment. But to understand why a ‘liberal’ is also an American leftist is impossible without a quick history. The liberal oligarchs of 19th century Europe (and the Americas) controlled all economic policy which engendered a terrible global crisis, triggering some of the worst wars and famines in history as the 20th century dawned. The invisible hand of nature failed their generations miserably, and through the mechanisms of democracy which were originally supposed to only be a sham legitimizer of their rule, and through the war and revolutions, some policies, governments, and institutions that were robustly democratic emerged around the world in the wake of this disaster. Militarist reactionaries in Mussolini’s Italy and Hitler’s Germany wanted to set back the clock and recapture the naturalizing economics and a semblance of the former order from the grasp of democracy. Hitler actually got his start by denying that Germany lost the war, which should tell you something. Through perverted norms of civility, cynical mass propaganda techniques and so on, this nostalgic daydream deepened the crisis in Germany and ultimately only brought on a nightmare of economic cannibalism in the concentration camps, much akin to what Swift brought ‘ad absurdum’ when liberalism was a fresh 18th century way to enlighten your powdery whigged up head. But, mostly thanks to the communist grit and sacrifice, the skeletal specter of fascism passed and was forgotten, and over much of the 20th century the strongly democratic economic policies of now not-so-liberal nations like America built up educated work forces and absorbed millions from around the world into a fertile and rich economy that seemed to never slow down. But, like a zombie from the 18th century, ‘neoliberal’ dogmatists clawed their way out from under Hitler’s tombstone, murmuring their self-concerned discontent. It wasn’t natural that they should pay taxes, that democracy should exist beyond some flimsy sham of a culture war. They felt bad about beating up Nazis in their opportunistic charge to carve up Europe, and had long talks with Werhner Von Braun about colonizing the moon with nothing but white babies. Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon killed JFK, MLK, declared war on humanity itself, and did it all in the name of Nature, blasted their message on television night and day, and ultimately created a culture that cheered for a reality TV show fetishizing a string of firings that can only leave one person in all of the world with a high paying job. And that’s why Bill Clinton and other democrats had to call themselves ‘liberal’, so you can be sure he’s not a communist. Although for the money, the best usage of all comes from the right wing bumper stickers declaring that liberalism is a mental disorder. Specifically, economic liberalism is the grandiose delusion in which one’s own property is inflated into a law of nature and made untaxable. ‘Neoliberalism’ is specifically the expropriation of democratic institutions by private ownership, and it is the direct track to neofascism paved by the CIA when they lit the sanction-busted Soviet’s government on fire and expropriated the whole goddamn empire. Putin was among the first neofascists, and it was just what the paperclippers in the CIA ordered.

As for ‘republicanism’, this was an ancient Roman concept that was rebirthed by Machiavelli in his most famous work, The Discourses of Livy. Unlike in the little-known pamphlet of personal advice for a dictator of a no longer existing form of government, The Prince, the Discourses is the book in which Machiavelli set out the schematic for a fully modern nation state. Featuring three branches resembling oligarchy, monarchy, and democracy all set against one another in tension Machiavelli designed the stability that is today embodied in many modern nation states that have hung around for unusually elongated historic periods. In the sense of American politics, a Republican is a Conservative with that eye for stability and properly separated power Machiavelli set forward in his book. But this scientific view of politics and the staunch conservatism always on the losing side of centuries of culture wars has broken open, seemingly without crisis, into a full-fledged oligarchist front which has now implemented a policy of crisis to make way for the neofascist cannibal type hotfixes already in experimental stages, to help bust open its own mean shell. Blowing up the ACA. Big irony to conclude today with, of course, the Trump Administration’s rabid anti-republican rhetoric dismissing all legitimacy in the other branches of government, and even parts of the executive that have a layer of traditional separation from the president’s office for reasons of propriety that are so obvious even Barrett Brown could spot it from the bottom of a junk binge. Neoliberal? That don’t mean nothin!