Dear diary,
Some of us wake up early in the morning and drink wine. Others of us prefer to start our day with cocaine or heroin. (Nobody smokes cannabis upon waking, because cannabis is illegal.) My question is this: What’s the matter with those folks who just wake up and go to work? Cuz I’ve heard that certain people shower immediately after waking, and then they prepare breakfast — ham sausage, pancakes with maple syrup, two eggs sunny-side-up, and a tall glass of orange juice — then after eating they hop into their car and drive to the office. They greet their co-employees with a smile, and they contribute to society by doing a real job.
There’s this concept called the Alpha Male. Everyone wants to be the Alpha Male (apparently there’s only one per geographic region). That word “alpha” is the name of the very first letter in the Greek symbol-set. Then I’m told that the last letter in the same set of symbols is “omega”. So if Alpha Male is the best, you’d think Omega Man would be the worst; but apparently that latter title is not exactly an insult. I’m just trying to figure out what letter I should claim, amongst males; cuz I’m a bad male, in the sense that I’m not the group leader — I’m way down the list of letters. I’m an Omicron Male. That’s not the last letter, but it’s far away from alpha, beta, or even iota. But this only applies to my rank within the grouchier sex. I’m an Omicron Male but an Alpha Mind. (At least that’s what I keep telling myself.)
All this hype about climate catastrophe, potential nuclear disaster and economic meltdown — the terrifying dangers that I was speaking about in yesterday’s entry — they all seem to me to lead to the same conclusion, which nobody wants to face: We evilly need a global government. Or if not exactly a government in the official, literal sense, we need some sort of way to be able to treat all countries and nations with relation to our shared planet the same way that states or provinces are treated by their nations or countries. It’s all about groups. My neighborhood in Thief River Falls is a group. My little two-person household is a group. My extended family is another group. Minnesota is a group within the group called U.S.A. — the UNITED States of America. So these States are United, but what about all Nations? I understand that we already have something called the U.N. — the United Nations — but that doesn’t seem to be cutting it. First off, how can any country own nuclear weapons if we’re all part of one common, national-global union? Well even tho my neighborhood is a peaceful one whose members respect each other, individual households still own firearms. That’s a good point — I hadn’t thot of that. Nevertheless, those firearms that Mr. Smith owns are for duck hunting, not killing fellow neighbors. Also they come in handy whenever Mr. Smith goes to Washington. (After 1939, he acquired a permit to carry a concealed weapon.) So maybe the nations that tote a vast nuclear arsenal, including two or more Doomsday Devices, are just trying to catch more elusive ducks.
“I can’t catch the rats anymore; they’re too smart.”
—a businessman, from the film Wrong Cops (2013)
Is it possible, tho, that, in the beginning, the founders of what came to be the U.S. wished to bar the possibility of having a permanent military? That’s what I sorta gather. I think they didn’t like the look of the standing armies that the previous empires maintained. It’s easier just to say to your citizens: If our country gets invaded, grab your firearms and join together as a temporary militia to fight the invaders. Then, when the invaders are defeated, we farmers will all return to farming our farms. In sum, we’ll convert our farming implements into firearms when the bandits appear; then, once the bandits are gone, we’ll re-modify our firearms back into farming implements.
And he shall judge among the nations, and shall rebuke many people: and they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruninghooks: nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. (Isaiah 2:4)
Why is it so hard to learn how to stop learning war? (By the way, can we consider that last clause in the above quote a failed prophecy?)
I half-vowed not to let any of the paragraphs in this present entry connect too plainly, but I wanna return to that idea that a standing military is undesirable. What happens is that a permanent army is expensive to maintain, so it bankrupts the empire. It’s that simple. That’s why you hear annually about the military budget being astronomical and exponentially increasing. It’s really easy to spot a failing empire, when it’s not your own — that’s why the so-called founding fathers of the U.S. were loath to begin the habit of army-keeping. They deemed it a better idea just to allow the citizens to fight, if or when the occasion ever arises. Now the reason that this idea attracts me so much is that it would justify the sentimental way that we United Statesians venerate our troops, our servicemembers. They’re held as holy and sacred (this thot is at the top of my mind because it was recently Veterans Day) — and this would seem a lot more natural if we were honoring those who truly put their own regular business on hold to risk their life to save their nation. But, on one hand, we honor the military personnel like they’re spiritually superior; then, on the other hand, this standing army to which those personnel belong is treated by certain statesmen and government contractors like a regular business, like a cadre of employees that may be rented out to the highest bidder. Cuz it sorta IS a service that can be rented. At this point in time (2019 Anno Domini Dada), countries like Saudi Arabia or Israel utilize the U.S. army the way that you’d rent a power tool from a supply company; that’s why we United Statesian suburbanites must wake up to daily news about weird wars in the Middle East, which “our” troops keep instigating. My point is to wonder how long we can have it both ways: for it seems that either the military is a sacred force because it consists of We the People protecting our nation, OR that the military is simply a business service like any other which can be purchased for its fair market price. If we want to treat its members as holy, we should abolish the standing army and all aspects of the military, and only defend ourselves with a volunteer militia, and only when invaded (when’s the last time we were attacked without our own bureaucrats provoking the ambush?); but if we want to rent out our military services to the highest bidder, then it makes no sense to give our servicemembers more respect than we’d give to any victim of any fraud. I’m saying that anyone who signed up for the armed forces in order to “serve this great nation” should be consoled as one who’s been criminally defrauded. I mean that sincerely: to be clear, I’m on the side of the rugged individuals who end up becoming our troops; and I’m against the conniving bureaucrats. I only wish there were a way to state what I’m trying to say here without enraging the servicemembers themselves or their loving families and supporters. For we’re on exactly the same side, and it’s the same small camp of racketeers who’ve tricked us.
What a strange predicament: to possess the faculty of language yet still to resort to violence. I wish we were more ashamed of ourselves for not being able to solve all problems diplomatically. We should see it as a failure of our intellect, every instant warfare continues.
And one always hears about corporations relocating their factories overseas. Why do they do this? Because if they keep their factories in their home country, they’ll need to pay more money to their loyal employees; whereas the overseas workers are willing to work for significantly less pay. Now here’s the obvious problem that’s waiting to happen: When the overseas employees gain a better standard of living, they’re going to want a raise in wages. So then, what is the corporation going to do? As long as there is a place that the corporation can move its factories to, where the employees are willing to work for less compensation, the corporation will keep shuffling its factories around the globe: like a game of musical chairs or leapfrog. And then the nightmare of nightmares: What if every nation’s populace achieves the same high standard of living, so that no population exists that is poor enough to please the corporate bean-counters? The result is unthinkable. That’s why I’m glad that Jesus assured us that we’ll never lack underlings:
For ye have the poor with you always, and whensoever ye will ye may do them good. (Mark 14:7)
So it’s good that we do them bad, so that we can keep them around. You don’t wanna lose a whole people; that would be wasteful. Every person-type is important, in its own way; and the poor are useful because they nurture our factories. This assures the world that its merchandise will remain cheap.
But I was thinking about agriculture the other day, cuz I was walking around in Albania near a green field, and I saw humans laboring in the field, planting vegetables. My first thot was: Why aren’t killer robots planting vegetables for us? But then I realized that if the killer robots kill us all and then take our jobs away, we will have no jobs to fight over, and that might be less profitable than our present scam. So my second thot was: Why must this tiny gang of disciples work all day long, just so the rest of humankind can consume foodstuffs? Why not divide the labor so that all of us does a little bit, instead of a dozen folks doing everything? Rather than a handful of scribes daily performing fieldwork nonstop, each of us 8 billion earthlings would only need to labor for one moment per year, to accomplish the same amount of work; and then we’d all share whatever vegetables we were able to plant and harvest in that span of time. So we’d enjoy superior-tasting radishes, garlic, and swiss chard; for the groceries would be able to sense that they are now being cultivated with love, rather than fear. And if the average amount of time that one earthling would be required to labor annually is just 450 seconds, and my neighbor shouts “Dear Bryan, I hate your idea; and I ain’t lifting one finger to contribute to your slave-cult, cuz your plan is against my religion of exploitative money-worship, and I believe that you intend to steal my property and murder my family because you hate our freedom, cuz we all work 60-plus hour weeks in the finance sector, and that’s how I want things to remain,” then I’d answer, “No problem, mister Jethro; I’ll gladly do your share of the work myself. I don’t mind adding your required 450 seconds of vegetable sowing-and-reaping to my own allotted 450 seconds, to make it an even 900 seconds, which works out to be fifteen minutes: that’s only a droplet in the ocean of time each year bestows us.” So I’d do the work for both me and my father-in-law Jethro (who lives next-door), and everything would turn out fine. Jethro would be, in fact, the only soul in the world who refuses to participate in my global experiment, going so far as to publicly burn the official Invitation to Join the Fun that I offer to him, which he calls a “veggie-commie draft card”.
No comments:
Post a Comment