== Eat the rich == By Mark Morford

[madokie]

Politicians? Lawyers? Not anymore. Time to loathe the *real* American monsters

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/g/a/2009/02/11/notes021109.DTL&nl=fix

Call it the backlash against the recoil against the collapse. Call it the completely natural response to the downward-spiraling times, though that seems a bit feeble and pansy-assed and not at all in alignment with the general attitude of raging seethingosity.

Call it, then, the death of all we once held dear, if what you held dear consisted of seven McMansions and three trophy wives and five revolving psychiatrists and four personal trainers and regular spa treatments for the Wheaten terriers, along with blatantly rubbing your aging genitalia against the stiff leather of your fleet of Porsche Cayenne Turbos after drunkenly nailing your mistress in your corner office at Goldman Sachs. Ahh yes, that's more like it.

Whatever you call it, there's a bitter tang in the air, a nasty streak of anti-Everythingism, a collective bullet of disgust and frustration that's most violently aimed at the most precious American commodity of all: the rich, the overly entitled, the uberwealthy, the manicured bankers and CEOs and Wall Street cash jockeys we used to cherish like royalty but who now smell vaguely of death and foreclosure and Bernie Madoff.

What a strange phenomenon. From the public outcry against giant investment firms daring to hold fancy Christmas parties, to the image of those bloated Big Auto CEOs driving themselves to Congress in cute little hatchbacks, to Obama himself decrying the obscenity that is the typical executive salary, it's like you can't swing a dead Gulfstream 450 these days without hitting a wall of anti-privilege outrage. Frugality might be the current national pastime, but it's also a mean sonofabitch. ...

[Mari333]

1. he always nails it. nt

[Cirque du So-What]

2. I do not know this 'we' of whom Mark Morford speaks

The 'we' who formerly held such high regard for the rich. I have never held that opinion - instead viewing them collectively as so much vermin sucking the lifeblood from society.

I have long held the opinion that all of human progress - from the stone age forward - has been despite the efforts of these overprivileged boomburrahs to keep all of us enslaved. The sooner these worthless overlords are swept aside, the sooner we can get on with the business of strategizing for survival.

When Genghis Khan romped and stomped across the plains of Eurasia and encountered a populated settlement, the first thing he did was identify the idle rich and slaughter them wholesale. I'm not saying I agree with that practice...but I understand.

[Peace Patriot]

3. It's definitely a fun read, but it's rather easy to skewer the pleasures of the uber-rich

and their trophy girlfriends, cars and MacMansions, and harder to nail people like Howard Ahmanson, the billionaire recluse who funded ES&S 'TRADE SECRET' voting machines, and also funded the extremist 'christian' Chalcedon foundation, which touts the death penalty for homosexuals (among other things), or the Bilderburg Group, or the Bush Cartel, and brethren, who have designed this sick culture, promoted it thru corpo/fascist 'news' monopolies, cleared the path for massive looting by Enron, S&L's, Exxon Mobil, Halliburton, et al, with massive deregulation, and committed two 9/11's--one of the buildings, the other of the financial system.

There is much more wrong with our country than "snorting cocaine off a caviar lid on the Italian Riviera with George Clooney" (which might actually have some social value). Morford does mention the tax code. And I'm glad he did. I know he's thinking more than frivolous, changing-fashions thoughts. But, really, the silly rich will always be with us, so long as we wage slaves continue to fund disaster capitalism, and so long as we continue to vote on 'TRADE SECRET' code voting machines. It is the very real conspiracy against us and our democracy that we need to address--vigorously, now--rather than the "Hobo Ball" mentality on 5th Avenue. (Marie Antoinette wasn't the problem--not really.)

[htuttle]

4. Modern human culture lives and breathes by images, not rational discussions

Marie Antoinette herself may not have been the problem, but she represented the problem.

Images influence opinions and values which influence actions and peer pressure. People seem far more swayed by metaphors than by logic. Don't know why, exactly (probably a hindbrain thing), but that's how it seems to be (cf. last 8 years as proof).

[Peace Patriot]

6. Agreed, images can be very powerful. And I don't at all dis something like

Obama reaching out to help a homeless woman. It's just one person and her family, true. But the symbolic value is enormous. We should all be doing this, reaching out to help each other. It's a good thing for a president to do--creating positive images.

However, I'm not sure I agree entirely about the last eight years. For one thing, the "get rich" image started way back with Reagan, on through Clinton. Bush didn't start it. He just turned it into a catastrophe! How did that happen? Bottom line: Clinton, Bush Sr, Reagan and other presidents had some controls on their behavior, including public opinion--staying popular, getting votes. Bush Jr & brethren have behaved as if they don't care about public opinion or votes, or anything at all, except enriching themselves and the super-rich. And why is that? I think the answer is stolen elections--stolen one way, in 2000, and in a whole new way (an on-going peril) in 2004. They didn't have to care. They weren't in any way beholden to we, the people. Their behavior is unprecedented. Their irresponsibility with regard to the economy (multiple tax cuts for the rich, while spending a trillion dollars on an unnecessary war; no-bid contracts; secret budgets; billions missing) is unprecedented. Their crimes are unprecedented.

I think, with them, we reached a whole new level of the manipulation of illusions and destruction of our democracy, with developments along the way, over the last three decades, that led to this. What I saw happening in 2004 is that an election that I am completely convinced was stolen (based on overwhelming evidence) was accompanied by a pre-written, false but plausible-sounding narrative that the corporate 'news' monopolies promoted. For instance, the Democratic grass roots blew the Bushites away in new voter registration, nearly 60/40, in 2004. Just after the election, some news-twit asked Rove how they won, and he answered that it was their "get out the vote campaign in the churches." There is no evidence for any successful Bush campaign "in the churches" in 2004, over and above their usual supporters. But there is A LOT of evidence that the Democrats way outdid them. The reporter, though, asked no followup questions (like, what evidence do you have of a successful GOTV in churches?) That was the false narrative--or part of it.

Consider this to be an image (part of illusion-making): successful Bush, successful Cheney, rightwing 'christians' "in the churches." It forms an image in the mind. That image won out, over substance (which was not just ignored; it was severely suppressed). The illusion--with no evidence to support it--that MORE rightwing 'christians' voting for Bush, than had voted in 2000, exceeded the Democrats' PROVABLY successful, big GOTV effort.

"People seem far more swayed by metaphors than by logic."

How were people swayed by this illusion? Bush's approval rating fell to 49% on the very day of his second inauguration--an unprecedented low for a second-term president--and then it started sinking like the Titanic and never recovered. What people were swayed by was their powerlessness to prevent Bush/Cheney from taking office, while they gradually penetrated the illusion that Bush-Cheney had won. This skepiticim was hot in some peoples' minds--those who pursued investigation of election fraud--but it was also a general state of disbelief, and a general malaise. Other statistics (issue polls) strongly support the disagreement of most Americans--on some issues way up in the 70% to 90% range--with virtually every Bush policy, foreign and domestic, during that period (2003-2005).

I would say that what was happening with that election is that the scales were falling from peoples' eyes. The images and illusions of Bushwhackism were failing. (That's one reason that 'TRADE SECRET' voting machines were fast-tracked all over the country during the 2002 to 2004 period.) So, when you say that "People seem far more swayed by metaphors than by logic," and use the last eight years as the illustration, you are not including this phenomenon--that people increasingly did not buy the "metaphor" (image, illusion) because logic was contradicting it. How could a president who lied us into war, tortured prisoners, gave multiple tax cuts to the super-rich and was spending like a drunken sailor, get re-elected? How could a president who couldn't put two coherent sentences together, get re-elected? It didn't make sense to people.

FACT: Count ALL the votes, in the public venue, and know what a fact is.

IMAGE: (metaphor-picture, illusion, delusion) Contradicts the facts and make you feel sick. Powerless. Angry. Frustrated. And, in some cases--blessedly--drives people to action.

When facts and the truth clash too spectacularly with manipulated images and illusions, people can and do start sorting the two out.

As for metaphor itself, as a means of communication, I would say that, yeah, some people--probably a big majority (especially in the TV-drenched USA)--are riveted by metaphors, especially when they take the form of pictures. They can more easily absorb the meaning of pictures (in words or images) than they can, say, a mathematical formula or chart full of numbers (unless it's quite visual). I am that way myself. I like geometry more than algebra. I understand abstract concepts by forming a picture in my mind. Give me a spatial concept of something, and I will remember it much better. Not everyone is this way, but I think most people are. BUT, if the graphic turns out to be an optical illusion, or false in some way, then I move to logic, investigation, other evidence, to figure out why.

That's just the way it is, with a lot of people. And it's true--it makes us suckers for illusions--maybe not Bushwhack illusions about 9/11 or the Iraq War, but certainly the illusion that we were powerless to do anything about it. But give us some credit as well for that worm of skepticism that arose in many peoples' minds on the night of Nov. 2, 2004. It was that skepticism, and the effort that resulted to bring more scrutiny to election systems and results, that led to the election of Barack Obama. Some of the skeptics were mathematicians. Most of them were not.

[Blue_Tires]

5. k+r