Wow. Clear Channel is really clamping down. I was listening to the broadcast yesterday when Howard was yelling at someone (his GM? Someone, anyway) about being bleeped 14 times. He talked about how he wanted to be fired cause they’d have to pay him out his contract, etc, etc, and I thought, “Man, they’ll never do it cause who’d replace his market share?” Also, I bet Stern is pretty upset, cause broadcasting was this guy’s life.
Whatever. Forget Howard Stern. What about our country going to hell in a sleigh drawn by elected officials whose sole job is to replace our parents, straight on through old age. “Want a parent that never dies? Elect me!” “Want a parent that does not learn? How about one that rules by fear?”
I could go on and on about how fucked up our country is right now, about how its lack of anything resembling sense simply astounds me on a regular basis, about how closed-minded, fear-run, no-imagination, imperialist-wannabes are in charge, how they’re ruining everything, but its not really them. Its us. Its us, and that’s what scares me. Think the next administration will get it Right? Dream straight the fuck on. They’ll bend you over in new and painful ways, all the while screaming about how much better you’re feeling now that the last guys are no longer ramming you from behind. Its a fucking farce because slobbering masses of humanity have somehow convinced themselves that they enjoy being raped, all because they can put a checkmark in the box for whichever soulless power-monger offers them the most money.
Behold, the power of cheese.
Where the hell is Alexander Tyler when you need him? That sonovabitch is rolling his rotted ass over in his grave at this very moment, laughing his skull off about the morons that all failed to heed his prophetic warnings. At least he had the good sense to die before it got to this.
There’s a parallel here, I think, that I’m about to butcher miserably, but the general gist of it is like this: I sometimes wonder if were on a pendulum. Like, over the last, oh, I don’t know, 1000 years, we’ve slowly been working up a parabolic curve whose ratio is supply to demand. There used to be one supplier (ignore families and any assorted monied folk, as 1000 years ago, they were too few to matter, statistically) for every demander. Everyone grew his own food, made his own clothes, etc. We’re coming closer and closer (faster and faster, too) to a point where there is just one supplier (or point of supply–in this situation, they’re one and the same) for nearly-infinite demanders. Legal monopolies are only minutes away from going to all out war with each other, and what do you think happens when megacorp Sony/Bertelsmann/Viacom (who’s about to buy Allied, you know) decides that Arch-rival ClearChannel/Time Warner/Boeing D&S has an overinflated stock price? If you don’t think that the results will be bloody, you’re in for a surprise.
The parallel here is that the final merger will be corporations and government – they’ve become conjoined twins–you already cant separate them or theyll both die. Theyre only moving closer, and once there is just one business (and since our “checks-and-balance” system is just a sham anyway) and one government, its only a matter of months before they do away with two identical entities that serve the same purpose and just form Govi-Corp, leadership for a new tomorrow.
To bring it all back in a circle to the top of this paragraph, I wonder when well get back to a much more even ratio. Will it require the fall of our great civilization? Will it be another so-called Dark Age? I feel a little like Marcus Aurelius in Gladiator – “Once, there was a dream that was Rome, Maximus. It was a fragile dream – anything more than a whisper and it would vanish.” And here we are, yelling at the top of the mountain, defying the avalanche.
Hallelujah, holy shit.
I just got back from watching EUROTRIP, and I kinda want to talk about that and THE DREAMERS, but I have to go finish filling some boxes. Tyler’s full quote is below, in case you’re interested.
