overfed

i have been rereading orwell's "homage to calalonia" and i cannot recommend it highly enough...in fact i would recommend reading orwell's non-fiction ( "the road to wigan pier" or " down and out in paris and london"for example ) and essays as a sort of counterpoint to "animal farm" and "1984"...he had more depth than that...and ion it he spends some time analyzing how the media outside spain simplified and slanted their coverage of events to fit a few preexisting views on fascism held by the balance of news consumers of the day...they lied by omission in other words...something we should all be familiar with...media outlets are corporate interests dedicated to acquiring and retaining an audience by telling it what it wants to here rather than anything objective ( this is true of msnbc, fox, the n y times, and any other one you's care to mention ) and so are more than happy to omit anything that might perturb readers/viewers/listeners...orwell was also a believer in a strong sapir/whorf hypothesis...that language controls thought and that by limiting language ( newspeak ) you can limit thought..nah..i will buy into a weak spir/whorf...some aspects of culture and society can define parameters of thought but those can be disrupted by epiphany...he also was deeply mired in "he who controls the past controls the future" and believed that propaganda sought to control the debate by unmooring historical perspective through the physical alteration and destruction of the past...as much as i admire orwell and feel he has a better handle on the political apparatus than huxley's hedonistic approach to societal control ( "better a gram than a damn" )we are about to part company...the curent crop of corporate propagandists are not trying to physically destroy the past...there is no "memory hole"...what;'s up instead is that there is such an abundance of conflicting material geared towards the specific beliefs of readers/viewers/listeners that finding any certainty is a challenge...you can read/watch/listen to anything you want and who knows what is what? you can find argument and "facts" to shore up any sort of belief system out there...no matter how extreme or unreasonably inane...an over abundance of information/opinion that distorts reality rather than a dearth...where to start rather than where to find...there's no end to it.

non-reformist reform

for me at least this advertisement from today's new york times magazine holds significant insight as to why the political system seems so disconnected and unresponsive to the actual needs ( you can forget desires ) of the polity at large...the system is consquentialist...is assigns ethical merit by what people have and how they achieved it is pretty much secondary...it's what you have, not what you are that matters...bny mellon understands this and wants to help you reach that gold standard of ethical preeminence by supplying you with a route to "never ending wealth "...there are a number of roads to wealth...televangelism...successful fraud...and this merits a brief aside...the system does not have many ethical rules about acquisition but a few do exist about sources of wealth...bernie madoff and jay gould were not necessarily vilified for fraud so much as whom they defrauded...jay gould stole from the stockholders and was made egregious...bernie, more recently, defrauded wealth as well...wealth frowns on loss...you can bilk and fleece the hoi polloi, be very careful appropriating wealth from the wealthy...politics is another road to wealth...have a careful look at the net worth of members of this congress and do some research on the next...they have more money than you...they are in the service of an acquisitive system and are becoming wealthy themselves...this does not bode well for substantive political change...i am prepared to believe that there are people who enter politics in a spirit of public service...i am not so much cynical about people as i am about institutions..which is what leads me to believe that their idealism doesn't stand much of a chance when it grinds up against institutional inertia...the system of government the framers instituted is profoundly resistant to substantive change...it requires an overwhelming agreement between rulers and ruled for it to come about and that, given the tribal and self-interested nature of humans, is a rarity...most likely the bits and pieces of their idealism that buttress the democratic image of the hegemonic culture will be co-opted...any hint of non-cosmetic change will be quickly squelched...a "blue wave"? bear in mind that the framers were all about defending the status quo from the depredations of an "interested and overbearing majority"..so it's hopeless is what i'm saying, right?

no, not entirely..i voted last friday...in terms of primaries, general elections, and off year local primaries and elections this marks the fifty-sixth time i have voted since 1972 and intend to continue for as long as i can...because it makes politicians nervous when a lot of people vote...it isn't going to alter the inertia of the system much...but it just might make them nervous enough about outcomes ( they love voter apathy...it becomes much more predictable when the only people voting are those directly benefiting from the systemic cronyism ) that they might have to pay some attention to voter needs rather than their handlers' interests...so go vote...the effort may prove worthwhile in terms of establishing some actual accountability... another small aside...this from personal history...my grandfather, whom i did not know..he died twenty years before i was born, was a politician in a small indiana town in the 1920s...my father knew his father and, i believe, loved him...my father also knew his father's political cronies and his constituents and said, in my hearing and something my mother repeated often well into her old age, "if an honest man goes into politics his friends will make him dishonest quick enough"...this holds true form the city council to the senate...jay gould is in the white house and even with a "blue wave" the prospects are grim...these people are not going to surrender their prerogatives readily.