Thursday, July 26, 2012

No Good News

I've made the mistake of reading the news lately according to CNN spin masters. It's very grim and I must learn that I'm not emotionally mature enough to read propaganda. The outdoor advertising, endless war, mass shootings, college football scandals. It's almost choreographed so that a pretty gymnast will sprain her ankle in London and manage to become the media darling and an audible sigh of relief will be heard. It's bait and switch in media land and the bread for the circus audience is running in short supply. I'm puzzled by it all because it doesn't seem real or it seems surreal and staged along with advertising and exposed cruelties. The media factory has a tight grip on our collective emotions or at least it's got a rusty hook in my cheek that I can't shake.

I was thinking that if I had been given some career counseling I would've double majored in Music and some kind of natural resource conservation field that would justify my park ranger ambitions. Currently I'm looking down the barrel of a servomotor brush refurbishing job and a ranch hand at a hot rod garage. I've got too many hobbies and my late night sweat thoughts turn to my Grandfather on my mother's side who drove trucks for most of his life and then sold shirts in Florida as his post retirement job but really he loved to fly fish in Maine and New Hampshire rivers. But he wasn't Zane Grey so he understood he had to work in order to do that hobby. I am torn between thinking that's the good, Humanist, Puritan philosophy, but I'm also torn because the Conservative elite basically stole the country from under his nose while he was grinding it out on the highway. One cowboy president after another lied to his face and he believed it. So, was it the right thing to do? I'm really divided. What's your opinion? I'm not ignorant to the conditions in Kenya where hundreds of men wait for the dump trucks to deposit the trash in great piles so they can sort through it for metal to sell. But the truth is that their leaders were simply more greedy than ours. It wasn't a resource issue but a leadership issue. Our leaders are like the car salesman who wants to sell you 10 lemons over 10 years. Their leaders were content with simply oppressing and stealing everything immediately. So, our quality of life (air conditioned libraries, clean sheets, food banks) is far higher than theirs but it's all based on an elephant of debt no one wants to admit exists.
I think my grandfather was content driving truck and retiring with minimum savings and fishing one week a year. Hell, I've probably fished more hours than he ever did and I don't even like to fish. When I wanted to play guitar I took an entire year off to play guitar. Fuck puritan values. The end of times are on the horizon and I'm not going to be nominated for any medals of honor so I'll take it one day at a time. I couldn't live on a truck driver's salary now anyway because inflation has made it way below poverty level. Times are different now. But I still wonder. Then it's time to start the day and hustle and get my arm to move again and dodge police and homelessness and it all drifts into the gray matter.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I will ponder your question this weekend while I sit on the beach. I am leaning towards believing your/my grandfathers had it right. But it was a far different world then. Far different.
Rozi

Anonymous said...

Is this you?

http://www.seacoastonline.com/articles/20120727-NEWS-120729814

Anonymous said...

Nermin Muhic, 43, of Milford, N.H., was found shortly before 5 a.m. on Thursday lying next to a parked semitrailer

Oggy Bleacher said...

Say a prayer for Nermin. It will be me one day but the locations will be different.

I think our grandfathers played by golden rule, which is what everyone should do, but since Lehman brothers, Bush Family, Standard Oil, Etc. didn't remotely play by the rule it basically turns everyone who is devout or friendly into a rube to be fleeced and worked until death. The chief law breakers are the ones who write the laws. I think the model of America was established in a Christian ethic intentionally to lure Puritans into thinking hard work will reap rewards...while Capitalism is the real religion which is based on pure exploitation, Financial (not social) profit, growth and abuse. So, gramps had it half right but he was also powerless to change anything so he basically trusted his instincts and it paid off with a life of labor and Medicaid knee transplants. I'm also powerless but I will do all I can to thwart and expose the American Way for a fraud. Maybe the power will come to me and I will be ready to speak the words that subvert this awful paradigm. I really feel public schools and the media are manufacturing monsters. The well is poisoned.

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Man in the Van by Oggy Bleacher is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.