Some Thoughts on the Olympics…

I was forced to watch the opening ceremonies of the 2012 London Olympics last night.

Tess was all excited by the thought of the spectacle, and got into one of those passive-aggressive moods of hers, in which failure to comply with her wishes – in this case, that we “enjoy” something that I find about as interesting as dry toast, and about as exciting as a case of toenail fungus – as “a couple”.

This is, after all, she tells me, what “couples do”.

She gets into these moods, with this sort of strange ideal surrounding it, every so often, and rather than have to deal with the complete bullshit (the expression of which ranges from the emanation of a simple “attitude” all the way up to “full Menstrual Fury”), it’s easier to give in, keep my mouth shut, and make her happy, just to spare myself the additional pain of all the “if you loved me, you’d make an effort…” nonsense.

Women…can’t live with ‘em, and you can’t kill ‘em…

A Nod to Some Local Bloggers...

I'd like to call your attention to two blogs that I've recently been introduced to that are written by my fellow Staten Islanders. I want to make it clear that that I agree with neither writer on most things, but, it is important that we do occasionally take stock of someone else's point of view, if only for our own education.

The first blog is Strangers in a Picture, which takes a bleeding-heart liberal view of well...just about everything. I normally would not spend much time reading this sort of stuff, but it is interesting in this regard: it's nice to know what the entitlement class thinks, or even if it thinks, at all. I do not mean this to be a knock on the author, but rather upon her apparent political philosophy. Give it a look see, just to be nice, huh?

The second blog is The Staten Island Wolf, which from what I gather, is the Principled Anarchist's view of things. Truth to tell, I know just about jack-diddly-squat about Anarchy-the-political-philosophy , but the author here at least makes some attempt to put it into a reasonable context so that even an non-indoctrinated doofus like me can make sense of it. This blog at least has something interesting to say.

I'll be putting them up on the Wall of Shame for anyone who may be interested.

And they say Staten Islanders are dumb? Look, some of us can actually write!

Burnham, Orwell and Obama, Part Two...

Force. Fraud, and Managerial Big Brother

When last we discussed these topics, we had laid the basic framework beneath both Burnham's Managerial Revolution, and Orwell's 1984. This time, we're going to demonstrate how Managerialism, coupled with the government monopoly of force, and the political system's penchant for fraud, brought us to President Titanic...err...Obama.

Burnham began with a basic premise: that the nature of all societies has been Hierarchical, consisting of a High, a Middle, and a Low; that these three groups have competing aims, and that politics can never be conducted honestly, nor without varying degrees of violence and coercion.

Burnham, Orwell and Obama, Part One...

Winston Smith, The Managerial Revolution, And Our Current Crisis
Lately, I’ve been talking a lot about George Orwell here. I can’t seem to help myself, and I promise, it’s not because I am obsessed by the man’s writing, though it is hard not to be. I would consider Orwell to be perhaps one of the three best writers of the 20th Century (Winston Churchill and H.G. Wells round out that list, IMO), and without a doubt, the best political writer of the second half of the same era.

It’s not just that books like 1984 and Animal Farm are great reads, telling interesting stories, but that they seem to reflect our own times so much that it’s difficult not to imagine that someone isn’t following his script.

The Metamorphosis...

It has been years since I read Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, but damned if I don't feel as if I'm living it, these days.

If you've never read this classic tale of bureaucratic stupidity and the dehumanizing oppression often exerted by governments, I'll give you the going-from-memory-nutshell version:

The main character is continuously being told by members of the bureaucracy that he is guilty...they just never get around to telling him what he's guilty of, mostly because no one is quite sure, but the paperwork all seems to be in order.

Eventually our hero is stripped of his humanity, becoming smaller and smaller after each encounter with the mindless bureaucracy until he literally transforms into a cockroach.

I was reminded of the overriding theme of Kafka's masterpiece yesterday, when, for something like the fourth time in the last three years, I found myself standing in line at the NY State Department of Motor Vehicles in yet another futile attempt to prove that, yes, I do fucking exist, you Assholes!