I remember back when they taught us the dumbed-down version of the Roman Empire when they talked about keeping the people passive with bread and circuses, it was presented as meaning by diverting them with distractions while keeping their bellies full. But that political science analysis looks a lot different to people who are well fed and people who are hungry. When it is a choice of bread or circuses, that changes everything. We are about to find out what that difference is, it will make all the difference. The American elite won't understand how that changes everything, I'm not sure if even the American underclass will see through the circus in time to avoid a bigger disaster than the one on us now.
As I've said a number of times, when I started writing blog posts in 2006 my motive was to try to figure out why the American left, traditional American liberalism, had failed after the pinnacle of its political power in the Johnson administration and the United States has been devolving into the stage where we had, first Bush II imposed on us by Supreme Court fiat and then the different disaster that the Obama administration was - what it is looking may be the last legitimate presidency in U. S. history - and all of its hardly liberal restoration and now Trumpian fascism which a combination of Republican-fascism in the cabloid media, the Congress and the Courts are trying to cement into place so it can't be disloged except through the most drastic action. If Democrats don't break the stranglehold that Republicans have on the congress in November, if even a Democratic congress falls prey to the Republican-fascist, Ivy-league Federalist-fascists on the Courts, American democracy as we knew it is over.
That, dear readers, constitutes a matter of the most serious import. I'd feel justified in the theme of my blogging, with all of its wild turns and jolting bumps on that ground alone.
When I started this blogging stuff I was in many ways still a conventional college-credentialed, lefty-magazine reading lefty, though I'd started having my doubts about the effectiveness of that left because as soon as I started reading my fellow lefties online, I realized too many of them were conceited jerks who were as conservative for their orthodoxy as traditional Republicans were for theirs. As we can see in the Republicans in the Senate, there are a lot fewer of those than pretend they are on Sunday morning TV. The traditional Republicans to the extent they really believed in their version of American democracy have lost out to hate-talk, resurgent racist Republican-fascism but the lefties of the magazine-informed, campus centered religion-bashing kind - the ones I have concluded in the course of my blog based investigations did so much to end American liberalism - never really had anything to lose because they never really gained or exercised power.
I will insert here that one of the first things I learned in this investigation is that the college-educated, snob left wasn't even capable of understanding the role that the free-speech absolutism they championed (as a goofy scheme to get power through commie propaganda) was the cause of fascist empowerment. One of the few things I learned from such people as Duncan Black, though he's never really been much of a lefty.
They got the mic of American liberalism from the effective liberals who did gain power and in the Johnson years made the greatest progress we've ever had, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference - Congress of 1964-5 liberals, but the "real left" immediately started driving it into the ground. Vietnam had more than a little to do with it, the escalation of a war Johnson got duped into expanding by the Harvard boys and some lying generals who skillfully played on the vulnerabilities of that most unlikely of giants of American liberalism, making him feel his uncouthness, his Southernness, his - though he was probably the smartest of them all - education at a small Texas teachers college instead of the Ivys. His fear of the free press accusing him of "losing Vietnam" of weakness. And there were the Kennedys trying to sandbag him to make Bobby president. My opinion of the Kennedy's and their court has greatly suffered in this investigation along with the Ivy league crowd, in general, right and pseudo-left. I think of that generation Ted was the one who survived long enough to learn something from their mistakes. If the upcoming generation of them have, we'll see.
As you can see, my investigation has led me to conclude, it's all a lot more complicated than will gain you a large audience.
Along the way I've been surprised at what gets read and what doesn't seem to be read as much. The pieces that I'm most surprised when they fail to get lots of reading are those that came from a break-through in my understanding. One of the earliest ones of those was a piece in which I understood the part that the free press played in a death in the Big Dig tunnel system in Boston and in other such disasters, the part that a combination of talk-radio and anti-tax journalism on TV but in print too have in lying people into believing you can get what you refuse to pay for. The last such piece that really shook my understanding was the one I posted a couple of days ago about the disparity in accepting responsibility for the Shoah between religion which was not ever mentioned as the reason the Nazis did it but which has been assigned almost all if not all of the blame and science and technology which provided the Nazis with everything from their motive in natural selection to their means of doing it to the efficient scheduling of trains to transport people to the industrialized-scientifically planned factories of death. Why some of those pieces that get huge numbers of hits take off instead of the ones that seem to me like they're the most important is something I haven't figured out at all.
If I wanted to dig through my old history of music books, I'd find the medieval musician who said "modern man loves brevity" but it's too hot to look for that level of citation. What modern man likes apparently hasn't changed over the centuries, they like it easy and fast and cut and dried and fun. If you don't believe that, look at what isn't being produced in theaters as they redo the same crap that sold before. If that has something to do with what gets read and what doesn't, I haven't figured out. I'm not interested in quick and easy when quick and easy doesn't work to understand what's important. I'm about totally done with that. I don't think anything important is going to happen through it, notice how wildly successful German satire was at preventing Hitler, it's only good for keeping what's important from happening.
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