Modernity Ward

I know it sounds cliché but we are standing at the crossroads of history.  There have been a number of loci in the past century where the course of future humanity, indeed the future of the world could have taken a tack away from oblivion.  These were either lost or corrupted to losses for society and for the continued well-being of the planet.  These loci were triumphs of the human spirit over greed and triumphs of the good of the whole over the good of the few.  But, in the same way that 'the war to end all wars' didn't, triumphs were coopted by the corporate machine and turned into widgets and memes.  Now, with the ascendancy of information technology and research in the behavioural sciences, comes the last stand of freedom and liberty.

There are two ways to look at how we have arrived at the current state of affairs.  The positive view says that domination by oligarchies has been around since humans formed satellite communities and have always been overthrown.  Chieftains, nobility, party members, juntas, etc. conspired to enslave their various populaces and exploit their labours,and strove to skew the distribution of goods within their societies.  And the people always rose up to win a more equitable share of the common good for everyone.  They rose up against emperors and clan leaders, against bishops and generals, against dictators and their bureaucrats.  The negative view says the oligarchies have finally become powerful enough to maintain the stranglehold of Adolf Hitler’s“Thousand Year Reich”.  

People used to rise up to protect the social good.  Their revolts were popular movements that sought to assert the primacy of the people. With time, the people were manipulated into rising up on the pretext that they were defending their way of life and the safety of their loved ones.  They were convinced that destroying another society’s prosperity was key to their own continuing comfort and ease.  They were press ganged into the dehumanization of basic training and damaged to the core as warriors conditioned to absorb the insanity of modern warfare.  Where past wars were profitable to the society through payment of tributes, enslavement of populaces, and expansion of domestic markets, the new wars are fought and paid for with public money and the plunder and tributes accrue to corporate entities and the obscenely rich who own and control them.

The next step is obvious and logical.  Since there are only so many protracted wars that can be sustained, the war must be taken to the populace itself.  In recent years it has become more and more obvious that the target of the super wealthy has become everyone else.  With the complicity of the merely wealthy whose goal it is to move into the oligarchic penthouse, the super rich prey on the marginalized – and eventually the vast majority in the society will become the marginalized.  Already, the old, the infirm, the children, the poor, the mentally ill, and their advocates are under attack.  When they have been isolated,what remains of the public will be (has already been) enslaved – shackled by their inability to earn a living wage, encumbered by crippling taxation and doomed to fight over the ever shrinking crumbs that are scraped from the tables of the rich.

Where are the vanguards of the slaughter of western society?  In the U. S., the southern Republican states lead the way with their bankrupting of state and local tax bases and the selling off any profitable public sector enterprises.  Right-to-work legislation, restrictive voting laws, the promotion of racial tension, and the suppression of education are all symptoms of the disease.  

In Canada, Alberta leads the way due to the vast influence of corporate (especially oil) interests.  Albertans were always a rather backward people, comprised of the avaricious, the religious, the essence of the American“. . . your tired, your poor, your huddled masses . . .” yearning to prosper.  Because of its resource wealth,it has attracted an inordinate number of carpetbaggers from the scum of the capitalist pond.  In other words, it is the perfect proving ground for the enslavement of the modern citizen.  Alberta is the poster child of the corporate dream where wealth abounds but is distributed unequally.  

The gulf between the wealthy and the rest has grown into a chasm and will soon be an abyss. Unfortunately, a majority of the population seems to feel that their prosperity and future security is best placed in the hands and pockets of those whose interests are in direct conflict with theirs.  And money will continue to weave the great illusion and the greater lies that will rob the populace of their rightful share and their offspring of their birthright.

It will soon become too late to make a stand.  Choose your side now as if the lives of your children and grandchildren depended on it.  Or fail to choose and the choice will continue to be made for you

Canaries in the Coal Mine

- Fritz Kropfreiter

As much as I feel disgust toward the January 6th rabble and the Canadian KKKonvoy, I can well understand what has them climbing walls and honking their horns.  The world as they know it is dying, even more directly and precipitously than the planet as a whole. Drawn out from their squalid double-wides and emboldened by a deranged narcissist, then confronted with the harsh reality of economic marginalization, these struggling masses of threatened white supremacists have arisen en masse.

Normal doesn't live here anymore. Beaver Cleaver (you'd never get away with that name in this day and age) has left the building along with Wally, June, and Ward. Andy is no longer the sheriff of Mayberry and the Six Million Dollar Man is doing windshields for spare change at Hollywood and Vine.  A white guy sits in the Whitehouse but, not long ago, there was a black president who was more articulate and poised than the Caucasians who bracketed his tenure.

And decade upon decade of pale skinned, rough hewn machismo did not prepare the current European descendants to take a back seat to people of colour: it was always the black man who sat at the back of the bus! Now we have black CEOs and generals, Hispanic judges, and Asian lawmakers. The social landscape is no longer clearly defined in darkening shades as one moves from top to bottom.

LBJ famously said, "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you." This truism has served the American south and much of rural America since the emancipation; however, today's poor, uneducated, unemployable white man has to resort to major self delusion in order to keep the fantasy alive.

And if you can maintain one fantasy, why not entertain a host of outlandish conspiracies and deceptions. If the world is deceiving people to believe that white supremacy is dying, why not believe that the Clintons run a sex slave racket out of a Florida pizza parlour or that jewish space lasers are responsible for California's fires. Climate change is a hoax and Bill Gates is planting 5G chips in vaccines. If you don't like the truth, change it.

That's why 'fake news' was such a master stroke (Trump may be an idiot but he has a nose for promotion) providing a 'get out of jail free' card for all the lies, misrepresentations, frauds, and crimes that Trump, Alex Jones, Rush Limbaugh, and Marjorie Taylor Greene (to name a few) perpetrated. When the Sandy Hook massacre of little children was attributed to crisis actors, the whole world should have risen in an ear piercing scream. Instead, the group who Hillary Clinton would later brand as Deplorables showed why they are worthy of the moniker.

Economic marginalization is the other edge of the double edged sword that hangs over the deposed white dregs. Where their strength had been the colour of their skin, the new world, having automated unskilled labour out of relevance and relative stability, now chose to profit the trainable and educable.  Service careers such as health care and social services far outstripped the want ads looking for pump jockeys and stock boys.  Stock room to the boardroom was always a lie to keep the peasants slavering but now it was impossible.

At the root of the new paucity of lower end employment lies the nature of the economic system.  As corporations and CEOs extract more and more wealth from the system, those who can be dispensed with to save money are thrown aside. The pool of available wealth that was divvied up in such a way as to carry the marginally employable now tilted away from the poor and gravity carried an ever growing pile of riches to the very rich.

Hence the title, Canaries in the Coal Mine. As the most vulnerable in our society, the poor white will be the first to be affected. Why not poor blacks, you may ask? Because they're used to getting the shit end of the stick. They had nobody to look down on because the whole racist structure of law, finance and society as a whole relegated them to the bottom rung on the ladder of success.

In the same way that canaries in a mine don't realize what is killing them, neither do the good old boys. The right wing media that has egged them on by pandering to their paranoia and scepticism has helped to ensure that they will never sense the carbon monoxide that is killing them. Not only that, the rest of us miners breathing an ever more poisonous atmosphere won't acknowledge what's killing us. The reality is that the obscenely wealthy are draining the oxygen out of the system.

Watch the canaries.

 Why do some people in the checkout line wait until the last minute to do a deep dive for their money/credit card/wallet/change purse? Did you think we were at the free grocery store? Did you think that broccoli was complimentary.