Plum Bilious

[degringolade]

Social Realism / George Tooker/ Lunch

Came home burnt out and tired last night.  Drank two 12 ounce beers and collapsed into my bed for a reasonably good night's sleep.  Picked up a pizza and ate half, the rest was today's breakfast.  Gonna spend the day thinking and then maybe doing something useful. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_slave

I think that I really can't argue Mike's discussions.  The real trouble is that we have come to a point where things can't move forward.  Moving forward has been masking the problems for a long time now. 

My real problem is that I cannot seem to hold onto the suspension of disbelief required to live in the West today.  I try to just be a "happy idiot, struggling for the legal tender" but I can't help but see the cracks in the edifice, as they are getting larger and the edifice is creaking around me.  It is a pretty big edifice, I try to look through the news to get the idea how other folk's sections are doing a damn me if they aren't looking pretty shaky too.  So I huddle into my cave, with a glass of something in hand and try to figure out what comes next and how the fuck we got here.

Then Mike, with his current penchant for Whitehead threw out this little rule of thumb:

A fundamental difference between ancient and modern political theory, is the change from a presupposition of slavery

That and Bucky's blurb above kinda show me what my age-challenged brain has come up with as the reasoning behind all the nonsense.  I realize that I have been beating this particular drum for a while, but hear me out.  The reason is that neither party can provide a realistic means back to the number of energy slaves available to us and Poppy Bush's famous  “The American way of life is not up for negotiations. Period.” quote just doesn't have any meaning anymore.  COVID and twenty years of endless war have reduced us to actually having to address that inconvenience. 

In the mess that calls itself American political dialogue (HAHAHAHA) This fact is laboriously circumvented, after all, politicians remember what happened to Jimmy Carter.  So really, the vote this year is defining what sort of slaves we are going to make of the 50% that neither party wants to call their own.  After all, one can't really not have slaves.  It has been super convenient for us to have folks ship us their stuff so that we can burn up the oil that they ship us for the cost of the paper printing.  This has made our greed possible.  It has allowed the entire country (and yes that includes poor folk of all race/creed/color) better off than would otherwise be possible.  The 'energy slaves" that allow this largesse have a lot less day to day maintenance than the 47% Deplorables, who are targeted to be the next iteration of slaves, but one does have to make due.

I think that the main problem with this years election is that both parties and the greater part of the American people know that the gig is up.  They are just trying to keep the party going for a couple more years so that they can lay the groundwork for who will be master of all the new slaves.  They are also trying to figure out how to sell it as an "improvement".