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Meet the new third party in national politics: Reality.
Reality is the only party with an agenda
consistent with what is actually happening in the
world. Reality doesn't need
to drum up dollar donations from
anyone. Reality doesn't
have to pander to any interest group or subscribe to any inane belief
system. Reality doesn't even
need your vote. Reality will be the winner of the 2012 election no matter what the ballot returns appear to say about the bids of Barack Obama and Mitt
Romney to lead the executive branch
of the government.
In the vicious
vacuum that national party politics
has become, the Republicans
and Democrats are already
dead. They choked to death on the toxic fumes of their own excreta. They are empty, hollow institutions animated only by the parasites that feed on and squirm over the residue of decomposing tissue within the dissolving membranes
of their legitimacy. Think of the fabled Koch brothers as botfly larvae and the Securities Industry
and Financial Markets Association PAC (SIFMA PAC)
as a mass of writhing maggots.
These are desperate days
in the republic. Between
the two empty spectacles
of the official party nominating conventions, a terrible nausea rises in the collective gorge of the swindled
body politic. The putative contest
of ideas is a dumbshow in a hall of mirrors. None of it avails to reduce, mitigate, or even acknowledge, the tensions that may tear this
country apart, in particular
the web of fraud that shrouds all the operations of
money and banking - which
is to say: the fate of everything the nation thinks it has invested in itself and its future. In the
USA of 2012, anything goes
and nothing matters.
Reality has a different view
of where this all ends
and how it will work out.
Compare and contrast
the platforms of the Republicans
and Democrats with the
Reality Party:
The two major
parties both propose that
the colossal machine of everyday life in America can not only run indefinitely,
but continue expanding, and include
ever more member people who trade ever
more schwag. All that is required, they say, is
twiddling the settings of the machine, to get it back to running smoothly as it did in the good old days before the mystifying crash of 2008. They disagree slightly on which dials to twiddle. Reality
knows we have entered along-term compressive economic contraction; that there is no way
we can persist in the current living
arrangement; and that the necessary
outcome to avoid immense human suffering can be described
as the downscaling and re-localizing
of everything we do.
The two major
parties regard the rule of law
as optional, especially
in money matters. Neither
party has any will to interfere with a broad array of financial rackets that range from the blatant manipulation
of markets, interest
rates, and currencies to computerized
front-running thievery, traffic
in booby-trapped derivatives
and counterfeit shorts, pervasive
accounting fraud, channel stuffing, irregularities in central bank bullion leasing, flagrant confiscation of private accounts, municipal
bond-rigging flimflams,
"private equity"
looting operations,
offshore banking dodges,
and untold other scams, rip-offs, and cons that have crippled the basic functions of finance, namely: price discovery, currency as a reliable store of
value, and the allocation of surplus wealth for
productive purpose. Reality knows
that the absence of the rule
of law is suicidal. Reality is incapable
of pretending that it doesn't matter.
Reality provides work-arounds
for intractably dishonest
political arrangements: civil war
and revolution. Both are invoked out of extreme desperation and have unpredictable
outcomes. Like Reality itself, they are what they are.
The two major
parties pretend that so-called "entitlement"
programs can be simultaneously reformed, improved, and abolished - that is, you
can have your cake and eat it (with
ice cream) at the same time you throw it
in the garbage. Reality rejects
this incoherent juggling act and proposes that Americans better just make
other arrangements for old
age, routine medical
care, and daily bread.
This implies cultural as much
as economic transformation and it
will occur emergently no matter what empty promises anyone makes. People who want to get
food at regular intervals will have to find some way to make
themselves useful to others. Medicine will return to the local clinic
model and doctors will
have to find another
motivation for practice besides the acquisition of German automobiles. Old people will
have to prevail upon their offspring for care and
protection, and they will
be expected to play a useful role in the household or community in return if they are
able-bodied.
The two major
parties both proclaim that the USA is verging on "energy independence." Both
parties are lying. Reality knows
that the shale oil "game changer" is a mirage.
By 2014, the "sweet spots" of the Bakken will deplete
faster than new wells can be
drilled, and the impairments
of banking will constrict the supply of capital
investment for that hypothetical future drilling.
All the deregulation in the world will not alter the fact that future oil is expensive, exists in places where it is hard to work, and entails unappetizing geopolitical contingencies. Reality favors letting go of automobile-based
living and the adoption of walkable communities connected by inland waterways and railroads.
The two major
parties believe that the foreign wars are good for
business as long as you can
minimize the casualties on our side
and keep war news off the TV. Reality knows that war as currently
practiced by the US Military
is a failure if 1.) you can't control the terrain
in the foreign theater of
operations, and 2.) you can't control the behavior of
the foreign population. Notice that
we can't do either of those things in Afghanistan or the sundry
other places where the US
military might be found today.
The two major parties also
favor the application of war-time
"security" operations
on the US public inside our
borders - i.e. spying,
data harvesting, monitoring of cell
phone and bank records.,
et cetera - contrary to what
US law and the constitution says.
Reality believes that, if
the rule of law remains optional, the time will come when American government officials who authorized these activities may be dragged
from their command centers and hanged from traffic signals by a citizenry pushed too far.
Mitt Romney and Barack Obama would label
Reality a "terrorist movement"
if they could and seek to blow it up with predator
drones. But Reality is harder to stamp out than truth, which can be shouted
down, papered over, fudged,
outlawed, etch-a-sketched, exiled, and reviled. Reality is everywhere. It lurks inside and outside the doors of the phony-baloney
convention vaudeville shows in its cloak of invisibility, ready to work its hoodoo on the feckless, the fatuous, and the wicked. Reality is America's last best hope. Join the Reality Party.
In fact, all the
male energies in American political
economy have been directed
lately in the service of a
one multifarious enterprise:
the support of fraud, which
includes the promotion of untruth,
the protection of the wicked, and the evasion of reality. That can only end badly as this vast cargo of lies passes through the event horizon of circumstance and sucks us into the unknown territory that lies beyond the fall of empire. You can be certain of this: genuine male energy will re-emerge
from the shadows and that energy will
re-engage the still unresolved tensions abroad in this land. When they do, anything can happen. For now, the election of 2012 remains a mere pussy riot.
The storm churning through the Gulf of
Mexico may remind us just how large and uncontrollable
the forces of nature are as the curtain rises on
the political season of a
grievously misled nation.
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