So, why didn’t I vote for Obama?
There were many reasons, but among them, the one most able to be the butt of amusement, is that I find annoying the company of such sincere, but clueless, nimrods like this lady:
[ link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P36x8rTb3jI&feature=player_embedded]
I do not want to be dependent on a government, a state, or set of agencies and assorted apparat.
The very notion is repugnant to me, moreover many of us used to be raised to be repelled by the idea of being dependent on anyone. Even if I secretly wanted to be breastfed by the state and guberment I would have the dignity not to admit it in public. But dignity is lacking in our society today. It is a dead instinct.
I think that a subtle sense of entitlement has entered American culture over the last couple of decades. At one end it’s gross and blatant, like this video. But go through each level of society, each gender, each race, each class, and you see lingering traces of an entitlement, a notion that one actually deserves certain things, for any reason. It becomes a social poison.
The sentiments this lady is expressing, then, form the very definition of a slave mentality – someone who wants and yearns for some all powerful master to pay their damn mortgage, or rent, and gas for them.
This isn’t social justice, it’s slavishness.
There are levels of slavishness, field slaves have a field slave mentality, house slaves have a house slave mentality, Mamlukes and military slaves have their own mentality, and criminal slaves have their own mentality.
Before the election I had some early conversations on these lines with Baruti, Black Nationalist, entrepreneur, and citizen journalist. We discussed our mutual perception that the “black community” (however defined) was being herded like sheep into gleefully voting for someone en masse that really was going to end up just using them. He pointed out to me that it’s no wonder no one takes the “Black community” seriously, when voices like this pop up.
Similar to the interesting mentality behind Smitherman’s and the local NAACP’s stances on the proposed Cincinnati street car line – an inability to see the broader picture – being caught up on short term benefits or the lack thereof.
[Nate Livingston has had some interesting things to say on these issues, while often I disagree with Livingston, sometimes reading him gives me something really thought provoking to think about. Something provocative.]
Anyway, the point is this. There is no sugar daddy, “no one rides for free, cash grass or ass, nobody rides for free” – Obama is not a milk chocolate Jesus Christ people, he is not a messiah, not only will he not pay your bloody gas, but he never will, and any politician who does is only doing so to buy your consent and further increase the degree to which you are owned.
Contemptible.
I’d swear to god if the topic wasn’t so blasphemous, Obama’s administration is going to go down in history as the second “Great Disappointment” and one with far more profound social effects
Governments, officialdom, and politicians, are not there for you first and foremost, they serve other masters, benefits you accrue are incidental.
Sure, their formal job description includes being a “public servant” but know for a fact that the only public they serve are actual stakeholders (to use the think-tank wonky term de jour) – they do not know who you are, or even care if you exist if you are not a stakeholder, and trust me, you probably are not…
No one gets this; on the Left liberals and progressives sure do not, and on the Right neither do conservatives, be they neo-cons, social-cons, or paleo-cons.
It is simple, but we must first have courage to open our mind, and throw out the ideology we use as a crutch, and try to examine things more flatly. To see what is going on without flinching.
The government is not civil society, this notion is absurdly recent in human history, civil society is you, and your family, and your friends, and your communities.
Officials a thousand miles away do not know your family, nor your community, your history or your troubles. They do not know your ethnic and racial tensions, your class tensions, your employment and industry dynamics, your environmental troubles, your economic difficulties.
To any government, no matter how well meaning the faction in power happens to be, you are at best an abstraction – part of an aggregate mass to be catered to with pleasing words so that you gush with a thrill of joy over the prospects of some concern of yours finally being addressed.
Reducing living phenomena and dynamic systems to easy to grasp abstractions is both a strength in the Western mind, and a real serious curse and weakness. One’s weaknesses are often inverses of one’s strengths.
Government itself is an abstraction, we are talking about people in factions of varying strengths of cohesion with their own loves and hates, hopes dreams and fears, and very importantly ambitions. People 1000 miles away legally behelden to you but ignorant of your actual real fleshy existence can only see you as abstract numbers, just as you can only see them as abstract symbols of forces, Obama will do this, Obama will do that, the administration will do this, the administration will do that.
This is a child like way of seeing the world.
To get in power, promises may be told to you and here only the promise matters, not the reality of its fulfillment – and the words can be recycled endlessly whenever you notice the promise is not fulfilled to give you new promises as you consent to their agendas in the hopes your few particular human needs and interests will be addressed.
Doesn’t matter if you are a “taker” or a “maker” both of you fall for it, endlessly.
How do you know a politician is lying?
He’s breathing.
I mean, he doesn’t really have to be speaking to be lying, his very presence is an illusion.