I’ve talked about Big Evil before. It’s like the more famous Big Oil, Big Pharma and Big Tobacco, but not as romantic as smokes and Lunesta. Big Evil is more insidious because it’s banal. It’s rooted in the faulty organization of people, not necessarily the overwhelming individual badness of the people: the war profiteers, the mercenaries, the torturers, the mental midgets who are also fathers, aunts, “cat people”, scout leaders, dog owners – I mean, how to possibly explain the easy acquiescence of perfectly ordinary human beings in grossly inhuman behavior? To expunge Banal Big Evil, we need a ground-up do-over. I mean a “put on the garb of the founding fathers and get to work with plumed pens and parchment, tar and feathers” type do-over. Because there aren’t mechanisms in place to “address” the problem of a system which cannot be anything but corrupt. Structural malfeasance in the American system of governance can’t be ‘fixed’ by the American system of governance, it’s all foxes in sheep’s clothings guarding hen houses. A reorganization by the people (in knickers and powdered wigs), is in order, and such a reorganization in the face of concentrated power may be the most difficult problem we will ever confront.
The allocation of all the major conduits of power is really just a small smattering of malevolent but frail lunatics, huddled together, bleeding from their eyeballs. There are 300 million of us. I’m not saying KILL the Fox freaks, the Teafodders and the newscast broads, it’s not even really their fault, that’s just the way human beings are. Given the colossal influence of television on events, those who control it are bound to become degraded and spoiled, corrupted by their own power. But they can’t be left to control the one key communication path in our civilization, while the rest of us control only our own thoughts (and if we’re “lucky”, a twitter stream or a blog). If we didn’t have a communications medium of our own, we’d have no voices at all (thanks, Al Gore!). The TV and radio behemoths are bellowing so loudly that a mere “human” voice is like the tiniest Who in Whoville, just a small speck of dust on a clover, trying to be heard over the cacophony, trying to tell everyone that is is there. That is exists.
I read somewhere that the German people who possessed any sort of conscience effectively died during the Nazi reign. They technically lived out the rest of their lives, but they might as well have been dead. That’s why we must act, even if it kills us. Because we’re sort of dying anyway now, aren’t we? Living in shame and disgrace over things done in the name of our country. Kind of watching it happen, sick and horrified, unable to change a thing. Living in a kind of state of permanent low-grade mortification. It’s what gives life in Today’s America such an eerie feeling of morbidity. The spectral feeling of death in life. La vie des morts, en français. It’s why America has no feelings whatsoever for the Iraq war. It crosses minds like an Impresario’s cape. But it isn’t real. It’s as if it passes in a dream from what already is a dream. It occurs….but out “there”….somewhere else, in the distance…..as just another shadow world.