We live in the age of the political celebrity. I might be misstating this and the leadership has always been the single most visible element anywhere at least in places where totalitarianism is the accepted goal. It goes without saying that power is about power so again, I’m just saying this pop theme here. Political celebrity. I think though we can definitely see that there is something to this. It might be the same as all history but we’ve only had the internet for a couple of decades now.
The genuine stars of Democratic politics are showing up all over the media these days. AOC shows up surprisingly enough on a podcast run by Bernie Sanders. Bernie himself drags out the old socialist lying about taking down the millionaires and billionaires.
And suddenly there is Barack Obama saying hello and reminding everybody that he has away with words. He is a party member now. He is about fealty. The word president is interchangeable with the word king. An interesting thought really. But what about that moment when we got to look at the former first lady. How about that for a shock?
Michelle Obama I’m sure has been reasonably busy as well for the last 4 years. She has her own following of people who think she is somebody. A person of some character. I wonder what she would be like if she were suddenly a party person. That’s what happened with Hillary Clinton. Nobody is saying that they were not qualified. I think we have this very ironic twist of marketing going on in Belarus. One of the opposition people hoping to be president during the last elections was jailed. In his place, we’ve decided that his wife is the true exiled leader or underground opposition. I don’t exactly know how that happened. I’m sure she’s quite qualified and I’m sure she knew all about the blogs her husband was making. Oh well. She’s a good looking lady.
And then there’s Kamala herself. A little fake. Maybe too fake for my taste these days but maybe it’s in there. She’s the one. She’s the one in power. None of the other superstars seem to mind Kamala Harris being in power. Image. She’s going to be a prosecutor and everybody wants us to believe that this is a good thing.
These are the big guns. You can’t argue with charisma and charm. You can’t argue with fire. Really good looking people. It’s a bit shocking for me to listen to Obama give this speech. It’s so much Richard Pryor now. He doesn’t really carry the weight of the country anymore. It makes a difference. You also can’t quite get over that AOC is saying the same things she was saying 4 years ago and the fact that she is saying it to Bernie Sanders who’s been saying the same thing for more than 40 years makes you think. We’re not winning any wars. The other side has done whatever they want to do and they don’t really have great people of character speaking of great ideas representing them politically. They’ve made a joke of the political process because they have managed to get what they want despite great words about caring for the plight of simple people and workers and other such important entities.
It’s not that I don’t agree with them. It’s the redundancy of the problem never going away. It is the redundancy of existing as an entity that itself is completely redundant because of its impotence to stop the thing it is trying to stop.
What is a professional politician?
Everybody’s got a story. Everybody has got a life story. Well, I’m running for politics because I have a life story. What is your life story? I became aware of social trends when I was a teenager. Not many teenagers are aware of social trends to the extent that they could see great movements. In my poor neighborhood, I could see how there were racial divisions that were exactly connected to economic divisions that were exactly connected to problems we were having. I could see this chain of events clearly and so I decided to fight for the people that needed fighting for. Beautiful stuff. And who can argue in a free market economy that someone would take a wild stab at getting paid to be a politician. I mean, you can’t do anything in America if you don’t have enough money to live.
I’m not saying this is an inherent corruption that colors everything but one could say that this is an obvious truth. We are talking about professional politicians. We are talking about people who earn their living by doing the job of lawmaking. This means showing up for votes and having conversations of deep meaning and figuring out how much they can lose in their compromise just trying to get some justice from an injust system. Nobody is saying it’s an easy job but it is a paid job.
It means something to people to have a regular income. I’m not saying anything outrageous here but I grew up understanding clearly that money was pretty much everything and nobody ever thought about anything but it. You can’t be an American or even live next to America or even live on the planet Earth without understanding something about how much Americans make at their jobs. The potential is astronomical to some people around the globe. This is technically an issue. But think what it is to be an American. That’s it bro, you got to make the money.
And so here we have our heroic celebrity politicians. Good looking people. Really good looking people. These really good looking people show up and charm the living crap out of everybody trying to get folks moving in a good direction. Now, what is a good direction? The answer is always the same thing. Perhaps you have a little Civic pride. You look after your neighbors. You be handy and helpful and do what you can to keep things running. Do your job. This would be the traditional values. Keep your eyes open. Make sure your people are safe. This is what people do when they have a great vested interest in their communities.
But this unfortunately is not what happens. We do not have people with division to understand how the powers are moving great chunks of resources around and making a profit from them and how this is harming their people. What we have is people looking to get paid by the party. So now, we don’t have an aspiring mayor or some local level politician for ourselves, we have a little rat with a clipboard asking us about measure 9 on the new ballot. He wants us to vote no. No to nine. What is 9? 9 is a very bad thing. Nine takes away your rights. 9 brings us back to a time a hundred years ago before we had everything we have now. 9 is a loser. Vote no on 9.
Tell me this is not standard political rhetoric for Americans even to this day?
I think it’s an interesting thing to broadcast oneself as an influencer in this world. I have led a few videos into my head, miserable tiny addictions. You suddenly have something in front of your eyes and your body resonates with it. But then you say give me more and you never really get more. You get less. The more content, the more beautiful, the more interesting, the less you want to give. It’s the problem with media. They are interesting little meals but you can’t plug into them as much as you want to. Maybe the fact that it’s electronic should tell you that you will never find home here.
But yet this is where the elections lie. Who was the government when I was growing up? I never had any sense but there was a government. When I was away from my parents, I found out we had a government because the police like to pick on single men. Once they start picking on you, it gives you kind of an attitude. I had a reputation. Sometimes it was funny. When I know who I actually am as a person and what I want and what I think is a pretty good idea to try for has nothing to do with being violent. You just have to protect yourself and sometimes the world just keeps feeding you people who want to find out what losing their independence is about. I don’t like being violently attacked. Do you?
I don’t understand who these people are. I don’t understand who they are to me. They are theoretical entities doing a theoretical job. Maybe there is enough transparency in their day that I know what they’re doing. I don’t mean to be an ass but taking myself as an example, people would know generally what was going on with me because I would be writing it down in words. We could do this like the president of Ukraine and you can just take a picture of yourself. I for one am against this. I think it’s important that people understand what you had to say much more than how you look. Images very betrayable. Certainly I am a liar because I may talk with great bravado even though I physically am much more frail than my words might show. But I can just say what I did in a sentence and now we’re back to reality. Here are my great words of importance and this is what I had to say today.
I’m not asking for the job of President. I’m recommending how the job of president should be done.
They have these presidential libraries. The general thought is that during the time of the presidency, text information was shared and official conversations were had and these were well documented. It might be a point of security that the general public is not privy to some of these situations. This is bloody arguable. If we took the military out of the equation, then holding information back is criminal. If we take war out of the equation, we have peace and that seems to mean we can talk to each other again. I’m saying that all of this in hiding stuff is beneficial to people who don’t really like to let people know how they spend their day.
I spoke last week about working on the Egyptian theater in Ogden Utah. There was a guy running this crew that I ended up on. And this guy was an interesting boss. Some bosses would get into things and get his hands dirty or at least get his eyes on problems and make sure that things are running good. Some bosses build when they are not particularly needed as a boss. Maybe they give themselves a tricky project or a little assembly to get ahead of the game or something like that. And I guess some bosses just show up give the news and leave. Whoever is in charge is actually a worker and you know, everything runs more smoothly when everybody is working.
This guy had the unique habit of just being there. He would dress up in clothes that might be associated with a gentleman builder and had a podium with the plans on them and he would stand at the podium and look at the plans. I don’t know why we didn’t have a trailer that he could sit in and plan in private. He had to do all of this planning in public. I remember being on this job on the roof and looking down on him and seeing that yes indeed, there he was leaning on the podium and staring at the plans.
How much can one person stare at the plans? I remember one of the crew members asking this. The next day or soon after this, we had a fuck up. We had ill built a scaffold and we were throwing boards across it for walkways and one side gave way and the board that was thrown went off the roof. It came now directly on our boss and hit him in the head. Truly, he was blessed for wearing that hard hat. But it was as if someone had planned this out. It was really an accident. I was there and I saw it but I was not a participant nor was I involved in building the scaffold. But I was apart of this team that could not quite understand our relationship to the boss or the boss’s relationship to reality.
Well, this was a big money build so OSHA was called in and there were inspections and relevant issues were found. The one to take the heat for these mistakes of course is the boss. He made a speech and talked about safety and talked about how some of the men might feel about him and his actions. But he felt that we were in a good situation because we worked for a good company. We had a fine theater to build and if we just step up our efforts and be more conscientious, good things will happen. And that was it.
If you really wanted someone to fight, you don’t want anyone like like myself. I am the biggest bum in the world. I really don’t bring extra responsibility to myself if I don’t need it. I have the basic job of doing the agriculture in my world but I underplanted this year. I did not go full volume and intent to do maximum planting for maximum rewards. I didn’t do all of the math and the geometry necessary to know everything and just have production to look forward to. I make excuses because I messed up so I work at a much, much less intense level. I just set up things that were fun to set up and I got lucky in one or two things. But I eat from my field and what I grow is a great portion of my calories and that is all I wanted to do.
You might want someone like me slightly younger though. You might want someone who writes and thinks and doesn’t mind doing it publicly. You don’t want specifically me but I think you might want someone who does more than tweet. You might want someone who thinks deeply about things. Maybe I’m being overly sentimental but I think the idea of presidential libraries started with Lincoln. Or maybe it was Jefferson. These were the real writers. These are the ones who left great histories. We are talking about people who at least felt transparent in the face of God. Not only by being religious people, but by having the truth as it lands on paper to be mathematically analyzed be your guide. That’s a genuine philosopher. That’s a genuine idealist. I think there’s a big difference.
But this is usually not the guy or the lady we put in Washington. This is not the person who is out there to breathe fire and make sure that our people are protected against the special interest groups and all the people who buy and sell us and bring misery to our lives. Usually these are not absolute rocks tied to philosophical ideas that need to be fought for. Usually, we pick up people who are willing to say the things the party tells them to say and do the things to party tells them to do. Usually we try to pick good looking people because it helps.
It’s good to have fighters but where are they fighting?
What about the activist? What about the person who wishes to physically do something to make things better? I have a warm spot for the ecological warrior simply getting trampled for putting themselves in the way. I have ridden in critical mass bicycle rides. Usually the point is to mildly hinder normal road traffic by making bicycles, which are often harmed in acts of road rage or simply because they were ignored by unconscious drivers, more visible and apart of a political crowd. Nowadays they just sit on the road and wait for the police to drag them away. Some people are gluing their hands to the ground so that pulling them away is that much more difficult.
If you’re going to represent people, at least tell us that you’re prepared to get in the face of any super villain trying to poison us more than we are already poisoned.
What I’m saying is that there is a level of attention that needs to be paid and this is something that cannot allowed to be a part of a machine. Certainly, you want to have absolutely regular information about all of the key places under your care. Obviously you want routine calls and hopefully there really is no genuine problem to be addressed at the moment. Excellent. But you can’t say that the problems all get handled automatically because that just isn’t the nature of human problems. Even if you have seen something a million times before, you’re still dealing with a hysterical someone experiencing something very frightening for the very first time. How you deal with that, officially at least, it’s who you are as a member of the community. I vote for learning kindness skills so you can at least lie well.
But you’re there. You’re looking. You know what it looks like with your own eyes. And, if you’ve got adversaries there, you talk directly to them and you let them know what kind of army you’ve got to fight with. It’s true. I want a blood and guts prosecutor taken down the bad guys. I just want a prosecutor to prosecute oil. I want to prosecute the people who are responsible for the murders of the world. I want to put an end to the weapons business. I want to put an end to the oil business. I want to put an end to the alcohol business and the meat business. I want to put an end to national level business. I want to prosecutor who will take America back from the corporations and give it to the human beings that live here if for no other reason then we would make less pollution this way.
I think the difference now for me is that I understand that we have all been looking at and listening to the same lies for as long as lies have been told. I understand that a government retaining power as a government is the sole job of any government. This is true for the government and true for any government official from the top down. While it is true that there are elements of community building inherent in the thought of at least a superficial democracy, it is also true that we have career politicians sitting in offices and playing video games most of the day. We have people who don’t actually work at a job but our bosses and only need to keep appearances up in order to keep their jobs.
What we need is a different type of organizer. I’m not going to say that there are those with sight and those without. I’ve been in education too long to believe in a human’s ability to acquire information more quickly than they are physically capable of doing so. If there has never been any education asking anyone to have a vested interest in the community, if there is no reason to tie yourself to the people in the houses around you, you have no vested interest in your community unless you are a small business owner. And if the corporations run everything, you can’t have a small business.
I personally am open to debate about this subject but it does seem easy to get to these conclusions if you just write down what happened during the games. If you start understanding who the good guys are and the bad guys are, you start putting together a list of archetypes. You start understanding what you believe is right and wrong and good and bad. The difference is that these thoughts were not fun games that you played and then threw away like a child. Some people believe when you have these thoughts, it means that you use them to direct yourself down a particular path. If you know something is true or believe it’s true, you must use this to guide your actions.
I also think we should go vegan. I think we should quit playing with animals. I think we don’t need to kill animals and we don’t need to drink their secretions. We don’t need them. We don’t need to harm them or to control them. We don’t even particularly need them for agriculture. What we need is to have the time to leave a clean life. I’m not talking about a Christian clean life where you agree to keep your job and deal with the pressures of the world stoically. I’m talking about leading lives that do not pollute where we are at least physically responsible for our own existence. I say this means we help grow food. I think this means that everybody gets their hands dirty.
Well, I’m glad that there was a time before they were elected where they needed to make money and they had jobs. I’m glad that these jobs gave them further wisdom about the difficulties of life. And this is of course why they became career politicians. These jobs come with paychecks though. And once you start putting someone’s paycheck on the line right there next to their opinions, you’ve got a natural gravity there. And this is just the base pay. This is not in the under the table envelope get rich quick pay type. Because you get those two when you have power. You get rich when you have power.
Am I accusing Bernie Sanders of this? No. Do I think Barack Obama wanted to grow rich in the politic business? No. I think he lives a particular lifestyle that’s reasonable for a well-paid executive. He’s got a pension. I think he writes books too and give speeches. No, we’ve got some really good looking people in the Democratic party. We’ve got some really smart people who really know their stuff. The stars are out in the Democratic party and we are the smart ones who know the social problems. The only question is are we acknowledging these problems as being reasons why we should vote Democratic or are we acknowledging these problems to solve them? Do we wish to be leaders or appear to be leaders?
