I’ve decided to make some bread this week. It’s possible if I look really hard that I will find pre-packaged tortillas. I can also go with rice or pasta. Actually, the steam bun I created over oil poached vegetables was so good it was ridiculous. With some kimchi on the side? Are you kidding me?
This cover picture is people in the Soviet Union during the time of the fall trying to get bread to eat from the state shop. That’s what that word says. It’s a bread shop. I used to make a point of getting factory bred once a week. I gave up on it. They are not bread makers in the way people can be bread makers. They are not bread makers and you can’t talk to them because they are absolutely locked into doing their bureaucratic job. So goes the army, so go the schools, so go all of the support people who talk to us over the phone these days, so goes everyones way of doing business.
But maybe we should have some bread. We say a prayer for the bread. We should have bread. If you have bread, you have home. This is the theory at least. If you have enough space for a wheat field, you can have bread. And if you have fresh bread, you have people near you. I think that’s a better question then the one about chickens and eggs. What came first, bread or a family?
I have been caught up in these thoughts about communication and mind-robbing propaganda force fed to a population not quite prepared for it. It is a notable feature about telephones and electronic information. Most people are suffering from information overload. The people who are using the internet to further their political and economic desires for world domination, they are completely in favor of communication overflow. They want people to get jacked up. We don’t want to listen to a board drummer slow down. We want that bitch accurate and to the line and to teach people how to get along with electronics in much the same way.
This is great in terms of re-education. If the true goal of the planet is to create super soldiers or super consumers then it’s perfectly fine to make use of every single technology available to do your job well. You could argue with some autocrat about this sometimes. They would tell you there are layers to the onion. It’s not just getting reelected. Getting reelected is bullshit. It’s getting them to believe crazier and crazier things that’s the most fun. Do you actually get genuine reactions from my whims. This is the thing that drives us forward.
I could see where that would be enticing. But as a result, one guy might enjoy playing with his giant electric train set but the rest of us are obligated to suit his whims. It’s daunting to suit someone else’s whims.
A quick story from my teaching days. One of the greatest bad students I ever had was the local oligarch. I will not reportray the entire story here but at the beginning, he approached me and attempted to be a good and serious student. As it turned out, all of that was nonsense. What he really wanted was to figure out a connection. I was an American and therefore there was something different about me. This class was entrepreneurial. I was teaching privately after being locked out by the school system. That’s what he liked. I was like him maybe in his mind. I was not a zombie like everyone else. He often would tell me his secret desires. Something about steaks, Spain and 50 million dollars. He talked like he was someone who would get it. I always wondered why he thought it important to tell me about it. Was he going to include any of that money for me? Classical guitar on the beach?
No, that’s not the way we make people. The people who actually have the checks coming in, they now live on a different planet. They have mobility. They have the right to make decisions. When you are someone to whom the checks flow, it is your choice what to do with this money. Most people here pray to God for even a single opportunity to make a decision about money. The local Russian wives association wants absolutely nothing more than to have agency within your checkbook. They just want to know you will withdraw money and give it to them for some reason. If they have this connection, the blood is free to flow. And yes, this is a cultural norm and nobody would ever say I’m sorry for getting caught or getting rejected. Actually, reject them one time and see what happens to their face when they stop acting.
Is this just economics? No. It’s the soul. They’ve gone after and demanded the soul.
I was involved in a terrible story about power. One person had power and an entire army. He just entered the other person’s house and tore it up. There was nothing to be done. Power was established. And then when all the deals were offered, it was very important to seal the deal with a very long successful kiss of the powerful man’s genitalia. Part of the job. Take it and like it.
In this story though there was one nuance. He wanted them to want it. I’m talking about the torturer. He wanted his victims to want to pay their penalties. He wants to see that they took pleasure in the action and that they had desire to do it. Possibly to do a better job. Possibly to get away from a bunch of unnecessary emotions and crying. Possibly to get out of quite a few things. But why? If it’s already about power, why do you need more?
And here we get to the needles and pins of it. It’s a drug. It’s not that we have a government that stays in power because it is professionally built to stay in power. It’s drugs. They are all ridiculously on drugs and keeping the flow of resources going and the flow of opportunities going at this completely unacceptable and most polluting level is a sin beyond words. What word can I say? It is a crime of endless proportions. It is a global crime against humanity. And however we have the world set up that someone ends up at the top of the pyramid and just gets to put his people into a meat grinder and make hamburger out of everybody, it is and all anybody else does is stand around talking. And the conservatives and the oil people and the war people and the pharmaceutical hospital people and the big farmers, they just sit there making sure that their private holdings stay intact.
That is the goal. That’s my goal! I am retired and I am sick. I am not interested in working for anyone! You can work for me and I’ll pay you if we have a good deal but I’m not working for you unless I agree to give you some advice and you agree to leave me alone afterwards or something like that. I’m not going to get hooked into something that’s not going to work and I’m not going to be paying attention to stuff with someone who’s not doing their job 100%. Anybody would think this way so why wouldn’t a guy with economic agency? That’s the difference. When you are the guy controlling the flow of money, you make your decisions and 100%, your first thought is to do you.
Meanwhile, the workers are actually here at their own benevolence. We have an argument right here in this picture how much money a human life is worth. Let’s say we have one guy who gets up into the six or seven figures and then the rest of us who are lucky to see even five figures. Some people get less. Some people get much less. Some people are never going to get more of anything and this is the one thing they know everyday when they wake up.
So we have a popularity contest. If we can get like half the people feeling like they have enough drugs to keep them happy, you have a political party. This is the conservatives. If we can get half the people to party publicly and actually enjoy it and generate stories and make sure that the bars stay open and the insanity continues, we can get all of the private junkies and all of their friends to buy corporate stuff at corporate prices. Life goes on, the flow of money continues and people get to be exactly as they are and have been forever and ever and ever.
In order to make this very simple bread, I use chia seeds. We could argue that perhaps I should be using some kind of local variant. Lin seeds are here. I could use that instead. It’s to add some sense of stickiness to it. I’m imitating an egg bread but I’m not going to use egg. I’m not working really hard on making a challah. I just like putting the chia seeds in there for the flavor on Shabbos and because I’m replacing eggs. Other than that, maybe 50% white, 25% protein and 25% whole wheat. One rise. Definitely it requires kneading But not extensively so. These are just going to be flatbreads. No matter what we do with them, they only need one pop and we are good to go.
I’m talking about this because I don’t know anyone else who worries so much about these decisions. When I think of all of the people I have associated with over the last 20 years, if I were to open a discussion about bread making, they would panic. It would be an opportunity to be a troll or to make a joke. They would become completely uncomfortable because they would need to quickly come up with something to say and have it be finished and cause nothing but humor. They are not in any conversation. They are just functioning the best they can and trying to keep everything together. Just a lot of frightened people with absolutely nothing in the world to pay attention to except the political situation they live in. Everybody, everywhere completely throttled by a system that will never allow them a day of peace in their lives and is destroying the world because of the amount of industry necessary to keep it going.
Well, if you want some bread, you can buy it or you can make it. The problem with making it is it opens up a huge Pandora’s box. Every single choice of how you’re going to create this bread is yours. Every weird bit of creativity that comes into your head how to make this thing better or different or how to make some other type of bread has to be dealt with. One decision after another and each one in the hope of having some kind of success. You could call that a hobby but I call that an entrepreneurial mind. Or, maybe we could just call this a living person.
I am a dog wailing in the wind If I try to say that my position is somehow different or more interesting than Winston Smith in 1984. Do I stand up to battling apartheid and staying in prison for decades? Do I have any right to say I am in any way special? No, of course not. I’m just a foolish person making their own choices and living with them for good or for bad. And if you talk to me, you know that I am telling you what I think or protecting my assets from you if I don’t trust you. And that’s all you need to know and now we can talk about anything you want if you can do this. If you have the power of speech. If you are a human being with your own eyes and ears. If you ever make genuine decisions for yourself. I’m just saying that the world doesn’t have enough of this anymore and I’m saying it’s a rather eloquent symptom of the disease to have to live with. Not just the death of species after species, the death of even the pleasure of conversation. For money.
One final edition that concerns this picture. I think it’s one thing to ask a population to dedicate itself to its community. Or think there’s a lot of selflessness necessary in this. To truly care about your own people is not a horrible thing and one can see where the argument makes sense. The non-entities we make today, the video game players, the online entrepreneurs, the jealousy people, where would they be in a self-sufficient world? It’s a completely economic game being played by people trying to find an edge somewhere. And everyone and I mean everyone is looking for the national money.
The game breaker for me is when the government continues to ask for this selflessness even when going into a system that requires great egotism. You could say that they are practicing good gardening techniques. Rich people remain rich because of the power they wield. These people make money but these people don’t make money. The problem is when you talk to your working class. What exactly are you telling them? They are worthless. Nobody cares what happens to them and they can simply suffer if they don’t get it through their mind the level of perfection necessary to join the elite class. It’s doubtful any members of the elite class ever had even a day like most people do in Russia. Elite class usually means the parents had enough money for elite schools and tutors.
It all comes down to taxation without representation. It all comes down to the perpetuation of slavery. If they think you’re a slave, how are you going to change their mind? You can’t even talk to them like a human being. How are you going to convince someone who takes one look at you and absolutely knows that you are worthless to them and somehow change their mind? Start dancing? Show them you’re over the top oral sex skills? Rattle off numbers like a pro? What are you going to do to kiss their ass when they just don’t care one way or another?
