Thursday, January 25, 2007

I have seen the future, and it is Cheney.

Alas, having no access to CNN – or, for that matter, CBS, ABC or NBC – LI did not see the Wolf Blitzer interview with Dick Cheney. However, apparently it was quite a spectacle. Cheney’s bullying, monomania, and blood in the mouthism was on full display, to rally the lobotomized in the usual ways. That’s good, because Cheney is a forerunner. Having coddled and nursed into being a class of grotesque parasites, aka the CEO class, for the past thirty years, America will get what it grew: an endless stream of Cheneys.

One has to remember a basic rule about CEOs – they are horrors. A just state would simply expropriate their wealth entirely, simply to disempower a clearly dangerous class. This is why LI has always supported a 100 percent tax rate for incomes over 10 million dollars. Soi-disant conservatives are, of course, utterly opposed to such schemes, which is simply a way of saying that they are soi-disant – read any traditional political theorist, from Aristotle to Montesquieu, and they will warn you about concentrated private power in the state. That power isn’t anti-statist – it is, rather, much more likely to use the state for its own ends. For the liberty of the vast majority, there should be a war between the rich and the state. The rich have found it advantageous to pretend that there is. The truth is, of course, that there is no structural difference between big business and big government. The great art of government, for the liberal, is to produce enough countervailing power to force the state to act, every once in a while, for labor. The myth that the state supports the powerless and “punishes” the entrepreneur is only believed by losers who are deep in their cups at the Rotary Club smoker. They are losers precisely because they don’t know the first rule of entrepreneurialship – when you find the goose that lays the golden eggs, first, claim that the goose really doesn’t lay golden eggs, and second, get yourself elected a representative to the goose so that you can shrink it down to a small sized goose - in order, of course, to promote liberty - and then you can harvest all the fucking golden eggs you can stand. Best to have a long long long long war, of course, in reserve to justify the golden egg hording.

I can imagine that Cheney would say to the board at Halliburton, about the purchase of Dresser (whose asbestos suit liabilities cost Halliburton some 3 billion dollars), that it was an enormous success with the same snappishness that he claimed, to a disbelieving country, that we are “winning” something in Iraq. The swaddling of the CEO class produces that monstrosity, the grown up baby. Thus, Cheney’s claims seem more like the cries of a one year old in a high chair than reasoned discourse, or even the shady mumblings of some vast controlling puppetmaster. When the torturers in Brazil donned the baby masks, the director was directly plugged into the future – our torturers come straight off the Gerber label.

We have to shortcircuit the culture that elevates creatures like Cheney.

7 comments:

Qlipoth said...

The aptly-named Vice President was busy producing supersecret maps of Iraqi oilfields a full six months before the punctual emergence of an All-Purpose Casus Belli. Which only goes to show that every cloud has a silver lining, especially for those who make the weather:

http://www.counterpunch.org/singham07192003.html

The former UK Environment Minister has it right:

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/iraq/comment/0,12956,1036687,00.html

Anonymous said...

Cheney=Qlipoth.

There is nothing less trustworthy about any form of Cheney than there is any form of Qlipoth. How perfectly squalid.

Qlipoth said...

Ah, it's Patrick J. Mullins, the Sage of Queens, impoifectly disguised and struggling to impersonate Helen Mirren as Her Imperial Majesty.

The plot thickens, or at least slows.

Qlipoth said...

Ah, it's Patrick J. Mullins, the Sage of Queens, impoifectly disguised and struggling to impersonate Helen Mirren as Her Imperial Majesty.

The plot thickens, or at least slows.

Anonymous said...

That's a fascinating conception, roger.

I would extend this observation quite a bit downward into society, though. Much of the professional upper middle class in this culture is profoundly juvenile in thought patterns. The obsessive nannying of over-swaddled smothered children, the horrif NIMBYism ("my income is $100,00 per year. I don't want my children to be exposed to families earning $40,000 a year (an actual quote from a public hearing here!), the shopping mall religion. Our entire culture is somewhat infantilized, with an amazing sense of entitlement and lack of empathy-particularly across class lines.

Is this just an American thing, though? Not to be politically incorrect/racist, but I have met too many members of the expatriot Indian professional class that show even more of this lack of empathy. Heck, it's a key tenent of the dominant religion? Is one of the reasons for this cultural poison in our culture perhaps the spread of debauched-Calvinist "Prosperity Gospel"?

Anonymous said...

'impoifectly'.

Well, that sounds a little less Scottish than Jewish. It's good to know that it's become impossible to distinguish between the two of you. That should at least make sure that I get no more 'begging-for-it' emails on the one hand and accusations of betraying confidences on the other (because the accusations, while false, were 'blessed' by the accusee, a Neville Chamberlain impersonator). Sages of Queens ask no more than to be left alone by blogger-lice.

Anonymous said...

'accusee' should be 'betrayee', as that is what both Siamese Twins agreed was acceptable, even though the 'betrayee' had to own up to other Leninist management that it was false. I give her credit for that one, but she should have made it public if even a single further one of her vast verbiages was to be taken seriously as anything but an annex of the 'accuser'. It is hardly my fault if my memory is such that it does not resort to infinite temporizing such as is practised by the Siamese Twins.

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