It’s an old axiom – “If an extraterrestrial (we used to say ‘Martian’ but we know what is in store for Mars – terraforming, toxic bombs of sulfur, microbes and viral, self-replicating bots, Avatars of purple epidermis and femurs as long as an NBA star’s jump shot) were to just drop into a city or plop right down in the middle of a Congressional hearing … or land into a football stadium two minutes before halftime … or light into some Lazy Boy with the nuclear family watching TV, well, you get the idea – that Martian or extra-galaxy being would be blown away by our species. Just a minute with Obama, Jon Stewart, Jeff Bezos, Rand Paul, any actor a,b,c or TV or radio star, x,y,z, well, that extraterrestrial would just slither back into hyper-space at Mach 10 to the tenth power speed, and just skedaddle outta here.”
Try that with the Huffington Post, New York Times, People, and any other junk box of cultural crass. Can you imagine if another species of thinkers had to judge us in a snapshot of experiencing something from this white sicko culture of money grubbers, i-Addicts, screenie weenies, all the putrid comics who are our leaders, the cultural jokesters who are the art of us, or the grand wizard sellouts in academia or Mass Suicide Media? Can you imagine if your great-great-great-great-great granny came back from the dead and had to spend 10 minutes in this hell?
Children, old folks, and you putzes who swerve AT me while running-bicycling-motorcycling in your suburbia paranoia, all of you, us, really, the collective crash of this creaky society that insists that the junk of food, the junk of ideas, the junk of on-line avatars, the silos we build to our little angel-hallowed heavens, we sad syrupy rascals, loving every click of the mouse, every flip of the screen, every slide of the digital dream world we just can’t get enough. But children, really, take a look at these headlines, from the aggregator, Alternet.org. Look at what that alien species would be seeing in its nanosecond assessment of us, the alien species, the doodling minds, the mental midgets lacking in visionary viscosity. Consumopithecus Anthropocene indeed!
Look at what a visitor from another galaxy would be reading, seeing what our attention spans might be wrapped and warped around. Here, today’s Alternet headlines.
WATCH: Texas Sports Anchor Delivers Jaw-droppingly Honest Speech on Michael Sam and Homophobia in the NFL
What It’s Like to Go From Harvard to Working as a Naked Camgirl
The Truth About “Macho” Men
4 Best Films Exposing America’s Insane War on Drugs
Jerk Alert! Wealthy CEO Tells 99 Percenters: Stop Whining, You’d Be Rich In India!
Lindsey Vonn’s Nasty Comments About Celebrities’ Bodies Show Sports Culture at Its Worst
10 Key Steps for Writing About the Woody Allen Scandal That Will Wow the Glitterati and Your Pretentious Editor
37 Quotes from Heroin Users on Addiction and the Struggle to Stay Sober
7 Surprising Things I Learned from Working at a Sex Shop
10 Right-Wing Psychopaths’ Vitriol this Week—That Somehow Made Pat Robertson Look Reasonable
ESPN Sports Analyst’s Major Gaffe Shows How Backwards America Still Is on Gay Rights
Intoxicated Sexual Assault Victims Are as Guilty as Their Attackers
How the California Drought Could Drive Up Nation’s Marijuana Prices
Latest Chapter in the Multibillion Dollar Yoga Wars: Patenting Online Yoga Videos
5 Ways Rich People’s “Entitlements” Cheat You and Me
The Truth about Sex and Equality
The Scary Future of Creationism in America
Subway, Eat Fresh… Plastic
The 10 Worst Couples in Literature
Crybabies of the 1 Percent: The Rich Complain While Getting Away With Everything
If Obama Orders the CIA to Kill a U.S. Citizen, Amazon Will Be a Partner in Assassination
9 Stupid Things that Cops, Nurses, Lawyers and Friends Should Never Say to Rape Survivors — But, Alas, Have
12 Insanely Bad Pieces of Sex and Relationship Advice
Well, the CIA and Jeff Bezos and Amazon story, now, that’s interesting, and so is this — “Is the Outrage Over GMO Overblown?” by some great gift of gab, Ari LeVaux. He’s covered food issues for several years, and the upshot of this little piece, well, he now doubts the veracity of those of us who might dare question the motives of Monsanto and the other half dozen purveyors of copyright hell, pesticide Armageddon and seed sickness. Oh, the world goes better with chemicals, genetic engineering, patenting life, sending in the goon squad against farmers and deploying black robed jurists to lock ‘em up, and well, it’s about profit, profit, profit, yep, that’s the human right to food and resources, and self-sufficiency and sustainability — at the whim of the gatekeepers, Monsanto. That’s okay, Ari LeVaux opines. Schmuck.
This is the slippery slope of American thinking, writing, putzing around with a pen and devil’s advocate hard-on, that’s it, really, a world of National Public Radio Koch Brothers Salespitchmen/women, a world where up is down, pre-crime is a done deal, and no amount of middle, lower, poor class common sense and art and smarts and pure amazing stick-to-it-ness will be covered with genuine interest.
So this is where we are – Spitzer boners, rotten reality shows with girls in diapers getting Botox shots, where the world of IT, software, anything-goes-with-Amazon-dot-com is the coming of the third appearance of the good of greed.
Look at the headlines above. Even if you wanted to read through those stories (sic), the bulk of them are superficial, trashy, same old-half lefty crap, hipster or uninspiring, or worse, irrelevant, more white noise in a large bowl of flatulence. The story after story of silliness, shadow boxing the enemy (Republicans and Tea Baggers, really, they are the enemy?), these whoring writers who just jump around their little kingdoms of the zeitgeist and cultural crap of their times.
Everything they think and write is steeping in capital-capitalism, profits, things, the marketplace, things, ways of exploiting this or that, but just their own sort of exploitation, because, or course, we have to hear it from a One Percenter Jon Leibowitz Stewart how bad the Republican speak of the house is, or we have to hear from how many Olympic (sic) athletes (sic-sic) that they are concerned about global warming!
Those planetary tourists would have one nanosecond after another nanosecond worth’s of our collective room temperature IQ after scouring the likes of Alternet or Huff Post or all the emasculating and misogynistic crap on TV.
In the theaters.
Blasting out of our ear bugs.
Games and drones and bots up our colons, and, shoot, we’d be seeing men in black running for the hills, skinning themselves, wanting immediate respite from this species.
Voyeur. Voluptuous vampires. Veg-heads. Vapid. Vexing. Venting. Venomous. We are this funny cockroach wannabe species, lethal, full of water-air-soil-blood curdling toxicity. We are the nations of energy churners, at any cost. PCBs, radionuclides, atmospheres of purple peroxide haze. We are the electrolysis apes. Hydrogenating, hydraulic, monsters of metal on metal. Locomotion through the teats of fire exploding the chambers of hydrocarbon mists.
Oh, golly, I sort of get it. I know we are all Gomer Pyles, and shoot, that Jim Nabors did tie the knot with another guy, a firefighter from Hawaii. Oh, golly. This is the stuff that makes us all seem like little dafts, Down syndrome, well, I don’t think so, because I know a few Down Syndrome special people, and they have more gumption, fun, outright hilarity and deep regard for the stardust of our beginnings than any Chomsky or seriously sad bloke like Bill 350 dot org McKibben.
Jim Nabors came out in his 80s, married this fellow who was his companion for 35 years. Way to go, U.S.M.C.
That’s it, now, is it not? We suck on the lollypop of lascivious thought. We want these ping-pongy days and nights occupied with frivolity, armchair judgment, and the supreme distance from everyone else’s pain as we stuff our fat cheeks with carbs, salt, sugar, and Bud.
It all brings me back to alternative life forms, like Jeff Bezos, Princeton graduate, the dildo salesman of the world, the aggregator, the killer of moms and pops, the giant Slurpee in the Sky, Bezos, this Adderall thing, this multi-billionaire with his army of techies, and the endless crap of the Amazon z to a smile. Oh, sure, that little thing called the CIA, his powerful tool, his drone lust, the very beingness of his Burning Man deadpan lust for more money.
It is in his blood. From Normon Solomon, Alternet.org:
Drone attacks in Pakistan are “an entirely CIA operation,” New York Times reporter Mark Mazzetti said Tuesday night in an interview on the PBS NewsHour. He added that “the Pakistani government will not allow the [U.S.] military to take over the mission because they want to still have the sort of veneer of secrecy that the CIA provides.”
The sinister implications of Amazon’s new CIA role have received scant public attention so far.
As the largest Web retailer in the world, Amazon has built its business model on the secure accumulation and analysis of massive personal data. The firm’s Amazon Web Services division gained the CIA contract amid fervent hopes that the collaboration will open up vast new vistas for the further melding of surveillance and warfare.
Notably, Amazon did not submit the low bid for the $600 million contract. The firm won the deal after persuading the CIA of its superior technical capacities in digital realms.
Amazon is now integral to the U.S. government’s foreign policy of threatening and killing.
That’s right, Bezos bought the grey Lady, that Washington Post-pone, and, alas, you think the WP is going to cover the Amazon contract with the guys and gals who take contracts out on us, them, anyone, with that drone thing, the favorite toy of Bezos’ Prozac mind – he wants drones all over Seattle first, to try out his 30 minute or you get it free delivery idea for orders for his useless shit, the upside down world of Maslow’s hierarchy of misneeds/deeds.
I met the fellow as a union organizer, working on one of his Amazon stockholder meetings, trying with my one stock to make some impact on the dilated creep. You know, trying to get him to recognize that his warehouse workers (they call it fulfillment centers, what sick double speak) were passing out from the heat and tripping on snapped knees from the constant deadend nature of guys like Bezos, who is a zombie maker, a billionaire with no smiles, just the steel eyes and ceramic flesh and endless ideas and schemes to sell-sell-sneak-spy-squeeze.
Oh, now, oh now, what would I do if I saw that creep? Here we were the week before the shareholders’ meeting, where we ended getting routed out by cops, Seattle PD, in the hire of Amazon, of course – one week before outside the Amazon campus, on West Lake, and we had workers there from Pennsylvania, and we talked and roused the crowd, and the techies, pencil necks, hands worn down from the mouse pads and their 23-speed $21,000 bicycles, well, they fit the bill for Jeff-land: they just looked on from their two and three story perches, filming us, of course, with their i-pads, trying to understand the very nature of their existence tied to the endless and monotonous motion of life under the smile of Amazon dot com, a to z.
Oh, what would you do to mess him up? What do we really do, writing these, reading even the blurbs under the headlines of most of this country’s pabulum. I have to hear the CBC Canadian show, The Q, and the inspired nature of the hipster class, the creative (sic) class. Interviews of the One Percent, or the ones in the rear guard, at 19 percent. Actors, players, sports stars, authors. The media mania here, these people write about, make films about, blog about, broadcast about on TV or radio, about these chillingly happy and contented and know-it-all types, all happy and lucky and so gifted. Some goof ball husband and wife team who saved Canada according to the Q’s goofball just with their little management team, Own the Podium. Heard they just did that little marketing and sports assessment for Russia. Can you believe this, teams of people working as consultants for the Putin government, so the Russians might get a medal or two out of the multi-billion dollar theft from the public treasury. Imagine, “Own the Podium,” a Canadian couple who started it, featured, now working for Russia, and oh how they believe their work is a god-send, a saving grace for humanity.
When we have the headlines above and the constant mutual admiration society of the One Percent and their Media Muscle, well, it can be a very Zombie Hotel kind of moment for some of us.
What would I do to mess up Jeff Bezos? Oh, it’s not good to put names and faces to the killing squads when they are billionaires. He’s a punk, and the world gobbles up his feces. And we, USA taxpayer, spend hard-earned bucks for Jeff Bexos’ a to z junk market computerization — mark that as $600 million for the power of Amazon retail giant’s servers and software programs that dredge the world of every stinking bit of information, every bit of flowing fictions, every bit of USA spy lie so we can target — thank you very much, NeoConMan Obama — anyone on earth. Ya gotta wonder everytime you order that DVD set of Breaking Bad’s premiere season or that How To Make A Million Bucks on the Internet autographed book through Amazon just when will NSA’s-CIA’s drones will come a callin’ outside your bedroom window.
And Jeff Bezos don’t need no stinking badge to be top cop – just the Washington Post in his back pocket. As Solomon continues in his short piece:
But, as I wrote to Baron last month, it’s all too convenient — and implausible — for the Washington Post to claim that there would be “no direct relevance of the [Amazon-CIA] cloud services contract to coverage of such matters as CIA involvement in rendition of prisoners to regimes for torture; or in targeting for drone strikes; or in data aggregation for counterinsurgency.”
The surveillance state and the warfare state continue to converge. The Washington Post does not want us to insist on journalistic disclosure. Amazon does not want us to insist on moral accountability. President Obama does not want us to insist on basic constitutionality. It would be a shame to oblige any of them.
What would I do in that shareholder meeting today? What kinda messing up would I do to that titanium tyke, Mister Bezos? One can only dream.