Attn.: Bosses

Germantown/Louisville August 2011

To Whom It May Concern:

  Hey, it’s me.  I know you’re not paying attention … I mean, I know on some computer somewhere you’ve tabulated my various rantings, verbal and otherwise, and neatly cataloged them by occurrence of certain suspect keywords, but it’s not like you’re really paying attention … but I’m going to go on and say this anyway, with you just sitting there ticking off notes on a pad like some malevolent psychotherapist or something.  

  Have you ever tried to steer a boat at low speed?  Especially one of those inboard/outboard jobs?  A-and, like maybe on a shallow river, with the rear outboard unit raised up to avoid churning up the river bottom?  See, it’s not easy, and sometimes you’re cranking hard to the port, and the boat seems like it’s not moving at all, until boom! the bow comes swinging around, and all of a sudden you’re running upriver leading with the starboard side, the bow hard on the port side, and you’re desperately wheeling around to the starboard, trying to straighten out?  Or even just trying to run the damn boat in a straight line, and at first you’re patient, but then you start swinging a little more with each correction, and pretty soon you’re running a zigzag down the river instead of a straight line … 

  That’s how it is trying to run people the way you do.  And, I gotta say, I think you over-corrected after this Obama thing.  After all, he wasn’t ever really that far out of your wheelhouse, was he?  I mean, it’s not like he was even a Kucinich or a Sanders, much less a wild-eyed, bomb-throwing radical like you make him out to be … 

   … yeah, okay, you didn’t make him out to be that, but some of your minions did, and you can blame that directly on the kind of conditioning you subjected them to, so it’s like you handed them the gun and told them to shoot, even if you didn’t pull the trigger … 

  (lord above, I hope that never happens literally … and I don’t suppose you do either, when it comes right down to it, since that would put things outside your control, at least at the outset …)

  … but anyway, I know you needed a course correction after Bush, since the blinders were starting to come off your subjects, so you tossed them Obama.  And then the boat started to come back hard starboard.

  Well, you know what?  Shit’s not so easy anymore, is it?  The operant conditioning sunk down & mutated in ways you didn’t really predict, didn’t it?  I mean, I don’t know why you didn’t see it, ‘cause you’re not stupid.  Maybe you just chose to ignore it because you didn’t think it would matter.  Well, it did.  As they say, play with fire and get burned.  All those scared, xenophobic, broke ass bastards you created, ready to mobilize as your fear-fueled shock troops … well, they’re mobilizing all right, and it doesn’t look like they’re so much under your control.  Why, I do believe Mitch McConnell actually broke a sweat (as opposed to his usual sheen of slime) during the debt-ceiling fiasco.  And now, there’s that whole S & P downgrade bullshit, and it seems that the boat is waggling all over the place while you’re swinging the wheel around like a madman.

  ‘Cause, you see, your zombie strike force has turned on you.  Well, not exactly “turned on you”, because that would require consciousness of the situation, and we both know that’s not the case.  Let’s just say “done gone and blowed up in our hands”.  Yup, the Tea Party almost went and scotched the whole deal for you.  It seems that they don’t have your, uh, moral flexibility, and they’re taking these dancing phantoms you’ve dressed up as threats and beamed directly into their brains and responding to them with a gusto which would be, frankly, a bit admirable if it wasn’t so damn pathetic and wrong.

  I’ve got to give you credit.  You managed to paint Obama as “the man”, which he is, and simultaneously a left-wing radical, which he isn’t (how you managed to pull off that Karl-Marx-as-Mandingo thing is totally beyond me).  You created your zombie shock troops to resist fine intellectual distinctions (or, to put it another way, blatantly ignore anything resembling logic), so they can - with disturbing focus - criminalize him as the establishment ogre and, at exactly the same time, the thing that would destroy the order of things as they are (that is, the establishment).  Really, my hat’s off to you.  The audacity behind this project is breathtaking.

  But now, as they say, the worm has turned.  Seems the Tea Party has taken various parts of your faux doctrines seriously, and they are turning the tables against you.  That whole debt phobia thing you came up with to limit the size of the government?  Yeah, they take that seriously, and they don’t care if it fucks you up, because they got GOD on their side, and if you’re not on the side of GOD, then you’re on the wrong side.  And you know what?  It doesn’t matter that you created their GOD, because no matter how much you imbued this GOD with your values, it’s GOD they worship, not you.  By the way, congratulations on that whole “invisible hand” thing, you did it really well.  Perhaps a bit too well, if you catch my drift.

  Listen, I know there are contingency plans.  I know that you moved to co-opt the Tea Party quicker than you moved to co-opt punk rock (“cash for chaos” indeed).  I remember the Tea Party conventions with $500 tickets at the door (though I have to admit confusion here: are you trying to sink the Tea Party under the weight of its own inconsistency, or are you just trying to turn it into the old boys club it really wants to be?), I see the astroturf organizations that are blatant even to the brain-dead faithful.  I know you will have essentially neutralized the Tea Party’s more unruly characteristics by the next presidential election.  I, as always, have faith in your grim efficiency.

  And it’s not like I’m going to join them.  The enemy of my enemy is not always my friend.  I’m not interested in joining the jihad, even if it brings down repressive oil money regimes.  In the same way, I’m not interested in joining the Tea Party, even if it brings down the international bankers.

  All I’m trying to say is this: chickens tend to come home to roost.  It may take a while; they may be really fat, stupid (by the way: props for criminalizing education - it’s the best/most destructive thing you’ve ever been able to do to the people of this country, far worse than any Bush tax cut or any blow to campaign finance reform), blind, and lazy, but chickens come home to roost.  Faux intellectualism has a way of turning into real intellectualism.  Faux populism has a way of turning into real populism.  At some point, one of these Tea Party geniuses will be sitting in his (or her) La-z-boy watching the History Channel (‘cause that’s the propaganda they reach for when they can’t stand one more second of Geraldo on Fox) and say “Hey, that Lincoln guy we always say is the greatest president ever?  You know what?  He pretty much stood against everything we stand for.”  At about that point, wheels will start to turn … 

   … and wheels turning is never, ever, good for your project.

  So, yeah, I know you’ve got a plan.  And I have faith that your plan is a good one, damn its evil eyes.  But it seems to me that, even though we both know it was bullshit theatrics of the highest order, this whole debt crisis thing had to be just a little bit of a wake up call to you.  What is it in your nightmares?  That someday, instead of trying to convert government, the Tea Party will try to convert culture?  Well, they’re trying to do that already, and though they are currently marching to your orders, that may not always be the case. They call government a scam; they may soon see that it is your scam.  They are more likely than so-called liberals to see that these so-called financial markets mean nothing to anyone but you and your systems of repression.  They may soon see through the shit brown veil to the threats that are real.  And, if that day comes … well, I know you can resist it for a while, but the handwriting will be on the wall, as they say.  It will then become a question of when, not if.

  Well, that’s pretty much it.  Here’s a Blue Oyster Cult playlist for you, and I’ll be at work Tuesday.

  Until we meet again, assume that I am plotting your demise, as you are mine.

Bill