The Progressive Complaint

or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Blog

Strange bedfellows...seeking and finding truth in early 90's hiphop...The Santa Clara Blues...The truth is messy but profits are always tidy...Purdue don't know nothing about this Big Ten...Jackson Browne: possible asshole, wonderful songwriter...Ashes of the Coliseum...The Keanu Reeves Unified Theory of Everything

Alright, time to pay the rent, so to speak. If the people wanted panda feet and musings on limericks there are monkeys pounding out that sorta copy all over the internets. But the people come here for the homecookin. The Daily Special. The cheese in their macaroni, as the Baron says. Well, soup's on, ring the bell.

That shit looks good as hell, right?

A lefty pal of mine is dating someone with an extremely conservative worldview. How conservative? The Volunteer-for-the-military-no-sex-til -marriage-dinosaur-bones-are-a-test-from-G-D kinda conservative. For real. Dude was alright though. He wasn't preachy in the least and actually had a very open mind - except where the Bible was concerned. That shit was like Scripture to him. The few days I got to chat with him though I actually learned a lot - and not just how to sweep centuries of scientific knowledge under the rug.

Look at all these tests G-d left us!

As cuz and I spoke, I found myself struggling to cut to the marrow of the progressive complaint; that root theme of what progressives find most dissatisfying in society. I kept having to stop mid-thought in order to backtrack and describe other issues my first thought either linked to or rested upon. In the end, the ultimate link, the center of the web/cornerstone issue that I kept coming back to, was our American system of capitalism.

The mother of all pyramid schemes

How many societal ills stem from, that is to say, find root and nourishment, in the steamy Big C pile? The Big C, after all, requires inequality. Poverty is a mandated tenet of The Big C. The Big C makes it a biological imperative of the modern corporation to put its profit margin above all other considerations, including democratically-enacted laws or the public interest. By its very nature, the modern corporation cannot act another way. When you combine that M.O. with seriously unchecked influence and access to our nation's lawmakers, protection equal to personhood in the eyes of the law and an American Idol-worshipping general public, like Flav said, it all adds up to a funky situation.

Flava as The Big C: "I can't do nuttin' for ya man! I'm busy tryna do for me!"

At one point in our conversation, my new conservative friend said something along the lines of, "Where'd you get your information from, huh? (he didn't mention anything about fronting when Revelation comes - whew!)", and for a second, I didn't know where to start. I know that my first summer spent as an environmental campaigner led me to start reading up on environmental philosophies, like deep ecology. Soon after that someone dropped the "oppression knows no hierarchy" bomb on me and I realized that the fight for animal rights is the same as the fight for human rights and civil rights and so on and just like that, my politics changed. Back at school my friends and I shared whatever credible sources of non-mainstream facts and info we found and, over time, my progressive education gained a momentum all it's own. I don't think my path was too different from most other progressives.

We read the magazines, we watch the TV specials, we visit the websites. We have the conversations with friends that fill the gaps in our knowledge on things like pesticides, the threat media agglomeration poses to free speech and how international trade law keeps AIDS medicine from southern Africa and skews the playing field so heavily we'd have been smart to start storing bottled water yesterday.

It's no shock we developed distrust for the storytellers. Once we realized just how limited the story is that we're being given: the talking heads, the politicians, the advertisers, anyone with an economic incentive to deny us the full scoop was immediately suspect. And yet this distrust, when vocalized, is categorized and labeled by non-progressives as paranoid behavior. Craziness. We're upsetting the herd, rocking the boat, blocking the TV screen, etc. But to call someone crazy is to dismiss and ignore their complaint. Disregard it like the cat that stares raptly at your finger instead of looking at where you're pointing.

Pulled Up Talking Heads = OK

Ok, fine. We've read what others haven't. That's great, but so what?

So We Know.

Yeah, heard ya the first time, but now what?

Well, what would YOU do? What would you do if you felt like you knew an important secret that few others had been let in on? Would you run around screaming like Chicken Little? Would you gang up with other likeminded folks and take to the streets? What if not enough people listened? What if they said you were nuts? Or worse, what if everyone heard you but nobody cared? What if the most effective outlets to get your secret out were of little help and actually part of the larger problem? Uh oh!

Now what? Do you retreat with your secret to the woods? Just you, your beard, your secret, your filthy grey hoodie and your typewriter? All alone except for the occasional unlucky hiker? Or do you dedicate your life to toiling in the non-profit trenches for little pay, little recognition and no guarantee you'll ever get to see the fruits of your labor? Hey friend, wouldn't you rather just set down that heavy conscience and your liberal guilt, say fuck it and start spending some long overdue quality time looking out for No. 1?

OR would you rather just take it one-day at a time, pick and choose your battles and just try to be a good person? That's it...just breathe easy...breathe. Damnit. If only there were this, like, watchdog organization out there, whose job it was to monitor and curb the harmful influence that corporations could have on the American people. You know, somebody or something that could sweat all the details that we can't keep track of. Oh wait, I forgot, there is one! It's called the Government.

But forget them, man. That horse took a fatal shit in the barn years ago. And why not? They have met the enemy and they is them! The Founding Fathers were wary of corporate power, so were Lincoln and Eisenhower. Each sought to warn the nation of the risk involved in allowing corporations to have too much influence over civil society. I'm not sure if this is explicitly mentioned in Locke's musings on the social contract but it seems like part of the faith we place in our elected officials is to execute the necessary functions of government that we, the people, aren't supposed to have time for as we busy ourselves being productive members of society. Isn't that why we elect representatives? To put the bumpers in the gutters, so to speak? That shit's their job, right?

No more gutterballs!

Well, I think I may have finally stumbled upon the essence of the progressive complaint: The psychopaths are driving the goddamn bus and the windows have all been painted black.

Pop quiz hotshot, what do you do?

Well, having tried most of the approaches mentioned above, I'm exploring what options remain. I do still hold faith that the best way to improve the quality of life for us all is to improve the quality of our leaders. Hence, my current gig as a roving campaigner. Toss out the bums and make room for a better breed, I say. It may not go for the jugular and it's certainly not a quick fix but Rome wasn't burnt in a day either. In the meantime, blogging seems to help. So does drinking. The occasional rant to a hypothetical audience is delusional yet kinda comforting. Sort of like believing dinosaur bones are a test from G-d but hey, we've all got our issues.

What time do the bars in the Rabbithole close?

The real question remains though: What's a person of conscience to do? Now that you know, what are you gonna do? I don't wanna know what it says about me that my summation is a synthesis of lines from Keanu Reeves movies, but there it is. Pop quiz hotshot, red pill or blue pill, what do you do? Pop quiz hotshot, now that you know, what do you do?

Apparently, you start a blog. And try to give yourself peace of mind while still giving the people what they want, which, in case it's less diatribe and more animal feet, I'm with that too. Alright, I'm going out. Later.

Selah.