Let Them Eat Hors D’oeuvres
So big money orphaned the body politic when it got away with using taxpayers money to restore broken banks. Overnight Main Street was ghettoised and Wall Street came to rule the proverbial roost, making way for the banksters to impose their faux disciplines on the body politic.
Detroit car workers have it in the form of the unionised pact…or had; Wall Street shysters have it in the form of lust for filthy lucre; competitive sport has it in the form of glorified accomplishments rewarded with accolades; Australian aboriginals had it before the power of the Anglo-sphere removed their right to identify with their land; religious extremists have it by virtue of their pathological belief systems; the British Royal Family have it in the blueness of their blood…or so the narrative goes; the untouchables of India have an unique form of it, because they have long forgotten why they were disenfranchised in the first place, and by whom; the fourth estate believes it still has it because the public needs access to information per dissemination; everybody has it in some form because we all share temporal and three dimensional space in myriad strangeness. It follows therefore, that narrative as an art form, is strange only to the eye beholding it from outside its given context.
Narrative, in a word, is our way of defining perspective in order to add value to the context we find ourselves in. The strange thing about narrative is its ability to focus on strange perspectives relating to the particular…strange by any count… while ignoring the strangeness of the whole…the whole being strange because there is no universal language to represent it. Without a universal language to confirm the whole, we understand parts to be the sum total of reality. Because the parts represent diversity, difference can sometimes appear too strange to comprehend.
To address the respective value of a particular group, we need to gauge its efficiency in relation to its ability to promote discipline within the context of meaningful narrative. Discipline in a private context is a Janus-faced phenomenon that focuses on doctrinal horizons while looking back to its adherents…as ‘followers’…to validate the exercise…it is in this way that elitism establishes its privileges. Strangely, religious adherents want a slice of the action as do customers who buy stock on the exchange. Strangely, yet again, Judaism, Islam and Christianity all function at the level of cultivating an acquired taste for authority through narrative…money too, can shape the narrative if you get enough of it.
On the other hand, modernity comes into being offering new ways and hopes for a world in need of fixing. Science and technology appear to contain the means to emancipate the multitudes through progressive thinking and innovative methodologies. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, the pace of change quickened while growth within the system extended the possibility that the spoils of the factorial engine… organised industry…could satisfy the needs of the collective gut. What jolted the system out of its hors d’oeuvre phase of economic naivety was the great shock that was experienced when the stock market banquet of 1929 crashed back to earth after the dodgy financial culture of Wall Street imploded. From that point onwards, the writing on the wall clearly read ‘GIVE US PUBLIC SCRUTINY PLEASE’.
The umbilical cord connecting the Wall Street speculators to their forefathers who honed their money-lending skills in the ghettos of Europe, was perceived to be too particular to a time when money was understood as something to be traded, and usury a capital requirement. Ever since the great collapse of the markets in 1929, the zig zag tension between regulation and innovation have been the underlying sub-text directing and disputing our navigational bearings in matters pertaining to public interest and the private alchemy of speculative hubris.
That the latter-day hoary-headed-sociopaths who continue to dominate Wall Street, The State Department and The Mainstream Media, need to be run out of town before the system can be fixed, is beyond dispute…the voting public must find the means to deliver the big heave-ho to yesterday’s men and women…push and shove are synonyms of f*ck off and useful stratagems are needed in the exercise to banish the charlatans from the temple. The ‘occupy movement’ was perhaps the first hint that a third rail was possible, an indication that the ‘fixers’ were in the wings waiting to sweep the distended gut of ‘privatisation’ into the trash can of history. If we don’t succeed in removing the hoary-herd of swindlers from our midst, we will sink further into neo-tribalism.
That promotion of group interests throughout history evolved through raiding parties acquiring rights to property by seizure, and then onward to securing ill gotten gains with the aid of a standing army, are everywhere in evidence. The image of monarch Liz astride her imperial high chair and wearing her bejewelled head-piece while brandishing her sceptre, attest to a narrative that behoves the tribal Brits to feel pride in empowerment. The Anglospheric and European Christian world over time became the vehicle for transporting delusions of racist grandeur to a world deemed inferior by virtue of its relative technological inferiority. Pax absurdus was cemented when the peoples beyond the pale were forced to accept submission to colonial forms of chicanery dressed up as desirable disciplines.
For instance, Paul the Apostle so successfully applied himself to conflating doctrine and discipline in the first-century world, that he managed to secure a franchise on discipline itself, by means that privatised the message… later to be institutionalised by the Roman State…meaning that a particular form of elitism was accepted as having veto rights over the general public through a State legislative authority that favoured hierarchy. Note the appearance of the tall headdress worn by bishops and senior abbots as symbols of office at this time…my hat is bigger than yours…for the monarch, my chair is more elevated than yours…consigning those on the receiving end of this display of doctrine and discipline to a submissive role that imputes impotence to those so led. The puppeteers practice their discipline in order to consolidate their control over the puppets.
In modern times, the virility of the bull-market…a wholly owned franchise clinging to the idea of privatisation per se…is epitomised in the lurid image of the iconic beast representing an ascendant market determined to crash-through with any deal that increases the ever expanding girt of the Wall Street fat-cat community. These connections clearly allude to a history of investment in private disciplines, for the purpose of securing privatisation of resources as a means of controlling the narrative.
This system of Colonial Capitalism that came into effect in the West, allowed the ‘particular’ to speak for the whole, thus replacing the Hellenic, which had the opposite effect, acknowledging diversity of ‘particularism’ as a means of celebrating the potential of the ‘whole’. By objectifying the particular in this way, Hellenism (world view) managed the concept of the unified whole without recourse to doctrine, and religion had no paramount function in shaping the system…objectivity tended to feed into science.
So back to the future and the emergence of Neo Liberalism…economics is now portrayed as the authentic language of politics…markets nowadays can only be understood by elites who control the narrative while conducting negotiations within the market that enhance the idea that investment, as non-regulated economic activity, can be made to look like it serves the interests of the many, rather than exposing its true purpose, providing prosperity for the few.
Politics is rendered subaltern to economics and regulation subaltern to faux disciplines in the Neo-Liberal era, leaving the charlatans of Wall Street to freely remove the ‘fix-it’ mechanism of the New Deal… what historians called the “3 Rs”… Relief, Recovery and Reform. Regulation was deemed antithetical to Corporate Capitalism’s insatiable need to chomp on all before it, so it had to go. With the connivance of the Duopoly…Republicans and Democrats…Tweedledum and Tweedledee…politicians, in the pockets of the Corporate Elite, hastened to dispense with the regulations that protected the public from criminal excess so that the shysters on Wall Street could feed the brute in the plutocratic bull.
So what can be done to restore the vitality of the Republic? When will the clarion call to action occur? We can now understand what is needed. We need THE-FIX-IT party poste haste. The duopoly we have is moribund and represents little more than a chorus of gutless wonders shuffling for rights to swill. They have shown that they are complicit in a process that sends the wealth of the nation into the coffers of the Corporate State, and while standing to one side, they show indifference to the recession that hollows out the middle class as well as increasing the ranks of the poor. The existing political parties are terminally inept in their inability to understand the mess that has divided the country, let alone engage in the formulation of any meaningful reforms.
So big money orphaned the body politic when it got away with using taxpayers money to restore broken banks. Overnight Main Street was ghettoised and Wall Street came to rule the proverbial roost, making way for the banksters to impose their faux disciplines on the body politic…Central Banks have the power to take over a nation’s economy and become that nation’s real governing force. What we have here is a scam of mammoth proportions covering what is actually a hidden tax, being collected by private concerns…Rothschild “Let me issue and control a nation’s money and I care not who writes the laws”…the speculators speculated that the only system between America and the toilet was the one they owned. Congress had to believe it or else…To Main Street it must have seemed strange that the manna dropping from heaven onto the heads of the fat cats who wrecked the system in the first place, was now rewarding them for their greed. The gambits and ugly excesses perpetrated by those versed in industrial-scale-financial-chicanery were deemed too hot to handle by Congress. Craven aspects of abuse were seen as merely strange …phenomena arising from financial alchemy could not be decoded…leaving Main Street with the impression that the system had become opaque beyond belief.
The vulgarisation of the American Dream is in full flow now, and the swill-fest, better described as the Neo-Con Grunt-Fest, continues to drip-feed drivel, derivatives and malfeasance into a Game of Thrones look-alike narrative hell bent on turning the clock back. We need to wake up to the fact that the real American narrative is not dead…it has been privatised!
Denis A. Conroy is a retired journalist and a voracious follower of matters political outside of the mainstream arena.