When we look to our representatives politically, what is it they are actually representing? It’s not us anymore that’s for sure. We look for leaders to head our glorious nation to rain prosperity down upon us from on high. We don’t even want representatives anymore outside of the local council or what have you. When it comes to heads of state, be they presidential or parliamentary, the main thing we the masses look for from both the left and the right is whether or not they’re a leader. Do they have what it takes to have their fingers on the button the last bastion of human hope in the fate of nuclear Armageddon?Can they crack down on the enemies of our society whether they’re terrorists, foreign nationals, refugees, drug addicts, organised crime, activists, immigrants, or lone wolf shooters? Can they pull us out of this recession? What will their policies do to the economy? Can they adequately represent our nation on the world stage? These questions are fair and valid and fairly tantamount in the mind of the average voter, but along the way our western ideal of democracy has gotten distorted. An “informed voter” is little more than someone who reads, listens and watches the news made by people who have fairly similar ideas to them and knows when elections take place. Sure some might read all the sources, cut through the bullshit on their own. Good for them, but one thing is still missing from this ordered chaos of a representative democracy. The representation. We vote for politicians selected and put forward by parties that have become partially charitable investment pools by rich people (of the corporate and biological variety) allowing a nice little tax deductible grease to the cogs of our great political machine. We vote for candidates that “make sense” and have “clear visions of the future”, those who will do whatever it takes to put the country first. When did we stop caring about voting for people who had our interests? Who would lobby and represent on behalf of the people who voted for them. We prioritised the rhetoric and polices of good politicians over the statements and representation of good people. In a way we replaced one aristocracy with another. We people who have no backgrounds in foreign affairs, tax policy, national defence, health, the environment, or the economy vote for people who are usually lawyers so they can make laws about things that they also barely have a grasp on so they can keep getting money from whoever is donating to them so they can use this money to win more elections by making advertisements and passing out leaflets about how they’re great leaders and are cutting or raising taxes or spending money on nice things that we can use and need to survive as the cycle goes round and round again. We have created a political elite that doesn’t know what it’s doing most of the time, but the worst part is is they are not us. They rarely speak for us as much as they say they do. They read public opinion polls and focus group results and learn to say things that people like to hear but they are not of the people, or by the people for that matter. They represent who chose them not who elected them.To change this people need to rethink what makes a good politician and find that the fair and just representation of good people needs to be led by good people.
The Flowering of Youth
The flowering of youth
The pricking of their thorn
Facts spoken most uncouth
Lies and silences from these troubles are born
Friends lost where enemies are found
Fuck maturity
Bitterness and hatred abound
The revolution’s been halted
The angry young have gone
It’s just the id and ego; our morals have all bolted
We lie to ourselves and then to each other
We delude ourselves then duck and take cover.
Inexorable Romanticism and Crippling Pragmatism
And I’m feeling rather bad,
I’ve fallen for a friend and she’s driving me mad.
And I’m feeling rather sick,
There’s a guy I don’t know and I want to steal his chick.
I know she isn’t his to steal but at the end of the day I know what I want to feel.
I know what I’m feeling and I know I’m not feeling you.
Yeah, there’s a girl that you might miss, but she lives in the past.
It was never gonna last.
She no longer exists and I feel poor, white, and cis.
I know it’s not my fault.
The things that I thought,
The times when we fought.
And here I am still afraid that there’s something that I lost,
If my life has gone astray.
But now I am so painfully aware
of everything that I say
and every shirt that I wear.
I think does that make me a prick?
To want an easy fuck?
To want an easy kiss?
I’m aware I’m an addict
Through the pain that I’ve caused
Through the pain I will inflict.
Through methadone romances, stuffy night club dances, I feel my chances slip away,
But who can blame me?
Who can stand up and say,
That they don’t sin like me, at least not everyday?
At the end of it all, we all want to feel loved if you’re bi, pan, straight, or gay.
And yes, there is something that we all missed
There is no one around who lives in perfect bliss.
As humans we complain, until it drives us insane,
“Why’s everyone everyone happier than me?
Am I too wired, is it the problems they can’t see?
Or maybe they don’t worry like I do?
These feelings that I feel tell me you feel them too?”
We all just proof that we’re alive
That our sex drive
doesn’t mean we’re depraved,
Just that we’re deprived
We don’t need anyone to tell us when we’re saved.
Remember to Howl
We’ve seen without knowing the best minds of our generation destroyed ,not by madness, no by our own urges and drives and by the foolish consequences of those who came before us,
the Ritalin powered academic sufferer, hiding his flagellations and internal self mutilations inside the confines of his cloistered chamber and mind,
slaving over text after text, page upon page, scouring notes,
like a lamb before the altar of God, spilling that precious lifeblood that is coffee and sweat. Drained of all ambition as his wearied body pulls him toward the timeless swan song of sleep. His mind entombed, not in Bellevue or Bedlam, but within itself as the pharmaceutical companies rejoice and grind their mechanised gnashers against the flocks of the insecure and the hopeful. Doomed.
Hopeful that their ailing abnormality is beyond their mortal grasp, but can be fixed by talking to their doctor today and being told all shall be well before popping their precious pills promptly and with the powerful presumption of the pharmacological proclivity to productivity and efficacy. Creating a new generation of corporate addicts
Testaments to the product of the American Pipe dream with Ativan and Zoloft pumping through their bloodstream.
A generation destroyed by the power of boredom and the death of curiosity.
Of mass produced, mass marketed, mass entertainment ignoring the funeral mass of art and love as the communion wine is replaced with the corporate Kool Aid and the common liturgy swapped with xenophobic propaganda pumped out twenty four hours a day by the news cycle with more to lose from the truth and truest news than to gain,
controlling like the floodgates that started at Watergate and our generation is to bring the walls crashing down.
We stand before the dawn of a new age with information weeping from the eyes of bureaucrats and oligarchs.
The education of many shall fail them, but we have a chance to seek a remedy beyond what the eye can see. Either we decide to act in the defence of all or suffer the crumbling of the many at the hands of the few as millions live between life and death, plenty and poverty.
Scorned by police, misled by politicians, scammed by businesses, and harmed by each other as the rat race runs off course as blood fills the street as wine did in the streets of Paris and Rome with the poor lapping it up like dogs and dogs they soon turned biting their neglectful masters. People filled with anger and hatred, the grapes of wrath have come into a fine vintage and risks souring over and there shall be bloodshed, but the bonds that hold us in captivity shall unite us in comradery and after the chains fall there will be those to seek advantage under the guise of improvement, but a jeweled chain is but a chain for fools. There is no bread and no grand circus, only maggots scavenging on the fresh dead. The gladiators and lions of the past have been replaced. Evolving into the media and it’s multicoloured fabric of rape, misogyny, racism, pessimism, narcissism, and existentialism. A world that focuses on the individual at the cost of the generation, leaving behind an ancient veneration of human being and that of all creation. Those that reach for stars are hit by cars and the emerald light of lovers lost becomes a plight of all others and what cost? Roaming as desperate souls irreversibly lost.
A Bit of Me
The one thing essential to who I am is my nearly constant struggle with the looming monstrosity of boredom. As an only child, I grew up learning to amuse myself through whatever means of imagination necessary. I could float from building castles and fending off hordes of evil wizards and knights to being a commando trudging from shrubbery to tree to sand pit. I never feel like that led to any spoiling of my character, quite the contrary. What that accomplished was a really useful trait that took a while to get used to. It let me amuse myself through the simplest of means, however it made an enemy of boredom. Whenever I got the slightest bit bored, I’d change gears. In my youth that led me to read books ranging from butterflies to ancient civilizations to engineering. As I grew, this became more of an issue. I have always been very aware of what I can and cannot do. Things that I have no aptitude are anything math related, foreign languages, and physical activity. So when my schoolwork, I inevitably turned to something that interested me and that inevitably led me into the less than usual pastimes of a teenage boy. One evening could entirely be devoted studying the history of the political structure of the Venetian trade republic in the Twelfth Century, while another could be writing a blog post about the difference between Nazism and Fascism in detail and the large amount of research into how morally reprehensible both methods of governing are. I’ve become a voracious reader in the course of avoiding boredom. In the 8th grade I choose the Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas for a free choice book report that we had two weeks to complete. It remains my favorite novel to this day. In short, my high school career has been rather lacking. Boredom drove me away from succeeding in simple tasks. My SAT and AP scores overshadow my rather mediocre grades. Although school work might not have been my main goal in the past, over the last few years I’ve tried to refocus my brain and work a little harder. Through everything I do, I try to prove to myself and the world that I am a learner. I will willingly attempt to learn anything from theoretical physics to world literature to history to political science to geography. Regardless of where I end up in terms of college and universities, I will be learning.
Despondency and Lethargy as the Winds Blow Northwesterly
The days go by like water from a leaky pipe
Slowly but consistently, in spurts with dry spells in between
Sleep, boredom, and self ignorance is the last remaining gripe.
An insomniac at the precipice of life,
between waking and dying
between living and laying,
Surrounded by one’s fellows, but utterly alone,
like the madness of a statue sealed in silent stone.
A cup may runneth over, but how does one atone.
Time, food, and money in plenty, but nothing less to waste,
No activity, no fun, no lesson, but all is done post hate.
An insomniac, who lays still, stiller than the dead
Listening to doubts and worries, yet all is in his head.
The Winepress
You can hate the younger generation for having more time than you, you can hate the older generation for doing more than you, you can hate your generation for squandering their talents, and you can hate yourself for wasting your time. You can hate the young for not appreciating the things they have, you can hate the old for wasting what they had for the future of their kind. You can hate the rich for keeping the things the way they are or you can hate the poor for being divided and accepting the lot in life they have been given or for not getting up and working their way out of poverty like the good ole’ days.
The problem is not any one individual group however. The problem would be easier if it was. As things have progressed, the tangled state of who controls whom has grown from simple feudalism concept to a highly convoluted, multi-faceted chain of being. The average guy or girl. Wakes up each morning, awoken by their phone’s alarm clock a phone which is mass produced and houses every possible 21st century necessity that could arise, listening to music, probably owned by a corporation that controls the writing, production, and distribution destroying any fabric of artistic integrity, they brush their teeth, with water from a local source, that’s being bottled and sold just on the other side of the pipes for an exorbitant profit, they put on their mass produced clothing, made in China or Bangladesh and if anything should rip or permanently stain the cloth they would probably throw it out and buy another because it’s not worth the effort to fix it and just buy a new article creating an ever voracious consumer that cannot be fed with the greatest extent of wage enslaved factory workers, they drive to work in a cars, that are far too complicated for the average person to understand, which runs on a petroleum product that is so expensive wars and alliances are built around it, and on top of this they probably drive alone in a car that can hold four grown adults comfortably for no reason other than they can, they then arrive at a workplace where they probably have a minimal say on how things are done and watch the fruits of their labour create significant wealth for someone they have never met while the waste away in working class squalor, at lunch they eat food that comes from a factory farm filled genetically modified, pesticide ridden plants and animals that destroy the environment and produce food that at the end of the day is probably safe for production, but forced millions of farmers out of work and off their lands, then after work they go home watch television filled with lies, misconceptions, or distractions designed for the specific goal of attracting viewers to view advertisements for things they do not need or want, then they may check social media to become engrossed in the lives of those around them on a scale of never before seen uselessness, all while horrible injustices and corrupt systems are simply accepted as the way things are. The few who notice are rail-roaded from telling people facts as the masses refuse to accept changes, as they are worried about how they look, how they are perceived, how much money they make, how other people making money is making money that they aren’t making, while blaming foreigners or non-existent fifth columnist because the billionaire media conglomerate’s decided violence and sensationalism get views so they get paid more by their advertisers. The education systems make workers and not thinkers, spreading scientifically ignorant people who refuse to vaccinate their children or believe in global warming. And at the end of the day this drives people to smash keys on their keyboards fanatically writing about injustice on their blog they don’t pay to operate because they keep all of the ad revenue on his or her own work.
There is no longer a corrupt king, twirling his majestically evil beard as a toady noble insists on raising taxes on the poor to pay for their new Turkish bath house moved brick by brick from Anatolia, that we can rally together and overthrow. There are hundreds of powerful politicians, bankers, and CEOs that ban together to exert control over the lives of as many people as possible. We live in a time where freedom and independence are seen as ideals, but how free is a society that forces conformity or how independent can one be when the consumerist machine forces the consumption of everything that generates billions if not trillions of pounds, dollars, or euros each year on the necessities of food, housing, power, and water alone. There is no excuse in the age of information for ignorance of any kind. The whole of human knowledge is at our finger tips and yet we waste hours on leisure, including clicking cookies, watching fake people kill fake zombies, or reading about the latest trick that will give you the body you want this summer. There’s no excuse, we’re all guilty of it nut there is nothing we can say to defend ourselves. When is it we can say we have changed the world for the better. Rarely at best, unless you are one of the few champions of civic virtue that we have left. Extending a helping hand to a person in need is a great start or even just the hand of friendship to a stranger in a land where politeness runs parallel to urban anonymity. We have to begin to ban together at some level, relate more to people than possessions. At the end of the day, we are the sum of the contribution we make to the world and that is how the effects of our lives will be felt long after we are forgotten. It’s all we have. There is only so much one voice can say on their digital soap box, but there needs to be a change in how we view the world or there might not be too much left to view of it.
De finibus democratia
I have recently returned to something that I thought I had given up forever. I made a comment on Facebook about a politically themed post. I know I shouldn’t have. It usually ends with me complaining to my equally socialist therapist about the idiocy of fifth columnists, the fourth estate, and libertarian third wheels. Luckily it was a post supporting the wonderfully progressive Bernie Sanders who has recently announced his canidacy for president. Here is my verbatim overly long comment responding to the need for change in the American government. Some argued the need for swift action, others lauded the need for people to join in the democratic process, I added my unique point of view that gained a total of one like (which I am very proud of). Enjoy and I’ll try to post more in the future: The trouble with America and most liberally founded states isn’t that people don’t care, it’s that they are put into systems that are remove any sense of true agency. A hyper individualist culture with an overwhelming sense that those who can succeed will do so of their own efforts. (There are so many good quotes but I’ll summarise for the moment) There is no true sense to improve the country put into anyone. Children grow up wanting to be doctor’s to make money, to be prestigious and in many cases to help people. Nobody grows up with role models like FDR or Wilson. The brightest minds of the incumbent generation are more focused on their projects to achieve immortality in their work and to be fulfilled. They have little or no desire to change anything. These same systems allow the same people to get elected over and over again to do nothing except make fiscally idiotic decisions that make enough people happy to get them to have another round of continued shenanigans. There is no method for change that is accepted. Protests are bemoaned by quasi intellectual propaganda propagators and stolen by the fattened culturally intolerant communities that are in large parts victims of the systems failing to provide adequate education.
The problem with fixing this beautiful chaos is that it’s not broken. It works perfectly. The majority of people don’t see the greater picture, they get upset only when things affect them personally and may momentarily band together to make sure their internet is marginally faster or that their water isn’t flammable or poisoned. The entire process is totally sustainable. The only thing that is unsustainable is the ability to change. We correct one thing and we hang up our hats and retire safe in the knowledge we’ve helped the world a tiny bit. Petitions and calling your congressman or members of parliament and what not may do something, but that is not enough. The Kafkaesque systematic bureaucracy these systems are founded on, block all true innovation. Any change that does happen is about ten or more years too late. Human culture is evolving at an ever increasing pace, but our politics remain stagnant. I won’t say democracy is failing because I’m a staunch advocate of it, but I will say that our governments are failing in the very things that makes democracies democracies. Americans are a people enraptured by their constitution. It’s a lovely document. It creates a very workable method of government in the late 18th century. I heavily contest with the idea that a 226 year old document be stuck too so rigidly. I’m not saying that you have to be France and have a new constitution every decade or so. But society changes and so should government. Finding a socialist who agrees with every detail of the Communist Manifesto is rare, yet the constitution is the defining document in terms of creating, enforcing, and evaluating every aspects of politics. How many amendments do you need before you might as well have just written a new one. There is no system for overall change in the American way of life, there is simply is not and something needs to change if the government is to ever again truly serve the needs of it’s people.
Legal Questioning
My psychology teacher, who has an opinionated flair for the dramatic and a tendency to overshare, brought up the point that criminal investigation techniques and the associated sciences have gotten so advanced that the majority of convinctions are just. She went so far to say there are probably more people who walk free then are unjustly incarcerated. This however points to a fact in which it matters not, in this case, what the statistics are. Numbers, for once in this quantitative world in which we live in, are unimportant. The fact of the matter is that simply allowing one’s self to believe that the legal system is relatively optimised allows for greater powers to be taken. The watchers must be watched. The answer to Juvenal’s “Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?” must be the watched in a democracy. Simply allowing or at least accepting the actions of any one body or organisation through ignorance or even faith is tantamount to the invitation of exploitation. It is the duty of an informed citizenry to observe, question, and uncover the truth to best serve themselves and their community.
Past, Present, Future
A thoroughly well written piece on New York City and it’s past and future struggles. The monstrous machinations with sleepless applications with influence and power greater than several nations. The dark past, the needy, the quick paced, the speedy, the romantic, narcoleptic, neurotic, wide spread narcotics, corruption, and riots, the famous, the fad diets. Whether bred from the waters of Babylon or a modern day Tower of Babel, you can love it or hate it, but New York City is a major influence on our past and will continue to be well into future. Found this quite interesting and I think you will too. (For my blog followers I intend on writing some new content and have it up for you lot shortly. Cheers!)
When you think of New York, what do you think of? The tall buildings, reaching out above the crowded sidewalks? The stars strutting around and the movies shot in one or the most famous cities in the world? Or is it the hustle and bustle that gives “the city that never sleeps” its title?
There’s a scene from the trailer of the soon-to-be-released movie, Lucy. The audience sees, from Lucy’s point of view, the reversal of time in the middle of (ironically) Times Square; she uncreates all the buildings, rips up the pavement, and changes cars back to the classic rounded style that we seem to romanticize so much. If any readers have seen Baz Luhrmann’s adaptation of “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald, you know exactly what old-timey New York looks like. If we go even further back in time, according to a website dedicated to…
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A Well Organised Asylum 