Weeklong Existential Funk Continues
The hits came early and often over the last week. After I unmasked Charlie Crist as a Democratic Mole, he immediately turned out to also be a possible crook.
Having had my last vestige of hope in the Republican Party removed, I then learned that former Senator Rick Santorum may join the Fourth Estate. Which is great. Because my profession certainly needs another batshit-insane right-wing newspaper columnist. I know I haven't seen enough of them.
Meanwhile, the South Florida blogosphere has been quivering over the report in online magazine Category305 — currently inexplicably "under contruction" — that the Miami PD brutalized local photographer Carlos Miller. The local blog heavy hitters — Critical Miami, Stuck On the Palmetto, The Daily Pulp, etc. all blogging about the alleged incident.
My own opinions on the Miami PD and their prediliction for violent mayhem are already well known. But what readers of this blog may not know is that I've met Miller on several occasions, even drank with the man once, and traded barbs with him online on more occasions than I can recall.
So, I feel pretty comfortable in saying, yes, dude's a bit of a hothead. But that in no way justifies the actions of the police on this occasion. Many of the responses to the story, both on Category 305 and on the blogs mentioned above, have been along the lines of "He got what he deserved for not listening to the cops when they told him to leave." If that is the attitude of most of the United States, we might as well declare the police state now and move on. No need for shadowy, slow swings toward police-state status, as with the Patriot Act, Free Speech Zones and other oppressive examples to come down the pipeline in our scarily civil-rights-free post-9/11 country. Just declare the police state now. If the response to this story is any indication, most people will just nod meekly and bend over for the mandatory cavity search.
Feel that? That's freedom.
Indeed. It's probably apocryphal, but infamously corrupt but populist Louisiana politician Huey Long was supposedly once asked if he ever thought fascism would come to America. "Yes," he responded, "But we will call it anti-fascism."
Terror has come to America, but we call it anti-terror. And when our own government takes away our freedoms, they do so in the name of liberty. But that doublespeak isn't as nauseating as the willful acceptance of it by many Americans. And that applies to people cheering for the Patriot Act when it passed, as well as people who say Miller got what was coming because he didn't listen to the police. "Mewling milquetoasts" I believe I called these people in a comment on the Critical Miami site, and the description fits. The sad part is that most of these cowed souls are also self-described conservatives. Believers in the rugged-individualist, pull-yourself-up-by-your-boots-straps American myth that is, at its core, libertarian and anti-government. Is unquestioningly obeying authority the new revolution?
In other news, they're still fighting over what remains of Anna Nicole's putrid flesh, and the Bush administration's "support the troops" platitudes are just more lies, given what happened at Walter Reed. But more and more, I'm struck by the larger issues that Republicans certainly don't care about, but that neither the media nor Democrats talk about, or even seem to be aware of. Things like this and this.
Read those and see what you think. Name of this blog's pretty apropos, eh? As long as I keep my head on the larger issues, the bits about global corporatism enslaving mankind for the brief bit of history we have left until our entire economy collapses into an oilless money trench that makes Mad Max look like heaven, I expect the funk to continue. But I shouldn't worry myself about it. The next election cycle will come up soon, and then I can be distracted by the horse race, and doing my part to elect the people who will not intentionally try to screw us all, but instead do so through sins of omission.