Days of Future Past — Part III

[Dave Monroe]

Days of Future Past — Part III
July 4th, 2009 by The Agonist - thoughtful, global, timely


In Parts I & II we looked back on days past, via Steinbeck and the
Great Depression, and wondered if that is a vision of our economic
future? Economic issues aren’t the only thing we should be concerned
about in the future…, and those issues seem particularly relevant on
Independence Day. Thomas Pynchon took a look back at the 60’s and 70’s
and gave us his vision of what the Ronald Reagan Road of the 1980’s
looked like, behind the media veil, in his book, “Vineland“. I wonder
what Pynchon is saying today…, with a new cabinet level government law
enforcement agency called Homeland Security…, and Border Patrol agents
manning checkpoints, stopping all law abiding citizens and boarding
buses? Are they really looking for “terrorists” and illegal aliens? Or
are they just testing us…, again…, to see what magnitude of fascist
oppression we will stand still for?

Mucho blinked sympathetically, a little sadly. “I guess it’s over.
We’re on into a new world now, it’s the Nixon Years, then it’ll be the
Reagan Years–”

“Ol, Raygun? No way he’ll ever make president.”

“Just please go careful, Zoyd. ‘Cause soon ther’re gonna be coming
after everything, not just drugs, but beer, cigarettes, sugar, salt,
fat, you name it, anything that could remotely please any of your
senses, because they need to control all that. And they will.”

“Fat Police?”

“Perfume Police. Tube Police. Music Police. Good Healthy Shit Police.
Best to renounce everything now, get a head start.”

“Well I still wish it was back then, when you were the Count. Remember
how the acid was? Remember that windowpane, down in Laguna that time?
God, I knew then, I knew….”

They had a look. “Uh-huh, me too. That you were never going to die.
Ha! No wonder the State panicked. How are they supposed to control a
population that knows it’ll never die? When that was always their last
big chip, when they thought they had the power of life and death. But
acid gave us the X-ray vision to see through that one, so of course
they had to take it away from us.”

“Yeah, but they can’t take what happened, what we found out.”

“Easy. They just let us forget. Give us too much to process, fill up
every minute, keep us distracted, it’s what the Tube is for, and
though it kills me to say it, it’s what rock and roll is becoming–just
another way to claim our attention, so that beautiful certainty we had
starts to fade, and after a while they have us convinced all over
again that we really are going to die. And they’ve got us all over
again that we really are going to die. And they’ve got us again.” It
was the way people used to talk.

We had a chance to turn that Nixonian fascist world in the making
around when Jimmy Carter was elected. If he would have received the
support from the people and the Congress that he deserved I believe he
would have. But he faced an unprecedented economic crisis and no one
was willing to make the sacrifices it required to confront and cure
it. The man had a set of cajones…, and they weren’t in anyone else’s
pocket. He said things like, “We can be sure that all the special
interest groups in the country will attack the part of this plan that
affects them directly. They will say that sacrifice is fine, as long
as other people do it, but that their sacrifice is unreasonable, or
unfair, or harmful to the country. If they succeed, then the burden on
the ordinary citizen, who is not organized into an interest group,
would be crushing.” But the “ordinary citizens” Jimmy Carter was
trying to protect weren’t willing to make those sacrifices…, and the
“special interest groups” who own the Congress wouldn’t stand for it.
America chose the Reagan Road instead. Reagan tripled the national
debt and saturated the courts with law and order control freak judges
who legislated from the bench to the point where we are now subject to
search and seizure for a routine traffic stop. Then George E. Bush
convinced us that we were all going to die if the Patriot Act wasn’t
passed and we didn’t invade Iraq…, and now Bill Clinton’s emails are
getting legally screened. Bush sold us his War on Terror just like
Reagan sold us his War on Drugs…, and used it for the same purposes.

When Barack Obama was elected to clean up the mess we were in I asked
in, “The Election That Changed the World…,” if he would be a Carter or
a Reagan type president? I think that answer is clear enough now. He
won’t even reveal who he is meeting with at the White House. He hasn’t
done a thing about the Patriot Act. If he continues on the economic
path he has chosen, he will make Ronnie look like a penny pinching
money miser. If Obama even has a set of cajones…, they are in the
pockets of Wall Street and the Banksters.

It’s beginning to look to me like this passage from “Vineland”
describes our current President…, as well as the Pynchon character,
Brock Vond.

Well, what a life, you’d ordinarily say. But Brock coveted more. He’d
caught a fatal glimpse of that level where everybody knew everybody
else, where however political fortunes below might bloom and die, the
same people, the Real Ones, remained year in and year out, keeping
what was desirable flowing their way. Prosecutor Vond wanted a life
there, only slowly coming to understand that for someone of his
background there would be no route to this but self-abasement,
fawning, gofering, scrambling for tips and offering other such hints
of his eagerness to be brevetted on life’s battlefield to a rank
higher than he would ever, by means of his enlistment, have deserved.
Though his defects of character were many, none was quite as annoying
as this naked itch to be a gentleman, kept inflamed by a stubborn
denial of what everyone else knew–that no matter how much money he
made, how many political offices or course credits from charm school
might come his way, no one of those among whom he wished to belong
would ever regard him as other than a thug whose services had been
hired.

Yeah…, Obama is a wannabe…, a wannabe Real One. He isn’t the least bit
interested in restoring the individual freedoms that this country was
founded on…, freedoms that have been slowly taken away by
Nixon-Reagan-Bush. He will continue to funnel money directly to the
Real Ones…, and keep us ordinary citizens in check and in debt. But…,
not to worry. If it all blows up and goes to hell…, Ronnie left Obama
with REX 84 to fall back on. Even Ronnie wasn’t so sure that all that
taxpayer money that he gave away to the Real Ones wouldn’t blow up in
his face and end in disaster.

http://malarkynews.com/2009/07/days-of-future-past-part-iii/