degringolade | A Taste of Mammon

Just chopping wood and carrying water. Gonna spend the weekend getting ready for a vacation, gonna get the van into the shop. I have to stop dithering about getting up and leaving the current gig. It is over there, I am just hanging on out of sheer cussedness.

Screed

"The sense of responsibility in the financial community for the community as a whole is not small. It is nearly nil. Perhaps this is inherent. In a community where the primary concern is making money, one of the necessary rules is to live and let live. To speak out against madness may be to ruin those who have succumbed to it. So the wise in Wall Street are nearly always silent. The foolish thus have the field to themselves. None rebukes them."

John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash of 1929

Michael has got me a pondering about the way that our society has been structured. Because, even though we claim a democracy, and we assiduously maintain the trappings of the fictitious beast, I can't really say that we are any such thing anymore. With the outsized corporate power and the reach and societal worship of the uber-wealthy, we have become something else. I am trying to figure out exactly what we have become.

It doesn't look pretty. S.I. Hayakawa was required reading assigned to me in the summer by folks long ago. Took me down the primrose path to the genteel poverty where I currently reside. He coined the term "snarl words". One could also take the time to go through and look up "purr words" and kind of think hard about how the language is used of by the panjandrums. What I find especially telling is the way that all descriptions of any political structure that doesn't pay lip service and support to the decidedly non-democratic system that we so heatedly espouse as being the end of history have been converted to snarl words.

Seriously, think about it. Think of the words that label means of political control in the world. If anything pull out any what you can think of them and examine their true definitions and compare the definitions of these "snarl words" to the description of the current state of affairs here in the "Land of the Free(TM)" and tell me about cognitive dissonance