If you’re following along in your puzzle books, you know I’ve watched a flash flood of video on RV culture, vanlife, and the whole Nomadland phenomenon of late.
While doing so, I tripped over this.
WE LOST 135K IN ONE DAY – And Our Dream RV – Don’t Let This Happen To You
They take a longish while to tell their story, but the title isn’t clickbait, and they’re at least entitled to tell it in full.
In essence, this is a story about a fairly hardworking, reasonably intelligent and quite responsible middle-aged couple who were fucked out of liberty and the pursuit of happiness by greedy grunting capitalist pigs and systemic institutionalized lies. Nota bene: They’re nice folks, who would never even think of seeing their own story that way, or using those words. That’s on me.
Having grown up on lies, about the dignity of wage slavery and the Opportunities available in America and nowhere else in the world, what are they to do now? What are any of us to do, now, with apocalypse a routine fact of everyday life in the neo-liberal capitalist Empire?
Well … I think they, in particular, will bounce back strong–I pray for it.
But who could blame them if they were to hold a grudge against the merciless Machine that cut their throats and left them for dead? Who could blame them for wanting to see it smashed; at least maimed and regulated into some vaguely democratic order? Who could blame them for turning into Trumpists or giving up on voting as utterly useless to the real problems of their real lives?
Who could blame them, or any of the victims of the housing crash, or anyone whose brother was gunned down by a cop, for giving up and giving in to the phenomenon of All-American Despair?
Any of those might be, from an oblique angle, the most rational and sane response available.
Certainly more rational than the most common response of the average American, which is to take it upon themselves, and see their problems as personal failings, rather than the natural results of a rigged casino game run by the murderers we call the Captains of Industry and their overfed lackeys on both sides of the congressional aisle.
Democracy, ennit?
Trump wasn’t the disease.
He was only a predictable symptom of the disease.
Scranton Joe has zero interest in even slowing down the Progress of the malady. He believes that his own victory means the System is now working as prescribed, and that he will now proceed to make America great again, again.
Folks, it’s all about the diet and exercise. You need to get plenty of sun, take your vaccinations as scheduled, and of course vote for the lesser of two evils when it counts.
Did you know that while the rest of the world celebrated International Worker’s Day on May 1st, Uncle Joe issued a proclamation that the IWD was changed now, just for Americans, into frickin’ Loyalty Day?
“I call upon the people of the United States to join in this national observance, display the United States flag and pledge allegiance to the Republic for which it stands”, decreed the man I voted for.
Joe, I cannot heed your call, for a wide variety of reasons, chief among them that the Republic for which it stands was sold off to the highest bidders in the days when you were a fresh-faced, speech-stealing, intern-molesting member of Congress.
I never heard your savage lament for the fact. You cashed in. You cashed your son in for a dirty war, and cashed his inferior crackhead brother in for a mess of pottage in the Ukraine. Then you set about the people’s business with gusto, except for You that meant locking the slaves back up for non-violent drug offenses and sending your storm troopers in to finish off their neighborhoods.
All that considered, and if it’s all the same to you, I think I’ll stick with the original meaning of May Day, which was precisely a commemoration of the Haymarket Affair in 1886 Chicago, in which the police took out a bunch of labor demonstrators on the spot, and then hanged four of them, all innocent but all avowed anarchists, after the fact. To set a good example, about justice.
I heard once that America doesn’t celebrate Worker’s Day because Haymarket wasn’t good PR for entrenched power–a little too commie, for a capitalist Empire, you know. Instead, we get “Labor” Day, as far away in the calendar from May as you can get, and it celebrates loyal wage slavery, rather than workers exercising their free speech rights in resistance to their tycoon overlords.
Loyalty Day might be little more than a tap dance on the decks of Planet Titanic, but I guess it’s a good way to mark off Joe and Kami’s first 100 days, and remind us peasants sternly about whose side they’re really on.
The side of the rigged market javelinas. The side of the Machine that lies, steals, and kills.
I’m not calling for a revolution. I’m not even saying one would do any good in time to save me, or you.
I’m not crying Woe in the wilderness or trying to channel the prophet John Brown, or even Eugene Debs.
I’m just saying, don’t believe what they filled your brain with from the time you were a defenseless child.
Watch the bastards.
Beware.
And most of all, Don’t Let This Happen To You.