#and like this moment of joy was so necessary to offset the stuff that comes next

[theetwinkleboy]

[mst3kproject]

802: The Leech Woman - Part I

I tend to get all social-justice-y on this blog, so it will probably come as a surprise to you that I kinda like this movie.  I won’t pretend for a moment that The Leech Woman is not stupid and offensive, but something about it absolutely fascinates me.

Dr. Paul Talbot, an endocrinologist, is searching for a cure for Old.  This is at least partly because it will make him ludicrously rich, but also because his wife June has turned forty and he’s no longer attracted to her.  An old woman, Malla, tells the Talbots that her people, the Nando, know the secret of renewed youth.  They therefore follow her to Fake Africa where they learn that the Cure for Old has two ingredients: the pollen of a rare orchid, and a human pineal gland, scooped from a still-living brain.  Is June willing to commit murder in order to be young and beautiful again?  You bet your sweet booty she is!

I was kind of surprised when my word processor didn’t underline ‘Nando’.  I googled it, and apparently Nando’s is a South African restaurant famous for their ‘Peri-Peri Chicken.’  You learn something every day.

This movie is gross on so many levels.  It hates everybody.  Its ‘Africans’ are primitive mystics in loincloths and skull headdresses, its women are domineering and predatory, its men abusers, criminals, and dull-ass ciphers. I hardly know where to start.  In fact, the badness of The Leech Woman is so complex and pervasive that I think we’ve got another multi-part series here.  In this review, I’m going to talk about the characters.  Next week, I’ll go on to other stuff.

The Leech Woman is, of course, not the first movie I’ve watched in which there is no hero… but I’m not just talking about this being another film in which the so-called ‘hero’ doesn’t do anything.  This is more like The Amazing Transparent Man in that there is literally nobody in the film who can be described as ‘good’.  It’s not a movie about good overcoming evil, it’s a movie about evil destroying itself.  That’s probably part of the reason why I find it so interesting, as it’s an unusual way to approach a narrative, and The Leech Woman shows an astonishing amount of commitment to it.  We’ve seen a number of movies on MST3K where the good guys really aren’t important but there’s still somebody, usually a dull cop or reporter, who theoretically fills that role.  The Leech Woman doesn’t even have one of those.

Let’s take a look at our cast, shall we?  We’ve basically got six important characters: Paul and June Talbot, David the jungle guide, Malla, Neil the lawyer, and Neil’s fiancée Sally.  I think I’ll start with the men.  They’re all terrible.

The first character who speaks is Paul, and the first thing he says is to insult his wife, sneering at her about her drinking.  The conversation that follows tells us not only that they hate each other, but that Paul seems to have married June primarily so he could experiment on her, and is pissed that she doesn’t want to let him.  Then while June is hurt, drunk, and vulnerable, he goes from insulting her to fawning over her, softening her up so that he can return to emotionally abusing her later.  When, on the trip to Africa, she accuses him of ignoring her, he tells her she’s imagining it.  He’s also deeply unprofessional at work, insulting and scoffing at Malla when she’s there in response to his request for research subjects.

Of course, Paul is a villain in this story.  We’re glad to see him go, and the nice irony of him not living to see June rejuvenated is one of the few things The Leech Woman does right.  His detestable traits are so cartoonishly overblown, though, that it’s really hard to take him seriously as a character.  Paul comes across more than anything else as a plot device, a necessary stepping stone for June to come into contact with the Nando and their youth pollen.  Once he’s served that purpose he’s no longer needed.  Nobody misses him, and June never shows the slightest trace of regret, immediately attaching herself to David instead.

David starts off seeming like a slightly better person than Paul, since he treats June like a human being and attempts to offer her some actual comfort after she fights with her husband.  Then he goes steadily downhill.  He steals the youth pollen and the ring at a moment when he should be worrying about them getting out of there alive, and then when June ages again, he not only refuses to give them to her, he runs away.  I guess he’s supposed to do this because he realizes he’s the only person around she could tap for pineal juice, but at this point we have no evidence that she’s willing to do that.  She didn’t even watch while the Nando killed Paul.  Instead, it looks for all the world like David runs because he’s physically repulsed by her, or because he’s afraid she’s going to infect him with Old.

Finally, there’s Neil.  I think we’re supposed to like Neil… I think we’re supposed to see him as a nice guy destroyed by a scheming woman, but the truth is that Neil destroys himself.  The moment he sees young June, in her disguise as ‘Terri’, come up to him, he throws all decency out the window and practically follows her around drooling for the rest of the movie.  When his fiancée points out, understandably, that this is unacceptable behaviour, he treats her exactly as Paul had treated June, telling her that she’s imagining things. All these things stack up against us liking Neil, and he displays no redeeming qualities to offset then… in fact, other than being easily led by his dick, he has no qualities at all.  He’s a cardboard cutout with ‘handsome guy’ written on it.

Of course, none of these men are a point-of-view character in the story. The Leech Woman is a story about women, so how about them?  Well, unsurprisingly they’re terrible too.  Malla uses the Talbots to get her back to Africa and then tries to have them killed, and clearly has no problem with the whole ‘a man must die to make her young’ thing.  The Nando as a culture are used to this idea, but Malla didn’t grow up with that – she was raised in the west, where people would definitely not be okay with it.  If the men were shown to be willing sacrifices this might not be quite so bad (although it still wouldn’t be okay), but no, the guy we see is struggling as he’s held down and drugged.

As for Sally, the movie evidently wants us to think she’s a nagging harpy.  It doesn’t quite succeed, because of the way Neil drools after ‘Terri’. Sally has every right to be worried, impatient, and annoyed, especially when he brushes off her concerns the way he does.  Instead, what’s terrible about Sally is the way she offhandedly threatens Neil (“you better not try anything like that if you want to stay in one piece”) and seems to view him as a possession rather than a partner.  When he admits he prefers ‘Terri’, Sally’s plan is to send this woman away until she and Neil can marry, as if signing his name to the paperwork means he can never escape from her again.  He belongs to her now.  She has a receipt.

I assume that Neil and Sally met through Paul, but until the point where they turn up at the airport, we never see them together and have no indication they know each other exists. The impression I get is that the Bride of Neil was originally going to be a different character, but they couldn't afford another actress.

Then there’s June.  The Leech Woman is obviously her story – she’s in almost every scene, and is the one with a bit of a character arc.  It’s possible that we see Paul as unsubtly evil and Sally as a paranoid bitch because that’s how June sees them.  If anybody’s the protagonist, it’s her, but she is never, ever likable even in a villainous sort of way. We root for her to destroy Paul because we hate him too, but everything she does is awful and like the other characters, she doesn’t have any good characteristics to offset it.

When we first meet her, she’s a self-pitying drunk. She is so badly-treated by Paul that by the time it looks like she’s going to have him killed and run off with David, we’re all for it.  Then her downhill spiral begins as she murders David for his pineal.  This is supposed to be a surprise and a demonstration that June is irredeemable, and it works as far as it goes, but it leaves us with no interest in her affair with Neil.  We don’t root for them to get together because it’s obviously impossible, and we cannot believe that this is some great tragic love when they’ve only just met. It’s just a couple of selfish idiots being selfish idiots.

After the way Paul has treated June, we understand why she enjoys seeing men doing her bidding.  She’s always been ignored and disregarded, so she derives great joy from being able to make people pay attention.  She uses beauty to wrap Neil around her little finger, and wealth to do the same to the would-be robber.  She knows she’s ruining Neil’s life by seducing him as ‘Terri’, and she seems positively gleeful about that.  The problem is that she’s not really trying to accomplish anything through this manipulation.  She has no long-term plan, it’s just all-out hedonism, and when she finds herself cornered, she commits suicide.  June never learns anything from any of this, and nobody else learns anything from her. At the end, she’s just pointlessly destroyed a number of lives, including her own, and it’s hard to say what the audience is supposed to take from that.

And man, that’s just the dramatis personae!  I have way more to complain about in The Leech Woman, so stay tuned.  Next week I’ll be back in SJW mode with a vengeance.  See you then!

[theemichelleb]

The Red Plague

Disclaimer… any men that come into this post are going to immediately regret it. I’m sorry, you’re DOPE too, I know it, but this is one of the reasons why I focus on women. I’M. A. WOMAN. Love you anyway though.

No, this is not something you will ever be able to understand fully that we go through as women, but you could gain some knowledge on what you’ll need to willingly deal with when it comes to loving on a woman PROPERLY. Again, love you anyway but… once a month… we’re going to hate you. It’s a given fact… get over it!

I may be a little hostile, apologies, but trick or treating with Mother Nature this month has been absolutely horrible! She came at the worst possible time, and, of course, when I just want to ball up in the arms of comfort of MY MAN, I don’t have one. Yes, I’m going to take a second to be sad about that, LOL.

I know there are plenty of boys/men I’ve pissed off due to this unbelievably toxic relationship I have with my period. To you all that weren’t egotistical dickheads… I truly apologize. To the rest of ya’ll… you know you deserve every bad thing that’s coming your way, stop with the nonsense and get off this page! LOL

On a serious note, we as women struggle through the most outrageous things with our bodies and I appreciate the men that stand by our side with the tummy rubs, midnight craving runs, and non judgmental ears they provide when we choose to cry over dumb stuff like not putting down the toilet seat or sending a “Good Morning, Beautiful” text a hour later than what you normally do. No, I don’t do that, but my emotions do some extremely outrageous things at that time of the month trust me, LOL.

When I think about it, age has really taken it’s toll on me and I’m not even done changing yet which is too scary to even accept. Then I think about co-existing with another human being of the opposite sex in this binding connection called marriage expecting them to deal with my cataclysmic mood swings once a month when the reality is I don’t even want to deal with me through that! It’s just an all around mess, but it’s going to be okay. I have to keep telling myself that beautiful man will find and love on me exponentially. I will be great! As will all of my beautiful sistas reading this post with the Amen’s and the head nods. Yes, it is definitely happening, LOL, even if it’s just those in my close friend circles doing it.

Shout out to the lucky women that don’t cramp and only suffer for approximately 3 days (on a long rotation) and feel the need to flaunt that extravagance in my face like I’m a peasant! I love you and you give me hope that one day my body will in fact love me the way yours does, LOL.

I had no idea becoming a woman was going to be so painful for me. I was a late bloomer in many ways, but when it hit me, I definitely without doubt wanted to give it back. Cold sweats, cramping, throwing up, back pains, sore body… do you know how ridiculous it is to have your body in pain AND sore at the same time?? Who thought that was a good idea? Please tell them, they’re fired… sorry Eve, but sis you’ve got to go! I don’t forgive you for your transgressions in the garden that now affect us all… I just can’t, LOL, because everybody doesn’t suffer the same. I feel like Eve may have been one of those 3 day women too, LOL, like sis share the wealth, throw me life jacket, SOMETHING!

Whew Jesus! The devil is at work with this hurricane in my pelvis and I rebuke him!

I know this is coming off as ranty and after the last couple weeks I’ve had I think I deserve that much, and I know I can’t possibly be alone in what I’m feeling. Sometimes, I just need the release. I never suffered from mood swings when I was younger, but now it’s like it’s second nature for me.

Although, there are so many unwelcome symptoms in this instance of being a woman I have to step back and really think about the beauty that comes from it. I have moments when I get really sentimental and suffer from baby fever. The joy and beauty in thoughts of one day giving birth and becoming a mother should offset the pain I endure in these hard times. I mean, they don’t, LOL, but it’s nice to believe once I give birth and have a nice little bundle of joy to call my own (after marriage of course) I will appreciate the struggle I am now going through.

On a serious note, I just want to give love to all women out there that feel like things they experience or issues they are faced with are unique to only themselves and may feel weird or strange about it. We are in the same boat, pass the oar (thanks to my friend for that reference). The thing about being a woman is, we all suffer through this and we all yell, curse, and scream through it. I say this because I need to follow my own advice, but talk to your doctor and stay up to date on everything relating to your body. We are our most important advocates when it comes to our health, especially during pregnancy and labor and everything in relation to our sexual organs and our bodies.

I am no specialist and neither biology nor chemistry are included in my profession whatsoever, but I am a firm believer in positive body, mental, and emotional health.

To any men that actually read through this… thank you for caring about us. We appreciate you for the runs to the drug store for pain killers, pads/tampons, ice cream, chocolate and whatever else we ask for in that time of need. I appreciate you are trying and being worried enough to actually read through my rant. Be an advocate for the women in your life, and continue to protect them the way I’m sure you already do. There are so many differences in how we’re raised compared to men but success in all things requires communication and understanding. We are in tune with our emotions, we listen intently, and we latch onto hope like it’s necessary to breathe. The best way to understand your woman, especially when we’re in a heighten emotional state due to Aunt Flo, because I now understand mood swings, don’t be afraid to talk to your woman, and women you have to be open when they ask how they can help. Even if the answer to that is telling them you don’t know and you just need space.

Welp! Thanks for tuning in for this weeks funnel of release!

Be D.O.P.E. black girls!

[vitalmindandbody]

Two American Nightmares: how a dumbed-down society failed batch of a great opinion

As Clinton and Trump prepare to debate next week , noble principles are devastated in a culture where most Americans do not know what is real anymore and the dream of equal rights is just a fantasy

Every child had a pretty good shot

To get at least as far as their old man got

But something happened on the best way of that place

They threw an American pennant in our face.

Billy Joel, Allentown

Its one of the greatest fabrications of all time, and just like it says on the dollar bill novus ordo seclorum it developed an entirely new prescribe in human things. After millennia of pharaohs, lords, emperors, rulers, sultans, caesars and czars, with all their attendant gentries and locked-down social system, countries around the world was founded where birth and pedigree didnt subject so much, where by application of your flairs, vigor, labour and willingness to play by the rules, you could improve your fabric lot in living and achieve a measure of financial protection for yourself and your family. Peasants and proles could aspire to more than mere existence. Progressive!

We know it today as the American Dream. The now-obscure historian James Truslow Adams coined the period in his book The Epic of America, characterizing the American dreaming as TAGEND

a dream of a social order in which each man and each wife shall be able to attain to the fullest prominence of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.

Adams was writing in 1931, but the daydream was there from the beginning, in Jeffersons pursuit of happiness formulation in the Declaration of Independence, happiness residing in its 18 th-century sense of succes, grow, wellbeing.

Nobody ever came to America with a starry-eyed dream of working for starvation wages. Slew of that offered in the old country, and thats precisely why we left, escaping serfdom, peonage, tenancy, indenture all different iterations of what was essentially a rigged plan, to employ it in current political verbiage that channeled the profits of our proletariat upstream to the Man. We came to America to do better, to self-assured for ourselves the liberation that economic security makes, and for millions principally white males at first, and then slowly, sputteringly, women and people of color thats the acces it worked out , nothing less than a change in the human condition.

Upward mobility is indispensable to the American Dream, the notion that people can rise from working to middle class, and middle to upper and even higher on the simulate of a( imaginary) Horatio Alger or an( actual) Andrew Carnegie. Upward mobility across castes peaked in the US in the late 19 th century. Most of the benefits of the 20 th century were achieved en masse; it wasnt so much a phenomenon of great numbers of people emerge from one class to the next as it was standards of living rising crisply for all first-class. You didnt “ve got to be” exceptional to rise. Opportunity was sufficiently broad that hard work and steadiness would do, along with implicit buy-in to the social contract, allegiance to the system continuing on the assumption that the system was basically fair.

The biggest amplifications occurred in the post-second world war period of the GI Bill, cheap higher education, strong labor unions, and a progressive imposition system. Between the late 1940 s and early 1970 s, median household income in the US redoubled. Income inequality reached historic lows. The median CEO salary was approximately 30 periods that of the lowest-paid employee, compared against todays gold-plated multiple of 370. The top tariff bracket wandered in the neighborhood of 70% to 90%. Awarded, there were far fewer billionaires in those dates. Somehow the commonwealth survived.

America is a dream of greater justice and the possibilities for the average “mens and”, if we are not able procure it, all our other achievements amount to nothing. So wrote Eleanor Roosevelt in her syndicated column of 6 January 1941, an apt lead-in to her husbands State of the Union address eventually that day in which he enumerated the four impunities essential to American republic, among them freedom from want. In his District of the Union address three years later, FDR expanded on this concept of freedom from want with its own proposal for a Second Bill of Privilege, an economic statute of rights to offset what he viewed as the growing autocracy of the modern economic tell TAGEND

This Republic had at its beginning, and grew to its present forte, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights among them the right of free speech, free press, free love As our society has grown in size and prominence, nonetheless as our industrial economy has expanded these political rights have proved inadequate to assure us equality. We have come to a clearly defined realization of the fact that true personal freedoms cannot exist without economic its safety and independence.

Political claims notwithstanding, impunity doughnuts exceptionally hollow when youre going nickel-and-dimed to death in your everyday life. The Roosevelts recognized that compensation peonage, or any plan that inclines toward subsistence level, is simply inconsistent with self-determination. Subsistence is, by definition, a confined, hopeless commonwealth; ones horizon is necessarily limited to the present epoch, to getting enough of what their own bodies must be free to make it to the next. These daylights a minimum wage employee in New York City clocking 40 hours per week( at$ 9 per hour) makes $18,720 a year, well for the purposes of the Federal Poverty Line of $21,775. Thats a scrambling, uneasy live, narrowly bounded. Close to impossible to decently feed, robe, and shelter yourself on a wage like that, much less their own families; much less buy health insurance, or save for your minors college, or are represented in any of those other good American occasions. Down at peon rank, the endeavours of joy sounds like a bad pun. Its “ve called the” American nightmare, George Carlin cracked, because you have to be asleep to believe it.

Necessitous husbands are not free humanities, said FDR in that 1944 State of the Union speech. Beings who are hungry and out of a enterprise are the stuff of which tyrannies are stir. A dire word, demonstrably genuine, and specially unsettling in 2016, a point in time when the American Dream seems most viable as nostalgia than a lived phenomenon. Income inequality, abundance distribution, mortality rates: by all the necessary measures, the average individual that Eleanor Roosevelt celebrated is subsiding. Extraordinary people continue to rise, but overall mobility is stagnant at best. If youre born poverty-stricken in Ferguson or Appalachia, chances are youre stay around that method. Ditto if your early storages include the swimming pool at the Houston Country Club or ski lessons at Deer Valley, youre likely going to keep your perch at the top of the heap.

Income inequality, gross the gaps in capital: were told daily, endlessly, that these are the necessary the effects of a free market, as if world markets was a personnel of sort on the order of weather or tides, and not the alone manmade erect that it is. In daylight of recent history, blind following of this sort of financials would seem to require a firm commitment to stupidity, but lets presume for the moment that its true, that the free market exists as a universe unto itself, as immutable in its workings as the regulations of physics. Does that universe include some ironclad regulate who are in need of inequality of opportunity? Ive yet to discover the occurrence for that, though doubtless some intrepid thinktanker could invent one out of this same free-market financials, along with aromas of genetic determinism as it relates to calibers of subject and reputation. And “it wouldve been” bogus, that case. And more than that, sinful. That we should allow for wildly divergent opportunities due to accidents of birth “ve just got to” ten-strike us as international crimes equal in savagery to child abuse or molestation.

Franklin Roosevelt:[ F] reedom is no half-and-half affair. If the ordinary citizen is ensure equal rights in the polling place, he must have equal opportunity in the market place. The proposition runs deeper than sentimentality, deeper than policy, deeper even than adherence to equality and the pursuit of pleasure that are set out in the Declaration. It cuts all the way to the nature of republic, and to the prospects for its continued existence in America. We may have democracy in its own country, wrote supreme court of the united states justice Louis Brandeis, or we may have enormous abundance concentrated in the mitts of a few, but we cant have both. Those few, in Brandeiss judgment, would inevitably use their supremacy to subvert the free will of the majority; the super-rich as a class plainly couldnt be trusted to do otherwise, a thesis thats being starkly acted out in the present period of Citizens United, Super Pacs, and truckloads of dark money.

But the lawsuit for financial equality goes beyond even equations of supremacy politics. Democracys premise remains on the idea that the collective profundity of the majority will testify right more often than its wrong. That have enough opening in the endeavours of joy, your population will develop its abilities, its intellect, its better judgment; that over duration its capacity for discernment and self-correction will be broadened. Life will improve. The pattern of your uniting will be more perfect, to acquire a word. But if a critical mass of your population is kept in peonage? All its sparkle spent in the trenches of day-to-day survival, with scant opportunity to develop the full range of its faculties? Then how much poorer future prospects for your republic will be.

Economic equality can no more be divorced from the smooth functioning of republic than the ballot. Jefferson, Brandeis, the Roosevelts all recognized this home truth. The American Dream has to be the lived world of the country, not just a moderately tale we tell ourselves.

I have always gotten much more advertisement than anybody else.

Donald Trump

Then theres that other American nightmare, the numbed-out, dumbed-down, make-believe world where much of the national consciousness resides, the sum concoction of our mighty Fantasy Industrial Complex: movies, TV, internet, texts, tweets, ad saturation, celebrity preoccupation, athletics infatuation, Amazonian sewers of porn and political bullshit, the entire invasion of media and messaging that is endeavouring to separate us from our intelligences. September 11, 2001 detonation us out of that daydream for about two minutes, but the dream is so elastic, so all-encompassing, that 9/11 was immediately absorbed into the the matrix of FIC. This exceedingly complex episode horribly direct in the result, but a swamp when it is necessary to interpretations was stripped down and binaried into a dependable fantasy narration of us against them, good versus villainy, Christian against Muslim. The week after 9/11, Susan Sontag was practically executed for pointing out that a few shreds of historical awareness might help us is how we came to this quality. For this modest suggestion , no small number of her fellow Americans bid her dead. But if wed followed her result if united done the hard work of delving down to the roots of the whole frightful happening perhaps we wouldnt still be fighting al-Qaida and its offspring 15 years later.

An 11 -year-old girl wears Trump socks at awareness-raising campaigns happening for the Republican nominee at the Trump International Hotel in Washington DC. Photo: Mike Segar/ Reuters

Heres a hypothesis, ugly, uncharitable, but returned our recent record it begs ask: the majority of cases most Americans dont just knowing that real any more. How else to interpret Trump, a billionaire on an ego trip capturing a major partys nomination for chairwoman? Another blunt-speaking billionaire tried twice for the conference of presidents in the 1990 s and went out in flames, but he made the mistake of flowing as himself, a recognizably flesh-and-blood human being, whereas Trump comes to us as the eventual animal, and indisputable maestro, of the Fantasy Industrial Complex. For much of his occupation until 2004, to be exact he harboured status in “peoples lives” as a more or less normal fame. Bigger than life, rest assured, cartoonishly grandiose, shamelessly self-promoting, and reliably objectionable, but Trump didnt become Trump until The Apprentice debuted in January 2004. The first occurrence depicted 20.7 million viewers. By likenes, Ross Perot received 19,742, 000 referendums in the 1992 general elections yes, Im likening referendum totals with Nielsen ratings but Trump retained attracting that robust 20 million week after week. The season climax that year contacted 28 million viewers, and over the coming decade, for 13 more seasons, this was how America came to know him, in that weirdly intimate behavior Tv has of delivering personality into the very middle of our lives.

It was this same Trump that 24 million viewers a record, of course tuned in to watch at the first Republican debate last year, the glowering, blustering, swaggering boardroom action flesh who established every hope of shredding the pols. One speculates if Trump would have ever been Trump if there hadnt been a JR Ewing to pave the way, to show just how dear and real a dealmaking Tv rascal could be to our centers. Trumps performance on that night did not sadden , nor through all the debates in the long marching that followed, and if his regard for the truth has proved more erratic even than that of professional politicians, we should expect as much. In the realm of the Fantasy Industrial Complex, actuality happens on a slipping scale. The truism is just another possibility.

I speak the password primeval.

I would give the signal of democracy ;P TAGEND

By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

In nine days Trump and Hillary will take the stage for their first face-to-face conversation. There is likely to be blood. The bayonets are going to be out, and the ratings are bound to be, need it be said, yuge. The American Dream will no doubt be invoked from both podiums, for what true-blue patriot was ever against the American Dream? And hitherto for the past 30 years the Democratic campaigner has worked comfortably within “states parties ” foundation thats battered the working and middle classes down to the bone. The brand-new Democrat of the Clinton era are always strong for political rights, as long as they dont disturbed corporate Americas bottom line. Strong for racial and gender equality, strong for LGBT privileges( though that took season ). Meanwhile this same Democratic establishment connected with the GOP to push a market- and finance-driven economic ordering that enriches the already rich and leaves the rest of us sucking wind.

Thats the very real feeling Trump is speaking to , no fantasy there. Bernie as well; small-scale wonder their constituencies overlapped, though Trumps claimed devotion to the common man stumbles over even the simplest proofs. On whether to raise the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, Trumps moral compass has invented from an shown no( wages are already too high ), to imply yes( wages are too low ), to weasel word( leave it up to the states ), to yes and no in the same sigh( I would leave it and conjure it somewhat ), and, eventually, when pressed by Bill OReilly in July, to yes-but( promote it to $10, but its still best left to the states ). All this from presidential candidates whos firmly in favor of abolishing the estate tax, to the great benefit of heirs of multimillionaires and nothing at all to the vast majority of us.

Meanwhile, the Fantasy Industrial Complex is doing just fine such elections season, thank you. Communicating at a Morgan Stanley investors seminar in March, one of the commanders of the FIC, Leslie Moonves, the chief executive of CBS and a person whose 2015 compensation totaled $56.8 m, had this to say about the Trump campaign. It may not be good for America, but its damn good for CBS. The coin rolling in and this is fun this[ is] going to be a very good year for us. Sorry. Its a cruel stuff to say. But delivering it on, Donald. Keep going.

Read more: www.theguardian.com

The post Two American Nightmares: how a dumbed-down society failed batch of a great opinion appeared first on vitalmindandbody.com.

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[vitalmindandbody]

Two American Dreamings: how a dumbed-down society failed view of a great theme

As Clinton and Trump prepare to debate next week , noble principles are overwhelmed in a culture where most Americans do not know what is real anymore and the dream of equal rights is just a fantasy

Every child had a pretty good shot

To get at least as far as their old person got

But something happened on the way to that place

They hurled an American pennant in our face.

Billy Joel, Allentown

Its one of the greatest inventions of all time, and just like it says on the dollar bill novus ordo seclorum it generated an entirely new prescribe in human occasions. After millennia of pharaohs, lords, monarches, kings, sultans, caesars and czars, with all their attendant aristocracies and locked-down social structures, a country was founded where birth and lineage didnt trouble so much better, where by application of your expertises, power, labor and willingness to play by the rules, you could improve your material slew in living and achieve a measure of financial security for yourself and their own families. Boors and proles could aspire to more than mere existence. Progressive!

We know it today as the American Dream. The now-obscure historian James Truslow Adams coined the period in his volume The Epic of America, defining the American daydream as TAGEND

a dream of a social order in which each man and each girl shall be able to attain to the fullest prominence of which they are innately capable, and be recognised by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of delivery or position.

Adams was writing in 1931, but the fantasy was there from the start, in Jeffersons pursuit of happiness formulation in the Declaration of Independence, pleasure residing in its 18 th-century gumption of prosperity, thrive, wellbeing.

Nobody ever came to America with a starry-eyed dream of working for starvation compensations. Plenty of that offered in the old country, and thats accurately why we left, escaping serfdom, peonage, tenancy, indenture all different iterations of what was essentially a rigged plan, to put it in current political verbiage that channeled the profits of our proletariat upstream to the Man. We came to America to do better, to self-assured for ourselves the liberation that financial defence makes, and for millions chiefly white males at first, and then slowly, sputteringly, women and people of color thats the practice it used to work , no less than a revolution in the human condition.

Upward mobility is indispensable to the American Dream, the notion that people can rise from implemented in order to middle class, and middle to upper and even higher on the example of a( imaginary) Horatio Alger or an( actual) Andrew Carnegie. Upward mobility across classifies peaked in the US in the late 19 th century. Most of the benefits of the 20 th century were achieved en masse; it wasnt so much better a phenomenon of great numbers of people emerge from one class to the next as it was standards of living rising sharply for all castes. You didnt have to be exceptional to rise. Opportunity was sufficiently broad that hard work and steadiness would do, along with implicit buy-in to the social contract, faithfulnes to the system continuing on the assumption that the system was basically fair.

The biggest increases happened in the post-second world war era of the GI Bill, inexpensive higher education, strong labor unions, and a progressive tariff system. Between the late 1940 s and early 1970 s, median household income in the US redoubled. Income inequality contacted historic lows. The median CEO salary was nearly 30 hours that of the lowest-paid hire, compared with todays gold-plated multiple of 370. The top excise bracket ranged in the neighborhood of 70% to 90%. Conceded, there used to be far fewer billionaires in those dates. Somehow the society survived.

America is a dream of greater justice and opportunity for the average “mens and”, if we can not find it, all our other achievements amount to good-for-nothing. So wrote Eleanor Roosevelt in her syndicated line of 6 January 1941, an apt lead-in to her husbands State of the Union address later that day in which he listed the four democracies essential to American republic, among other issues freedom from want. In his Country of the Union address 3 years later, FDR expanded on this notion of freedom from want with its own proposal for a Second Bill of Rights, an economic greenback of rights to offset what he viewed as the growing oppression of the modern financial tell TAGEND

This Republic had at its inaugurating, and changed to its present strength, under the protection of certain inalienable political claims among other issues the right of free speech, free press, free hero-worship As our commonwealth has grown in size and stature, nonetheless as our industrial economy has expanded these political rights have proved inadequate to assure us equality. We have come to a clear realization given the fact that true personal freedoms cannot subsist without economic its safety and independence.

Political claims notwithstanding, discretion sounds excessively hollow when youre getting nickel-and-dimed to fatality in your everyday life. The Roosevelts recognized that payment peonage, or any organisation that inclines toward subsistence level, is plainly inconsistent with self-determination. Survival is, by definition, a restricted, frantic district; ones horizon is necessarily limited to the present day, to getting enough of what the body needs to make it to the next. These dates a minimum wage work in New York City clocking 40 hours per week( at$ 9 per hour) pays $18,720 a year, well for the purposes of the Federal Poverty Line of $21,775. Thats a scrambling, uneasy existence, narrowly bounded. Close to impossible to decently feed, robe, and shelter yourself on a wage like that, much less a family; much less buy health insurance, or save for your teenagers college, or participate in any of those other good American circumstances. Down at peon rank, the endeavours of merriment is just like a bad gag. Its called the American fantasy, George Carlin cracked, because you have to be asleep to believe it.

Necessitous mortals are not free men, said FDR in that 1944 State of the Union speech. Beings who are thirsty and out of a occupation are the stuff of which totalitarianisms are see. A grim statement, demonstrably true-blue, and especially unsettling in 2016, a point in time when the American Dream seems more viable as nostalgia than a lived phenomenon. Income inequality, abundance dissemination, mortality rates: by all the necessary measures, the average individual that Eleanor Roosevelt celebrated is dropping. Extraordinary parties continue to rise, but overall mobility is sluggish at best. If youre born poverty-stricken in Ferguson or Appalachia, risks are youre going to stay that channel. Ditto if your early remembers include the swimming bath at the Houston Country Club or ski lessons at Deer Valley, youre likely going to keep your roost at the upper part of the heap.

Income inequality, gross the gaps in abundance: were to say daily, incessantly, that these are the necessary the effects of a free market, as if world markets was a army of quality on the order of weather or tides, and not the alone manmade fabricate that it is. In light of recent history, blind credence of this sort of financials would seem to require a firm commitment to stupidity, but gives premise for the moment that its genuine, that the free market exists as a universe unto itself, as immutable in its workings as the laws of physics. Does that universe include some ironclad convention who are in need of inequality of opportunity? Ive hitherto to discover the lawsuit for that, though doubtless some enterprising thinktanker could manufacture one out of this same free-market economics, together with gusts of genetic determinism as it pertains to qualities of penalize and character. And “it wouldve been” bogus, all such cases. And more than that, vile. That we should allow for wildly conflicting openings due to accidents of birth “ve just got to” strike us as international crimes equal in brutality to child abuse or molestation.

Franklin Roosevelt:[ F] reedom is no half-and-half affair. If the ordinary citizen is insure equal opportunity in the polling place, he must have equal rights in the market place. The hypothesi croaks deeper than sentimentality, deeper than programme, deeper even than adherence to equality and the endeavours of joy as set forth in the Declaration. It cuts all the way to the nature of democracy, and to the prospects for its continued existence in America. We may have democracy in its own country, wrote supreme court of the united states right Louis Brandeis, or we may have enormous money concentrated in the mitts of a few, but we cant have both. Those few, in Brandeiss judgment, would inevitably use their influence to subvert the free will of the majority; the super-rich as a class plainly couldnt be trusted to do otherwise, a thesis thats being starkly behaved out in the current period of Citizens United, Super Pacs, and truckloads of dark money.

But the client for financial equality goes beyond even equations of dominance politics. Democracys premise remains on the idea that the collective wisdom of the majority will prove right more often than its incorrect. That given sufficient opportunity in the pursuit of pleasure, your population will develop its knacks, its ability, its better judgment; that over duration the national capacity for discernment and self-correction is likely to be increased. Life will improve. The way of your solidarity will be more perfect, to acquire a word. But if a critical mass of your population maintained in peonage? All its vigor spent in the excavations of day-to-day existence, with scant opportunity to develop the full range of its modules? Then how much poorer future prospects for your republic will be.

Economic equality can no more be divorced from the functioning of republic than the ballot. Jefferson, Brandeis, the Roosevelts all remembered this home truth. The American Dream has to be the lived world of the two countries, not just a reasonably legend we tell ourselves.

I have always gotten much more advertising than anybody else.

Donald Trump

Then theres that other American fantasy, the numbed-out, dumbed-down, make-believe world-wide where much of the national consciousness resides, the sum concoction of our mighty Fantasy Industrial Complex: movies, TV, internet, text, tweets, ad saturation, celebrity obsession, boasts infatuation, Amazonian sewers of porn and political bullshit, the entire foray of media and messaging that strives to separate us from our brains. September 11, 2001 bombed us out of that reverie for about two minutes, but the reverie is so elastic, so all-encompassing, that 9/11 was rapidly absorbed into the the matrix of FIC. This exceedingly complex event horribly direct in the result, but a swamp when it comes to causes was stripped down and binaried into a reliable fantasy narration of us against them, good versus villainy, Christian against Muslim. The week after 9/11, Susan Sontag was practically executed for pointing out that a few smidgens of historical awareness might help us understand how we came to this phase. For this modest recommendation , no small number of her fellow Americans bid her dead. But if united followed her conduct if united done the hard work of delving down to the roots of the whole horrid thing perhaps we wouldnt still be fighting al-Qaida and its offspring 15 years later.

An 11 -year-old girl wears Trump socks at awareness-raising campaigns occurrence for the Republican campaigner at the Trump International Hotel in Washington DC. Image: Mike Segar/ Reuters

Heres a hypothesis, ugly, uncharitable, but yielded our recent biography it begs research: most of the time most Americans dont just knowing that real any more. How else to clarify Trump, a billionaire on an ego trip capturing a major partys nomination for chairman? Another blunt-speaking billionaire tried twice for the conference of presidents in the 1990 s and used to go in flames, but he made the mistake of extending as himself, a recognizably flesh-and-blood human being, whereas Trump comes to us as the eventual beast, and indisputable maestro, of the Fantasy Industrial Complex. For much of his job until 2004, to be exact he harboured status in our lives as a more or less normal celebrity. Large than life, to be sure, cartoonishly lofty, shamelessly self-promoting, and reliably hateful, but Trump didnt become Trump until The Apprentice debuted in January 2004. The first episode depicted 20.7 million viewers. By similarity, Ross Perot received 19,742, 000 votes in the 1992 general elections yes, Im likening election totals with Nielsen ratings but Trump stopped sucking that robust 20 million week after week. The season finale that time reached 28 million viewers, and over the coming decade, for 13 more seasons, this was how America came to know him, in that weirdly intimate lane Tv has of delivering celebrity into the extremely middle of our lives.

It was this same Trump that 24 million viewers a record, of course tuned in to watch at the first Republican debate last year, the glowering, blustering, swaggering boardroom activity person who made every hope of shredding the pols. One thinks if Trump would have ever been Trump if there hadnt been a JR Ewing to pave the way, to show just how dear and real a dealmaking TV crook could be to our centers. Trumps performance on that night did not disappoint , nor through all the debates in the long progress that followed, and if his reference for the truth has proved more erratic even than that of professional legislators, we should expect as much. In the realm of the Fantasy Industrial Complex, reality happens on a slithering magnitude. The reality is just another possibility.

I is talking about password primeval.

I would give the sign of republic ;P TAGEND

By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

In nine days Trump and Hillary will take the stage for their first face-to-face debate. There is likely to be blood. The spears are going to be out, and the ratings are bound to be, need it be said, yuge. The American Dream will no doubt be invoked from both platforms, for what true-blue patriot was ever against the American Dream? And yet for the past 30 times the Democratic candidate has worked comfortably within a party organisation thats battered the working and middle classes down to the bone. The brand-new Democrats of the Clinton era are always strong for political claims, as long as they dont disturbed corporate Americas bottom line. Strong for ethnic and gender equality, strong for LGBT privileges( though that took experience ). Meanwhile this same Democratic establishment assembled with the GOP to push a market- and finance-driven financial guild that fertilizes the already rich and leaves the rest of us sucking wind.

Thats the very real feeling Trump is speaking to , no imagination there. Bernie as well; small-time amazement their constituencies overlapped, though Trumps declared devotion to the common man stumbles over even the simplest proofs. On whether to raise the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, Trumps moral compass has revolved from an connoted no( wages are already too high ), to imply yes( wages are too low ), to weasel word( left open up to the states ), to yes and no in the same breath( I would leave it and raise it reasonably ), and, eventually, when pressed by Bill OReilly in July, to yes-but( parent it to $10, but its still best left to the states ). All this from presidential candidates whos securely in favor of abolishing the estate tax, to the great benefit of heirs of multimillionaires and none at all to the vast majority of us.

Meanwhile, the Fantasy Industrial Complex is doing just fine such elections season, thank you. Pronouncing at a Morgan Stanley investors meeting in March, one of the leaders of the FIC, Leslie Moonves, the chief executive of CBS and a man whose 2015 compensation totaled $56.8 m, had this to say about the Trump campaign. It may not be good for America, but its damn good for CBS. The coin rolling in and this is fun this[ is] about to become a very good year for us. Sorry. Its a cruel situation to say. But bringing it on, Donald. Keep going.

Read more: www.theguardian.com

The post Two American Dreamings: how a dumbed-down society failed view of a great theme appeared first on vitalmindandbody.com.

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Two American Dreams: how a dumbed-down person lost vision of a great impression

As Clinton and Trump prepare to debate next week , noble paragons are overwhelmed in a culture where most Americans do not know what is real anymore and the dream of equal opportunity is just a fantasy

Every child had a pretty good shot

To get at least as far as their old person got

But something resulted on the way to that place

They hurled an American pennant in our face.

Billy Joel, Allentown

Its one of the greatest fabrications of all time, and just like it enunciates on the dollar bill novus ordo seclorum it established an entirely new guild in human occasions. After millennia of pharaohs, lords, princes, monarches, sultans, caesars and czars, with all their attendant gentries and locked-down social organization, a country was founded where birth and lineage didnt question so much better, where by application of your knacks, vitality, labor and willingness to play by the rules, you could improve your textile heap in life and achieve a measure of economic defence for yourself and their own families. Boors and proles could aspire to more than merely survival. Revolutionary!

We know it today as the American Dream. The now-obscure historian James Truslow Adams coined the period in his work The Epic of America, defining the American nightmare as TAGEND

a dream of a social order in which each man and each wife shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognised by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous all cases of birth or position.

Adams was writing in 1931, but the daydream was there from the beginning, in Jeffersons pursuit of happiness formulation in the Declaration of Independence, joy residing in its 18 th-century appreciation of prosperity, thrive, wellbeing.

Nobody ever came to America with a starry-eyed dream of working for famine wages. Spate of that available in the old country, and thats precise why we left, escaping serfdom, peonage, lease, indenture all different iterations of what was essentially a rigged structure, to set it in current political verbiage that channeled the profits of our labor upstream to the Man. We came to America to do better, to self-assured for ourselves the liberation that financial defence makes, and for millions chiefly lily-white males at first, and then slowly, sputteringly, women and people of color thats the behavior it used to work , no less than a revolution in the human condition.

Upward mobility is indispensable to the American Dream, the idea that people are able to rise from working to middle class, and middle to upper and even higher on the simulation of a( imaginary) Horatio Alger or an( actual) Andrew Carnegie. Upward mobility across categorizes peaked in the US in the late 19 th century. Most of the benefits of the 20 th century were achieved en masse; it wasnt so much a phenomenon of great numbers of parties rising from one class to the next as it was standards of living rising crisply for all years. You didnt “ve got to be” exceptional to rise. Opportunity was sufficiently broad that hard work and steadiness would do, along with implicit buy-in to the social contract, allegiance to the system following on the assumption that the system was mostly fair.

The biggest increases happened in the post-second world war era of the GI Bill, cheap higher education, strong labor unions, and a progressive excise system. Between the late 1940 s and early 1970 s, median household income in the US redoubled. Income inequality reached historic lows. The median CEO salary was approximately 30 ages that of the lowest-paid employee, compared against todays gold-plated multiple of 370. The top tax bracket wandered in the neighborhood of 70% to 90%. Awarded, there were far fewer billionaires in those dates. Somehow the commonwealth survived.

America is a dream of greater justice and the possibilities for the average “mens and”, if we can not find it, all our other achievements amount to nothing. So wrote Eleanor Roosevelt in her syndicated article of 6 January 1941, an apt lead-in to her husbands State of the Union address afterward that day in which he enumerated the four liberties essential to American democracy, among them freedom from want. In his District of the Union address three years later, FDR expanded on this concept of freedom from want with its own proposal for a Second Bill of Privilege, an financial legislation of rights to offset what he viewed as the growing oppression of the modern economic order TAGEND

This Republic had at its beginning, and ripened to its present fortitude, under the protection of certain inalienable political rights among them the interests of free speech, free press, free praise As our person has grown in length and stature, however as our industrial economy has expanded these political privileges have proved inadequate to assure us equality. We have come to a clear understanding of the fact that true individual freedom cannot prevail without financial security and independence.

Political rights notwithstanding, democracy doughnuts excessively hollow when youre going nickel-and-dimed to fatality in your everyday life. The Roosevelts recognized that wage peonage, or any system that inclines toward subsistence level, is simply incompatible with self-determination. Subsistence is, by definition, a restricted, frantic commonwealth; ones horizon is necessarily limited to the present epoch, to getting enough of what their own bodies must be free to make it to the next. These epoches a minimum wage worker in New York City clocking 40 hours per week( at$ 9 per hour) earns $18,720 a year, well for the purposes of the Federal Poverty Line of $21,775. Thats a scrambling, uneasy life, narrowly bounded. Close to impossible to decently feed, invest, and shelter yourself on a compensation like that, much shorter a family; much less buy health insurance, or save for your boys college, or participate in any of those other good American happens. Down at peon grade, the pursuit of gaiety sounds like a bad pun. Its called the American dreaming, George Carlin cracked, because you have to be asleep to believe it.

Necessitous people are not free followers, pronounced FDR in that 1944 State of the Union speech. Beings who are ravenous and out of a job are the stuff of which tyrannies are see. A dire announcement, demonstrably true-blue, and specially unsettling in 2016, a object in time when the American Dream seems most feasible as nostalgia than a lived phenomenon. Income inequality, opulence deployment, mortality rates: by all the necessary measures, the average individual that Eleanor Roosevelt celebrated is sinking. Outstanding parties continue to rise, but overall mobility is sluggish at best. If youre born poverty-stricken in Ferguson or Appalachia, chances are youre stay around that behavior. Ditto if your early recalls include the swimming bath at the Houston Country Club or ski exercises at Deer Valley, youre likely going to keep your roost at the top of the heap.

Income inequality, gross the gaps in money: were told daily, ceaselessly, that these are the necessary consequences of a free market, as if the market was a violence of quality under the orders of weather or tides, and not the altogether manmade construct that it is. In lighting of recent record, blind adoption of those kinds of financials would seem to require a firm commitment to stupidity, but makes assume for the moment that its true, that the free market exists as a universe unto itself, as immutable in its workings as the laws of physics. Does that universe include some ironclad regulate that requires inequality of opportunity? Ive yet to discover the subject for that, though doubtless some intrepid thinktanker could invent one out of this same free-market financials, together with stenches of genetic determinism as it relates to characters of train and reference. And it would be bogus, all such cases. And more than that, immoral. That we should allow for wildly diverging opportunities due to accidents of birth ought to ten-strike us as international crimes equal in brutality to child abuse or molestation.

Franklin Roosevelt:[ F] reedom is no half-and-half affair. If the average citizen is secure equal rights in the polling place, he must have equal rights in the market place. The proposition disappears deeper than sentiment, deeper than plan, deeper even than adherence to equality and the pursuit of gaiety as set forth in the Declaration. It cuts all the way to the nature of republic, and to the prospects for its continued existence in America. We may have democracy in this country, wrote supreme court justice Louis Brandeis, or we may have great money concentrated in the handwritings of a few, but we cant have both. Those few, in Brandeiss judgment, would unavoidably use their power to subvert the free will of the majority; the super-rich as a class simply couldnt be trusted to do otherwise, a thesis thats being starkly acted out in the current era of Citizens United, Super Pacs, and truckloads of dark money.

But the occurrence for economic equality moving beyond even equations of influence politics. Democracys premise rests on the idea that the collective prudence of the majority of members will prove right more often than its wrong. That have enough opportunity in the endeavours of delight, your population will develop its aptitudes, its ability, its better judgment; that over duration the national capacity for discernment and self-correction is likely to be enlarged. Life will improve. The structure of your league will be more perfect, to borrow a motto. But if a critical mass of your population is kept in peonage? All its vitality spent in the excavations of day-to-day survival, with scant opportunity to develop the full range of its modules? Then how much poorer future prospects for your republic will be.

Economic equality can no more be divorced from the smooth functioning of democracy than the ballot. Jefferson, Brandeis, the Roosevelts all discerned this home truth. The American Dream has to be the lived actuality of the two countries, not just a moderately fib we tell ourselves.

I have always get much more advertisement than anybody else.

Donald Trump

Then theres that other American reverie, the numbed-out, dumbed-down, make-believe world where much of the national consciousness resides, the sum make of our mighty Fantasy Industrial Complex: movies, TV, internet, verse, tweets, ad saturation, celebrity infatuation, boasts obsession, Amazonian sewers of porn and political bullshit, the entire raid of media and messaging that strives to separate us from our mentalities. September 11, 2001 smashed us out of that nightmare for about two minutes, but the daydream is so elastic, so all-encompassing, that 9/11 was quickly absorbed into the the matrix of FIC. This exceedingly complex occasion horribly direct in research results, but a swamp when it comes to interpretations was stripped down and binaried into a dependable fantasy narrative of us against them, good versus villainy, Christian against Muslim. The week after 9/11, Susan Sontag was practically executed for pointing out that a few iotums of historical awareness might help us understand how we came to this level. For this modest proposal , no small number of her fellow Americans cared her dead. But if united followed her precede if united done the hard work of mining down to the roots of the whole nasty happen perhaps we wouldnt still be fighting al-Qaida and its offspring 15 years later.

An 11 -year-old girl wears Trump socks at awareness-raising campaigns event for the Republican nominee at the Trump International Hotel in Washington DC. Image: Mike Segar/ Reuters

Heres a hypothesis, ugly, uncharitable, but rendered our recent record it begs inquiry: most of the time most Americans dont “know what i m thinking” real any more. How else to show Trump, a billionaire on an ego trip capturing a major partys nomination for president? Another blunt-speaking billionaire tried twice for the conference of presidents in the 1990 s and used to go in flames, but he made the mistake of extending as himself, a recognizably flesh-and-blood human being, whereas Trump comes to us as the ultimate person, and irrefutable maestro, of the Fantasy Industrial Complex. For much of his profession until 2004, to be precise he comprised status in our lives as a more or less ordinary fame. Larger than life, to be sure, cartoonishly extravagant, shamelessly self-promoting, and reliably obnoxious, but Trump didnt become Trump until The Apprentice debuted in January 2004. The first escapade reaped 20.7 million viewers. By comparison, Ross Perot received 19,742, 000 votes in the 1992 presidential election yes, Im equating vote totals with Nielsen ratings but Trump stopped attracting that robust 20 million week after week. The season climax that year reached 28 million viewers, and over the coming decade, for 13 more seasons, this was how America came to know him, in that weirdly intimate acces Tv has of delivering luminary into the exceedingly center of our lives.

It was this same Trump that 24 million viewers a record, of course tuned in to watch at the first Republican debate last year, the glowering, blustering, swaggering boardroom act person who devoted every hope of shredding the pols. One speculates if Trump would have ever been Trump if there hadnt been a JR Ewing to pave the way, to show just how dear and real a dealmaking Tv rascal could be to our nerves. Trumps performance on that night did not baffle , nor through all the debates in the long advance that followed, and if his view for the truth has proved more erratic even than that of professional politicians, we should expect as much. In the realm of the Fantasy Industrial Complex, world happens on a slithering proportion. The truism is just another possibility.

I speak the password primeval.

I would give the sign of democracy ;P TAGEND

By God! I will accept good-for-nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms.

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass

In nine eras Trump and Hillary will take the stage for their first face-to-face dispute. There is likely to be blood. The knives are going to be out, and the ratings are bound to be, need it be said, yuge. The American Dream will no doubt be invoked from both platforms, for what true-blue patriot was ever against the American Dream? And hitherto for the past 30 years the Democratic campaigner has worked comfortably within “states parties ” constitution thats battered the working and middle classes down to the bone. The new Democrat of the Clinton era are always strong for political rights, as long as they dont disturbed corporate Americas bottom line. Strong for racial and gender equality, strong for LGBT rights( though that took experience ). Meanwhile this same Democratic establishment connected with the GOP to push a market- and finance-driven economic order that enriches the already rich and leaves the rest of us sucking wind.

Thats the very real feeling Trump is speaking to , no fantasy there. Bernie as well; small ponder their constituencies overlapped, though Trumps claimed devotion to the common man stumbles over even the simplest proofs. On whether to raise the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour, Trumps moral compass has invented from an suggested no( wages are already too high ), to connote yes( wages are too low ), to weasel words( left open up to the states ), to yes and no in the same breather( I would leave it and parent it moderately ), and, eventually, when pressed by Bill OReilly in July, to yes-but( conjure it to $10, but its still better left to the states ). All this from presidential candidates whos securely in favor of abolishing the estate tax, to the great benefit of heirs of multimillionaires and none at all to the vast majority of us.

Meanwhile, the Fantasy Industrial Complex is doing just fine such elections season, thank you. Pronouncing at a Morgan Stanley investors gathering in March, one of the commanders of the FIC, Leslie Moonves, the chief executive of CBS and a being whose 2015 compensation totaled $56.8 m, had this to say about the Trump campaign. It may not be good for America, but its damn good for CBS. The moneys rolling in and this is fun this[ is] about to become a very good time for us. Sorry. Its a terrible happen to tell. But making it on, Donald. Keep going.

Read more: www.theguardian.com

The post Two American Dreams: how a dumbed-down person lost vision of a great impression appeared first on vitalmindandbody.com.

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